[defanor]

> 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 circumstance for the newly-introduced crime of searching for "extremist" information. That seems to deter many people already, and once the majority is forced to use the local approved (surveilled, censored) services, it is even easier to introduce whitelists or simply cut international connections (as is already practiced temporarily and locally), at which point the ban is successfully applied to everyone.

[flexagoon]

Is it working in Russia? I'm Russian and basically every single person I know has and actively uses a VPN with no consequences. WireGuard also works just fine - I was able to selfhost and use it without any extra obfuscation. They only blocked a few largest providers, but that's seemingly it.

[majormajor]

I'd be concerned there about the combination of "loggable" with "practically everyone breaks the law every day" (the latter is generally true in many countries, but not always in ways that are easy to record). You can get away with it but if you ever displease someone, then the consequences could show up suddenly then.

[nostrademons]

That's the regime that the vast majority of the world lives under now. You're almost certainly breaking the law in some way; we have a vast corpus of law that is usually unenforced until you draw the ire of some bureaucrat, politician, or law enforcement officer, and then they come down on you like a ton of bricks. The average citizen is usually counting on being boring, nondescript, and non-threatening enough that nobody bothers to call them on it.

Why else do you think actual policies change so much between presidential administrations (assuming a U.S. bias, but other countries have similar issues)? All the laws about cryptocurrency, DEI, greenhouse gas emissions, environmental regulations, etc. that the Biden administration cared about but the Trump administration is choosing not to enforce are still on the books. If Democrats ever get back in to power, people that are casting them aside under pressure from the current administration are likely in for a whole lot of pain. And likewise, during the Biden administration all the laws about immigration and federal control over the federal budget were still in force, and people who relied upon a friendly administration are currently going through a world of pain right now.

No, this is not the way it should be. If I were to rewrite the Constitution, one thing I'd put in is a feedback mechanism between legislation and enforcement, so that laws which are not enforced fall off the books, and it becomes illegal for the executive branch to choose not to enforce a law. That'd force the body of law to converge to what is a.) realistically enforceable and b.) what actually happens in practice, so that people can look at what their neighbors are doing and be reasonably sure that they're not breaking any laws by doing the same thing.

But in the absence of that, your best bet is often to still just look at what your neighbors are doing and do the same thing, because then you blend in to the crowd and don't attract attention.

[defanor]

> every single person I know has and actively uses a VPN

I do know people who use no circumvention methods: some are simply not sufficiently familiar with technologies (including older people, who seem to think that something is wrong with their phones), for others it is a mix of regular shying away from technologies and being worried that it draws the government's attention. And then there are those who appear to genuinely support the censorship (or whatever else the government does). I also hear of people switching to local services as the regular ones are blocked.

Anecdotal data is of little use to determine the extent though, and trustworthy statistical data may be hard to come by, but if you somewhat trust the Levada Center, their polls indicate that YouTube's Russian audience halved following the blocking, among other things. [0]

> WireGuard also works just fine - I was able to selfhost and use it without any extra obfuscation.

For both IPsec and WireGuard, I have both heard of the blocks [1] and observed those myself, particularly to servers across the border (which were otherwise available; there is a chance that I misconfigured something back then, but I recall it working fine with local servers). For IPsec, I have also observed blocks within the country (and RKN lifting those on request, confirming an intentional blocking that way, twice; also confirmed that those were for IPsec packets in particular, not any UDP). But possibly it does not affect all the foreign subnets: as with a recent blackout [2], when quite a few were affected, but not all of them.

[0] https://www.levada.ru/2025/04/24/polzovanie-internetom-sotsi...

[1] One of the recently seen public mentions is at https://blog.nommy.moe/blog/exotic-mesh-vpn/

[2] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/490

[idiotsecant]

Are you saying that it's reasonable to think fully half of YouTube traffic was Russian?

[defanor]

Of course not: I meant Russian audience, which that poll and the post were about. Added "Russian" into the post, to avoid further misunderstandings.

[idiotsecant]

Oh, well that sounds reasonable, then.

[drdaeman]

> WireGuard also works just fine - I was able to selfhost and use it without any extra obfuscation.

Good for you. I have a few machines around the world (a truly geo-distributed homelab lol), and my node on a residental connection in Russia (north-west, no clue about other regions) has pretty spotty vanilla Wireguard connectivity to the rest of the world - it works now and then, but packets are dropped every other day. My traffic patterns are unusual compared to usual browsing (mostly database replication), and something seem to trigger DPI now and then. Fortunately, wrapping it in the simplest Shadowsocks setup seems to be working fine at the moment.

