More Matrix.org/Freenode fun… Bonus: Why VPNs should be normal, not just for cranks.

Yesterday, I ran into more Matrix.org/Element fun.

Since Cancel Culture runs rampant on Matrix.org and entire rooms and users get knifed and disappear daily, I decided to try to use nerdsin.space instead, and the problem is that while the Matrix protocol supports federation, the IRC bridges are not available locally on nerdsin.space, leaving you to do a double shim into IRC.

To get into Freenode, you basically have to load Matrix.org rooms and then select the Freenode room you want, and then you’re logged into nerdsin.space, federated to Matrix.org, and then bridged into Freenode IRC.

The problem here is that now, any issues on any one of those platforms can compromise your ability to use IRC.

I’m rapidly finding out that just because Matrix is “modern” doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t an even bigger rat’s nest than just using IRC directly.

Yesterday, around 1:35 PM local time, and going on for about a day, nothing from Matrix.org would federate into nerdsin.space, but if you sent a message from nerdsin.space it would reach the Matrix.org room.

For a while, I wondered if they banned my account or just locked out nerdsin.space for reasons unknown. It seems that from the perspective of other users, they want to keep bans as quiet as possible.

When they finally kill someone’s account, it just says that they changed their user name to whatever the raw name of their matrix.org account is and that they left the server and that the account “will no longer be active”. It doesn’t say anything about who banned them.

(As I’m writing this, Matrix.org is refusing to federate, AGAIN. I couldn’t even get through writing this post and had to come back here to say this.)

Since the coup d’état on Freenode, Techrights has been wondering about whether it’s time to move elsewhere (seems like “strongly leaning towards not moving” considering the opportunists who are engaged in the current crisis, in order to start a new network and control what goes on there more thoroughly), but the situation on Matrix.org is much more unstable, in my opinion.

Oddly, they’re pitching themselves as a communications platform that’s business-ready while in fact they’re tossing out everyone except Chromebook kids (one of which told me that they found out that the E2E encryption confuses the firewall filter at their schools) and LGBT rooms. Anything out of the realm of left-wing SJW politics is verboten.

One false move (meaning anything that doesn’t fly past whatever mood two people are in that day) by any of your users will results in “Abuse Management” taking over your room, making it read-only, renaming it to “Content Violation”, and then everyone leaves. It wasn’t this bad before, but in the last several months, I’ve seen it happen to dozens of rooms and many users.

The federation between servers eventually came back up, this time, but it’s not guaranteed that this will always be the case. So, in the end, IRC is probably still superior. It’s sad that a protocol from 1989 is, in many ways, superior.

While Matrix.org outflanks IRC technologically, the mentality of the userbase and the moderators is very soft.

The “hacker culture” that used to facilitate open debate and meritocracy has been declared illegal by Matthew and Travis (the mods), who have set up a Code of Conduct that, if applied in the real world, would be like something out of the movie Demolition Man. Everything offensively non-offensive. In fact, this new ethos is percolating in the software development world to the point that to even have a relative comparison on the merits of two or more different approaches to a problem is a microaggression.

It’s possible to ruin a social community without a Code of Conduct, but it’s sure a lot harder to do.

The folks urging Debian and other projects to abandon freenode will get more and more vocal because crisis fades quickly and crisis and opportunity go hand in hand.

People who are truly toxic always need all kinds of stupid drama going on, but they call other people toxic as a form of projection.

Bonus: It’s not a terrific idea to use the internet out in the open anymore, regardless.

In 2007, my ISP at the time, AT&T, decided that because Windows malware often happened to use IRC as a means to an end (contacting a “Command & Control” server to receive marching orders from a person managing the botnet), that _any_ secure connection to IRC must have meant you had a botnet malware program installed.

Back then, Virtual Private Networking services were not as robust and widely available as they are today (Mozilla runs one through Mullvad….which I might look into further after my Private Internet Access subscription is over.)

Corporations don’t like to entertain the idea of communities that they can’t easily control, and when you get an open protocol where you could talk to anyone, they have their reasons to want it to die.

