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China Tells Carriers To Block Access to Personal VPNs By February (bloomberg.com)
China's government has told telecommunications carriers to block individuals' access to virtual private networks by Feb. 1, people familiar with the matter said, thereby shutting a major window to the global internet. From a report: Beijing has ordered state-run telecommunications firms, which include China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, to bar people from using VPNs, services that skirt censorship restrictions by routing web traffic abroad, the people said, asking not to be identified talking about private government directives. The clampdown will shutter one of the main ways in which people both local and foreign still manage to access the global, unfiltered web on a daily basis. China has one of the world's most restrictive internet regimes, tightly policed by a coterie of government regulators intent on suppressing dissent to preserve social stability. In keeping with President Xi Jinping's "cyber sovereignty" campaign, the government now appears to be cracking down on loopholes around the Great Firewall, a system that blocks information sources from Twitter and Facebook to news websites such as the New York Times and others.
President Xi should study his people's history. Every dynasty eventually loses the 'mandate of heaven'.
Whenever something unpleasant happens to human rights online, a lot of people shout, "Just use a VPN, and all your problems are solved!"
In a small way, they're not wrong. But this misses the big picture: VPNs are few and easy for centralized authorities to block. The ultimate answer cannot be narrow and fragile circumvention measures. It has to be a robust, decentralized, and authoritarian-resistant internet architecture. It needs to be all-or-nothing: either authoritarians block the entire internet, or none of it, because all content is safe from snoops and they cannot tell the things that please them, from the things that displease them.
VPNs are at best a fragile workaround for a systemic problem. And what's happening in China can easily come to the USA and Europe, because terrorists and because the children. The technical community has to take back the internet, before it's too late, or we will have lost the most important revolution in human communication to happen since the printing press to authoritarians.
Wait till their real estate bubble pops. It's going to be ugly as fuck.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
...what are they afraid of them learning on the open internet?
Wow, you sure are opinionated for a topic you know fuckall about.
Marx believed communism wouldn't be viable unless it was part of a democracy. It was later communists who came up with the "state" owning things "on behalf of" the workers - and while they were the ones who took over the Soviet Union and then spread their version world-wide they weren't even the majority until some 20 years AFTER the Russian revolution. The majority of communists were democrats or anarchists - whose version had no state at all, merely the ownership of the means of production vested in the actual workers in the form of coops.
Such anarcho-communists ran Andalusia in Spain for 20 years (and it was a successful, industrial city. George Orwell fought on their side in the Spanish civil war and described them as the closest thing to a perfect society he had ever witnessed - and a society where there was no hunger, poverty or suffering). Nor an overbearing state - in fact, no state whatsoever.
Communism, capitalism and socialism are all, really, collective nouns for dozens of different philosophies (each) which contradict each other on many key points. In each situation - only having one thing actually in common.
In capitalism the means of production are owned by investors ("capitalists"), and in communism it is owned by the workers. This is the only part that applies to all versions of either. Socialism was originally a synonym for what came to be called communism, then Marx defined it as the end-state communism is supposed to one day achieve, currently it's best thought of as "capitalism but with a rock-solid social safety net", another word for "welfare state" as that's how it's mostly used these days.
So yes, communism is actually quite rife in the US - and government has nothing to do with it. America's largest carpet factory, and largest robotics factory, and LA's largest bakery are all worker-owned coops. A worker-owned coop is the very definition of communism - and everyone of those workers will tell you they are MORE free than they would be in any other company since, in this company, they get an equal share of the profits (it doesn't go to outside investors - it all goes to the people who actually did the productive work that produced the profits), and they all get a vote in management decisions. Does the company need a new slogan ? Should we open a new location in Albuquerque or would it be better to reinvest that capital locally in more staff and higher wages for us all ?
Instead of hoping and praying that a bunch of wall street stockholders who have no actual understanding of what they do will direct the CEO to make the best decision (and thus secure their livelihoods) - they can vote on that decision themselves, relying on their actual experience in the business and the wisdom of crowds to guide them. Because it's their business -they own it. And while, of course, every decision has risks - they never have to feel that they are being punished because of somebody else's idiocy in making a terrible business decision. They made that decision, they were part of it - and the decisions that determine whether they can feed their families tomorrow, are decisions they are themselves responsible for.
That's more freedom than most anybody else in the world gets. And it's communist to the very heart and soul of it, in fact, I would say it's much MORE communist than what the Soviet Union did - since those workers never truly owned the means of production - the state did, and without democracy, that state couldn't EVEN legitimately claim to be representing the workers.
By the way - more than 80% of companies in Argentina are worker-owned coops now, representing well over 90% of all employment (the remainder being almost exclusively civil service jobs). This came about after a complete economic collapse led to absolute capital flight and every shop, factory and office in the country was shut as the owners fled with their hoards. The workers just showed up and took over the abandoned businesses and ran those bus
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