Digital Fiefdom (aka walled-garden) Required

senate.be is configured to push a broken CAPTCHA to Tor users.

Love the irony and simultaneous foreshadowed embarrassment of Elon denying availability and service as a way to be more efficient.

The irony

Cloudflare enables web admins to be extremely bloated. Admins of Cloudflared websites have no incentive to produce lean or efficient websites because Cloudflare does the heavy lifting for free (but at the cost of reduced availability to marginalized communities like Tor, VPNs, CGNAT, etc). So they litter their website with images and take little care to choose lean file formats or appropriate resolutions. Cloudflare is the #1 cause of web inefficiency.

Cloudflare also pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs with reckless disregard which needlessly wastes resources and substantially increases traffic bloat -- all to attack bots (and by side-effect text-based users) who do not fetch images and thus are the most lean consumers of web content.

The embarrassment

This is a perfect foreshadowing of what we will see from this department. “Efficiency” will be achieved by killing off service and reducing availability. Certain demographics of people will lose service in the name of “efficiency”.

It’s worth noting that DOGE is not using Cloudflare’s default configuration. They have outright proactively blacklisted Tor IPs to ensure hard-and-fast fully denied service to that demographic of people. Perhaps their PR person would try to spin this as CAPTCHA avoidance is efficient :)

The other embarrassment is that they are using Cloudflare for just a single tiny image. They don’t even have enough competency to avoid CF in the normal state & switch it on demand at peak traffic moments.

The microblog discussion

Microblog chatter here.

A lot of gov services use the same shitty social networks. But it’s just a bit extra disgusting when the FCC uses them along with the not-so social platforms. It’s an embarrassment.

The FCC privacy policy starts with:

“The FCC is committed to protecting the privacy of its visitors.”

Fuck no they aren’t. And we expect the FCC in particular to be well aware of the platforms that would make their privacy claim a true statement.

In particular:

• MS Github (98 repositories and maybe a bit strange that they are hosting UK stuff there.

• MS LinkedIn: “Visit our LinkedIn profile for information on job openings, internships, upcoming events, consumer advice, and news about telecommunications.” ← At least it’s openly readable to non-members. But I clicked APPLY on an arbitrary job listing (which had no contact info) and I was ignored, probably for not having a LinkedIn account. Which is obviously an injustice. Anyone should be able to access government job listings without licking Microsoft’s boots.

• Facebook: “Keep informed and engaged about consumer alerts, Commission actions and events.” ←Non-Facebook members cannot even view their page. And they are relying on it for engagement and consumer alerts.

• Twitter: “Follow @FCC for updates on upcoming meetings, helpful consumer information, Commission blog postings, and breaking FCC and telecommunications news with links to in-depth coverage.” ← At least it’s openly readable to non-members. But despicable that non-Twitter users cannot engage with the FCC. It’s an assult on free speech in the microblogging context. If you don’t lick Elon’s boots and give Twitter a mobile phone number (which they have been caught abusing before twtr contractors were caught spying on old accts, which came before Twitter was breached [twice in fact]), you cannot microblog to your government.

• YouTube: “Playback recorded webcasts of FCC events and view tutorials, press conferences, speeches and public service announcements on the FCC's YouTube channel.” ← One of the most atrocious abuses of public resources because Youtube is no longer open access. You cannot be on Tor, you cannot use Invideous. Due to recent extreme protectionism by Google, you are subject to surveillance advertising tied to your personal IP address.

Public money finances the FCC to make whatever videos the FCC produces. Since we already paid for the videos, they should be self-hosted by the FCC, not conditional upon entry into an paid-for-by-advertising walled garden with Google as a gatekeeper. It should be illegal to do that -- and we would expect the FCC to drive a just law in that regard. We would also expect the FCC to have the competency to either stand up their own peertube instance or simply put the videos on their website. People should be fighting that shit for sure.

What a shitty example they set for how government agencies should implement comms.

I wouldn't lump Github with Facebook or Twitter because, at its core, it's just a plain jane git server. If you stick to core features, you can exfiltrate your repos at any time in seconds and move them someplace else. And you can interact with Github's git server with open-source, fully documented tools.

It's the extended features Github offers that lock you in - the social media stuff and advanced git tools. So if you want to give Microsoft the finger, use Github only for basic services.

Me, I host all my repos there, and I use them also to host videos and as Linux distro repositories (apt and rpm) for my packages: I make it my duty to use up as many Microsoft resources as possible without paying them a dime and without giving them any edge to lock me in.

I am certain this community is not instantly popular. Even in the fediverse most people are fine with walled-gardens (we know this from Lemmy World). So just pointing out it’s interesting that 35 bots instantly monitor new communities as soon as they are created.

(BTW: “metapost” in the subject means it’s an off-topic post about the community itself. It’s not a reference to that shitty corp that has hijacked a generic word for commercial exploitation)

Facebook is used to make announcements to RUC students. The internal RUC website (outside of Facebook) is littered with FB references.

There are social events that are officially school-sanctioned which appear exclusively on Facebook.

Some might say “fair enough” because social events are non-essential and purely for entertainment. However, RUC has organized all the coursework around group projects. A culture of social bonding is considered important enough to justify having school-sanctioned parties on campus. The organisers have gone as far as to strategically divide student parties and to discourage intermingling across the parties so that students form more bonds with the peers they work with academically. Social bonding is an integral component of the study program.

Announcing these social events exclusively on Facebook creates an irresistible temptation for non-Facebook users to join. Students face an ultimatum: either become a serf of Facebook, or accept social isolation. It also destroys any hope of existing FB users who want to break away from a Facebook addiction from doing so. Students without Facebook accounts are naturally in the dark. Facebook non-patrons may be able to catch ad-hoc hallway chatter about school events but this is a reckless approach.

When the official class schedule is incorrectly published, students who discover the error in advance announce it on Facebook. Facebook then stands as the only source of information for schedule corrections, causing Facebook non-patrons to either miss class or show up for a class that doesn't exist.

Unofficial student-led seminars and workshops are sometimes announced exclusively on Facebook. These workshops are optional but academic nonetheless.

Sometimes information exists on the school website and is duplicated on Facebook. The information becomes very well buried on the poorly organized school website because the maintainers are paying more attention to the Facebook publication that they assume everyone is reading. Specifically the study abroad program has two versions of the document that lists all the foreign schools for which there is an exchange program. One version is obsolete showing schools that no longer participate. Both versions appear in different parts of the website. The schedule of study abroad workshops is so buried that a student relying on the school website is unlikely to know that the workshops even exist. Removing the Facebook distraction would perhaps mitigate the website neglect.

RUC does not instruct students to establish Facebook accounts. There is simply a silent expectation that students are already Facebook serfs. Some of the above mentioned problems can come as a surprise because Facebook excludes non-members from even viewing the content, so non-patrons don’t even have a way to see what kind of information they are missing. There is an immense undercurrent of pressure for RUC students to become addicted loyal patrons of Facebook's corporate walled-garden.