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Comment by jk_danson | Hacker News Reader

Someone needs to make a small sketch of the Uganda government with 7 year olds making up the laws.

Child 1 - "Let's tax people for being on social media to stop them from saying bad things about us" Child 2 - "Yeah that's a great idea. Plus we'll have more money for candy." Govenments notice - "Social media is hereby taxed. Your local ISP will be collecting the tax automatically." People - "Whatever, we'll just use VPN" Government Screams- "AND NO VPNs ALLOWED!"

So much for free speech.

Good luck stopping the tor network.

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The Chinese government has had a lot of success blocking Tor (and VPNs) most recently. You may know that all of the normal relays are publicly listed in the Tor directory, making them trivial to block by IP address. That will then require Tor users to do extra work to find bridges or configure pluggable transports for censorship circumvention, which most users may not be motivated enough to do. Censors can also try to fingerprint and block some of the circumvention methods.

In sum, Tor is not trivially or resoundingly winning the censorship arms race, even though it has some good work on censorship circumvention that's often effective in particular countries.

Some good background on this is in

https://www.bamsoftware.com/papers/thesis/

I doubt the Uganda has the infrastructure that the Chinese government has to implement such a complex system. They would have to tax more internet usage. Youtube is probably next. "For every video you watch there is an entertainment tax."

That's very true. The effectiveness of Internet censorship has depended a lot on the resources that governments have brought to bear, and I assume the Ugandan government won't have the resources the Chinese government does, maybe resulting in less effective Internet blocking programs.

I remember a time when we used to make fun of governments' lack of understanding of the Internet and the unlikelihood that they would be able to control it. Unfortunately, that was a very different time.

I see this all the time on HN, the dismissal of real problems by suggesting the wide spread use of using highly technical solutions. It is naive and frankly arrogant.

The vast majority of the population, and I'd bet it's even higher in Uganda does not even know what Tor is, yet alone how to use it.

My mom just figured out how to send photos via text message for heaven's sake.

It is true the TOR does not solve the problem. But I don't think discussing how to solve it here would do anything for Uganda.

But if anybody from Uganda does find this. It's time to stand up and fight for your rights as a people and not let the corrupt politicians push you around. In the meantime, if you want to know how to use TOR here is a great tutorial: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2686467/privacy/how-to-use-t...

And here is the Facebook site for TOR: https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/

Good Luck!

> suggesting the wide spread use of using highly technical solutions.

this is certainly something that happens in tech communities, but come on. it's like a three step process to install Tor browser and it works just like normal Firefox. any motivated person who can use a computer at all should be able to figure it out in about 15 minutes.

motivation is also the key missing factor in the anecdote about your mom. i bet she would figure out how to send photos by text real quick if her safety or job depended on acquiring that skill.

Sometimes, parody can't outdo reality.

(That won't stop the Ugandan government from working hard to outdo their past feats: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda_Anti-Homosexuality_Ac...)

Reminds me of pre-revolution Tunisia. Maybe that's the actual solution.

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