3 ms·

You can't fight political issues with clever technical solutions

psychoslave 6mo ago
That's actually part of rebellion modus operandi, so totally something realistic. But not within the frame of law and not in the sweet position of someone away from the "I'll die for the just cause" mindset.
- tryauuum 6mo ago
  can you rephrase your idea please. What's realistic, fighting stupid laws or corporations with a VPN? Yes, but not for long. They are always stronger than you, they can switch from blacklisting to whitelisting and your VPN becomes useless. What is this "sweet position" you talk about?
  - psychoslave 6mo ago
    Sorry for being unclear. I was trying to refer to an actual rebel position, which is actors which use illegal practices to achieve their goals agaisnt institutions in place. Which might have the cool attitude imagery attached to it, but which is certainly not an easy one in reality.
peanut-walrus 6mo ago
Yes you can. Fight with clever technical solutions and the politics will follow once the solution becomes common or displays its usefulness. It is in fact the most effective way to fight dumb political issues.
- tryauuum 6mo ago
  In my country (Russia) the politics followed, now the ISPs block the OpenVPN and wireguard packets. And sometimes the white list mode is enabled, so you cannot connect, with your clever custom VPN solution, to a host outside the country
  - peanut-walrus 6mo ago
    And eventually even a worm will turn.
  - necovek 6mo ago
    You should be able to use things like sshuttle or even tunnel through HTTPS whatever you want, right? As you can control both sides of the tunnel with encryption (comes by default), no MITM-ing unless you are forced to use solutions that install and eavesdrop on your secure traffic too.
    - out_of_protocol 6mo ago
      1) they do protocol sniffing, and any inconsistency (including statistical) gets you blocked 2) "white list mode" which engaged sometimes (poorly implemented atm), means nothing goes outside of country at all (means 99.9% of everything is broken). They really want to become North Korea soon
      - bryan_w 6mo ago
        If they turn off the internet, that gives you more time to meet your neighbors and do "arts and crafts" and read (cook)books. He's getting so old, at some point the horse throws him off
      - necovek 6mo ago
        Are any streaming sites allowed? It should be really easy to make a VPN through HTTPS tunnel appear to have a traffic pattern exactly like you are streaming videos and/or music (depending in the bandwidth needs) by throwing discardable traffic through when no valuable traffic is needed. Obviously, everything can be cut off, but the point is that if encrypted something is allowed, there should be a way to get anything through.
toast0 6mo ago
It depends on what the political system is trying to do. A VPN won't help against government blanket outages, where the target is complete control of communications, and attempts to circumvent may result in extreme penalty. In this case, where the government policy is to stop unauthorized streaming, and collatoral damage is acceptable, a VPN hosted in a more favorable location is likely to work enough. Afaik, I don't think Spain has the political appetite to block VPNs and such during football matches. You can still fight the political issue with political means, but in the mean time, you can also get work done.
- swiftcoder 6mo ago
  > Afaik, I don't think Spain has the political appetite to block VPNs and such during football matches Unfortunately nobody is quite sure what appetite they have, because LaLiga is doing this all on the back of a relatively narrow judicial ruling that hasn't been reviewed in a long time
logicchains 6mo ago
You totally can, that's why bittorrent still exists and works fine.
fc417fc802 6mo ago
That became a popular refrain at some point but the truth of it varies. In fact many political issues are brought about by technical changes so obviously the reverse must be possible as well. What technical solutions can't change is the underlying social dynamics.
- necovek 6mo ago
  Even that is IMO untrue: "technical solutions" have indeed changed society at large quite significantly; eg. "social media" is one very influential example, "smart phone" is another, "internet" itself, etc.
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    Aren't you agreeing with me? None of those things changed the underlying social dynamics that humans exhibit but they nonetheless affected widespread social and political change.
    - necovek 6mo ago
      We might have different definitions of "social dynamics": to me, it is a marked change when people tune to impress strangers on "social media", vs building their "standing" with peers and neighbours.

