Nepal bans social media(Facebook, X, Reddit, Mastodon, Discord, Signal, YouTube and more) for failing to register with the government; Only 7 to be open(Viber, TikTok, Telegram and more)
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36863320
::: spoiler Comments
- Reddit.
:::
Viber, WeTalk, TikTok, Nimbuzz, and Poppo Live are already registered.
Similarly, Telegram and Global Diary are in the process of registration.
Social media platforms to be blocked:
- Facebook Messenger
- YouTube
- X (formerly Twitter)
- Snapchat
- Discord
- Signal
- Threads
- Quora
- Tumblr
- Clubhouse
- Mastodon
- Rumble
- MeWe
- VK
- Line
- IMO
- Zalo
- Soul
- Hamro Patro
::: spoiler Other Sources
- Associated Press;
- The Hindu.
:::
They only implement DNS blocking so you have to change your DNS and everything will work again — this is also the case with their ban on porn sites. It's just an inconvenience to the citizens, all because they aren't competent enough to manage "criminal activites".
- Reddit.
-
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36863320
::: spoiler Comments
- Reddit.
:::
Viber, WeTalk, TikTok, Nimbuzz, and Poppo Live are already registered.
Similarly, Telegram and Global Diary are in the process of registration.
Social media platforms to be blocked:
- Facebook Messenger
- YouTube
- X (formerly Twitter)
- Snapchat
- Discord
- Signal
- Threads
- Quora
- Tumblr
- Clubhouse
- Mastodon
- Rumble
- MeWe
- VK
- Line
- IMO
- Zalo
- Soul
- Hamro Patro
::: spoiler Other Sources
- Associated Press;
- The Hindu.
:::
OK so three things:
- How are they going to ban Mastodon. Like they cannot ban every mastodon instance.
- From what I know about people in regimes like this: VPN usage is basically normal because of things like this. I live in the UK and I'm using a VPN.
- Hamro Patro, if you don't know, is the Nepali "everything" app. It's officially a calendar app, but it also does News, Horoscopes (something that's important to Nepalis I guess), Exchange Rates, Radio and Podcasts. It is one of the most popular apps in the country and the most popular Nepali developed app period. This is like if the US banned the CNN app or if the British Government banned the Sky News app.
- Reddit.
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The fact it's interconnected makes it easy to just worm your way though banning everything.
Doesn't matter if it's all independently hosted. The greatest strength of the frediverse is the fact it's federated.
That also it's biggest fuck up point. These arent wholely independent forums.
And if the frediverse has to fully defederate everything to prevent itself from being scrubbed away. It defeats the entire fucking point.
Cause at that point just fucking go back to forums.
I think they best solution here is just easy to deploy proxies, it prevents banning by DNS or IP. More than that and they might as well just put the great firewall.
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Assocks. They don't need (backend-level) access to the platform in order to fight that. They just have to do good, boots-on-the-ground detective work. In other words, earn their salaries. We don't precime-inalize silverware companies because people may use kitchen knives to kill each other.
No, but if one brand of knife is used in the majority of a category of crimes, it's fair that the government should have a clear point of contact with the manufacturer to help identify why it's happening and how it can be prevented.
Realize this: The Nepalese government is being treated the same way as a "normal" person - they're having trouble prosecuting these crimes because they're not being given any access to hidden or deleted posts. They're having to go though the useless fake support chats and the like. What they're demanding, mostly, is that they have a known human being who will cooperate with the government and to whom they have a clear and unambiguous connection. Frankly speaking, I think that ought to be a bare-minimum for any company anywhere. I don't support corporate sovereignty or corporate personhood. If you have a company operating in a nation, that nation should always have a clear point of contact for law enforcement & taxation purposes, as well as more general communication when needed.
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Blocking the domains connected to it is one way I can think of.
Because that works so well with the pirate bay. And with Mastodon or Lemmy, just having access to any one of the instances would enough.
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Is there even a desktop client for Signal? The mobile app isn't on F-droid so I can't easily install it (I don't use the Play store). Maybe i can get the APK from somewhere.
The other points are reasonably valid though the lack of end to end encryption is somewhat mitigated by self hosting.
I don't understand why browser notifications are slower than other types of app notifications, but I'm not an Android wizard so maye there's a reason. Does Signal require Google Play Services to get Firebase messages? I have that turned off too, so that's another annoyance / privacy invasion that I'd have to enable.
I don't particularly want Signal to be federated any more than I want all the world's websites to be federated. I want a zillion separate self-hosted non-federated servers, not like the tragic 1-way internet that we mostly have now. So your contacts file has something like email addresses in it, that tell the client what server to connect to for a given person.
