Cloudflare wants to get rid of CAPTCHAs. They say it takes too much time to complete them, and want people to “prove their personhood” using a physical device.

They say it is anonymous, but once everyone’s used to what Cloudflare proposes, it will be easier to skip the privacy bit entirely.

From the Cloudflare blog:

Select all the buses. Click on bikes. Does this photo have traffic lights? As ridiculous as these questions are, you’re almost guaranteed to have seen one recently. They are a way for online services to separate humans from bots, and they’re called CAPTCHAs. CAPTCHAs strengthen the security of online services. But while they do that, there’s a very real cost associated with them.

Based on our data, it takes a user on average 32 seconds to complete a CAPTCHA challenge. There are 4.6 billion global Internet users. We assume a typical Internet user sees approximately one CAPTCHA every 10 days.

This very simple back of the envelope math equates to somewhere in the order of 500 human years wasted every single day — just for us to prove our humanity.

Today, we are launching an experiment to end this madness. We want to get rid of CAPTCHAs completely. The idea is rather simple: a real human should be able to touch or look at their device to prove they are human, without revealing their identity. We want you to be able to prove that you are human without revealing which human you are! You may ask if this is even possible? And the answer is: Yes! We’re starting with trusted USB keys (like YubiKey) that have been around for a while, but increasingly phones and computers come equipped with this ability by default.

Today marks the beginning of the end for fire hydrants, crosswalks, and traffic lights on the Internet.

…

CAPTCHA without Picture: Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood

“Hardware security keys are devices with an embedded secret that can connect to your computer or your phone”

From a user perspective, a Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood works as follows:

1. The user accesses a website protected by Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood, such as cloudflarechallenge.com.

2. Cloudflare serves a challenge.

3. The user clicks I am human (beta) and gets prompted for a security device.

4. User decides to use a Hardware Security Key.

5. The user plugs the device into their computer or taps it to their phone for wireless signature (using NFC).

6. A cryptographic attestation is sent to Cloudflare, which allows the user in upon verification of the user presence test.

Completing this flow takes five seconds. More importantly, this challenge protects users’ privacy since the attestation is not uniquely linked to the user device. All device manufacturers trusted by Cloudflare are part of the FIDO Alliance. As such, each hardware key shares its identifier with other keys manufactured in the same batch (see Universal 2nd Factor Overview, Section 8). From Cloudflare’s perspective, your key looks like all other keys in the batch.

There are at most three clicks required to complete a Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood. There is no looping, where a user is asked to click on buses 10 times in a row.

Yes, let’s just use these physical devices to “prove our personhood” and access the internet, and while we’re at it, why don’t we also use these devices to prove our coronavirus vaccination history?

How are protesters supposed to organize the destruction of their country now?

Myanmar suspended use of social media briefly at the beginning of the riots. Then, for some reason, they turned it back on.

Now, they’re turning off all internet.

AP:

Myanmar’s wireless broadband internet services were shut down on Friday by order of the military, local providers said, as protesters continued to defy the threat of lethal violence to oppose the junta’s takeover.

A directive from the Ministry of Transport and Communications on Thursday instructed that “all wireless broadband data services be temporarily suspended until further notice,” according to a statement posted online by local provider Ooredoo.

After weeks of overnight cutoffs of internet access, the military on Friday shut all links apart from those using fiber optic cable, whose speeds are drastically slower. Access to mobile networks and all wireless — the less costly options used by most people in the developing country — was blocked.

The Norwegian telecoms company Telenor, one of the biggest carriers in Myanmar, confirmed it could no longer offer wireless services. It was offering fiber optic service of up to 40 megabytes per second in its packages as of Friday, well below high-speed access that’s at a minimum 100 Mbps.

The government has shut down all but a handful of fully military-controlled media outlets. Some of those banned or whose operations have been suspended have continued to publish via social media or whatever methods they can find.

Facebook announced it was providing a safety feature to enable users in Myanmar to beef up security settings locking their profiles to prevent access by non-friends. That includes preventing non-friends from enlarging, sharing or downloading full-size profile and cover photos and seeing any posts on a person’s timeline.

Facebook and other major social media platforms have banned members of the Myanmar military, also known as the Tatmadaw, and are blocking ads from most military-linked commercial entities.

The rioters are now burning the Constitution, which they had previously said they were supporting.

Despite deadly crackdowns on anti-coup rallies nationwide, Mandalay residents again took to the streets on Thursday in protest of the military regime. They burned copies of the military-drafted 2008 Constitution after the CRPH announced the abolition of the charter. pic.twitter.com/lNaYuWGTP5

— Myanmar Now (@Myanmar_Now_Eng) April 1, 2021

So now what are they supporting?

No one knows.

This is the same movement as was in Hong Kong. The media in the West was framing it as “pro-democracy protests,” but they were Antifa communists of some kind, claiming that they were against Beijing because it was “capitalist.”

