I dont use it and have no desire or interest.
Ok i looked yesterday for the first time, initial thoughts were why and what for
But interested in the American government ban and now the uk is considering the same.
On the same vain I dont use facebook, although i do have an account as one hotel only offered free internet if you had an account, but no idea user namè or password and again will not go back on unless the same hotel insists next time I visit.
So social media !
Bad or good ?
There is a movement in Australia to ban social media access for under 12’s.
Something to do with cyber bulleying.
The have no idea how they might implement it.
Personally I hate Tiktok. And have the same feeling for the other so called socialmedia-things. They are harmful even for grown-ups!
As for the banning, I think it was rather a political (anti-chinese) decision.
The US first wanted to buy it from the chinese. They did not sell , now it’s banned, the justification is ridiculous: it’s a spyware.
I agree, it spies! But the same applies to facebook/google/etc…
So personally I welcome its banning, but please ban the others too!
Or leave this one working too, or else how can we talk about the “freedom of the internet”?
So in nutshell: ban them all!
If that doesn’t work, don’t ban any of them.
Thought this topic would generate interest.
Couple of points,
China a few years back banned several sites, cannot remember what or why, around the riots in the square.
How do you ban access to a site, remove it from DNS, or have servers set up that stop access… but if you use VPN does that get round it
We all know tiktoc, facebook are social media, but where is the line to say this is social media and this id not… so youtube ? Whatsapp ?
Then dating sites metic, bado, etc
Or sex sites grinder, xxxxxxx etc
Gaming sites sorry dont know any
Ok some of these can be controlled by credit cards age checks at 18 but how at 12 and why 12 not 14, 16 …
So many questions
It’s banned in Bharat from 2020. china steals data…
It should be banned or even shut down completely…
Do you know how ?
Technically or just policed provention ?
If you have a vpn does that get round it ?
I’m sure it can circumvent the ban, if the VPN server is in an area, where the ban is not effective.
I don’t know, but I beleive there are firewalls around a countrys intternet connection, kind of a “virtual border”. Then the firewall could be configured to stop traffic towards and/or from the banned servers IP addresses.
Again: this is my suspition, I’m not sure it works this way everywhere in the world. But there was a site officially banned here, and it didn’t work without a VPN.
In my own home network I just configure the DNS server not to resolve the name of a blacklisted server.
I don’t know exactly how. But it can’t be used with VPN as well
I worked as technical director in a large hospital. We introduced the internet to give medical staff access to research data, ideally medical journals or research centres, great idea, but staff were looking at other things perhaps not suitable especially evenings or quiet periods.
So i had my team put a list of reserved words on the internet server to stop access to sex sites… great move. But our department for sexual health (vd, std clinic) of course needed access, so had to get around that …thought we had it solved.
I had to do a presentation to the board of directors showing how good we were and how secure etc. Tried a porn site, blocked, good, tried playboy bolcked great, but the the chief nurse said we dont want to look at naked girls, try playgirl (naked men) sadly we had not blocked that one and it ket us onto the site … back to the drawing board and more coding to block.
Who black lists servers, what do they contain
Mostly I have just slight clues 
But generally those are some tracking, advertising sites.
The most intrusive I came across is heatmaps.com I think.
I do it myself. Well, based on many other people’s suggestions.
