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Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

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Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go and Rust are better at different things. Go uses garbage collection, while Rust uses manual memory management with borrow-checking to ensure safety. Both are just as safe, but garbage collection is slower while Rust's manual memory management requires a lot more effort on the part of the developer. In particular, the performance of garbage collection is less predictable, making Go unsuitable for things like audio…

> Both are just as safe With a single execution context this is true. But, whereas you simply can't write data race bugs in Safe Rust† in Go you can write them and they blow up your safety guarantees. If you race something trivial Go promises (unlike C or C++) that this doesn't immediately set fire to the world, the raced trivial object (say, an integer) is ruined and you must not touch it, but if you stay away from…

To be pedantic, Go strings are immutable and will carry different pointers to different underlying rune slices, so the reader would just display one string or the other, not "Susan Sarcemin".

That said, I'm not sure why developers freak out over races so much. Races that result in simple display of data that's one nanosecond old is typically not a failure condition in most applications. Actual failure conditions from races are usually from read-operate-writes like increments/decrements/etc. And for these, we have tons of solutions, anywhere from atomics to transaction contexts to CRDTs, etc.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#132
post #118

Bear with me on this one. Look at Cuba, and North Korea. Those two suffer famines, crippling blackouts, and the harrowing and pervading stench of failed civilization. Yet, the citizens of none those countries are trying to topple their government. How do they manage? Massive brainwashing, which is in turn made possible by controlling access to information. Cuba, the case I'm most familiar with, it's very interesting…

The asymmetry in DPRK prevents overthrow by the citizenry. It would need to happen by a coup / military overthrow. Read a book by an escapee and you'll see that DPRK will execute people in the streets which keeps the populace under control.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#133

Ah, of course. Good ol' Russia furthering its reach of state propaganda and brain washing its people into truly believing that Russia doesn't invade, but instead saves other countries. Source: Am from Estonia, and a lot of Russians living here very much believe this.

Don't mention the Americans in the middle east.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#134
post #67
post #13

I'm a little confused what Russia has to gain from this. My impression was previously that Russia was somewhat of a wild west when it came to piracy and internet restrictions. To make things weirder, the article claims that only mobile networks are affected. I wonder why that is. Is this just the decisions of a handful of telcos and it's being reported as a state-imposed restriction? Edit: also in my opinion, "blocki…

> I'm a little confused what Russia has to gain from this. People use VPNs to get western news and information through other channels than state-controlled Russian media. If Russia can block these other channels, then their own propaganda becomes the sole information citizens have access to.

In a strange twist, I'm currently in Russia and use a VPN almost daily, but not for news — English-language news sites from HN to CNN simply aren't blocked, and to watch out for any new scary local stuff I find it most convenient to subscribe to Meduza in Telegram AND read a Russian news site such as lenta.ru "between the lines".

Websites I need a VPN for most of the time are ones that just don't like users with Russian IPs, like my Western credit card company.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#135
post #18
post #14

I have been researching VPN protocols that work in China and found that Xray [0] is the most recommended route to escape the GFW. An ideal VPN setup is one where packets appear as normal https traffic. Some VPN setups take it a step further and proxy the traffic through Cloudflare. Setting all this up is nowhere as easy as Wireguard. Coincidentally, I came across this project on Github earlier today which is an obfus…

I have noticed many new security and privacy oriented projects use Go and even C/C++. Wasn't Rust supposed to be the language that should be used to write all security-critical software? What happened? Are crates like rustls/ring still intentionally sabotaging Rust's cryptographic ecosystem with their "we will always be pre-1.0.0 and never have a stable API" philosophy?

rust was supposed to write excessive bloatware like servo at 50% quality, that's its killer feature

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#136
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"sooo many" is a technical term? "Sooo many" compared to what? Did you scrutinize the equivalent of Java's SDK in Rust + extra crates to get the same functionality? Do you include things like unrelated package bugs, like log4j bugs?

