[lebuffon]

India is kind of cute.

In the late 90s I attended a Telephone industry conference while working for a telephony test equipment company. A rep. from the Indian government gave a talk on their telephone system regulations. During the question period I got up and asked how India was dealing with voice over internet protocol (VOIP). With a straight face the speaker replied "We will not allow it". :-)

[kube-system]

And it's also cute when people imply the internet is unregulateable. There are plenty of tools that countries use to regulate internet traffic. They can require ISPs to DPI the traffic and block it. They can MITM traffic. They can shut off the internet entirely. They can throw people in jail. etc.

This stuff happens in many places, including in India.

[gruez]

>And it's also cute when people imply the internet is unregulateable. There are plenty of tools that countries use to regulate internet traffic. They can require ISPs to DPI the traffic and block it. They can MITM traffic. They can shut off the internet entirely. They can throw people in jail. etc.

I don't think there's any country that can keep a lid on the internet. The best they can do are leaky blocks (china's gfw is probably the best in the world, but still quite leaky), or complete shutdowns (eg. iran).

[SoftTalker]

As I understand it, China's GFW is intentionally leaky, balancing as much control as they can get away with but not enough to forment open revolt. As with a lot of things, the best control is not total control.

[inigyou]

Also not revealing their capabilities. During normal times, some VPNs work. Whenever there is a protest in Beijing, suddenly, none of them work any more.

[infinite_spin]

except this implies total control, and a willingness to use that control to gaslight your citizens into believing they have some control

[inigyou]

Neither of those is a problem for any government on the planet, I promise.

[iamnothere]

They could even just shoot people for using the internet! It’s hopeless. Anyone who wants freedom should probably just give up now before it’s too late.

[kube-system]

I'm not suggesting people should give up, I'm suggesting that some countries can resort to doing very uncute things when faced with noncompliance.

When someone with the monopoly on the use of force says they will not allow something, that isn't something cute to ignore, it is serious.

[iamnothere]

Fair enough, yes people should be ready to fight for their rights (physically if necessary). The tone of your post came across as an attempt to demoralize. Intentional or not, my comment was a pushback against that.

[inigyou]

Reminds me of FSF versus some Uyghur. Summary:

FSF: if you use PGP your communications will be unreadable by outsiders.

Some Uyghur: bruh, the government assigned a Han Chinese person to live in my house and watch me whenever I use technology.

[hootz]

There are workarounds for all of those things up until the point of you suffering violence for just using any encryption. But if you are at that point, then your country is completely fucked.

[kube-system]

It is trivial for a law to simply ban workarounds. The vast majority of countries can and do censor the internet in some ways, and they all use violence to compel compliance with it. The only thing that varies is the extent to which it is censored.

[inigyou]

Then the question gets much more political: how to make the government prefer not to shoot me for using encryption? There are some strategies that are better discussed with e.g. communists than with tech nerds, as they have more experience and thinking on this as it becomes primarily a political thing not a tech thing.

One example - the government would lose infinite respect if it martyrs some normal guy who bought business supplies with foreign (TLS-encrypted) online banking. So it won't do that. So how far can that line be pushed? i.e. what is the least normal thing the government won't punish?

[golemotron]

Reminds me of Elon's answer to the question of what various countries can do about StarLink: "They can shake their fists at the sky."

[kube-system]

India's solution is that they put anyone who has a starlink ground station in jail.

[josefresco]

Starlink can be jammed.

[kristjank]

Jamming can be defeated quite funnily, by digging a pit and putting the antenna at the bottom of it.

[josefresco]

Thanks for sharing, very interesting: https://www.technology.org/2023/08/01/did-russia-learn-to-ja...

[close04]

Or fly a plane or drone overhead and see [0] where the terminals are. After a few fines most people would decide it’s not worth the risk.

I remember how the Uber rollout worked in Berlin. Uber said they don’t need to comply with anything the city asked for and enjoyed their position in the safety of an ocean away so the local authorities instituted eye watering fines for drivers caught providing Uber rides. Uber decided to comply.

[0] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/quadrf-can-spot-drone...

[iamnothere]

Depends on how many terminals there are and whether or not the neighborhoods they are in are sympathetic to the operators. It’s very easy to move them.

Resistance against totalitarianism is a duty.

[close04]

I wasn’t thinking of totalitarianism but rather a country objecting to Starlink operating on its territory. This is why I brought up Berlin and fines, not the secret police breaking in your house at night.

After living under one of those totalitarian regimes, all Incan say is that everything sounds easy in an HN comment typed from the safety of a democratic society.

