8 ms·

I always wonder what the real effects of these kind of blocks. For even average users of the internet, it was easy to overcome this block by just putting a "0"

by eralps 7y ago

I always wonder what the real effects of these kind of blocks. For even average users of the internet, it was easy to overcome this block by just putting a "0" in front of the domain name. 0wikipedia.org is a clone of wikipedia and it was accessible. WHOIS search shows 0wikipedia domain name was created on 4 May 2017, just five days after the block. I am a Turkish grad student in the US. Whenever I visited Turkey, I would get surprised by the error page, remember that it was blocked and overcome it by just putting a "0" in the domain name.

jacquesm 7y ago
The real effect is that Turkey will get more and more behind the rest of the world because its citizens do not have access to information. Regimes that block access to the truth are structurally disadvantaging themselves and their citizens in the long run.
- blfr 7y ago
  It doesn't work like that. The Soviet Union which had some of the most tightly controlled access to information, and didn't have to worry about the Internet, managed to stay at the cutting edge of science and technology, even sometimes outpacing the west. The communist economy couldn't support it but that's a different problem.
  - blattimwind 7y ago
    Common perception is that Soviet electroncis were generally 10-15 years behind.
    - TheNorthman 7y ago
      Common perception is that the US contributed the most to ending WW2 (Not the opinion at the time) Common perception is also that the US won the space race (Not the opinion at the time outside the US). Perhaps "common perception" isn't the right metric to go by.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        It depends on whose perception. Common as in 'the world' is something that we don't really have so you are always going to have to go by some locally colored version of events. The US eventually did win the space race, but they lost Rounds 1 and 2 to Russia. The United States getting involved in WW2 when they could no longer ignore it ended up getting the formidable American industrial engine engaged in ways that had Japan been a little bit smarter might have seen a completely different ending to WW2. The US view is that they did all the heavy lifting, when in fact Canada and the UK did given the relative sizes of their population at the time made a disproportionate difference in Western Europe, but America was definitely very important while in the East Russia made the biggest difference. In the pacific it really was the United States that made the difference. Perception when simplified to the point where it makes no sense isn't the right metric to go by, but with some nuance it can actually be quite useful.
        TheNorthman 7y ago
        > The US eventually did win the space race They did _because they started a new round_. What the US did is equivalent to losing badly and then screaming "Last goal wins" repeatedly until you score the last goal. Yes, US sources claim a US victory. That doesn't mean they actually won. > The US view is that they did all the heavy lifting, The Soviet Union was responsible for ~80% of german casualties. The Soviets made a difference in Western Europe by winning in the east. It's what killed the german propaganda machine.
        adventured 7y ago
        > The Soviet Union was responsible for ~80% of german casualties. None of which would have been possible without the extraordinary industrial might of the US that kept the USSR supplied. They had no capacity to fight minus being supplied. Do you know how much territory the European allies had reclaimed in the years of fighting prior to the US invasion of Europe? None. There is no scenario where Nazi Germany gets defeated without the US supplies and invasion and the USSR leadership openly admitted exactly that privately. Here's a map at the time of Normandy in 1944 (WW2 of course began in 1939): https://omniatlas.com/assets/img/articles/complete/europe/europe19440620.jpg https://omniatlas.com/assets/img/articles/complete/europe/eu... Notice anything interesting? The Germans hadn't lost any territory in nearly five years of war. The US was a liberator of Europe. It didn't keep half of Western Europe for itself. Do you know what the Soviets were by comparison? It was the 1,900,000 US soldiers, backed with US supplies and nukes (to stand off the Soviet conquerors in the East), that enabled Western Europe to become free after the war. The USSR would not have even been able to keep its trains functioning without the US supplies. The US gave them nearly 2,000 locomotives. It included 12,000+ airplanes. 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. 400,000 jeeps and cargo trucks. 8,000 tractors. 12,000 armored vehicles, including 7,000 tanks. 35,000 motorcycles. 1.5 million blankets. 15 million pairs of boots. Four million tons of food supplies. And a vast amount of energy supplies. Between Dec 1941 and August 1945, the allies consumed seven billion barrels of oil. The US supplied six billion of those barrels. So the US kept the USSR in the war with its industry, while fighting two massive war fronts simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
    - monadic2 7y ago
      Common perception about soviet anything is generally wrong, at least in the us.
      - CamperBob2 7y ago
