cross-post from Reddit
It seems surprising to be greeted by a cookies banner on such a website. There isn’t even the option to reject them.
Cookie banner is imposed by the underlying hosting, Miraheze, which is hosted in UK where they’re mandatory.
I don’t currently have the ability to host a publicly facing wiki myself, so the next best thing is Miraheze. They’re a non-profit hoster who do not impose any ads or tracking, so they meet most of the requirements of hosting a privacy conscious wiki. They do have their issues, such as the cookie banner as well as banning contributions from TOR, but despite that, I do not know of a better option short of self-hosting.
Yay, another place where we can spread Western propaganda against non-Western nations!
Setting the precedent
Let’s say that regardless of the copious reasons why this is a bad idea, we still decide that the trade-offs are worth it and we pressure phone and app makers to introduce a backdoor into their products. Soon, other countries will want this level of access too. If you’re an anglophonic person, you may be okay with the notion of Western nations having access to those tools but once again the question is where we draw the line. Should we give access to this backdoor to Turkey, who has historically been a reliable Western ally but has recently taken interest in oppressing the very Kurds that Unites States supported in the fight against w:Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant? Do we give it to China to spy on Uyghur Muslims and place them in w:Xinjiang detention camps? Parties like China already heavily control and often outright ban Western companies’ operations in China, refusal to share this access would be the end of their China operations.
How confident are we that your average tech CEO focused on the next quarterly report would have the moral fortitude to stand up to China?
The wiki has barely any articles and yet we already have shit taken against the East as if Western countries would have the slightest degree of freedom or humanity.
If you’re an anglophonic person, you may be okay with the notion of Western nations having access to those tools but once again the question is where we draw the line.
This sentence in particular is fucking ridiculous and so anglocentrist it makes me puke.
I’m okay with fair criticism about China particularly when it comes to privacy, but this shit seems like a place to spread Western culture as the highest stage of civilization and regard everything else as Orwellian monoliths even though anglophonic nations and their allies have the biggest surveillance system. I like the idea of the wiki, but I know how it will end.
I actually wrote most of that (sans some subsequent edits). The whole example of the slipperiness of the backdoors is conditional on being an anglophone individual who supports Western governments, which is most anglophones. It’s not a political endorsement of Western governments, and I find it surprising it’s read that way. If anything, my personal stance is strongly pro-Snowden and pro-Assange (although I do agree he’s a dickhead), and I think that every US president since Bush Sr has been a war criminal, so, I’m not shilling for the American establishment.
It’s a wiki, and the page is meant to be a work in progress. If you have a better way to demonstrate why backdoors are shit, in a way that is more politically ambivalent, please do. The only political stance I intend to come down hard on is anything anti-privacy.
