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Comment by DrJokepu | Hacker News Reader

Here we go again. It's 2011 and our governments still don't understand the Internet. They don't understand that it's way bigger than them. They don't understand that it's not possible to monitor, govern, control, tax it, simply because it's so cheap and simple to circumvent any of these measures and there's plenty of motivation to do so.

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Tell Chinese government how impossible it is to control the internet. The Great Firewall of China (GFC) is advancing very fast. Just a few years ago even an unencrypted proxy abroad would do the trick, and yet most people did not know how to set it up and did not care enough to find out. Nowadays even VPNs and SSH tunnels are commonly blocked. It is not trivial to bypass the GFC and it is only getting harder by the time.

That isn't really the internet, just a web proxy.

That's all that will be left if these sniveling fuckers get their way.

Well, let them get their way, and the whole internet will crumble and become useless for everyone (see Directive 10-289).

I personally, am prepared to walk away. I grew up with BBSs and 2400bps dialup, only one user at a time connecting. It was not horrible. I remeber downloading .gl video files over dialup, too. This level of communication is completely feasible today without relying on any corporate or government owned network.

We can start anew and create a network controlled by the citizens of the world. We may not have HD video at first, but we can have Twitter and a Lynx resurgence....

...or live together in a secluded valley in Colorado, protected by an air-wave reflection device.

I don't know where I would go to buy a modem these days. Perhaps, if I find one, I'll add it to my disaster kit.

More like ad-hoc wifi, or a bunch of customized WRT54Gs.

But since you asked... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16825104...

When without a foreign proxy you only get the very limited version of the internet, access to a proxy becomes synonymous with the internet access.

And SSH is used not only for tunneling the HTTP traffic, try managing a remote server without it.

> They don't understand that it's not possible to monitor, govern, control, tax it, simply because it's so cheap and simple to circumvent any of these measures and there's plenty of motivation to do so.

Actually, it is trivial to do all those things. You forget that govt controls access to bit transport.

The hard part is allowing extensive "appropriate" access and denying those things, but with limited appropriate access.....

If govt has a choice between doing what it wants and allowing you extensive access, what do you think will win?

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