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What happens in China now could happen in 5 years in the rest of the world. For "security" reasons or "fight agains terrorism", while it's really a fight betwe

What happens in China now could happen in 5 years in the rest of the world. For "security" reasons or "fight agains terrorism", while it's really a fight between those in power and those who want power :-( The need for IPFS, webRTC and other non-centralized protocols becomes more pressing every day, to defend everyone who is stuck in between.

janandonly 9y ago
It should be noted that using a non-china based iTunes account still allows you to install vpn apps and run the app inside Chinese borders... But The Great Firewall could and sometimes does already block all VPN traffic so it would not be any use.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  If the VPN actually works the app might still be useful. It is a game of cat and mouse between the government and the VPN providers.
nannal 9y ago
I'm a massive fan of decentralization and it seems that bittorrent has shown that it is resilient against oppression, while the magnet link hosting sites are regularly taken down, the protocol its self has shown that it can continue to thrive. In this way it shows that decentralized networks are the way to circumvent oppressive people. The on-going movement towards decentralisation is something to celebrate as is the transformation of users, slowly becoming peers.
cjsuk 9y ago
Looks like I won't be owning any Apple products in 5 years then.
- nobodyshere 9y ago
  But they still have the built-in VPN client in iOS, don't they? As long as they don't block this particular feature in China, I don't see that as a big reason for panic.
  - avcdsuia 9y ago
    PPTP and L2TP are blocked, we mainly use Shadowsocks. And what Apple did is removing apps that provide Shadowsocks local client. e.g. Surge, Shadowrocket, Potatso‏...
aiyodev 9y ago
Governments can outlaw those too. We need a p2p internet before it's too late. It doesn't have to be the fastest or the best. It just has to work well enough to bootstrap free access to information whenever the government tries to snuff it out. In Cuba they use thumb drives but we can do better.
- yarg 9y ago
  There's a fundamental limit to what is blockable. Even if all strong cryptography is prohibited and all that can legally be utilised is a backdoored version, a steganographic option can be encorporated in a way that is mathematically undetectable - albeit at rather low bit rates relative to the absolute rate of the stream. The problem for censors is that there is not such thing as optimal compression for a given stream, since the optimality of a given compression codec is a probabilistic function of all data streams that could feasibly be compressed with the given codec. What do I mean by this? Inoptimality is fundamentally immeasurable (even when a more optimal version is feasibly calculable, it may be inefficient to utilise it due to the increased complexity involved in encoding or decoding - and the possible reasons behind any given encoding choice are indistinguisable from each other), so a sliver of a data stream could potentially be utilised to package encrypted data in a manner that is fundamentally indistinguishable from encoding inoptimalities. In a world where a huge amount of out data is ultra-high bandwidth multimedia content couple with personal super-computers, crytographically indistinguisable steganographic communication channels of a more than useful bandwidth are well within the realms of feasibility.
  - acdha 9y ago
    That's technically true but largely irrelevant because it ignores the hard problem: if you're a covert agent supported by a major power, sure, you may have the opsec training and resources needed for that to be relevant but in most cases the question is not crypto magic but how it handles discovery, trust, and individual compromises. You can have perfect steganography but as soon as a government informant says they got contraband data from you people are going to jail or worse. Similarly, all of the plausible deniability in the world won't help if they compromise your system and record you accessing that data. Among other things, this kills widespread underground media dissemination because as the number of people increases the odds approach certainty that state actors will learn how to access it, and the risk to users increases constantly – how well do you really know the person who hooked you up with an invite code? Is the P2P node you're connecting to anything other than a honeypot? The hottie you hooked up with last night – really into you or just installing malware on your computers and mapping out your social network? (Lest you think that's a stretch, consider e.g. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29743857 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29743857 and ask whether the Chinese government is more or less concerned with activists)
aluhut 9y ago
Well maybe you shouldn't use a locked system then. There are enough and better alternatives and always have been. It's not like this is a surprise at all. People have warned about this for years but the fan base and the cool design were stronger. I'm pretty sure there will be no uprising in the western Apple community about that at all.
geokon 9y ago
Just on a positive note - HTTPS has done wonders BC it destroys any granularity in censorship. For instance BC English Wikipedia isn't blocked you are able to look up any topic and authorities have no way of knowing which topic you've looked up. They could block all of Wikipedia ofcourse, but it'd be overly draconian, hard to justify and people would be upset (though itll happen eventually. They're working on a wikipedia clone right now)