But yeah, can confirm, VPNs are ubiquitous and work reasonably well for everyone I know who still lives there. Although I think all decent VPN providers have measures against traffic analysis nowadays, as plain Wireguard is not exactly reliable.

[flexagoon]

Have you tried AmneziaWG? From what I know, it's specifically designed to bypass protocol-level blocking of WireGuard

> decent VPN providers

You'd be surprised by the amount of people I know who use random "VPN services" which are literally just WireGuard configs you can buy through a Telegram bot for like 100₽/month

[eutropia]

Why and how is your homelab distributed like this?

[drdaeman]

Well... It all started from a single-location homelab 20-ish years ago, while I was still living at my parents' place (although I had a 1/4 stake in ownership). Then I moved around but kept the server at the old place and added a second machine. Just because I'm self-hosting my email, and residential connections aren't best in terms of availability I thought having a HA system would be fun and useful - and so it was (although not always fun, of course). Few more moves later, I've ran a bunch of servers on residential connections all around the world. Some were demoted to VPSes for consensus and backups, as I moved out, some are still there.

There's a Wireguard-based mesh (static routing, but declarative centrally managed setup using Nix) with Shadowsocks for traversing hostile borders. Runs a few private/personal services for myself, family, and friends - email, messaging, media library, the commonplace homelab stuff. Certainly not the best design - things never are, there's always room for more and more improvements, no matter how much you work on it, but I'm pretty happy with it overall.

There's no real reason why is it like this. I could've done it more conventionally and probably avoid a lot of downsides - but it's a fun little exercise that allows me to play with various technologies, and I like that the system is truly mine, hardware and premises it's on, all built by my own hands (random fun fact: I was a founding engineer at the ISP that two of my nodes are on).

tl;dr: Had a single home server, moved around and added a few more. No particular reason, it's just a fun geeky toy for me. :-)

[cedws]

I think us software people tend to think in absolutes. Yes, completely banning VPNs is very difficult. But for a totalitarian government, reducing VPN usage by say 60% is a win. You only have to make it difficult enough for the layman.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I think us software people tend to think in absolutes.

"Software people" have an above-average understanding of probabilities overall. It's politicians who tend to think in absolutes. If you tell them that the effectiveness of something is poor and vastly exceeded by its costs, they say "so you admit that its effectiveness is more than zero". And then people will instead have to say that something doesn't work when they mean it has low effectiveness or an underwater cost-benefit ratio.

Moreover, a lot of things with computers actually are absolutes. You can't backdoor encryption without a massive systemic risk to national security and personal privacy of someone bad getting the keys to everything. You can't allow people to send arbitrary data to each other while preventing them from communicating something you don't want them to -- the same string of bits can have arbitrarily many semantic meanings and that's proven with math, and software can do the math without the user needing to understand it.

And the most important one is this:

> But for a totalitarian government...

A totalitarian government is trying to do something different and illegitimate. Banning VPNs etc. has higher effectiveness as a means for censoring the general population than it does as a means to prevent crimes or limit contraband in a democracy, because criminals will take the required countermeasures when the alternative is being arrested or not getting their fix whereas laymen are less likely to when the alternative is "only" that they don't get to read criticism of the government.

"It works better for totalitarian regimes" is an argument for not doing it.

[coldtea]

>"Software people" have an above-average understanding of probabilities overall. It's politicians who tend to think in absolutes.

If I had a penny for everytime a software person / nerd on HN and elsewhere made an argument that shows little understanding of probabilities and statistics, or perhaps only a theoritical understand that's context dependent (meaning they know the math, but magically forget them when discussing some specific topic), I'd be rich.

>"It works better for totalitarian regimes" is the argument for not doing it

Parent is not justyfing them doing it. They are explaining how little exhaustive their implementation can be, while still being effective for their goals.

[AnthonyMouse]

> If I had a penny for everytime a software person / nerd on HN and elsewhere made an argument that shows little understanding of probabilities and statistics, or perhaps only a theoritical understand that's context dependent (meaning they know the math, but magically forget them when discussing some specific topic), I'd be rich.

If 75% of people in some group are above average then 25% of them still aren't.

