R. Hill

I miss John Pilger, moreso today. johnpilger.com/the-war-on-dem…

@RnaudBertrand John Pilger made an excellent documentary about the complicity of journalists in manufacturing consent for war—everybody should take the time to watch it: “The War You Don’t See”, johnpilger.com/the-war-you-do… 2010 but still very relevant.

Julian Assange once said (in this London speech: youtube.com/watch?v=TQVBZQ…) that wars are always ultimately started by the media, via the manufacturing of consent to prepare public opinions. He asked: "Let us ask ourselves of the complicit media, which is the majority of the mainstream press: what is the average death count attributed to each journalist? [...] Who are the war criminals? It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists. Journalists are war criminals." Assange didn't precise this but it is not just journalists: to manufacture consent for most recent wars they were in an unholy alliance with an ecosystem of so-called "human rights" activists who constructed the arguments, the reports, the talking points for their articles. People like @AlinejadMasih and @NazaninBoniadi (👇) in the case of Iran, who tirelessly for years built the arguments for the war, providing the "moral" scaffolding for it. They too very much are war criminals. I've made that argument for years. If you genuinely care about human rights (and if you genuinely care about journalism), you should be in direct opposition to most (not all) human rights organizations and activists in the world today because they have so thoroughly corrupted the concept - turning it into little more than the humanitarian packaging in which wars and sanctions are wrapped and sold to the public. It's supposed to be a shield meant to protect the vulnerable and they've made it into a weapon used to justify their persecution and destruction. As the war goes on and their own country and people get destroyed and massacred, Iran's "human rights" activists will try to distance themselves from it - as they're already starting to do 👇- but, make no mistake, this is the very logical consequence of their own actions and they couldn't not have known. Every single time it's exactly where this road leads: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, all justified - to some extent - on the basis of "human rights", of "saving women from oppression", of "liberating" people or "giving them a voice." And every single time the result was the same: tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the country destroyed. They saw this, they knew this, and they did it to their own people anyway. You simply can't plead ignorance. In many ways it's even worse in the case of Iran because their "human rights" activists even actively called for war. Just this January, Alinejad wrote an op-ed in the NYT (nytimes.com/2026/01/27/opi…) in which she explicitly called for U.S. military intervention against her country, dismissed comparisons to Iraq and Libya as "paralysis" and a "permanent permission slip for every dictator," and went full Orwell by framing the **absence** of war as having "a body count." She literally preempted the very argument I'm making - that previous interventions destroyed countries - and explicitly dismissed it. So she definitely can't plead ignorance! Same story with Boniadi. She herself in her screenshotted tweet 👇 acknowledges that she advocated for "targeted intervention to bring down the regime." And at the Munich Security Conference just 3 weeks ago, she was on stage alongside Reza Pahlavi (securityconference.org/en/msc-2026/ag…), actively lobbying for foreign military intervention and regime change. Assange was right that journalists are war criminals - but at least journalists can hide behind the pretense of "reporting." These people literally campaigned for the war, making it their life's cause. The bombs falling on Tehran, the current acid rain and the schoolgirls massacred are not a betrayal to them - it's exactly what they were calling for! I know I'm being utterly naive but at some point there should really be a reckoning for the entire ecosystem that makes these wars possible, and for what has been done to the very concept of human rights.

Pilger, 2011: johnpilger.com/2011/06/19/the…

I miss John Pilger, moreso today. johnpilger.com/the-war-on-dem…

In 2026, the financial siege that strangled Cuba for more than six decades became a military one. Five oil tankers seized in a single month. 7.3 million barrels confiscated. One of the tankers was not even under sanctions. The largest naval deployment in the Caribbean since 1962. US drones surveilling Mexican tanker routes. An executive order threatening tariffs on any country on earth that sells Cuba a single barrel of oil. Mexico, facing $400 billion in trade exposure to the US, stopped shipments. Venezuela's supply was destroyed by force. No alternative supplier was willing to risk retaliation or seizures. 20-hour daily blackouts. Hospitals on generators running out of diesel. Families cooking with wood. The Secretary of State testified to Congress that regime change is the objective. The President said: "I think it's just going to fall." But the siege did not begin in 2026. It began decades ago, and it was never unilateral. 187 nations vote to condemn the US embargo on Cuba every year. 33 consecutive years. The most lopsided vote in UN history. And every year, every country that votes against it lets its banks enforce it anyway. The reason is structural. 88% of all global foreign exchange transactions touch the US dollar. 95% of cross-border dollar payments clear through 42 American banks. One country controls the pipes through which the world's money moves. That is all it takes. Any foreign bank that processes a Cuba-related payment faces ruin. BNP Paribas was fined $8.9 billion. Société Générale, $1.34 billion. HSBC, $1.9 billion. Standard Chartered, $1.1 billion. ING, $619 million. $13.5 billion in penalties against foreign banks from countries that formally oppose the embargo. The lesson was received. Most foreign banks now refuse all Cuba operations. Several countries passed laws making it illegal for their own companies to comply with the US embargo. Total enforcement of those laws over 30 years: one fine. $15,000. Against a hotel in Mexico City. The votes against the blockade are symbolic. The fines are real. And the machinery does not stop at banking. A US private equity firm buys a Dutch software company. 23 years of Cuban contracts, severed in a week. A US corporation acquires two Swiss ventilator manufacturers. Deliveries to Cuba stop overnight. An American cargo company refuses to deliver Jack Ma's donated medical supplies to Cuba. It was the only country in Latin America that did not receive them. PayPal blocks any transaction containing the word "Cuba." Including orders for a cocktail recipe book. Cuba does not lose these suppliers to politics. It loses them to mergers, algorithms, and compliance departments that would rather cut off an entire country than risk a phone call from OFAC. The result: 35 children on a pediatric ward vomiting 28 to 30 times a day because the anti-nausea drug essential for chemotherapy cannot be sourced from anywhere on earth. An 89-year-old woman implanted with a pacemaker recycled from a dead patient, two years of battery life, because no manufacturer will sell to Cuba. 69% of necessary medicines unavailable. Infant mortality rising for the first time in decades. When one nation controls the infrastructure through which the world trades, and weaponizes that control to deny an island of 11 million people fuel, medicine, food, pacemakers, ventilators, software, insurance, shipping, and banking for more than six decades, while every other nation on earth formally objects and none enforces its objection, the word for that is SIEGE. The longest siege in modern history. Condemned annually. Enforced permanently.