- doguozkan 9y ago
  Wikipedia (also apparently expressvpn.com) is already blocked in Turkey, and I am indeed very upset about it, but there's nothing I can do about it and I think it'd be the same with the Chinese. Such oppressive governments really won't mind denying their citizens access to the single greatest source of information for their citizens if it plays into their hand.
  - dis-sys 9y ago
    could you please stop representing 1.4B Chinese? if the government is so bad, why there is no systematic resistance given the fact that Chinese people had a long history of fighting the repressive regimes?
    - aluhut 9y ago
      Fear of the Government that is even in your pocket?! As someone who grew up in the East Block, reading such naive comments as yours leaves me divided. It's good on one hand that you've never came even close to an oppressive government so not even your imagination allows you to grok. On the other hand facing the development in the world, it's quite concerning.
      - dis-sys 9y ago
        > As someone who grew up in the East Block so you grew up in the old communist eastern bloc, and you want to blindly compare what you suffered back then to what is happening in China now? I didn't grew up in communism, I grew up after the 1978 reform in China. My entire extended family work for the private sector with my closest family members running their own successful private businesses. Did you guys have that in the eastern bloc (not east block)? I got Internet connection back in the early 90s and I have been openly posting comments on Chinese forums criticising some of CCP's policies for the last 20 years. They didn't give a sh!t about it and I never got myself into any trouble. Can you guys do that back in the eastern bloc days? Starting from my middle school, they have been teaching me that the market economy is the only viable solution, they encourage the best students to study in western countries and offered numerous benefits for that, e.g. a long list of tax benefits if you study in the west and go back to China later. Did your eastern bloc "motherland" encourage you to do that? The eastern bloc failed for an obvious reason: communism. Chinese killed that rubbish back in 1978. Learn something.
cinquemb 9y ago
As corps/IC agencies/.mil's around the world tighten the nooses around the population, it will only empower people to engage in similar behaviors. Who's to say one can't technically compromise and take advantage of AmaGoogAppBookWeiTenUbtakte infrastructure and use it for any ends, in similar ways corps/IC's agencies/.mil's do for their ends? After all its still hardware and software with flaws like anything else.
QAPereo 9y ago
there isn't going to be a technical solution to the problem of terrible world governments, the only real solution is going to be to change the governments.
- jmiserez 9y ago
  In democratic countries, at least you have that possibility. Elsewhere it might not be possible at all. Nationwide censorship and surveillance are probably pretty effective technical “solutions” for preventing change.
- jMyles 9y ago
  Why are they different things? Isn't, on some very fundamental level, the act of changing the governments a "technical solution"?
the8472 9y ago
The UK is already rolling out more and more censorship infrastructure for example. All ISPs have porn-filters enabled by default (which you can opt-out) and additional block lists that you have to circumvent through technical means (e.g. wikipedia was blocked due to the Scorpion's virgin killer album cover). Now they also want to expand those filters to cover "extremism".
- mark_l_watson 9y ago
  +1 the USA and UK are definitely on the path of governmental control of content/privacy on the Internet. A bit off topic: I am in the USA and it surprises be constantly how most of my friends and family buy into American exceptionalism. Mostly, they don't travel much to foreign countries so they don't realize that the USA is one of MANY great places to live. The world for the most part is an awesome place but the news media convinces people otherwise. Re: China: even though China has problems with internal ethnic violence (source: I took an online class in English covering history, economics, and politics taught by three professors in China) my impression of people in China when I was there is that they are generally happy with their society. It is not my place to tell other people what form of government they should have.
awkwarddaturtle 9y ago
> What happens in China now could happen in 5 years in the rest of the world. China? This has been happening in the US and Europe for years. Look how heavily censored all social media is now.
- fghtr 9y ago
  I understand that we all at HN know about the media censorship, but when you are trying to convince someone who disagrees, some evidence would be very useful.
  - madez 9y ago
    Depending where you live, there are likely laws prohibiting communication in public about sexuality (think graphically explicit pictures where accessible to children, think non-standard sexual expression), politics (think inciting hate against groups of humans and calls to kill them), culture (think sharing a song you really like with your peers), and many more. You might say that these restrictions and censorship is okay because you agree with the given reason. But exactly like that, people in china might agree to the reasons their government is giving them for their censorship. Who is right?

