The Palestine Congress in Berlin has just been stormed by the police, electricity has been shut off.

17:29 The Palestine Congress has been made illegal without justification by the police.

This comes after Ghassan Abu Sitteh, a Palestinian doctor who spent 43 days with Doctors Without Borders at the Al-Shifa Hospital, who also is the Rector of the University of Glasgow, was denied entry into Germany at the Berlin airport today because he wanted to speak about his experience at the congress.

German media calls this congress antisemitic and pro-Hamas, the evidence for these claims is insubstantial. „Some supposed invited speakers have liked images by groups who are said to...” and so on.

This congress is prevented as the German fascist party sits at a 20% approval rating and ~1000 far right (and often armed) extremists are currently on the run from the police.

While the EU is forcing all social networks equally to become federated, protect user's data, delete misinformation, and stop monopolistic or gatekeeping behavior, the US is banning foreign social networks under the pretense of “national security”.

With members of congress enacting this ban only acting in their own financial interests, as they own the stock of the competing American big tech companies [1]. Seriously, when have you seen 81% of congress agree on anything? To elect the speaker of the house it needed 18 votes and the split was disastrous.

To ban TikTok? Bipartisan decision. When it comes to representing corporate interests, the United States of America has one party.

A fine of $5,000 - $10,000 or an imprisonment of up to 20 years was supposed to be given for a different TikTok Ban (RESTRICT) last year [2], it is not certain what using a VPN to circumvent the ban would mean now.

STOP USING LOREM IPSUM!

- TEXT WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE MEANINGLESS
- YEARS OF WRITING PASSED yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND FOR “dolor sit amet”
- Yes please give me “consectetur adipiscing elit, sed”, I'd love to have one “aute irure dolor in reprehenderit” — statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

LOOK AT what DESIGNERS have been demanding your RESPECT for all this time:

_{^{(this is REAL TEXT written by REAL DESIGNERS)}}

- Hipster Ipsum: Brunch raclette vexillologist post-ironic glossier ennui XOXO mlkshk godard pour-over blog tumblr humblebrag.

- Cat Ipsum: Chase ball of string eat plants, meow, and throw up because I ate plants going to catch the red dot today

- Pirate Ipsum: Swab black jack ahoy Brethren of the Coast schooner poop deck main sheet topmast furl marooned.

“Hello I would like Ut enim ad money please”

_{They have played us for absolute fools}

>

How much money do you think the United States has spent since 1945 on the Cold War? Sometimes they ask this question then from the back of the audience comes in answer ‘billions and billions‘. A huge underestimate – billions and billions. The amount of money that the United States has spent on the Cold War since 1945 is approximately 10 trillion dollars. Trillion, that’s the big one with the ‘T’. What could you buy with 10 trillion dollars? The answer is: You could buy everything in the United States except the land. Everything. Every building, truck, bus, car, boat, plane, pencil, baby’s diaper. Everything in the United States except the land, that’s what we have spent on the Cold War.

So, now let me ask: How certain was it that the Russians were going to invade? Was it 100% certain? Guess not since they never invaded. What if it was only let say 10% certain? What would advocates of big military buildup have said? We must be prudent. It’s not enough to count on only the most likely circumstance. If the worst happens and it’s really extremely dangerous for us we have to prepare for that. Remote contingencies if there is serious enough have the prepared for. It’s classic military thinking – you prepare for the worst case.

And so now, I ask my friends who are comfortable with that argument, including the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, why doesn’t that same argument apply to Global Warming. You don’t think it’s 100% likely? Fine. You are entitled to think that. If it’s only a small probability of it happening since the consequences are so serious, don’t you have to make some serious investment to prevent it or mitigate it? I think there’s a double standard of argument working and I don’t think we should permit it.

— Carl Sagan, An excerpt of a speech given on the 2nd of September in 1990 at the 5th Emerging Issues Forum at NCSU

To all Fedi Admins Currently Being hit with a Spam Wave:

This kind of spam is now over! Unmute all the instances no longer on my list!

I've just released v4.0.0 of The UNmute List! I'd be very happy about a small donation because I have very little time and I cannot really justify working on this list with my current schedule :mycomputer:​

There is a new type of spam, the same instances are affected as before. Those responsible in Japan are said to have been arrested.

Without further ado...

Limit these instances:

[Full List of Affected Instances Here]

Just get the list to download and import here.

Simply import this list and you'll mute the 47 worst spam instances currently known to me! I've worked on it for multiple weeks, sometimes ~9 hours at a time verifying all lists sent to me manually.

Limit first, defederate only in worst situations!

Consider re-federating with and un-silencing any of the mentioned instances once the spam is mitigated. The admins of some of these may have just been asleep when this all started.

Ban Spam Accounts via their E-Mail Domain

Block the following E-Mail Domain and whatever temp Mail provider it resolves to: chitthi.in

Just to be safe, block these ones too (same provider)

- mailto.plus
- fexpost.com
- fexbox.org
- mailbox.in.ua
- any.pink

All our spam accounts came from these E-mails.

Since you probably have some of these accounts sleeping:

https://[your-instance.tld]/admin/accounts?email=%25%40chitthi.in there just select all and press “Ban”.

Find Remaining Spammers

I've seen instances that fixed the spam issue but began being hit later again. The spammers might use new E-Mails, so here is a way to find and block them anyway:

https://mamot.fr/@vincib/111946701929274350

IP Bans and TOR

These spammers seem to be using the TOR Network as all of their IPs are TOR Exit Node IPs, hence an idea (with some collateral damage if executed) would be to ban all TOR exit node IPs for sign ups. I am personally against this idea as you'd also prevent users who simply wish to stay anonymous online (political refugees, leakers of important documents, etc.) from using your platform. For now, simply banning every user using a particular Spammer IP will not help and will merely ban users that try to stay anonymous! Not necessarily the spammers.

How To Block All Temp E-Mails in the Future

If you want to prevent this from ever happening again, you should block E-Mails from Temporary Mail providers all together:

-

Here is the list of all Temp email providers (there are both blocklist and allowlist)

-

Here how to install it in Mastodon

-

The script that automatically pulls the list via Cronjob and imports it into Mastodon

-

Script template

Because of this, hessen.social, for example, was not affected by the spam attack! They had already banned the email domain the spammers used ages ago.

In future updates on Mastodon, maybe Admins can simply click a button that says “Ban Temp E-Mail Providers” Automagically from the E-Mail Menu? There could be E-Mail categories that can be banned, such as temporary mails.

Why did this happen?

The real reason hundreds of us spent hours of our days during the spam on mitigating it is the following:

Cyberbullying Gone Global: Fediverse Spam and Operation Beleaguer

This is the full exposé @cappy has been working on regarding the February 15th Spam Attacks!

Thank you @BrodieOnLinux for mentioning this post in a video!

Good luck, everyone!
Thanks for participating in the Fediverse Experiment!

#FediBlock #FediAdmin