Internet

MIT Free Speech Alliance email hijacked?

This entry was posted in News and tagged Internet MIT on by

UPDATED 8:10 PM EST, November 21, 2023. Sorry, I misread the mail headers. I’m out of practice.

UPDATE 2, 4:48 PM EST, November 22, 2023. Got a statement from the MIT FSA. See my new post.

Yesterday I received an odd email purporting to be from the MIT Free Speech Alliance, but attacking it. The headers in the mail seem to say it originated from the usual source, suggesting that either an insider sent an unauthorized message or the account’s security was compromised. CORRECTION: The message comes from a Yahoo account unrelated to the usual sending account. Even so, the sender was able to get hold of at least some of the addresses on the organization’s mailing list. The mail said “Ask them to remove your name from the MFSA membership list they claim to represent as they advocate to destroy the diversity that helps make MIT the great world-class institution it is today.”

I’m trying to figure out what happened, and I’ll provide more information when I have it. Meanwhile, treat any email you receive from mit_freespeech@yahoo.com with caution. Note that that is not the address from which legitimate MIT Free Speech Alliance emails come. The situation suggests that even if the mail server wasn’t compromised, a malicious party got hold of all or part of the list of subscribed addresses and could make further use of it.

A look into the cancel culture mind 1

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged ethics Internet on by

We’ve all run into the vicious nastiness which pervades the Internet. If you make public posts, there’s a good chance you’ve been its target, if only from occasional potshots. Sometimes it’s seriously painful. Anyone who’s had a loved one die of COVID needs to think carefully before mentioning the fact publicly.

An Atlantic article by Kaitlin Tiffany, “How Telling People to Die Became Normal”, looks at the kind of people who try to increase other people’s pain. Referring to a Facebook group dedicated to this kind of malice, she writes:
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Kafka’s Mastodon

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary and tagged censorship Internet mastodon on by

I run the Filk News account on Mastodon, providing information about concerts, filksings, and other items of interest for the filk music community. Normally I don’t write much about filk here, but the story has relevance to anyone who uses Mastodon to distribute or gather information or just to connect with friends.

The first part of the story is in my earlier post, “The petty tyrants of Mastodon.” You may want to read it first if you haven’t already. Since then I’ve gotten no satisfaction from indieweb.social and found it necessary to move Filk News to liberal.city, which I think will be a better home for it. (Another post which I made, “The impending strangulation of Mastodon,” reflected a user error on my part, so I’ve removed it from public view.)

As I said in “Petty Tyrants,” my personal account is on Liberdon, which is included on a “Tier 0 Blocklist”. It simply lists domains to block without giving reasons. When I noticed trouble interacting with Indieweb from Liberdon, I reported the issue to Indieweb’s admin, Tim Chambers. He said he had changed Liberdon’s status from “blocked” to the less restrictive “silenced” while looking into the issue.
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The petty tyrants of Mastodon

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged censorship Internet mastodon on by

Having a federated system like Mastodon guarantees that no voices can be completely suppressed. Intolerant people can still try to silence others within their sphere, though, and some have wider influence than others. There are blocklists that many Mastodon sites use, and certainly some sites deserve to be blocked. They spew intentional falsehoods, advocate violence, or dump pornography on those who don’t want it. But once the lists get acceptance, their managers can start adding sites which they simply don’t like.

My personal Mastodon account is on Liberdon, a libertarian-oriented server. Its policy says:

Liberdon’s community adopts a “good neighbor” policy, as one of our goals is outreach to the other communities. As such, “ostracizable” (non-tolerated) behavior includes spamming, scamming, nudity* / pornographic / sexual / graphic / NSFW content, advocacy of the initiation of violence, ethnic/racial/homophobic slurs, harassment, or other content/activity that could get this site shut down by state agents with guns. Offending content will need to be removed by the user, and repeat offenders will be banned from the community.

Even with these limits, much of what is posted on Liberdon (including my own posts) will outrage many on both the right and the left. That’s why I like it. However, some people express their outrage in blocklists. At some point, Liberdon got put on a “Tier 0 blocklist” which seems to be widely used. As I’m typing this, it includes 417 servers. There’s no explanation of why they’re listed, only a claim that the list is “a combined blocklist of only the worst actors, and it exists to provide one blocklist to which surely no one can object as a baseline for others.”
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The EU Media Freedom Act and a two-tiered Internet

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged EU Europe Internet law liberty on by

A language gripe which I haven’t mentioned lately is the treatment of “media” as a singular. I’ve given it up as a lost cause, but it damages discourse. People often think of “the media” as one thing. Obviously there are many media. This blog is a medium for information, no less than CNN is. But in common use, you don’t qualify as a medium unless either you’re a big corporation or a fortune-teller. Similarly, there’s a tendency to count people as “journalists” only if they work for a “medium” (or is it “a media”)? This leads to the idea that freedom of the press applies only to properly credentialed and accredited journalists and media.

This trend appears in Article 17 of the EU’s proposed Media Freedom Act, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation has strongly criticized.
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