This is the same as the movement in Thailand. They are attacking the Monarchy, despite the fact that the Monarchy is mostly just symbolic politically, and is much more of a social and cultural institution associated with Thai Buddhism.

There have been like 7 different Thai governments under the monarch. Just to really put a fine point on that knife: in neighboring Cambodia, which has a culture very similar to Thailand, both the French colonial government AND communism maintained the monarchy. So an attack on the Monarchy is a direct attack on the basic culture, not anything to do with the government or democracy or whatever the heck.

To be clear: the Hong Kong, Thai and Myanmar revolutions are all part of an umbrella movement, that is literally called the “Umbrella Movement.”

It’s the Asian version of the Arab Spring – or that is the CIA plan. They are using some kind of anarcho-communist doctrine in Asia like they used Islamic terrorism and the Moslem Brotherhood in the Arab Spring.

It all comes from social media. The CIA is able to organize these movements using Twitter and Facebook. They did it in the Moslem world, and now they are repeating it in Asia.

Related: Amazon Used “Troll Army” to Promote Anti-Union Agenda on Twitter

You don’t have to shut down the entire internet. It is all based around Facebook and Twitter.

Someone recently wrote to Andrew Anglin that North Korea had done a good job keeping Western influence out of the country, and Anglin replied:

Unlike North Korea, China is able to be completely open to Westerners, and even give people access to most of the Western entertainment media (pretty much anything that isn’t openly anti-China or obscene), while also preventing the population from getting sucked up in Western culture.

It’s quite the balancing act they’ve performed, and they’ve done it very well. I remember in the 00s talking to edgy young people in Shanghai and Beijing who would say “oh, the government doesn’t let us talk” and I’d say “you’re talking now – I could be a spy, your phone could be listening, your building could be tapped, but here you are talking.”

This was sometimes at explicitly “edgy” Western style bars and cafes. The police wouldn’t raid these places, and there was no real evidence they were being spied on. Probably, the government would occasionally send someone in to just monitor local chatter, and it could be that some of the regulars were snitches, but you never heard about anything like that.

This is to say: they never went too hard. They had rules, but they never created a situation where people were actually feeling oppressed. I doubt that can actually be said about North Korea. Sure, when you have a totally closed society like North Korea, you effectively have people in a sensory deprivation chamber, so you can print total nonsense in the media, and have 99.999% of people worshiping the leader as a god incarnate, but you also can’t ever hope to achieve anything.

China was able to hit the perfect balance of social freedom and cultural protection, which made people not really feel oppressed, because they weren’t really being oppressed, while also keeping the CIA from overthrowing the government.

I had a neighbor (white guy) who was a coomer, but also not savvy enough to use a VPN, and he would tell me that it was actually not hard to find pornography on the internet in China, and had found that they only really censored big sites. I have never tried to use the internet in China without a VPN, so I don’t really know what it’s like, but in general, it seems that they only block stuff in the Chinese language, and don’t really care about anything else. This means that anyone who learns English (or for that matter knows enough to buy a VPN) has access to all kinds of anti-Chinese propaganda, but they know that 99% of the people who learn English are also well-off and therefore invested in the Chinese system.

Some things that the Chinese do really are almost poetic in their perfection, but other things are just so dumb it’s confusing.

I always note how popular the film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” was in the West, and note that the Chinese never tried to turn exportable films into an industry, despite the fact that this would so obviously cause significantly fewer people on earth to hate them. The same confusing ineptitude is seen in the way they deal with their client states. I get that they just don’t want to be involved with foreign politics at all, they just want to build roads and skyscrapers and sell products, but it would be so easy to bring this CIA social media stuff up at a meeting and say “we’ve got an alternative, we can localize it for you, and it will protect your government from a revolution – so let us know if you want to work on that. We’ll throw it in for free with the trade deal.” Most or all of these governments would say “ah, hah-ah, yes, yes – I understand.”

This should have been considered earlier.

They didn’t need to put themselves in this situation.

In Burma, if the military had taken over and there was no social media, no one would have thought anything about it, as long as the military didn’t start messing with their lives.

Most people care about freedom, and they want the freedom to do the things they want to do.

Related: What is the Meaning of “Democracy-Freedom”?

Obviously, if a government starts impinging on those freedoms, in the way for example the US government has with all of its crazy and oppressive laws, and now the totally insane lockdown regime, people will get mad. But if a government doesn’t bother people’s lives, most people will not think very much about the government.

The Myanmar military government is not messing with people. They’re not getting involved in their business, like Western governments do.

They’re not doing this:

Related: NY Business Owners Chase Communist Health Enforcers Out the Door! WE WILL NOT COMPLY!

The only reason these people are freaking out is because they’re being agitated by CIA materials on social media. You notice: it’s almost all women, as always.

