Eric Sammons: A Guide to Living in an Orwellian Digital Age

[Gnarwhal]

Eric Sammon's has really shot up to the top of my list of Catholic writers since his content doesn't seem to skew too radical like some others I've followed in the past 1-2 years. Recently he was promoted to Editor-In-Chief of Crisis Magazine, which is probably one of the better publications out there along with One Peter Five (IMO).

He published this to his personal website but I think it's something great to think about given recent events and really what's been going on over the past year, five years, 10 years, etc. Eric's a libertarian so you know he's evaluating things from that lens which I think is important right now. It's really more of a practical piece making suggestions for our tech usage given how the ground has shifted lately.

We shouldn’t really be surprised by the massive censorship Big Tech is now engaging in. It began years ago, when they started to ban “fringe” figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones. Most people didn’t really care for those figures, so they didn’t really care that they were booted from social media. But once COVID-19 hit, the censorship went up another notch—anything related to the virus that did not conform to the establishment party line was swiftly removed from YouTubeFacebookTwitter.
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A Guide to Living in an Orwellian Digital Age

 

[zippy2006]

This is such a big problem, but with the new Democratic government it is highly unlikely that section 230 will be revisited. A little guy like Parler probably needs a web-based approach that can work around things like Apple's app-store totalitarianism.

 

[eastcoast_bsc]

Tor has been around for quite some time. In fact that is how journalist Glen Greenwald and Snowden communicated. I don't believe there is a government backdoor. Spys and terror groups use Tor and encryption as well.

What I didn't understand is why one of the encryption apps took off in such big numbers unless there are large groups wanting to hide information from intelligence sources. Curious.

 

[Gnarwhal]

This is such a big problem, but with the new Democratic government it is highly unlikely that section 230 will be revisited. A little guy like Parler probably needs a web-based approach that can work around things like Apple's app-store totalitarianism.

They probably will do that, since I imagine the only other way will be jailbreaking methods which can brick the user's phone. I know they're suing Amazon but they may also be in the process of finding an alternative server site, maybe even their own.

Gab's been working around the clock to install new servers cause they saw a surge of like 600K new users in one day after Parler got shutdown, but man they're still struggling to keep up with demand.

I haven't confirmed this but I heard today that the owner/founder of Gab might be Catholic, so that's cool.

Tor has been around for quite some time. In fact that is how journalist Glen Greenwald and Snowden communicated. I don't believe there is a government backdoor. Spys and terror groups use Tor and encryption as well.

What I didn't understand is why one of the encryption apps took off in such big numbers unless there are large groups wanting to hide information from intelligence sources. Curious.

Ah yeah I remember Tor years ago, I liked it but the uplink times were slow—such is the nature of the beast when your bouncing your IP through multiple locations. Brave browser actually has Tor built in as a second "incognito" option.

 

[chevyontheriver]

They probably will do that, since I imagine the only other way will be jailbreaking methods which can brick the user's phone. I know they're suing Amazon but they may also be in the process of finding an alternative server site, maybe even their own.

Gab's been working around the clock to install new servers cause they saw a surge of like 600K new users in one day after Parler got shutdown, but man they're still struggling to keep up with demand.

I haven't confirmed this but I heard today that the owner/founder of Gab might be Catholic, so that's cool.



Ah yeah I remember Tor years ago, I liked it but the uplink times were slow—such is the nature of the beast when your bouncing your IP through multiple locations. Brave browser actually has Tor built in as a second "incognito" option.

It's time for all of that now. That is if it's not too late. We already lost privacy but we had access. Now we have censorship, so we are losing access too.

pgp makes it so they have to try a lot harder to figure out what I'm saying. I don't mind them wasting their time to know what I said.

 

[zippy2006]

They probably will do that, since I imagine the only other way will be jailbreaking methods which can brick the user's phone. I know they're suing Amazon but they may also be in the process of finding an alternative server site, maybe even their own.

Right. Now instead of net neutrality concerns regarding ISPs the same concerns are arising with second-level monopolistic services like Amazon Web Services. There is a global interest in finding a way to apply anti-trust laws to big tech and internet companies.

Business Insider reports that Germany, France, and the UK are worried about Twitter's banning of Trump: Angela Merkel says Twitter's decision to bar Trump is a threat to free speech