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Comment by paradite | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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?

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