Did you talk to the sopuli.xyz admins about this?

I did not. But you seem to be correct. Unless there is a quite serious defect in Lemmy server, a sopuli.xyz admins would be the only culprit.

Can you please also edit the thread on the lemmybefree.net instance to remove the false accusation of our moderator who was not involved at all?

Done. Interesting to note that I was only able to edit that because I incidentally happened to save a link to that thread (as sopuli’s copy was apparently also tampered with).

makes it clear that dead naming her is not something she wishes for:

Not actually clear, but somewhat useful as far as knowing Manning’s wishes. And only /somewhat/, because it clarifies history (that Manning considered herself female during a time when presenting as male). Apart from that, Manning does not say that she expects history to be rewritten to refer to a name that predates the existence of that name. Manning’s statement is only clear about deadnaming today in the context of today. To describe a historic event or time period when the dead name was in fact a live name -- that is not dead naming because it is not refering to today’s Manning. The death of Bradley and simultaneous birth of Chelsea occurred at a point in time. It would be like referring to Exxon before the merger with Mobil as ExxonMobil. It was Exxon the discovered climate change, not ExxonMobil.

Manning does not get to decide for everyone that historic records must be altered for ex-post-facto events, at the expense of historic accuracy and confusion. That’s the bigger problem. What do historians say? It’s a bad idea to, for example, let an event in 2015 change our accounting of what happened in 1995. If 2015 event were to reveal something we did not know regarding 1995, that’s fair enough. Some particular individual may have had a past false presentation while others not. We generally know what gender someone presents as, and when, but we don’t get the benefit of knowing what’s in their head (their introspective gender) unless you have someone like Manning actually declaring how far back their introspective gender goes.

It’s wrong to assume that all trans people had a false gender presentation before the change that goes back to birth. I had a roommate that had a flipping gender. One day female, next day male.. using a male and female name interchangeably from one day to the next, also dressing feminine or masculine depending on the day.

The mod call seems right to me.

Can you elaborate? Why is there legitimate value in censoring my viewpoint? You want to generalize that most people don’t care about privacy (perhaps true, but it’s IMO an injustice to take this assumption as rationale for suppression of expression on the part of privacy advocates and historians).. that (without their input) their new identity can be tied to their past identity, and it’s okay for this generalisation to oppress people who want the contrary --- so much so that it is okay to suppress the fact that a counter (privacy-respecting) viewpoint exists?

So this is either a technical glitch or an admin on your own instance sopuli.xyz removed in locally from your instance only.

Woah, holy shit. I am quite baffled that you were able to post an URL to a slrpnk.net-hosted page showing that it is not censored. I saw an entry in the modlog of the community, so I am confused on that. It seemed clear that the comment was censored from the slrpnk side. If it was censored from someone other than a mod or admin of slrpnk.net, that opens up possible tyrannical actions I was not even aware of.

And I must say, the Lemmy software is garbage if it can present a “modlog” that reflects actions by foreign instances without attributing actions of those instances. The modelog looks like a log local to the hosting instance. For that reason, I am somewhat skeptical of your claim that it was a remote censorship.

apparently not, but thanks for the suggestion. There are 15 FOSS NAS platforms, but I don’t have my hopes up.

Qnap is apparently an option.. I’ll have to look into that. QNAP is mentioned in the manual as a 3rd party behind the stock firmware, so I guess it’s not likely FOSS.

I’m not sure what the Tor Project advice is these days, but my phone is setup to have Netguard hijack the VPN option of AOS and force select apps over tor (to Orbot). It’s annoying because in fact it is impossible for me to run Netguard and Tor over a VPN. Because Netguard hijacks the VPN, I cannot use a real VPN. I can run a VPN (generally openVPN), but then I must give up Tor if I do that. Orbot can only run in parallel, but because Netguard loses the VPN slot I can only use Tor-aware apps in that situation. So ultimately what you’re thinking is not possible with my tool chain (of old versions).