Regardless of Signal's financial intentions there's no question that money and eyeballs hypnotize people and warps their minds. This happened to Wikipedia decades ago. They operate just like an internet startup where they obsess over user activity. They abandoned their vision of giving everyone in the world a free encyclopedia (i.e. every computer in the world has Wikipedia on its hard drive for completely private access) and instead focus on running a giant web site that constantly tracks people, gets censored, etc. They are swimming in money and are always asking for more anyway. I see Signal trying to reach a similar future.
Is there even a desktop client for Signal?
Yes. There's also an experimental third-party client for desktop Linux called Flare. I've used Flare on some devices that the official client doesn't support and found it adequate. With some more maturity, I'll probably prefer it to the official client. Signal officially discourages third-party clients because it cannot guarantee their security but does not attempt to block them except in cases where specific clients are known to be compromised.
Account creation on the mobile app is recommended before using these as it relies on SMS verification. I don't like that, but it probably cuts down on spam; I've received exactly one spam on Signal in over 10 years of use.
The mobile app isn’t on F-droid so I can’t easily install it... Does Signal require Google Play Services to get Firebase messages?
Signal encourages installing from Google Play and uses Firebase messages by default, but does work without them. Given your set of preferences, however, you would probably prefer the third-party client Molly, which is on F-Droid and supports UnifiedPush.
I want a zillion separate self-hosted non-federated servers... something like email addresses in it, that tell the client what server to connect to for a given person.
That sounds like it ends up with properties similar to federation, but the client has to do all the work. The client would also need some means of identifying itself to all those random servers where there's a cost to creating new identities, or people would need to do key exchange when they exchange contact information. Without that, this proposed system would be overrun by spam as soon as it got popular.
Server-side federation solves a lot of problems. Why wouldn't you want that?
every computer in the world has Wikipedia on its hard drive for completely private access
You can do that. The download with images is over 100gb compressed, and it expands to several terabytes. It's not hard to imagine why most people don't want to use it that way.
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OK so three things:
- How are they going to ban Mastodon. Like they cannot ban every mastodon instance.
- From what I know about people in regimes like this: VPN usage is basically normal because of things like this. I live in the UK and I'm using a VPN.
- Hamro Patro, if you don't know, is the Nepali "everything" app. It's officially a calendar app, but it also does News, Horoscopes (something that's important to Nepalis I guess), Exchange Rates, Radio and Podcasts. It is one of the most popular apps in the country and the most popular Nepali developed app period. This is like if the US banned the CNN app or if the British Government banned the Sky News app.
A number of these sites try hard to Filter out VPN users.
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OK so three things:
- How are they going to ban Mastodon. Like they cannot ban every mastodon instance.
- From what I know about people in regimes like this: VPN usage is basically normal because of things like this. I live in the UK and I'm using a VPN.
- Hamro Patro, if you don't know, is the Nepali "everything" app. It's officially a calendar app, but it also does News, Horoscopes (something that's important to Nepalis I guess), Exchange Rates, Radio and Podcasts. It is one of the most popular apps in the country and the most popular Nepali developed app period. This is like if the US banned the CNN app or if the British Government banned the Sky News app.
Modern laws rarely if ever have anything to do with what they claim to be changing. Just figure out where the graft is flowing and that's your answer. There's no graft to be had with mastodon because nobody is making any money there so at first it's simply ignored unless it annoys someone in Nepal's government. If an instance suddenly started getting popular and making money in Nepal then it gets on their radar and they have to start paying bribes to continue operating just like the big guys, and there will be no room at all for a 'medium guy' who makes a little profit but not enough to comply with the requirements of corruption.
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Modern laws rarely if ever have anything to do with what they claim to be changing. Just figure out where the graft is flowing and that's your answer. There's no graft to be had with mastodon because nobody is making any money there so at first it's simply ignored unless it annoys someone in Nepal's government. If an instance suddenly started getting popular and making money in Nepal then it gets on their radar and they have to start paying bribes to continue operating just like the big guys, and there will be no room at all for a 'medium guy' who makes a little profit but not enough to comply with the requirements of corruption.
It doesn't need to make money, it just needs to be a "Problem".
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Websites you can block via DNS - yes, i know that this can also be fairly easy circumvented - but the folks who know this are NOT the target audience for state action like that.
Oh, yeah I know that sites can be blocked easily enough. My comment was more about whether specific apps are needed. For example, I rarely put apps for specific websites on my phone and instead just use the browser. Cuts way down on ads and other bullshit.
