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“Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

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Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#301

Post by westicle »

escape_goat wrote: post #14
teej wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being facetious here - what country do you live in that you think the government can't/won't interfere with your code?

Perhaps I am misunderstanding your use of English, because it is difficult to see how this is not a facetious question. There are relatively few countries in which the government both could and would interfere with someone's publication of code, and I think only in China is there both widespread computer use and internet access, on the one hand, and state security actors (the civil police, actually) who have the soph…

I'd add the USA to that list - plenty of evidence that National Security Letters have been used to stifle/gain access to/alter coding projects in the interests of US GOV.

It's probably even more insidious, because simply confirming the existence of an NSL can be a crime punishable by significant custodial sentences. In the USA, posting "The police asked me to delete this code" could land in you federal pound you in the ass prison for 10+ years.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#302

Post by ausjke »

mrb wrote: post #54

I was visiting China recently (my first time there). I thought bypassing The Great Firewall was going to be as simple as an "ssh -D" SOCKS setup, or a "ssh -w" tunnel. Oh boy, I was wrong. If you try this, or even a basic OpenVPN setup, you will quickly find out your VPN works fine for about 5 minutes, but then latency increases to 5sec, 10sec, 30sec(!), and then everything times out. After some research I read onlin…

This was exactly what I experienced in summer at China this year, no openvpn(not even commercial one or Linode self-hosted one), no ssh-tunnel, no other used-to-work vpn solutions.

For ssh it sometimes work for a few days then the whole IP/host is blocked.

I did not have to time try obfsproxy, shadowsock or whatever, but it really really sucked, to make things worse, my Nexus phone could not get any updates etc either, as Google is also _fully_ blocked, I felt I was back to Stone age there.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#303

Post by Goladus »

gnu8 wrote: post #224
radmuzom wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leave to where? To a country where 1. a few rich people control the entire political process by buying out politicians. 2. where there are frequent shootings and you are never safe due to some idiotic Constitutional amendment. 3. where regularly unarmed minorities are shot dead by the police and the majority jury allow them to go unpunished. 4. where there is no mandate to give workers paid leave include those with a…

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the second amendment and of cause and effect.

Also substantial ignorance about crime patterns and the role of the courts.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#304

Post by adventured »

DanBC wrote: post #278
adventured wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is not a massive change In fact marriage equality, and the increasingly broad acceptance of homosexuality in America, is an extraordinary accomplishment. And it's only going to keep getting better. That contrasts sharply with the majority of the world, that is the exact opposite and opposed to marriage equality. > If you exclude the places where murder happens most, of course you appear to have a low murder rate. N…

> Not excluding at all. The whole of the US has a murder rate [...] on par with Amsterdam. Amsterdam, a dangerous city, has a murder rate of about 4.4 murders per 100,000 population. The entire US, including the empty rural bits, has a murder rate of 4.7 per 100,00. But if we include all of Holland we see a rate of less than 1 per 100,000 population. Your comparison of a single dangerous city with the entire US is di…

It's not dishonest in the least. For a country supposedly as violent and dangerous as the US, with the vast number of guns that we have, to have a murder rate on par with Amsterdam is worth noting - it's also worth noting that it has been improving for decades almost non-stop. As we gradually end the war on drugs, it's likely to drop a lot further.

If we get that 4.x rate down to a high 2.x rate in the next 20 years, would that not be a solid accomplishment given the guns in America? At the rate violent crime has been dropping over time, that's likely to be the outcome.

And as I've noted previously, America in fact has a lot of cities with extremely low murder rates. If you want to live in a very safe city, there are plenty of options.

Let's look at San Diego versus Amsterdam: nearly twice the population and nearly half the murder rate.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#305

Post by IkmoIkmo »

DanBC wrote: post #278
adventured wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is not a massive change In fact marriage equality, and the increasingly broad acceptance of homosexuality in America, is an extraordinary accomplishment. And it's only going to keep getting better. That contrasts sharply with the majority of the world, that is the exact opposite and opposed to marriage equality. > If you exclude the places where murder happens most, of course you appear to have a low murder rate. N…

> Not excluding at all. The whole of the US has a murder rate [...] on par with Amsterdam. Amsterdam, a dangerous city, has a murder rate of about 4.4 murders per 100,000 population. The entire US, including the empty rural bits, has a murder rate of 4.7 per 100,00. But if we include all of Holland we see a rate of less than 1 per 100,000 population. Your comparison of a single dangerous city with the entire US is di…

I want to add that Amsterdam is TOTALLY NOT dangerous. It's got a high murder rate because it's a capital for drug lords and assassinations happen. Civilians are completely unaffected by this. In my neighbourhood multiple people were assassinated while I was a kid, nobody ever talked about it, nobody was scared or anything, it's a non-topic really. In fact most of them used to happen in the wealthiest part of Amsterdam where all the rich people live and where I'd happily and safely cycle to school by myself at age 8 every day.

One of the streets where an assassination happened and where I'd cycle daily was this one: http://www.studiokoning.nl/Foto_Amsterdam_2/Apollolaan_14042...

Again this is a street where virtually everyone living is a millionaire, and the primary school she's 1 minute away from is one of the best in the country.