Hell, even closed ones with sketchy EULAs, like Parler, can’t even last until they make agreements with Apple to silence their users and come back with all the same problems as Facebook, and more.

Don’t think that just because most governments in Western Europe or North America haven’t threatened to shoot down a passenger plane to get at one critic (at least not so brazenly), like Lukashenko did in Belarus this week, that they don’t keep an eye on things.

Many Western politicians want to make encryption itself illegal after their new laws made VPNs a high demand commodity, while people who associate with criminal sexual deviates (such as Epstein…and may be one themselves), like Bill Gates, cheer this on.

Naturally, they’ll exempt themselves. British PM Boris Johnson uses Signal, which makes it impossible for the British government to later comply with open records requests as they pertain to himself. Meanwhile, insecure options like Zoom which can easily be intercepted and monitored have been pushed on Americans for tasks ranging from university activities to meeting with therapists and attorneys, using the pandemic as an excuse.

While Americans were cheering on the second Coronavirus stimulus where they got $600 (which isn’t much, especially with the hyperinflation currently spilling out into the real economy), the Democrats and Republicans got together to pass a Kangaroo Copyright Court law in the same legislation, where any American can be sued for copyright for up to $30,000 each claim.

The EU Meme Law was scandalous, and Americans were just so broke that they accepted a one time payoff, while the price of one order of french fries at McDonalds is now $3.75.

The rise of VPNs should come as no surprise to lawfakers in both parties, as they do the MAFIAA‘s bidding for it. Unfortunately, this does make life easier for actual criminals, because as more people go to ground to commit mostly benign copyright violations without being sued into bankruptcy and to enjoy their constitutional right to freedom of speech and association, the selection of VPNs goes up while the price comes down. There will also be more users of the Tor Browser, which means that law enforcement will need to search bigger haystacks for the needle.

What alarmed me 14 years ago about AT&T complaining about my IRC usage and what alarms me now about “Comcast Constant Guard” and “network protection” is that they slip it in as if they protect you from viruses, but they make sure that it’s very loud and that you know that you’re under surveillance.

The implications of this are that you’re supposed to self-censor out of fear of what ramifications will spring from your online activities.

And spring, they do. Already, at least one company that does “background checks” printed out several hundred pages of Twitter likes and comments of one of Jamie Zawinski’s friends and sent them to his HR.

Richard Stallman warned about Facebook’s real name policy years ago, and I suspect that there’s no end to the amount of abuse this can lead to. With employers, it makes all the sense in the world. They don’t want employees who think too much, are opinionated, and have the “wrong political opinions” especially. What’s the first thing that people do when they get on “Social” media? They often wear their politics on their sleeves.

Cynically, Facebook also has every reason (other than the engagement advertising dollars that Stallman pointed out) to destabilize the American government. If they’re too busy worried about internal security after events like the Capital Insurrection, then they might not investigate Facebook for wide ranging antitrust abuses and not paying their tax.

I’ve been using a VPN for some time now because I’m just tired of feeding into everything my ISP knows about me.

If you look at the way courts demand information, it also becomes immediately clear that they want positive identification about the user of a service. Comcast hands that over 100% of the time, and for sure if a court has compelled them to. Even though no law requires them to retain data about their users, they do so for their own reasons (advertising, to hand to law enforcement to make themselves invaluable to the government and negotiate to pay less in taxes, etc.)

To date, PIA hasn’t turned over data about anyone that I’m aware of.

They recently implemented support for the Wireguard VPN protocol. I had been using OpenVPN protocol, previously, and Wireguard was designed to be simpler and much easier to audit for security issues, but the network throughput is better while overall drag on the computer is much lower.

Oddly, it was also big tech that enabled VPNs to work well.

Chip companies like Intel, AMD, and now Apple (with the M1) put encryption acceleration helper instructions in their CPUs, hoping to make Digital Restrictions Malware work “better”, but the byproduct is that encryption in general just has negligible overhead these days, and the user should be employing it everywhere they get a chance to. Including using HTTPS-only inside the browser, inside the VPN, with the kill switch on.

Leave the gun, take the cannoli.