but right nto firefox is faster thant he 3

And well, its downright impossible to avoid tracking

Google has dossiers on everyones whos opened chrome I bet

I was playing around on Brave here.

I'm guessing Tor is not entirely unsafe.

It means they know you have used it but only really major actors will possibly know what you have used it for.

Actually, the more people who use it, the safer it becomes.

Because they can't hit everyone and wouldn't want to spill their hand on who or what they are monitoring.

And realistically, there's so many jumps involved in tracking, I'm not entirely sure if you could avoid getting identified with a second computer. The ISP is the weakpoint.

Google knows more about you than you do about yourself at this point.

yea, you just see people disapearing

or ''suicide'' with 2 bullets in the head

I just want to say that I love my life and have no plan on committing suicide and that Hillary is not a cunt *pls dont kill me*

Actually, that's an interesting idea. Is there a way to establish a network that would reveal if people are being "disappeared"?

maybe but it would probably disappear

A fair concern. But people knew people were disappearing in the USSR and China. The question is can it be detected before it gets so extreme.

Maybe some kind of collective deadman's switch?

Argentina had the missing generation thing too

And now Venezuela has a missing economy

lel

What's the consensus on Alex Jones being banned?

Seems to be that he creates a lot of shitty content that people don't like, but that if he were breaking the ToS of these websites then he should have been banned long ago, and the coordinated take down makes it seem like it wasn't because of rules violations, but most likely public pressure, and that's setting a bad precedent.

Also a lot of the press lied about him calling for violence with battle rifles when really the video was telling people to be prepared for the future with them, but that video was taken down which made it easier for them to lie

"which made it easier for them to lie" - basically sums up 2018

even Bill Maher stood up for Alex, that was surprising

I dont always agree with Maher but occasionally he makes good points

Private companies cant simply do as they please, thats why we have rules and regulations

In this case alex jones should be allowed to remain because as far as im aware hes done nothing illegal

Nothing that has a -phobic attached to the end of it should be grounds for dismissal from a public forum

Alex Jones is a nut. But he's no worse of a nut than the nuts who broadcast for several hours a night on Coast to Coast (must be listened to to be believed). Or make up the bulk of current cable network programs (think Ancient Aliens on "The History Channel"). Or populates the universities (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14 if you want more campus madness, I can find other examples).

He should not have been banned. The degree to which he was attacked by basically everyone (including platforms from which he almost certainly had no interaction like LinkedIn) and the DDOS on InfoWars is a terrifying precedent. He won't be the last for the Tech companies to decide to dogpile and unperson. No matter where you stand on the left-right spectrum, seeing a massive coordinated takedown of a largely peaceful and nonthreatening person such as Alex Jones should leave you deeply concerned. Facebook removed Occupy London (a presumably left-win page) and they went after Dennis Prager (a very middle of the road, normal American conservative). The censorship is broadening. You could very likely be next. Discord has already removed a number of 'alt-right' discord servers.

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I personally am of the stance the **only** solution is the regulation of very large platforms (Google or Facebook scale) by declaring them public squares (or something stronger). When Tim Wu wrote The Master Switch (and coined the term Net Neutrality) he actually singled out Google as a point of potential population control and related the story of the Western Union Telegram monopoly abusing it's power to leak confidential telegrams to elect Rutherford B. Hayes (the obvious implication being that it could very well happen again).

The Right should be opposed as this is a direct attack on them and several key parts of their platform that will likely become more important going forward. The left should be opposed as the use of corporate power to manipulate and control public conversation is an obvious attack on democratic processes and represents the dominance of powerful private interests over the people (and the tech industry is really, really rich too).

ADDENDUM: I bring up Net Neutrality and Tim Wu because the NN repeal and NN imposed by Obama did not impact the tech giants (only the ISPs to my knowledge it didn't even impact the DNS services which have been de-listing people too). The majority of the left is very pro-NN (ironically, the right generally isn't).

Battleforthenet and most of the NN lobbying groups have ties to the tech giants (particularly and notably Google, Facebook, Netflix and particularly Reddit). You will notice when the NN advocates show up they make a bunch of excuses why the tech giants should be exempt. This is because they are cynically protecting themselves from regulation while using it as a sledgehammer to attack the ISPs. Google will sidestep NN as a product of it's physical investments to be close to the key infrastructure of the Internet (as will many other giants). NN as envisioned by Google et al. is more a way to prevent having to ever negotiate with the ISPs.

It's the height of hypocrisy to accuse the ISPs of throttling and censorship while Google, FB, twitter et al. *actually* engange in censorship.

I was pretty anti-NN (title II is far too broad and potentially dangerous). But a demonstrated tendency to censorship, undue favoritism or selectively leaking information are cases that demands regulations. Particularly when you operate as a de facto monopoly or cartel as the tech giants have proved themselves to be. The issue with NN is that it appears to be targeted at the wrong people. Amusingly, Ajit Pai called out the tech industry briefly during the height of the NN repeal.

Quick note on Coast to Coast: George Noory is nothing compared to Clyde Lewis. Coast to Coast approaches weird topics as open skeptics. Clyde Lewis seems to host his damn show with a tin foil hat on every day.
In short, Coast to Coast guests sound crazier than the host. 'Ground Zero' guests usually sound a little more sane than Clyde.

>I personally am of the stance the only solution is the regulation of very large platforms (Google or Facebook scale) by declaring them public squares

please no.
do you want the large platforms to cement their market dominance? they *want* to legally and eternally be defined as the "public square".
why do we want to save these platforms by forcing them to make their policies acceptable?
let them keep shoot themselves in the foot and let them die like myspace.
it's just like bailing out the banks because they are too big to fail.

and lets say they do bring in these politicians with their infinitive internet wisdom and infallible heroism to protect what you and me think is free speech, do you really think the government is ultimately going to define alex jones as free speech rather than hate speech?
if you ask me, alex jones would be universally and legally banned from every single platform by law, rather than randomly by arbitrary policy enforcement as it is now.
we have the better deal right now, imo, when i can still go to infowars.com and bitchute to watch alex jones.

we live in a world where governments consider milk and pepe white supremacy symbolism ffs.

That argument hinges on the idea that they would be permanent institutions. They would only be permanent institutions if made so. I don't see why that has to be the case when it could be done in different ways like 'as long as you have x amount of the population' or 'you are a public square for 5 years and reevaluated after'. I'm sure those ideas have many holes in them, but they're what I came up with in 15 seconds.
Maybe they would have some advantage over the competition with this designation, but they may also have extreme disadvantage with the limitations that would likely be placed on them, and either way if a better platform came along people would move just like they did with myspace.

Really it seems like you're only imagining a worst case scenario here.

it's because the worst case scenario is usually what happens when you try to force things to be what you want

What if we just... don't make them permanent institutions? Seems like a pretty simple solution to me.

i'm pretty sure the regulators are not going to solve it in the way we want them to. you're talking from a position of you having control of what the regulation says, and it wont be lobbied by the corporations to support their dominance

I'm not even in favor of this being done, that just seems like a bad argument. "If you do the bad but unnecesarry thing it will be bad"