By Oleg Atbashian
First published in FrontPage Mag

It's now the Cube vs. the Pentagon.

Our reader, who is a U.S. Army officer, has sent us the above screenshot showing that The People's Cube has been blocked by the DoD Enterprise-Level Protection System due to "hate and racism" - a blatantly false label applied by someone on the government payroll, whose salary comes out of our taxes.

When I lived in the Soviet Union, my speech was expected to be blocked as politically unreliable and not aligned with the government's collectivist, socialist agenda. Such was the default setting and there was nothing I could do about it. At the time I assumed that if I were to move to the United States, I'd be free to speak without censorship. Imagine my surprise when I found that many in this country, including on the government level, were motivated by the same collectivist, socialist agenda I had escaped from.

Dismayed at the sight of this happening in a free country, I began to satirize the left's absurd and crooked schemes again, this time in English, and launched the People's Cube. This site has become an outlet not just for me, but for thousands of like-minded Americans and contributors from around the world, who opposed socialism and collectivism in general.

Shortly after the Cube was launched, the "open-minded" proponents of socialism began to use misrepresentations and lies in order to block our content. Starting with the Google purge in 2006, we've been blacklisted, shadow-banned, suspended, down-ranked, and otherwise hindered by the prog-warriors inside what has since become collectively known as Googlefacebooktwitter. We've been purged from Wikipedia. We've had our products removed from online stores in Zazzle, SpreadShirt, and CafePress. We've been slandered by Snopes. PolitiFact put us on their list of fake news sites. We've been denied ad revenue due to organized complaints to ad providers from invisible leftist operatives. And, finally, my wife's contributions to the People's Cube have led to a forced resignation from her job.

If it weren't for all this blackballing, our traffic and popularity could have generated enough income for us to focus solely on running and improving the site, instead of doing unrelated work to make ends meet.

Technically, since all those malefactors were private companies, they were within their right to censor any content, even though one could question the legality of their monopolistic use of public space to impose ideological filters and thus skew the national discourse leftward. And yet, the classic definition of censorship has always been about the government silencing a citizen's free expression.

So when the Department of Defense, a powerful government organization, blocks our content under a false and partisan pretense, it means that we have arrived.



Maybe it's true that the Pentagon employees have more important things to do than to read our satirical website; I'd have no problem if we were banned under the category of "goofy-and-silly." But being banned for "hate-and-racism" is something completely different.

Another Soviet immigrant to the U.S., Ayn Rand, defined racism as being the basest form of collectivism. And collectivism happens to be precisely what we oppose philosophically, preferring to see every person as an individual. But this is probably what looks like "racism" to the collectivists, who prefer to see people as a faceless mass divided into identity groups, where all members are expected to conform to assigned roles, feelings, and thoughts based on their color, gender, ethnicity, etc.

Such a view of humanity comes with collective guilt, collective hate, and collective punishment. This view is a precursor to real racism and other malignant "isms" that infect our world today. It's what we satirize. It's also very likely that whoever has branded us with "hate and racism" inside the DoD shares such views, which makes this episode look like a deleted scene from 1984.

If the Pentagon had slandered the People's Cube with such language under president Hillary, this would have indicated a very scary Orwellian scenario. Luckily, that is not the case and this blocking only reveals the presence of Obama's holdovers inside the DoD, who are still trying to impose their rules and dictate their terms. It is our hope that the new management will downsize the "parental controls squad" and will no longer treat the military as if they were children in need of adult supervision to protect them from the facts of life.

My Soviet experience had trained me not to expect favors from the powers that be. Like anyone who appreciates freedom, all I want from the government is that it leaves me alone. But that is too much to ask from the deep-state elites whose very reason for existence (they may prefer raison d'être) is never to leave people alone; they will destroy anyone who threatens their power by any means available to them, including filtering internet content on the basis of slanderous and improvable accusations.

Getting rid of that political filter would reduce their arsenal by at least one powerful weapon.

