Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet (2021)

https://madattheinternet.substack.com/p/where-the-sidewalk-ends-the-death

by cowtools • 4 years ago

74 68 4 years ago

madattheinternet.substack.com

tomrod• 4 years ago

The irony of complaining about the fragmentation of information and free things being given when a freemium modal block prevents you from reading the screed.

thrown_222• 4 years ago

There's a difference between reading something for free and being free to read something.

A paywall is annoying but solvable with a wallet. Being behind the great firewall isn't.

Brian_K_White3• 4 years ago

It's not really that different, because there is no law that says the article must be made available to me as long as I pay a reasonable fee. The paywalling company is free to discriminate both the readers and the writers at it's whim.

areoform• 4 years ago

I don't know how to feel about this.

The interlocutor is not neutral. He is - to put it politely - an enabler of, or an active participant in, some of the most distasteful acts a person can commit short of physical violence.

I try to avoid thinking about these things as I strongly believe in GIGO, but based on cursory research this person's website has,

The Kiwi Farms community considers it a goal to drive its targets to suicide, and has celebrated such deaths with a counter on the website
The forum’s homepage featured a “kill count” that tallied how many people the site had hounded to suicide

https://forward.com/news/517780/kiwi-farms-trolling-website-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms

On August 24, 2022, U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene stated in an interview with NewsMax that she was swatted twice by an individual claiming to be Kiwifarms moderator "AltisticRight". She demanded that the website be shut down

https://www.businessinsider.com/kiwi-farms-trans-activists-m...

"A few years back, I was doxed by Kiwi Farms, and someone came to my home and raped me. I have reason to believe he got my address from KF."

https://twitter.com/BathysphereHat/status/155387982349959578...

Twitch streamer under the name "Keffals", was doxxed on Kiwi Farms in a thread dedicated to discussing her. Users on the site posted personal information about her (e.g. addresses, phone numbers) as well as that of her friends and family. Users also leaked sexually explicit photos of her and made death threats.[34][35] She was later swatted, arrested, and detained for over ten hours in August 2022 when someone stole her identity and sent fake emails to local politicians threatening mass violence. She was later cleared of any wrongdoing, and police acknowledged the incident as a swatting attempt.

In the final Twitter thread they posted before their death, Near—who also went by Byuu, and identified as nonbinary—publicly called out Kiwi Farms for making their lifelong experience with online harassment and bullying “orders of magnitude worse.”
“It’s escalated from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and doxing my friends, and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction from me,” they wrote. “The internet is not a game. It’s real life. I’m a real person. This stuff really hurts.”

https://gizmodo.com/the-worst-site-on-the-web-gets-ddosd-aft...

And the list goes on and on.

There's a difference between maintaining a forum whose users do horrid things v. maintaining a forum where the owner/chief moderator posts a counter of the number of people they've driven to suicide.

It's vile. BUT does that merit banishment?

In the spirit of Jean-Luc Picard, while the interlocutor is abhorrent, removing him from the internet, a fundamental service feels just as wrong as doing nothing.

I don't know what the answer is over here.

What is the morally correct thing to do in the face of such immediate evil and a righteous choice that will also (eventually) lead to evil? How do we pick the lesser?

How do we know that we've made the right choice?

To quote one of my favorite TNG lines, "Villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well-camouflaged."

kurisufag2• 4 years ago

I can't speak for all of the mentioned incidents, but I know that the MTG swatting at the very least was fabricated for the specific purpose of trying to take down the website.

The situation was patently absurd -- the chance somebody called in a swatting and included the name of their online persona is far lesser than it being a false flag attack.

zoklet-enjoyer• 4 years ago

Was there actually a kill count on there? I never noticed that and seems like something I wouldn't have missed.

richbell4• 4 years ago

IIRC a single user had a sarcastic "kill count" added to their profile description, which was then reported as the website itself having that.

the-printer2• 4 years ago

I find it bizarre that you can list all of those incidents and then cap it off with a soliloquy depicting the banishment of the website as some deep moral dilemma. I don’t mean to be rude when I use the word bizarre, but I am seriously perplexed. Based on what you’ve described, expulsion from the internet pales in comparison to the criminal prosecution that normally follows these kind of allegations.

diputsmonro• 4 years ago

Agreed, and to put it more simply - Shutting down a website that aims to kill people is not at all on the same level of sin as trying to kill people. To argue otherwise is asinine and, frankly, offensively pretentious.

Besides that, I've lost patience with the high-road wait-and-see attitide. Being "good" is not simply to condemn and look down upon the "bad". Being good requires intentional, decisive action to eliminate the world's evils. Anything less is indifference and virtue signaling. All that is required for evil to prevail is for "good" people to do nothing.

causi• 4 years ago

criminal prosecution that normally follows these kind of allegations.

