Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by wolco5 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

wolco5

Encription was banned in the US but it didn't work out so well.

Parler build itself on Amazon which was the big mistake the next company won't follow.

It's a wakeup call to anyone using the cloud that one day it might decide you are not welcome.

View on HN

Encryption was never banned in the US. There have been restrictions on export of encryption technology.

DeCSS, which was an algorithm that could decrypt DVD content, might be more apropros. Sites were being sued for hosting the DeCSS source code, and there was resistance to that like printing the code on t-shirts.

Wasn't it limited to only using weak form of encryption though?

That was due to the export controls. Basically, you could (as a US-based software provider) have a US edition that offered stronger encryption, but for anything leaving the US were limited to weaker encryption (principally measured in key size, not necessarily encryption method). If a user could verify they were in the US, then, you could offer maybe a 128-bit encryption package, but outside only 56-bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

Unless you're talking about ham radio, encryption has never been banned in the US

He doesn’t know. All that comment is trying to get across is “woe is Parler”

> Parler build itself on Amazon which was the big mistake the next company won't follow.

There are servers you can host yourself, and there are networks (payments and communication) from which you can’t be independent, in practice.

Even this you can overcome - there is always crypto and while you're ultimately dependent on communication infrastructure, there are ways to make it infeasible to be blocked.

Unfortunately, even if you go to extremes, all (ISPs, Browsers, etc) have to do is choose not to connect to you.

Tor - there's always a way

A very limited way. Ways for savvy individuals to secretively exchange information and communicate are one thing. Running a site that has a large data footprint and is intended to be accessible to a large unsophisticated audience is something else.

The shut down silkroad. Or whatever it was that tried to use tor to anonymously allow selling illegal products.

Which has been replaced by bigger sites every time they are shutdown and often within the same month.

Boy, if only we hadn't insisted on browsers becoming so ludicrously complicated so we could kludge applications onto them we might be able to solve at least one of those problems.

But I guess that plane has sailed. All hail the one true platform: Chrome.

So long as there are open source browsers, involuntary censorship via the browser will be difficult. One can always fork and start again. The most real danger comes when utility functions like access to an ISP or internet backbone interconnection are threatened.

The risks of using cloud servers are now well documented, but, out of curiosity, do they extend to colocated servers? Do data centres turn a blind eye to their colocation customers?

Most don't.

Those that do command a premium ("Bulletproof hosting") ...and are sometimes shut down themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker

Yea except its the same with servers, and if you host your own ISPs... we really need the cloud in space or somewhere else outside of the influence of countries.

It’s a wake up call to read the TOS and not promote what amounts to an open market for contract killings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com