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Fellas, Is It Fascist To Block Suspicious Web Traffic?
published: 2022-09-15
If I own a business and require people to not have extreme body odor in order to enter, is that fascist? If I have good reason to believe that the person won't be a paying customer and thus kick them out to avoid reaching venue capacity, am I somehow participating in an ideology with the blood of millions of people on its hands? If I don't want people shitting all over my store floors, am I Literally Hitler?
In the quest to make Let's Decentralize the best alternative to the hundreds of Hidden Wiki clones floating around Tor, I've stumbled across many a blog of a person who I wouldn't have any association with had I the choice. I find it half-hilarious and half-perplexing when I find a link to Let's Decentralize nestled in an alt-right blog's blogroll or link list, as if I'm not exactly the kind of person they would want dead had they the balls (as these are 99% men from what I've seen) to admit it instead of hiding behind "muh bell curve" or "muh FBI crime statistics". The latest entry in this pattern is a moid who is an open antisemite, claims sexualizing children is somehow fighting for freedom, and thinks calling everything he doesn't like "soy" is the most watertight argument in the world.
Normally I would not give this person even the time of day, just set up a rule in Caddy to block traffic from them in the referer and call it a day, much less bother trying to write a well-sourced rebuttal to anything when this type of person can just spew out any old bullshit sans research and, in their eyes, win the "debate" anyway. But there's something about this specific person's latest post, "The problems of browser fascism", that rubs me the wrong way. I mean, other than the constant soy jokes and the strawmanning of leftist concerns about the rise of actual fascism worldwide. His argument goes like this:
...forcing people into using a specific browser and/or version in order to view a websoyte is considered browser fascism.
A few paragraphs above this, he also writes:
When people think of fascism, they immediately think it's all about racism, right-wing, violence, blablabla... If you seriously think that, then you're absolutely overbloating the term. Fascism means forcing people into doing, saying, or even thinking in a certain way, even if it's literally impossible. That's it!
Even if we were to take the author's definition of fascism at his word (which we shouldn't, because it conflates government use of force with individual force, a distinction you'd think a self-proclaimed "libertarian" would know to make) not bothering to make a website compatible with a browser outside the mainstream is not imposing force on the user. When a web bot tries to visit one of my sites and gets 403ed, I'm not going up to where the bot lives out of the blue, breaking down its door, and pointing a gun to its face. The bot is coming to my house unsolicited, and I'm refusing to open the door to let it into my house to see my stuff. My website is my property, and I get to choose who comes in and who doesn't. This is, like, the opposite of fascism.
The author goes on further to claim:
Lots of soytes made by hipsters who can’t code and were never supposed to code in the first place use retarded technologies that should have never been invented, like Webpack, Angular/React/Vue/whatever, ECMA, and all the other bullshit... This time there are no buttons, but plain text notices saying something like "This websoyte only works in Goolag adrenoChrome 99 and newer or Furryfox 100 and newer", this is no different from basically saying "if you don't show me your papers, then I will deny you from entering the store", which to any reasonable person is pure fascism and pure evil...
While I generally agree that using overly-complicated web technologies and unnecessary JavaScript can in fact de facto exclude indie browsers from viewing a website, this is not equivalent to a "papers, please" scenario. The "papers" are not official government documents which could result in a life-or-death scenario if falsified or refused to be given but instead often just a simple user-agent string check. Which, you should know, can be changed with ease in any mainstream browser with the use of extensions and often is a native option in many indie browsers, such as Falkon, Lynx, Midori Lite (on Android), EinkBro (also Android), and Epiphany. For your convenience, since you (the author) didn't choose to do some basic research instead of whining in a post, here's a frequently-updated list of all the user-agents of mainstream browsers. At that point, if your browser is pretending to be Chrome or Firefox to bypass the user-agent string check and still can't display the site properly, that's a choice you're making to exclude yourself by not using a compatible browser. That's not fascism.