[mothballed]

I can see how that worked in Berlin. In USA or someplace with a healthier culture of resistance that would fail laughably. Americans will drive with no license, registration, in cars they've stolen back from the repo man because they refuse to pay anything to anyone. When my car was totalled by an illegal alien, the police didn't even show up, wisely because they were surely driving without license, identity documents, insurance, registration, or any sort of recoverable assets or any way to punish them but to throw them in an overflowing jail. You could try fining them but it would be like trying to draw blood from a stone. I suppose could try to jail them, but you'd find our jails are already full, and we already let violent criminals out on bail.

In much of the world including USA poor people will slang crack for $5 under threat of life in jail and fines higher than they could ever hope to pay. Suffice to say there's an endless line of people willing to uber for roughly crack slinging wages without the risk of life imprisonment even if the fines are as bad -- because their alternatives are worse.

[ted_dunning]

Albania and Georgia have much healthier culture of resistance than the US.

The US has almost entirely lost this culture except for short moments in isolated places. Minneapolis is nearly a proof by exception in this. Very, very few people need to be detained or killed to get the mass of Americans to stay inside and self-censor. Much less is required to get businesses to put their head down and play nice with the government.

[inigyou]

Let American police crush any car violating traffic rules into a cube, and then see how quickly people obey traffic laws.

[close04]

I think you wanted the opportunity to beat that “healthy culture of resistance” drum. Every tweaker, every inbred, every starved person acting out of desperation is Rosa Parks now.

You name things and decide that‘s “resistance”. People break the law because there’s no real consequence or because they just have nothing to lose. They’re not “resisting”, they’re surviving. The US society decided that a large class of people will be forced to operate at that level their whole life and are incentivized to do worse by the insane punishment model applied only to them.

The only people doing the “resisting” in the US are those who can afford a good lawyer. Everyone else does what the cracks in the system allow, or what they need to do out of desperation.

No German Uber driver is desperate enough to risk their whole livelihood especially for that meager payoff. Most civilized countries make sure that people have something to lose which will keep people acting straight rather than always act on desperation. Depending on your goal, having people exercise self restraint works better than restraining them with tasers, chokeholds, and bullets to the back.

> because their alternatives are worse.

Ah, ok. So not “a healthy culture of resistance” but more “desperation because the country made sure that’s driving them”.

[everfrustrated]

Why do you think China is putting lots of satellites into space.... All those tons into orbit isn't for the lolz.

[Terr_]

That stops working when the jamming is coming from a hostile satellite that's also in the sky.

[mothballed]

It would be easier to shoot it out of the sky than try and jam a whole country from starlink

[verdverm]

Putting aside the geopolitics of satellite destruction, we're likely moving to the realm of microwave based disablement instead of kinetic. It's the thing that can scale and provide some plausible deniability while the numbers are low.

[inigyou]

Might be easier to jam the uplink. Just modify some starlink units to transmit nonsense and place them around the country.

[satvikpendem]

That's funny considering the scale of WhatsApp now in the country.

[inigyou]

As I understand it's primarily an anti spam thing. They will allow apps to spam you but the telephone network is sacred.

[inigyou]

That is still the case. I looked up this law. It is strictly forbidden to ever connect the POTS network to an IP network. End of story.

[toast0]

Lots of countries ban voip in some way or another. Not allowed to connect to the PSTN. Disrupted by licensed ISPs based on traffic inspection. Large vendors yelled at. Etc.

[em-bee]

isn't phone tech itself digital over the internet nowadays just like VOIP if it isn't using VOIP directly?

on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly.

[toast0]

Yes, but PSTN using voip is paying all the telecom fees and taxes and respecting the government surveillance mandates which is what the Indian Government is concerned about.

> on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly.

Not so much in countries where it's banned and the ban is enforced.

[inigyou]

It's not the tech they care about, it's the network structure.

[em-bee]

sure, but i as a user care about the tech, and what i am trying to say is that VOIP as tech for endusers is no longer interesting because we use video chat now.

[inigyou]

Not on the PSTN you don't. The PSTN is a parallel internet whose main difference is that you need a verified identity to connect to it. It also simulates circuit switching and costs a lot.

[em-bee]

i don't get your point. that does not matter. what i mean is that as a user i care about the tech that runs on my phone, not how the connection is made. i don't make phone calls anymore. nowadays everything is done with video chat. neither PSTN nor VOIP offer that, so their use will eventually decline unless they start offering video. phone numbers are also a privacy nightmare. they need to be replaced with something that allows me to pre-authorize who can call me. this is unlikely to happen any time soon, but the point is that VOIP in particular is hardly relevant except in a few specific use cases.

[SoftTalker]

voip is pretty effectively banned, or at least marginalized, in the USA. Can't use a Google Voice number for most payment services, for example.

[inigyou]

Does jmp.chat work?