I grew up listening to VoA as a kid as well, I was born in a then not so developed part of the Balkans. Sometimes I have the feeling that the ordinary Americans don't have a clue about the impact VoA had in the countries like ours.
My father/grandfather were avid fans of international broadcasts. VoA, Radio Nippon, Deutsche Weller, BBC. By our childhood, TV came with 2 channels and in adolescence 60. My son has access to YouTube, Netflix...
It's America's state-sponsored propaganda network. It wasn't even allowed to broadcast to Americans until last decade. Despite the label, it's been a pretty good source, though admittedly with a pro-US bias. Now it looks like it's been DOGEd.
It is americas foreign propoganda program. is was intentionally made hard for americans to listen to. That it was hard to get at meant the types of people who want to control government propoganda didn't care and so it turned out to be a reasonable source of low bias information.
The difference is that public broadcasters like NHK, BBC etc are usually set up to be nominally independent from the government, usually through a license fee enforced separate from taxes.
Together with "Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty" - it was the main source of information not controlled by the party for people behind the iron curtain.
Radio Liberty was employing variety of native journalists living abroad but with the intention to talk about their native countries and cultures.
The amount of influence it had on the generation is hard to overestimate. It was also shut down recently by the DOGE.
I am Polish; I didn't grew up during period of Communist occupation, but I've certainly heard of stories of people risking their wellbeing via trying to listen to VoA. It was very much a big crime.
In my town (in Czechoslovakia), of the people of my generation, only those who listened to the BBC or VoA knew who the Vaclav Havel was, who became the first president after the fall of communism. I can't imagine the chaos that would happen if no one had any true information at the time of the fall of communism.
I might have been mistaken on that one, I'll fully admit. I am not sure if it was Głos Ameryki or Radio Wolna Europa - but my comment applies to both of them, anyway.
This reply is quite late, but I thought I’d answer it anyway. When I was a child, I enjoyed the VoA more than the BBC Africa service, and when I was a teen my preferences swapped. I had never really thought about why before. And I had never really clicked that the VoA was a propaganda tool.
My best answer is that listening to the VoA as a kid was just way more fun than the BBC. And maybe it being propaganda was a big reason for that. Stories were simple, there were good guys and bad guys, science was awesome and we might make it to Mars by the year 2000.
As I got older, I started to see that things weren’t so simple, I wanted unbiased, or at least balanced, reporting about the region I lived in, and then BBC Africa took over.
Good luck to anyone in a shitty regime that thought they could at least rely on American propaganda to get some useful info from an alternative. Despite VoA being cheap and enormously effective, and being something no Americans care about, he still kills it.
This might be related with the case of Richard Scolyer, the Australian pathologist diagnosed with Glioblastoma. He was receiving some kind of experimental treatment for it.
I believe he got just got either Ipilimumab and Nivolumab as a combo therapy or Pembrolizumab. He's a researcher who focuses on neo-adjuvant (use therapy before resection) therapy in melanomas. It was a good gamble to try the same paradigm in Glioblastomas
I actually used the 1.0 version of Netscape Navigator, and did some web development on it back in the day.
Originally, _blank, _new, etc. weren’t special. A target ref to a name which wasn’t used would open a new window. If it was already used, it would take you to that open window.
People started using _whatever because just ‘blank’ would almost always cause a collision. Eventually it got standardized that it would always open a new blank window.
I use that, but it's quite slow compared to running it yourself on hetzner on a VPS. Still the burden of updates.
About the banning... I don't do anything remotely shady and have been a customer over 5 years.
I've seen evidence of Hetzner banning people for no reasons, they also seem shady about their hardware access, not a good sign. It also seems about as expensive as running just Google Drive for my purposes (at least 2 TB with plans to expand further).
PS using E2E encryption on their Storage Box solution seems to be a decent alternative though.
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