I don't want to live in a world where the next superpower blocks websites as they suit them, suppress freedom of speech and journalism, exploit prisoners, religious segregation camps, employing social dystopian systems and is led by unimpeachable, unchallenged leader who has elected himself with a 1000-0 vote as perpetual president of the country.
It is sad to see that the rest of the world has to bend down to serve this repressive state. I've been to China and the people there are the same as us - I despise the party, not the people. The next generation that grows up there will not have the perspective of what it means to live in a free democratic country.
Please don't post political/national rants to HN. They are all the same, making them tedious, and they lead to flamewars, which produce even-less-interesting scorched earth. None of this serves intellectual curiosity, which is what this site is for.
I really don't understand this line of thinking.. if someone (whether it's a country, company, person) engage in evil behavior then of course we should do everything possible to dissuade others from supporting them until they change. It's possible for this site to serve intellectual curiosity without directly supporting an evil regime that put Muslims in concentration camps, engage in medical genocide (organ harvesting), and all sorts of human rights violations.
It gets simpler if you understand the purpose of this site: to gratify intellectual curiosity. If there's no new information, curiosity can't get gratified. People bashing each other with political sticks is the ultimate in no-new-information. Nationalistic arguments doubly so. And a comment like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18627641 is a black hole of this kind of thing.
Here's another way to look at it: being right, such as when criticizing something evil or dumb, isn't enough. For a comment to be a good one here, it needs to lead to good conversation. A comment's value on HN is the sum of the expected values of the paths it leads to.
Did spectramax's comment contain any new information for you? Do you think it contained new information for anyone? Judging by the responses, that's not the case. Posting what can be summed up as "The government of country X is evil." predictably leads to comparisons with the US government, all of which is just noise. It's certainly not going to dissuade anyone from supporting them, since nobody thinks of their actions as supporting them. If you actually want to change someone's behavior, you're going to need a different kind of argument and make sure to avoid flame-baiting.
It doesn't need to contain new information in order to be relevant. Their behavior may not affect you but I can guarantee that it affects other people, such as myself. I believe doing what's the morally right thing to do is more important than earning a few extra bucks.
> Their behavior may not affect you but I can guarantee that it affects other people, such as myself.
Assuming "their behavior" means that of the Chinese government, then I can assure you that I have also been affected.
> I believe doing what's the morally right thing to do is more important than earning a few extra bucks.
And nobody is going to disagree with that. Nobody who earns a few bucks thinks that they're morally in the wrong, but does it anyway. And it's not because they think that the Chinese government isn't evil either. They simply don't see a connection between what they do and what the government does. So arguing that the government is evil doesn't change anyone's mind, because they already agree with you on that.
You'd do better by focusing on the direct consequences of specific actions. E.g. if a Western company storing user data on Chinese servers led to the arrest of an innocent person, that's a much stronger argument than saying that you shouldn't use Chinese servers because the government is known to arrest innocent people. Otherwise the connection just isn't there.
I agree, but my first impression was that you were talking about the US! I live in Iran and many sites are simply blocked for all people here because of sanctions. I know there are reasons and such for these sanctions, but as you said people are the same and not all those reasons might be valid. Anyways, blocked sites here include many programming resources including Java, Go and Android, many services like Slack, and even lots of sites hosted on GCP.
Also for most of people here, "unimpeachable, unchallenged leader" resembles Trump who cancelled agreements like JCOPA or Bush who atacked our neighbour countries. I'm not arguing that any of those actions are right or wrong, but many people are badly affected by the US more than they are affected by any dictator.
>It is sad to see that the rest of the world has to bend down to serve this repressive state.
To be honest it is not our place to tell the Chinese people how to govern themselves, that is for them to figure out.
I don't see how we're 'serving' China. The US is already in an open trade war with the country, and many other regions are growing weary, but it is not up to us to interfere in the country's internal affairs.
More groups of people cope with restrictions, more momentum towards doing so; less protest against it.
it's a pretty simple idea. If you work within a framework, you're complicit by default.
You can look at it two ways : You're helping the folks in China; or you're helping the world's largest walled garden remain that way by adding content.
Perhaps, developers who have taken a moral stance should put a notice on their websites/services against authoritarian governments, when accessed from those countries.
It’s better to put some vpn resources on their websites. Don’t tell people what is “bad” like authoritarian governments do; let them see what’s beyond the firewall and decide for themselves.
I agree, instead of "giving in", we as technologists should take the opportunity to provide some context as to why our website is not working as intended.
But, all bets are all if you lose significant share of your business as morality takes a backseat when it comes to profitability, market share and business goals.
the internet will become impossible to censor (for everyone - it’s already easy for the rich to avoid censorship) when satellite connections become cheaper / faster / more accessible
In many countries sending something over a satellite requires registration (which can be used for control subsequently), or even a license. Unless it will be a type of technology which is very hard to block, and locate, I wouldn't expect it to beat censorship.
They already do it: first of all, by controlling of import/sales of equipment, and by incentivizing citizens to tip police. Also, there are frequency control inspections which keep maps of radiotransmitting activity. It's easy to spot any new transmitter.