Hyperbola GNU/Linux ditched OpenJDK becasue either bugs or patents. The list on Java CVE's it's atrocious. Java should've died long ago with Golang and some cross-plaform (basic) GUI libraries promoted from Google. Nothing fancy, something like plan9/9front UI's, but enhanced. Java exists today because of corporateware. Outside of it, it's dead. De-ad. No one uses Java seriously for emulators, browsers, or basic soft…

JetBrains is valued at $7 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and they build their popular IDEs in Java... So Java isn't de-ad outside of corporateware...

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#137
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both are just as safe With a single execution context this is true. But, whereas you simply can't write data race bugs in Safe Rust† in Go you can write them and they blow up your safety guarantees. If you race something trivial Go promises (unlike C or C++) that this doesn't immediately set fire to the world, the raced trivial object (say, an integer) is ruined and you must not touch it, but if you stay away from…

To be pedantic, Go strings are immutable and will carry different pointers to different underlying rune slices, so the reader would just display one string or the other, not "Susan Sarcemin". That said, I'm not sure why developers freak out over races so much. Races that result in simple display of data that's one nanosecond old is typically not a failure condition in most applications. Actual failure conditions from…

> I'm not sure why developers freak out over races so much

In all languages if you cause a data race you lose Sequential Consistency. Java's experience teaches us that even if you go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that everything else is still fine, programmers cannot reason about non-trivial software without Sequential Consistency and so now they can't fix it. In something like C or C++ all races are Undefined Behaviour, all bets are off. In Go as we saw some data races aren't immediately dangerous but even if you're careful you do lose Sequential Consistency and so good luck doing anything when you don't understand what your program means any more.

> And for these, we have tons of solutions

If you put the solution in place and thus prevent a data race, you don't have a data race. Now, when was the last time you wrote a program in which you got everything right first time?

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#139
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't about cracking down on piracy or anything of that sort. It's about slowly getting control of the media and information channels that Russian people have access to. The same playbook that China has been using since forever. Authorities have been encouraging popular Internet celebrities to start posting their content on local networks/apps, so in time Western media sources like Youtube and Twitter will be bl…

I don't live in China. Yet I'd very much like my country having its own national software stack (OS, search engine, browser, social media apps). All is fine for you guys in the US, but you forget when our national interests conflict with yours or big tech corporations or when the privacy of our citizens is concerned, it happens to be a national security issue. I trust my own government to not spy on me unnecessarily,…

I fully agree with you. Digital sovereignty is important for countries and it makes sense that they are trying to become digitally independent. The bad part is that this particular instance, it will be used against the people.

I would say that better goal would be for individuals to be digitally sovereign, and not countries. Individual digital sovereignty protects us from external and internal oppression.

Re: Russia Starts Blocking VPN Protocols

#140
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both are just as safe With a single execution context this is true. But, whereas you simply can't write data race bugs in Safe Rust† in Go you can write them and they blow up your safety guarantees. If you race something trivial Go promises (unlike C or C++) that this doesn't immediately set fire to the world, the raced trivial object (say, an integer) is ruined and you must not touch it, but if you stay away from…

To be pedantic, Go strings are immutable and will carry different pointers to different underlying rune slices, so the reader would just display one string or the other, not "Susan Sarcemin". That said, I'm not sure why developers freak out over races so much. Races that result in simple display of data that's one nanosecond old is typically not a failure condition in most applications. Actual failure conditions from…

> To be pedantic, Go strings are immutable and will carry different pointers to different underlying rune slices,

I wasn't thinking specifically about Go for this example, but alas Go's strings aren't trivial objects, and so this data race would be immediate UB in Go, whereupon "Susan Sarcemin" while still very unlikely is not impossible. The text (underlying rune slices? really? I guess that would be on brand but it's a bad idea) isn't getting mutated, but your string typed value is, and that is a non-trivial object.

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