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From reporting by The Daily Dot.
Conservative psychologist/alt-right guru Jordan Peterson officially announced that he is launching what he calls a "free speech platform" known as Thinkspot.
Peterson insists that Thinkspot will adhere to his principles of anti-censorship so strongly that the platform will only ban or remove users if it is ordered to do so by the U.S. court of law. Because there's no way that could go horribly wrong.
Peterson also mentioned that Thinkspot will have a minimum word count as opposed to a maximum. "If minimum comment length is 50 words, you're gonna have to put a little thought into it," Peterson said to the right-wing outlet NewsBusters. "Even if you're being a troll, you'll be a quasi-witty troll."
Thinkspot is being marketed as a creator-to-consumer payment processor such as Patreon while also serving as an alternative to services such as Twitter and YouTube.
Thinkspot has an intended release date of August 2019.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @08:45PM (21 children)
And what is wrong about this?
It is wrong by default. Censorship is always wrong. We should never let the courts or anybody else decide what we can see and hear on the internet. We can do our own filtering at our end. We just need a way around the damage when the authorities try to cut the wire
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @09:58PM (9 children)
Agreed. That is an excellent way of looking at things.
Sadly, federal officers knocking down your door won't think so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:01PM (8 children)
Who, exactly, has had their "door knocked down" by US authorities *only* for expressing themselves?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:06PM (3 children)
Fine, you win. It was UK authorities who knocked down Julian Assange's door, so he won't have a door to knock down when the USA takes custody of him.
He's probably homosexual too!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:19PM (2 children)
I wonder how much it cost the Ecuadorians to fix their door? Oh, wait...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @11:14PM (1 child)
I could give you the cost now, in €, or we can wait until November 1st and you can have the cost in £.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @11:43PM
Your choice. Although, given that the Limeys didn't bust down any doors, I'm guessing zero. In any currency.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:09PM (1 child)
Well, it was more of an analogy for the praetorians in other countries. Not everyone is as blessed to live in Ruby Ridge - I mean America.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:17PM
Except Ruby Ridge [wikipedia.org] wasn't about free speech:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @07:04PM (1 child)
The US has obscenity laws, free speech zones, national security letters, draconian copyright laws such as the DMCA, FCC censorship, and so on. Not to mention, the US government constantly forces through similarly unconstitutional garbage such as FOSTA, which then takes massive amounts of effort to get rid of, assuming the courts happen to care about the Constitutional on that day. Simply being better in comparison to something else is not good enough.
(Score: 2) by J053 on Monday June 17 2019, @09:16PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RandomFactor on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:31PM (9 children)
There was a saying in Fidonet "route around the bastards"
Of course it was a different world then. Every byte that came down someone was paying long distance rates for (and that meant something back then..) And the government didn't really play in our sandbox.
Nowadays it isn't connectivity to the data so much as the actual data that those with evil intent want to control, but the principle remains largely the same, and in a way the results are the same.
Google is broken, you get DuckDuckGo
Twitter is broken, you get GAB
YouTube is broken, you get BitCHUTE
Patreon is broken, you get THINKSPOT
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by arslan on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:47PM (5 children)
I'm puzzled, decentralized alternatives like IPFS [ipfs.io] (and its various equivalents) have existed for a while now and yet the uptake just isn't there, even among the geeks. Is it because the issue is only serious enough for whinging in internet boards, but not enough to actually take action?
Heck, I'd be keen to run an IPFS node (or again any of its equivalents) for SN if SN ever decides to go that route.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @11:17PM (2 children)
The motivation wasn't there because these days tribalism requires political stands. When the alt-right declares itself under siege their tribes will follow.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday June 18 2019, @03:56AM
Yea.. it makes me ponder that engineering and tech should have some form of accreditation body with the single core principle of separation of tech and politics.
Any member mixing the two should be stripped and be labelled an outcast with whatever maximum negative professional consequences society & industry can inflict on said individual.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:53PM
The 'alt-right' left for elsewhere ages ago. Those under siege on the big social media platforms haven't been alt-right for quite some time.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday June 17 2019, @12:15AM (1 child)
If you have to run a "node", you're just asking for trouble. It's not really decentralized, it's more like "distributed". The system has to be absolutely positively transparent, blend in with the noise, catch the wave, hang ten...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday June 18 2019, @03:52AM
Not sure if I agree with your definition of decentralized vs distributed. Something can be distributed but can still have a single point of dependency, like a Kubernetes cluster, the worker nodes can be distributed but they all still depend on the central command & control like the master nodes. Decentralized means you have minimal, ideally no, dependency on a central thing.
IPFS to me is decentralized. The only potential central dependency is during bootstrap it requires to know at least 1 node to talk to to join the mesh - but that isn't strictly a "centralized" entity. There's a "central" registry that makes it easier for automation, but is not mandatory. I can boot a node and manually pass it a list of other nodes that I've validated separately if I want. The whole thing is entirely encapsulated within me and my node as another actor joining the mesh - not on some central thing.
I don't see why me running a node means its not decentralized. This is not a server node, there's no concept of a server vs. client nodes. It is just a node.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:54PM (2 children)
I worked for a networking hardware vendor back in the early '90s.
I was doing some testing on our TCP/IP module and randomly selected an IP address to ping against. I let it run for a few days to make sure we didn't see any issues, and everything worked perfectly.
Turns out the ISP for the customer's IP address that chose charged by the byte. Needless to say, there was one angry Aussie yelling at us a few weeks later when he got his bill.
Oops.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Monday June 17 2019, @12:07AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday June 17 2019, @12:21AM
Thanks for the reference!
The Coriolis effect is a bitch! :)
I didn't open your link before responding, which may leave me open to a booting! :)
[Please stand by]
Yep. I was right. Whew! That was a big boot!
"In fact, in Rand McNally, they wear hats on their feet and hamburgers eat people."
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @01:41AM
Ha ha ha. If people hear what they want to hear they won't filter it. It will only reinforce their belief.
Like what you just said........