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Cake day: January 24th, 2024

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  • Thanks for the explainer, but that’s not what I meant.

    For example: If I, an ISP in Beijing went to BEIJING CERTIFICATE AUTHORITY Co., Ltd. which is on the list, and had my cert issued by them for foobar.com that listed them as the root trust, wouldn’t that work? Because the service operating there currently is illegal and I need to take it down, i don’t see how or why they could refuse. If they can’t do this for ISPs, then certainly law enforcement should be able to force them to comply, I would assume.

    If I then went to abuse that cert and spread malware on my fake cloned site, then what are the affected users going to do, call the cops and tell them the illegal seedbox is down?

    This is the only way I can see governments being able to display blocked website notices, takedown notices and other MITM insertions demonstrably happening in all sorts of countries without triggering a “back to safety” warning in most browsers.

    This has to be possible, because otherwise the observable results don’t make any sense.

    I’m not necessarily saying they did the attack this way instead of just simply spreading malicious torrents which is far easier, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t be able to do this.


  • or has access to a trusted CA’s key, as per above.

    I don’t see why they wouldn’t, or couldn’t do this if they wanted to if they were also willing to straight up resort to spreading malware, which idk about SK but that’s illegal anywhere in the west under very broad laws.

    EDIT: They could also do a redirect to a different URL with a valid cert I guess, though I’m sure browsers block that too. Well I’m out of ideas then, I feel bad for cybercriminals these days.

    EDIT2: Wait a sec, how does government censorship work then? Like e.g. https://ttrpg.network/post/7634428 How is the government able to MITM this person? The website is HTTPS and they’re using a VPN, but presumably locked to the DNS of the ISP. How are they able to block websites at all in this case with anything other than a termination of a connection (i.e. displaying a banner)?

    Even without a VPN by your logic if the ISP can’t present a foobar.com cert then they couldn’t block it via just DNS. How do FBI takedown notices work? Shouldn’t all of these throw up SSL errors and “back to safety” prompts?


  • I think it’s much simpler than that.

    Webhard is Web Hard Drives - SK torrenting scene is very different from the west, to simplify from how I understand it (English info seems scarce) basically everyone uses seedboxes or “web hard drives” in SK to download stuff.

    While I can’t seem to find out anything about what “The Grid system” is, if the whole thing is an online portal or software.

    If ISP routers are anything like the west that means they control the DNS servers and the ones on router cannot be changed, and likely it blocks 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 and so on, as Virgin Media does (along with blocking secure DNS) in the UK for example, which definitely opens up a massive attack vector for an ISP to spin up its own website with a verified cert and malware and have the DNS resolve to that when users try to access it to either download the software needed to access this Grid System or if it’s a web portal - the portal itself.

    I don’t think this included any attacks on the BitTorrent protocol at all, because as others said, it’s pretty secure, but another possibility is simply malicious torrents being distributed, which rights holders definitely done before (read decoying part in https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/03/mediadefender/)


  • Read pretty much any story from those who left the USSR to get a better picture of how life was there.

    A very unbiased account indeed

    but I find real stories of people trying to flee more valuable in understanding life in an area than books with economic figures.

    I don’t. People for the most part are morons that gulp down ivermectin and bleach enemas by the truckload to make their healing crystals work in time for Sunday church, so they can pray away the gay. People are fickle, and are often at odds with facts. As a trans person I know this well.

    If life was so good there

    That’s the neat part, I never claimed that. The USSR was a shithole, but the user I originally responded to was wrong as well. Two things can be true at once.

    UBI

    Or just nationalize necessities to cut out capitalist middlemen taking a cut. All a UBI of $100 will do is raise prices by $100 because people now have $100 more, and landlords et al. will want those $100. Under capitalism and neoliberalism the rich will always be at the top of the food chain in this manner.

    Socialist policies should be limited, imo, to voluntary associations, like co-ops and private unions.

    So they can be easily crushed by capitalist lobbying in western “”““democracies””".

    I admire neolibs who genuinely want to make things better, and you have my respect for that, but I think you’re just a bit naive and haven’t quite thought everything through.


  • In reality, their education system was overly focused on technical skills, neglecting essential life skills like critical thinking, creativity, decision-making, and many others.

    The US is the only country in the western world that teaches strictly extra-curricular matters at a university level, afaik. I went to uni in the UK for computer science, all of my classes were only about computer science and it’s subdomains only, there are no “life skills” classes.

    This became apparent in the 90s when many supposedly ‘highly educated’ individuals were involved in fraudulent schemes, failed to build and stand for democracy

    As opposed to the low levels of fraud and extremely healthy democracies of which countries exactly?

    As for the rest of your claims I would like to see direct sources. The “essential items” tidbit in particular I find suspect because the definition is quite fickle and the idea is subjective and depends on circumstances. Cars were famously not very common amongst USSR citizens. What was though is public transport, and we’re now in the west finding out that neglecting public transport and shifting towards personal vehicles has been a huge mistake, so that’s that.


  • Lolwut? USSR recovered from being a devastated bomb crater of a country faster than Europe did on American dollar while waging a cold war against the rest of the world. They beat the US to space time and time again too.

    Come the 80s, their manufacturing was well ahead of the west, and there weren’t any food issues either, so I’m not sure what you mean? The horrors of Stalin’s collectivisation efforts were a good bit before the cold war, and that wasn’t really an issue of food manufacturing.

    Nobody was forced to do any type of work more than anybody is under capitalism, if anything under capitalism as it is today - you take what you are given.

    In the USSR, higher education being free (as is the socialist tradition) gave people a lot more choice, no need to balance student debt against future potential earnings and as such ability to pay health expenses, like we see in the US today.

    They suffered from consumer goods issues because things like game consoles and tamagotchi can’t exactly be planned in a planned economy.

    It’s why I personally believe in a dual-economy, where necessities are planned centrally, from housing to infrastructure to utilities and independent worker co-operatives do the rest, I think that’s the lesson there ultimately. Oh and fuck the Russian Federation.