That's the thing. Illegal content posted to KF is reported and removed. Even Mathew Prince couldn't show a screenshot of the "imminent threat" that got KF taken down. The illegal acts committed by people who have KF accounts aren't committed on Kiwi Farms. So the question becomes, is your website being populated largely by assholes celebrating other people being assholes a good reason to terminate its access to hosting and ISPs?

Personally I stand by my now decade-old position that ISPs should be common carriers.

richbell4• 4 years ago

On August 24, 2022, U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene stated in an interview with NewsMax that she was swatted twice by an individual claiming to be Kiwifarms moderator "AltisticRight". She demanded that the website be shut down.

I think it's naive to accept claims like this at face value.

Kiwi Farms is an extremely controversial website that people are constantly trying to take down by any means necessary, including DDOS and hacking. Isn't it suspicious that in the midst of a massive public campaign against KF, someone SWATs a far-right political figure and then calls back to say "by the way I am <well-known user> on KF"?

avereveard• 4 years ago

I'm perfectly fine for people that are a detriment to a society to not be let partecipate in the society.

My only gripe with the whole thing is that we shouldn't rely nor give private companies such power. That is something that provider should have deferred to judiciary, and then acted upon their direction.

There is a scale question in there to be solved, but frankly it's scary how much power comes from the oligopolization of certain aspect of the infrastructure. It's not even just internet, payment processors are so few they can literally meet in a zoom call and decide you won't do any business in half of the world.

achenet3• 4 years ago

In the spirit of Jean-Luc Picard, while the interlocutor is abhorrent, removing him from the internet, a fundamental service feels just as wrong as doing nothing.

I know that Finland will disagree with me here, but the internet is not a "fundamental service". It is set of insanely complex systems built and maintained at large cost by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.

If I own a car dealership, or a bakery, I have the right to refuse service to anyone who walks in and insults me. Similarly, I think ISPs have the right, as businesses, to refuse service to anyone, for any reason.

Now you could argue something like "but it's a public good! The government pays for a part of it!". This is true, but you can say the same thing about the road system - the entity responsible for creating the road system (in this case, the government) has the power to decided under what conditions it can be used. For example, if you drive drunk, you can be excluded from the road system, 'fundamental rights' be damned.

Despite the lofty rhetoric of post-Enlightenment constitutions, it is wise to remember that the so-called 'social-contract' [0] is, like any contract, a two way engagement. You get police protection and education and access to services, ONLY on the condition that you play by the rules.

[0] and that's assuming we avoid the cynical anarchist view that really, a government is just a glorified protection racket imposing its will upon you by coercion.

amadeuspagel5• 4 years ago

If I own a car dealership, or a bakery, I have the right to refuse service to anyone who walks in and insults me.

Yes, but not if you own a telephone company. Is an ISP more like a telephone company, or more like a bakery?

0dayz• 4 years ago

The pathological liar aka keffal is not someone I would take their words to heart[1].

KF is at best passively in support of doxing and of harassing people or at worst actively doing both of it.

[1]https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffals-a-case-study-on-int...

concordDance2• 4 years ago

Note that most of these are false, misleading or unconfirmed.

Do not believe everything you read when looking at the heavy drama parts of the infosphere.

cpsns• 4 years ago

I'm super hesitant to take any position at all on this given who the author is and the issues surrounding him, so I will comment more generally.

The internet is becoming smaller (I don't mean in physical size), more centralized, controlled by fewer parties, and I really fear at this point how far that is going to continue in the future. Truthfully at one point I never thought we'd end up where we now find ourselves.

I see the dream of what the internet was supposed to be dying and it makes feel hopeless if I'm honest. It's one of the most important things we've ever collectively built and yet I'm increasingly cynical about its impact and future.

YPCrumble• 4 years ago

Has Kiwi Farms now been kicked off the internet? It doesn’t show up in Google, there is no link on the Wikipedia page, and a more recent Cloudflare announcement says they stopped providing DDoS protection service.

sweetbitter2• 4 years ago

They seem to be online via Tor, but have temporarily taken down whatever proxy/server their .net domain points to for the last ~week for reasons. It's likely that they will put their stuff back online though. And before that they were online on clearnet for many weeks and thwarting DDoS fine.

Gigachad2• 4 years ago

The owner has been posting updates on telegram. He didn’t take it down. The tier 1 ISP Zayo blackholes his IP.

