The End of the DreamHost vs. DOJ privacy case (opens in new tab)

But the cost of moving a developer over to satisfy the DoJ's request is practically unquantifiable. Say DH has a dev team of 10. One of them moves over to implement the DoJ search protocol and develop redaction scripts. Do the other 9 now work this person's workload?

Or does DH bring in a new developer? Now DH has to train this person up. We all know, as programmers, that a new developer to a team induces a temporary drag on performance.

Anyways, I think Apple covered this hypothetical in their response brief to the FBI request.

Googles recipes for anthrax and home made bomb making techniques

I'm gonna be judged on that

https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/128/4/1633/184...

Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? We address this question by studying the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through coordinated rallies across the country on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. We exploit variation in rainfall on the day of these rallies as an exogenous source of variation in attendance. We show that good weather at this initial, coordinating event had significant consequences for the subsequent local strength of the movement, increased public support for Tea Party positions, and led to more Republican votes in the 2010 midterm elections. Policy making was also affected, as incumbents responded to large protests in their district by voting more conservatively in Congress. Our estimates suggest significant multiplier effects: an additional protester increased the number of Republican votes by a factor well above 1. Together our results show that protests can build political movements that ultimately affect policy making and that they do so by influencing political views rather than solely through the revelation of existing political preferences.

Others who may not have heard about the cause hear about it and get involved.

That, or if the man is doing something you don't like, do something they don't like.

It's better than sitting on the couch and reading about the things you don't like in the world.

That's a really strange thing to say. There are lots of examples of disruptive protests that have helped bring about change. As an example, take a look at:

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/A-Decade-of-AIDS-Activism...

Includes some bridge-blocking.

Open a history book and read up on the Civil Rights Movement, specifically the Selma to Montgomery Marches.

Blocking roads and bridges is one of the oldest and most effective forms of political protest in America.

I have some actual moral qualms about typing this out. I'll try to make it as short as possible.

Will blocking a single bridge help? Nope. The whole "raising awareness" and "starting a conversation" are irrelevant, for the most part.

So, let's say you live in America and want to effect meaningful change. In order to do so, you want to get the attention of the politicians and the media.

I should probably title this, "How to get the FBI Party Van Parked on Your Street."

However, unless they really stretch the laws, this is probably perfectly legal. I'll leave the morality judgment up to you, the reader, and simply tell you how to do this.

Some history:

I modeled traffic. This doesn't actually come in handy very often, but sometimes it does. Of course, when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

I like to say that I built the greatest traffic simulation game ever made. Of course, I'm biased. Eventually, we'd even be able to output some of that simulation as graphical representations, but that's a story for another day.

Traffic modeling concerns itself with optimizing - it's not always optimizing the greatest throughput. Sometimes, it's optimizing for speed, simplicity, or efficiency.

In order to understand traffic, it helps to realize that traffic is a chaotic system. A chaotic system is a system that appears to have random elements but, with enough data, you can tease out certain patterns. This is all very complicated and has varied accuracy depending on your ability to know the initial starting state.

However, with enough information, you can bring any city's traffic to a crawl with minimal effort. Give me a month to study the data (well, longer now as I'm retired and don't have the hardware to hand, the code, or current models) and some two way radios.

After I've studied the data, give me a dozen drivers and I can almost certainly reduce throughput by greater than 50% - and that's without breaking any laws or being the direct cause of an accident. It's really not hard. Start ahead of time and coordinate to merge slowly, to move at the posted speed limit in specific areas, to change lanes and brake, and to do this at key points where you can create bottlenecks.

I only say I can do it. To be completely frank about it, I've never yet met a municipality that would consider allowing me to actually try this. However, I can replicate this time and time again - and I have reasons to believe this would be as effective as it is in the models.

It won't even take much to do so. A dozen cars may actually be overkill, depending on the infrastructure. You can actually (I don't recommend doing so) test and see the results of some of the methods.

Find a spot in traffic where there is room in front of you. Speed up slowly until you're exceeding the speed of the vehicle in front of you. Brake late and hard. For bonus points, change lanes as you brake.

What will happen is the people behind you will increase their speed and will still be adapting to your speed increases. When you brake, they'll need to brake harder because they braked later due to reaction times. This will increase and ripple its way back through traffic - you can actually watch it happen. If done "right," it will spill over into the other travel lanes.

All you had to do was be the butterfly and you've now sent a cascading wave of confusion and reaction behind you. Not only will the person behind you have to brake harder, the people behind them will have to do so and, depending on their distances between cars, will have to keep on doing so for many cars behind you.

This also gets compounded by people being unable to see the first braking car(s). They are unable to see the cars way ahead in the line and they begin acting in what they believe is a rational manner. They brake hard and seek to change lanes.

(If you want to stop the ripple, brake and leave space between you and the vehicle in front of you - and allow people to safely merge into that space while making room to maintain that space in front of you. One car can significantly impact throughput.)

Why do I type all this?

Well, imagine you had a government that you felt was a tyranny. Imagine you had a bunch of people who agreed with you?

See, it's VERY important that you have a bunch of people who agree with you - otherwise, you're just an asshole. This way, you're an asshole with a legitimate democratic complaint. And, trust me, you are an asshole if you do this.

Let's assume that you're right in your presumptions about how people feel concerning the political arena. Let's just say you get 100,000 people who agree with you.

If you can't get 100,000 people who agree with you - and want to effect change - perhaps you're message really isn't important?

