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Big Tech 0, Ricochet 1
We’ve all read the news: Twitter has banned the President of the United States and many of his supporters from their service. Hosting enterprises like Amazon Web Services have tossed conservative-leaning sites from their servers. Apple and Google have removed apps like Parler from their app stores.
So, is Ricochet vulnerable?
No. This community is hosted by Astroluxe, a hosting enterprise founded by like-minded businesspeople. One of them is an old friend of Ricochet’s, Charles Cooke, the original Conservatarian. The other is John Ekdahl, who in addition to being a web developer extraordinaire, is also a fierce 1st Amendment advocate. We’re proud to be in business with them.
Charlie had this to say about hosting Ricochet in this perilous moment: “The Internet was designed to be a distributed, open platform on which people could speak without permission and argue as they saw fit. Astroluxe is committed to that idea, even as others rush to abandon it. We’re proud to host Ricochet, and a host of other websites, on which a broad range of opinions are shared.”
All of which is to say this: Ricochet is here to stay. We’re not worried about being “deplatformed” or tossed off a hosting site. Our hosting partners and our members have the same unwavering bedrock commitment to liberty, freedom of speech, and spirited civil conversation.
To our fellow members, our deepest thanks. To those who have yet to join, we’re eager to have you. To the entire community, we are here to stay.
Published in General
It will eventually be our turn.
I figure we’re all going to get what we deserve, good and hard.
But that’s not necessarily bad. It could be that we all get tacos.
On a slightly more serious note. OK, semi-serious.
My company uses a third-party hosting provider, for project management software. There’s a long list of reasons why we didn’t have internal IT support this (we are a very large company, and the group using this provider is only a part of the overall enterprise), but it made a lot of sense to do this years ago and it’s still a good model.
This provider has been doing a lot more updating and patching around security, though, in the past year, than they ever have before. Mandated, mandatory, DHS “stuff”, which I put into a large bucket because I’m not a technical guy. But they are mandated to do this, because some of the providers other customers have even slight and tangential relationships with gov’t entities.
If you fall anywhere near in that bucket, you’re now mandated. Which means, essentially, some level of control. This can be easily and broadly expanded, because if you’re using the service to do business, and/or you do business with the gov’t, you’ll snap into line, because revenue and you like to make your mortgage payments until that big $600 bucks lands in your checking account. That the feds know the numbers to.
So while I don’t think Ricochet falls into the danger zone or anything, nor should it, there’s a whole world of regulations and requirements that may or may not come down, and to assume there won’t be impacts is interesting.
One last thing: The Christmas Day bombing that blew up an AT&T site – one hell of a lot of traffic flowed through that location, including stuff for utilities, and the like. To say that there now won’t be a massive spend on hardening (stifle a chuckle at “hardening”), required now by the government, would likely be an error. I’m assuming fallout for this will go beyond small potatoes, as it impacted first responders, FirstNet, and data carried by utilities (not just for metering, either).
One hopes that Ricochet doesn’t fall under the watchful eye of Californians.
http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/01/californias-internet-censorship-office.html
“Report misinformation,” a flier from California’s Office of Election Cybersecurity blares. Social media users are urged to report “misleading” materials to the Secretary of State’s office.
A government office created by California Democrats is monitoring hashtags, classifying political speech it opposes by “threat level”, taking screenshots of posts, and then storing the information indefinitely, before reporting the offending speech to social media companies for censorship.
“Election Security is our number one priority,” the Office claims. But its focus isn’t securing elections by fighting hackers or voter fraud. Instead it’s fighting “the spread of mis- and disinformation”. That’s an Orwellian way of saying that it’s fighting and censoring online speech.
“We created the CA Office of Election Cybersecurity to keep your vote safe – so you don’t have to worry! The Office is a non-partisan government arm dedicated to ensuring your vote is safe,” Secretary of State’s office unconvincingly tweeted.
That may well all turn out to be true. But numerous websites knew years ago, not to trust the Big Three. Yet Parler went and did it anyways. Which was stupid.
This is horrifying. And so un-American. Doesn’t anyone in California care?
Can somebody point me at Astroluxe? Searches on the internet return inconclusive. If these folk are truly conservative and will not roll to the coming government actions then I would love to move my and my customers platforms over to it.
The only thing I can find is https://astroluxe.io/ which seems to be blocked at many of my work locations firewalls.
That looks like the right link. Maybe Tor in?
Great news! Thanks for the info . . .
We are witnessing a rapid acceleration into an Orwellian world based on fear and control. People are desperate for peace and sanity, so will they sign on to any means to get there? It seems so – giving these big platforms so much power didn’t happen just yesterday. I have yet to see the documentary The Social Dilemma, but people that have worked at these places have been sounding the alarm for years.
