The main criticism ‘established’ western-aligned media uses to attack The Grayzone is that they have maintained and shown evidence for ISIL using chemical weapons against Syrians, whereas the western narrative is that it was the Syrian government.

Two days ago, OPCW (The UN) came to the same conclusion as the Grayzone.
https://www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2024/02/opcw-identifies-isil-perpetrators-2015-chemical-attack-marea-syria
They explicitly say that no one other than ISIL is a probable suspect.

Not even a whistleblower. A foreign journalist doing journalism.

Kan du laste opp den artikkelen til archive.org? Gratisversjonen av artikkelen henger hovedsaklig på denne:

i sosiale medier spekuleres det i om Hersh’ kilde snarere kan befinne seg i Russland og jobbe på vegne av Kreml.

Altså at NAFO sier det er Russisk propaganda. Men de sier alt er Russisk propaganda. Å sette en anonym kilde fremstilt av Hersh og Reddit kommentarer på samme linje er helt useriøst. De nevner også Tweeten om at “poor waif in his underwear” er et Russisk ordspill som ekstra bevis, men så vidt jeg kan finne så stemmer ikke det. Det er ikke engang relevant, siden det ikke er samme kilde det er snakk om. Blir også teit å si at en hypotetisk Russisk kilde hadde hatt interessekonflikt, og deretter vise til en Norsk kilde. Snakker da om Faktisk.no.

Faktisk.no kan jeg ikke debunke eller bli overbevist av. Det krever for mye teknisk kunnskap, ressurser og data vanlig folk ikke har tilgang til, og det vet de. Dette føles som ‘gish gallop’, fordi når jeg ser på de delene hvor jeg faktisk kan forstå nok til å ha en mening, så er det tydelig lav kvalitet på argumentene.

En del av artikkelen handler om at Stoltenberg er for ung til å ha hatt noen mening om Vietnamkrigen. Det blir for dårlig. Den kan godt hende at han tok feil, han blandet Stoltenberg med noen andre. Samme det vel? Det er en så liten detalj. Dessuten så er det faktisk.no som tar feil. Stoltenberg begynte i AFU i 1972. Og han sier han angrer på at søstra dro han med på en anti-Vietnamkrig protest. Anti-anit-Vietnamkrig er pro-Vietnamkrig.

En annen del av artikkelen klager på at kartet han brukte har en legendefeil.

Hersh presiserer at kartet «ikke er nøyaktig». Det er en underdrivelse.

Det er jo 95% riktig, bare at legenden har motsatt farge på marine og luft baser. Det spiller ingen rolle for artikkelen.
Flere ganger i artikkelen bruker de Forsvaret som kilde for å finne ut om Forsvaret ødela Nordstream. Er det dette som skal være bedre journalistikk en My Lai Massacre (Som forsvaret i USA og i Norge nektet), MHChaos (Som forsvaret i USA og i Norge nektet), Highway of Death (Som forsvaret i USA og i Norge nektet), Abu Gharib (Som forsvaret i USA og i Norge nektet), Saringassangrepet i Syria (Som forsvaret i USA og i Norge nektet)?

His reporting has always relied on anonymous sources, and has always panned out in the long run. Nothing’s changed, we’re just not far enough removed from the war in Syria for the propaganda to lose control of the narrative in the west.

Your three sources are all undeniable propaganda. If you don’t think Tucker Carlson is a serious journalist, that’s perfectly understandable, but surely even the bottom of the barrel is more serious than the literal agents of the governments you’re at war with? If I was Putin, I’d also turn down the literal BBC. Libs are so up their own ego they can’t imagine someone not wanting to be filtered through their state’s propaganda apparatus.

By EU standards, Putin is basically a centrist…

You can just switch suppliers? Like how is it in your interest to have someone bomb your less competitive supplier? Do libs not have a problem with monopolies even in the abstract??

