181–190 of 419 posts
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You can, though. That's what laws are.
HN is US based. You'll have fun getting a law like that through in the US, or even the UK or EU. They do have a law like that in China I think.
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It won’t even work* *without resorting to complete Russian style government control The US is not (yet) Russia. The rule of law is definitely being destroyed as we speak, so who knows 5, 10 years down the road, but there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban.
Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."
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Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."
>Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad." This is a pretty bold claim and I'm not sure it matches up with reality. Karl Marx said that in the first stage of communism there would be a required period of dictatorial control in order to transition from and dismantle capitalist institutions. This is exactly what happened…
As far as Marx, well, he didn’t provide a recipe for phase 2 either—he just kind of assumed that things would fall into place naturally after the revolution (that needed to be global! the whole communism-within-a-country thing was a later invention / post-hoc rationalization, lampooned masterfully by Voinovich’s Moscow 2042). The entirety of the nascent social sciences field (which Marx was performing to the contemporary standards of, however disastrously that turned out) was rather high on the whole natural law thing around that time. Turns out that, if you created a power vacuum, it would be filled by people who had most ruthlessly optimized for capturing power, as opposed to fairness, your preferred ideology, or anything else. Which at first meant Lenin and then ultimately Stalin, in whose purges died the last true (if at that point very, very bloody) believers. (Notice also how there are very few mentions in history of the eponymous soviets, councils [of workers and peasants], deciding anything whatsoever.) Also most of the intellectual backbone of the nation and the national liberation movements of multiple peoples, but who’s counting.
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It won’t even work* *without resorting to complete Russian style government control The US is not (yet) Russia. The rule of law is definitely being destroyed as we speak, so who knows 5, 10 years down the road, but there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban.
Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."
The context with this article is different but the similarities are with how lawmakers misunderstand VPNs. They are an essential tool for workers and there are many other ways to circumvent censorship without VPNs anyway. The irony of this ban is that Zanzibar also wants to attract digital nomads, and the most important tool for them is an unrestricted and reliable internet connection.
Western leaders are in panic mode. I am not very political but when I look at the last Biden administration and the current Trump administration I see two men in panic mode - very weak.
A partial solution to western civilization collapse is to make ourselves as individuals strong: prioritize family, friends, continual life long education, spirituality, highly productive work, supporting our local communities, etc.
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If it went this far, the US would no longer be recognizable. Not to say it can’t happen, and the US is fast marching in that direction, but this would be a dramatic shift in the entire underlying fabric of the country.
Some would argue that the US is already unrecognizable in many ways, and that there are clear indications this trend will continue.
> It Won’t Even Work I heard similar sentiments about censorship efforts in Russia, but it does seem to work, unfortunately. So far they have outlawed and blocked major VPN providers (and keep blocking more, including non-commercial ones, like Tor bridges, and foreign hosting companies' websites), blocked major detectable protocols used for those (IPsec, WireGuard), made usage of proxying ("VPN") an aggravating circu…
It won’t even work* *without resorting to complete Russian style government control The US is not (yet) Russia. The rule of law is definitely being destroyed as we speak, so who knows 5, 10 years down the road, but there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban.
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Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."
From my reading, the GP comment isn’t claiming otherwise, but just that that sort of VPN ban isn’t enforceable in advance of some of those changes. They do directly suggest they don’t know how long this will remain the case.
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If this keeps going, they will ban self-hosting next: only government-approved hosts allowed. We can't just rely on technological solutions because you can't out-tech the law at scale. People need to actually understand that the government is very close to having the tools needed for a stable technocratic authoritarian regime here in the US and all around the world. It might not happen immediately even if they have t…
If it went this far, the US would no longer be recognizable. Not to say it can’t happen, and the US is fast marching in that direction, but this would be a dramatic shift in the entire underlying fabric of the country.