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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”

#411

Post by jedisct1 »

lucagold wrote: post #241
geff82 wrote: post #178

as a sidenote I encourage all people with talent to leave countries with suppressive regimes. I think they should be erased from their position. One way to do that is to encourage everyone to leave their country. One can argue that staying in a bad country may one day help to build it up again, but on the other hand, nothing hurts bad people in power more than complete brain drain.

you have to realize that sometimes it is not that easy for people to just leave. it's not like they just quickly buy a plane ticket and fly off to some safe country and the happy ending is complete. you'll have to to be wealthy enough to afford finding a way out. you'll have to be willing to leave your family/friends. you'll have to be willing to leave the place you might be very attached to. you'll have to be willin…

Most importantly, you need a visa, which is not necessarily easy to get, especially if you are a Chinese citizen.

It's not just about being attached to your friends or to a place. A lot of people would love to leave their country, but aren't allowed to.

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

#412

Post by dang »

cLeEOGPw wrote: post #236

Any technology can be used for both good and bad. There's nothing inherently wrong with technology.

This subthread detached from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10102113 and marked off-topic, since it seems to be the root of the flamewar.

We've noticed over and over how generic tangents are the gateway to flamewars. Tangents about something specific ("off-topic, but I once worked with that group...") are often interesting, but generic tangents dilute discussion and not infrequently eventuate in Hitler.

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

#413

Post by kjs3 »

mnem wrote: post #402
kjs3 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Plowshare succeeded in it's practical applications. They wanted to dig big holes fast, and by god they did. That was when the indirect costs of applying the technology (namely, poisoning the world) became apparent and it was prudently abandoned.

Isn't radioactive fallout a direct cost of the technology?

As maxerickson pointed out, that's true, and I acknowledge the defect in my argument.

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

#414

Post by Ankaios »

woodchuck64 wrote: post #371
blackgear wrote: post #144

This is the end of a century. People in China had used 4 kinds of tools to skip the GFW: freegate, openvpn, goagnet, shadowsocks. freegate is a traditional http proxy or socks proxy built by Falun Gong ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong ). They built lots of software with the same technology: freegate gpass freeu dynapass... People share this kind of banned software sending to each others just like teenagers…

> I means recently more and more evidence shows that GFW has finally find a way to recognize shadowsocks's packets. Hmm... okay, so they defeat shadowsocks by recognizing the packets. > Then they stopped the development of shadowsocks. But if they already had shadowsocks beat, why do they make a public show of shutting it down? Sounds more like they recognize that they don't have the GFW technology to defeat shadowso…

There's no such thing as overkill.

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

#415

Post by switch007 »

tired_man wrote: post #299
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?

They want to remain in control and never be displaced. You can tell when a country is either totalitarian or when it's heading that way when they begin seeking increased control over the media, when your communications are subject to routine governmental monitoring, when you can become criminally suspect for having cash, when they're afraid of you being able to encrypt anything because it might be Terror/ChildPorn (r…

UK is heading this way..

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

#416

Post by peterhadlaw »

njloof wrote: post #325
leoc wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allegedly it's mostly or at least originally Cisco's technology: https://insidersurveillance.com/cisco-huawei-and-semptian-a-... .

And let's not forget BlueCoat. These are our colleagues designing and implementing these tools of oppression. We should ask them why they exercise their talents in this way.

They probably appreciate having their family alive...or something. It'd be better if our colleagues who don't have their hands and relatives tied to create and proliferate liberating software.

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

#417

Post by madengr »

radmuzom wrote: post #189
geff82 wrote: post #178

as a sidenote I encourage all people with talent to leave countries with suppressive regimes. I think they should be erased from their position. One way to do that is to encourage everyone to leave their country. One can argue that staying in a bad country may one day help to build it up again, but on the other hand, nothing hurts bad people in power more than complete brain drain.

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…

>where there are frequent shootings and you are never safe due to some idiotic Constitutional amendment.

Oh please please please move to China or Iran (assuming you live in the USA). I'll keep my evil black rifles.

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

#418

Post by tripzilch »

sdm wrote: post #234
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…

In my experience ... spending a lot of time working in China ... most people use Astrill or ExpressVPN. I'm surprised no one has mentioned them here yet. They own the VPN market in China. Almost every senior developer I've met here subscribes to one or the other -- with Astrill being far ahead in terms of user base. They both champion their "stealth" options and other than the odd day you don't really notice the GFW.…

I don't understand, who can afford US$1000 per month? I'm assuming only medium-large businesses, so do they divide up these "international lines" among their employees or something? Can these employees also use these lines at home, or only in the office?

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

#420

Post by hobs »

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…

In your hyperbolic example, the tool has no potential positive purpose, so obviously it is only a tool for destruction. I don't think nukes come close to fitting this description, and I don't really understand the purpose of the question, but if it is earnestly asked I will answer it.

I don't deny that nuclear technology has contributed to some of the worst calamities to befall humanity, I simply disagree that they have ONLY done negative things.

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