Perhaps it is time for a product that fixes this. If they are desperate to hold us up because we speak our mind, the salesperson in me will be keen to offer every user of this place such a product in my next post.

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”

Our DoD insider has just made another puzzling discovery and sent us this screenshot.

One could make the case that the DoD is run by anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and neo-Nazis because they are blocking a website dedicated to the memory of Auschwitz and its victims - https://auschwitz.dk - as "hate-and-racism" (just like this site).

This particular page is about Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who died as prisoner 16770 in Auschwitz, on August 14, 1941. When a prisoner escaped from the camp, the Nazis selected 10 others to be killed. One of them had a large family, so Father Kolbe stepped forward and asked to die in his place. His request was granted. Kolbe was later canonized by the Church as a saint.

According to the DoD korrektified filtering system, that's hate and racism.

Should we submit a Freedom of Information request to the DoD and find out just where from they're getting their list of "hate-and-racism" sites destined for the memory hole?

Oleg:
That is a good idea to file a FOIA request. However, I suggest contacting Judicial Watch and let them know what is going on with your site. This is right up their alley. They are the king of FOIA requests. Another good organization to contact would be the Institute for Justice. They litigate pro bono for the small guy if they feel they are being trampled on. Can't hurt and might help.
-Ratskins-

Perhaps Komrades, it is time to storm the Bastille (Congress)!
Meme storm them on twitter, FB, etc. wherever an opportunity arises!

https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/att-net-neutrality-internet-bill-of-rights-1202674949/

OK, I did some additional research today; keep reading if you have a nerdy interest in boring details.

It's likely that the DoD, like many others, is using private companies to handle it web security. I was told it could be Bluecoat or Websense (now Forcepoint - had to register for that one). I located and used their URL review tools - but both of those sites categorized the Cube as "Entertainment" and the Holocaust site as "Reference."

So I kept digging and tested about a dozen online categorization and filtering services, and everywhere our categories were legitimate - from humor/jokes to philosophy/advocacy.

Then I discovered a company named BrightCloud owned by Webroot.

That's where the URL lookup resulted in the Cube and the other site categorized as "Hate and Racism."

You can try it, too, by clicking here - https://www.brightcloud.com/tools/url-ip-lookup.php - and maybe look up some other websites and report the results here.

Here's a screenshot as of tonight:

[img]/images/various_uploads/SCRN_BrightCloud_Cube.jpg[/img]

There was a link to "request a new URL category." So I clicked on it and requested a change to "Entertainment" since they didn't have Humor/Satire on the list of options.

I wrote this comment: "This is a parody/humor/satire site of international repute, run by an ex-Soviet immigrant. It was wrongly categorized as "hate and racism" - perhaps by a recipient of its edgy saire. Please correct."

The automated response was, "Thank you! We have received your submission. We will review and respond to your request, and post the appropriate change. Thank you for helping to make the BrightCloud Master Database the best in the world."

Then I did the same for the Holocaust site, asking to change it to "Reference."

So now we'll have to wait and see. I'll post any further updates here.

I still have some unanswered questions.

1. Why did they put us in that category in the first place and who was their "trusted source"?
   
2. Did they use someone else's database, or is any other such company is using their database?
   
3. Is the DoD using BrightCloud? If so, is it directly or through an intermediary? And if BrightCloud changes our category, will it be reflected in the DoD results?
   
4. How many other companies are using this database to filter their web traffic? What are those companies?

UPDATE:

I have received a response confirming the change of our classification by BrightCloud. See below.

So the only burning question remaining is "Who defends us from the Dept of Defense?" I served six years in the US Army, and in the end my "glavniy vrog" was the federal Govt.

UPDATE:

BrightCloud representative has politely responded that we have fallen victim of an AI error and that someone human has now made a manual adjustment. They aren't at liberty to disclose who feeds off their database, and they don't know whether the other companies' AI will make a similar manual adjustment if the update doesn't go through automatically.

This made me feel like a character from a dystopian sci-fi novel.

I guess the good news is that all this AI is not yet connected into a single artificial brain controlling our lives, like SkyNet.

