waterhouse23

Yes, actually I'd like to better understand what China does do with their state control of social media.

Clearly you can explicitly suppress certain political views. But I think there's probably a lot more you could do. For example, down rank content that while not banned, is seen as undesirable.

Beyond that, I'm sure there are many other forms of social manipulation which a state which wishes to control their population could apply.

The way North Korea uses watermarking to track the progress of file distribution is kind of interesting. But nothing compared to the psychological manipulation you could do with a social network.

They could probably shut down his account for terms of service violations.

Actually kind of interesting to imagine what a state could do if they owned twitter or a similarly large social network.

This is awesome, and actually a pretty neat way of evaluating websites.

A surprising number of people are still on low bandwidth connections, while it's probably not reasonable to optimize for them, it's at least worth considering that market occasionally.

This seems like a really awesome idea. I'm curious to hear how it works out in practice.

There are various (obvious) issues with it being remote and working with strangers. But sounds like a great way to meet and work with new people.

The reason they chose this Broadcom part is because they could get it cheap from Broadcom (founders have an association with Broadcom).

So, basically it was a political choice to use this part. I think it also helped Broadcom sell a part which wasn't hugely popular.

No, Broadcom is quite unique in requiring blobs to boot. There are plenty of SoCs that are functional without firmware blobs.

Generally there are issues getting the GPU working well without firmware blobs but other aspects work fine.

Check out the Freescale part used in Bunnie's Novena laptop for example.

This is also the case for TI parts and the other manufacturers you list. Broadcom is somewhat unique in requiring a blob to even boot the system.

I don't have any specific recommendations (though I'm happy with my provider).

What I would say, is go with a provider who accepts bitcoin and doesn't require an email address. Even if you end up paying my card/PayPal, at least you know they have a route to a more anonymous/private service.

Yes, that's a sad prospect. However, at that point I assume there'll also be no countries to host content in either so VPN would be useless in any case.

I assume at the point Tor's popularity will surge.

Same deal in the UK. I wonder how long until the US goes down the same route.

I'm quite surprised that they've gone down the DNS based filtering route. I'd expect that to change in a few years time.

I recommend investing in a VPN service. They're relatively cheap. And if you pick the right one, the bandwidth is generally pretty good.