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How would you host content that big companies may not like?
For example, hardware tinkering forums, modchip sites etc? I have no interest in hosting this kind of stuff, but i'm curious as to how you guys would handle it? Bang it on a VPS until your provider starts complaining about the DMCAs? Or host it in a country with lax laws? What about content more "dangerous" than that?
Comments
I consider hardware tinkering is a right. You bought the hardware you are able to use it as you like (of course warranty waivered). Modchip also, you bought it you are free to change it it is yours, it is a product not a license. Sure, if you start producing it, then it is another matter but my washing machine producer cant sue me for changing the way the waterpump works why would other hardware producers do that ?
Put it on a VPS is a bad idea unless a country that doesnt care. The provider will have to obey the law no matter how crooked.
But it can be hosted anonimously on Tor Freenet, just make sure you provide instructions on how to reach it there are many gateways to Tor that allow people that dont use it to access the content.
Sooner or later, a big mesh of a supraweb will develop constantly shifting through IPv6 and metropolitan meshes, untraceable, much better than freenet.
Until then just use an .onion site and give links through gateways. It should work for more dangerous sites too, such as hate speech, racism, banned cults, extreme right or left, things like those.
Democracy should not fear those, if t does then it is ill, maybe dying.
I, too, believe hardware tinkering (including modchips) is a right but some countries won't agree. My first thought was hosting on Tor but for the vast majority of people, that would be slow and cumbersome to access (although the tor > web gateways make it easier). The added bonus to this is also having an anonymous domain name for your site.
It's interesting you talk about democracy fearing hate speech, racism etc, but in the UK, you get cautioned and even arrested for saying shit on Twitter that's not even that bad. It's horrendous here, and i can't wait to get out (wow, how times have changed!).
Host it in Romania, No ACTA there and they are easy on a lot of stuff
Agreed, Tor "Hidden Services" (.onion websites) are the way to go.
What I've started doing is setting up a webhost where ever I want and then getting a 64mb or 128mb VPS in an obscure non ACTA location and set up nginx to just be a proxy to my real webserver that generates the content. I also configure the real webserver to only talk to the IP's of my endpoints.
Then you can use a DNS provider that allows selecting regions, so your provider in Romania will host your EU traffic, and your provider in Canada will host your US traffic. And you can build in failover stuff so if one host gets smacked down, the DNS will just route it to the backup VPS IP.
The Pirate Bay does something similar, but I think they use VPN tunnels instead of just web proxying.
Failover, keep moving. Be like the pirate bay. No one has any illusion about where it was started. Is it dead yet? Nope.
Yet -it works really well for Pirate Bay (you can't hide) ...(o),(o)
I think the idea of not allowing particular sites to operate is wrong on many levels, of course, so in most cases I will just write to the provider and check if they're OK with it. Most of them are, until they are flooded with complaints from various organizations. Why bow to such pressure, particularly since most countries claim to be 'democratic'? Isn't it praxis to let everybody have their say and then evaluate it? The concept of banning opinion just doesn't sit right with me. Imagine how it would be if it was reversed, that whatever opinion you hold, on whatever subject, was not permitted to be heard. It's absurd.
So I just check with the provider, and if they signal that it is OK, I'll test them out.
Democratic doesn't mean you decide what the law is. It means you collectively decide on the law, or in the US you decide on the people who decide on the law. In pure democracy, 49% can be pissed off. People are obviously involved in setting the laws, and we forget corporations are also filled with people who have a voice in a democracy. Hosts don't bow to pressure because they lack respect for democracy, they just don't see someone else's resume website going down so you can host NES roms, due to legal pressure, as a positive end to a week.
If you really want to be secure and want to use light-weight VPS's, you could set up your webhost to be a tor hidden service and then set up your failover front-end webservers to connect to the tor hidden service. If the VPS front end just gets wacked, you move to another one... But if the VPS gets seized and inspected, they won't find the IP address of the "feed" server within it, just the TOR address.
If you want to keep the heavy duty stuff like page processing and rendering on the front end VPS's in order to reduce the bandwidth between the source server and the front-end servers, just build your site in two pieces. A backend database with an API and then the front-end website that makes the API calls through the TOR service.
Tor has a lot of latency though so performance might suffer with both solutions. Maybe you could keep your tor hidden service in the same datacenter ;-)
If it's going to be a mostly static website, then just keep the source on a machine somewhere and everytime you spin up a new VPS, you can push the static site to the server as part of the deployment process.
Sorry for rambling. I've been thinking about these issues as well for a few projects of mine.
I would host it in a hot air balloon, over international waters.
It is not that simple. If, one day, 51% of the americans will vote in a referendum to make Obama president for life give him full control over everything and dissolve the Congress, similar to what happened in Germany, this will not work. Same, if 99% will vote to abolish taxes that will also not work.
Who cares about the constitution if the people want it ? Screw the 49% they can be sent to re-education camps to learn how to respect the black people and stop protesting against the president, that would be a racist slur.
It all depends on the way the spin doctors are doing it. The above seems outrageous now, yet already, speaking against any jew, having a separate opinion on historic events, on Islam, being a member of certain minorities (ethnic and religious) is suspicious at best if not straight illegal, can ruin careers and land you in jail. Many of these things would have been unacceptable in a democracy even 15 years ago, but the majority of corporations and churches agreed this is the best way forward now.