> They are explaining how little exhaustive their implementation can be, while still being effective for their goals.

But their goals are different than yours. Or if they're not, you're the baddies.

[coldtea]

>But their goals are different than yours. Or if they're not, you're the baddies

Which is beside the point. Parent (and me explaining what the parent men) aren't approving of the goals of those proposing such laws. Nor are we going into their merits or their evilness, whether pro or against.

We are making a merely technical point about how such a measure doesn't need to be 100% enforced air-tightly to have the desired purpose (again: desired by the governments, not by us).

And we go into this argument because someone dismissed the impact of such measures with the reasoning that since they can't be fully enforced, they're unimportant.

[GeoAtreides]

I'll be honest, I'm struggling to understand how your reply addresses the points made in OP's comment.

OP's points were:

completely banning VPN is difficult

significantly reducing VPN usage is a win for (totalitarian) govs

it's enough to make it difficult for the layman to achieve govs' goal

[AnthonyMouse]

> completely banning VPN is difficult

No one disputes this.

> significantly reducing VPN usage is a win for (totalitarian) govs

But a loss for non-totalitarian countries, and therefore a cost rather than a benefit in the context of US states doing it.

> it's enough to make it difficult for the layman to achieve govs' goal

And I addressed that, but I'll reiterate.

Even ordinary people can bypass VPN blocks with a trivial amount of effort. It's really not that hard, and in fact there is an entire cottage industry dedicated to making it easier, because we don't want totalitarian regimes keeping their population in the dark -- and the people thwarting those blocks are our friends, or often even the US government itself, for actually good reasons for once.

So if you block something that people aren't that interested in seeing, like criticism of the government when that's something that tends to make a lot of people uncomfortable, then blocking people from seeing it has an effectiveness which is a little better than totally negligible. Because some people won't go out of their way even a little bit to see it, and then they don't. (Which is why it's important that we make it absolutely trivially easy for ordinary people to bypass those blocks.)

Whereas if you're trying to block something that people actually want -- drugs, porn, whatever -- it's not going to work because that trivial amount of effort to bypass it is too small to be meaningful in a context where the user is actively seeking it out.

[baranul]

> "It works better for totalitarian regimes" is an argument for not doing it.

The problem is that authoritarianism has been allowed to become attractive to many politicians, because they are allowed to be bought by corporate money, even if it harms their constituents. Rights, freedom, and privacy has become secondary to money and the blind lust for power.

[AnthonyMouse]

That's more of a second order effect but I'm not sure it's wrong.

You have so many twits trying to get away with authoritarian nonsense that they're conditioning people through propaganda to accept authoritarian nonsense. What happens then? More twits trying to get away with authoritarian nonsense.

We need to come up with a better solution to this than the historical norm of things getting so bad that people are finally willing to fight a war over it.

[gjsman-1000]

I keep citing, as an example of this, speed limits.

You can literally break the law by just pushing your foot down harder. It's that easy! Therefore they're pointless.

Or, the TSA. They might have taken away my knife, but putting a rock in a sock and hitting someone in the head is an easy workaround. Therefore it's pointless.

(Arguing that the law is easy to break has no effect on whether the law is a good idea, should exist, or is effective.)

[AnthonyMouse]

> You can literally break the law by just pushing your foot down harder. It's that easy!

How are you distinguishing that from any other law? You can literally break the law against theft by just picking someone's pocket. It's that easy!

But that was never the argument to begin with. They're proposing a law requiring websites to ban users who visit via a VPN. So to begin with we already have a major difference. The people subject to the law (websites) are different than the people who would be trying to circumvent it (users and VPN services).

Meanwhile websites have no actual means to know if someone is using a VPN. There are a zillion VPN services and anyone with an IP address can start one. There is no way for them to comprehensively ban them all. So now what happens? The website bans some VPNs -- they would be doing an incredibly painstaking job if they managed to get three out of every four -- and then the user just tries three or four random VPNs or VPN-equivalents until they find one that works and keeps using that.

At this point you could try to prosecute the website for failing, but then you'd be prosecuting everybody because nobody would actually be able to do it. Whereas if making an attempt is sufficient for compliance then they check their compliance box meanwhile everybody is still bypassing it. Which is why it's useless.

[ACCount37]

TSA really is pointless, and airport "security" in general is an example of what you get when you keep sacrificing real freedom to fight imaginary threats.

