Hacker News Reader

Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

Can you clarify what this does? Even after reading the readme it's not clear to me what it does or what the use case is. And the phrase "silence censorship, automate the effect" is confusing since censorship is an attempt to silence others. I am familiar with the Streisand effect, where an attempt to hide information serves to publicize it. Does this library propagate secure, encrypted servers? So if you feel in danger of being censored you can quickly spread your message to other servers? Something more than that?

View on HN

It sets up a new server running L2TP/IPsec, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks, Stunnel, and a Tor bridge. It also generates custom configuration instructions for all of these services. At the end of the run you are given an HTML file with instructions that can be shared with friends, family members, or fellow activists that will help them connect to the new server.

The use case is to make it easier for people to set up servers that allow individuals who live in countries where the Internet is being blocked to circumvent these restrictions.

"Silence censorship" is meant to be sort of funny, but the idea is that censors have had it too easy for too long, and an automated and repeatable method of setting up an anti-censorship server can help change that.

"Automate the effect" is meant to reflect the fact that you can start as many of these servers as you want. If a country starts censoring the Internet, more servers will spring up in response.

I hope these explanations make sense. I will try to figure out a way to make the README more clear.

Cool, so this allows me to setup a server that can't easily be censored and send instructions to non-technical people in order to grant them access.

I found what you wrote in the above comment way clearer than the README :)

When you say "If a country starts censoring the Internet, more servers will spring up in response." can you confirm that you (or I, as the person running the servers/service) would have to initiate the spin up?

I want to read "more servers spring up in response" to mean that the program automatically detects censorship using proxies in each country (or some other magic?) and creates new servers if it detects blockages, but I have a sense that that would be too good to be true...

That would be extremely cool. Maybe someday!

I meant that people can easily start more servers when a censorship event happens.

...but how would people know when it happens if the information is censored before it can get out?!

Thanks for clarifying. That does make sense. I didn't mean to be too critical of your "Silence censorship" tagline, it is clever. But it is frustrating when something feels cleverly pitched without providing a clear explanation of what it actually does and why it's valuable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com