"Snowflake Makes It Easy For Anyone to Fight Censorship" by Cooper Quintin
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I read an article: "Snowflake Makes It Easy For Anyone to Fight Censorship" by Cooper Quintin. It's about an extension called "Snowflake" used to help people in countries such as China, Russia, and Iran bypass Internet censorship.
What do you folks think? Is this a lemon, is this unsafe to use on your computer? Or is it a harmless and useful tool to fight censorship?
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I guess you are not familiar with the EFF.
They are highly unlikely to be promoting malware.Snowflake is an open source project related to TOR, so yes hackers would love to compromise it, but as it is TOR related a lot of eyes will be inspecting the code looking for vulnerabilities.
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflakeDoctor Flay ™
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@Dr-Flay said in "Snowflake Makes It Easy For Anyone to Fight Censorship" by Cooper Quintin:
I guess you are not familiar with the EFF.
They are highly unlikely to be promoting malware.Oh, I doubt the EFF would promote malware. But just because a program's not malware, doesn't mean it wouldn't cause problems!
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@Eggcorn , Snowflake is precisely to avoid problems, disguising the connections as normal access out of suspicion. It's like sending encrypted messages, this would attract attention, but it doesn't if, instead of doing it directly, we use steganography methods, encrypting messages in innocent vacation photos or pieces of music.
The only problem I see is, less the use of these methods, but the download of these applications in countries with tight control over connections.
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A big part of my concern is: Just who am I helping by using Snowflake? Snowflake helps people to access Tor, and Tor is used to bypass censorship and promote free speech. Tor is also used for child porn and the like! Would I be doing more harm than good by using this to help people access Tor?
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@Eggcorn , I disagree on this, you should ask if you want to deprive people in dictatorships with strong censorship or journalists in conflictive countries of secure communication, just because some criminals use these techniques for pedophilia?
>Laptop ACER, AMD Ryzen, GPU AMD Radeon RAM 16GB, SSD 512GB -Win11 Home 64 v24H2| Vivaldi last stable|
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@Catweazle Pedophilia is just an example. Point is: It's a question of numbers. How many people would I help to bypass censorship, and how many people with I help perform criminal and/or immoral acts?
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@Eggcorn Any more, calling out dangerous lies, insults and threats, promoting civility, manners, responsible communication and accountability for what you say is "censorship." Some are determined to spread toxic verbal pollution, demand they face no consequence for it, and so they need to "fight censorship." I'm not a fan of such philosophies. They grow Alex Joneses, Edgar Maddison Welches, David DePapes, and other such wonderful human beings.
Volunteer Mod and tester on Windows 11 Home X64, i7-13700 @ 5.4 GHz turbo; Intel UHD 770 graphics; 1TB NV2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD; 32 GB DDR4-3200 RAM. Community Code of Conduct
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@Ayespy The price of free speech is that people are free to spew verbal diarrhea. That's why this forum is not a free speech zone: We don't want to deal with the verbal diarrhea that comes with free speech. There's nothing wrong with that: We're not a government, we're not taking away someone's right to free speech! We're just telling them that this forum is private property, and they can speak freely somewhere else.
Censorship by the government, that's another matter! Do you want to live in a country where people go to jail, because the government doesn't like what they have to say? If you do: Move to Russia or China. As for me: I'll live in a country with verbal diarrhea, if it means I don't go to jail for speaking out against the government.
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@Eggcorn The government simply doesn't censor people in the US. They don't. No one has to fight censorship here (as to the government) because it doesn't exist. The "censorship" people worry about is either in foreign jurisdictions or corporate-sponsored or private reaction to public speech.
I'm pleased we have a first amendment.
I am highly displeased that money is spent to broadcast lies that can get people hurt or killed, in the interest of some agenda or other. If money is spent that way, it seems only wise, to me, if money is also spent to try to limit the harm of such speech, or to de-platform it. There is a movement in the US that holds that if a given sector of society is free to spread lies that result in their domestic enemies being terrorized, hurt or killed, that's a GOOD thing. I don't feel like it's a good thing. That said, incitement has never been legal - but it is essentially never prosecuted because of the difficulty in linking my speech to your acts. It doesn't mean the link isn't there. It most certainly is. The problem is producing objective evidence of the link.
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@Eggcorn If I stand on a soapbox in the town square and rile up a mob to burn half the city down, and they immediately go do it, I will pretty surely go to jail for that. If I sit in my mom's basement and do the same thing, and a month or two elapses between my blog post and the riot, it's almost a given that nothing will happen to me (aside, that is, from my becoming an opinion leader among the crazies).
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Freely defaming, spreading hoaxes, calling for violent acts or promoting it, have nothing to do with the right to free expression. These are harmful acts that call into question a civilized coexistence in society. It can even endanger the lives of others and in the worst case a civil war. Recent example the assault on the Capitol.
