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Comment by imron | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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