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Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility

802 points · 405 comments · hn_acker

  1. usernomdeguerre · · focus · HN ↗
    >As we’ve said time and time again: the internet will always route around censorship.

    Is this still true, or has it become a truism? It seems nations like Iran and China (and events like Kashmir come to mind) have progressed the state-of-the-art and playbook to where we can't actually say it definitively will route around it.

    Now seeing that the US and EU are flirting with these similar restrictions it's making me wonder how we'll be able to keep hold of these principles.

    Maybe my concern with that adage is ultimately its passive voice, since it takes 'active' action by people to give us those options, and will probably take more actions by more people to keep it alive now.

    1. tialaramex · · focus · HN ↗
      The thing China can do, and does do: Kill your network connections, whether that's a TCP session, your ability to send or receive packets with some particular IP addresses, or at the extreme armed men show up and now it's not an Internet problem.

      Things China can't do: Magically "downgrade", "decrypt" or "intercept" the secure protocols we use every day like HTTPS. Facts won't budge, the technology we are using does what it says on the tin.

      The Internet can't route around you being thrown off a tall building by men with guns, but the IETF has for some years considered it to be extremely important to design the network protocols to prevent these shenanigans. BCP # 188 "Pervasive Monitoring is An Attack"

      1. kccqzy · · focus · HN ↗
        Yes China will kill your network connections. And that is proof that Internet cannot route around censorship. Any time Internet routes around censorship China finds a new way to censor it.

        Normal people don’t care about “downgrade” or “decrypt” or “intercept” they care about availability.

        1. anamexis · · focus · HN ↗
          Have you been to China? It is still super easy to bypass the Great Firewall with VPNs.
          1. someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
            China knows them all and allows it. Whenever there's a protest, they flip the "actually block VPNs now" switch and almost no bypass method works.
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