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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

And it's also cute when people imply the internet is unregulateable. There are plenty of tools that countries use to regulate internet traffic. They can require ISPs to DPI the traffic and block it. They can MITM traffic. They can shut off the internet entirely. They can throw people in jail. etc.

This stuff happens in many places, including in India.

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>And it's also cute when people imply the internet is unregulateable. There are plenty of tools that countries use to regulate internet traffic. They can require ISPs to DPI the traffic and block it. They can MITM traffic. They can shut off the internet entirely. They can throw people in jail. etc.

I don't think there's any country that can keep a lid on the internet. The best they can do are leaky blocks (china's gfw is probably the best in the world, but still quite leaky), or complete shutdowns (eg. iran).

As I understand it, China's GFW is intentionally leaky, balancing as much control as they can get away with but not enough to forment open revolt. As with a lot of things, the best control is not total control.

Also not revealing their capabilities. During normal times, some VPNs work. Whenever there is a protest in Beijing, suddenly, none of them work any more.

except this implies total control, and a willingness to use that control to gaslight your citizens into believing they have some control

Neither of those is a problem for any government on the planet, I promise.

They could even just shoot people for using the internet! It’s hopeless. Anyone who wants freedom should probably just give up now before it’s too late.

I'm not suggesting people should give up, I'm suggesting that some countries can resort to doing very uncute things when faced with noncompliance.

When someone with the monopoly on the use of force says they will not allow something, that isn't something cute to ignore, it is serious.

Fair enough, yes people should be ready to fight for their rights (physically if necessary). The tone of your post came across as an attempt to demoralize. Intentional or not, my comment was a pushback against that.

Reminds me of FSF versus some Uyghur. Summary:

FSF: if you use PGP your communications will be unreadable by outsiders.

Some Uyghur: bruh, the government assigned a Han Chinese person to live in my house and watch me whenever I use technology.

There are workarounds for all of those things up until the point of you suffering violence for just using any encryption. But if you are at that point, then your country is completely fucked.

It is trivial for a law to simply ban workarounds. The vast majority of countries can and do censor the internet in some ways, and they all use violence to compel compliance with it. The only thing that varies is the extent to which it is censored.

Then the question gets much more political: how to make the government prefer not to shoot me for using encryption? There are some strategies that are better discussed with e.g. communists than with tech nerds, as they have more experience and thinking on this as it becomes primarily a political thing not a tech thing.

One example - the government would lose infinite respect if it martyrs some normal guy who bought business supplies with foreign (TLS-encrypted) online banking. So it won't do that. So how far can that line be pushed? i.e. what is the least normal thing the government won't punish?

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