Now, pick a day... Go on, pick one. I recommend picking a day that is a Friday. I'd specifically recommend that you pick a Friday that marks the end of a week-long legislative session.

So, you have a date and 100,000 people.

Now, you need a time and a place. I'd suggest 12:00 noon and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Not to worry, you're not getting there.

Those 100,000 people will then set their GPS to arrive at 1600 Penn. Ave and they'll set it to arrive at the same time.

From across the country, people will leave and head to that address. They'll leave at different times because their goal is not the same departure time - but the same arrival time. Their goal is to all arrive at 1600 Penn. Ave at noon.

Of course, they can't do this. No, no... The urban area simply can't adapt to that much traffic all arriving at the same time and trying to get to the same place.

So, eventually you're going to reach a point where your car can go no further. If you're the first to arrive at 1600 Penn. Ave, just stop your car. (Impeding the flow of traffic is a minor offense, not subjecting one to jail time.)

Everyone else, when you get as close as you can, do the same thing. Stop your vehicle, exit your vehicle, lock the doors, and go have a drink.

Plan on being there for a while. You might want to bring food, water, blankets, prescription medication, camping gear, and be prepared to wait for a long while.

This will cause a giant wave of congestion that brings traffic to a halt - not just in DC but in the wider area. I once did the math, based on just 100,000 participants and current populations and existing local traffic, and my estimate was that it would create a snarl of traffic that's about 50 miles across - covering all primary, secondary, and tertiary travel lanes.

Here's the fun part... You've locked your vehicle and exited it. You've simply walked away. (Other than the first few people, this is a reasonable choice after a period of time.) They also won't be able to sort all the vehicles from those who were there to intentionally cause mayhem and those who were there for more "legitimate" (subjective) reasons.

They will be weeks moving these vehicles. They will be calling in tow trucks from around the country. They will initially clear single lanes for emergency traffic and this process is almost certainly not going to be gentle on your car. They'll be bringing in the National Guard and yanking your vehicle out of the way with chains.

And they haven't got anywhere to park that many additional cars. You're not just going to have 100,000 cars - you are going to have many of the local cars caught in it as well. You're going to have delivery vehicles, giant trucks, people towing trailers, and all that sort of stuff. You'll have RVs and limousines, people towing ATVs on their way out to the country for the weekend, taxis, police cars, etc...

This will shut down vehicular traffic for quite a while. Not only that, it will slow it down for even longer.

This affords you plenty of time to talk to the media and you'll absolutely have attention from the politicians.

Caveats: This is VERY severe. This will hamper emergency responses. This will negatively impact people who are innocent. This will seriously mess things up - probably for weeks.

Do NOT do this unless you're damned certain you're right. Do NOT do this unless you're able to accept that people will be harmed. This is very, very likely to result in indirect deaths.

So, blocking one bridge isn't very effective. However, blocking a lot of them, all at once, almost certainly will get attention. (Depending on your cause, the attention may be negative or positive.) Blocking one bridge isn't going to do much attention getting. Shutting a city down for multiple days and slowing it down for weeks, on the other hand, probably will.

I'd like to stress, again, that this isn't something to be taken lightly. It's a near certainty that multiple people will suffer because of this. However, if your choice is this or violent revolution... This is very, very much a "second to last choice option."

Finally, I'm sort of sorry for the length. However, I figured I would try to explain it in full AND stress that it's a horrible idea - but almost certain to get attention. What you do with that attention is up to you, but it's going to get attention. I am ABSOLUTELY not suggesting you do this, at least not at this time.

Indeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_to_Montgomery_marches

You can have unjust peace. Or you can fight back.

Peace is when you don't fight back.

There was a period around 2009-2010 where Dreamhost tech support became bad--aggressively bad. Replies to support requests were very slow, and when they did finally arrive they were terse and unhelpful. I think that period really damaged their reputation. Due to the crappy support I was planning to migrate my sites elsewhere, but it was a big job that was easy to put off.

Around 2011 they must have changed something, because the quality of tech support improved considerably, and they've been a great host since then.

I have heard reports of some shared servers being worse than others, but generally I've only seen reasonable performance at a low price.

That said, I also use Digital Ocean, AWS, and Rackspace still for various projects. Really, they're all pretty great.

I, personally, think it's still debatable as to whether the DailyStormer issues qualify as censorship.

Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, brought this topic up when they dropped DailyStormer. There's no easy answer on how to deal with it. Is there strong demand for a vertical monopoly in content hosting which will host any kind of offensive content? Are legislators close to passing laws denying the right to host a website for distasteful speech?

I would argue that censorship is an active action and that what happened to the Daily Stormer is mostly a passive action.

Analogy: This is not like burning a book. It's more like every book publisher passing on publishing the book before it's printed. Would you risk your reputation as a book publisher just because "I don't want to censor the author" despite not liking the content, not knowing if there was any paying market for the book, and despite the negative press + potential boycotts of your company? If you won't, how can you expect anyone else to do different in similar circumstances?

The slippery slope argument is a valid concern, but is there a moral panic spreading concerning things that are equally distasteful? Last I checked, the Westboro Baptist Church is still on the internet with both a website and a Twitter account. And they were used by the FBI to train agents to withstand hateful speech while maintaining their composure.

Note: Granted, Google Domains not allowing them to transfer their domain seems very icky, but I can see how there is no good policy for that situation.

How is it indisputable? Please don't forget your citations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHZSfhd1X_8