Also disrespect for law and order, censoring history or rewriting it to suit a new narrative didn’t just happen yesterday either. The Great Reset if you look it up, covers a great deal more power and control at the hands of a few. We’ve had our issues in this country, we’re not perfect, but we witnessed a weird change in 2008 when Obama was elected. I didn’t vote for him, but I thought he would be good for the country, and especially for people of color. The opposite happened – nothing improved, and things got more heated and divided. That made no sense, unless you read Rules for Radicals, the Sal Alinsky manual that he and Hilary lived by. Then it starts to make sense. This has nothing to do with skin color or gender.
Many of Obama’s former aides are part of the WEF Great Reset, and now we are seeing a recreation of his administration coming back with the Biden election. This is not conspiracy – what we used to laugh about when they used terms like New World Order. This is how it’s achievable – exactly what is unfolding. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset/
This was planned before the pandemic, and will we ever learn the truth about how that started? I’m glad Ricochet is here. There is no reason for it not to be, just like there is no reason for the silencing of our fellow citizens on any other forum.
A slight nitpick on my part that derails the conversation (sorry), but do you really think Trump is a conservative? On what grounds? Is he socially conservative? Fiscally conservative? He hasn’t shown much respect for institutions or tradition recently, at any rate.
This statement by Charlie is so naive. “Data centers could, but we have a good relationship.” Famous last words for any personal or business relationship.
@Fron Seat Cat
I recently watched The Social Dilemma and it is not about Social media being biased and censorious, it is making the case that the social media companies are only motivated by money and not censorious enough!
That is correct and I added it to the post as well.
PM me and we can get you a good price on hosting through the deal we have with them.
The AT&T bombing is concerning. I have been around the internet for quite a while. It was designed to distributed and self healing. For that much data to flow through Nashville and be knocked off line by a single bombing sort of indicates a forcing of data channels for other means. Nashville going off line should have maybe had an effect on the local area but should not have knocked down significant functionality in KY, IN, TN, GA, NC, SC, AL.
Back when we (the industry) was designing this stuff the key was distributed networks with lots of routes, data centers and syncs. Mainframes were dead because it meant choke points and single points of failure. We wanted DISTRIBUTED computing. For some reason we have decided to go back to the centralized model with all the issues were designed against in the first place.
Not behind company firewalls.
He is not a socialist and he loves America. By today standards that makes him a Conservative.
Not that I agree much.
I suspect the Parler folk felt the same.
Compared to whom? Mitt Romney? John McCain? George W. Bush?
Trump promoted one the healthiest and most robust economies since Reagan putting millions back to work and increasing employment across all demographic sectors. Eliminated burdensome regulations. Has been the most pro-life president in the history of the republic. Has rebuilt the military. Brokered peace accords in the Middle East. Defeated ISIS at minimal cost. Increased sanctions on Russia. Put leverage on China to trade more fairly and blocked certain Chinese companies from continuing to compete in America with stolen IP from American companies..
Compared to other conservatives who talk the talk but can’t walk the walk; I’d say he did surprisingly well. As for showing respect for certain institutions and traditions, you’d have to be more specific. He definitely expanded the base of the GOP especially with Blacks and Hispanics.
Of course, there are certain institutions that sullied their own reputations before Trump was even sworn in – the DOJ, the FBI, the EPA, the FDA, the State Dept., the news media including several ostensibly conservative commentators — how much time do you have?
Just shows the sort of thing one misses when one rarely surfaces all the way up to the Main Feed?
Hi David. Charlie here. You’re right of course. ISPs aren’t currently common carriers; those rules have bounced back and forth depending on the FCC’s makeup. ISPs may go back to being common carriers under Biden, if he uses Title II, but even then the details would have to be determined. The internet providers I was referring to are those that affect hosting and core infrastructure: the data center and the multiple peering networks that connect it to the broader internet, the domain registry, the institution(s) that allocate IPs, etc. Under a combination of government and contractual rules, those can’t discriminate based on viewpoint. These are the variables that we can control/rely on, and we have mitigation plans in place should any of this change. Your ISP could, of course, cut out Ricochet. But we have no control over that, and it wouldn’t be contingent upon where it was hosted anyhow
how interesting the timing is, given the movement to recall the present governor
https://rushbabe49.com/2021/01/14/are-we-and-they-blind-taking-media-censorship-to-the-next-step/
Which will be enforced by… Attorney General Merrick Garland?
I shouldn’t laugh this hard before lunch.
I’m pretty sure that not ALL of us deserve tacos.
I think the easiest hole in this argument is that they can say “Oh we didn’t shut them down because of viewpoint. It’s about THREAT! And DANGER! And VIOLENCE!”
If t-mobile, verizon, and AT&t wireless were to eliminate the “ricochet.com” entry in their DNS , your web browser wouldn’t recognize ricochet.com
…. how many folks would be savvy enough to know that they could use openDNS in their cell phones, and how many would be savvy enough to reprogram their home cable routers to use openDNS… like the man said, crippling any website would be trivial
You could also just get the IP numbers once, and then use those rather than the domain name.
If your ISP blocks the direct IP too, then you’d need to use a VPN to get around it. Until they block the VPN too…