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

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

#341

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 3:00 PM UTC

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…

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

#342

Post by njloof » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 3:01 PM UTC

bitinn wrote: post #63

hipaulshi wrote: post #27

For people who are not aware of this: Shadowsocks is a popular and very simple tool to circumvent Great Fire Wall in China. It is written to reduce characteristics in network traffic so that GFW cannot easily block it by deep traffic analysis. clowwindy is the original author.

And to add more context: Shadowsocks isn't just a tool nowadays, it's a group of applications that target both developers and common folks. People have built successful VPN services using Shadowsocks, and they are available on many platforms, like routers and embedded systems. And the iOS version is more or less the author's recent efforts to build a VPN client that can run on non-jailbroken iPhone, much like Cisco A…

Is this the same? http://liguangming.com/shadowrocket

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

#343

Post by njloof » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 3:05 PM UTC

noselasd wrote: post #141

4684499 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago, news said China "banned" bitcoin, years later miners in China live just fine. I guess this is not going to be so different.

The only thing that's "banned" regarding bitcoins in china is that financial institutions arn't allowed to trade them. You can mine them, you can set up companies that mine them, you can trade them if you're not a financial institution.

And as an aside they're the easiest way to exchange money when overseas. It's like a bank where the bank meets you at your hotel and gives you cash, and you never have to worry that your PIN won't work or your home bank will decide not to honor your transaction for fraud protection.

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

#344

Post by ColinWright » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 3:06 PM UTC

nly wrote: post #323

ColinWright wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it does, but they have a less expensive and more effective means of enforcement, which is just to shut it down. That's effective because the actions they take at a single location apply to a large number of infringements. But if they can't shut it down via technology, they'll most likely shift to individual enforcement and harassment. In that case they have to chase people one at a time, so to get widesprea…

Escalating the issue could be a good thing, even if people suffer. The problem with technological oppression like censoring or pervasively surveilling the Internet is that it's invisible and there's very little organised outcry. Just look at Snowden revelations. Nothing has changed, and most people simply don't care. Effectively once the requirements for bypassing the GFW become harder to deploy than a few clicks, fr…

My point was not whether this would be a good thing or bad, but to point out a likely consequence.

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

#345

Post by adventured » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 3:12 PM UTC

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #339

adventured wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can find an equivalent population in Western Europe (e.g. UK, France, Germany, Benelux, Scandinavia) the size of the US population If we're going to compare the top 25% of Europe versus the US, then let's use the top 25% of the US for the comparison, and use the bottom 25% of Europe to compare against the bottom 25% of the US. Given the population numbers are a lot closer for that comparison, it makes drastical…

I think you missed my point. I'm talking about bundling all those countries so you can get an equivalent population and then make comparisons. I wasn't comparing Norway to the US, I mentioned it as part of a bundle of countries that get to an equivalent size of the US population. If you take the countries I mentioned you get something close to 300 million. The US population is a little less than 320m. Western Europe…

I didn't miss the point, I disagreed with the premise of picking the top outcomes in Europe, while ignoring the other half of Europe that represent quite poor outcomes.

When comparing the US vs European nations, there are certain requirements to get a positive outcome for Europe. You have to drop most of the medium countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Czech, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Turkey from the comparison - to say nothing of Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia, Belarus, Russia, Albania, Moldova.

The focus has to be on: France, Germany, UK, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium.

If you deviate from that exact list, Europe's ratings on everything implode rapidly.

It points to the persistent intellectual fraud in most comparisons to the US that you see with regards to Europe. People always want to stick to talking about just a few nations. They never want to do even a EU vs US comparison (eg twice the unemployment rate of the US, with next to zero GDP growth for eight years and with only ~60% the GDP per capita). US life expectancy is also as high as the EU, despite our supposedly inferior healthcare system. Median incomes are quite higher in the US than the EU, and median household wealth is also higher. The US also produces greater total output in terms of science, innovation and nobel prizes than the EU does.

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

#346

Post by Procrastes » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 3:14 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #217

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…

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…

> 5) Has some of the most generous welfare state policies of any nation. The US has free healthcare, and very large food and housing programs for the poor. Which is why America's poor are better off than all but half a dozen nation's poor.

Not to start an argument. I'm hoping you know something I don't and that will be a huge help.

