Are the pillars of the state falling?

[Mr Khan]

SamuelRSmith said:

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"

 

 

This assumes that we want to have the internet at all, as opposed to a completely private, state-maintained network, which they could then grant the special interests access to. Shut down the DNS Root servers and the average person is completely lost. Hit other key points and the whole thing comes tumbling down. Would all communication be killed? No, but the whole thing would become a massive excercise in frustration.

China's case is a little similar, because they want the fruits of capitalism without the messiness of civil and political freedoms, and simply can't reconcile the two, leading to systems that are accessible enough to then be undermined by comparatively wealthy Chinese. If the government got it in their head that the internet as a whole was more of a liability than an asset, they could largely crush it

In Iran's case (though this wouldn't work as well for other countries) who is going to set up cross-border relays of a "radio free europe" type? The gulf monarchies? Iraq? Azerbaijan? Afghanistan? Turkmenistan? Pakistan? Likely not.

and yes, calling "them" (being the people of the government) "psychopaths and tyrants" is pretty vitriolic, considering most of the folks you dislike are just technocrats, perfectly sane and relatively benign people