My version of Orbot apparently pre-dates that. At the bottom of the orbot screen it says “trouble connecting? Use bridges [boolean slider]”, and the switch is toggled off. I don’t see mention of “Smart Connect” in the settings.

I am not going to keep track of your esoteric personal preferences. If you non-transparently keep this rule concealed, the consequences are on you.

Please put your bizarre new rule in the sidebar so people who accurately discuss past events do not get broad-sided by unexpected interventionalism. The norm is that people use the present gender for present tense chatter, which needs no explicit rule. But this zealous idea of inserting someone’s new identity into their past (prior to the current identity) at the risk of disrepecting their privacy really calls for some explicit wording. Feel free to name the rule of this niche scenario after me, if you want.

UPDATE

I see the new rule in the sidebar. I agree with it. It does not cover this corner case of the context of historic accounts.

The problem with offline is that it’s more expensive, and often less convenient.

We can nix convenience. There are three scenarios:

1. exclusively digital/online access
2. exclusively analog/offline access
3. ppl have a choice between digital and analog

In case 3, convenience is assured because people can choose whatever method they find most convenient. Case 1 is probably convenient to most unless CAPTCHAs and similar enshitification is in play, but the rest are marginalised or burdoned. Case 2 is unlikely because even if analog is on offer it still makes sense to deploy digital in parallel for the cost savings, as the bulk of users favor digital.

We can disregard convenience on the part of the public service workers b/c they are compensated regardless. Workers choose the gig they want to sign up for. So it boils down to cost savings w.r.t the public service side of this.

I don’t see a fundamental reason why offline communication must be available.

Consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Art.21-2: “Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”

Saving a buck is not great rationale for denying fundamental human rights. There should be a good reason, like for example denying someone who needs a heart transplant their right to life because the list of those needing a heart is longer than organs available.

You could say: ok, we will give free Internet and hardware to all those who are offline, assuming they can handle it. It could only still be economically sensible if all such people are walking distance from a public library. But there are still other human rights to account for: the right to privacy (Art.12) and the right to autonomy (a derivitive right from Art.1 dignity/self-determinism).

Let’s assume that your country added a fundamental rule (for example for the USA this would be a constitutional amendment) saying that all goverment services should collect the minimum amount of data necessary to function. So they would have to support things like Tor, to avoid collecting IP addresses, etc. Would this be enough for you to waive the offline requirement? Because the world is always marching towards more efficient communication, and an offline requirement could hold society back for little benefit.

“Data minimization” is an important policy which has already been implemented in Europe (2016) and a few other places that have tried to do a GDPR-like policy (California, and Australia IIRC). In Europe it’s a bit of a disaster. Even though strictly speaking GDPR Art.5 is violated when public web services block Tor, they are nonetheless blocking Tor with reckless disregard and effectively laughing at complaints. People in some countries cannot even get /read/ access to legal statutes from Tor. There is a GDPR rule requiring data controllers to be diligent with infosec and implementing protective mechanisms to ensure this. Rightfully so, but the effect is that this becomes an excuse to shrug off the Tor community. They ultimately have a legal defense of claiming anti-Tor measures are to comply with infosec mandates (though in reality it’s sloppy lazy IT admins who blocks Tor).

I have little hope for competency prevailing. In principle, data could be secured without blocking Tor. But that conversation is quite far from taking place AFAICT. I’m almost certain the courts would take the lazy way out. What judge would risk forcing a data controller to serve Tor users and then being responsible for an attacker who uses Tor when exploiting some unrelated vuln?

I fear this is unavoidable. If you depend on certain services (like interacting with the government), then you simply can’t fully boycott that service or any dependency of that service.

If your choices are send email to the gov (who selected MS for their email supplier) or to send a letter, then boycott rights are sufficiently respected.

For example, if the government only accepted post mail, you would not be able to fully boycott the postal service.

A national post service is itself a public service. When the gov depends on the gov for service, that’s about as non-controversial as it gets. Someone who opposes the government should be more focused on leaving the jurisdiction they have contempt for.