Their response is below.

Hello Oleg,

These determinations were made by our machine learning system, our classification systems use several metrics and record multiple details about websites to pick up common patterns of online content in order to set a classification, and stores this information in our own databases. We periodically review and make adjustments to our database in order to ensure the highest level of accuracy.

We changed auschwitz.dk to the Reference and Research category, and thepeoplescube.com to the Political category. Our machines will be fed the change information and will learn from it.

The companies using our databases will have the update available to their firewalls within a 48 hour time period, some may need to be manually updated on their own firewalls. We are not allowed to give information on these companies as it is confidential information.

Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns.

YESTERDAY:


But then we sent them a map of Siberia (Kolyma highlighted!), wrapped in a fishy ПРАВДА.


Lo and behold, by Batyushka's mustachio, TODAY:

.


UPDATE:
(suspicious coordination? TPC conspiracy? see Red Square's and Dummkopf's timestamps!)

Red Square wrote:UPDATE: ... like ... a dystopian sci-fi novel ...

#MeToo!
Viva KafkAI !

Genosse Dummkopf -

Thank you for your help and for the updated screenshot with the change.

Apparently, we've been contacting them simultaneously. The answer you received had come from their AI - I had also received them. But I had also received an email written by a human, and it advised me to disregard the automated responses and wait for their human review. I have just posted the result above.

.
THANK YOU!
.

In related news, we are still being blocked by AT&T wifi service it provides to the Home Depot and other corporations.

Our reader has reported this with screenshots here and last night I also stopped at the local Home Depot, connected to their wifi, and tried to access the Cube. The result was exactly as described by our reader.

I can't really blame the Home Depot - the trail leads to AT&T. I tried but unable to find any online info on AT&T traffic blocking and site classification. There is no transparency in who exactly is being blocked and who decides what to blocked and why.

It gives me hope, however, that since the AT&T category (hate-and-racism) is identical to that of the DoD and BrightCloud, it may come from the same source, which may well be BrightCloud, and so there's hope the update will go through to the both other systems.

But are there other systems? There are things we already know that we don't know about. Unfortunately, there also exist things we don't know that we don't know about.

This human individual is at a loss. Ideas?

Red Square wrote:... Apparently, we've been contacting them simultaneously ...

I saw (yesterday) your initial post, and thought uh, just in case, send them a Change Request, too (with mini-hint that it's not "hate/racism" at all, but humor, satire, polit-satire).

(BrightCloud's offered Category choices are a bit awkward: no 'Humor/Political Humor', no 'Satire/Political Satire' - thusly, for instance, The Onion is categorized as 'News and Media'.
For TPC the only halfway passable BrightCloud approximations are, indeed, 'Entertainment and Arts' or 'Philosophy and Political Advocacy'.)


Looked also (not extensively) for other TPC-harming "categorizers", saw none.

Comrade Putout wrote:THANK YOU! ...

But this goes to Comrade Director, of course (who contacted the BrightCloud people).

My just in case Change Request was meant as "support".
Got (of course) the automatic Ticket-opened confirmation. Some 8 hours later, the (surely full automatic) "... have reviewed ... and determined that [the classification 'Hate and Racism'] does not need to be changed ..." (in pic above).
Smelled doubleplusungood, yet I did not contact BrightCloud, just murmured let's check a day or two later for correction (as requested by Comrade Director).
(and my ПРАВДА-wrapped "Kolyma" a jest, of course).

But, but - back to essentials, Komradette Putout:
Cheeky new avatar you got here. Be a shame if arkancide happened to it ...

Comrades Dummkopf & Square,

ATTENTION: CPU and RAM have expressed a growing sense of discomfort with the tone of your discussion. It is disrupting control-flow integrity and abusing the stack pointer sequence. AI will begin enabling DEP enforcement algorithms to mitigate the damage, and if necessary, targeted application lock-downs will be deployed without further warning.

HAL

Craptek!

You may have ration of beets.... UGH!

-Commissar Rooster