He has VPS providers willing to host the site but there are only 16 tier 1 ISPs and now that they are engaging in censorship, it’s impossible to run anything but a tor site. And the owner stated that if he is unable to get back on the clear net he will shut the site down and change name.

pseudo0• 4 years ago

A week ago, they were dropped by their ISP, Zayo, for an alleged violation of Zayo's AUP. There was a thread discussing this last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33307711

postultimate4• 4 years ago

So, who wants to crowdfund a tortitious interference suit against Zayo ?

kurisufag2• 4 years ago

The "real" (i.e. without central authority) internet isn't over HTTP. It hasn't been for some time now, and all of the web3 stuff lately is the result of that latent sentiment bubbling up for the last 30 years.

The core issue is that alternate options for maintaining a generally accessible presence rely on squatting traditional infrastructure -- TOR, freenet, i2p, urbit, etc. all rely on some sort of cloaked communication over the standard global network hierarchy, and can at any time be blocked on a packet level if the established entities wish it. These blocks can be circumvented, and so far they have been, but freedom is generally on the defensive here.

What is the solution? Meshnets are the only thing that come to mind, but they're not a feasible thing to construct, especially with a niche userbase.

richbell4• 4 years ago

These blocks can be circumvented, and so far they have been, but freedom is generally on the defensive here.

This weakness has become especially apparent in recent years when governments react to civil unrest or protests by shutting off the internet. Signal doesn't help much when the data pipes stop flowing.

I recall hearing about another privacy-focused messaging app that could be used peer-to-peer with Bluetooth, though I cannot recall its name. Edit: I think it was Briar? Not something I'm familiar with.

whywhywhywhy• 4 years ago

App might have been https://scuttlebutt.nz/ off the grid focused p2p messaging system.

cm42• 4 years ago

I just came across "something p2p with Bluetooth" called Berty, though didn't get much further than bookmarking it for later.

cheschire• 4 years ago

Mesh networks are easy to destroy as the only scalable solution is wireless and that is obviously weak against localized jamming.

A protest or other meatspace collective organized through a mesh net would be cut off and disrupted to the point where the network would be viewed as unreliable. Kids on horses are far more reliable.

Mesh networks to share information broadly are susceptible to misinformation campaigns, partisan politics, and the simple problem of covering vast distances with pedestrian tech. AM Radio is far more reliable.

emptyparadise• 4 years ago

We need to normalize anonymity online so Kiwi Farms wouldn't be able to kill people. The successful push for real identities destroyed the internet.

pixl972• 4 years ago

But the FAANGs don't want that because they can't make billions selling you ads and compiling your information.

xypage• 4 years ago

I think you're right but for the wrong reason. Social media is insanely profitable, and when you anonymize that people wouldn't be as invested, so they want people in it personally and often.

I don't think it has to do with them compiling your information because it'd be easy for us to be outwardly anonymous on the web so no one you're interacting with has any idea who you are while still allowing those companies to track you in depth since they're behind the scenes. It's not like they need to know your real name to give you targeted ads.

amadeuspagel5• 4 years ago

Everyone can make an anonymous website. And anonymity has nothing to do with ads. You can allow people to post anonymously, without a username, so that they can't be doxxed, and still show them targetted ads.

concordDance2• 4 years ago

Kiwifarms and their users has not been confirmed to have killed anyone or caused any suicides.

But yes, pseudoanonymity is important.

postultimate4• 4 years ago

Would there be any merit in rebuilding the internet inside the exising one, using it only as transport ? Rebuilding all of it, including DNS ?

blooalien• 4 years ago

There might be if the current Internet wasn't almost entirely at the mercy of the whims of governments and mega-corporations. Either can too readily just "shut you off" if they desire, leaving you "out in the cold" with no means of connectivity. No VPN or encryption will help you if you're barred from even connecting to the network.

postultimate4• 4 years ago

Against government it wouldn't help much. But against mega-corporations, it could be quite effective. How do you pull the plug when the logical and physical topologies don't match ?

Gigachad2• 4 years ago

You can already host just about anything via Tor. But it’s so slow and inconvenient, especially on mobile that you may as well not exist.

Ebree3• 4 years ago

Only because of the way modern web is developed now. If you build for a slow network it is much faster. We had internet when infrastructure was much slower you know.. And why to not mix both.

amadeuspagel5• 4 years ago

Reforming section 230 is misguided. The author already seems quite wary of how that might be screwed up, but in my view still not wary enough. Instead, infrastructure companies (ISPs, DDoS protection, CDNs, hosting providers) should be regulated as common carriers[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

thrway989012• 4 years ago

To the author and everyone who might think the way he does:

Here are a couple of rules I have found true and are actually really basic.

- No one owes you anything not attention, not money, not food, not land, not bandwidth, not domain name, not peering agreements, nothing.

- Access to everything in the above list is predicated on not being an asshole, because if you are an asshole, you are going to be shunned in the best of cases.

