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I'm curious as to which "Chinese example" do you have in mind that doesn't work? Edit to reply to your wifi issue: you need to use that one website to login to

I'm curious as to which "Chinese example" do you have in mind that doesn't work? Edit to reply to your wifi issue: you need to use that one website to login to access the "full" internet.

wodencafe 9y ago
The Great Firewall of China, of course.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- paradite 9y ago
  It's working exactly as intended. You need a VPN to access certain websites, some keywords are censored properly. How is that an example of not working? So what do you exactly mean by not working?
  - illuminati1911 9y ago
    Chinese government is unable to prevent people accessing prohibited content. Which part is unclear here?
    - paradite 9y ago
      Well it prevents 99% of the people who don't know how or don't bother setting up VPN from accessing prohibited content, that's the intended effect. So I would say it's working well.
      - imron 9y ago
        On the other hand, it blocks 0% of people who have the intent to access that content so it doesn't really work at all for the people it's supposed to stop.
      - viraptor 9y ago
        According to stats I found, it prevents <71% in China. https://www.statista.com/statistics/301204/top-markets-vpn-proxy-usage/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/301204/top-markets-vpn-p... Edit: another one is pretty close as well: http://insight.globalwebindex.net/chart-of-the-day-90-million-vpn-users-in-china-have-accessed-restricted-social-networks?ecid= http://insight.globalwebindex.net/chart-of-the-day-90-millio... And that's just people who explicitly use it. With that kind of market penetration basically everyone knows what to do, or who to ask if they want to access some geoblocked service in the future.
        paradite 9y ago
        According to my observations now here in China, your stats are wrong. Edit: Just to substantiate, many people I spoke to vaguely know what they would see if they get unfiltered internet, so there's not really much motivation to bypass GFW.
        viraptor 9y ago
        Sorry, but this is an anecdote. Do you have a source that shows some usage? I'd love to see that, whichever side it agrees with, but personal experiences rarely generalises to nations.
        paradite 9y ago
        Interestingly with censorship being such a sensitive topic in China, it's hard to find statistics on VPN usage rate. I will just say that I'm a Chinese citizen who visits China regularly every year. My impressions can't be too far off from the actual stats.
    - intended 9y ago
      That's meaning-less - Use police as an analogy. Police forces are unable to prevent people from committing crimes. True - But police forces are phenomenally capable at both stopping a lot of people from committing crimes, and dissuading people from even thinking about committing crimes. They also raise the barrier of entry (so to speak) for being criminal. ---- In today's day and age, a great firewall will work. The average person does NOT have the patience or inclination to go figure out a VPN. Heck I couldn't be arsed, and I am dramatically more capable than the average person. But there's an additional risk you should consider. Great firewalls are content to let the minority get away with accessing other sites, as long as they don't make themselves a nuisance. Instead, they train the Average person, and the average populace to behave in a particular manner. And that shift means that future generations of tinkerers, thinkers are the ones which will start out far removed from a natural set of ideas.
    - JetSpiegel 9y ago
      You can't cheat everyone all the time. The point is not cutting China out from the Internet, but keep sensitive information in the educated elites, not the masses. As a bonus, they created parallel version of services that exist on this side of the firewall.
imron 9y ago
The Chinese example where they have tens of thousands of people monitoring internet content and spend millions per year on filtering and blocking technology - and it can all be circumvented with a VPN.
- paradite 9y ago
  Interesting. So on one side people are bashing the the level of censorship by the government and how people are unable to exercise certain rights. On the other side the same people are laughing at its ineffectiveness and how trivial it is to circumvent them and access information freely. One of them must surely be wrong? Btw, censoring of keywords and blocking of websites are two different issues. VPN solves the latter, not the former.
  - kristianc 9y ago
    I don't see the tension between saying that the government's intent is to create an all encompassing censorship machine based on what it defines as social harms, and saying that such an endeavour is doomed to fail. One is about intent, the other is about ability to execute on that intent. In law, we punish people for intent to commit harms if they have gone some of the way towards planning those harms, even if the intended harms do not come to pass.
    - paradite 9y ago
      Right. So we can say that Chinese government has bad intentions. But based on your description, surely Chinese people do enjoy freedom of speech and access to the information, since such censorship efforts are doomed to fail? Why is that I see the the opposite conclusions in Human Rights reports?
  - viraptor 9y ago
    No, both can be right. Censorship can be ineffective, but circumventing it may still put your name on some list. And once you do get charged with something, that fact can easily come up. Also, VPNs are usually leaky. You can trivially identify many protocols, even under encryption. There was some researcher recently (sorry, can't find the link) identifying which movie is being streamed over encrypted link. Some networks are better at injecting noise than others - Tor has some benefits here for example.

