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I agree that even the Great Firewall of China can easily be beaten by simply using Tor, however, it is now our democratic duty to prevent this from becoming a n

by mahrain 15y ago

I agree that even the Great Firewall of China can easily be beaten by simply using Tor, however, it is now our democratic duty to prevent this from becoming a necessity in the western world.

maguay 15y ago
Also, if every country had the Great Firewall, there wouldn't be a Tor to get out of any of them, period.
olalonde 15y ago
Democracy is highly overrated. What we need is a strong constitution that guarantees individual freedom. 51% of the population imposing their beliefs on the other 49% can lead to highly undesirable outcomes. Censorship, racism, systematic discrimination based on sexual orientation or religion come to mind. Democracy is fine as long as the role of the elected government is essentially limited to the protection of individual freedom. Anyways, I'm getting carried away here. I simply wanted to point out that we shouldn't use the word democracy so liberally as it is often the thing we should be fighting. Let's talk about constitution instead :)
- getsat 15y ago
  > 51% of the population 32% vote for candidate/party A, 33% vote for B, 35% vote for C. 65% are not represented. First past the post needs to go. :(
  - olalonde 15y ago
    Perhaps I was understating my case ;)
  - electromagnetic 15y ago
    Canada has a 'majority' government with less than 40% of the vote. The depressing thing is that in the majority of areas that the Conservatives won, they won only because they purposefully split the vote between the Liberals and NDP who are politically a few notches apart. Now we have the first government ever in a Westminster Democracy that the Prime Minister lost to a vote of no-confidence for breaching parliamentary conduct and we turn his minority government to a majority. Fucking Canadians are idiots, 40% of them at least.
    - mahyarm 15y ago
      Actually, out of the entire population of Canada (including people who can't vote), only 10% voted for the conservative party. Similar numbers happened when Chretien was first voted in too. It's just a feature of FPTP in general. Being voted in contempt of government is only practically possible in minority governments and most of the time Canada has had majority governments.
  - Andrew_Quentin 15y ago
    Considering that not all those eligible to vote, do vote, the numbers may be much lower, or perhaps higher.
- bluedanieru 15y ago
  A constitution won't mean shit if the electorate continues to happily elect people who will ignore it. And if 51% of the people want to oppress the other 49% a constitution will not hold them back for long. Don't pretend we have society of laws rather than of men, or that such a thing is even possible.
- safeaim 15y ago
  Maybe relevant: "The results of cross-sectional and time-lagged analyses suggest that U.S. foreign policy is most heavily and consistently influenced by internationally oriented business leaders, followed by experts (who, however, may themselves be influenced by business). Labor appears to have significant but smaller impacts. The general public seems to have considerably less effect, except under particular conditions." Who Influences U.S. Foreign Policy? LAWRENCE R. JACOBS and BENJAMIN I. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=290966 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...
- CWuestefeld 15y ago
  Censorship, racism, systematic discrimination based on sexual orientation or religion come to mind. ...and for some reason, property rights and freedom of contract are always forgotten. But for a prosperous society, these are every bit as important.
- wisty 15y ago
  Look at Russia. It's a democracy, but you can get your head kicked in (literally) if you raise a fuss. Look at the US, just before the Civil War. Or even pre Civl Rights act. Were all natural born Americans given the right to pursue happiness? There's a lot of things that make a country work well. Not all of them are in the constitution. New rules need enforcement. There's a lot of levels of government, and a lot of public institutions (such as the police, judiciary, and education systems), and they virtually never work together. Sometimes, there's no abstraction layers that make sense, and you just have to talk about fixing stuff that's broken.
- eliasmacpherson 15y ago
  I think you defeatist in accepting the bastardisation of the term Democracy. Elections are term based not decision based. https://jolitics.com/ https://jolitics.com/ is an example of people voting online, it has potential improvement over what currently passes for Democracy. The Swiss system of local vote taking for many more local decisions is a better example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland Democracy is used liberally as you say and it has come to mean something else other than what it was supposed to, this is the thing we should be fighting.
vabole 15y ago
I am writing this from China and unfortunately it is the other way round. Tor is beaten by the Great Firewall of China. Since the list of nodes is available to anyone who connects to the Tor network, blocking them is trivial. So most of the time it is not possible to connect. And when you do manage to connect the speed will make 14.4 kbit/s modem feel fast.
- elehack 15y ago
  Tor has a way to work around this - bridge nodes. They're hidden and their IPs are distributed in various non-batch forms (e-mail, social networks, http://bridges.torproject.org http://bridges.torproject.org).
  - drinian 15y ago
    Some bridge nodes are blocked in China as well.
new_world_order 15y ago
You're obviously just another fool, making stuff up on the internet. The state firewalls of China, Saudi Arabia and the like are blocking all Tor nodes (those are public). Even skilled hackers are unable to bypass the filtering, unless they have friends abroad or international credit/debit card.

