Comment by lebuffon
1 day ago
India is kind of cute.
In the late 90s I attended a Telephone industry conference while working for a telephony test equipment company. A rep. from the Indian government gave a talk on their telephone system regulations. During the question period I got up and asked how India was dealing with voice over internet protocol (VOIP). With a straight face the speaker replied "We will not allow it". :-)
And it's also cute when people imply the internet is unregulateable. There are plenty of tools that countries use to regulate internet traffic. They can require ISPs to DPI the traffic and block it. They can MITM traffic. They can shut off the internet entirely. They can throw people in jail. etc.
This stuff happens in many places, including in India.
>And it's also cute when people imply the internet is unregulateable. There are plenty of tools that countries use to regulate internet traffic. They can require ISPs to DPI the traffic and block it. They can MITM traffic. They can shut off the internet entirely. They can throw people in jail. etc.
I don't think there's any country that can keep a lid on the internet. The best they can do are leaky blocks (china's gfw is probably the best in the world, but still quite leaky), or complete shutdowns (eg. iran).
As I understand it, China's GFW is intentionally leaky, balancing as much control as they can get away with but not enough to forment open revolt. As with a lot of things, the best control is not total control.
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They could even just shoot people for using the internet! It’s hopeless. Anyone who wants freedom should probably just give up now before it’s too late.
I'm not suggesting people should give up, I'm suggesting that some countries can resort to doing very uncute things when faced with noncompliance.
When someone with the monopoly on the use of force says they will not allow something, that isn't something cute to ignore, it is serious.
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Reminds me of FSF versus some Uyghur. Summary:
FSF: if you use PGP your communications will be unreadable by outsiders.
Some Uyghur: bruh, the government assigned a Han Chinese person to live in my house and watch me whenever I use technology.
There are workarounds for all of those things up until the point of you suffering violence for just using any encryption. But if you are at that point, then your country is completely fucked.
Then the question gets much more political: how to make the government prefer not to shoot me for using encryption? There are some strategies that are better discussed with e.g. communists than with tech nerds, as they have more experience and thinking on this as it becomes primarily a political thing not a tech thing.
One example - the government would lose infinite respect if it martyrs some normal guy who bought business supplies with foreign (TLS-encrypted) online banking. So it won't do that. So how far can that line be pushed? i.e. what is the least normal thing the government won't punish?
It is trivial for a law to simply ban workarounds. The vast majority of countries can and do censor the internet in some ways, and they all use violence to compel compliance with it. The only thing that varies is the extent to which it is censored.
That's funny considering the scale of WhatsApp now in the country.
As I understand it's primarily an anti spam thing. They will allow apps to spam you but the telephone network is sacred.
Reminds me of Elon's answer to the question of what various countries can do about StarLink: "They can shake their fists at the sky."
India's solution is that they put anyone who has a starlink ground station in jail.
Starlink can be jammed.
Jamming can be defeated quite funnily, by digging a pit and putting the antenna at the bottom of it.
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It would be easier to shoot it out of the sky than try and jam a whole country from starlink
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That is still the case. I looked up this law. It is strictly forbidden to ever connect the POTS network to an IP network. End of story.
Lots of countries ban voip in some way or another. Not allowed to connect to the PSTN. Disrupted by licensed ISPs based on traffic inspection. Large vendors yelled at. Etc.
isn't phone tech itself digital over the internet nowadays just like VOIP if it isn't using VOIP directly?
on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly.
Yes, but PSTN using voip is paying all the telecom fees and taxes and respecting the government surveillance mandates which is what the Indian Government is concerned about.
> on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly.
Not so much in countries where it's banned and the ban is enforced.
It's not the tech they care about, it's the network structure.
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voip is pretty effectively banned, or at least marginalized, in the USA. Can't use a Google Voice number for most payment services, for example.
Does jmp.chat work?