Comment by itake
9 days ago
seems to be working in China. While many Chinese use VPN software, many don't bother with the friction and are fine just using rednote and friends.
9 days ago
seems to be working in China. While many Chinese use VPN software, many don't bother with the friction and are fine just using rednote and friends.
Leaving the complexity of attempting to circumvent the great firewall aside, VPN isn't free. Not many are willing to drop £60+/year just to avoid identifying yourself on PH. Easier to find a website that doesn't enforce it.
In the UK case, TOR seems to happily get around these restrictions for free (I gave it a quick check yesterday). I'd imagine that there might be some kind of crackdown on TOR exit nodes in the future though
People in the UK generally believe that the only people who use Tor are those looking for child pornography, even though it's an anti-censorship tool.
I'd be careful if I were you. The police could use that as an excuse to raid you.
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Tor is not an ideal browsing experience.
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> VPN isn't free. Not many are willing to drop £60+/year
Yes it is, well, the shady ones that make you part of a botnet are. Those are the ones people are going to predominantly use.
VPNs barely work in China IME. NordVPN didn't work, for example, and my self hosted VPN would often get disconnected.
For a self-hosted VPN, you'll need to use a protocol that is specifically designed to be resilient to censorship. VLESS, for example. Things like WireGuard and OpenVPN are very easily detected.
Ah ok, that makes sense as I just hosted openvpn.
Maybe it's changed recently, but I knew a lot of locals just using the VPN stuff to use the outside internet (though, like a couple other countries, they have a big enough homegrown market to where for most people not having fb or whatever is a no-op)
My experiences in the country using VPN stuff was pretty interesting though... it _really_ felt like depending on where you were physically in the country that you were going through completely different censorship pipes. And things like Apple push notifications would just get through no problem so you could at least receive stuff via push from banned apps.
I wonder what kind of detailed explanations of the mechanics there are, because I don't have a mental model of it that works beyond "censors just tell each regional office of national operaors to do stuff and they all do it slightly differently"
They work but you have to put in some effort to find the right ones.
"Seems to be working in China." Yeah, let's follow the example of the authoritarian countries just to prove how liberal "democracies" have nothing to do with freedom.
The parent comment is not about following examples, but rather that the impact Streisand effect is going to be very limited, and the common folk will not bother to circumvent.
>common folk will not bother to circumvent. I think you underestimate the public's desire to coom. You can't kill everyone's sexual urges unless you drug the entirety of the population. VPNs are already soaring so they won't stop people from JOing.