It is very easy to get women all hyped up and going nuts by using the internet.

Men will then follow the women.

That is literally the oldest story in history.

At this point, Myanmar has let this get out of control, and they do need to just totally shut the internet off. They also need to make a gesture of good faith to the people, and calm them down.

In the future: all the Asian countries, all the CIS countries, and for that matter any other country that doesn’t want the CIA having a revolution in their country need to shut down Twitter and Facebook, and offer people an alternative.

There are plenty of alternatives.

They just get some local celebrities involved, put up some ads, and boom – there it is. Problem solved.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

In this new installment of “we need everyone to do X in order for the fight against the pandemic to work,” experts are telling us that everyone must access the internet if we hope to defeat the virus that’s ravaging nursing homes all across the world.

Previous installments in the series include:

• Every US state must be under lockdown at the same time in order for lockdowns to work
• Africa must have coronavirus under control in order to prevent new outbreaks in America and Europe
• Everyone’s movements must be tracked through their smartphones in order for virus to stop spreading
• Everyone must be under surveillance in order for lockdowns to be lifted

Do keep in mind that coronavirus is only really a threat to the sick and the old.

Daily Mail:

Half the world’s population doesn’t have access to the internet and this is holding back efforts to slow the spread of coronavirus, campaigners warn.

The Web Foundation, established by World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, says digital tools to slow the spread of COVID-19 aren’t as effective as they should be as so many people can’t share information online.

The group campaigns for universal internet access to be considered a basic right – saying that if this was already in place the virus could have been slowed sooner.

In its latest report, it said the current crisis and subsequent lockdown – with millions working and studying from home – underlines the importance of internet access.

Adrian Lovett, president of the Web Foundation, said: ‘The web is a critical lifeline. And yet billions are not connected as we fail to meet these targets.’

‘While this crisis affects everyone, those without the tools to protect themselves and their families are more vulnerable to the virus and its painful economic and social impacts,’ the web advocate added.

The group say the virus outbreak proves ‘the web is a basic right, not a luxury’, saying that efforts to tackle COVID-19 must include getting as many people connected to the internet as quickly as possible.

‘This global pandemic has cruelly exposed the extent of the digital divide,’ said Lovett.

‘Governments and companies must work urgently to accelerate progress to ensure that everyone, everywhere has the opportunity to get online.’

The Web Foundation warned that because most people who are unable to get online were in low and middle-income countries, as COVID-19 cases in those countries rise, the lack of digital resources could hinder steps to stop the spread.

Many of the tools being used around the world to trace and slow the spread of the virus require an active internet connection.

An app being built by the NHS in the UK uses a combination of Bluetooth and other technology to alert smartphone users when they have come into contact with someone who has tested positive for the virus.

These apps are seen by many experts as a vital tool in slowing the outbreak and helping countries out of lockdown but they require a significant majority of the country to install the app.

In the UK the NHS is said to be hoping for 80 per cent uptake of its new app – something impossible in countries with very low internet availability.

This is being framed as “oh no, the poor people who cannot read the fake news about this fake pandemic are in danger!”, but it’s actually a smart move to consolidate unthinkable power at a global scale.

Once everyone has internet access, the internet can access everyone.

Devices such as smartphones allow people to access the internet, but it can also allow governments to access people’s devices through the internet.

Considering that coronavirus is less scary than the flu, chances are that the real goal here is to have access to people.

Our megacorporation cyberpunk future is coming.

So, the world’s biggest telecom company (AT&T) just merged with the world’s third largest entertainment company (Time-Warner). This new megacorporation will own CNN, Warner Brothers, HBO and a host of other news and entertainment media, along with the internet infrastructure to deliver it to the people.

This is obviously a disaster – Time Warner is a kiked-out company pumping out vicious anti-White propaganda 24/7. This acquisition means that AT&T, one of America’s biggest internet service providers, now has financial incentive to promote their content across these tubes.

The Verge:

AT&T and Time Warner won a historic court victory this week, convincing Judge Richard Leon in the US District Court for the District of Columbia that they should be able to merge over the antitrust objections of the Department of Justice. The deal, now finalized, combines one of the world’s largest telecom carriers with one of the world’s largest media organizations.The resulting company will have unparalleled market power over both content creation and distribution.

Who is this judge? How fat do you have to be to become this corrupt and/or stupid?

Oh. Looks about right.

The Trump administration was rightly like, “yeah, nope” when this deal was first proposed, and sued the two companies to stop the merger.

But this guy apparently thought it was a fantastic idea to have two gigantic corporations merge into a vertically integrated monstrosity.

The decision surprised almost everyone — not necessarily that AT&T and Time Warner had won, but that Judge Leon allowed the merger to go through with no conditions or prohibitions on their behavior at all. In fact, Judge Leon’s opinion seems downright excited for the two companies, while systematically discounting the government’s case at every turn. Honestly, it’s a little strange.