        And yet, we're still here, and they're gone. I guess that's our fault, huh. It always is.
        WanderPanda 7y ago
        Maybe you didn‘t win each sprint, but you definitely won the marathon
        CamperBob2 7y ago
        Eh, I dunno. We'll see. There are indications that the race didn't actually end, but took a turn through some very dark woods. And unless your name is Pheidippides, there's not much point in winning a marathon if you die on the other side of the finish line.
        monadic2 7y ago
        The people of the USSR are most certainly still around.
      - blattimwind 7y ago
        It's not like you could just walk up to some preserved soviet microelectronics and compare their technical sophostication (e.g. metal layers, feature sizes, power density) to contemporary Western technology.
      - rimliu 7y ago
        This one is not. Computers were clones (IBM?), cameras were clones made on equipment brought from Germany, cars were clones of FIAT. (I grew up in USSR, for what it matters).
      - int_19h 7y ago
        Not in this case, from personal experience living in the last years of the USSR. I remember just how "magic" the microwave ovens were to us, and how much better non-Soviet-made tape players and recorders were.
    - billfruit 7y ago
      On the other hand Soviets were at par with the West in Mathematics, Control Theory, etc. I kind of feel there is a tendency to downplay their achievements, fuel by cold war era sentiments.
  - noizejoy 7y ago
    I can’t help but wonder how much it really matters, if you have cutting edge technology that nobody gets to use, because your economy can’t get it into enough hands.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Well, witness North Korea in the present day, and many other dictatorships besides, they usually lose their ability to innovate about as fast as they bury their dissidents.
    - blfr 7y ago
      Chinese came up with many inventions (gun powder, printing press, ocean faring ships) we consider civilization-defining and didn't do much with them. Meanwhile Europeans took them to new heights and conquered the world. A level of individualism is probably the most important factor and fairly incompatible with totalitarian regimes but wide access to information isn't nearly as crucial as infovores assume.
  - jasonzemos 7y ago
    That's because they stole it. When you stand on the shoulders of giants it's not difficult to take the next step. In cases where the Soviets outpaced the west, most notably in the space race, they did so for lack of prudence. The US could only tolerate at most one accident (Apollo 1) else the entire endeavor would have been jeopardized. Rigorous testing, empirical investigation, and redundancy all imposed costs on the US. The Soviets instead just devalued human life and kept all their failures secret, lowering their cost to gain agility for progress. In the end the Soviets produced a very small amount of organic peer-reviewed cutting edge research in contrast to the west. Worse, the politics impressed on its academics lead to Lysenkoism.
    - blfr 7y ago
      They stole some of it but that is what jacquesm is advocating: copying ideas. And in the space race they were also first with the unmanned Sputnik with no such safety concerns.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    They were substantially large, which must be accounted for. Large enough to be a mirror universe, sort of. Turkey is not. Maybe China will be.
- monadic2 7y ago
  I’m not sure I buy this. Sure you can have access to the “truth” in the west, but you also see a staggering amount of propaganda/mass manipulation/willful distraction and no easy way of differentiating the two. That said, wikipedia specifically would be a massive loss to anyone.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    You’re right that learning to read critically is a challenge, but the idea that just not having access to the written word is somehow better... I guess I’ll put it in your terms: I have a hard time buying that. If your suggestion is that it’d be better to go back to a centrally controlled publishing industry... I also don’t buy that.
    - monadic2 7y ago
      Reading critically is hardly a solution to this; you evaluate “truth” based on sources and authorities with internalized misinformation themselves entirely rationally. I don’t have a prescription, and I am certainly against censorship.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    >Sure you can have access to the “truth” in the west, but you also see a staggering amount of propaganda/mass manipulation/willful distraction and no easy way of differentiating the two. The thing is, when you have access to both truth and misinformation, you still stand a non-zero chance of filtering out trash and getting to the truth. In that scenario, misinformation has to step up its game and compete with real information. It cannot be too wild and out there to capture the minds of the majority. Whoever spreads the misinformation has to carefully balance the strength of their misinformation vs. appearing legitimate. On the other hand, when the truthful info is all blocked completely, the quality of misinformation and propaganda doesn't matter. If it is the only source of info, then that's what the population will consume. It can be as wild as possible, and it won't matter at all, people will eat it up. No need to balance the strength vs. legitimate appearance, you can put all your chips on