by mahrain 15y ago

I agree that even the Great Firewall of China can easily be beaten by simply using Tor, however, it is now our democratic duty to prevent this from becoming a necessity in the western world.

maguay 15y ago

Also, if every country had the Great Firewall, there wouldn't be a Tor to get out of any of them, period.

olalonde 15y ago

Democracy is highly overrated. What we need is a strong constitution that guarantees individual freedom. 51% of the population imposing their beliefs on the other 49% can lead to highly undesirable outcomes. Censorship, racism, systematic discrimination based on sexual orientation or religion come to mind. Democracy is fine as long as the role of the elected government is essentially limited to the protection of individual freedom. Anyways, I'm getting carried away here. I simply wanted to point out that we shouldn't use the word democracy so liberally as it is often the thing we should be fighting. Let's talk about constitution instead :)

getsat 15y ago
> 51% of the population 32% vote for candidate/party A, 33% vote for B, 35% vote for C. 65% are not represented. First past the post needs to go. :(
- olalonde 15y ago
  Perhaps I was understating my case ;)
- electromagnetic 15y ago
  Canada has a 'majority' government with less than 40% of the vote. The depressing thing is that in the majority of areas that the Conservatives won, they won only because they purposefully split the vote between the Liberals and NDP who are politically a few notches apart. Now we have the first government ever in a Westminster Democracy that the Prime Minister lost to a vote of no-confidence for breaching parliamentary conduct and we turn his minority government to a majority. Fucking Canadians are idiots, 40% of them at least.
  - mahyarm 15y ago
    Actually, out of the entire population of Canada (including people who can't vote), only 10% voted for the conservative party. Similar numbers happened when Chretien was first voted in too. It's just a feature of FPTP in general. Being voted in contempt of government is only practically possible in minority governments and most of the time Canada has had majority governments.
- Andrew_Quentin 15y ago
  Considering that not all those eligible to vote, do vote, the numbers may be much lower, or perhaps higher.
bluedanieru 15y ago
A constitution won't mean shit if the electorate continues to happily elect people who will ignore it. And if 51% of the people want to oppress the other 49% a constitution will not hold them back for long. Don't pretend we have society of laws rather than of men, or that such a thing is even possible.
safeaim 15y ago
Maybe relevant: "The results of cross-sectional and time-lagged analyses suggest that U.S. foreign policy is most heavily and consistently influenced by internationally oriented business leaders, followed by experts (who, however, may themselves be influenced by business). Labor appears to have significant but smaller impacts. The general public seems to have considerably less effect, except under particular conditions." Who Influences U.S. Foreign Policy? LAWRENCE R. JACOBS and BENJAMIN I. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=290966 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...
CWuestefeld 15y ago
Censorship, racism, systematic discrimination based on sexual orientation or religion come to mind. ...and for some reason, property rights and freedom of contract are always forgotten. But for a prosperous society, these are every bit as important.
wisty 15y ago
Look at Russia. It's a democracy, but you can get your head kicked in (literally) if you raise a fuss. Look at the US, just before the Civil War. Or even pre Civl Rights act. Were all natural born Americans given the right to pursue happiness? There's a lot of things that make a country work well. Not all of them are in the constitution. New rules need enforcement. There's a lot of levels of government, and a lot of public institutions (such as the police, judiciary, and education systems), and they virtually never work together. Sometimes, there's no abstraction layers that make sense, and you just have to talk about fixing stuff that's broken.
eliasmacpherson 15y ago
I think you defeatist in accepting the bastardisation of the term Democracy. Elections are term based not decision based. https://jolitics.com/ https://jolitics.com/ is an example of people voting online, it has potential improvement over what currently passes for Democracy. The Swiss system of local vote taking for many more local decisions is a better example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland Democracy is used liberally as you say and it has come to mean something else other than what it was supposed to, this is the thing we should be fighting.

vabole 15y ago

I am writing this from China and unfortunately it is the other way round. Tor is beaten by the Great Firewall of China. Since the list of nodes is available to anyone who connects to the Tor network, blocking them is trivial. So most of the time it is not possible to connect. And when you do manage to connect the speed will make 14.4 kbit/s modem feel fast.

elehack 15y ago
Tor has a way to work around this - bridge nodes. They're hidden and their IPs are distributed in various non-batch forms (e-mail, social networks, http://bridges.torproject.org http://bridges.torproject.org).
- drinian 15y ago
  Some bridge nodes are blocked in China as well.

new_world_order 15y ago

You're obviously just another fool, making stuff up on the internet. The state firewalls of China, Saudi Arabia and the like are blocking all Tor nodes (those are public). Even skilled hackers are unable to bypass the filtering, unless they have friends abroad or international credit/debit card.