A user blocking an instance does not block the users from that instance from interacting with the user who blocked.
It’s not well explained, but my understanding is that an instance block just prevents communities from that instance, and posts made by users on thay instance, from showing for the user that blocked the instance. Comments from users of that instance still show for the blocking user, and the block is one way anyway.
because it shuts out everyone on that instance.
But it doesn’t. Unless they’ve changed the functionality in the last 3 major revisions or so, a user blocking an instance blocks all posts from that instance. Not the users or their comments on other posts.
It’s an easier way than blocking each community from that instance individually.
Anything supposedly said by “Anonymous” as a hacker group should always be treated with immense skepticism.
There do exist somewhat legitimate sub-factions that actually take serious actions and do serious ops, and also semi-legitimate “outlets” for their statements… but there’s also an overwhelming amount of smokescreen bullshit “anon news outlets” and little script kiddies running around. It’s important/intentional that those continue existing as smoke screen for the more “serious” factions.
Beyond that, being an anonymous group with no real methods of confirming membership to outsiders (insiders can just check if you’re in the private IRCs and etc) it means that just about anyone and everyone can make some big declaration like this. The proof will be in the results, not some announcement that could be made by a rando.
No matter who is really making these threats/warnings, I think things are going to get pretty dire in the US government IT space. It’s been well known for decades that most government orgs have absolutely abysmal cyber security, and now you have a bunch of young adult tech-bros with no true accountability running roughshod over all of it. Then there’s the fact that more than one of them have “serious black hat hacker” backgrounds.
Going to be one wild ride.
Copyright is regularly abused by large corporations in the pursuit of more money. Previously it was primarily used as a cudgel against individuals (against piracy, parody, and fair use). But now that their own rules are inconvenient to them they ignore its existence in pursuit of further profits.
Copyright to protect large companies? Fuck that.
Copyright to protect individuals from having their work appropriated? Yes please.
Copyright is already abused against individuals. Corporations already have these powers. What people want is the ability for these powers currently only available to the corporations to be available to the public. I’ve not seen anyone arguing for corporations to be granted more.
Trying to support individuals enforcing copyright against corps isn’t going to change the fact that corporations alrwady have these rights, it’s just trying to get corps to play by the same rules they apply to us.
Plus, any of the critically needed changes to copyright law would be fucking useless as long as we allow corporations to ignore what already exists for the sake of convenience.
Completely discarding concepts and arguments based only on the fact that they are associated with “the enemy” is dumb as hell. Likewise, “owners of intellectual property” != “only companies”. “Owners of intellectual property” covers anyone who takes photos, writes text, makes art, or makes original “content”.