I keep hearing about this free healthcare, yet I have friends and family members who can't afford the medication that keeps (kept) them alive. There was no other option even after chasing programs offered by the drug companies for "free medication" and applying to state programs. Do you mean they can go to an emergency room? That's not free either, you end up getting calls from collection agencies for the rest of your life, just like any other debt. And the emergency rooms are never a good idea unless you're actually bleeding out. My former father-in-law sat in the waiting room with a ruptured appendix for 12 hours because he was obviously poor and had no insurance. The nurse explained, if you have insurance, you have a Primary Care Physician to get you admitted, you can get right in. He didn't, so they told him to go home and take some ibuprofen. When he didn't (he couldn't physically get up) they got to him when they could.

For myself, health insurance is the single highest cost item in my budget. It costs more than my car payment or rent. I'm on the least expensive Affordable Care Act insurance in Texas. There is no subsidy unless you make 400% of the poverty level. As a business owner with a new business, I have zero revenue or income. I would be fine with that cost as a tax on income, it could grow with me. But as a flat rate, I will only be able to afford this a few more months unless our business becomes profitable, then I'm in the same boat as all the other poor, unless I go running back to some established employer. My wife has Type II diabetes. So I'm going to do whatever I have to. Her prescribed medication costs ~$400 per month, but after much searching we found a different combination that was $40/mo. Hopefully it works as well, we'll have to see.

I'm not complaining. I've had high paid jobs and and made alot of money over my life. We have it easier than most of the people we know. We are both young(ish) and healthy enough to still work. We have some savings, but I've spent most of it pitching in on healthcare for the family members I mentioned including my daughter. One of the reasons we started a business is we want to have something that will support us when we aren't able to do it ourselves, because we don't have anyone to do for us what we did for them. We don't have other options that I know of.

Tell me you do. I want to live in the America you do.

(edited to fix typos)

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

#347

Post by nilbot » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 3:15 PM UTC

tajen wrote: post #107

realfuncode wrote: post #2

“Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this. Today they asked me to delete all the code from GitHub. I have no choice but to obey. I hope one day I'll live in a country where I have freedom to write any code I like without fearing. I believe you guys will make great stuff with Network Extensions. Cheers!”

I find this is a very gentle warning compared to what we hear about secret law enforcement in general and China in particular. Isn't the practice to stage a suicide after deleting his repositories?

Let's hope this isn't one of those cases.

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

#348

Post by __kaichen » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 3:19 PM UTC

FooBarWidget wrote: post #185

Any knows a good shadowsocks tutorial for OS X? I'm going to China next week but I need to keep working while I'm there. I need to access Gmail, Github, AWS, etc. I can't get it to work with the few tutorials I found: the connection appears to freeze, and only certain browsers respect the OS X socks settings (no command line tools).

Hey, you could use a GUI client named GoAgentX on github. You could find the download link at this address.

http://shadowsocks.org/en/download/clients.html

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

#349

Post by jefurii » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 3:23 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #335

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 is a great talk about some of the methods China and other governments use to block the Tor network: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwMr8Xl7JMQ It's a pretty sophisticated arms race that's lead to some cool stuff, notably pluggable transports (like the obfsproxy you mentioned): https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html.en Unfortunately the companies that enable this deep packet inspection are oft…

> Why do American companies sell this kind of stuff to China and non-democracies in the middle east? They must rationalize it in someway, but I think it's wrong.

Pursuit of the almighty Free Market without regard for scruples or morality. Basically, public corporations base success only on money. If you as an executive refuse to bow down before Mammon[1,2] then you are replaced by someone who will. Seealso Charles Stross' excellent Invaders From Mars[3]. The Chinese government and other regimes pay big money for these tools.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammon [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammon_%28Dungeons_%26_Dragons... [3] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders...

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

#350

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 22, 2015, 3:27 PM UTC

chronial wrote: post #327

hobs wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about all the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions (PNE)? The nuke is extremely destructive and extremely dangerous, but its not inherently wrong, they have been used to close gas wells by the Russians, and I am pretty sure the US had the plowshares program. There are definitely some arguments that we could have used conventional explosives for those purposes, but my point is that a nuke is just a tool, its the people wh…

We might just fundamentally disagree an the whole tool ideology. Imagine this device: It only has button, pressing it will torture every human beeing in earth for 100 years and then wipe out what's left. Trying to disassemble or analyze it will do the same. Would this still classify as "just a tool"? (peaceful uses: explaining the importance of restraint etc.) This is not supposed to be an analogy, but a serious ques…

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