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goneharoldingSeptember 15, 2020
Good thinking ahead, this seems plausible to me, unfortunately. But I don’t know what you mean by canary. Would you please elaborate for those of us who may be ignorant of these things? Thanks!
Basically how it works is when a entity, say Ovarit gets served a warrant, it is usually accompanied by a gag order preventing them from notifying the target user that they have been subjected to surveillance.
So companies put up warrant canaries on their website. These usually say that as of that date, the company hasn't received any warranties, gag orders etc from government organizations.
When the company does get a warrant for user info, they simply delete the warrant canary. That way they are not breaking the gag order, while still getting the information out to the users that there has been a warrant.
Yes, we've thought about it. I'm just not entirely sure I'm totally understanding the concept so I didn't want to put it up until I did. It's on the todo list.
The canary at saidit includes information about their hosting company and servers, as well, which would be very useful.
Can you elaborate? That's new to me.
If the hosting company requires you to remove content (due to TOS violations, etc.), you can remove that part of your canary to show that they've interfered with the content. Here is a comment showing what changed in saidit's canary after they banned a sub due to violations of their host's TOS.
Here is Saidit's canary, they have a sub dedicated to them and it's linked at the bottom of every page. I would read through those, there are some interesting discussions in the comments that may be beneficial to deciding what to include in a canary for this site. The thread discussion of the hosting company and servers is canary #16.
The nice thing about having a sub for the site canary is that you can publish monthly canaries, and you can publish a new canary as soon as you encounter a problem that the canary covers.
Users (or a comment bot tool, not sure if those are supported here) can comment with a diff comparing the last canary to the current canary to see what (if anything) has changed.
I have little experience with canaries, so hopefully someone more experienced can chime in.
Cool, I had no idea that Saidit's canary is so informative. Having a sub for it is so useful.
Agree - it's a very good idea! Hopefully Ovarit does the same.