news
Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:
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To learn about and discuss meaningful news, analysis and perspectives from around the world, with a focus on news outside the Anglosphere and beyond what is normally seen in corporate media (e.g. anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, Marxist, Indigenous, LGBTQ, people of colour).
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To encourage community members to contribute commentary and for others to thoughtfully engage with this material.
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To support healthy and good faith discussion as comrades, sharpening our analytical skills and helping one another better understand geopolitics.
We ask community members to appreciate the uncertainty inherent in critical analysis of current events, the need to constantly learn, and take part in the community with humility. None of us are the One True Leftist, not even you, the reader.
Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:
The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.
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Link titles: Please use informative link titles. Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.
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Content warnings: Posts on the newscomm and top-level replies on the newsmega should use content warnings appropriately. Please be thoughtful about wording and triggers when describing awful things in post titles.
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Fake news: No fake news posts ever, including April 1st. Deliberate fake news posting is a bannable offense. If you mistakenly post fake news the mod team may ask you to delete/modify the post or we may delete it ourselves.
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Link sources: All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include the Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance) or at least strip out identifier information from the twitter link. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source.
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Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.
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Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.
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American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.
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Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.
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AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.
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God did they really try standing this thing up on MediaWiki? (I can't tell, but after several minutes I got a 500 error with a message about PHP). This kind of shit needs to be a static HTML file with minimal attack surface. It needs to be something that can be trivially downloaded in full, archived, and shared. You are hosting the greatest threat to US domestic law enforcement on the internet on something with an attack surface the size of O'Hare International Airport, and your threat model is literally the final boss of threat models.
Anyway, it's really cool and I hope the information finds its way to the people who need it.
Especially because each agent is their own page, so 1500+ pages needing to be archived...
Yea some people may be trying to scrape and copy, causing 1500+ GET requests each and "DDOS'ing" the site.
.html or .json zipped and put out in a torrent?
Id heard wikileaks has a copy.
i mean once we have access to the list we can just make a simple rtf with everything in it
No yeah in just thinking about how I might distribute important [legally obtained] data if I came into possession of it.
Someone else can make the website for it
Username jokes aside, I'm working on something along those lines, without any legal or financial ties to American companies.
I've had to shut down a previous attempt at such a site because it turned out that the allegedly-entirely-within-Canada hosting company, Canhost, turned out to be owned by vicious American transphobes at PJ Media.
DM me when you decide on a host, I would be curious what your end up with
Will do. It's been a major challenge finding a hosting service with zero American ties. I need this project to be as immune to American legal threats as it can possibly be. That won't be a perfect shield of course, but even just throwing some roadblocks in the way of takedown attempts is better than nothing. Even delaying a takedown by a few days can make the difference between info lost forever and being able to restore on a new host from a backup.
I could do it by Tor hidden services easily enough. I'm writing all the services to be pure server-side-rendered HTML/CSS in Go, no Javascript anywhere, and doing all the testing in a default-settings Tor browser. But I'd prefer them to be accessible to as many people on the open web as possible. All the services will be under the AGPLv3 of course. I'm writing them with a focus on ease of installation and on clarity of the code for easy auditing. There's too damn many libre server projects with a hundred ridiculous dependencies and write-only code.
It's good to think about how to host it yourself, sure, but probably more important would be to provide it in a distributable form so that other people can easily host it in many, many places. Decentralization will be our friend here. It's a lot easier to attack one hosted service (through legal, technical, or social means) than it is to swat flies in thousands of places as they pop up, and keep doing so.
So I like the AGPL bit. It'll also help to have really clear documentation for building and deploying it, that people with minimal technical knowledge and experience can follow.
Agreed on all points. The project motto is basically "Don't be Mediagoblin". I'm making extensive use of sqlite. It has performance limitations to be sure but it drastically simplifies installation, backups, and restorations.