No conditions!

AT&T could flat out block Fox News and MSNBC from their network, and it would be just fine by ol’ Rick here.

And by the text of his decision, it appears he’s either retarded, or pretending to be retarded.

And I don’t know which is worse.

Here’s Leon, glowingly writing about AT&T’s argument for the merger:

At the same time, Facebook’s and Google’s dominant digital advertising platforms have surpassed television advertising in revenue. Watching vertically integrated, data-informed entities thrive as television subscriptions and advertising revenues declined, AT&T and Time Warner concluded that each had a problem that the other could solve: Time Warner could provide AT&T with the ability to experiment with and develop innovative video content and advertising offerings for AT&T’s many video and wireless customers, and AT&T could afford Time Warner access to customer relationships and valuable data about its programming. Together, AT&T and Time Warner concluded that both companies could stop “chasing taillights” and catch up with the competition. Those are the circumstances that cause them to claim today that their merger will increase not only innovation, but competition in this marketplace for years to come.

An excellent summary of AT&T’s pitch to its investors! But did you spot the glaring foundational error? Judge Leon thinks Facebook and Google are vertically integrated, data-informed competitors to AT&T and Time Warner. And that is sort of true, in that Google owns YouTube and pays for some premium content there, and Facebook is doing whatever doomed video thing Facebook is always doing.

But neither Facebook nor Google owns the ultimate distribution layer of the consumer connection to the internet. They aren’t the world’s largest telecom company. Neither is Netflix or Amazon or any of the other companies AT&T and Time Warner are afraid of. (Yes, I know Google owns Google Fiber, but that has been more failure than success.)

Basically, judge Leon doesn’t understand (or pretends not to understand) the difference between an internet service provider and a company with a website.

In principle, an internet platform can’t directly undermine their competitors by blocking or throttling their traffic, or charging customers more for access to their competitor’s services. But an ISP like AT&T could totally do that. In other words, you get free access to CNN and HBO with your internet service package, but have to pay extra for YouTube, Netflix, and so on.

Ajit Pai frowns upon these shenanigans.

Of course, this is now legal due to the abolition of net neutrality (which is obviously a good thing). But a situation in which a single company is both a massive telecom provider and a major internet platform is something completely new and obviously harmful to the freedom of the internet.

This is why the government acted to stop this insane merger.

It’s almost like this absurd decision was an “up yours” to the Trump administration, saying “oh, you abandoned net neutrality? Watch this.”

We can only hope that the Trump administration will take new steps to curtail this emerging megacorp’s dark power.

New FCC regulation preventing ISPs from giving preferential treatment to any of its subsidiaries would be a nice “fuck you” to these people, making the merger nearly meaningless. Even better, reclassifying ISPs as “telecommunication services” would solve this problem, as well as all our censorship woes.

Do it, Ajit Pai.

Political activist Anders Breivik is being tormented ruthlessly by the Norwegian state.

It’s a well known fact that Anders Breivik, world-famous freedom fighter, is being mistreated by his captors. Even the Norwegian courts have agreed with this; they recently granted him victory in a human rights trial against the prison system.

But Norway is still laughing in the face of those who fought and died to establish human rights legislation in the United Nations. Some of his fundamental rights, as described by the United Nations declaration, are still being violated with impunity.

UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 19

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

This means that Mr. Breivik has a right to be granted access to the internet to receive and impart information with the rest of the world.

GET #BREIVIKONLINE! IF ONE OF US ISN'T FREE TO USE THE INTERNET THEN NONE OF US ARE FREE! #HUMANRIGHTS pic.twitter.com/HV8QOFylTr

— IRONMARCH (@IronMarch) July 26, 2016

Retweet this, and make the hashtag go viral!

How ironic it is, that Breivik was wrongfully imprisoned for fighting for human rights in Norway in the first place…

They can’t argue against this interpretation of article 19, because they’re already invoking it in order to grant access to the internet to refugees pouring into Europe.

If internet access is an inalienable human right for refugees, then it certainly is for political prisoners as well.

We will win this, brothers, and insure justice is restored!

Some may try to argue that human rights don’t apply to “criminals.” That, of course, is false, otherwise it would be permissible to torture, starve and kill them. Which of course, it isn’t under the UN’s charter.

Also, we already have the legal precedent that Breivik’s human rights cannot be violated because of the earlier ruling in his favor.

I can't believe the oppressive Norwegian prison system's allowed to mistreat Anders Breivik this way. #BREIVIKONLINE https://t.co/Yb2N2SdrfX

— Zeiger (@IM_Zeiger) July 26, 2016

Each of us can do his part.

The Daily Stormer is unequivocally on the side of supreme justice.

We must fight for what is right. And that means we must get #BreivikOnline at all costs.

Hail victory!