Comment by opello 5 hours ago
> Brazil's national telecommunication agency, Anatel, has been ordered by de Moraes to prevent access to the platform by blocking Cloudflare as well as Fastly and EdgeUno servers, and others that the court said had been "created to circumvent" a suspension of X in Brazil.
Blocking Cloudflare and Fastly seems like a reactionary measure that is not exactly well conceived.
They are not blocking Cloudflare or Fastly.
They are blocking X IPs being used on Cloudflare and Fastly.
These CDNs agreed with Anatel, to reserve IPs exclusively to X, so IPs can block X without collateral damage, that's all.
That said, Cloudflare is also blocking X. Cloudflare Warp doesn't open X.com anymore, neither iCloud Relay's (which seems to use Cloudflare).
Nation states will always win against a corporation. They are authorized to use force, both physical and economical. They also control access to their market.
I don't think it's always true. It seems like it would have to depend on how the nation state responds to its citizens when the nation state does things like break large portions of the web. And what actual economic leverage the state has (or could bring to bear) over the company.
Losing the citizenry might be more politically damaging faster than economically damaging to X/Starlink.
> Losing the citizenry might be more politically damaging faster than economically damaging to X/Starlink.
Provide evidence Brazil will lose the citizenry over this. It appears that Brazil has been surgical in directing access restrictions to X; millions of X social followers have moved to Bluesky [1], and while Starlink customers might be impacted (~250k terminals) who cannot access X, they are not a majority in any sense (based on ground station count; 250k vs a Brazil population of 215.3 million people).
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It's also easy to get caught in the trap to believe that other people think how one's own self thinks [2].
> Provide evidence Brazil will lose the citizenry over this.
Just this month, people literally got out of their homes, went out and onto the street, assembled and protested this judge, demanding his impeachment. This happened in seven of our capitals.
https://www.ft.com/content/142a6d95-b06e-47e3-a605-a203e2bc4...
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-musk-x-moraes-bolsonaro-sa...
https://g1.globo.com/jornal-nacional/noticia/2024/09/07/mani...
While this was going down, the judge was apparently attending a barbecue with the ruling party. They made fun of the protesters. "Your homages have already begun", they are reported to have said to him.
None of this is “well conceived”. De Moraes is way too high on his own supply.
When the person named is spending their days making childish AI images of the judge behind bars, is it not reasonable to cite them directly?
Exactly. Elon Musk said you have to be braindead [1] to prefer being banned in a country over honoring censorship requests by the government. But he immediately abandoned any pretense of that position due to his personal animus against the government of Brazil.
Don't forget them quietly deleting Elon's "secret master plan" about climate change [1] because Elon decided that oil and gas are OK, actually [2]
[1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-deletes-elon-musk-master...
[2] https://www.bncnnews.com/2023/12/elon-musk-asserts-oil-and-g...
Incredibly productive? Twitter's value is down almost 90% since he took over
https://fortune.com/2024/08/15/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sale-tw...
Haha, or just about any other oligarch. Also, "free market" is equally laughable.
Such a silly comment.
Here's a good explanation of how the Brazilian Supreme Court did a creative and novel interpretation of the law to give itself powers to investigate and regulate the internet without law enforcement or legislative/executive involvent.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39966382
That's not enforcing the law.
As documented by the New York Times, the first thing the judge did after getting powers to censor was to call a Brazilian magazine article about the person that gave him those powers 'fake news' and got it removed. It later turned out that article was true so he had egg on his face and had to retract his censorship order.
> To run the investigation, Mr. Toffoli tapped Mr. Moraes, 53, an intense former federal justice minister and constitutional law professor who had joined the court in 2017.
> In his first action, Mr. Moraes ordered a Brazilian magazine, Crusoé, to remove an online article that showed links between Mr. Toffoli and a corruption investigation. Mr. Moraes called it “fake news.”
> Mr. Moraes later lifted the order after legal documents proved the article was accurate.
What success? Twitter is down nearly 90% since he took over!
https://fortune.com/2024/08/15/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sale-tw...
I don't know much about Brazil , nor the background on this story, however even if Musk is in the right here, that doesn't make him any less of a fascist.
There isn't always a good and bad guy in these situations. Corrupt people and organisations can and often do oppose each other.
Political censorship is unconstitutional in Brazil. These judges are after Bolsonaro and his supporters for the political speech they engaged in. Blatant political censorship.
The constitution literally contains the words:
> Any and all censorship of political and artistic nature is prohibited
It's really not that hard to understand. Any citizen can understand this. It's just that it doesn't matter what the law says. Because there's no court above them, the law becomes whatever they say it is.
Which parágrafos or incisos of the Constituição da República Federativa do Brasil
> literally contains the words:
cited in English?
Isn't political debate in Brazil sharply divided by selective absolute Constitionalism in any case?
Why leap to the defence of bad faith falsehoods spread by bad losers of a democratic election?
> Blatant political censorship.
Shutting down businesses (not speeches, they aren't keeping pro-lula Twitter accounts up while censoring conservative ones) for refusing to comply with the law isn't censorship.
Censoring books in public library is censorship though, and Musk supported De Santis anyway.
> keeping pro-lula Twitter accounts up while censoring conservative ones
Funny. Among the accounts targeted by this judge, not a single one is pro-Lula. Really curious, indeed. Are these guys saints? Are they literally never wrong on the internet?
Not too long ago, one of Lula's ministers "disseminated" some serious "misinformation". She literally said about a hundred million brazilians are starving to death right now. Where's the judge's fact checking? I wonder.
I mean, Lula himself has admitted to journalists that he just makes up statistics on the spot. You'd think he'd be this judge's worst enemy, given how gung-ho he is about "misinformation"... Oh shit, is that the judge attending a barbecue with Lula and his allies? Whew, lad. What do you know?
There's an argument to be made that lying to the public is not political speech.
Relevant analysis: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/framing-disinf...
> "How? He's just enforcing the law in Brazil"
> "Elon is the one who cut off Twitter's 5th biggest market because misinformation is the opium of fascist-wannabees like him"
You don't seem to be sure on what is going on or even know what 'fascist' means.
Anything can be declared as "misinformation" these days which is the what many governments commonly use to enforce censorship and for its citizens to continue to believe one narrative for governments to then continue to lie to its citizens.
Why do you want this?
If someone tells me the sky is blue, and then someone else tells me the sky is purple, I'm not going to believe it's purple just because "the government" tells me the weather forecast
Cloudflare already isolated X on their network so that Brazil can block just X again.