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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to feel that way in, say, the U.S., where only hate groups are getting censored right now, and even that only by private companies. If you think about a country like China, where for example it's hard to find anything online saying a massacre at Tiananmen Square ever happened, then the purpose of these things becomes more obvious.

The time to set up uncensorable communications is before you're being censored. After, it's a lot harder to get traction.

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Websites that publish child sexual exploitation material are getting heavily censored in the U.S. too. Think through what uncensorable implies.

> Websites that publish child sexual exploitation material are getting heavily censored in the U.S. too. Think through what uncensorable implies.

To me, it implies that things you agree with and things you don't agree with cannot be censored. This seems like a prerequisite for a free society.

This is a bit meta and for that I apologise, but it's kind of interesting that the "drug addicts, paedophiles and terrorists" rhetoric seems to have lost almost all of its potency.

I found the reference to hate groups to be a much more effective argument, I think purely because everybody is so used to the kids/drugs/terror angle being overused and abused to chip away at liberties.

Surveillance-state dystopians take note.

Hate groups also seem to be much more abundant and visible. You don't see your local pedophilia lobby getting involved in politics.

That material could also be loaded on a flash drive and sent via the mail. I suppose the USPS and flash drives should be banned.

If I'm not yet censored then why wouldn't be better off saving time by using much easier tools to publish my speech?

So that's essentially a public goods problem. If the censorship-resistant tools aren't popular, they won't be there for you if the censorship does start. But you'll likely have little effect on their overall popularity by publishing your own content on them, so you do better by publishing on the easiest tools, and hoping to freeload on others building popularity of the resistant tools.

The best way to address this is probably to make the resistant tools as easy and compelling as possible.

FWIW, Tor is blocked in China.

Isn't "But think of the dissidents in China" the libertarian version of "Think of the children"?

In any case, OP was visibly grappling with a tradeoff. The question is if there are compromises, i. e. methods to make such projects more useful for the good dissident, and less so for criminals.

One idea would be to restrict the types of files: video would seem to be more useful for illegal pornography than anti-government organisation. Please note: more useful. I'm not saying video is completely useless for good causes.

You could even make features dependent on the language used, or do some rudimentary geolocation. Or correlate directly with freedom: "if Wikipedia is not blocked, your upload speeds are severly limited".

None of these are perfect, and most are easily circumvented by people with a working compiler. But But they might help mitigate the possible misuses. Denying even the possibility is just lazy.

I would say video is one of the most useful tools for dissidents. A lot of good has come from video of police abuses, for example. And if the news media isn't covering your protest, it might as well not exist unless you're able to publish your own video of the event.

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