it was mostly a bump in the fucking road considering we're back and business has carried on as usual.
I suspect Null might have a different opinion of how big a "bump" it was. The tranny tunneller (backchannels, geddit?
) did manage to effect a couple of "whole internet pays attention"-level changes (the Cloudflare ban and the thankfully temporary GTT null-routing); the former had only ever happened twice before and the latter was a first in the internet's 50+ year history. It can't really be overstated how significant this specific "win" was.
I'll remind everyone that despite widespread intense sanctions against Russia because of their invasion of Ukraine, they
still didn't get null-routed. That's a conflict involving tens of millions of people between the two beligerants and hundreds of billions of dollars being burned up by western nations to prop up a puppet state against a single nation with whom there's been a cold war simmering for arguably longer than the internet has existed, and yet we collectively still allowed them to continue to connect to the internet.
Meanwhile a gossip and shit flinging internet forum with less than twenty thousand users and an annual budget that probably just barely flirts with five figures was hit with this new, never used before "kill shot." People have collectively done more -- technologically, socially and politically -- to force Kiwi Farms offline than they have trying to down (or punish) The Pirate Bay, actual bona fide criminal sites (CP, black markets, drug vendors), and even a motherfucking enemy nuclear superpower.
The only way they ever went harder against TPB than they have against Kiwi Farms was the copyright cartel's successful multi-billion dollar decade-long lobbying effort to apply enough political pressure to pass enough hostile laws to charge, find and capture, prosecute, convict and imprison two of its operators. But even
that never actually killed TPB. And that approach won't really work here since nobody's breaking any laws and despite what doomposters might think, passing enough laws -- with enough teeth to actually be trouble -- to target the site or its owner/operator with criminal charges is pretty much impossible since it would affect
everybody and it'd meet with insurmountable resistance from pretty much every side.
The classic mantra that "the internet was designed to route around damage, and it considers censorship to be damage" is still accurate, though the lesser-known caveat is "that self-repair isn't instantaneous and is not always automatic." The latest takedown efforts have indeed made Kiwi Farms more resilient, just as they always do (rather like The Pirate Bay), but that wasn't cheap or easy to set up. Hardening and diversifying a site's functionality and connectivity isn't nearly as simple as people usually think it is under normal conditions. It's an order of magnitude harder when a very large portion of the world's various internet service providers won't even talk to you because of what they've heard about you.
We won, and we're back, but I don't think it was really just a speed bump. More like a concrete partition we managed to steamroll over.
nypost.com
www.theverge.com