janandonly 9y ago

It should be noted that using a non-china based iTunes account still allows you to install vpn apps and run the app inside Chinese borders... But The Great Firewall could and sometimes does already block all VPN traffic so it would not be any use.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
If the VPN actually works the app might still be useful. It is a game of cat and mouse between the government and the VPN providers.

nannal 9y ago

I'm a massive fan of decentralization and it seems that bittorrent has shown that it is resilient against oppression, while the magnet link hosting sites are regularly taken down, the protocol its self has shown that it can continue to thrive. In this way it shows that decentralized networks are the way to circumvent oppressive people. The on-going movement towards decentralisation is something to celebrate as is the transformation of users, slowly becoming peers.

cjsuk 9y ago

Looks like I won't be owning any Apple products in 5 years then.

nobodyshere 9y ago
But they still have the built-in VPN client in iOS, don't they? As long as they don't block this particular feature in China, I don't see that as a big reason for panic.
- avcdsuia 9y ago
  PPTP and L2TP are blocked, we mainly use Shadowsocks. And what Apple did is removing apps that provide Shadowsocks local client. e.g. Surge, Shadowrocket, Potatso‏...

aiyodev 9y ago

Governments can outlaw those too. We need a p2p internet before it's too late. It doesn't have to be the fastest or the best. It just has to work well enough to bootstrap free access to information whenever the government tries to snuff it out. In Cuba they use thumb drives but we can do better.

yarg 9y ago
There's a fundamental limit to what is blockable. Even if all strong cryptography is prohibited and all that can legally be utilised is a backdoored version, a steganographic option can be encorporated in a way that is mathematically undetectable - albeit at rather low bit rates relative to the absolute rate of the stream. The problem for censors is that there is not such thing as optimal compression for a given stream, since the optimality of a given compression codec is a probabilistic function of all data streams that could feasibly be compressed with the given codec. What do I mean by this? Inoptimality is fundamentally immeasurable (even when a more optimal version is feasibly calculable, it may be inefficient to utilise it due to the increased complexity involved in encoding or decoding - and the possible reasons behind any given encoding choice are indistinguisable from each other), so a sliver of a data stream could potentially be utilised to package encrypted data in a manner that is fundamentally indistinguishable from encoding inoptimalities. In a world where a huge amount of out data is ultra-high bandwidth multimedia content couple with personal super-computers, crytographically indistinguisable steganographic communication channels of a more than useful bandwidth are well within the realms of feasibility.
- acdha 9y ago
  That's technically true but largely irrelevant because it ignores the hard problem: if you're a covert agent supported by a major power, sure, you may have the opsec training and resources needed for that to be relevant but in most cases the question is not crypto magic but how it handles discovery, trust, and individual compromises. You can have perfect steganography but as soon as a government informant says they got contraband data from you people are going to jail or worse. Similarly, all of the plausible deniability in the world won't help if they compromise your system and record you accessing that data. Among other things, this kills widespread underground media dissemination because as the number of people increases the odds approach certainty that state actors will learn how to access it, and the risk to users increases constantly – how well do you really know the person who hooked you up with an invite code? Is the P2P node you're connecting to anything other than a honeypot? The hottie you hooked up with last night – really into you or just installing malware on your computers and mapping out your social network? (Lest you think that's a stretch, consider e.g. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29743857 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29743857 and ask whether the Chinese government is more or less concerned with activists)

aluhut 9y ago

Well maybe you shouldn't use a locked system then. There are enough and better alternatives and always have been. It's not like this is a surprise at all. People have warned about this for years but the fan base and the cool design were stronger. I'm pretty sure there will be no uprising in the western Apple community about that at all.