If Trump administration was ever serious about reducing government waste, they should have dismantled the TSA.

[JustExAWS]

Are you really unaware of how often plane hijackings use to occur?

[AnthonyMouse]

Plane hijackings used to occur because the SOP was to not resist and try to negotiate with the hijackers for the safe release of the passengers.

After 9/11 the assumption has to be that they're going to fly the plane into a building and kill everyone, so now if you try to hijack a plane all the passengers and crew are going to beat you to death with their fists and shoelaces like their life depends on it, which makes it a lot harder to hijack a plane. The TSA has approximately nothing to do with that.

[netsharc]

TSA is security theater, but I think checks are still necessary. Otherwise people can bring C4 onto planes, blow themselves (and the plane) up in the air, and freak a lot of "Western civilization" out.

The liquids ban really is bullshit though, it's to prevent a fictional movie plot using a bomb mixed up using binary liquids...

[raw_anon_1111]

Yes and how well is that going to work if people can get guns on board? Flight 94 they had knives.

[fn-mote]

Eyeballing the data [1], it looks like total fatalities in the low 1000s, and roughly 20 hijackings per year 1980-2000. Let's value each human fatality at $1M, and - lacking any knowledge about the subject - cargo also at $1M/incident.

That's about $1B in human life loss and $20M/year in cargo.

The 2025 budget for ths TSA was over $10B, so we're spending 10x the loss to prevent it. Value each human life at $10M? Then the total value of lives lost over a 20 year span is about one year of TSA spending.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/airline-hijackings-...

[JustExAWS]

You’re completely ignoring the knock on economic effects of lower confidence in flight safety, liability and the not so hypothetical ability of someone to take over a plane and use it to attack ground targets.

AirTran for instance went out of business because of one crash. If someone blew up a United plane, I can guarantee you that Delta would increase the security before you got on their flights to instill confidence on passengers.

And people act as if airport security and the TSA measures are unique to the US. My wife and I just got into a position where the stars aligned for us to fly a lot post Covid. But during that time the three countries that we have flown out of - London, Costa Rica and Mexico all have the basic same security measure with the slight difference that you can bring liquids on board from LHR because they have newer scanners that supposedly detect explosives.

And it’s not just airlines. We also had to go through the same type of security to get on the “Chunnel” from London to France.

The only thing that is really theatre is taking off your shoes in the US.

[antonkochubey]

The current VSL (value of a statistical life) is approximately $13.1 million, a figure that varies by agency. For example, the Department of Transportation (DOT) uses $13.7 million for its safety standards.

[idiotsecant]

Barely ever? I don't see any evidence to suggest that the TSA has any level of effectiveness in preventing them, either.

[Filligree]

What prevents them is the reinforced cockpit door, and the passengers’ knowledge that they’ll die if they don’t stop the hijackers.

The TSA just happened to be made ac the same time as that changed.

[ACCount37]

And are you aware of what exactly has changed?

One notable change is: reinforced cockpit doors that can't be forced open from the outside easily. Good luck hijacking with that.

But another notable change is that plane crews and passengers all understand now that plane hijacking is a life or death situation, and would fight hijackers to the bitter end.

Which is what happened on the very day of 9/11, on Flight 93.

[JustExAWS]

With reinforced doors - pilots still come out to use the restroom. Flight attendants usually just block the aisle. People will fight back in the case of knives. But how much fighting back dk you think is going to happen if people have guns?

How long do you think it’s going to be before a pilot opens the door if a hijacker starts shooting people?

Airport security is by far not just in America with the only exception in my experience is that other airports don’t make you take your shoes off and some allow liquids in carryon

[thaumasiotes]

Your examples are unlike each other.

What stops people from speeding more than they already do is enforcement. The law isn't doing anything.

But the TSA isn't a law. The TSA is, notionally, the enforcement. And it doesn't do anything either.

So the TSA really is pointless. If you drive around at 30 mph over the limit, you're going to get a ticket, and this traffic cop presence stops people from speeding "too much". If you smuggle explosives onto an airplane, you may die in the crash, but that would have happened regardless of the TSA. The TSA hasn't added any value.

[brookst]

The examples are similar in that they demonstrate that reducing probability is a reasonable goal, and it is a mistake to say anything imperfect is useless.

