Welcome to your new, Big-Tech overlords

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Twitter. Facebook. Google. Apple. Amazon. Watch what you say or you too will be permanently banned. Welcome to your new, Big-Tech overlords.

Welcome to your new, Big-Tech overlords

We all like convenience. We all like simple choices. However, it's all fun and games until those technologies we've all become addicted to rise up to bite us in the ass:

This is a clear case of political reprisal. Are you next?

By all accounts, the 2020 Presidential election results are in dispute. Half the country believes the process was legitimate. The other half believes it was not. Regardless of possible evidence of wrongdoing, what is clear is that the portions of our government responsible for verifying the validity of our election process have refused to do their jobs. In light of this, expecting things to somehow simply go back to normal where we all magically forgive, forget, and unite under a single president is beyond the pale.

After seeing a full year of fake, election-year outrage, bullying, and violence in the streets during 2019 by radical, far left-wing, Anarchist-Communists in the form of BLM and Antifa, to hear such disingenuous outcries of shock and horror at right-wing protesters storming Capitol Hill to stop a travesty of justice, by force if necessary... To the knee-jerk, leftist, lackey apologists I say: Shame on you.

It's as if we took the generally, demonstrably peaceable right-wingers as "good dogs" that should just keep accepting abuse after abuse. That they should willingly and silently accept being the target of underhanded tactics, fully protected by their mainstream, leftist media cronies, whitewashing every crooked, devious act perpetrated in broad daylight by their BLM/Antifa, brown shirt thugs.

We all went into this election cycle knowing full well that our system of mail-in ballots and electronic voting machines were full of security holes. Yet, rather than fix the issues, we went full-steam ahead. How can we trust the outcome of an election, based on such shaky ground? We all expect our elections to be above-board and beyond reproach, with not even a hint of impropriety.

If those voting machines can be mishandled, have malicious software installed, or have all records of their improper operation be wiped without a trace, how would we ever know something went horribly wrong? The fact that we don't have positive proof that nothing could have gone wrong, alone, should be enough to throw out the results of the election, redesign the process to be bullet-proof, and immediately do the election all over again. There is no need for some "smoking gun" of evidence of wrong doing. The burden of proof is on those running the elections to show how nothing could go wrong. One thing is crystal clear: They have not met that burden of proof, in any way, shape, or form.

The great thing about the internet is that if something goes wrong with it, the internet is designed to route around such damage to continue operating:

  • Twitter bans you? Open an account on Parler.
  • Amazon shuts down the cloud servers powering Parler? Parler sets up on other cloud service provider(s) and you open an account on Gab, as well.
  • Apple deletes the Parler app from the iPhone store? Configure your iPhone to disallow remote app deletions (Android phones don't lock you down into a single store for apps)
  • Sick of Apple or Google controlling you through your smart phone? Get a freedom and privacy-preserving, Linux-based smartphone from Purism, such as the Librem 5.
Purism's Librem 5: Your very own James Bond phone
  • Sick of "no cost" Facebook and Twitter trying to control you, making you their product? Use the paid, fee-based Librem One service from Purism.

A special note about the Purism company, itself. While they appear to be striving to make unique, privacy-preserving products, their track record of not delivering new products within a reasonable time frame is legendary. Former management-level employees have sounded off about certain, discouraging company mismanagement shenanigans. If you do want to buy the new Purism Librem 5 phone or new Librem 14 laptop, my strong advice is to not pre-order it. Wait until they are in full production with phones and laptops in stock, with community verification of receipt of product within no more than a week of ordering. In fact when verifying this, I would ignore Purism's own forums and instead review external forums about Purism. In my humble opinion, Purism tends to over-moderate their own forums to reflect the company in an overly positive, unearned light. Having said that, I really do hope Purism delivers on their promises. The world sorely needs a proper, privacy-preserving alternative to the smartphone duopoly of Apple vs. Google.

The best way to preserve and defend your right of free speech is to have a government that protects it. All evidence shows that is not the case for American citizens. Your next best bet is to defend your rights, yourself:

  • Don't depend on any single digital speech platform. Create yourself a static blog website.
  • Don't use dynamic-site, security-hole-ridden, garbage services like Wordpress. Instead, use a much more secure static website blog with a desktop blogging app like Publii.
  • Don't choose a website hosting service within the reach of U.S. law, making you susceptible to DMCA-takedowns. Choose an offshore web-hosting service in free speech respecting countries like Iceland, The Netherlands, or Luxembourg.
  • Make yourself immune to distributed-denial-of-service attacks with the protection that a CDN (Content Distribution Network) provides.
  • Choose a domain-name registrar that protects your personal registration information from harvesting.
  • If your blog or business depends on cloud-hosted servers, make sure to not "put all of your eggs in one basket" by locking yourself into a single cloud provider, like Amazon. Instead, use a multi-cloud strategy (Parler? Are you listening? Take note).

There are many such service providers to choose from, some of which provide their services for either very low or zero cost.

Once properly set up, you can express your legal views without reprisal, free to post a link to your blog post to any number of available online speech platforms. If they take your post down, so what? The original source is protected and is available on every other online speech platform you posted your blog post to, as well.

Don't be an iPhone zombie

It's easy to get lulled into a false sense of security and convenience. Nearly all people (and I am looking directly at you when I say this) are ignorant of better choices, when it comes to technology. Your rights in an information-based world are necessarily digital. If you fail to lift a finger to learn even the slightest bit about better, arguably simple, technology choices, you doom yourself to a world where you better watch what you say, lest they come for you next.

Full disclosure: I did not vote for either Trump, Biden, or Hillary.

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