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Comment by alexjameson | Hacker News Reader

Let me tell you how it has been in Russia during last 15 years. WE saw targeted blocks that apply after cease and desist letters. Later they learned to block outgoing OpenVPN and wireguard for everybody except firms who applied to a special registry. Then they learned to cut Vless and Trojan and blocked all sites behind freaking Cloudflare due to ECH v3.0 enforced. Here also go proxies (specifically for Telegram'm MTProto) and other stuff like Quic.

The point is if they start — they can proceed way further than you can imagine now.

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I know all of that. I'm a native Russian speaker and I have quite a lot of Russian friends, I'm pretty well aware of the situation. Nevertheless, despite all the government’s efforts and the enormous amount of money invested in this, there are still - at least for now - ways to bypass the blocks even there. I suspect that as long as they don’t physically cut the cables, there will always be ways to circumvent censorship. And yes, I’m not talking about carrier pigeons :)

So I hope that in the UK and other European countries, by drawing on Russia’s existing experience, people will be able to adapt to these restrictions before they become too severe. Of course, the government could also adopt Russia’s approach right away, but that’s unlikely, as it would provoke far too much resistance from citizens - they aren’t used to that level of restriction. If Europe does indeed continue moving in this direction, everything will happen gradually, just as it did in Russia; no one will roast a frog with a flamethrower - they’ll cook it according to the classic recipe, so to speak.

OK, got it. But it's important to remember that avoiding restrictions gets harder and harder every year. You have to juggle several protocols, have backup proxies, think about TLS nuances, keep in mind that you are being tracked after all. Lots of casual users just gave up. It's not like we find a solution and it just works — one has to adapt to new restrictive measures continuously.

I just don't understand why some other people in such discussions still think that its only about children and weigh pro and cons when they have an actual example of all these things being implemented.

> But it's important to remember that avoiding restrictions gets harder and harder every year.

Yes, that's right. Now the only reliable protocols to communicate with my friends in Russia seem to be e-mail ones like SMTP, because everything else constantly gets interrupted if not blocked completely. The only thing we can hope for here is that sooner or later, that hell will finally end; we just need to do what we do.

> I just don't understand why some other people in such discussions still think that its only about children and weigh pro and cons when they have an actual example of all these things being implemented.

Maybe I'm being kind of rude, but to me that seems just like... for the lack of better words, it seems like they're in denial. In a psychological sense, I mean.

Maybe I'm being kind of rude, but to me that seems just like... for the lack of better words, it seems like they're in denial. In a psychological sense, I mean.

There's a larger phenomenon than simple denial at work. Infantilization of adults is a necessary component of fascism. We are told, implicitly, that we are all the children of the state. Those who accept that message -- and there will always be some -- will embrace the protection promised by authoritarianism.

The actual children are, as always, just along for the ride.

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