Nobody I knew ever witnessed anything, you'd just read it in the newspapers. The people who got assassinated were high level drug bosses who'd been in organised crime for decades. We're not talking about civilians here.

Beyond that, these are eurostat numbers and they're a bit shitty. The murder rates include drumroll abortion, dangerous driving and euthanasia. In short, it has nothing to do with crime or safety. So even the homicide rate of the Netherlands (a mere Amsterdam is a super safe city I've lived all my life. (and I've traveled and lived in 4 continents so I can compare.) In terms of safety, sadly no developed country compares to the US, it's that bad.

I'll tell you the actual murder rates for Amsterdam and the Netherlands for 2014. Amsterdam 20, the Netherlands 137.

Per 100k that's about 1.5 for Amsterdam (for comparison, 1.3 in 2010, 1.5 in 2011), the most dangerous city in the Netherlands, and 0.8 for the Netherlands.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#306

Post by AnthonyMouse »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #254
adventured wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, to the country that is: 1) A leader in freedom of speech, press freedom, property rights protections, general freedom of movement, and is low on the corruption index. One of the few countries with extraordinarily well protected freedom of speech rights enshrined at the core of the nation. 2) Has a rapidly adaptive culture, able to implement changes at a fast pace despite its immense scale. That includes things li…

> 2) Has a rapidly adaptive culture, able to implement changes at a fast pace despite its immense scale. That includes things like legalizing and decriminalizing drugs, which is now underway across numerous states, and marriage equality. The US is able to implement seemingly big changes quickly, but they're not necessarily as big as you think them to be. "Marriage equality" (a name many disagree with, by the way) is…

> If you exclude the places where murder happens most, of course you appear to have a low murder rate.

There is no "of course" about it. If the murder rate were uniform throughout the US then excluding any handful of locations would have minimal effect, but excluding those locations causes it to drop precipitously.

That isn't to say it isn't a problem, but it's a localized problem. So if you're moving here and are worried about being murdered, all you have to do is live in New York and not Baltimore.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#307

Post by nly »

melling wrote: post #176
nly wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like an overseas vendor needs to drop a blanket of satellite internet coverage over mainland China.

Sounds like you live in a world where you didn't notice that China became the second most powerful economy, and which will become the most powerful economy within a decade or so. Of course they're going to have the military to go with that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_...

The great firewall is a cowardly, non-confrontational technical infrastructure. I don't see China using a multi-billion$ missile system to shoot down a harmless foreign communications satellite that also served people outside of China. They're smarter than that.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#308

Post by IkmoIkmo »

adventured wrote: post #304
DanBC wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not excluding at all. The whole of the US has a murder rate [...] on par with Amsterdam. Amsterdam, a dangerous city, has a murder rate of about 4.4 murders per 100,000 population. The entire US, including the empty rural bits, has a murder rate of 4.7 per 100,00. But if we include all of Holland we see a rate of less than 1 per 100,000 population. Your comparison of a single dangerous city with the entire US is di…

It's not dishonest in the least. For a country supposedly as violent and dangerous as the US, with the vast number of guns that we have, to have a murder rate on par with Amsterdam is worth noting - it's also worth noting that it has been improving for decades almost non-stop. As we gradually end the war on drugs, it's likely to drop a lot further. If we get that 4.x rate down to a high 2.x rate in the next 20 years,…

1) you're comparing the safest US cities to the 'murder capital' of Europe. That's a total joke. It's like comparing the standard of living of a European billionaire to an American homeless person and saying 'look!'. That's why he's saying it's dishonest.

2) Even if the comparison was reasonable, you completely fail to understand the cause of the numbers and what they say. And they say nothing about safety for ordinary people living in Amsterdam, I can tell you that right away.

Here's some more info on nr (2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10102529

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#309

Post by Intermernet »

sidcool wrote: post #281

I seldom wonder; what is that the Chinese government aims to gain from all this oppression? What any government hopes to gain? North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia (?) etc....What exactly do they want?

Like most governments around the world, they tend to think that "change = defeat". The US, UK, Canadian, and Australian governments are not really any better in this respect. They don't really understand the internet, and are therefore (sometimes justifiably) frightened by it.

Governments, by definition, are meant to "Govern". Most see that the the rules of governance that they, as experts, have defined, should be "The Only Rules". They have a vested (if only intellectual, but rarely is this the case) interest in seeing people follow these rules. Any discussion, or debate, regarding alternative rules, is obviously being pushed by people who don't know what they're talking about.

It's oppression based on consensus and bureaucracy. Sometimes it's nefariously directed, but often it's just pigheadedness and arrogance that lead to decisions like this being made.

Although, sometimes it's just downright manipulative pricks holding the reigns. Hopefully this is less frequent than it actually appears to be. I'm giving these governments the benefit of the doubt, though they haven't done much in recent years to deserve it.

Re: “Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this”

#310

Post by nly »

ColinWright wrote: post #188
nly wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like an overseas vendor needs to drop a blanket of satellite internet coverage over mainland China.

... usage of which would be detected, and the users arrested and hauled off for "questioning" about spying and/or being a terrorist.

And using a VPN doesn't have these risks?
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