The author of this article has a very strong track-record, so I choose to trust it. Though it does rely on anonymous sources. https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

Sick.
Edit: I take it back. Lame. Electric SUVs are just as bad. Fuck cars.

This is like mobster tactics or something, terrorist tactics is indiscriminate bombing, collective punishment, scorched earth, torture, targeting civilians, targeting humanitarian efforts, disproportionate responses. Everything they’ve been doing until now.

Exactly like that.

Eh, a red passports in my pocket, along with a military id of same color say otherwise

Then you know better than me.

Though I’d advice to consider one in Armenia, if possible. It’s close, but much more liberal and the internet speeds are just as good. Though computer part imports seem to be problematic in there so I’m not sure if there are any good providers.

I don’t have a particular love for Russia for this type of thing, it just happens that a lot of low cost barely-professional providers are in Russia, and that Russia isn’t among the worst countries in terms of surveillance law and competence to enforce those laws. I’d happily rent from an Armenian provider, they’re just a little worse at SEO. Thanks for the tip.

ones that don’t use it as a pretense to infringe on your privacy.

My current ISP works with any router but there is a mandatory purchase of their partner’s router when you sign up. That router doesn’t host a configuration page, if you want to configure the SSID or password, you need to use their Windows/Android app. The Windows app installs a root certificate. I haven’t done that, and I think it’s just to facilitate regular updates rather than MITM decryption, but it could be either. ISPs have smart people (or people with skills in the right technical area), but they don’t have any financial incentive to use a clean solution sadly.

But it’s sad to see that they are, too, going political with this.

I’m not categorically against blocking illegal content, but it’s the surveillance I find really icky. Countries with laws about having to keep logs on users. Mandatory invisible/silent data-sharing with police. Gross.

I’ve never needed dead hand software. I wipe my phone before going through airports but that’s it. If I needed it, my first instinct would be to write my own, because my use case would probably be pretty simple. I’m not sure. I think you’re vastly overstating the danger of travelling through Russia. Still, I’d wipe my phone (or leave it at home) like anywhere else of course. Always best to be cautions.

But then, renting a box in Russia just to break out of it using a VPN kind of defeats the whole purpose.

This is just kinda how I use everything. I mean I’m paying for the VPN anyway… But it doesn’t degrade performance for a seedbox. You connect to it and stream your files when you need them, it’s less hassle than if you download things to your own home. Doesn’t degrade performance for most private tasks to be honest.

If your place also does this and it has a working democratic and judicial systems, I would suggest starting to raise questions about it.

It absolutely does not. But even if it did, I think most countries in the EU have some form of internet censorship. Almost always left to the discretion of the ISPs when it comes to implementation. Your instance is in Estonia, so I checked, and Estonia blocks copyright infringement and gambling, and according to one source, as if this year, ‘Russian propaganda’.

Should urge the UN to support a single state solution and Palestine’s full membership instead.

This is the People’s Republic of China. Their disputed territorial claims amount to a few villages claimed by India and a few small islands claimed by Japan and Vietnam. All three countries have much bigger territorial disputes with other countries. You’re thinking of The Republic of China, who claims whole countries and very large swaths of land. The Republic of China doesn’t have a seat in the UN because they don’t have majority support. (1.4% vs 98.6% for PRC).

Somehow higher than 0% success rate.

Here are couple of auto-translated articles with some technical details on said spy-boxes.

I found the technical exploration interesting, even if the translation I read might not have been completely accurate. But at least 8 years ago, they didn’t seem to have any ability to analyse and modify content, instead relying on a simple domain block-list. There’s domain blocking where I live too. I imagine it’s handled similarly on a technical level. Seems more of a concern for home users, I don’t think one of these boxes sitting outside a data-centre would affect you at all. Your hosted web application would have proper encryption and they’d only see the destination of one leg of the journey. Even for 8 years ago, this doesn’t really seem like a level of technical sophistication that trumps even non-rigorous general best practices.