That only works with a small number of transmitters. If Samsung or Apple released a phone with native satellite default support, it would be impossible to police.
To be sold in a particular country every model needs certification which obviously may be a very complicated thing if that country's authorities are not happy with counter-censorship capabilities. Moreover, in many countries (including AFAIK Russia, and Chine) every shop selling satcom needs a separate certification. I am not sure Samsung, or Apple will ever risk to invest in something which cannot be legally exported to a large number of countries.
Finally, you should not underestimate how far a state can go to keep the status quo. Did we hear already:
- What, they will check every phone?
- What, they will demand our passwords?
- What, they will slow down all out-of-country traffic?
- What, they will block millions if websites, and look into every network packet?
All of these were asked sarcastically, yet every point is happening now on a massive scale.
Actually, in late 90s there were a lot of talk about 'new era', because 'internet made censorship impossible'. Hold my beer! - said state bureaucracy everywhere.
Of course, technology can sometimes leapfrog gov't capabilities, but as a rule it's a very temporary thing. Censorship is a political, and cultural problem, and it needs political, and cultural pressure to be resolved.
Btw, I don't think it only works with a small number of transmitters. In the UK they has been taxing TV watching, and managed to have a huge fleet of specially equipped vans cruising streets, identifying where are TV sets (and it's harder task then scanning for transmissions), and checking addresses against national registry. Nowadays, I suppose methods are different due to internet broadcasting, but it seems they are still capable of taking pennies for it quite successfully. FWIW, state officials love massive budget disbursements, creation, and expanding of departments, and they can use modern technologies for large-scale operations too.
Perhaps the open Internet is the aberration here. Look at my post history - while I’d like it to be otherwise I honestly believe the Internet as we know it will Balkanize/fragment - it’s a matter of time.
>To be honest, I'd feel more comfortable using Chinese Internet, because at least their censorship is predictable, relatively fair, and only concerned with preventing the spread of fake news.
If the Chinese internet isn't that bad, then Google isn't bad for collaboration, and then the indictment of the West doesn't work. Likewise if Google is bad for wanting to turn in people to the Chinese government, then China is bad for having people turned in to them.
Even then, there's a certain irony to saying, "they're stamping my boot into my face, but it's not so bad because they're not pretending they aren't." In the US the government had to pretend that the NSA wasn't really breaking the law, because the people still have some power and the law some meaning.
Now, if you want to say, "they're both evil," fine. Evil is a binary thing, so it naturally sidesteps the argument about who is stepping on your toes and who is sawing them off. Still, Chariman Xao sure is holding a sharp saw over there...
If you forget that there are degrees of the problem you will not be able to find your way towards improvement. It's like gradient descent in optimization.
> Now, if you want to say, "they're both evil," fine. Evil is a binary thing, so it naturally sidesteps the argument about who is stepping on your toes and who is sawing them off. Still, Chariman Xao sure is holding a sharp saw over there...
I should have used a sarcasm tag. YES, I am saying they're both evil. And I'm disgusted that American's are being just as bad as the Chinese government. And if I must choose, I'd rather have the Chinese style of honest authoritarianism than the smug and dishonest authoritarianism that is encroaching on the west.
I'm not a Chinese shill. I used to be proud of my country. I used to actually admire Google. And now they are licking the boots of the Chinese government.
There are almost certainly innocent people who are dying in prison camps because of indifference, if not outright assistance of our Silicon Valley robber barons. When American corporations assisted in other genocides during WWII, we didn't invite their executives to give freaking TED talks.
And the smugness. At least the oil executives and weapons dealers who funded both sides of bloody wars didn't preach to us about how woke they were while they were doing it.
And on top of everything else, a large part of the tech community celebrates censorship now.
So please forgive me for seeing hypocrisy. (that was sarcasm).
This comparison is just like comparing apple to orange to me.
When a company blocks you, you could just voice your opinion on another platform. It's an open internet afterall. But if it's the government, the center of all power, that blocks you, you just have no other way.
That is the difference of having and not having freedom of speech.
If the people are really concerned about Google's and Apple's business with Saudi Government, they have the freedom to go for the third option. It may seem difficult but it's totally possible and viable. But under an authoritarian regime like China, even the freedom choice is an illusion.
To be fair, there's a grain of truth in this downvoted comment. Western elites increasingly turning in favor of censorship using blurry definitions of "hate speech", "extremist materials", "terrorist propaganda", "fake news" to persuade societies to surrender free speech. It nevertheless doesn't make Chinese censorship less ugly.
I was afraid that my comment will turn into USA vs. China. or _____ vs. China. That is all we do here on HN. Every single time anyone criticizes China, there is a preposterous tendency to "soften" the criticism by showing examples of other countries doing one or two things - pick and choose your favorite thing.
I am honestly frustrated with openly criticizing a regime, doesn't matter who, without resorting to comparisons. I almost put a disclaimer on my comment to avoid rat-hole'ing into ____ vs China comments.
It is sad to see that the rest of the world has to bend down to serve this repressive state. I've been to China and the people there are the same as us - I despise the party, not the people. The next generation that grows up there will not have the perspective of what it means to live in a free democratic country.