"malicious browser extension called NexShield that impersonates the legitimate uBlock Origin Lite ad blocker [...] Ironically, the victim was searching for an ad blocker when they encountered a malicious advertisement" huntress.com/blog/malicious…

@AngelicaOung There is a 10-part documentary out there titled "Hong Kong Returns", worth a watch if you haven't seen it: youtube.com/playlist?list=…

"It is so interesting following different news sources concerning this event. Completely different analysis based on each news outlets agenda. What is the truth???" <== A comment about the Hong Kong riots six years ago. Well, let me tell you back in 2019 I was working in a restaurant kitchen in Los Angeles, barely online. I only saw one version of the Hong Kong riots: innocent fresh-faced students as naive as lambs getting the book thrown as them by the big bad SeeSeePee. I didn't know people threw petrol bombs. I didn't know people caused mayhem and injury and plunged Hong Kong into chaos. And how remarkable it is that all this news was completely out there...they just didn't make it through my information bubble because that's not what the western media reported.

All browsers can limit on which sites an extension can read/change data, they all offer "deny by default/allow on specific sites". r/n Safari does it best as it also offers "allow by default/deny on specific sites", a better approach for a content blocker. x.com/anasTheCatwanj…

To be clear, "Read and change all your data on all websites" also exists with MV3. Installing one of top MV3-compliant content blockers currently in the Chrome Web Store still warn about this, as seen in pictures below.

@AlexRoseGames @iseawhy @Yuya_2026 @hetmehtaa The whole thread here is about Chrome Web Store extensions going rogue after changing hands. uBO in Chrome Web Store never changed hands. Stating that this happened to uBO is incorrect.

@gorhill @iseawhy @Yuya_2026 @hetmehtaa I don't really get the nuance between "transferring it to someone else" and "handing it away" but because you are the emperor of the free internet I will just nod and accept your explanation

Everyone keeps saying uBlock Origin ‘saved the internet’ but we casually gave it permission to read and change everything we do in the browser, logins, cookies, banking, crypto, all of it. If that code ever gets sold, hacked or pushed a bad update, your ‘ad blocker’ instantly becomes a perfect spyware plug‑in sitting on every site you open. Chrome removing it isn’t just about ads, it’s also because these old‑style extensions had too much power under the old Manifest V2 system, so they’re being disabled as “not following best practices” on Chrome as well. Use browsers with built‑in blockers like Brave/Vivaldi, or go one level up with Pi‑hole, AdGuard Home, or NextDNS so ads get blocked before they even reach your browser.

@AlexRoseGames @iseawhy @Yuya_2026 @hetmehtaa That Wikipedia article doesn't say the Chrome Web Store extension was "handed away".

@gorhill @iseawhy @Yuya_2026 @hetmehtaa 1. you are god 2. that's awesome that you replied, thankyou I am not worthy 3. wait so the ublock->ublock origin story is a fabrication? or I just misread the story back in the day? I still am confused

@AlexRoseGames @iseawhy @Yuya_2026 @hetmehtaa I have maintained without interruption uBlock in the Chrome Web Store (CWS) since June 2014, the day uBlock was first published. I never handed away the CWS listing. At most a change of name, that's it.

@iseawhy @Yuya_2026 @hetmehtaa @gorhill that's essentially what happened to ublock. original creator handed it away, then the next guy was begging for donations so the og created ublock origin

Also: defend.wikileaks.org/2019/05/26/jul…

There is a regression in uBO Lite 2025.1215.1455, potentially causing issues on YT. A fix in version 2025.1217.1755 has been published -- currently available in Edge and Safari store, but not yet available in Chrome store (review delay is unpredictable in CWS). Sorry about this.

New blog post! 🚀⚡ Using an ad blocker isn’t just about convenience - it’s a security measure every organization should consider. I’ve written a guide on deploying and configuring uBlock Origin Lite at scale using Microsoft Intune and PowerShell. imab.dk/enterprise-ad-… #msintune #powershell #ublock #security

Another aspect is content blocking effectiveness. For this, I have been working on an extension which sole purpose is to count what is *not* blocked, which tells more than counting what is blocked. See github.com/gorhill/uBO-Sc…

Though uBO Lite did somehow end up being measured in a 2024 benchmark from @DebugBear: x.com/gorhill/status… "ad blocker adblox" was just a rip off of uBO Lite.

A post on Reddit was brought to my attention: "Why no love for uBlock on Safari?" reddit.com/r/Safari/comme… I was not aware of "no love". Anyway, I want to argue various points made in one of the replies.