Platforms Systematically Removed a User Because He Made "Most Wanted CEO" Playing Cards

www.eff.org Platforms Systematically Removed a User Because He Made "Most Wanted CEO" Playing Cards

On December 14, James Harr, the owner of an online store called ComradeWorkwear, announced on social media that he planned to sell a deck of “Most Wanted CEO” playing cards, satirizing the infamous “Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards” introduced by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2003. Per the....

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Platforms Systematically Removed a User Because He Made "Most Wanted CEO" Playing Cards

www.eff.org /deeplinks/2025/01/platforms-systematically-removed-user-because-he-made-most-wanted-ceo-playing

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Platforms Systematically Removed a User Because He Made "Most Wanted CEO" Playing Cards

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3w ago

Platforms systematically removed a user because he made "most wanted CEO" cards

www.eff.org /deeplinks/2025/01/platforms-systematically-removed-user-because-he-made-most-wanted-ceo-playing

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Really highlights the fact that any free speech and naive western sense of freedom in these walled garden is just a button press away from being taken away and that there are no rules or standards. Whenever the owners or their friends feel even slightly displeased, annoyed or god forbid afraid the masks go off and the hammer falls.
- Protocols not platforms are the future.
  
  Sadly look at email. Technically you can host it yourself but if you're not one of the 15 or so big providers, good luck not being marked as spam before you even do anything.
  The real problem is with the oligarchy controlling everything, service or protocol. This is why Threads was/is dangerous.
  
  That is definitely a good point.
  
  That's literally the same point I was making, that your protocol can be blocked when they've decided they don't like it.
  
  Theres always tor
  
  https://lemmy.world/comment/14473226
  
  Ugh, but even so popularising the protocol would make it prohibitively expensive to increase the odds of interacting with threat actors. Its never 100% but its not worse.
  
  Somewhat unfair judgement against emails IMO, especially cause it’s the “trust list” that’s in the control of a few, with no open manner to add more people to the trust list. The protocol isn’t at fault for failing to prevent problems; it’s the ability for corporations to gain significant market share without control, before they are then allowed to put barriers down to disallow or discourage interaction between those in and out, forcing those within to stay in, while those outside to give up on others in order to gain usability.
  
  That was my point too, I guess I wasn't clear enough so thanks for elaborating. The protocol isn't at fault, but something being a protocol (and not just a proprietary service) isn't enough if the vast majority of the market share is being held by a few corporations.
  
  And they’ve been systematically shutting down anonymous email services.
  Load up Brave with a tor connection, and try to sign up for anonymous email. When they can’t track you reliably, even the “anonymous” services require a confirmation email or phone number.
  
  Man I don't want a future where we doxx ourselves to just be on a PC. Its insane that parents think real ID for gaming is a good idea. Linux might be the only way to escape any of this in the near future.
  
  They pretend it’s to protect us from illegal activity, but it’s really to protect them from whistleblowers.
  
  That's not entirely true. The push for KYC came because spam started going crazy. You have no clue how bad spam is right now. And believe me, you don't know. Take the worst case scenario you can think of, and multiply that by 100, and that starts to describe the state of spam emails for the past decade.
  
  My spam email gets like 10 a day instead of 900+ a day, significant improvements.
  
  Did they suddenly put a stop to email spam, and no one told me? My spam folder says otherwise, but I can confirm the hit to privacy.
  Maybe combating spam was just the excuse?
  
  If you get 100 spam emails a day, then without those protections that have been put into place that number would be in the 100s of thousands at best.
  
  Nah. I call bullshit.
  
  A few years ago I switched the mail provider for the company I work for from a small MSP provider over to Google Workspace. The reason is my boss' inbox had an average of 5k+ of spam daily. He even had to abandon one of his email addresses at one point. After switching over to Google that number went to a more manageable few dozen daily.
  It's absolutely a massive problem.
  