strength. One can argue about how much truth people are able to consume when it is mixed with tons of misinformation, but if truthful sources are blocked, the answer to "how much" becomes "almost none". And the situation is made even worse by how much more wild and more dishonest the misinformation can become if there is a vacuum of sources of truth due to them being completely blocked. As an example, in countries that tend to block major sources of truth and where we tend to think that a lot of people are just mindless sheep eating up government propaganda, I personally don't think people there are just naturally too dumb to not figure out they are being lied to or they are predisposed naturally to be more susceptible to propaganda. When you have a vacuum of info, it has to be filled by something. If all that's on the plate is wild misinformation, then that's all you will eat, it isn't like you have any other choice, aside from completely isolating yourself from society.
- elfexec 7y ago
  > The real effect is that Turkey will get more and more behind the rest of the world because its citizens do not have access to information Considering the censorship that goes on in Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, etc, I'm not so sure about your claim. > Regimes that block access to the truth Lets not kid ourselves and pretend wikipedia is the "truth". Jimmy Wales has come out as being partisan and agenda-driven like much of tech. Wales/Wikipedia represents "truth" no more than Google or Facebook does. Not only that we know that there are unsavory actors ( including government, ngos and especially PR groups ) who are manipulating wikipedia articles.
  - Twixes 7y ago
    Sure, no single person is completely objective, but Wikipedia is not a news outlet with Jimmy Wales as editor-in-chief. It's an encyclopedia crowd-sourced from an immense number of volunteers, all with different knowledge. So popular articles can generally be trusted to be informative, as they were overseen by many people with overlapping knowledge. Surely this is a more objective source of information than most state–run or commercial media where the voices are far fewer and often kept on a short leash of agenda by management (TRT's agenda, for example, being presenting the current Turkish government as the best possible one).
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- agumonkey 7y ago
  Not convinced that much, I'm sure they have encyclopedia or even local copies of wikipedia. Most of the valuable data is not from 2010s (some maybe) so an out of date pedia is already a lot
- Yizahi 7y ago
  That's why you don't need to block offending wiki but simply rewrite it as fit the narrative. Like Russia does - all their "ru" Wikipedia pages are occupied and rewritten by pro-putin forces and whole moderator structure also supports this. Mostly this happens in history and politics pages.
jammygit 7y ago
Imagine the near future when governments become more technically adept and those holes get plugged. These stories are scariest because they utterly prove how eager governments are to control access to information and communications. Same thing with DRM - its scariest because one day it will work
- majewsky 7y ago
  > Same thing with DRM - its scariest because one day it will work. If corps really needed DRM to work well, it would work well already. The reason that it doesn't is that there is no business case: 1. The music industry has mostly (heavy emphasis on "mostly") woken up to the fact that DRM does not stop piracy. Only a good user experience stops privacy. Hence why piracy stopped being a big problem once streaming services like Spotify became available. 2. The movie and game industry only rely on DRM protecting the initial wave of sales right after the initial release. When the DRM of a AAA game gets cracked 90 days after release (as is usual for Denuvo afaik), it doesn't matter much because 95% of sales are already done at this point. Same for movies. The long tail is impacted a bit by the movie or game being available on piracy sites, but most customers still go through the official sales/streaming channels unless they're absolutely atrocious.
  - WanderPanda 7y ago
    „Only a good user experience stops privacy.“ Very true
- furbyhater 7y ago
  Sorry to break it to you but we're well past the "scary because it might (theoretically in a far away future) work" phase. Today IP blocks are practised by all or at least most nations, and even western "democratic" governments are salivating at China's advances in mass surveillance. Some of the worst offenders are Britain and Germany, but France is not much better. Countries with a "free" internet are becoming few and far between (thanks to the "free speech craze" the US is still amongst them, but on the other hand punishments are draconian if you "misbehave").
aaron695 7y ago
> For even average users of the internet, it was easy to overcome this block by just putting a "0" in front of the domain name. I disagree. Blocks like this work. China started this way. The Firewall was weak and easy to circumvent, but people just didn't go around it. If you Google something and get multiple results will you chose the one you can read straight up or the one that takes work. One click beats two. And one click kicks ass on typing. Android chrome is removing editing URLS as a general idea for instance. Google considers URLs as redundant. They are not right, but also not wrong.