If the gov were to do something stupid like outsource the national postal service to Federal Express (a private courier service in the US who finances right-wing politics), then having an alternative would be important. If the alternative is Microsoft, then it’s a choice between two shit options; in which case I would demaned yet another option, like fax.

But I feel like your idea of boycotts is also too extreme.

I find it obnoxiously extreme to force people into the marketplace to patronize a particular corporation. It’s not the same as the gov itself internally supporting harmful corporation, which is quite rampant in the US but out of our hands. When individuals are forced to directly lick the boots of an evil corporation, it’s an extra hightened degree of abuse. It’s an assault on self-determinism. I will not feed a baddy. I insist. Nothing is more tyrannical than forcing someone to proactively take an action that goes against their beliefs.

Americans do not have a fundamental right to consumer protection. But Europeans do. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union Art.38 states: “Union policies shall ensure a high level of consumer protection.”

Despite that right, consumer protection is still a shit-show in Europe. People rely on incompetent unmotivated consumer protection agencies to take action. So for me, the most important consumer protection is that which does not rely on the action of others -- the right to boycott. I don’t know if a court would agree that a right to boycott derives from the right to consumer protection, but I am running with it. I will march all the way to the supreme court if I must, to push my claim on a right to boycott.

If you want to boycott Microsoft, and all local grocery stores used Azure somewhere in their infrastructure, would you stop buying groceries?

There are countless street markets and farmer’s markets selling their produce for cash. The only thing digital is the scale. Mom and pop shops have old fashioned cash registers. I would only imagine the supermarket chains use the cloud. The giants are not transparent enough for customers to even know what they use internally. Websites of 4 of the giants around me block Tor. One of them even uses Cloudflare which masks their hosting provider but I boycott Cloudflare anyway. Indeed I boycott the 4 chains on that basis.

I see boycotting as simply doing your best to avoid a company’s products.

In some cases I patronize the lesser of evils, depending on the level of despiration or need. In other cases I boycott entire industries. There are only 3 or 4 mobile carriers and I have a problem with all of them. If I despirately needed mobile phone service I would pick the lesser of evils. But I have opted to give them all the middle finger because I don’t really need the service.

All washing machines have undocumented kill switches. So I am hand-washing my clothes until that changes.

Analog systems need to be designed too. And they can be just as tyrannical, inconvenient, and invasive.

I’d have to say not even close. Do a search on /dark patterns/. There are countless abuses digital systems can push precisely because of the efficiency of automation. Analog systems entail manual labor which inherently limits the extent of tyranny and abuses due to resource limitations. Analog systems are also hard to conceal. You can’t stick a guy in a windowless office writing code to collect and abuse data on a large scale in an analog system. The demand for more human labor in analog systems means trusting more people to keep secrets.

I also don’t know what would be the analog version of a broken CAPTCHA that cannot be solved, which would block advancing to the next step.

Lack of competency is often simply lack of incentive. What incentive does the government have, for providing privacy-friendly services?

Indeed there is insufficient direct pressure on govs to protect privacy. Which is precisely why it is critical to mitigate the data collection in the first place. They can’t get your IP address from your postal letter. But if you concede to giving up analog methods, abuse has no limits. In the US there is no concept of gov transparency.. no way to confidently know what they are collecting and what they are doing with the data.

Likewise, if they have incentive to track people, why would they provide an offline option, which is both more expensive and bypasses their tracking measures.

You seem to be answering your own question. Fighting to keep an offline option on the table is the only control you have on the abuse. They are limited by budgets. So if analog processing eats up a significant amount of budget, that’s less money that can be spent on mass surveillance abuses.

Based on your entire reply, it sounds like what you mainly want is privacy.

Privacy and boycott rights have become inseparable. Boycotting used to simply be a matter of not buying something. Now with surveillance advertising in play, boycotting requires privacy. Not feeding Microsoft requires not sharing personal data with MS, thus not sending email that traverses their servers.

It’s an important distinction, because I reckon that it will be easier to ask the government to enshrine privacy as a fundamental right, rather than offline access as a right, since offline access is much more expensive to provide.

