And cue the rise of self-hosted VPNs. 1 click to get a VPS instance, install VPN software, and make a connection. Automatically destroy the instance with another click or after a certain amount of time.
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 the tools, but once the tools are built, that future becomes almost unavoidable.
When the ban happens it'll be really easy to implement without requiring only government approved hosts or any such distributed measures requiring enforcement. Certificate Authorities.
There are just a handful of corporations get to decide which websites are visitable every 90 days. Put a bit of legal pressure on the corporate certificate authorities and there's instant centralized control of effectively the entire web thanks to corporate browser HTTPS-only defaults and HTTP/3 not being able to use self-signed certs for public websites.
The full list of CAs with root certs in corporate browsers is fairly short. That's all that matters. If your CA isn't in $browser/$os cert root store then it's not going to be useful.
$ ls -lathr /etc/ssl/certs/ | wc -l
265
And of those far fewer are going to actually be giving out certs to human people. CAs are the chokepoint but I acknowledge that saying 'a handful' was hyperbolic. A few dozen.
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.
For sure. And the US looked very different under McCarthyism too, so there’s even precedent. But my point is that there are other prerequisites that have to happen first.
Why is that important? Sounds like saying "well before winter comes, autumn must come first". Yeah duh, so what? Winter is still coming, if anyone cares about it.
Because if you overreact to an issue, then that can and will be used to dismiss your arguments entirely, and the general public can more easily be swayed against you.
Non sequitur. Pointing out an intermediate step changes nothing about how bad or good the issue is or how appropriate or inappropriate the reaction is.
I feel like that'd take a level of surveillance that's technically unsustainable. But then again, sustainability isn't a consideration when it stands in the way of "better" control.
AI is the perfect low cost tool to enable that. Plantir knows this and has been making strategic moves to build this
Seems quite achievable and sustainable to me
Every human carries dense compute and sensors with them. If they don't they stand out while still surrounded by dense compute and sensors held by others at all times
Not nice to think about but it is the reality we are moving towards – vote accordingly
Voting doesn’t help. You need to win hearts and minds, and the synergy of resources available between the trillion dollar industries like AI and Marketing and you makes that a losing battle too.
People want this stuff. People want ring doorbells, they want age verification, they want government control. Think of the children/criminals/immigrants.
Voting doesn't work because people are not smart enough to think multiple steps ahead of people who are professionals at this.
Voting doesn't work because everybody votes on everything, not just people who understand the subject matter.
Voting doesn't work because it's impossible to express nuanced choice - you vote for a candidate or party as a whole, not on specific policies. The number of parties is much smaller than the number combinations of policies so some opinions can't be expressed at all.
Those are arguments why voting does not produce a perfect outcome. That's different than "voting doesn't work". Using arguments like yours nothing can ever work.
Society is complex and there will always be someone somewhere that can influence an outcome where he/she doesn't understand the subject matter. Hence, nothing works and can ever work.
"Let's just give up" is the only conclusion I can see. Hardly useful.
Can you give an example of something that works by your standards?
It does not work to produce a society where people are actually the ones holding power and where laws side with those in the right - i.e. the current legal system anywhere does not represent a consistent moral system and is not even close.
You're right it's too strong as a general statement but it was in response to a specific issue - those in power wanting to take yet another bit of power from the general population - (this time and in this particular country) by banning VPNs.
People always vote based on the most pressing issues to them - immigration, taxes, abortions, LGBT rights (random list which is different in every country). Minor issues fall between the cracks until they become so bad they become pressing to enough people.
> "Let's just give up" is the only conclusion I can see. Hardly useful.
Then you're reading it wrong. I listed specific issues - the solution is to find solutions to those issues.
Here's a couple suggestions I'd like to see gamed out and tested:
- The right to vote not as a function of age but a test of reasoning ability and general knowledge.
- Limiting the amount of time a person can perform politics (including professional lobbying) to 5-10 years.
- Splitting laws into areas of expertise and potentially requiring tests to prove understanding to gain the right to vote on those areas for both the general population and politicians.
- Replacing FPTP with more nuanced voting systems.