by eralps 7y ago

jacquesm 7y ago

The real effect is that Turkey will get more and more behind the rest of the world because its citizens do not have access to information. Regimes that block access to the truth are structurally disadvantaging themselves and their citizens in the long run.

blfr 7y ago
It doesn't work like that. The Soviet Union which had some of the most tightly controlled access to information, and didn't have to worry about the Internet, managed to stay at the cutting edge of science and technology, even sometimes outpacing the west. The communist economy couldn't support it but that's a different problem.
- blattimwind 7y ago
  Common perception is that Soviet electroncis were generally 10-15 years behind.
  - TheNorthman 7y ago
    Common perception is that the US contributed the most to ending WW2 (Not the opinion at the time) Common perception is also that the US won the space race (Not the opinion at the time outside the US). Perhaps "common perception" isn't the right metric to go by.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      It depends on whose perception. Common as in 'the world' is something that we don't really have so you are always going to have to go by some locally colored version of events. The US eventually did win the space race, but they lost Rounds 1 and 2 to Russia. The United States getting involved in WW2 when they could no longer ignore it ended up getting the formidable American industrial engine engaged in ways that had Japan been a little bit smarter might have seen a completely different ending to WW2. The US view is that they did all the heavy lifting, when in fact Canada and the UK did given the relative sizes of their population at the time made a disproportionate difference in Western Europe, but America was definitely very important while in the East Russia made the biggest difference. In the pacific it really was the United States that made the difference. Perception when simplified to the point where it makes no sense isn't the right metric to go by, but with some nuance it can actually be quite useful.
      - TheNorthman 7y ago
        > The US eventually did win the space race They did _because they started a new round_. What the US did is equivalent to losing badly and then screaming "Last goal wins" repeatedly until you score the last goal. Yes, US sources claim a US victory. That doesn't mean they actually won. > The US view is that they did all the heavy lifting, The Soviet Union was responsible for ~80% of german casualties. The Soviets made a difference in Western Europe by winning in the east. It's what killed the german propaganda machine.
        adventured 7y ago
        > The Soviet Union was responsible for ~80% of german casualties. None of which would have been possible without the extraordinary industrial might of the US that kept the USSR supplied. They had no capacity to fight minus being supplied. Do you know how much territory the European allies had reclaimed in the years of fighting prior to the US invasion of Europe? None. There is no scenario where Nazi Germany gets defeated without the US supplies and invasion and the USSR leadership openly admitted exactly that privately. Here's a map at the time of Normandy in 1944 (WW2 of course began in 1939): https://omniatlas.com/assets/img/articles/complete/europe/europe19440620.jpg https://omniatlas.com/assets/img/articles/complete/europe/eu... Notice anything interesting? The Germans hadn't lost any territory in nearly five years of war. The US was a liberator of Europe. It didn't keep half of Western Europe for itself. Do you know what the Soviets were by comparison? It was the 1,900,000 US soldiers, backed with US supplies and nukes (to stand off the Soviet conquerors in the East), that enabled Western Europe to become free after the war. The USSR would not have even been able to keep its trains functioning without the US supplies. The US gave them nearly 2,000 locomotives. It included 12,000+ airplanes. 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. 400,000 jeeps and cargo trucks. 8,000 tractors. 12,000 armored vehicles, including 7,000 tanks. 35,000 motorcycles. 1.5 million blankets. 15 million pairs of boots. Four million tons of food supplies. And a vast amount of energy supplies. Between Dec 1941 and August 1945, the allies consumed seven billion barrels of oil. The US supplied six billion of those barrels. So the US kept the USSR in the war with its industry, while fighting two massive war fronts simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
  - monadic2 7y ago
    Common perception about soviet anything is generally wrong, at least in the us.
    - CamperBob2 7y ago
      And yet, we're still here, and they're gone. I guess that's our fault, huh. It always is.
      - WanderPanda 7y ago
        Maybe you didn‘t win each sprint, but you definitely won the marathon
        CamperBob2 7y ago
        Eh, I dunno. We'll see. There are indications that the race didn't actually end, but took a turn through some very dark woods. And unless your name is Pheidippides, there's not much point in winning a marathon if you die on the other side of the finish line.
      - monadic2 7y ago
        The people of the USSR are most certainly still around.
    - blattimwind 7y ago
      It's not like you could just walk up to some preserved soviet microelectronics and compare their technical sophostication (e.g. metal layers, feature sizes, power density) to contemporary Western technology.
    - rimliu 7y ago
      This one is not. Computers were clones (IBM?), cameras were clones made on equipment brought from Germany, cars were clones of FIAT. (I grew up in USSR, for what it matters).
    - int_19h 7y ago
      Not in this case, from personal experience living in the last years of the USSR. I remember just how "magic" the microwave ovens were to us, and how much better non-Soviet-made tape players and recorders were.
  - billfruit 7y ago
    On the other hand Soviets were at par with the West in Mathematics, Control Theory, etc. I kind of feel there is a tendency to downplay their achievements, fuel by cold war era sentiments.
- noizejoy 7y ago
  I can’t help but wonder how much it really matters, if you have cutting edge technology that nobody gets to use, because your economy can’t get it into enough hands.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Well, witness North Korea in the present day, and many other dictatorships besides, they usually lose their ability to innovate about as fast as they bury their dissidents.
