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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Hypothetically, if sideloading is allowed

1. How do you access said apps? There has to be some repository storing the apps.

2. Certain regions can straight up ban sideloading by only allowing pre-approved app stores (eg. Mainland China). Ofc there will be technical ways to bypass this, but you are limited by technical knowhow and internal intelligence agencies abilities to find those people.

3. You could make using certain apps with such capabilities illegal. People may try to use it, but if found among a small set of protesters, they can just be "isolated". How do you prevent that?

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> How do you access said apps?

Sent to you via bluetooth file sharing (an OS feature) by someone else who already has it. Or tor, vpn, etc.

How do you download a Tor client if every repository providing it is blocked by default?

What if Bluetooth File Sharing is disabled via a region lock? (Eg. China)

What if the only VPNs allowed are those that have prior approval from an Interior Ministry?

What if a country initiates Internet Whitelisting at the ISP level for "national security reasons" and requires every user to maintain access logs?

Get an old android phone and flash some degoogled rom on it. There's plenty of them floating around.

Those sites hosting degoogled Roms might be blocked themselves by the ISP.

In addition, certain countries may require you to run approved Roms, and if you don't you can face prosecution.

This has been done in action in India with ISPs like Jio to block TPB for example.

Remember - any traffic over the internet can be logged by your service provider (eg. ISP, VPN, etc)

Sure, and when they release the mind reading necromancers we'll all be totally screwed, too.

Mind reading Necromancers (probably) don't exist, but every example I listed above has already been deployed in a piecemeal manner in various countries the last 10 years.

Mass File Sharing Blacklisting has been enforced by Indian ISPs since 2019

VPN+ISP traffic log sharing has been enforced in Kazakhstan (along with SSL stripping)

Blocking Tor downloads has been implemented already (with varying levels of success) plus attacks to deanonomize Tor have started occurring since 2021.

Turkïye has implemented ISP Whitelisting ostensibly for Children but the same core technology can be extended to everything - https://internet.btk.gov.tr/guvenli-internet-hizmeti

App Store restrictions and region locks have existed in Mainland China since the early 2010s.

It's very easy to tamp down and censor internet based communications. Individual corporations have the capabilities to apply such censorship if they wanted to, let alone ISPs.

Keep on raising that bar. Just remember that USB sticks exist, I guess.

Solved problem (by governments and industry). It's called Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR).

I'm not raising the bar btw, I'm just someone who works in the intersection of cybersecurity, government, and business.

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