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Angry comments that begin "I suspect" do not count as substantive on HN.

If you continue to break the site guidelines by using HN primarily for political battle, we're going to ban you, as I explained yesterday. That's not because we support dystopian surveillance, evil dictatorships, or whatnot. It's because we need to protect the commons here as a place for intellectual curiosity, rather than a scorched-earth battlefield.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So now HN readers are not allowed to make predictions based on past and recent behaviour and revelations (that in my opinion make these predictions extremely likely)? Anyhow it's your site, your rules. I visit HN to discover new technology, and engage mostly with privacy-related discussions (since other topics that interest me rarely if ever appear on HN). If you think the site would be better off without my comments then feel free to ban me.

I don't want to ban you! I would rather try to persuade you to use the site as intended. It's in your interest to do so, because if HN becomes a flamewar wreck, it won't remain a good place to discover new technology or do the other things people like to do here.

>Now for the sad part, even after they've showed their cards, companies and governments will still continue to invest in China, continue to bend over and do whatever they ask for.

Publicly-traded companies are completely enslaved to profit-seeking because of their overriding need to appease shareholders, lest shareholders fire them and install someone more willing to do whatever it takes to seek profit.

This is why regulation is necessary -- not because businesses are amoral, but because shareholders are, and businesses have to be whatever shareholders want them to be.

If we want businesses to act a certain way toward political and social freedoms abroad, we have to either tie the hands of employees through prohibitions or incentivize shareholders toward other avenues of seeking profit.

What an interesting implementation of 1984's "Ministry of Truth", just threaten the commercial providers of your crap with market exclusion.

It always irks me that we (I and my non-tech friends) now communicate using media controlled by corporations, e.g. WhatsApp or FB Messenger, or Google Chat. At least email is still open. On FB Messenger you can't share PirateBay URLs because they "may be harmful to your computer".

It'd be wonderfully dystopian if desperate Mark agreed to China's requirements so he could gain a few more million advertising targets in "the growing market", and after that point you'd no longer be able to talk about Taiwan because, let's see, how about the error message "this topic may be harmful to the national security of China"?

They’ll rewrite any article that they feel is a threat to their power systems and therefore a threat to China. No surprise there. We have similar measures in the US - the government is willing to strip your rights if they feel you’re a threat.

There is nothing really all that new in what you’ve suggested. I would be surprised if those things didn’t happen.

> the government is willing to strip your rights if they feel you’re a threat.

And most citizens won't make a peep about it if it's painted as "fighting (or preventing) terrorism". Case in point: the door-to-door searches in the wake of the Boston Marathon Bombing, which were a violation of the 4th Amendment.

I've never seen any major browser (or some other method) censor/rewrite an individual page that's protected by SSL before.. as far as I know then it's not possible, which is why they've had to resort to banning the entire website (which in GitHub's case would be too costly).. If you know about previous incidents then please do share.

From today we know they are already able to do whatever they please (as long as they can get people to use their browser).. abuse other organizations reputation to spread lies and misinformation. If governments don't act then it won't be long until all these Huawei, Lenovo, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, etc devices come with their browsers preinstalled (and likely default back to their browser to open links from other apps even if you tried to change the browser).

> they'll put great emphasis on promoting their own browsers in foreign countries, force hardware vendors to preinstall their browsers on devices sold outside China

This will also help them monitor people's communications to acquire kompromat. See also the Chinese ownership of Grindr.