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Classic Streisand effect - attempts to restrict content access inevitably lead to widespread adoption of circumvention technologies.
by ethan_smith 1y ago
Classic Streisand effect - attempts to restrict content access inevitably lead to widespread adoption of circumvention technologies.
- itake 1y agoseems to be working in China. While many Chinese use VPN software, many don't bother with the friction and are fine just using rednote and friends.
- bapak 1y agoLeaving the complexity of attempting to circumvent the great firewall aside, VPN isn't free. Not many are willing to drop £60+/year just to avoid identifying yourself on PH. Easier to find a website that doesn't enforce it.
- dns_snek 1y ago> VPN isn't free. Not many are willing to drop £60+/year Yes it is, well, the shady ones that make you part of a botnet are. Those are the ones people are going to predominantly use.
- voidUpdate 1y agoIn the UK case, TOR seems to happily get around these restrictions for free (I gave it a quick check yesterday). I'd imagine that there might be some kind of crackdown on TOR exit nodes in the future though
- crimsoneer 1y agoTor is not an ideal browsing experience.
- voidUpdate 1y agonor is submitting your ID to a third party agency to allow you to go to a website
- Jigsy 1y agoPeople in the UK generally believe that the only people who use Tor are those looking for child pornography, even though it's an anti-censorship tool. I'd be careful if I were you. The police could use that as an excuse to raid you.
- bargainbin 1y agoThe police aren’t going to raid you for using Tor any more than they would for you using a VPN.
- lesser-shadow 1y ago"Seems to be working in China." Yeah, let's follow the example of the authoritarian countries just to prove how liberal "democracies" have nothing to do with freedom.
- syockit 1y agoThe parent comment is not about following examples, but rather that the impact Streisand effect is going to be very limited, and the common folk will not bother to circumvent.
- lesser-shadow 1y ago>common folk will not bother to circumvent. I think you underestimate the public's desire to coom. You can't kill everyone's sexual urges unless you drug the entirety of the population. VPNs are already soaring so they won't stop people from JOing.
- winrid 1y agoVPNs barely work in China IME. NordVPN didn't work, for example, and my self hosted VPN would often get disconnected.
- xdfgh1112 1y agoThey work but you have to put in some effort to find the right ones.
- rtpg 1y agoMaybe it's changed recently, but I knew a lot of locals just using the VPN stuff to use the outside internet (though, like a couple other countries, they have a big enough homegrown market to where for most people not having fb or whatever is a no-op) My experiences in the country using VPN stuff was pretty interesting though... it _really_ felt like depending on where you were physically in the country that you were going through completely different censorship pipes. And things like Apple push notifications would just get through no problem so you could at least receive stuff via push from banned apps. I wonder what kind of detailed explanations of the mechanics there are, because I don't have a mental model of it that works beyond "censors just tell each regional office of national operaors to do stuff and they all do it slightly differently"
- grishka 1y agoFor a self-hosted VPN, you'll need to use a protocol that is specifically designed to be resilient to censorship. VLESS, for example. Things like WireGuard and OpenVPN are very easily detected.
- winrid 1y agoAh ok, that makes sense as I just hosted openvpn.
- grishka 1y agoThis is how it worked out in Russia. First, around 10 years ago, they adopted very limited laws that required ISPs to block websites. Things like drugs and suicide, with the classic rationale "won't someone please think of the children". Then piracy websites were added to that. Fast forward to now, ISPs were mandated to install black-box "ТСПУ" devices on their networks, "to protect against threats", so now Roskomnadzor doesn't even pretend to care about the law. Half the internet is broken. More if you're on mobile data. Everyone knows what a VPN is. I personally have set up DPI bypass tools for many of my relatives. In other words, if you censor enough of the internet that your population knows ways around that, your censorship simply ceases being effective.
- rightbyte 1y ago> Then piracy websites were added to that. Really? I thought it was de facto no care for piracy from the gov side. Maybe that is just how it looks from the outside.
- grishka 1y agoThe government does care somewhat and does some token gestures, at least because Russia is a WTO member. The people mostly don't care.
- rdm_blackhole 1y agoAt least in Russia and in china, the governments don't pretend that what they are doing is to save the children(TM) whereas in the west we like to drape our authoritarian tendencies under such false pretenses.