When it comes to websites made by governments and businesses open to the public, laws often come into play mandating that websites are accessible to those with disabilities. I cannot speak for the entirety of the world, but I do have two examples: the Americans with Disabilities Act in the USA, and the Equality Act of 2010 in the United Kingdom. Both of these set out guidelines for businesses and governments to ensure that services and employment positions they offer are able to be fairly and equally used by people with disabilities by providing reasonable acommodations. Reasonable is a key word here. Take this snippet from the official ADA website (emphasis mine):
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and, if the government entities receive Federal funding, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, generally require that State and local governments provide qualified individuals with disabilities equal access to their programs, services, or activities unless doing so would fundamentally alter the nature of their programs, services, or activities or would impose an undue burden.
The Equality Act in the UK concurs:
Adjustments only have to be made if it's reasonable to do so.
Blind users need screen readers, so ensuring a website has alt text in images and is structured semantically for easier navigation in screen-reading software like JAWS is a reasonable accommodation. Users who are hard-of-hearing need subtitles, so providing subtitles is a reasonable accommodation. Users with limited mobility need websites to be keyboard-navigable (which JavaScript is, in fact, capable of being), which is a reasonable accommodation.
Does your indie browser support caret browsing, which uses the arrow keys to move the cursor instead of having to use the trackpad? Does your indie browser work well with screenreaders like JAWS or NVDA? Does your indie browser have options to change the color of backgrounds and text and text size, or support extensions that do so? Does your indie browser support WebAuthn so that Cloudflare doesn't have to show you a gazillion CAPTCHAs?
If governmental and public-business entities are required to support browsers outside the mainstream, how far back does it go? Do they have to backport everything to versions of Firefox and Chrome that were last supported ten years ago? Do they have to support obscure browsers that haven't seen development updates in several years? Do they have to support Netscape 1.0? If we're going that far back, why don't we get rid of TLS on all websites everywhere and go back to transmitting sensitive information like credentials and health data and payment methods unencrypted so some neckbeard in his basement can use his eMac, HIPAA and other data protection laws be damned? Hell, let's just force all of society to go back to Gopher if browser rendering is the issue. Truly this won't greatly empower mass surveillance and accelerate the rise of, erm, fascism...
I can't think of a disability that requires that a user use an indie browser. (And don't say autism: I'm autistic, and I'm extremely sensitive to temperatures outside above 75 degrees Fahrenheit, but that's not a legally valid excuse for me to miss work at any job I've ever seen.) And if it's a question of not having the hardware to run a modern browser, well, every library I've ever gone to has computers available for use by the general public, and the advent of COVID-19 (although I suppose the author believes it's a hoax) has massively expanded the options for low-income and other disadvantaged individuals to get a decent laptop for free or at reduced cost.
Other than disability accessibility laws like the ADA, there is no rule or law saying that webmasters can't pick and choose who gets to access their website or not. If a hundred requests from the same IP come in within the span of a minute, I think I'm safe in assuming it's either a shitty attempt at a DDoS or a web scraper and blocking that IP. If someone's requesting the infamous /wp-login.php, I think I'm safe in blocking that IP since I've never used WordPress on any of my domains. If I'm developing a web application that handles data that's life-altering or otherwise potentially sensitive, I think I'm within my rights to restrict it to mainstream browsers I know won't introduce disastrous errors because of an incomplete or idiosyncratic JavaScript implementation. If I don't want Scrapy or the default Golang HTTP module or a WordPress vulnerability scanner or a search engine whose developers' politics I don't like to be able to access my sites, then I'm fully within my property rights to set up rules in Caddy blocking the relevant user-agents, and users are within their rights to either attempt to bypass the rules keeping them out, switch to a different browser, or use an archiving service like the Wayback Machine to make the wanted content accessible to them.
And as long as we're using immature zoomer lingo in lieu of actual arguments, dude, you use "pussy" as an insult. Why would you insult your mother, whose vagina was strong enough to push you out, like this? Why would you insult the resilient anatomy of every woman, without whom the human race would not exist? At least our reproductive organs don't dangle out of our bodies in an easily-kickable location. L + cope + seethe + mald, you scrotoidal walking abortion.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander