American Thinker has a good idea.
“My guess is that Big Tech thinks it can destroy us by killing our communication avenues. So let’s fight back. We can still communicate with each other and get around the ban by dusting off that old fax machine in our closet.
Maybe my fax idea is not workable anymore. So I challenge our side to look for alternatives and not give in to the censorship crowd.”
What’s happening right now is what sci-fi predicted as “cyber war”. So far it’s not that impressive (losing Facebook and Twitter is hardly the same as losing the local grocery store) but no matter how much they may try to put the toothpaste back in the tube; right now is clearly “something”.
Despair is unwise. It’s better to slowly and intelligently adapt. They can’t stop the signal… but we’ve got to do our part. Feeding on the crap floating by in Facebook’s aquarium of allowed thoughts isn’t sufficient. A free people need more.
Think things out and when you’ve got a good idea… spread it around.
Been thinking about ol’ FidoNet a bit lately….
You can do the same with Emails. You don’t need to use a public and free email domain like Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo…..you can use a paid (but fairly inexpensive) service like Protonmail. (Plus it is encrypted(ish)).
While I use Blogger, that may change. We get so used to having things for free, but we may have to acceot that to communicate we need to ponly up some cash. Email groups will serve as well as the old Fax newsletters and are nearly impossible to stop.
YMMV
I’ve still got my 40 channel CB radio…
Nice!
I’ve got mine as well.
It has 45 channels.
Back in the day, you could buy crystals 41 thru 45 that would give you channels that were a private way to communicate.
Replace Twitter with Gab. Dump Facebook for MeWe. Get rid of WhatsApp, who is going share info with FB now, with Signal. But we all have to do it. Twitter shares fell yesterday by 7 percent because they banned Trump and other Conservative voices. Imagine what happens if we all do so. If you own their shares sell them, boycott their services, get in the faces of their shareholders owners and staff. We need to use their own tactics against them.
The owner of Gab(?) copied all of Trumps tweets before he was deplatformend so you can still get your Trumpism from Gab.
Get yourself a VPN, most of them offer incredibly easy setup options for phones and PCs and there are great price discounts for some of them right now.
If you aren’t sure what to look for in a VPN service, pick one that swears it does not keep logs, has lots of exit locations, isn’t owned by Russians and offers the configuration options you need.
I have VPN.
Just wait till governors start shutting down grocery stores. Ours did, but mostly in the deplorable part of the state to get back for disobeying the mask mandate, it didn’t go over well. One California native who moved to get away from Draconia said NM made CA look pretty nice, they might consider going back.
The most obvious means of comms I haven’t seen mentioned is ham radio. If you fear it because of the study and licensing requirements, you deserve the situation you find yourself in. It isn’t hard, it isn’t expensive. I can talk around the world with a reasonably priced radio powered by a twelve volt battery. There are clubs or ARES groups in virtually every community in the country. Look into it!
I have a HAM license.
Ham radio is how Nellie Ohr communicated from her office @ Fusion GPS with her hubby Bruce @ DOJ.
No digital footprint stored in one of those vast warehouses out in Utah.
I agree with The Patriarch-missing FidoNet these days. Enough so that I have dusted off a very old IBM laptop (old enough to have a built-in modem), bouth an IDE to CompactFlash adapter and a 32G card and downloaded a lot of old BBS software, I’m not in a hurry, but I’m going to put up a BBS. How I get the word out without compromising OPSEC I don’t know, but I’ll figure out something.
Now I need to figure out how one would time an old data modem to a cell phone….
Back in the days of echelon disclosures, it was said the safest electronic communication was a handwritten fax since it would have to be manually read and that would only happen if they had an interest in you.
These days, handwritten and scanned documents, especially with sloppy writing and low quality scanning, are still a good bet for secure communications – while OCR software has gotten better over time, cursive is still difficult to read electronically. And again, anybody looking won’t put man hours into it unless you are already on their radar.
Written word. As bad as the Unbelievably Stupid Postal Service (USPS) is, they still get most of the mail entrusted to them to its eventual destination. I may not be able to get a letter across a town of 25,000 in less than 12 days, but bulk mailers with companies who don’t even have locations in the state can sure get a useless piece of drivel begging me to avail myself of their convenient business hours all the way from their HQ in south Florida to the Frozen Freakin’ North in 3 days.
Hell, it worked for Gropey Joe’s vote early & often mail in ballot scheme.
Funny that, just picked up a plain paper fax machine at auction for 8 bucks, nobody wants them (yet). Going to see if I can get a) get it working and b) have it to double as a B&W printer, assuming anyone still offers parallel port drivers.
Oh yuck… parallel port drivers were always my nemesis. Just bad luck I guess.
BBS – for as long as there is phone service, text is king….