Your take on TSA seems to be in the imperfect=useless camp. There are good ROI, efficiency, and philosophical reasons to want to abolish TSA, but it seems naive to say there is zero value and their mere existence has not deterred anyone.

[maxbond]

I think the problem with these examples is that they conflate instrumental goals with terminal goals.

People speed to get to a destination faster or to relieve their frustration on the road (street racers notwithstanding). If the cost of speeding increases they'll speed much less, because they're more interested in their terminal goal. There's a lot of elasticity here.

Attacking a plane is a terminal goal for terrorists. If it gets harder, they'll do it somewhat less or pursue softer targets. But there's much less elasticity here. So it's less clear that more security measures will result in fewer deaths.

That doesn't imply the TSA is useless but I think it might be clarifying to the discussion.

[thaumasiotes]

> There are good ROI, efficiency, and philosophical reasons to want to abolish TSA, but it seems naive to say there is zero value and their mere existence has not deterred anyone.

Are you familiar with the TSA's measured efficiency? It's not naive at all to say that, below a certain detection threshold, the deterrence value is zero.

Compare https://www.loweringthebar.net/2015/06/tsa-successfully-pass... .

You'll notice that what I actually said was "[the TSA doesn't] do anything", which is accurate in a context of accident prevention. I didn't call them imperfect. I called them useless directly. It isn't the case that they do some good work and some bad work. They don't do anything that is useful in any degree.

[adgjlsfhk1]

the problem with TSA is that their effectiveness is near 0. every time there have been tests, ~3/4ths of bombs/guns go straight through. you'd get better accuracy out of a monkey pointing at whoever happens to have a banana in their bag

[liveifsh]

I'm from Russia, can confirm that. We are constantly trying to get around these blocks but no tech can help from cutting international connections. Also there is another issue: local browsers (Yandex and Atom from Mail Ru group) are using government certificates by default. That means that https encryption between sites inside the country becomes useless

[imiric]

Unless the government decides to ban all cryptography, or forcefully install their own certificates on every device, it should be possible to avoid any restriction attempts. If they're doing deep packet inspection to detect specific protocols, then those can be tunneled via encrypted protocols they do allow, such as TLS or SSH. This is certainly more inconvenient to use, but not impossible.

If they're blocking all traffic beyond their borders, then that's a separate matter, but usually such restrictions are more annoying than absolute.

[pxc]

Take a look at the tools Chinese people use to evade the national firewall. They're extremely sophisticated, and need to advance all the time because the GFW constantly becomes more sophisticated. There are a lot of encryption technologies that the government also allows to work until they block them at a critical moment. All of the VPNs you've ever heard of in some advertisement on YouTube or whatever are easily and totally blocked in China.

Governments can make evading their censorship very difficult, painful, and risky, if they want to. It can have a huge impact.

[crystal_revenge]

> All of the VPNs you've ever heard of in some advertisement on YouTube or whatever are easily and totally blocked in China.

Have you actually been to China? I was there not long ago traveling around a range of cities and never had trouble with either Mullvad or Astrill having used both hotel and residential networks. I have many friends who have similar experiences. In fact, I've never recalled anyone having trouble getting outside of the great firewall.

[InsideOutSanta]

The last time I was in China a few months ago, I used an off-the-shelf, popular VPN, and it worked perfectly fine.

[bogdan]

You can buy a Hong Kong esim in China that has access to everyrhing. You can use any vpn service and it just works. The only place I had trouble was the airport wifi but shadow proxy works fine. So I don't know what you're talking about

[bluebarbet]

>So I don't know what you're talking about

All this did was to inject venom into an otherwise civil exchange.

[whydoineedthis]

I dont think so. I run a VPN whitelabel and its parent company is based in China.

[rvnx]

Technically it's easy to come around restrictions (for example, where I live, RT.com is fully censored "to protect me").

But from a lawmaker perspective, the topic is not technical.

The question, at the end, is about the enforcement of the punishments that go with circumvention; and in some places there is punishment even when you are "just" trying to circumvent these restrictions.

It's easy to break-in into someone's place. What prevents you from doing it, is the punishment (and potentially ethics), not the physical barrier.

[spwa4]

> It's easy to break-in into someone's place. What prevents you from doing it, is the punishment (and potentially ethics), not the physical barrier.

It's illegal to steal a macbook that has been abandoned on the train. Try leaving yours and see if the more important thing is the physical barrier or ethics/punishment/existence of laws.

