| Mr Khan said: You've really become more vitriolic in the last half-year, haven't you? Ultimately, the government's lack of control over the internet is only because A: the old guys that run the government still don't quite "get" the internet, and B: The profits of the internet's current relative freedom outweigh the costs (at the end of the day, even the big government guys know that piracy really isn't that huge of a deal). The question of using the internet to "fight the power" is much like the question of using guns to fight the power. In both cases, if the state really cared, they'd fuck your shit up six ways from sunday. Iran is actually a decent case study in this. They've blocked VPN access and are in the process of cutting the entire country off from the world-wide-web (having an Iran Wide Web as a replacement). How well the Iranian people will be able to circumvent these changes will demonstrate how the balance of power will tip vis-a-vis the internet when a state really decides that the freedoms of the net are too much of a burden. |
I just want what's best for people, and I'm optimistic that we'll be close to that within the next few years, if that's your definition of "vitriolic", then, yeah, sure.
It sounds like you don't quite "get" the Internet, either, and controlling it is not as simple as you may think it is. Short of ripping up the entire infrastructure, and raiding every home to remove all the network components, there is literally no way that a Government can effectively do anything to the Internet. Considering how much the special interests that fund most Governments are now hooked to it.. it's not going to happen (you think Wall Street's going to give up algo-trading any time soon?)
Look at China. Over last Christmas, they deployed their "next gen Great Firewall" that was supposed to be all-powerful and even harder to crack. My girlfriend put that to the test when she went home to visit her parents in Feb. On the car journey between the airport and her home, she was on Facebook. Through her phone.
As for Iran. Iran didn't "block VPN", that's impossible. They just blocked popular VPN providers. Blocking proxy servers and VPN providers is kinda like trying to fight bed bugs in a world where DDT is banned. For everyone you kill, 10 more pop up. You say that they're deploying some kind of "iran wide web". If this comes to fruition, it'll be pointless within a month. First, the IWW would become too large to monitor for Iran within an incredibly short period of time, second, nothing's stopping activists from essentially creating little portals, or for people beyond the border to broadcast connections across to Iran, and for activists within Iran from putting up relayers.
These are just ideas I've come up with from the top of my head, if the IWW gets deployed, there will be several million Iranians trying to subvert it every single day, as well as people from all over the world.
"I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: "O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!" God granted it." - Voltaire.
""We're all standing in front of this mountain, and it's called Government. We don't know what to do with it, we can scream at it and say 'go away, go away, go away'... it's not getting us very far.
But some very clever people in the private sector have figured out how to dig underneath it, go around it, scale it with special new tools. That's what I think of the digital revolution" -- Jeffrey Tucker"