This is the script which gathers the blacklist for me, there you can see where I get my list from, and which sources I don’t use anymore (commented out):
#!/bin/bash
download()
{
wget -O hosts.txt $1
sed '/^#/d' hosts.txt >> collected_hosts.txt
}
cd /opt/gather
rm *.txt
touch collected_hosts.txt
#download https://www.adawayapk.net/downloads/hostfiles/official/3_yoyohost.txt
#download https://www.adawayapk.net/downloads/hostfiles/official/2_ad_servers.txt
#download https://www.adawayapk.net/downloads/hostfiles/official/1_hosts.txt
download https://getadhell.com/standard-package.txt
download https://raw.githubusercontent.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists/master/hostnames.txt
download https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts
#download http://hostsfile.mine.nu/Hosts.txt
#download https://curben.gitlab.io/malware-filter/urlhaus-filter-hosts.txt
download https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdAway/adaway.github.io/master/hosts.txt
#download https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FadeMind/hosts.extras/master/add.2o7Net/hosts
#download https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FadeMind/hosts.extras/master/add.Spam/hosts
#download https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hoshsadiq/adblock-nocoin-list/master/hosts.txt
download https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shreyasminocha/shady-hosts/main/hosts
#download https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Ultimate-Hosts-Blacklist/Ultimate.Hosts.Blacklist/master/hosts/hosts0
#download https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Ultimate-Hosts-Blacklist/Ultimate.Hosts.Blacklist/master/hosts/hosts1
download https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt
cat collected_hosts.txt | awk '{print $2}' > collected_hosts_filtered.txt
cat badhostlist >> collected_hosts_filtered.txt
cat viberlist >> collected_hosts_filtered.txt
#cat league >> collected_hosts_filtered.txt
cat collected_hosts_filtered.txt | tr -d '\015'| sort -u | awk '{print $1}' | grep -v spotify > sortedlist.txt
sed '/^localhost/d' sortedlist.txt | grep "\." | awk '{print "0.0.0.0 ",$1;print "::0 ",$1}' > /etc/badhosts
This outputs a list into /etc/badhosts, which looks like this (only snippet, the whole file is huge):
0.0.0.0 y8cqr.skysafe.email
::0 y8cqr.skysafe.email
0.0.0.0 y8htp9.icu
::0 y8htp9.icu
0.0.0.0 y8hxgv9m.kobetsu.co.jp
::0 y8hxgv9m.kobetsu.co.jp
0.0.0.0 y8news.com
::0 y8news.com
0.0.0.0 y8r4.cfd
::0 y8r4.cfd
0.0.0.0 y8u0i2.jordanhavvels.com
::0 y8u0i2.jordanhavvels.com
0.0.0.0 y8z5nv0slz06vj2k5vh6akv7dj2c8aj62zhj2v7zj8vp0zq7fj2gf4mv6zsb.me
::0 y8z5nv0slz06vj2k5vh6akv7dj2c8aj62zhj2v7zj8vp0zq7fj2gf4mv6zsb.me
0.0.0.0 y900.greenwichtime.com
::0 y900.greenwichtime.com
0.0.0.0 y927.f3322.org
::0 y927.f3322.org
0.0.0.0 y94327.com
::0 y94327.com
0.0.0.0 y97803nx.bget.ru
::0 y97803nx.bget.ru
Then the config of dnsmasq refers to this list. As a result, whatever in my own LAN asks for the IP of a blacklisted server, it either gets 0.0.0.0 or ::0 (if it was an AAAA query).
Of course it’s possible to configure a specific DNS server on any computer, but our own devices are configured to accept what the DHCP offers. This is the default behavior anyway
So does it work
Additionally, my own DNS server connects to Cisco Umbrella (OpenDNS) there are some blacklists too based on categories, those are community maintained.
You were thinking with a male brain, women tend to smart out that
Combine maybe VPN+a foreign DNS. If the VPN is in a non-banned area it must work. But I admit, Tik-tok doesn’t worth the effort
Thanks for sharing that
Article dated December 19, 2024
"Australia passed one of the strictest internet crackdowns in the world last month, banning children under 16 from being on social media or opening new accounts.
The law, which takes effect a year from now, holds social media companies responsible for verifying kids’ ages. Not complying could trigger fines up to nearly $50 million."
Somehow, some way, some sites can now tell if you are using a VPN. I was in Germany this past October and wanted to watch a show on the internet. I started my VPN, told it to say I was in the US and the site still refused to allow me access, I checked my IP address and it said I was connected as if I was in New York city, USA.
Try using that same VPN connection when you are at home and see if it works. Maybe they just block known VPN service IPs.
Another alternative to using a VPN is to use the TOR network (The Onion Ring) - there’s a dedicated browser based on Firefox - but Brave has builtin “New private window with Tor”…
From what I can tell - TikTok seems to be a platform for sharing animal cruelty videos… Also - ALL the content I’ve even seen on there (linked from other networks) is also human cruelty (to the person who happens to be looking at the 'content").
The bbc regularly banks my access in france. So i no longer bother trying cannot be that interesting and wait till another service picks up the report. We dont watch TV or series so no big deal.
I tried tictoc after reading about the ban to see what the problem was, only saw 2 or 3 films of teen girls dancing and singing… no interest in that so again not something I will miss.
On line bullying and violence should be stopped. I agree but dont know how and if blocks are correct, better shutting down the servers.