Comment by xoa

Comment by xoa 2 days ago

>do you think the public at large knows what VPS are? How to set up a VPN?

Do you think the general public NEEDS to know those things right now? Because that's what actually mostly drives what people put in the time to learn. This smug elitist "everyone is dumb except me the tech wizard" sort of comment shows up every such thread and it's deeply irksome. Most people are plenty intelligent and can easily learn things as trivial as setting up a VPN. For most that would just amount to "sign up for one of many turnkey services, install this app, scan this QR code" or even more commonly "ask one of the kids or techie person in circle of friends/neighbors to take care of it". All sorts of people working in a vast array of businesses use VPNs all the frickin' time, it's no big deal.

But there are endless such things in our lives and only so much time, so most people very reasonably triage and only put effort into things they enjoy personally or things they are forced to care about due to being important. Up until now, most people haven't needed to care in their personal lives, because they're satisfied enough with the fairly open internet experience we've had. If that changes, and it matters to them, the tools exist to easily deal with it and people will easily learn it.

GeoAtreides 2 days ago

It's not elitist to remark that people tech skills are atrophying. The zoomers literally have memes about how bad are at tech stuff.

Setting a VPN is 100% not trivial, I know that because I recently set up a wireguard vpn on a VPS. Not impossible, sure, but out of the reach for a normal person.

Sure, one can ask a techie friend (if one's has a techie friend capable of self-hosting a VPN). So now instead of the gov ban covering 90% of the population, it covers what? 85%? 80%?

All self-hosted tools will not make a difference. Selling turnkey tools will be banned.

You can't win against the government. Not in 2025.

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const_cast 2 days ago

I think there's a good chance that when normies have to upload a picture of their real life ID to watch a funny tiktok or read a tweet they might start looking into VPNs.
Right now most of the privacy violations are covert and everyone is dishonest. Nobody reads TOS or EULA, Google just say "pinky promise we're not mean!", etc.
But there's no way to automate scanning someone's face to view a Garfield comic.
Governments are getting far too cavalier. They're flying too close to the sun here. They've already gotten away with murder and then some, they should quit while they're ahead.
Their greed will be their downfall. People will eventually push back.

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xoa a day ago

>It's not elitist to remark that people tech skills are atrophying.
It is elitist though to not go into why that's the case and instead just assume it's because, what, people are dropping in IQ? A lot of (though not all granted) the cause boils down to the same reason as mechanical skills (engine repair and such) atrophying: lack of need. Things have gotten very polished for the average use case. Most people don't need to know all the inner workings, but that's not necessarily a bad thing right? I can remember easily in the 90s and much of the 00s when many OS crashed if you looked at them funny and had some pretty funky edges, and the state of the art advanced so fast diving into the internals was important. And it was great fun for me and I miss a lot of it. However it made life a lot harder for someone who only wanted an appliance tool, and now that's the changed. But while when comfortable a lot of us have a tendency to coast, as we see in disaster after disaster folks can get extremely inventive and learn in a real hurry if they experience enough motivation.
>Sure, one can ask a techie friend (if one's has a techie friend capable of self-hosting a VPN).
lol what? Why on earth would that be necessary?
>Selling turnkey tools will be banned.
I'm American. The british crown can kiss my red, white and blue ass. Just as with tor, I will contribute for free just to stick it in their authoritarian eye. As well as services from huge parts of the rest of the planet that aren't the UK, there is no reason there won't be fully open source apps where you put in a VPS API key and it does the rest and spits out a profile for you the end. On the contrary that's technically trivial, but there hasn't been that kind of need amongst the developed world.
The UK government will have to go all the way to the level of China for it to work like you're claiming, if they're even capable of that.

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- GeoAtreides a day ago
  
  >It is elitist though to not go into why that's the case and instead just assume it's because, what, people are dropping in IQ?
  Nowhere in my comment did I mention or assumed IQ, that's all you.
  
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GoblinSlayer 2 days ago

One techie can resell his vpn to other people.

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- GeoAtreides 2 days ago
  
  please re-read my comment
  >Selling turnkey tools will be banned
  you can't escape the state financial control, it's impossible
  sure, you can do it on a very very small scale, but nothing that would have any impact
  
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