That's actually part of rebellion modus operandi, so totally something realistic. But not within the frame of law and not in the sweet position of someone away from the "I'll die for the just cause" mindset.

tryauuum 6mo ago
can you rephrase your idea please. What's realistic, fighting stupid laws or corporations with a VPN? Yes, but not for long. They are always stronger than you, they can switch from blacklisting to whitelisting and your VPN becomes useless. What is this "sweet position" you talk about?
- psychoslave 6mo ago
  Sorry for being unclear. I was trying to refer to an actual rebel position, which is actors which use illegal practices to achieve their goals agaisnt institutions in place. Which might have the cool attitude imagery attached to it, but which is certainly not an easy one in reality.

peanut-walrus 6mo ago

Yes you can. Fight with clever technical solutions and the politics will follow once the solution becomes common or displays its usefulness. It is in fact the most effective way to fight dumb political issues.

tryauuum 6mo ago
In my country (Russia) the politics followed, now the ISPs block the OpenVPN and wireguard packets. And sometimes the white list mode is enabled, so you cannot connect, with your clever custom VPN solution, to a host outside the country
- peanut-walrus 6mo ago
  And eventually even a worm will turn.
- necovek 6mo ago
  You should be able to use things like sshuttle or even tunnel through HTTPS whatever you want, right? As you can control both sides of the tunnel with encryption (comes by default), no MITM-ing unless you are forced to use solutions that install and eavesdrop on your secure traffic too.
  - out_of_protocol 6mo ago
    1) they do protocol sniffing, and any inconsistency (including statistical) gets you blocked 2) "white list mode" which engaged sometimes (poorly implemented atm), means nothing goes outside of country at all (means 99.9% of everything is broken). They really want to become North Korea soon
    - bryan_w 6mo ago
      If they turn off the internet, that gives you more time to meet your neighbors and do "arts and crafts" and read (cook)books. He's getting so old, at some point the horse throws him off
    - necovek 6mo ago
      Are any streaming sites allowed? It should be really easy to make a VPN through HTTPS tunnel appear to have a traffic pattern exactly like you are streaming videos and/or music (depending in the bandwidth needs) by throwing discardable traffic through when no valuable traffic is needed. Obviously, everything can be cut off, but the point is that if encrypted something is allowed, there should be a way to get anything through.

toast0 6mo ago

It depends on what the political system is trying to do. A VPN won't help against government blanket outages, where the target is complete control of communications, and attempts to circumvent may result in extreme penalty. In this case, where the government policy is to stop unauthorized streaming, and collatoral damage is acceptable, a VPN hosted in a more favorable location is likely to work enough. Afaik, I don't think Spain has the political appetite to block VPNs and such during football matches. You can still fight the political issue with political means, but in the mean time, you can also get work done.

swiftcoder 6mo ago
> Afaik, I don't think Spain has the political appetite to block VPNs and such during football matches Unfortunately nobody is quite sure what appetite they have, because LaLiga is doing this all on the back of a relatively narrow judicial ruling that hasn't been reviewed in a long time

logicchains 6mo ago

You totally can, that's why bittorrent still exists and works fine.

fc417fc802 6mo ago

That became a popular refrain at some point but the truth of it varies. In fact many political issues are brought about by technical changes so obviously the reverse must be possible as well. What technical solutions can't change is the underlying social dynamics.

necovek 6mo ago
Even that is IMO untrue: "technical solutions" have indeed changed society at large quite significantly; eg. "social media" is one very influential example, "smart phone" is another, "internet" itself, etc.
- fc417fc802 6mo ago
  Aren't you agreeing with me? None of those things changed the underlying social dynamics that humans exhibit but they nonetheless affected widespread social and political change.
  - necovek 6mo ago
    We might have different definitions of "social dynamics": to me, it is a marked change when people tune to impress strangers on "social media", vs building their "standing" with peers and neighbours.