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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

What about countless of other, not censored, services delivered from the same network? Do they not "improve lives" and "deliver benefit"? Collateral freedom is akin to placing your guerilla command center in a hospital, in a gamble that the other side will leave you alone instead of risking extra harm to innocent civilians. In this case, the hospital decided to disallow guerillas to use it as cover.

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This is either the worst possible example or the best.

Russia BTW bombs civilian targets like hospitals and they killed their own bank sites when they tried to block Telegram recently.

Which teaches you about effectiveness of "collateral freedom" against states that Just Don't Care.

This.

People don't realize doing stuff like this is just going to make lives worse once these regimes block Amazon/Google/whatever.

In theory, in some case, it could be like that.

In this case it's just like being in a city. They're not trying to take advantage of any particularly sensitive institution.

> They're not trying to take advantage of any particularly sensitive institution.

They are. Amazon. And previously, Google.

The worst-case consequence is not people losing access to Amazon store, but losing access to anything that's powered by Amazon cloud. People operating all kinds of services hosted on Amazon servers are the patients and hospital staff from my example.

Amazon servers are an entire city. There is a vast gulf between the equivalent of "being in a city that has a hospital" and the equivalent of "locating a base inside a hospital".

Then it's even worse, because the picture you're trying to paint implies that it's either leave guerillas alone, or nuke the entire city.

A ban of a cloud service affects everything else that depends on it. The more popular a service, the more damage. That's the point of "collateral freedom".

(Note the name of the term. It's no accident. It comes from "collateral damage".)

Block the road, not nuke the city.

But if they were going to nuke the city? Fuck them, don't negotiate, it is absolutely not the fault of any group that is merely located somewhere inside the city.

I feel we're talking past each other because of a spatial analogy.

My point is - by employing domain fronting against censorship, you bet that the adversary will not ban the service you're using as a front. But they very well might just do that. At this point, everyone else using the service suffers. So that service, by refusing to be used as a domain front, is not just protecting its own interest - it's protecting interests of all the others who depend on it. You, on the other hand, are unilaterally putting those other people at risk. This does not make you a hero, it makes you a villain (even if a lesser one).

"Putting them at risk" not by doing anything to them, but by being near them.

The domain fronting could be set up in a way that doesn't spoof domains, and the risks would be exactly the same. The spoofing is a red herring. The issue is the mere idea that a censor would be unable to tell what domain a connection is for. The actual thing that puts people at risk is ridiculous to attack on a moral basis. It's the same as just existing in a crowd. Not grabbing someone to be your shield.

In other words it's Amazon and Google who are willingly help censors to avoid a bit of collateral damage during strikes.

It's like helping Assad to find targets where people with opposing views live.

The mistake here is that they are not guerrillas and are not hurting anyone. It's censors that do. It's collateral damage only from the point of view of censors.

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