Comment by esafak
15 hours ago
If you think technology will protect you from censorship look at China. They can stop all but the most persistent users. It is just a question of how much they care to; they have the means. And most users are closer to Homer Simpson than Edward Snowden.
Mississippi would have a hell of a time convincing every ISP in the US to put up a firewall too.
They could try, but not even China could build an impregnable firewall.
They don't have to go after all of them, they just have to make an example of one. See: qwest's Joseph Nacchio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
God, Nacchio's story is infuriating.
"Sorry, you can't use this evidence that exonerates you - it would be bad for the government."
If you get 75% coverage (or let's say the 5 biggest ISPs here, comcast and so on) you don't need to really chase the long tail of small providers that hard. It would effectively be unavailable to non technical people at that point.
AT&T, Comcast, C-Spire. I don't know anyone who is on anything else here unless it's through a university.
I heard from a friend that went to China and the hotel staff right away asks if they want to VPN their room.
Using a staff provided VPN sounds iffy.
six months ago I would have said the same thing about US universities.
Universities? The primary revenue source for basically 100% of US universities is the federal government. The concept of a private university in the US is little more than a legal technicality.
They don't need to. If only 1% of the people are able to access censored content and therefore hold censored ideas, the majority will treat them as crazy pariahs.
It's the same mechanism that makes us consider the 1% of flat earthers crazy. Sadly the mechanism works based on how many people believe a thing, not whether it's true, so it can also block true things if only 1% of people believe them.
We think flat earthers are crazy because it is a fairly trivial thing to prove them wrong. If you believe something that is that easily disproved AND widely understood to be so, there is clearly something wrong with you.
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Then we need to make every user the most persistent user. How many governments have given up because Tor Browser ships anti-censorship defaults?
technology does not work unless you use it
What does that mean?
China isn't an example of the impact of poltics vs technology because chinese people generally don't use de-centralized or private tech in the first place
On a side note I have very credible source telling that China might want open up the Internet "in a matter of days"
idk how "open" would this mean but drastic changes are coming.