US isn't a pure democracy. It's a representative republic. My point is really that hosts aren't spitting in the face of democracy, they're just not going to screw their other clients because you want to download a movie. If it's a freedom of speech issue maybe they'll back you, but not just any old copyright dispute that has little moral significance to begin with. Plus democracy isn't really an all inclusive word for "things I think are good." Plenty of people will disagree with the results of democratic decisions.
I am not sure where you get that, you are the first to mention movies here, roms and the like.
The strawman had enough kicking for today, let it rest.
Edit: nevermind. Mao's just being a dick again and rambling incoherently (shocking), not gonna bother with it.
Pirated movies and roms have nothing to do with democracy and free speech even when are about democracy and free speech, so no, your examples do not work, it is simply a case of strawman you try to build and then destroy with arguments.
The discussion is about hardware as it is clearly stated by OP and the right to host instructions on how to modify it once you own it (surely, you can argue it might be stolen hardware from some poor shop as Apple/Microsoft, but that is not a real argument either due to the likelihood of that being the case).
From this came to larger issues such as freedom of speech for political, ethnic, religious minorities which are banned by the law in many countries, for example the Holocaust cannot be discussed in some countries legally as long as the views are not identical with the official views, white supremacists and anarchists are also pursued and sometimes jailed on trumped up charges (most times true, also, but, since they are badly viewed by the public, anything goes against them, even when made up right ?).
My view is that democracy should not fear those minorities and the majority can always prove with facts they are wrong. Nothing to do with movies and roms.
Nope. Read the original post again, it was an example and the thread can go anywhere from there, read the one I responded to. You're just being a dick bro. I responded to the person above me, not one of your incoherent rants about religious paranoia or your thoughts on politics. Hosts are not defying democracy by bending to legal pressures as any kind of blanket rule. If the person I was responding to, clearly as they were right above me, wants to clarify their position and not the one you just decided this thread could only be about about (not sure when you became the discussion topic dictator) so you could rant about God only knows what, they can do so at their choice. Chill dude. That's all I've got to say to you, period. I don't like this side of you and I'll be the first to say it.
Thanks for your comments on the issue. However, i would like to clarify the subject a bit more. I don't mean to ask about hosting generally dodgy stuff like "pirated" movies, games, music etc for the sole purpose of copyright infringement (although i believe everyone is free to share what they have, but that's an argument for another matter). I'm thinking more towards spreading information and ideas from a place where it seems you can be arrested just for making racist jokes. Imagine how a country that cautions someone for making a Hitler joke, reacts to a forum dedicated overthrowing the monarchy, as an extreme example, or a forum dedicated to reverse engineering hardware allowing people to do much more things with it.
I just checked both posts where you mention movies and roms and none has a post above mentioning copyrights.
So, which post are you actually attacking ?
I was really responding to @k0nsl and his generic statement that suggests that hosts are somehow against democracy for bending to legal pressure. It's an absurd notion. Some (ok really just one person, consistently) like to try to drag things out into more than they are and start fights over it. I'm done with that shit.
Fair enough.
I still fail to see any roms, movies or other copyright infringments mentioned in the whole post. Please quote the exact phrase so we know if you indeed responded to a pirate promoting his infringing site or you really built a strawman as I said and you attacked me saying it is not true.
@Maounique give it a rest dude. So you disagree with my posts. Seriously, get over it. Everything isn't about you. Time to find my block plugin to help me fight the urge to feed your thread takeovers.
I know it is not about me, you use the copyright infringement issue to attack political views and other things, same as the governments try to spy on everyone saying they are abusing kids otherwise.
Nowhere in this discussion were movies and roms mentioned before you did it.
It is one thing that I disagree with your religious and militaristic views and quite another when you throw accusations left and right out of the blue to justify the silencing of people that do not hold those militaristic and religious views.
To me it looked like you tried to take it over with the copyright issue.
But, go ahead, you can ignore people holding different views and reassure yourself all the time that you are doing the right thing. There are so many TV channels and churches saying it. If everything else fails, US has enough army to "convince" half of the world.
Other than that, you are a nice person one day I hope we meet
Most (if not all) people arrested for Twitter related reasons (in the UK anyway) have been so justifiably.
Bragging about running over a cyclist and not stopping or reporting it is a crime.
Naming witnesses and/or suspects that are protected under a court order is a crime.
Making threats to rape and/or murder people is a crime.
As a UK resident, I assume you will know the 3 main stories I am referring to. Reading your posts on this thread, I am starting dislike your attitude and I can't wait for you to get out too.
Are you stupid? Why would you expect to be able to freely express racism without being punished? It's people like you that probably think the English Defence League was setup just to bash all Muslims whilst driving down the M1 chanting 'White power! White power!'.
I'm quite happy that you chose to edit your post as the original version was offensive to @jarland...
Nope, you must have read it wrong, I only edit to add and correct typos, add comas etc. What exactly was offensive ? And jarland was looking all the time you can be sure he would have asked mods to ban me if i would have written something offensive he doesnt like free speech much and is looking for ways to stop it.
Get off your high horse, either come into the topic and stick with the discussion or shut up.
I would use Island (EDIS) or Romania to host such content.
I am in the topic, I just fortunately don't agree on your views of the UK.
Unlike you, I am not a racist and I don't moan about criminals being arrested for the crimes they commit.