I'm curious as to which "Chinese example" do you have in mind that doesn't work? Edit to reply to your wifi issue: you need to use that one website to login to access the "full" internet.

wodencafe 9y ago

The Great Firewall of China, of course.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
paradite 9y ago
It's working exactly as intended. You need a VPN to access certain websites, some keywords are censored properly. How is that an example of not working? So what do you exactly mean by not working?
- illuminati1911 9y ago
  Chinese government is unable to prevent people accessing prohibited content. Which part is unclear here?
  - paradite 9y ago
    Well it prevents 99% of the people who don't know how or don't bother setting up VPN from accessing prohibited content, that's the intended effect. So I would say it's working well.
    - imron 9y ago
      On the other hand, it blocks 0% of people who have the intent to access that content so it doesn't really work at all for the people it's supposed to stop.
    - viraptor 9y ago
      According to stats I found, it prevents <71% in China. https://www.statista.com/statistics/301204/top-markets-vpn-proxy-usage/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/301204/top-markets-vpn-p... Edit: another one is pretty close as well: http://insight.globalwebindex.net/chart-of-the-day-90-million-vpn-users-in-china-have-accessed-restricted-social-networks?ecid= http://insight.globalwebindex.net/chart-of-the-day-90-millio... And that's just people who explicitly use it. With that kind of market penetration basically everyone knows what to do, or who to ask if they want to access some geoblocked service in the future.
      - paradite 9y ago
        According to my observations now here in China, your stats are wrong. Edit: Just to substantiate, many people I spoke to vaguely know what they would see if they get unfiltered internet, so there's not really much motivation to bypass GFW.
        viraptor 9y ago
        Sorry, but this is an anecdote. Do you have a source that shows some usage? I'd love to see that, whichever side it agrees with, but personal experiences rarely generalises to nations.
        paradite 9y ago
        Interestingly with censorship being such a sensitive topic in China, it's hard to find statistics on VPN usage rate. I will just say that I'm a Chinese citizen who visits China regularly every year. My impressions can't be too far off from the actual stats.
  - intended 9y ago
    That's meaning-less - Use police as an analogy. Police forces are unable to prevent people from committing crimes. True - But police forces are phenomenally capable at both stopping a lot of people from committing crimes, and dissuading people from even thinking about committing crimes. They also raise the barrier of entry (so to speak) for being criminal. ---- In today's day and age, a great firewall will work. The average person does NOT have the patience or inclination to go figure out a VPN. Heck I couldn't be arsed, and I am dramatically more capable than the average person. But there's an additional risk you should consider. Great firewalls are content to let the minority get away with accessing other sites, as long as they don't make themselves a nuisance. Instead, they train the Average person, and the average populace to behave in a particular manner. And that shift means that future generations of tinkerers, thinkers are the ones which will start out far removed from a natural set of ideas.
  - JetSpiegel 9y ago
    You can't cheat everyone all the time. The point is not cutting China out from the Internet, but keep sensitive information in the educated elites, not the masses. As a bonus, they created parallel version of services that exist on this side of the firewall.

imron 9y ago

The Chinese example where they have tens of thousands of people monitoring internet content and spend millions per year on filtering and blocking technology - and it can all be circumvented with a VPN.

paradite 9y ago
Interesting. So on one side people are bashing the the level of censorship by the government and how people are unable to exercise certain rights. On the other side the same people are laughing at its ineffectiveness and how trivial it is to circumvent them and access information freely. One of them must surely be wrong? Btw, censoring of keywords and blocking of websites are two different issues. VPN solves the latter, not the former.
- kristianc 9y ago
  I don't see the tension between saying that the government's intent is to create an all encompassing censorship machine based on what it defines as social harms, and saying that such an endeavour is doomed to fail. One is about intent, the other is about ability to execute on that intent. In law, we punish people for intent to commit harms if they have gone some of the way towards planning those harms, even if the intended harms do not come to pass.
  - paradite 9y ago
    Right. So we can say that Chinese government has bad intentions. But based on your description, surely Chinese people do enjoy freedom of speech and access to the information, since such censorship efforts are doomed to fail? Why is that I see the the opposite conclusions in Human Rights reports?
- viraptor 9y ago
  No, both can be right. Censorship can be ineffective, but circumventing it may still put your name on some list. And once you do get charged with something, that fact can easily come up. Also, VPNs are usually leaky. You can trivially identify many protocols, even under encryption. There was some researcher recently (sorry, can't find the link) identifying which movie is being streamed over encrypted link. Some networks are better at injecting noise than others - Tor has some benefits here for example.