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Comment by kristianc | Hacker News Reader

It does make me laugh as a British citizen when the government touts the use of evidence-based frameworks and its ' nudge' unit and then employs a blunt instrument such as this which is purely legislative and flies in the face of all available evidence.

Since the advent of the internet and the accompanying rise of internet porn, sexual irresponsibility, teen sex, rape and divorce have all been in decline. That's to say nothing of the arguments for encryption and against backdoors, which have been well trailed in these parts before.

Luckily, as the Chinese example shows, it just doesn't work, though I did find it amusing the time I caught a long haul China Air flight from Beijing with 'Free Wifi' where there was only one website available, and it was the website for China Air.

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The Great Firewall works amazingly well, if not perfectly well. It is a little leaky at the edges, but certainly influences how a very large proportion of Chinese users experience the Internet.

Yup. The goal of TGF is suppression, not complete shutout. By most accounts it unfortunately does a really good job of that.

I'm curious as to which "Chinese example" do you have in mind that doesn't work?

Edit to reply to your wifi issue: you need to use that one website to login to access the "full" internet.

The Chinese example where they have tens of thousands of people monitoring internet content and spend millions per year on filtering and blocking technology - and it can all be circumvented with a VPN.

It ultimately can't be, though. All it takes is for those governments to push for international enforcement of their laws for their own citizens (which already has precedent) allowing foreign subpoenas for IPs, or limit VPN use to require corporate/private licensure, or any number of other avenues of legal or technical attack, at least one of which is likely viable and already known to the Chinese as a contingency.

People who chuckle at "hurhur dumb legislators" ought to be scared shitless of the forest they're missing for the trees - the precedent that's being set as an impetus for further action in the future.

"But we still can now" is just that "first they came for the X" recitation all over again. Hyuk it up now, and by the time your avenue gets shut off, everyone else will have already been cowed into submission. It's the basic freedoms that are important to defend, not the loopholes that defer your fate.

Not to mention the target you paint on your back by being in the minority of people who dare to try and circumvent the government "protections".

It works "well enough". There will always be a 1% or 0.1% of the population who will be able to circumvent the blockaid, and China will keep arresting the ones it catches in the act.

But the point is it works for the other 99%. The thing about censorship is that you don't know what you were supposed to know. 1% of the population may see those censored articles before the governments gets around to censoring them, but what about the rest of the population? They'll keep living in ignorance of what was revealed and think the government is still great (with some help with the 24/7 propaganda bombardment from the media).

This is also like saying "(in-app) ad-blocking works on Android" - if you know how to root your phone and install it from F-Droid. But for the vast majority of people it doesn't.

Interesting. So on one side people are bashing the the level of censorship by the government and how people are unable to exercise certain rights.

On the other side the same people are laughing at its ineffectiveness and how trivial it is to circumvent them and access information freely. One of them must surely be wrong?

Btw, censoring of keywords and blocking of websites are two different issues. VPN solves the latter, not the former.

No, both can be right. Censorship can be ineffective, but circumventing it may still put your name on some list. And once you do get charged with something, that fact can easily come up.

Also, VPNs are usually leaky. You can trivially identify many protocols, even under encryption. There was some researcher recently (sorry, can't find the link) identifying which movie is being streamed over encrypted link. Some networks are better at injecting noise than others - Tor has some benefits here for example.

This is the research I think https://threatpost.com/netflixs-https-update-cant-combat-pas...

So basically you are arguing that censorship is still effective in the sense that it serves as a deterrence and the base for other forms of tracking. And that would certainly harm freedom of speech in certain ways. So you are still supporting the idea that censorship is effective.

> in the sense that it serves as a deterrence

Absolutely not. I argue it's effective, as in, it provides an extra tool for the government to go against you if you cross some gov. defined line. I think it provides little deterrence. Same as the law against murder is more for definition of the crime and punishment than for deterring people from killing each other.

The problem is that it suppresses the majority of ordinary people but the people who actually want to do the stuff the government is trying to stop can still keep doing it anyway.

> Btw, censoring of keywords and blocking of websites are two different issues. VPN solves the latter, not the former.

So in China, they block access to foreign apps like Twitter, Facebook and so on, and so people gravitate towards the home grown alternatives - which are required by government to censor keywords and content.

Also, China does dynamic blocking of websites based on keywords and other things.

It's both very sophisticated and trivial to bypass.

I agree with everything you said but I failed to see how that is a problem (from the perspective of the GFW). Again what you said is exactly the intended effect of GFW.

I don't see the tension between saying that the government's intent is to create an all encompassing censorship machine based on what it defines as social harms, and saying that such an endeavour is doomed to fail.

One is about intent, the other is about ability to execute on that intent. In law, we punish people for intent to commit harms if they have gone some of the way towards planning those harms, even if the intended harms do not come to pass.

Right. So we can say that Chinese government has bad intentions. But based on your description, surely Chinese people do enjoy freedom of speech and access to the information, since such censorship efforts are doomed to fail? Why is that I see the the opposite conclusions in Human Rights reports?

The Chinese 'Golden Shield' project should not be confused for this one; they have different goals. The primary goal in the Chinese case is economic protectionism and it's succeeding beyond their wildest dreams. Google, Facebook et al might dominate the rest of the world but they are solidly locked out of the Chinese market.

The Great Firewall of China, of course.

It's working exactly as intended. You need a VPN to access certain websites, some keywords are censored properly. How is that an example of not working?

So what do you exactly mean by not working?

Chinese government is unable to prevent people accessing prohibited content. Which part is unclear here?

That's meaning-less - Use police as an analogy.

Police forces are unable to prevent people from committing crimes.

True - But police forces are phenomenally capable at both stopping a lot of people from committing crimes, and dissuading people from even thinking about committing crimes.

They also raise the barrier of entry (so to speak) for being criminal.

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In today's day and age, a great firewall will work. The average person does NOT have the patience or inclination to go figure out a VPN. Heck I couldn't be arsed, and I am dramatically more capable than the average person.

But there's an additional risk you should consider.

Great firewalls are content to let the minority get away with accessing other sites, as long as they don't make themselves a nuisance.

Instead, they train the Average person, and the average populace to behave in a particular manner.

And that shift means that future generations of tinkerers, thinkers are the ones which will start out far removed from a natural set of ideas.

You can't cheat everyone all the time. The point is not cutting China out from the Internet, but keep sensitive information in the educated elites, not the masses. As a bonus, they created parallel version of services that exist on this side of the firewall.

Well it prevents 99% of the people who don't know how or don't bother setting up VPN from accessing prohibited content, that's the intended effect. So I would say it's working well.

According to stats I found, it prevents <71% in China. https://www.statista.com/statistics/301204/top-markets-vpn-p...

Edit: another one is pretty close as well: http://insight.globalwebindex.net/chart-of-the-day-90-millio...

And that's just people who explicitly use it. With that kind of market penetration basically everyone knows what to do, or who to ask if they want to access some geoblocked service in the future.

According to my observations now here in China, your stats are wrong.

Edit: Just to substantiate, many people I spoke to vaguely know what they would see if they get unfiltered internet, so there's not really much motivation to bypass GFW.

Sorry, but this is an anecdote. Do you have a source that shows some usage? I'd love to see that, whichever side it agrees with, but personal experiences rarely generalises to nations.

Interestingly with censorship being such a sensitive topic in China, it's hard to find statistics on VPN usage rate. I will just say that I'm a Chinese citizen who visits China regularly every year. My impressions can't be too far off from the actual stats.

On the other hand, it blocks 0% of people who have the intent to access that content so it doesn't really work at all for the people it's supposed to stop.

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