[SoftTalker]

The thing is, you're still breaking the original law, which is "you must prove your age to access this content."

Using a VPN, or any other technical workaround you can think of, doesn't negate that the law in your state says you must prove your age to access the content.

States require proof of age to purchase alcohol. You can ask someone who is of age to buy it for you, that doesn't make it legal for you to have it.

[senshan]

>You can ask someone who is of age to buy it for you, that doesn't make it legal for you to have it.

Not true for California, and probably many other states:

[0] https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/laws/minor-in-possessio...

[Lex-2008]

re: SSH - I once heard that in China they can throttle SSH speed so it's usable for terminal work, but not for copying files or browsing web.

[sidewndr46]

TLS and SSH obscure the exact data, not the usage pattern.

[LadyCailin]

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.

[forgotoldacc]

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."

[vinay427]

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.

[LadyCailin]

Exactly. I’m not saying don’t fight this, you should, tooth and nail. But losing doesn’t mean VPNs will stop working.

[nurumaik]

Every country that hasn't begins with same

[estimator7292]

That's a tautology, and not even an interesting one.

[jhrmnn]

Can you name some examples?

[colechristensen]

>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 in China and the USSR... there just never was a phase 2.

That's not quite "this will never happen here", more like premeditated dictatorship that never ended because the ruling class preferred being a ruling class rather than return themselves to "communist paradise".

[mananaysiempre]

If we’re exhuming odious corpses, Lenin did say the first step would be to control the telegraph and telephone exchanges. Control over the spread of information was understood to be crucial even then. (Admittedly in Lenin’s case he was also talking about battlefield coordination inside a city, what with the absence of portable radios.)

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.

[bccdee]

> Karl Marx said that in the first stage of communism there would be a required period of dictatorial control

Not that it particularly matters, but he didn't say that. Marx never set down specific ideas about how a communist or proto-communist society should organize itself. He thought history was a natural progression of inevitable forces and was more interested in establishing the inevitability of communism (ha) than in describing specifically what a post-capitalist society would look like. (Misleadingly, he did use the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat," though not to describe any type of dictatorial government.)

The whole "vanguard party of elites ruling by fiat" thing was Lenin's idea. Lenin though the working class wasn't educated enough to lead itself, so a ruling Communist Party should act as a steward on their behalf. Naturally, this idea was popular with people like Lenin and Mao, since it justified their being elevated to the status of authoritarian dictators.

> more like premeditated dictatorship

Lenin's communist party was, in theory, meant to represent the public. The pitch was never, "time for our prescribed period of temporary authoritarian dictatorship." Like any other political party, the Communist party was supposed to be democratically selected and represent the public. Obviously it quickly became corrupt and snuffed out the democratic elements, but any government is vulnerable to that sort of thing.

No, I think the USSR's descent into authoritarianism was very much an "it won't happen here" phenomenon, save perhaps for the fact that the Tsar's monarchy had only just ended and authoritarianism would have been nothing new to Russia.

[Gud]

Not really, because pre-Soviet Union wasn’t a capitalist society.

Russia and China were barely industrial nations.

[spwa4]

If buying and selling things internationally makes a country capitalist, then Soviet Russia was capitalist. Pre-Soviet Russia was mercantilist, which can be somewhat handwavyly described as capitalism-unless-I-can-kill-you, both between people within a nation and between nations themselves and is still not entirely dead.

[oscaracso]

Buying and selling things internationally does not make a country capitalist.

[Gud]

Well, that is not the definition of capitalism.

[Demiurge]

Russia was primarily an agricultural exporter, but it was most certainly a capitalist society prior to revolution. It bought and sold many things, and was an industrial nation, on par with many others in Europe, with a capacity to build war ships, tanks, artillery, trains and so on. It had other tremendous inequalities, but without factories, without lower officers in the navy and army, without the first revolution where the capitalists took over, there would be no second revolution of the bolsheviks, or soviets.

[colechristensen]

Your hair-splitting argument is missing the point entirely, don't you see that?

[nirui]

It's not just a VPN ban, the word VPN in the context means proxy, and you can setup a proxy with something as basic as a SSH command.

It's basically a restriction on communication, i.e. the government decides who you're allowed to talk to, not just a privacy issue.

[Spooky23]

Not really, that’s just the type the EFF gins up. The problem is the regulation of speech and requiring verification.