  - blfr 7y ago
    Chinese came up with many inventions (gun powder, printing press, ocean faring ships) we consider civilization-defining and didn't do much with them. Meanwhile Europeans took them to new heights and conquered the world. A level of individualism is probably the most important factor and fairly incompatible with totalitarian regimes but wide access to information isn't nearly as crucial as infovores assume.
- jasonzemos 7y ago
  That's because they stole it. When you stand on the shoulders of giants it's not difficult to take the next step. In cases where the Soviets outpaced the west, most notably in the space race, they did so for lack of prudence. The US could only tolerate at most one accident (Apollo 1) else the entire endeavor would have been jeopardized. Rigorous testing, empirical investigation, and redundancy all imposed costs on the US. The Soviets instead just devalued human life and kept all their failures secret, lowering their cost to gain agility for progress. In the end the Soviets produced a very small amount of organic peer-reviewed cutting edge research in contrast to the west. Worse, the politics impressed on its academics lead to Lysenkoism.
  - blfr 7y ago
    They stole some of it but that is what jacquesm is advocating: copying ideas. And in the space race they were also first with the unmanned Sputnik with no such safety concerns.
- jacobush 7y ago
  They were substantially large, which must be accounted for. Large enough to be a mirror universe, sort of. Turkey is not. Maybe China will be.
monadic2 7y ago
I’m not sure I buy this. Sure you can have access to the “truth” in the west, but you also see a staggering amount of propaganda/mass manipulation/willful distraction and no easy way of differentiating the two. That said, wikipedia specifically would be a massive loss to anyone.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  You’re right that learning to read critically is a challenge, but the idea that just not having access to the written word is somehow better... I guess I’ll put it in your terms: I have a hard time buying that. If your suggestion is that it’d be better to go back to a centrally controlled publishing industry... I also don’t buy that.
  - monadic2 7y ago
    Reading critically is hardly a solution to this; you evaluate “truth” based on sources and authorities with internalized misinformation themselves entirely rationally. I don’t have a prescription, and I am certainly against censorship.
- filoleg 7y ago
  >Sure you can have access to the “truth” in the west, but you also see a staggering amount of propaganda/mass manipulation/willful distraction and no easy way of differentiating the two. The thing is, when you have access to both truth and misinformation, you still stand a non-zero chance of filtering out trash and getting to the truth. In that scenario, misinformation has to step up its game and compete with real information. It cannot be too wild and out there to capture the minds of the majority. Whoever spreads the misinformation has to carefully balance the strength of their misinformation vs. appearing legitimate. On the other hand, when the truthful info is all blocked completely, the quality of misinformation and propaganda doesn't matter. If it is the only source of info, then that's what the population will consume. It can be as wild as possible, and it won't matter at all, people will eat it up. No need to balance the strength vs. legitimate appearance, you can put all your chips on strength. One can argue about how much truth people are able to consume when it is mixed with tons of misinformation, but if truthful sources are blocked, the answer to "how much" becomes "almost none". And the situation is made even worse by how much more wild and more dishonest the misinformation can become if there is a vacuum of sources of truth due to them being completely blocked. As an example, in countries that tend to block major sources of truth and where we tend to think that a lot of people are just mindless sheep eating up government propaganda, I personally don't think people there are just naturally too dumb to not figure out they are being lied to or they are predisposed naturally to be more susceptible to propaganda. When you have a vacuum of info, it has to be filled by something. If all that's on the plate is wild misinformation, then that's all you will eat, it isn't like you have any other choice, aside from completely isolating yourself from society.
elfexec 7y ago
> The real effect is that Turkey will get more and more behind the rest of the world because its citizens do not have access to information Considering the censorship that goes on in Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, etc, I'm not so sure about your claim. > Regimes that block access to the truth Lets not kid ourselves and pretend wikipedia is the "truth". Jimmy Wales has come out as being partisan and agenda-driven like much of tech. Wales/Wikipedia represents "truth" no more than Google or Facebook does. Not only that we know that there are unsavory actors ( including government, ngos and especially PR groups ) who are manipulating wikipedia articles.
- Twixes 7y ago
  Sure, no single person is completely objective, but Wikipedia is not a news outlet with Jimmy Wales as editor-in-chief. It's an encyclopedia crowd-sourced from an immense number of volunteers, all with different knowledge. So popular articles can generally be trusted to be informative, as they were overseen by many people with overlapping knowledge. Surely this is a more objective source of information than most state–run or commercial media where the voices are far fewer and often kept on a short leash of agenda by management (TRT's agenda, for example, being presenting the current Turkish government as the best possible one).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
agumonkey 7y ago
Not convinced that much, I'm sure they have encyclopedia or even local copies of wikipedia. Most of the valuable data is not from 2010s (some maybe) so an out of date pedia is already a lot
Yizahi 7y ago
That's why you don't need to block offending wiki but simply rewrite it as fit the narrative. Like Russia does - all their "ru" Wikipedia pages are occupied and rewritten by pro-putin forces and whole moderator structure also supports this. Mostly this happens in history and politics pages.