Privacy has been a fundamental right in the UDHR since 1948, IIUC. From there, it barely has much effect. Snowden pretty much made it quite clear that you cannot rely on privacy as a fundamental right. Even if a privacy law could be respected in some hypthetical world, you still have CAPTCHAs, forced apps (JavaScript and/o

Sorry for necro but your ideology is fascinating. It sounds like you believe offline people deserve the same benefits as online people.

Not in the case at hand. But yes, I do believe offline ppl are entitled to the same benefits w.r.t. public services. E.g. our human right to healthcare and education is not preconditioned on being online. It’s inalienable.

W.r.t software sold on the private market, it’s more about standards. Standards of privacy, quality, functionality, and pro-consumer. With the video game, I’m not sure if I am more annoyed by the needless dependency on a WAN, or the anti-consumer way of doing business in general, which entails using the money of paying customers against them. Paying for deliberate anti-features and product crippling rewards corporations for being proactively anti-consumer.. biting the hand that fed them. And so I oppose the idea of feeding enshitification.

Why do you believe this? Why shouldn’t the world move towards an expectation of online existence?

In Europe there is a battle emerging whereby some gov offices have decided it’s okay to exclude some people for being offline. Note that those same excluded people do not have a right to opt-out of taxation.

If I were to guess, your goal is not offline existence, but privacy, and doing things offline guarantees privacy, the same way that high-security environments use airgapped machines.

Privacy is one of many factors. Another factor, for example, would be that if I boycott Microsoft and the gov uses MS for email, I effectively lose my boycott privileges if email is the only means of communicating that the gov accepts.

Another factor is convenience. I find CAPTCHAs inconvenient, so I boycott them. My boycott against CAPTCHAs goes so far that I am willing to undertake a greater inconvenience in order to carry out my boycott against CAPTCHA pushers. And note that CAPTCHA is just one insideous¹ form of inconvenience. A local gov publishes their PDF community newsletter through some shitty 3rd party that animates the PDFs with JavaScript, so you can graphically see a visual of the page turning. That shitty protectionist js-forced service blocks people from simply downloading the PDF file. And I’ll be damned if I am going to support that kind of protectionism, so I insist that someone hand-delivers a paper newsletter to my door until they become competent. It’s unlikely that they will become competent in my lifetime.

Even if they manage to make the PDFs downloadable, they will fuck something else up. E.g. wget won’t work because they would arbitrarily decide to take an anti-bot posture without cause, and without realising that humans run wget.

¹ “insideous” because it puts humans to work for machines doing uncompensated labor which is potentially involuntary servitude in some cases. And performance of the labor often still results in DoS if the CAPTCHA is broken or if it discriminates against the incapability of the user.

But that’s just a means to an end. There are other ways of achieving privacy, like using vetted open source software that take privacy seriously, for example a fediverse client running in Tor browser.

Yes. In fact, well implemented tech gives more privacy than analog methods most of the time (cash payments being a notable exception).

Privacy does not necessitate being offline.

It does if the other party is too incompetent to get it right. The gov is not competent enough to publish a public key. It is not competent enough to maintain a server that allows Tor connections. It is not competent enough to design a webform that does not make email and phone number required fields.

The problem is not lack of possibilities. It’s lack of competency.

Going to a cafe to download articles to read offline, is not really offline either. It’s just an intermittent internet connection

The fetching is online (though not necessarily); the reading is offline. If I have a LAN with AP and no uplink, a friend or someone near my home could connect to the LAN and upload content, which would be an offline means of getting content. There are also ways to get info via SMS. The gov who uses a protectionist 3rd party to block PDF downloads and limit distribution to those running some proprietary JavaScript effectively blocks offline reading by someone like myself.

I suppose my ultimate thesis is that the gov should only be rewarded with digital participation if they competently deployed a service. An analog mechanism is always needed as an escape from the tyranny of poor design. Without an analog mechanism there is little incentive to implement a good design. Analog methods serve as an important quality control feedback mechanism.