No, we shouldn't arbitrarily cut off millions of people from communication because some westerners have bought into a new red scare. That's ridiculous and childish.
When that country is fomenting unrest in the west through various means utilizing the internet, why should the west allow themselves to remain at the mercy of these operations? Liberal principles should not be a suicide pact.
> fomenting unrest in the west through various means utilizing the internet
Various actors in the west have been manipulating narratives for decades. There are literally companies that provide astroturfing services to fossil fuel intetests and others.
But suddently people discover Russia is getting in on the action too, now its cause for panic?
>But suddently people discover Russia is getting in on the action too, now its cause for panic?
Yes, an adversary working against American and democratic interests is a cause for concern over and above the typical American and western profit-seekers.
Let me rephrase: we created the system where anyone and their dog can subvert the democratic process. Oil companies are doing it. Hackers are doing it. Random bloke down the pub and his dog too.
And someone had an expectation that adversaries will not take advantage of it?
The idea that this or that Big Bad state is fomenting significant unrest in the West is a false narrative manufactured to scapegoat from domestic mismanagement and distract from the fact that Washington hosts a massive global industry dedicated to destabilizing states, especially those Big Bad ones, via organizations like GEC, NED, USAGM, USAID, etc.
I don't think it is some big "Washington and the buddies" conspiracy theory, but something much simpler.
Fearmongering and doomer attitudes drive clicks for news publishers. Clicks drive money. Money drives their growth and influence. Which, in turn, drives more clicks.
And guess who is thrashing around in their desperate attempts to stop bleeding influence and money in the internet age? Traditional news media.
Not that difficult to see some clear examples of that either, like the recent bills in some countries trying to extort FB and Google to pay money for every news article shared on their platforms (for google it was in the form of the preview snippets, for fb it was in the form of users sharing links iirc).
Putin's disinformation tactics are well known and documented. There is certainly a question of how much of a causal factor they are as opposed to the pre-existing fissures in society. But it's not reasonable to act like this is all a false narrative manufactured by whomever.
This just isn't true. There is a well known and documented narrative that Trump is a Russian asset and Putin is puppeteering US politics and so on and so forth, but it doesn't match the evidence when you actually dig into it and abandon preconceived conclusions.
Russia doesn't have anything remotely like the global propaganda apparatus based in Washington. They do a lot of propaganda, sure, but they are small fries in comparison. They are investing in changing that, however.
This may be missing the purpose of Putin interference in western politics. He doesn't need to influence it in one specific direction or another. He only needs to turn it into a shit show. This is because his purpose is entirely to do with the domestic situation inside Russia. He needs western democracies to become shamblolic in order to perpetrate the myth that everything is fine in Russia, because democracy is a joke anyway, so no need to look behind the curtain.
The Russian propaganda machine is more about useful idiots than actual puppets. If you are doing something that creates divisions among their enemies, they try to encourage that, regardless of your ideological positions. In Soviet times, the useful idiots tended to be communists and environmentalists. These days, right-wing populists and conservative nationalists form a better target audience.
And when it comes to propaganda, it's good to remember that the US didn't win the cold war because it had a better propaganda machine. It won, because it had more substance behind the propaganda. As a kid in the 80s, I was exposed to blatant propaganda from both sides. The USSR fell, and I was left with an instinctive dislike to anything that suggests that America is somehow special. But I've never had any doubt of which side I would choose if I had to, because substance is ultimately more important than propaganda.
> And when it comes to propaganda, it's good to remember that the US didn't win the cold war because it had a better propaganda machine. It won, because it had more substance behind the propaganda.
How can you be so sure? Western propaganda was and is extremely potent since the Cold War. The West had Solzhenitsyn, rock stars and Hollywood, NYT to BBC, the cultural amplitude was unstoppable.
Meanwhile, USA was abandoning the gold standard and had leaders getting assassinated and embarking on insanely murderous wars of choice in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. What substance? Propaganda effectiveness is the main differentiator.
Because it wasn't difficult to see, even as a kid.
I'm from Finland, which was the USSR's favorite capitalist country. I went to the only school where everyone took Russian as the first foreign language. The Soviets had plenty of reasons to show us their best side, and they sure did try. We did school trips to the USSR before it fell, but as middle class kids, we could also travel around the West.
The thing is, no matter what imperialistic BS the Soviets and the Americans did, the Americans at least had the reality on their side. It was the little things that revealed it. Little things such as which countries had very favorable black market exchange rates for the currencies of the other side. Or where you could make money by smuggling everyday goods.
Putin's disinformation tactics in the west go far beyond anything specifically related to Trump. Putin's facebook ad buy and relationship to Cambridge Analytica is well known. So is Putin's playbook for fomenting unrest in Eastern Europe. It's some serious myopia to think Putin's relevance is entirely related to Trump.