That’s a dangerous precedent though, that a person can be arrested and held for indefinite amount of time without any significant evidence - just based on IP address.

Absolutely.

the entire Tor network was outlawed in Russia, so it won’t work as a defense any further.

This just says blocked, not outlawed. I also couldn’t find any other articles about Tor being outlawed. As long as it’s not illegal it’s no practical problem for me/you. According to this article, Tor and someone else is suing, which they wouldn’t do if they didn’t have a legal basis for operating. It even says it’s unconstitutional.

The decision violates the constitutional right to freely provide, receive and disseminate information and protect privacy.

Assuming that’s true, then that’s a pretty easy win for any data centre hosting my blackbox VPN-routed seedbox or whatever it would be.

you indeed have nothing to worry about, except for the downtime, and certain protocols and endpoints being unreachable

Yeah but I don’t feel you’ve demonstrated that at all. There were a few high profile raids, but they were decades ago. If my cheaper than average hosting has average downtime then I’m still getting a good deal. Based on what you’ve provided, it sounds like the anonymous computer in a cave scenario in the meme would go completely unnoticed by an averagely aggressive and averagely competent police state.

Though, if you are a political figure, the advice would still be to not touch anything Russian even with a 10-foot pole

assassination attempt to poison Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer and double agent for the British intelligence agencies

Come on. I’m not planning to spy on the Russian military for the MI6! That’s several levels of shady beyond ‘anti-establishment website’.

This allows them to perform MITM attacks by connecting to the website on your behalf, decrypting it, then re-encrypting it with their own cert and you’d still get the checkmark.

In theory that is true. And not particularly hard. But it’s not invisible, and so it would get discovered quickly. And it can also be mitigated with a VPN and not using the state’s DNS. Users of Russian e-banking are be susceptible to MITM, but my VPS isn’t, because I don’t have that certificate. And the Russian banking public isn’t being spied on because they’d burn the card when they use it. Is it being deployed to discretely and sparingly MITM-attack specific individuals? I mean maybe. But I think it’s being deployed so they can have a green check.

This time I must say your evidence and reasoning is much weaker. I disagree strongly with how you interpret this. Demanding foreign companies keep data on your citizens in your country is a good thing. The alternative is foreign spy agencies and governments having control over it. The fact that they have laws requiring companies to dox users is a completely separate issue. It’s bad, but it’s in-line with many EU nations. The NY Times article is especially bad because the tool they’re talking about, whois, is included standard with Mac and Linux. It’s not scary spy software. Inspecting and blocking traffic on the fly isn’t supported by the article as far as I can tell. And finally, having someone’s root certificate does not at all stop you from encrypting data. It lets websites that have been verified by the issuer have a green check mark in Firefox. You likely have tens or hundreds of root certificates installed on your computer. You can still keep data hidden from their issuers. It doesn’t affect your ability to encrypt.

In the case of that last link. He did go to jail for 20 days, but on the other hand, running Tor did literally save him from prison. This isn’t from that article but looking up his name, it seems he was cleared of all charges a week after he got out of jail and the judge’s reasoning was that because of Tor there wasn’t undeniable evidence. He wasn’t asked to stop hosting Tor either. Not defending the Russian justice system allowing them to jail you with only probable cause and not an actual conviction, that’s still bad, but where I live, I would get convicted instead, which is worse. This case sounds like positive confirmation that if I rent a Russia VPS and use it for Tor, I’m not breaking any laws and don’t need to worry about regular downtime, which was the original premise.

This is good evidence. Thank you for finding and linking these. Though I’d still object to ‘common occurrence’ if there aren’t a lot more; the most recent one is still 8 years old and all the examples are for sure guilty of breaking laws while having properly registered offices with their own data centre – high profile targets. Rather than a scenario where my VPS might randomly go offline because I hosted Invidious or Lemmy on it.

I’m sure you can corroborate this with evidence.