Western Rifle Shooters came back a couple weeks ago. They’re at https://westernrifleshooters.us/. It’s probably a permanent move.
Knuckledraggin My Life Away came back quite a while ago. They’re at https://ogdaa.blogspot.com/. I’d guessed it was a temporary move but it’s been there for a while so who maybe it’s the new permanent home?
What reminded me of this is that my search engine Duck Duck Go (just a privacy oriented front end over Google) is down today. Man, Google is shit isn’t it? (Using Brave and Duck Duck Go lets you forget just how uselessly biased the ‘net can get.)
I don’t know how much recent shuffling is deplatforming and censorship, versus how much is just creaky infrastructure. (Outsource tech support to Bangalore and fire nerdy programmers? Sure! Employ a fleet of purple haired Karens with degrees in grievance studies to police discussions? Sure! Oh no, our customers are pissed off and there’s smoke coming out of the server.)
Regardless, I’ve updated my links.
Also, I’m idly pondering blog approaches that go around deplatformers. Cancel culture ‘aint going away anytime soon folks. Might as well dig a moat before the pitchfork and torch crowd arrives.
Possibly, something as crude and simple as paper in envelopes? Before you laugh at least ponder the idea. One tends to reject it out of hand as a massive, expensive, unworkable pain in the ass. Is it? AOL spammed us with disks and CDs for a decade. Newspapers lasted centuries before they woked themselves good and hard (most them all the way to bankruptcy). There’s nothing sacred about web based interfaces found via links and Google searches. What we have now works, until it doesn’t. I don’t see printouts (or thumbdrives) stuffed in an envelope and mailed with a stamp as a necessarily wise idea, but I’m willing to think of new worlds. We’re smart monkeys. We haven’t yet lost the secret of movable type printing. What would a 21st century pamphleteer look like? Also, it would be fun to maintain a signal that will always reach the ‘verse.
It couldn’t be free. I’m probably the wrong guy to bother with it. I’m not even overly political. But I’m a helpless romantic, I’m having visions of those old school blue mimeographed sheets; delivered by pony express and drone. Can anything interesting be done? Is it the right time? Comments welcome.
For long distance comms, packet radio. For local stuff, private couriers. The FCC or country equivalents will not like it, but if one is careful it would work. A portable transmitter and some tradecraft and the massive effort necessary to df it in real time would be prohibitive. Or, stick to the old internet and hide the message in innocent cat photos.
There is a “half and half” approach. if the bloggers who are deplatformed by Youtube, all the blog software owned and operated by Google etc. set up VPN’s and/or make available their VPNs to others (rent them out?), then a printed newsletter or circular listing the web addresses of these would be the way to spread the word. Then if the bloggers using the VPNs list their favourite blogs (as you do), a lot of the damage can be worked around.
Paper can be photocopied and passed from hand to hand invisibly and reach a lot of people before they wear out.
Samizdat for a digital age, just like the USSR even today but with a digital twist.
I have done bulk mailings for a small club in past. Available for publications with at least a few hundred subscribers – once you get below 300 it isn’t really cost-effective. Although tedious, it is cheaper, and a good option for some things that aren’t in any hurry. It involves getting a bulk mail permit, sorting by zip code and color-coding the bundles. It also, sometimes, means delays in delivery of a month or more due to USPS Distribution Centers holding onto it until they literally have a slow day. They like to schedule things.
Media Mail is another option if it is just written documents (or other media) with no personal letters enclosed. Our club eventually went to First Class mail for the bundles as our membership numbers fell. Costs per member run about the same as a magazine subscription.
The little club that I mailed for was an “amateur press association” , which were the legitimate precursors of blogs. These were once very popular, but as time goes on, they’ve become obsolete. But they are a neat concept and great for specialized content.
Jim Dakin ala Bison Blog went this route of deciding to go off the internet reservation and send disks in the mail for a mere pittance of disk cost for his content. This happened approximately two weeks ago – I hope he chimes in and is able to give information on how much traffic he has. bisonprepper.blogspot.com is his discussion of how it works. I hope this helps.
I read Gateway Pundit daily. I tried to go there yesterday and the McAfee plug in for Chrome threw a message that it was a “very risky” site. The report said the reason was “politics/opinion” and “blog”. It did (farther down the list) mention adware, but that sounds like a crock. Sorry, long time lurker here, and I’m sick of this nonsense already.
And Nourishing Obscurity is now at:
https://nourishingobscurity.wordpress.com/
Looks like he didn’t learn from CA…
My $.02’s worth. Grain of salt and all that. Are you happy with your host and it’s ToS? Mainly can they be pressured into shutting you down? A quick search didn’t show any personal info associated with ac dot com but again, it was a quick, lame-assed attempt at a search. Can you be identified? Even through legal threats/attacks? If no to the above, I’d say go with what you have. Keep regular backups but you should be doing that anyway.
As far as a crude and simple alternative I suppose you could do an email “newsletter” type thing. Have people subscribe (with a payment requirement?) and you compile a distro list to send to. Cheaper than the Unreliable State Postal Scam.
About printers: the modern ones print a unique signature on every page, there are apps to fudge it but perhaps it would be wiser to source one from beforetimes that doesn’t do that at all. At some point, it will be necessary. All mail is photographed, too, and probably few mailboxes without some form of surveillance.
Ah well, we’re already on some kind of list anyway, not least because of the squirrel thing. Apropos…
I was aware of printer signature technology. I figure that means printing my blog would have to come from a dedicated printer. Then, if the top of a sheet of paper says “This Essay Was Written By Adaptive Curmudgeon” the only thing printer analysis is going to determine is “I’ll be damned, all these Adaptive Curmudgeon posts were printed by the same hardware”.
Unless… Sheesh… does the printer signature contain information about the computer that generated the text? Great googly moogly; my tinfoil hat just melted! I’m going to need a six pack to get over that thought.
Anyone know the limits of the printer signature?
As far as I know it is a pattern of yellow dots; that’s why the yellow tank runs out even when you only print black, and can’t print even that unless the yellow signals ink available…
It identifies the exact machine, which means the store that sold it and whatever records they kept, which these days means everything, probably up to faces, voices, gaits, and linked to everything else you even looked at, and everyone around you.
So when Team Sauron is stamping out the last holdout cells of ThoughtCriminals, every bit of paper not only has DNA and fingerprints, but printed proof linking it to…someone or something else. Think of it as malicious trojan steganography. As nanotech, rfid and 5g develop further, things will become worse. Total Information Awaress is not our friend…
I agree with all that, but it’s not time for despair yet. We’re not full Orwell so far. Crimethink remains legal and I haven’t had the NSA pounding on my door this morning. I intend to enjoy this time before the door swings shut (and perhaps it may never swing shut).
As for the yellow dots… I’m pretty pleased it only links to the printer I don’t own and surely would buy with cash… if I did, which I haven’t. I also wonder if printers sometimes get lost in tragic boating accidents?
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Back in the old days we did anonymous ftp to get our daily dose of Phrack magazine and whatever goodies were uploaded to WUArchive. Why not do the same only encrypted? The protocol is scp or sftp, for which there are a zillion clients available. For a buck a month you hand out a userid/pass via securemail, they synch content from your server to their AC folder, and read at their leisure. If you want to keep it free, set up an sftp server still allowing anonymous. Simple. And no CD costs for you to handle up-front. You could run this off your pi!
Hm. No static IP needed?