geokon 9y ago

Just on a positive note - HTTPS has done wonders BC it destroys any granularity in censorship. For instance BC English Wikipedia isn't blocked you are able to look up any topic and authorities have no way of knowing which topic you've looked up. They could block all of Wikipedia ofcourse, but it'd be overly draconian, hard to justify and people would be upset (though itll happen eventually. They're working on a wikipedia clone right now)

doguozkan 9y ago
Wikipedia (also apparently expressvpn.com) is already blocked in Turkey, and I am indeed very upset about it, but there's nothing I can do about it and I think it'd be the same with the Chinese. Such oppressive governments really won't mind denying their citizens access to the single greatest source of information for their citizens if it plays into their hand.
- dis-sys 9y ago
  could you please stop representing 1.4B Chinese? if the government is so bad, why there is no systematic resistance given the fact that Chinese people had a long history of fighting the repressive regimes?
  - aluhut 9y ago
    Fear of the Government that is even in your pocket?! As someone who grew up in the East Block, reading such naive comments as yours leaves me divided. It's good on one hand that you've never came even close to an oppressive government so not even your imagination allows you to grok. On the other hand facing the development in the world, it's quite concerning.
    - dis-sys 9y ago
      > As someone who grew up in the East Block so you grew up in the old communist eastern bloc, and you want to blindly compare what you suffered back then to what is happening in China now? I didn't grew up in communism, I grew up after the 1978 reform in China. My entire extended family work for the private sector with my closest family members running their own successful private businesses. Did you guys have that in the eastern bloc (not east block)? I got Internet connection back in the early 90s and I have been openly posting comments on Chinese forums criticising some of CCP's policies for the last 20 years. They didn't give a sh!t about it and I never got myself into any trouble. Can you guys do that back in the eastern bloc days? Starting from my middle school, they have been teaching me that the market economy is the only viable solution, they encourage the best students to study in western countries and offered numerous benefits for that, e.g. a long list of tax benefits if you study in the west and go back to China later. Did your eastern bloc "motherland" encourage you to do that? The eastern bloc failed for an obvious reason: communism. Chinese killed that rubbish back in 1978. Learn something.

cinquemb 9y ago

As corps/IC agencies/.mil's around the world tighten the nooses around the population, it will only empower people to engage in similar behaviors. Who's to say one can't technically compromise and take advantage of AmaGoogAppBookWeiTenUbtakte infrastructure and use it for any ends, in similar ways corps/IC's agencies/.mil's do for their ends? After all its still hardware and software with flaws like anything else.

QAPereo 9y ago

there isn't going to be a technical solution to the problem of terrible world governments, the only real solution is going to be to change the governments.

jmiserez 9y ago
In democratic countries, at least you have that possibility. Elsewhere it might not be possible at all. Nationwide censorship and surveillance are probably pretty effective technical “solutions” for preventing change.
jMyles 9y ago
Why are they different things? Isn't, on some very fundamental level, the act of changing the governments a "technical solution"?

the8472 9y ago

The UK is already rolling out more and more censorship infrastructure for example. All ISPs have porn-filters enabled by default (which you can opt-out) and additional block lists that you have to circumvent through technical means (e.g. wikipedia was blocked due to the Scorpion's virgin killer album cover). Now they also want to expand those filters to cover "extremism".

mark_l_watson 9y ago
+1 the USA and UK are definitely on the path of governmental control of content/privacy on the Internet. A bit off topic: I am in the USA and it surprises be constantly how most of my friends and family buy into American exceptionalism. Mostly, they don't travel much to foreign countries so they don't realize that the USA is one of MANY great places to live. The world for the most part is an awesome place but the news media convinces people otherwise. Re: China: even though China has problems with internal ethnic violence (source: I took an online class in English covering history, economics, and politics taught by three professors in China) my impression of people in China when I was there is that they are generally happy with their society. It is not my place to tell other people what form of government they should have.

awkwarddaturtle 9y ago

> What happens in China now could happen in 5 years in the rest of the world. China? This has been happening in the US and Europe for years. Look how heavily censored all social media is now.

fghtr 9y ago
I understand that we all at HN know about the media censorship, but when you are trying to convince someone who disagrees, some evidence would be very useful.
- madez 9y ago
  Depending where you live, there are likely laws prohibiting communication in public about sexuality (think graphically explicit pictures where accessible to children, think non-standard sexual expression), politics (think inciting hate against groups of humans and calls to kill them), culture (think sharing a song you really like with your peers), and many more. You might say that these restrictions and censorship is okay because you agree with the given reason. But exactly like that, people in china might agree to the reasons their government is giving them for their censorship. Who is right?