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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

> I don't think they will manage to make a fork of some of the browsers, simply because level of the our software production is kinda low, especially in goverment sector, and people will definitely not use the browser if they will attempt to make one

Well, they could always license browsers from other vendors, which they will, if things need to go that extent.

> they will manage to use VPN and will find other ways to just use the "normal" software

Are users in Kazakhstan willing to pay extra $5 or more per month for VPNs that respect user-privacy? If not, using free VPNs is going to only make matters worse. In India, where porn is blocked, users typically resort to using Telegram or free VPNs to satiate their desire for it; most wouldn't pay $2 per month for VPNs, even when they could afford it (since $0 VPNs are a click away and unblocks porn for them).

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I can't imagine how a free VPN could be worse than an actual government-sponsored man-in-the-middle attack, particularly since VPNs don't force you to install their own CA certificate (and therefore can't intercept HTTPS connections).

Agree, but: Most free VPNs are run by state-owned actors, may also in fact be honey-pots, which are now dripping with meta-data for literally everything you do on the Internet. Whilst that is not strictly worse than MiTMd HTTPS, it is still a step in the wrong direction.

Not saying you are wrong, but I would love a source for this statement.

I guess you mean source for state-owned VPNs?

My other comment has this ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18525041

And Lantern, a P2P VPN popular with the Chinese is backed by CIA (so is Tor):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20373425

> Most free VPNs are run by state-owned actors

That's a dramatic statement however and you didn't support it at all with your links. Can you back up the claim that most free VPNs are state-owned? That is what the reply was likely asking for.

https://www.top10vpn.com/free-vpn-app-investigation/

I'm not quite sure what you're insinuating about Tor. Tor is an opensource project govern by a non-profit. If you're worried about things like backdoors, that's why it was opensourced in the first place.

I'm not sure how you're connecting the CIA with Tor. I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA uses Tor. I know the State Department does.

Tor is open source but nobody knows who runs the nodes

It's a distributed anonymous network. It wouldn't be very useful if we knew who was running the nodes.

Of course. I am saying mentioning its open source says nothing about whether some of the nodes are CIA operated, etc

Sure, they always could get a license of some of the browsers, and still it will be hard to force people switch to that browser, simply cause people are used to work in a Chrome, or Firefox, or even Edge, this software is convenient, and mostly it works perfect. It will be very hard for government, and they will lose trust even more, it's kinda painful to use services that our government provides, it's usually slow, full of bugs and it's takes long time for them to fix it.

By mentioning VPN I meant it will be the way to get a normal software if the will block the downloads and updates for the certian browsers.

Of course user privacy it's other topic and I don't think that most of the people will pay for the VPN.

Curting off people's internet access us a pretty good way to get people to do just about anything.

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