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Anti-TPP Website Being Blacklisted
so.dan writes: The CTO of Fight for the Future — the non-profit activism group behind Battle for the Net, Blackout Congress, and Stop Fast Track — Jeff Lyon, is seeking advice regarding a problem with facing the website they created — stopfasttrack.com — to fight the secret Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.
The site been blacklisted by Twitter, Facebook, and major email providers as malicious/spam. Over the last week, nobody has been able to post the website on social networks, or send any emails with their URL. Lyon has posted a summary of the relevant details on Reddit in the hope of obtaining useful feedback regarding what the cause might be. However, none of the answers there right now seem particularly useful, so I'm hoping the Slashdot community can help him out by posting here.
Lyon indicates that the blackout has occurred at a particularly crucial point in the campaign to kill the TPP, as most members of the House of Representatives would likely vote against it were it brought to a vote now, and as pro-TPP interests have started to escalate their lobbying efforts on the House to counteract what would otherwise be a no vote.
The site been blacklisted by Twitter, Facebook, and major email providers as malicious/spam. Over the last week, nobody has been able to post the website on social networks, or send any emails with their URL. Lyon has posted a summary of the relevant details on Reddit in the hope of obtaining useful feedback regarding what the cause might be. However, none of the answers there right now seem particularly useful, so I'm hoping the Slashdot community can help him out by posting here.
Lyon indicates that the blackout has occurred at a particularly crucial point in the campaign to kill the TPP, as most members of the House of Representatives would likely vote against it were it brought to a vote now, and as pro-TPP interests have started to escalate their lobbying efforts on the House to counteract what would otherwise be a no vote.
Is not guaranteed from private organizations.
Censorship in the US doesn't have to be about the first amendment as long as you can get Facebook, Twitter and Google to agree.
So, he's using a domain without an SPF record (allowing it to be spoofed), and Cloudflare hosting which is notorius for spam and botnets. The same domain name with .RU extension is already associated with generating spam.
Furthermore, his homepage is chocka-block with links, that anyone could mistake for a link-farm / spam page.
There's no grand conspiracy here, just a webmaster who's not terribly savvy and some overzealous AI heuristics at Spamhaus, FB and Twitter playing it safe.
Nothing more to see here, please move along.
From the comments below the article....
1) Site was on spamhaus's blacklist.
2) Someone with more exerience than the poster suggested he add SPF records.
3) Poster added SPF records and thanked the other person.
4) Site is no longer on spamhaus's blacklist.
I got tired of reading comments before I figured out if this resolved all the poster's complaints.
Facebook is not the internet. Facebook is its own cryptic walled garden of bullshit that you've adopted as your medium of self expression. It's not public property.
1. Were you in fact spamming? If you injected your message lots of places where it was off topic, then you were spamming and earned your ban. If you failed to follow email best practices (this means *confirmed* opt-in prior to receiving any list content) then you were spamming and earned your ban.
2. Has the web site been hacked with malicious code? Assume yes until you can get a clean bill of health by bona fide security expert.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Apart from the pretty colors, it's pretty badly designed. There's only the one video explaining why it's bad, no text, no in-depth analysis, no outside opinions, no nothing. There isn't even (that I could find) a link to the text of the TPP. This might be a seriously important cause, but the website's not making a very good case against it.
Anyone know and want to elaborate on what this TPP is?
True, but that accelerated after NAFTA. In part because the promised protections used to get the votes to pass NAFTA were not delivered on. That history of lying to get profitable deals passed is why it's important not to agree to TPP, etc., without knowing what's actually in it, and not to believe promises about the future.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
First, we don't know everything about it because it is being kept secret to a large extent and debate is being officially suppressed.
Second, yeah there are a lot of problems we've gotten out of it via leaks.
1. There is some sort of committee being set up to settle a wide array of disputes that the US will have to submit itself to whether or not it wants to. The committee will be made up of unelected officials from many nations and their decisions will be binding on the US. That all by itself is unacceptable. Its like wishing for infinite wishes. You write into the agreement that some group can obligate you to abide by new regulations that some other committee comes up with whenever they want? No.
2. There is a lot of information security stuff in there. Basically they're exporting a lot of the NSA wire tap stuff to the rest of the world and they're forcing the US to continue to spy on its own people to comply in turn.
3. There are a lot of regulations on labor unions that shouldn't be involved in a trade agreement.
4. There are an almost endless list of ticky tacky regulations that they're requiring on everything including paying private hospitals money if you open a public hospital near them to compensate them for POTENTIAL losses to their profits. But really there are an almost endless list of these.
5. Basically no one in government has read the thing and yet they want to have a vote on it when no one has read it. They will let congressman go in there and read it. But they can't take it with them, they can't take notes out of the room with it in there, and they can't tell people what is in the thing.
6. THat it is secret is a bad sign in and of itself. If it isn't going against US interests then there is no reason to suppress knowledge of it or suppress debate. The argument is being made that if more people knew about it, then it would make negociations harder. However, that isn't rational because you can use the US congress as defacto bad cop in the negociations. Where in the administration could say "well, I'd like to do that but I'd never get that through congress". Suppressing information means our bargaining position is weakened and it is more likely that bad legislation or bad regulations will get through congress because no one will have read them before they were signed into law.
Congressman rarely read all these bills. They're too long. They use staffers and interest groups and the media to do the heavy lifting. And by denying congress the ability to use those features, they're basically forbidding congress from reading the law. Has Obama read the whole thing? Of course not. He's used his own staffers, interest groups, etc to read it for him and distill it to what he's going to care about.
Congressman do the same thing. You can't deny their staffers and interest groups and the media access to the legislation and expect them to know what was in the bill.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.