Comment by BurningFrog
3 months ago
China could also make that illegal, and probably has.
You're never going to outsmart the Chinese government with clever little tricks. They don't play like that.
3 months ago
China could also make that illegal, and probably has.
You're never going to outsmart the Chinese government with clever little tricks. They don't play like that.
It's not really about outsmarting them. Authoritarian systems of control rely on centralization. If you create an ecosystem where end users have lots of agency, of course most of them will go the path of least resistance, but the few who are willing to put in the effort to resist still can. Google and Apple tightening their grip over their respective mobile ecosystems is a very potent lever for authoritarian governments to pull.
They don’t rely on them. They successfully use them. In the Soviet Union every one horse village with unpaved roads had a commissar. No internet, no telegraph, no newspaper, no electricity but they held control just the same. Central control makes it convenient for them, but it isn’t the difference between them existing and not existing.
I admit ignorance of a lot of this but just going off of your comment wouldn't the commissar be the system of centralized control in this case?
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Surely there’s a difference between hardware being a locked down appliance and… well, a more generic computation device.
I think the argument is that Apple or even any company that makes Android phones could choose to have an open bootloader (and maybe some driver stuff) and normally that wouldn’t really offend any government, while also giving the users more freedoms.
Otherwise, what’s next, PCs that only run Windows and only allow Edge as the browser and force the telemetry on?
Can china make linux illegal?
Not only that, they can ignore their laws and disappear/kill you whenever they feel like it.
They're not killing their own people by the millions like in Mao's days, but it's still a brutal dictatorship when it wants to be.
Oh, we do that, too. And we also don't protect our own in other countries.
Chinese people lives are getting better and they largely are on the same page. Meanwhile the US has DEI in the govt while the govt says DEI is bad. Minority authoritarian rule in the US with the Senate.
The US is a brutal dictatorship all the time.
China thankfully has a govt that is on the same page as the people.
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What makes you think they wouldn’t if they felt it would be useful? Or more likely, require a particular government-endorsed Linux.
They can make iPhone illegal.
Would they? Unlikely, given iPhone creates a lot of jobs there. But if iPhone becomes the de facto devices for Chinese citizens to access illegal content then the chance is none-zero.
(And of course they can make Linux illegal too. It's just harder to enforce than making iPhone illegal.)
If Brazil can, China can.
Can you give me the source of where brazil made linux illegal? I am sorry but I tried to search and the only references I could find were of brazil banning twitter/X for some reason.
I am genuinely curious how someone can decide linux to be illegal. How would the ban even work out?
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