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Comment by arbitrage | Hacker News Reader

It was interesting when we saw governments attempt it last time, too. And then they stopped, because they were overthrown.

I wonder if this is going to be a law, now ... a government that attempts to dismantle the internet a piece at a time in their country is going to fail.

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This reminds me of the "information wants to be free" and "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" slogans of yesteryear. The internet isn't magic. There is no natural law that means it will always emerge victorious.

Well, it does "route around damage", but there's a difference between an infrastructure damage (be it a denial of service, or a tactical nuclear strike) and a continuous, intentional action of a sentient adversary.

Unfortunately, conflating those two concepts is a common mistake when designing or thinking about systems.

TBH it's mostly about the fact that the "route around damage" really applies only to a very small stack. What does the browser do, to "route around damage"? What does a DNS client do? Very little, if anything. They were not built to "route around damage", they were built to do client/server.

"What does the browser do, to "route around damage"?"

Browser doesn't - user does.

The user isn't part of the internet, unless it's someone with a cranial implant of some sort (surely coming soon...).

The phrase originally referred to protocols like TCP/IP and SMTP that used relays and packet forwarding to cope with the fact that any given set of servers might be disabled. In this respect Bittorrent is much closer to the original conception than HTTP.

I think you'll find that people mean the BGP protocol when they say the internet routes around damage. While this is true, it doesn't route around firewalls forcibly installed around a country by it's government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol

Also, I'd contend this is not really true in practice. While BGP does repair some faults, what happens in reality is that ISP engineers route around damage. BGP itself might keep reachability intact, but any error will still lead to massive capacity loss. This is then repaired by NOCs around the world. That's what really keeps the internet rolling.

The latter is quite a clever slogan, however it conveniently omits that the internet is ran and used by people. They need to put those mechanisms in place.

This might not be true of https traffic, since the intermediate servers that route to the destination may be compromised.

But it should be true of Tor, Freenet etc. right?

Tor software has the public keys of Tor directory authorities built-in. But it needs to trust those directory authorities to provide true up-to-date information about the network (Tor clients download the public keys for all the relays which are currently online and are deemed to be OK by the authorities, from the authorities (or their mirrors - everything is signed by dirauth keys.)) If the dir authorities are compromised, Tor clients are screwed.

You have to start trusting someone in a web of trust (or in wherever.) Just because you can do smart end to end encrypted communication with all the relays / with everyone you want to, someone has to guarantee that you're not being MitM'd (during e.g. DH key exchange.) At least that's my understanding anyway.

What about namecoin?

Sorry, haven't looked into namecoin. But I would presume that as long as you already know the domain name, no MitM can happen, and no explicit trust has to be placed onto anyone. This is true for, e.g., Tor hidden services, wherein if one knows the .onion name, they'll know if messages coming from that service are actually from that service, because they'll be signed by an ephemeral key that is itself signed by a key the fingerprint of which is the .onion name itself. (This is a gross oversimplification, and I could have made a mistake anyway..)

If a similar scheme is true for namecoin addresses, then the situation is better indeed.

fwiw, here's a rather relevant post: http://unhandledexpression.com/2014/04/07/revisiting-zookos-...

They haven't taken down the Internet, just a couple of sites. Information can (and does) still easily get in and out of the country. So my first thought was, it shouldn't really matter that much.

However, on second thought, while information can still travel freely, the question remains who to send it to and who to receive it from. That's because people have outsourced their social graph to single remote entities (case in point: Twitter). They could still communicate with everyone, but have made themselves reliant on a single point of failure.

Of course none of this refutes your point -- the Internet isn't magic. But I think the powers that be are very reluctant to through out the baby with the bathwater.

You're right- the internet isn't magic. There is a natural law at play here, and you just mentioned it!

Information does want to be free- its not just a slogan, its a universal law.

There is no practical way for a corrupt government to constrain the flow of information in this day and age.

I think you're gravely underestimating the effects of propaganda and herd thinking. Significant parts of the US populace appear the seriously believe - despite undisrupted internet access - that evolution is a lie, the world has been created 4000 years ago etc. And that's without a state-sponsored actor trying to influence people.

Unfettered access to information does not mean people will access, accept, understand, and use that information. If you have a massive state-run media monopoly, you're able to manipulate people in remarkable ways.

The information is out there, though, even if not everyone reaches the conclusions that you agree with.

What about North Korea?

I think that's still just a slogan.

North Korea never had Internet (as we know it) in the first place, so it does not apply.

"Information wants to be free" doesn't apply to North Korea because they never had access to the Internet as we know it? Information is only dependent on the Internet insofar as the Internet is a transmission medium. Other media exist even in NK- print, broadcast, word-of-mouth.

Information can be exchanged freely by whispering voices.

That information has a much higher chance of corruption while in transit, and the bandwidth is low. People can't broadcast photos and videos through whispers for instance.

Whether the information is corruptible isn't the issue. Freedom to share it is. Before the Internet, we had entire civilizations (even free ones) built on communication that was less than perfect. I'm sure that in the early years of the USA broadcasting photos and videos wasn't a high priority, yet, somehow, freedom to share information was acknowledged as a basic human right that must not be removed.

China's great firewall works pretty darn well. Plus the fear embedded in the populace, if they are aware of things they're not supposed to know (i.e. Tienanmen Square).

>It was interesting when we saw governments attempt it last time, too. And then they stopped, because they were overthrown.

Any examples? Because sure as hell many governments do just fine by making whole lots of stuff illegal, from marijuana to certain internet access, and are not overthrown at all.

We'll see. Turkey seems to be more stable. Do we have any reason to believe the Turkish government will certainly be overthrown, aside from the affront to our collective geek prides?

The Turkish military sees itself as the guardian of the Kemalist constitution and is unhappy with Erdogan.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Turkish_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

Rising conflicts between popular groups would, if they seriously undermined Erdogan's claim to be in command of the country, provide a pretext for a coup.

This understanding is outdated. AKP has gutted the old secular military establishment and instituted reforms that no longer make this a realistic scenario.

"Gutted" seems strong to me: the military has lost its influence over the judiciary, but they are a very strong, well-funded and influential arm of the state, and they seem to be gaining some measure of public respect that they lost. I could be wrong, but I think the ethos of being guardians of the constitution is still there. (And, for its own reasons, the AKP has been stressing the possibility of a coup as a reason for weakening the army).

How realistic a scenario a coup is depends on just how messy the months ahead get, I think.

Nope, the military isn't as strong in Turkey as it used to be. Jailing a bunch of top generals will do that.

Twitter, Youtube (and Facebook) are beyond the geeks now. One could argue that today the most passionate users are non-geeks.

I'd say governments fight the internet because they are failing.

From your lips to God's ears.

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