YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Measure internet censorship. Contribute to the largest open dataset

21 points Bluestein 1 hour ago 10 comments

like_any_other 37 minutes ago | parent

The most pervasive censorship is who and what social media companies decide to block or suppress. Even in places like China. It's deliberately harder to measure, but any censorship measurement that omits it is like measuring war casualties, but ignoring those on the front lines.

howunfortunate 37 minutes ago | parent

Hmm.

I'd wager the vast majority of internet censorship is within platform, like that done by Reddit mods.

The most egregious example I've seen in my lifetime was when old Twitter decided to censor a NYPost article, down to blocking sharing in DMs.

It seems that type of example is entirely missed here. Is there any attempt to capture that signal?

Bluestein 33 minutes ago | parent

As a thought exercise, could it be captured?

howunfortunate 30 minutes ago | parent

Depends on the platform. On Reddit, definitely yes, as almost all censorship is "deletion style" where the target post or comment is initially visible until the mods suppress it.

But your point is well taken, it's definitely more challenging and expensive than what's being done here.

Bluestein 26 minutes ago | parent

It would be one heck of a challenge, but, almost by definition "impossible" - as a naive guess, perhaps (for those platforms that have opened code) characterize some statistical signatures that "arbitrary data" ran through it (simulating user activity) would show ...

... and then check for those (or, counterexamples) in the wild.-

piskov 25 minutes ago | parent

> Measure the speed and performance of your network with the NDT test

This is very much in line with the likes of pokemon go, wiki landmark projects and what have you (those are nice things to have for autonomous drones/missiles to navigate only with vision when gps/cellular/starlink is actively blocked).

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Russia banned stuff like speedtest because things like that may help “map” the network, aid NSA to model malware propagation, etc.

Not that this should matter when you have cisco, dell, nokia hardware, but it won’t hurt either.

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I mean come on, some nuts even willingly install stuff like this: https://atlas.ripe.net/