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Comment by GalenErso | Hacker News Reader

There are countless programmers, from self taught amateurs to professional SWEs, white hats, grey hats and black hats, who would immediately jump at the opportunity to create stronger VPNs, mirror sites, Tor nodes, and other tools to allow the public to bypass these restrictions. Trying to control the Internet in America is a losing proposition, for better or worse.

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You're proposing a technical solution to a political problem. It doesn't work, this should be fixed at the source.

How exactly it doesn't work? Not even China has been able to make their Great Firewall resilient to stuff like VPNs.

A block doesn't need to be completely effective as to prevent violations - all it needs is to provide enough data to authorities so they can make sure you don't do it too often.

Or let people violate the law so that you can selectively enforce it on the people that you want to. "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law" - Oscar Benavides

Oh yes. That's also on the playbook of every authoritarian.

Yeah. I lock my front door at night, despite it being perfect.

This is such a blindspot for ‘24/7 engineer mindset’ people. And, in a professional context, things like this serve as a great litmus test for if someone is capable and geared to look at things at a bigger-picture level instead of just ‘computer problems’.

…not to equate looking at porn with getting burglarised. This is obviously BS.

> How exactly it doesn't work? Not even China has been able to make their Great Firewall resilient to stuff like VPNs.

I don't have any inside information, but my uninformed guess is that this is by design or at least tolerated to some extent. You don't want a watertight VPN because it stifles commerce.

China PR could pull a Singapore and impose the kind of punishment for using VPN that Singapore does for hard drugs. I have a friend from Texas who lives in China PR and regularly uploads to YouTube. Nothing political, he is talking about living and working as a teacher, so he isn't doing anything controversial but in theory what he is doing is unlawful by China PR laws, right?

Securitized regions like XinJiang will occasionally lock phones (including foreigners) with VPN installed, need to goto police station to unlock phone after uninstalling VPN apps. That's basically hardcore VPN/GFW enforcement mode.

Broadly PRC GFW is functionally VPN paywall for foreign content so most PRC nationals default to consuming media/narratives within the wall. TBH, apart from dissidents, researchers etc, in my experience, very few VPN users jump wall for foreign news, like exposure might be incidental due to being shared on timeline, but most PRC nationals jump wall for porn, business and lols. Plenty of foreign news gets filtered to domestic PRC net via diasphora who reverse VPN and post content back into PRC net - lots of foreign/western "propaganda" makes it's way in PRC, it's just rate limited to point where influence is limited, or censored if it ever gets legs.

In terms of regulations: VPN allowed for commerce, enforcement mostly against businesses who don't register/get approval using sanctioned VPNs. Individuals _generally_ free to use - there aren't clear laws yet against individual use, currently regulations target operators. 99% of VPN enforcement is at this level. Few individuals (outside XinJiang/Tibet) and no foreigners as far as I'm aware of have gotten in shit for VPN. For nationals who got in shit, it's what they do with VPN (coordinating with foreign forces etc), not use itself.

A rubber hose firewall doesn't need to be completely resilient to VPNs, in fact I imagine they would like a steady supply of people to make an example of.

China is a poor example if you're trying to say that people can circumvent political technology decisions. The firewall works for 90%+ of their population and allows them to present versions of events that don't align with the rest of the world. That can happen in the US as well, and we already know there's organizations that are willing to do it.

You don’t need a firewall to present versions of events that don’t align with the rest of the world. We’ve managed to do that with a completely unfiltered internet for years now.

China won that battle.

If only 0.01% of the population has the technical saviness to bypass the Great Firewall, then they've succeed beyond their wildest optimism. No one cares about the few exceptions. If those people speak out to anyone about how they're able to get around it... then guess what happens? And if they just shut up and keep it to themselves, that's a good outcome too.

You're chuckling "but it's not 100%" when they might have been satisfied with 85%. Joke's on you.

>How exactly doesn’t this work

I’ll show you: The next logical step would be to make it a crime of some sort to as a user attempt to evade the law. Maybe it’s even a felony to persuade folks to not to try. But the reality is they made the law just for political points and it never gets enforced it’s just there sitting on the books. Now years go on and you have been using vpn’s to evade the restrictions. Now 10 years later you decide to run for President and. a whole bunch of establishment politicians hate you for whatever reason. Now all of a sudden this phrase is really relevant: Show me a man and I’ll show you a crime.

That is why it needs fixing at the source.

China doesn't need 100% impermeability. As long as it circumvents most people from going outside the firewall, the job is done.

Think of it in terms of adblocking. You and I know all the tricks, but Google's bottom line suggests most people do not, and don't seem to mind. Similarly, the Great Firewall is tolerated because it doesn't block the things that are necessary for living life in China.

This is a huge problem, because it's another example of turning a wide swath of humanity into criminals for doing relatively normal things that should be allowed.

Of course they won't be able to enforce this most of the time. But if you end up in their sights for any reason, they may then notice you using a VPN and use that information to legally blackmail you.

Usually this goes with making the punishment very harsh: A stolen MP3 on your hard drive? 20-to-life unless you take a plea bargain down to 2 years and turn in 3 friends as well. Same deal now with VPNs.

I would have agreed with you 20 years ago. But I think today, large scale internet censorship would be feasible. My wife and I marvel at her (much younger) Gen Z siblings’ computer illiteracy. These kids are the iPad/walled garden generation. These laws would be effective to keep Internet porn out of the hands of a large majority of younger people. That’s especially true because so many kids rely on phones and iPads, so governments can easily control VPN apps and things like that by leaning on Apple and Google.

It obviously won’t keep information from getting out. But that’s not the purpose of things like anti-porn laws. Dramatically curtailing prevalence and access is sufficient.

Good point. The new generation that came online this past decade never had to deal with popups, Limewire viruses and other things that forced us to learn to some basic level how a computer works and how it can be compromised.

It reminds me of this 2021 Verge article quoting a college engineering professor who had to revamp teaching material as many of their students did not understand folder structures and computer file systems. Why would they? For them, everything is on Youtube, Netflix and Spotify.

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

Yep, when I was a teenager, computers were tools that provided access to things previously inaccessible. They were tools that empowered users. Enter a command, the computer performed the command and returned the results. Access to anything simply involved knowing the magic spell, and I spent my entire teens learning every incantation I could. My dad, who was totally computer illiterate, would not have had a chance in hell at enforcing content blockers.

My daughter today lives in a world where users no longer issue commands to computers. 99% of computer users limit themselves to typing into a search box and clicking links they are fed. I don't even need to set up content blockers, because the idea of telling her computer what to do is foreign to her. Despite my attempts to get her curious about how they work and about hacking, she doesn't even care enough about it to venture outside of the pre-screened bookmarked sites I set up for her. If it's not reachable via her toolbar's Roblox and YouTube buttons, she doesn't even have a remote chance of finding it, and I know because I've seen the access logs.

Anecdotally I can tell you that once Internet censorship in Russia (coming both from the state itself, and from foreign websites blocking access) ramped up enough, suddenly many very non-technical people have figured out how to use VPNs.

And with something as popular as porn? Why, that just might end up being one of the largest VPN awareness campaigns. ~

That is a consolation, but only a small one when the state violence apparatus is standing by to punish those who use them. It must never be illegal in the first place.

This is something we like to tell ourselves but they can do a whole lot, especially if the sites in question are expensive to host.

The point of banning stuff on the Internet is not to censor stuff, it's to make the stuff the government doesn't like unmonetizable.

So VPNs aren't a "bypass" or a loophole, they're the desired outcome of these laws.

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