These are just a few random suggestions described briefly. When I do this, people start nitpicking and then I have to reply with obvious solutions to surface issues - I encourage everyone to instead think how to make this work (yes, in an adversarial environment) instead of just trying to shoot it down.
Democracy is a complicated difficult thing. If you think you can fix it after a 5 minute reflection, think some more, read more. It's way, way harder than that. A lot of smart people have thought a lot about it, and clearly good ideas are in very short supply. Think more humbly about the subject, please.
Feels like they'd make that illegal, and enforce it by checking the CCTV footage for the person who planted that mini computer, then arresting that person.
Consider SoftEther, which is VPN over Ethernet wrapped in HTTPS. It's open-source. It has a server discovery site called VPNGate. You can host a server to let somebody else use, then use a server soneone else is hosting.
We're really only missing a few things before there's decentralized VPN over HTTPS that anyone in the world can host and use, and it would be resistant to all DPI firewalls. First, a user-friendly mobile client. Second, a way to broadcast and discover server lists in a sparse and decentralized manner, similar to BitTorrent (or we may be able to make use of the BT protocol as is), and we'd have to build such auto-discovery and broadcasting into the client. Third, make each client automatically host a temporary server and broadcast its IP to the public server lists when in use.
SoftEther isn't Tor, it's just like modernized client-server L2TP style VPN, same deal as WireGuard. The volunteer public gateway thing is completely optional and voluntary add-on.
The reason it exists is just that it predates WireGuard by ~decade.
The risk surely exists if you decide to run their gate service:
"After you activate the VPN Gate Service, anyone can connect a VPN connection to your computer, and access to any hosts on the Internet via your computer"
"When you are running the VPN Gate Relaying Function on your company's network, then any person's communication to Internet hosts will be relayed via your company's network."
It's no different from a coffee shop providing an open WiFi, or an ISP providing you with a fiber connection. What people do on it is their problem, not yours. Their web traffic is wrapped in another layer of HTTPS, not in plaintext you can read. Most traffic is not criminal traffic, you're not any more likely to be the exit node for a criminal than you are to purchase something from a criminal in real life. That waitress you just tipped at the restaurant? Might've been a murderer. In either case, you don't know that you've dealt with a criminal. You providing the exit node is like a transaction: you're "paying" for the VPN service by helping run the service.
The point of all this is to make it so that governments can't pin down the IP of any client without expending significant resources. It makes mass surveillance, control, and prosecution prohibitively expensive. Law enforcement would still be able to trace suspects through the hops with their rich arsenal of backdoors, exploits, and clues in the physical world, just not without significant effort and therefore expenses. So they will only be able to pursue criminals in a targeted manner, which is how law enforcement in a free society is supposed to work.
The decentralized VPN service can only work if clients are also servers, otherwise there will be too many people who use the service without contributing to it, resulting in a tragedy of the commons.
The regular SoftEther client server software doesn't have that feature. The VPN Gate features are the features of VPN Gate variant that you're trying to intentionally mixing up with. The regular server still comes with free dynamic DNS that does nothing other than letting you and your approved users access your own server from the Internet and nobody else.
Technically such a mobile client already "exists". I've been working on a cross-platform "super app", which is essentially just a Python REPL, but a key design is that components/controls of the UI framework that hosts it can be returned as a result.
I did this for years during the early 2010s, but given the IP ranges of most the major VPS players are widely known, many sites and services now just block them outright. It got to the stage I had to stop doing it. I suspect it has only gotten worse now many sites are trying to prevent scraping for AI training as well.
If your primary focus is just reaching region blocked content, Self hosted VPNs can work great if you have access to a residential IP in your target country- I've taken advantage of family member's domestic connections instead of VPSes now, as I was lucky enough to have family in the regions I wanted. Devices like the Apple TV can function as a Tailscale exit node too, which greatly simplified deployment.
Tailscale makes this trivial, which is why I'm worried about governments starting to block the Tailscale control servers. Which I think China already does.
I don't know if Tailscale has any plans to make their service more censorship resistant, but I hope they do.