The VPN stuff is a misapplication of security “best practices”. Tech companies are amoral and happily facilitate the use of their technology for oppression in other places.

[spwa4]

I would argue it's more accurate to say tech companies take the "old-style" US approach. It's based on the idea that propaganda doesn't actually work. There weren't many actual communists in Russia, it was a dictatorship with mostly prisoners/hostages who were threatened into lying, and knew full well that they were threatened, and after the teenage phase is over, actually start asking "why are we being threatened over this?".

So as soon as they left with little intention to return, they suddenly become the problem that socialists really hate to discuss: ex-Soviets hate socialism. It's like cults, or, if we're honest, there's other repressive groups and repressive ideologies that have loooooooooong lost their any usefulness and really only the repression remains.

In other words, if tech companies show Chinese that non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there, then no amount of CCP censorship will ever actually convince those people that the CCP has good intentions.

Judging by my conversations with Chinese, it's working.

[bccdee]

> There weren't many actual communists in Russia

What's this claim based on?

Hierarchies are fractal; at every level of an ideological authoritarian society, comfort and influence are only granted in exchange for affirming and regurgitating state ideology. Cognitive dissonance forces people who take that deal to choose between losing self-respect and accepting the ideology. I think you'd be surprised how well this works. People always want to believe that they deserve the things they have.

> ex-Soviets hate socialism

Naturally, they change their minds when they leave. There's no longer any psychological incentive to believe. Besides, people who choose to leave have typically already broken with the ideology. You compare it to a cult, but the thing about cults is that the members generally do believe.

> non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there

Life in many authoritarian states is fine for most people. It is what it is; if you don't make a fuss, you can live pretty comfortably. Obviously many dictatorships are not like this, but China is fairly stable.

For almost all of human history, people have lived under authoritarian governments. It's unpleasant to think about, but authoritarianism can be stable and durable. There's no guarantee that democracy wins.

[spwa4]

> Life in many authoritarian states is fine for most people. It is what it is; if you don't make a fuss, you can live pretty comfortably. Obviously many dictatorships are not like this, but China is fairly stable.

I've always found Chinese who left are either rich or not. If they're rich, they've seen other rich suddenly fall out of grace, suddenly "relocate" or outright disappear.

If they're not rich, they've always been miserable in China, and don't want to go back.

[pessimizer]

> there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban.

Ah, the "institutions." I didn't think about those. Very convincing.

[mananaysiempre]

Don’t exaggerate the level of control required. For all that things are bad and getting worse, Russia has not reached the North Korea percolation point where every facet of government control is tied to every other one. (Neither has Russia reached a NK-style total war economy, partly through bureaucratic dysfunction and partly by design; but I digress.) The things that it does are still pretty modular and don’t require $YOURCOUNTRY becoming Russia in its entirety. Hell, London had more outdoor surveillance than Moscow until after Covid. As far as Internet censorship, here’s what the playbook was:

1. Have a dysfunctional court system. (Not a powerless one, mind you; it’s enough that it basically never rule against the government. It would probably even be enough if it never ruled against any of the following.)

2. Mandate page-level blocks of “information harmful to the health and development of children” (I wish I were joking) for consumer ISPs, by court order; of course, that means IP or at least hostname/SNI blocks for TLS-protected websites, we can’t help that now can we. The year is 2012.

3. Gradually expand the scope throughout the following steps. (After couple of particularly obnoxious opposition websites and against an unavoidable background of prostitution and illegal gambling, the next victim, in 2015, was piracy including pirate libraries. Which is why I find the notion of LibGen or Sci-Hub being Russian soft power so risible, and the outrage against Cloudflare not being in the moderation business so naïve.)

4. Make sure the court orders are for specific pieces of content not websites (as they must be if you don’t want the system to be circumventable by trivial hostname hopping), meaning the enforcement agency can find a particularly vague order and gradually start using it for whatever. Doesn’t hurt that the newly-blocked website’s owner will be faced with a concluded case in which they don’t even have standing.

5. Ramp up enforcement against ISPs.

6. Use preexisting lawful intercept infra at ISPs to ramp up enforcement even further. Have them run through the agency-provided daily blacklist, fine the offenders. Any other probe you can get connected to the ISP will work too.

7. Offer ISPs a choice (wink, wink) of routing their traffic through agency-controlled, friendly-contractor-made DPI boxes they will need to buy, promising to release them from some liability. (First draft published 2016, signed into law 2019.)