I think you missed the part of the story where it turns out the "Russian election interference on social media" was cooked up by the Hillary campaign and liberal NGOs like the "Alliance for Securing Democracy" which made the infamous Hamilton 68 dashboard.
To be fair, most outlets never quite took the time to go back and admit they were spewing political oppo-fiction for years.
I don't think anyone is really disputing that there was an attempt, just saying that it's unlikely that $100000 in ad spend in an election with more than a billion in total spending made a difference. You can say "well 100 million people saw the ads" but as far as I can tell no one has ever even attempted to quantify if any of that influenced the results.
No one except the very two people I was responding to in this thread?
Also, not to get into a debate on the stale issue, but hypertargetted ad buys (Cambridge Analytica) in key districts can swing elections when they are decided by tens of thousands of votes in those districts. I find it endlessly fascinating that Putin et al understood our election system better than us. I guess he didn't have the luxury of motivated reasoning and reality distortion fields.
> I find it endlessly fascinating that Putin et al understood our election system better than us.
I think you’ve been brainwashed on this one. Local campaigns spend orders of magnitude more money and are run by extremely capable social media strategists. The IRA struggled with proper English grammar and mis-targeted their ads to staunch Republicans.
It was by all actual evidence an extremely shoddy effort run on a shoestring budget that made no difference at all.
Which when you look at the general competency level of Russia these days, I guess it’s par for the course.
For me the big takeaway isn’t arguing about political bygones. It’s that by and large, these boogeymen are entirely incompetent at what they purport to do, and don’t deserve a fraction of the hand-wringing that they seem to elicit.
They are hyped up boogeymen for political purposes. The reality is that they are poorly trained, underfunded, and entirely corrupt, and so the results of their efforts are predictably lame.
If you’re calling that article “utter nonsense” than I would completely agree!
That’s exactly the BS that was peddled back in the day that people like the NYT happily took home Pulitzers for, but where it turned out they spun it nearly out of whole cloth.
Actual research [1a] into the effect of such a meager ad buy showed not only were staunchly Republican voters the ones who predominantly saw the ads, but unsurprisingly it had no effect on their voting.
Looking back, it’s fair to say that on the order of 0-100 votes may have been changed by this “meddling”, for which the nation was subjected to years of breathless left-wing coverage.
It was, in short, a sham story and it’s well past time to be still be carrying water for such thoroughly debunked propaganda.
Personally, I buy much more into the theory that the fissures in society, are a result of infiltration by Marxists into academia, as was detailed by the Soviet defector and KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov. It's impossible to watch this interview and not tick the boxes.[1]
Putin is just the Russian leader who happens to be around when the fruits of those labours are paying off.
That's the wrong question. The right question is what did he lose because of that. And the answer is likely 'nothing'. So it's a free gain with zero downside, makes good sense to me.
Uhhhhhhh... real people live in those countries and might want to use his site? I'm not saying they are entitled to his service but the amount of irrational paranoia people have over port scans and SSH bruteforcing is truly phenomenal.
Nobody anywhere has an automatic right to use any service on the web. Half of Europe can't visit US sites because instead of complying with the law they decide to take it out on the citizens. That's fine by me. Corollary: it is also fine by me that parties that have weighed the ups and downs of serving certain countries have decided that the balance is in favor of blocking them outright.
Portscans and SSH bruteforcing are not necessarily the problem, but they can be preludes to a problem.
I did that as well. One benefit I got was learning that GeForce Now will store your PII on CCP controlled servers at nvidia.cn by default. This happened from the USA. I have never been able to come up with a non-conspiratorial reason as to why this choice was made.
I was able to get around this is by changing the login POST to use nvidia.com and everything worked just fine, and the ping to .com was obviously faster.
It is lightyears beyond dumb that this is even legal in the USA.
Would love to be talked down from this with a rational explanation.
Not the person you are replying to, but you are making an absolutely bad faith assumption here.
Is it that impossible for you to imagine that someone could be extremely apalled by the invasion of Ukraine and be fully in support of their side (i.e., being fully opposed to the Russian side), while at the same time standing for the principles of open internet and not believing in wholesale disconnecting entire countries?
Because that's my personal stance. I am fully on the side of Ukraine here, with no "ifs" or "buts", and I simultaneously don't believe in blackholing tens of millions of people like that being a good idea.
If MEGA is used repeatedly and almost exclusively by threat actors as an exfiltration point, and is unwilling to address legitimate concerns about their use across the web, why shouldn't every who isn't interested in using MEGA just block any connections to or from the service?
If a country is unwilling to make any effort to stop this criminal activity, why should individuals and organizations block them. They serve no benefit to the organizations exposing themselves.
