[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.