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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

> let's use the typical examples, e.g. child porn sites, malware domains

a futile game of whack-a-mole that only serves to make politicians feel good, and so they can claim they're "doing something" about social threats.

malware domains can be adequately addressed at the application level through things such as: https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=goo...

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Whack a mole can be a highly successful strategy if there is a cost to having the mole appear somewhere else and the whacker has more resources than the one controlling the mole.

Successful does not imply sustainable. There is an argument to be made for doing manual strategies like whack-a-mole until you have a generic solution, but if you don't have the generic solution coming down the pike, it's time to go back to the drawing board.

Devil's advocate response: If these content blockers are just 'futile games of whack-a-mole', then why are you getting up-in-arms about their existence? Should be easy to avoid them if you truly believe what you say.

Stuff like what the UK is trying to do with a DNS based "black list" of bad things on the internet? Futile game of whack a mole.

Authoritarian regime that forces all ISPs in a country to run networks funnelling all traffic through a government run central point where they do DPI and flow analysis on it (Chinese GFW for instance)? More of a real threat.

For instance there is one ASN in Iran that has transit connections to the outside world. All ISPs are forced to be downstream of it. https://bgp.he.net/AS12880

Well, yes, the original article is about funneling traffic through a centralised DPI content blocker, and not a trivial DNS blacklist.

Agreed, the UK's DNS filtering is definitely a simple to defeat by anybody whack-a-mole (e.g. thepiratebay.org is blocked? Oh no! Let's just google for Pirate Bay and pick one of the many, many unblocked mirrors)

But the kind of DPI, forced blocking utilised by these middleboxes is certainly a step above that, to the point that most people will not be (say) using measures like a VPN to bypass the block.

Because they create tools governments will use to restrict legitimate speech and freedoms. As history has shown they do.

Create and normalize. "What's one more site to denylist?"

...So, again, they can't be 'futile games of whack-a-mole', if they work, then?

I think it's more like taking the whack-a-mole bat and going and beating up people all around the arcade.

There are easily measures that will cause the closure of your small business if used against you personally that would not stop A drug dealer let alone all drug dealing.

Because whacking even 5% of moles looking for ways around government[0] censorship is a unconscionable travesty.

0: eg, China, Iran, etc; if you don't think people getting caught is a problem then I question your basic human decency; if you don't think 5% of people getting caught is a problem then I question your sense of scale and/or ability to multiply numbers by other numbers.

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