Freedom ends where it begins to eliminate that of others.>Laptop ACER, AMD Ryzen, GPU AMD Radeon RAM 16GB, SSD 512GB -Win11 Home 64 v24H2| Vivaldi last stable|
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@Catweazle said in "Snowflake Makes It Easy For Anyone to Fight Censorship" by Cooper Quintin:
spreading hoaxes
On that part I disagree: Who decides what is and isn't a hoax? Say I believe a political candidate's campaign promise, but you think that promise is a hoax.
Recent example the assault on the Capitol.
Oh, I wish it were just that one riot! Unfortunately, the Capitol riot was only one of many riots in the US around that time.
@Ayespy said in "Snowflake Makes It Easy For Anyone to Fight Censorship" by Cooper Quintin:
If I stand on a soapbox in the town square and rile up a mob to burn half the city down, and they immediately go do it, I will pretty surely go to jail for that.
Not if you're an elected official! Get voted into office, and you can rile up riots to your heart's content.
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@Dr-Flay said :
but as it is TOR related a lot of eyes will be inspecting the code looking for vulnerabilities.
I used to think so to. But then found that Tor Browser still makes connections to Firefox browser on startup and there is no way to disable it. Tor browser brags that it protects you from information leaks but itself enables this by not fixing this issue.
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@Eggcorn , don't get me wrong, it's not about someone believing that something is a hoax, but about spreading a hoax to discredit others, serious if this is spread by a politician and by the media in order to discredit another or a certain group .
There are plenty of examples of such cases destroying an opponent's political career with false accusations, even using false documents.
Imagine a moment that I spread falsified photos or evidence against you, claiming that you are a wanted criminal on social networks. Would this be freedom of expression?
Well, this is exactly what is currently happening in politics, a right wing, devoid of arguments, using all the means at hand to point out a supposed culprit of all evils or electoral fraud, is this the cause of the aforementioned assault on the Capitol and also of civil wars in the past, because there are many people who believe everything that this nice man on TV tells them or his newspaper in the morning or the influence on Twitter or YouTube, without bothering to contrast this information. Watch out for these things.>Laptop ACER, AMD Ryzen, GPU AMD Radeon RAM 16GB, SSD 512GB -Win11 Home 64 v24H2| Vivaldi last stable|
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I've installed the extension in july and because I've hidden most of my extensions, I don't check often, if someone is connected "with me" or not. but when I checked "Number of users your Snowflake helped to bypass censorship in the last 24 hours:" it's like 30+ users a day.
actually my machine is running less than an hour but already 4 persons were connected.since I have not noticed any disadvantages in any respect I will continue to run the extension
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@Catweazle I hope you're not suggesting that it should be illegal to claim that an election was fraudulent?
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@Eggcorn If you know the statement is a lie, and you are making it for the purpose of incitement to riot or other violence, then of course it's illegal, as it should be. People who repeat the lies they have heard and come to believe are not breaking the law, unless they, again, are engaging in incitement.
There are those in the US who actually believe that the constitution was written, in part, to enable the people to oppose a government of which they don't approve by force of arms. They don't believe it's illegal to tell their compatriots to threaten or attack or shoot and kill politicians whom they conceive to be their "enemies."
Of course they are wrong, but that doesn't stop them. The South was wrong as to secession and the civil war, but that didn't stop them. Being completely wrong about justifications for armed insurrection or other violence doesn't prevent the violence. But sometimes, policing lies and incitement can.
Volunteer Mod and tester on Windows 11 Home X64, i7-13700 @ 5.4 GHz turbo; Intel UHD 770 graphics; 1TB NV2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD; 32 GB DDR4-3200 RAM. Community Code of Conduct
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@Eggcorn , perhaps it is clearer to you with an image how the interested media work. The position of each of these is defined by who pays for their ink.
Nowadays, more than ever it is important to contrast any news, before forming an opinion that is based on real facts.
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@Ayespy said in "Snowflake Makes It Easy For Anyone to Fight Censorship" by Cooper Quintin:
There are those in the US who actually believe that the constitution was written, in part, to enable the people to oppose a government of which they don't approve by force of arms.
I don't think the US Second Amendment exists to protect hunting rights!
They don't believe it's illegal to tell their compatriots to threaten or attack or shoot and kill politicians whom they conceive to be their "enemies."
We all which someone had shot Hitler, but that's the exception and not the rule. The Second Amendment does not exist to protect hunting rights, but it also does not exist so you can assassinate democratically elected officials for light and transient reasons! If it's Hitler (and Hitler was democratically elected), open season. If it's someone who's for a policy you disagree with: No, that's not what the Second Amendment is for.
Of course they are wrong, but that doesn't stop them. The South was wrong as to secession and the civil war, but that didn't stop them. Being completely wrong about justifications for armed insurrection or other violence doesn't prevent the violence. But sometimes, policing lies and incitement can.
The Thirteen Colonies also succeeded and started a civil war. Granted, not for the sake of slavery. Still, the Constitution was written and ratified by the same secessionists and insurrectionists who used violence against the government.
We cannot altogether condemn insurrectionism, secessionism, and anti-government violence, unless we condemn the American revolution, all other wars that resulted in the independence of one country from another, the French Resistance of WW2, and the people who tried to shoot Hitler.
