Comment by Ansil849
5 years ago
Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time. It doesn't matter if you host your own domain/mailer daemon, the host and/or registrar can choose to suspend your account as well. So really, there is no solution. Other than the realization that our communications channels are not ours, they are always someone else's, and we are forever at their mercy.
Yes, in practice you always have to rely on someone. Even before the internet you'd have to rely on the USPS to carry your letters.
Unless you are physically speaking to someone in person, then there is always a middleman.
Well you can always just create your own courier. If you want true free speech these days you need to build your own stack from the ground up anyway.
This is well outside of the practical capabilities of anyone but a nation state or large commercial entity. Even then, it's hard. It's more practical for a physical letter than for digital stuff. For a digital service, you'd have to go down to cabling infrastructure or take something like the SpaceX route and launch satellites. If you need something between a few nearby buildings, it's more practical to come up with a solution, but anything further out ... you're kind of stuck.
(Your ISP classifies as a middle man as well...)
We Await Silent Tristero's Empire
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> you can always create your own courier
It is illegal to compete with USPS to deliver letters.
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You start by creating the universe...
Oh? Is the government interfering in your ability to say what you would like to say in an online space?
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the difference here though is that physically you can at least own the address, but even your digital address isn't actually yours. Phone, email, ip and whatnot are all provided by someone else and can be taken away.
Domains can be stolen, deprecated or simply restricted from your use.
> physically you can at least own the address
No, a town owns an address and rents it to you. If something goes wrong with the billing you get evicted, if they want a mall they forcibly "buy" it from you.
There's no resource you can count on in this way. Resources get reallocated at some point.
Well, the USPS has renamed towns before. Ask Waimea, Hawaii Island, Hawaii.
> Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time.
Not only can they, for many companies disabling accounts is the only tool in the shed. There's no digital governance platform, no user rights, no process, no punishment at all besides this final cruelest kill: only this bit flip, from enabled, to disabled, alive to not alive.
it's unbelievable tha not a single big platform seems to have any system of justice or remediation in place. it's all vast uncaring corporate monoliths as far as the eye can see, no contact I do, no follow up possible.
these entities are monsters. they treat us like trash.
This is academic/ theoretical. Having control over your email and preventing total loss of email like Terraria's author is not "difficult". Own your email domain, but pay a hosting provider for emails. Then, if that hosting provider doesn't want to host you anymore, you can switch to another provider instantly or host your own mail server (bad idea). You can argue the domain registrar can take it away from you, but that doesn't happen unless you do something illegal with that domain or don't pay the annual fee. The case with Google is neither of these serious issues.
> You can argue the domain registrar can take it away from you, but that doesn't happen unless you do something illegal with that domain or don't pay the annual fee.
Registrar TOSes are just as opaque as email providers, which just as many case of seemingly irrational domain seizures.
I presume you mean there are cases where registrar's have "seized" a domain. Would be good if you had an example, because I sure can't find one.
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The PGP trust graph is the ultimate fallback here. As long as your public key is out there you can even not have DNS and change your IP address and still be able to prove the identity.
Self-custody has risks too, most notably theft or loss of the private key. It's tradeoffs all the way down.