  Do protocols solve the problem of every hop in between you and the destination has to pass through what amounts to someone else's private property? Some private servers owned by who knows who on the way between that we have no idea whether they're inspecting every packet that comes through or not.
  Because that's the bigger issue, and I'm not even sure it's one we can solve, because it's pretty important to how the internet functions.
  A protocol still has to be supported and passed through private corporations walled gardens.
  Who else remembers Comcast illegally using Sandvine to throttle bittorrent traffic specifically? Pepperidge Farm 'members.
  https://torrentfreak.com/comcast-throttles-bittorrent-traffic-seeding-impossible/
  
  Do protocols solve the problem of every hop in between you and the destination has to pass through what amounts to someone else's private property?
  Yes. End-to-end encryption solves that.
  
  Not even necessarily end-to-end, just encryption. And possibly encapsulation within an already allowed protocol, like it's extremely common with HTTP these days.
  
  That's what integrity checks are for, so that no one along the path can edit what you say before it actually gets published.
  
  That's rather missing the point, an integrity check doesn't solve the fact that to communicate with anyone, you have to do it through giant corporations pipes.
  An integrity check doesn't help when an ISP have straight blocked your protocols traffic, like Comcast previously did with bittorrent.
  Can we stop sucking down the preachings of an idiot like Jack Dorsey? We don't actually have net neutrality, so it's totally within their current rights to just block traffic they don't like.
  
  Almost any protocol can be wrapped in any other protocol. You could, say, use bit torrent by encoding the packets and embedding the data in valid png files, then transporting them over http. As long as both sides understand the wrapping it'll work just fine.
  I've even seen http tunneled over DNS queries in order to completely bypass firewalls.
  
  Could always use a vpn or tor
  
  https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2021/12/was-threat-actor-kax17-de-anonymizing-the-tor-network
  Given the number of servers run by KAX17 the calculated probability of a Tor user connecting to the Tor network through one of KAX17’s servers was 16%, there was a 35% chance they would pass through one of its middle relays, and up to 5% chance to exit through one.
  This would give the threat actor ample opportunity to perform a Sybil attack. A Sybil attack is a type of attack on a computer network service where an attacker subverts the service’s reputation system by creating a large number of pseudonymous identities and uses them to gain a disproportionately large influence. This could lead to the deanonymization of Tor users and/or onion services.
  Given the cost and effort put into this and the fact that actors performing attacks in non-exit positions are considered more advanced adversaries because these attacks require a higher sophistication level and are less trivial to pull off, it is highly likely this is the work of a high-level (state-sponsored?) threat actor. As for who is behind this group, neither Nusenu nor the Tor Project wanted to speculate.
  A spokesperson for the Tor Project confirmed Nusenu’s latest findings and said it had also removed a batch of KAX17 malicious relays.
  “Once we got contacted, we looked through all the relays in the network and identified several hundred relays that are very likely belonging to the same group and removed them on November 8.”
  VPN's also by definition still use the same corporate pipes as anything else.
  
  Nothing in this world is ever 100% complete, but decentralization and protocols are extremely good combat measures. It is possible to poke holes in almost anything. But that does not mean it's not worth trying.
  
  Woosh. We're decentralizing everything except the hardware and everyone's like bUt iTs dEcEnTrALiZeD!
  
  Meshtastic and reticulium.
  
  Now that's an answer I can get behind.
- They've been getting away with their class-war for so long any deviation from norms is alarming. Usually we just talk about black vs white, right vs left, etc.
- That is a fair point. I've said it to numerous people talking about this subject: Americans are the most propaganda inundated people on the planet. There's some quote about about how in China people know to not believe in the gov propaganda and here it's just called the news lmao
  
  I mean, North Korea exists. But yeah, Americans are extremely propagandized.
  
  Lol tru you right. To be fair we did bomb like 95% of their structures to the ground.
- It seems like this is not a case of "no rules or standards". These platforms do have rules and standards. The article mentions them, in fact.
  
  .. and then goes on to point out how they are arbitrarily applied.
  
  Right.
  
  Do you happen to work in HR? You'd fit right in considering you defend arbitrarily applied rules at the behest of management.
  
  Ha! That's a good one.
- Except freedom of speech only applies to the government. You can't yell from your neighbor's front lawn either if they don't want you to.
  That said, the fact police were sent is BS.

87 comments