8. Mandate the boxes.

9. It is now 2021 or so and you’ve won, legally and organizationally speaking, the rest is a simple matter of programming to filter out VPN protocols, WhatsApp calls and such. Pass additional laws mandating blocks of “promotion” of block evasion if you wish, but the whole legal basis thing is a pretence at this point. For instance, you can de facto block YouTube absent any legal order by simply having the DPI boxes make it very slow, a capability not mentioned in any law whatsoever, then cheerfully announce that in the national press.

See how very easy it is? How each legal or technical capability logically follows from very real deficiencies of the preceding ones so even a reasonable court would be disinclined to rule against them? Understand now why I’m furious when reasonable people on this forum defend the desires of their—mostly good and decent!—governments to control the Internet?

(See also how most of this happened before “Russia bad” became the prevailing sentiment, and how most of it went largely unnoticed in the EU and US, aside from a couple of reputable-but-fringe orgs like RSF to whom very few listen because they cry wolf so much? The ECtHR didn’t even get to the cases, IIRC, before the trap snapped shut and Russia was drummed out of the Council of Europe to widespread cheering, making the matter de facto moot.)

You know that road. You know exactly where it ends.

[porphyra]

One time in China (in 2018) I ran my own OpenVPN instance on a Linode VPS in Singapore, and then it got blocked within a couple of days lol. I'm guessing it was deep packet inspection.

[wartywhoa23]

But then VLESS is thriving and the only way to stop this is by enforcing whitelists. Which is not something those scumbags are incapable of, of course.

[hereme888]

Russia is not even remotely similar to the U.S.A. in terms of freedom, rights, and infrastructure.

Politicians will never be able to ban VPNs or vetted e2e encryption (like signal, and now X) in the US. Especially with this strongly pro-American, strongly pro-privacy admin and Supreme Justices on the watch.

[bccdee]

> Especially with this strongly pro-American, strongly pro-privacy admin

lol

"pro-privacy" and "pro-cop" are diametrically opposed, and Republicans pick "pro-cop" every time. And "pro-American" doesn't mean anything; it's a marketing term.

> Supreme Justices on the watch.

Have you been keeping up with their rulings? The Roberts court is completely spineless. They do whatever the administration wants and justify it post-hoc. In their shadow docket rulings, they don't even bother with justifications.

[gilli]

Tell me another joke..

[hereme888]

Here's one: How successful was the combined efforts of politicians + 3-letter agencies + universities, at banning computer encryption in the past? Not successful at all, hahaha.

[bccdee]

Banning encryption proved infeasible, so they just switched to programs like PRISM instead. That was very successful.

[hereme888]

Let me explain a bit further:governments lost the battle to ban code. Since then, no code can really get banned. And, nowadays we have vetted p2p VPNs even if all world govs try to ban vpn companies, and no prism or quantum computing programs can bypass their post-quantum e2e implementation.

[bccdee]

Code is already banned by anti-circumvention laws.¹ I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard, legislatively, to have VPNs classified as a tool for circumventing "digital locks."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention#Distributio...

[drysine]

>simply cut international connections (as is already practiced temporarily and locally)

No, international connections are not cut.

The mobile internet gets cut locally and temporarily when the Ukraine attacks Russian cities trying to terrorize population. Several essential or popular Russian services are whitelisted. All the rest of Russian internet is as inaccessible as foreign servers.

[josephg]

> The mobile internet gets cut locally and temporarily when the Ukraine attacks Russian cities trying to terrorize population.

It’s hard to feel sympathetic when Russian bombs have been “accidentally” hitting Ukrainian civilians since day 1 of the war.

Has the war been affecting civilian life in Russia much? I hear Ukraine has been targeting the Russian power grid lately.

[drysine]

Why did you put "accidentally" in quotes?

[mopsi]

The Kherson human safari leaves no other option to anyone. When Russian drone pilots have nothing better to show to their fans on the social media to raise funds, they are attacking men fixing a roof of a small home, elderly women returning from the city with grocery bags, people waiting at a bus stop, and in case you want to classify all of the former as disguised soldiers, they are attacking even stray dogs.

[drysine]

>Russian drone pilots have nothing better to show to their fans on the social media to raise funds

You sure must have links to this social media, right?

[yatopifo]

The name is Ukraine. There is no “the”.