Finally if you can't find hosting, peering whatever, setup your own ISP and peer with Jim Watkins, I am sure you are going to love each other.

EarlKing• 4 years ago

No one owes you anything not attention, not money, not food, not land, not bandwidth, not domain name, not peering agreements, nothing.

Naturally when it's your turn to have the boot on your neck I'm sure you'll lamely acquiesce to the situation because, after all, nobody owes you anything.

Sometimes tortious interference really is tortious interference. Sometimes common carriers need to be regulated as common carriers.

Ebree3• 4 years ago

Wow. This felt psychopathic & elitist to core.

Nobody gets born in void and from void & not sharing faith of kinds, he never chose, just by own unique starting point he was spawn in.

You are born with roots & strings attached to everything around that specific spot.

nobody ever in history existed as a free electron.

Being born as a slave 2000 years ago is reality millions of people still experience just under different cultural name.

Pretending world works other way is just a wishful thinking of somebody lucky to isolate himself in own bubble, illusory reality.

BTW you probably were born in West and it itself means being born already indebted by decisions of generations before you & forced to pay collective ransom for their collective mistakes.

Every person owns to own parents for getting born, the less siblings has the more owns them, no matter what kind of raising got. Except if you believe it to be their debt to repay for own existence.

Asshole will never admit to being asshole himself but will see assholes even where there are none to make himself look better.

Asshole will deny all reality before him coming to the world & claim all his imaginary rights to start fresh as if being the first entitled human in history. Like the first exeuropean farmer immigrant on stolen commonly indian land.

Despite obviously being a one generic part of bigger picture, of long chain that will be still growing & continuing long after him and his meaningless brief moment of rebelling against own nature, origin & higher level purpose passess.

Cables put by my ancestors are co-owned by them, and through them by me, the same as right to send data through it anyway I wish, the same as land payed for for eternity by their blood, tears, scars, sweat, the same as their ideals & dreams, and space of mental freedom created by their thoughts & physical efforts. The same as public national forests. The same as free water & air. The same as common treasures under common ground & what living nature yields on that common wild & put loose territory.

And I owe to my fellow co-owners respect for their rightful share, even if they ignore own inborn rights, as long as they don't make it less as they are managing it faithfully & pass it to those after them.

The same as to those outsiders who come to build & increase this heritage in good will becoming part of it freely & by buying recognition through their sacrifices to this common eternal monument.

Betraying these principles & selling all national, historical land to some big entities or new monarchy doesn't change rightful ownership. You can take it back any time you want.

The same when a King betrays nation and gives away national crown to other foreign crown cutting off royal line of succession, as long as his blood exists, obligation to lead the nation exists too & can be restored by will of nation. As long as blood & myth lives as long the historical law of continuity is in power. Similarly with multigenerational ownership of a piece of land by a family or clan. the same family law, on smaller scale until the last one dies or looses memory of it.

All problems started when people were forced to live on territory in proportion comparable to a rathole without self-sustainability. Then all the competition & forced pyramidal centralisation & ratrace started. Farming at start helped to later make it worse by creation of rat colonies, called cities, full of assholes claiming nobody owns them nothing & they not own anything to blood related neighbours, even when an uninvited war or domestic aggression bites their "free" asses equally.

at_a_remove• 4 years ago

I typically bring up the ISIS murdersites that somehow lasted longer on the Internet than did sites like this, or Stormfront. Why do I do that?

Because I like to remind people who are all about how good they are that they focused on crap like Encyclopedia Dramatica versus places where you can see a row of men executed near simultaneously with detcord. Someone just has to point and say "Nazi!?" and everyone goes wild, but videos of a caged man being set on fire to dance about in his own self-immolation, that gets a pass. 8chan is bad if they take a clip of that and put "Disco Inferno" as a backing track as a .webm, but somehow the original source just ... well, that happened somewhere else. How does this work?

I remember the shoe being on the other foot in the distant past, but memories are short. Everything in this post is about the refutation of our naive "The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" beliefs back when it was "our guys" getting censored. While definitions of what constitutes fascism varies, many of them feature the tight alignment of corporations with the government, where the corporation carries out the will of the government at the time, side-stepping legal protections a citizen might have against the government.

Paypal is going to have its $2,500 disinformation fee. Payment processors can and will lock down anything not squeaky clean. This consolidation only allows for greater control by fewer and fewer entities.

If nothing else, allow me to appeal to your self-interest. Imagine that all of these strictures come into place and then the "wrong government" gets into power. Swap out wordlists of banned topics, update the image filters, and boom.

People are in such a hurry to create manacles but never stop to wonder if the shackles will end up on their own wrists.

Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet (2021)

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