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Comment by rqs | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what you mean by end-to-end encryption.

It's a group chat, so it's more likely all messages are processed on server and then relayed to every people in the group. The easiest way to monitoring that kind of chat messages is .... install monitoring software directly on server.

And as far as I know, many (If not all) commonly used domestic chat software in China are monitored by the government.

So, it's a rather common sense in China to NOT chat on some specific topic during some specific period (Or, don't talk about it at all) online.

It's not an end-to-end encryption problem, it is the problem of National security (What ever that means to CCP) v.s. Individual freedom.

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I’m not really an expert or close to that but I believe some apps (like whatsapp) encrypts each message individually for each member of the chat group. While the server relays messages, it does not have the private keys of recipients. That should work, no?

I agree that this is not a technical issue though. Still there are possible measures to be taken.

OP must mean GPG or something like that (where users control their own keys), but there is nothing to stop the government from holding you to demand your private key and the passphrase you use to unlock it.

The only real answer is to avoid using the internet for any meaningful political or community dialogue if you live in an authoritarian state that might use that dialogue against you. That is a truly depressing thought.

If you look though the history, you will found democracy in the entire history of China is very rare thing (Republic Of China is short lived).

So, I'm not so surprised that we Chinese end up with an authoritarian government model we currently have here.

First, let me clear one thing: It's not saying you can't blame the government for any wrong doing at all. In fact, I (and other people) do that all the time on the online forum operated by local government (I consider our local government is a fairly open one, so it's may not apply to other local governments). But you have to learn to avoid some topic that may get you into trouble.

This case is an example. If my guess is right: He's talking about a high ranking official of central government, who recently got exposed by a guy call GuoWengui[0] and been removed from a very important position.

In China, this kind of case by nature is very sensitive, CCP don't want to see anyone talking about it.

I'm not saying everybody should follow CCP's No Talk Rule though, I believe all kinds of censorship is bad. However, consider is very hard to change people's (Including government officials) mindset after thousands of years of authoritarianism, sometime it's better to save yourself from those troubles, and let time do it's work to upgrade the society first.

The hope is that, through years of advancement on science and economy etc (in short, productivity), the importance of individual can eventually out weight authoritarianism, and force the government to reform to an more advanced one.

Until then though, that censorship will stay.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Wengui

And, hey, there are lot's of places people can talk about those very sensitive topic, like ... Twitter? Why doing so on a domestic online service and then worrying about getting trouble because of that.

Well, if you look into history if the west, you also find not soo much democracy. A bit more and with the US a bit longer, but for the most parts we have been under empire rule as well.

So it is good, that you are optimistic about things to change, but I also see the other side, with smartphones acting as spying devices enabling true surveilance everywhere, which could fortify authoritarianism, rather than deconstruct it.

But in general I am also optimistic that eventually things will improve, even if it takes some generations..

I'm optimistic because I believe in the future, people are the most important element of productivity.

So as long as that won't change, all country will eventually lean towards democracy if they want to survive in the global competition.

Surveillance or spying devices won't stop that trend.

> If you look though the history, you will found democracy in the entire history of China is very rare thing (Republic Of China is short lived).

> However, consider is very hard to change people's (Including government officials) mindset after thousands of years of authoritarianism

Isn't that true for most parts of the world? Germany has only been a fully functioning democracy since 1945 (plus maybe a few years when the Weimar Republic was still working). The Republic of China was not democratic until 1987, when martial law was lifted in Taiwan. If we look at history as a whole, that's really just an anecdotal drop in the bucket.

Don't look it that way.

Let's first figure out why democracy rises in the first place: It's because some events, the Industrial Revolution for example, created a bunch of wealthy middle classes, who then sort of became the driving force of their country and start to demanding for rights.

Middle class exists for very long time before official democratization, and I don't think they just sit there and waiting for rights raining on them, rather, I believe they're constantly demanding for more rights. It's just the society takes time to change.

In China, something like Industrial Revolution never actually happened because of invasion, war and stupid government decisions. As result, we also don't have middle class people until after the Economic Reform[0] which is very recent compare to other countries.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform

They can't demand your keys if they can't find you.

There are group chats with end-to-end encryption, meaning the server does not have access to the message it is relaying. The "end-to-end" part is used to differentiate it compared to merely encrypting the connection with the server (which has been ubiquitous for chat apps for some time).

Does that include group chats with history (i.e. add a new member and they see the previous discussion)? I'm curious how the encryption would work in that case. In the simplest case I suppose the invite could contain a shared key, but is there an individually-keyed approach?

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