jammygit 7y ago

Imagine the near future when governments become more technically adept and those holes get plugged. These stories are scariest because they utterly prove how eager governments are to control access to information and communications. Same thing with DRM - its scariest because one day it will work

majewsky 7y ago
> Same thing with DRM - its scariest because one day it will work. If corps really needed DRM to work well, it would work well already. The reason that it doesn't is that there is no business case: 1. The music industry has mostly (heavy emphasis on "mostly") woken up to the fact that DRM does not stop piracy. Only a good user experience stops privacy. Hence why piracy stopped being a big problem once streaming services like Spotify became available. 2. The movie and game industry only rely on DRM protecting the initial wave of sales right after the initial release. When the DRM of a AAA game gets cracked 90 days after release (as is usual for Denuvo afaik), it doesn't matter much because 95% of sales are already done at this point. Same for movies. The long tail is impacted a bit by the movie or game being available on piracy sites, but most customers still go through the official sales/streaming channels unless they're absolutely atrocious.
- WanderPanda 7y ago
  „Only a good user experience stops privacy.“ Very true
furbyhater 7y ago
Sorry to break it to you but we're well past the "scary because it might (theoretically in a far away future) work" phase. Today IP blocks are practised by all or at least most nations, and even western "democratic" governments are salivating at China's advances in mass surveillance. Some of the worst offenders are Britain and Germany, but France is not much better. Countries with a "free" internet are becoming few and far between (thanks to the "free speech craze" the US is still amongst them, but on the other hand punishments are draconian if you "misbehave").

aaron695 7y ago

> For even average users of the internet, it was easy to overcome this block by just putting a "0" in front of the domain name. I disagree. Blocks like this work. China started this way. The Firewall was weak and easy to circumvent, but people just didn't go around it. If you Google something and get multiple results will you chose the one you can read straight up or the one that takes work. One click beats two. And one click kicks ass on typing. Android chrome is removing editing URLS as a general idea for instance. Google considers URLs as redundant. They are not right, but also not wrong.