The battle of Usonansk

This story is based on real events. Identifying information has been distorted.

“According to the sources we have, they plan to focus their forces in this region”. Little did the generals know that their sources had been intentionally poisoned with false information. Something quite different happened.

It turns out that certain military and high-ranking people were doing research on the region that was going to be attacked, leaving a digital trail that allowed the enemy to confirm that they had swallowed their false information. They had found weaknesses in the chain of command and would not fail to exploit them. Some of these people were stubborn and had long careers, so they had no interest in leaving their high positions, despite their successive mistakes. Thus, they suffered social engineering attacks.

The social circle of key people was highly monitored to obtain all kinds of information, identify weak points, etc. The danger of direct confrontation and the fear of escalating the conflict were some of the weaknesses identified in the enemy.

On August 14, they received a surprise attack that went around the world. Their hasty response was discussed, very thoroughly in important offices. They were losing credibility and power by leaps and bounds. No-one believed in victory. They were pulling their money out of stocks and banks, out of those places they thought so safe.

They were severely infected by parasites who lived off them and let the cat out of the bag, waging internal struggles... The huge giant had feet of clay.

Stop using Reddit

Thousands of Reddit communities will stop being accessible tomorrow in protest against the decision to charge millions of dollars to apps that use the API. As a result of the policy, many apps will stop working.

However, while some people are recommending that people stop using Reddit, the protest is limited to two days. The problem with doing a temporary boycott is that it sends this message to the owners: a lot of people are angry, but after two days they're going to come back and we're going to keep making money. Reddit stopped being free software years ago and it's not going to stop censoring information they don't like.

I support boycotting Reddit, but I think it shouldn't just last two days; it should be permanent. There are several programs similar to Reddit that are free and respect the privacy of their users: Lemmy, /kbin, Postmill, Lobsters, Tildes...

Lemmy and /kbin, unlike Reddit, are free and federated, so the administrators of a node cannot censor information from nodes they don't control or impose anything on them; each node has its own policy.

YouTube threats Invidious developers

Invidious developers have received an email from YouTube asking them to stop offering the program. According to YouTube's legal team, they are in violation of YouTube API terms of use, which is impossible, as Invidious does not use YouTube API.

They also claim that Invidious “is being offered on invidious.io”, which is also untrue, because that website does not host any instance of Invidious. As of today there are 40 websites hosting public instances of Invidious, over which the Invidious team has no control, as Invidious uses the free AGPL license. Even if Invidious were illegal in the United States, it is hosted on the Tor network, the I2P network and in many countries, making it virtually impossible to make Invidious disappear. In addition, its code can be found on several development platforms and is on lots of computers.

Invidious has neither agreed to YouTube's API terms of service nor YouTube's terms of service. YouTube allows access to content hosted on its servers via the HTTP protocol, so Invidious is not committing a computer crime; it is simply safeguarding the right to privacy and freedom.

Google (the company that controls YouTube), on the other hand, does not respect privacy, censors, requires the use of proprietary software, exploits its users, develops artificial intelligence software for military purposes, has a huge ecological impact, to name just a few examples. That's why there are people who think that Google should be destroyed.

Fortunately, even if Invidious were to disappear, there are other free projects such as Piped, NewPipe and youtube-dl. Will Google also threaten the developers of these projects and their millions of users?

Let's end digital colonialism

We are colonized. The Tech Giants control the digital world with the complicity of the United States. Most computers (those using AMD or Intel processors) can be spied on and remotely controlled thanks to a universal Keep reading Let's end digital colonialism