VPNs as a technology might not be illegal but circumventing the firewall certainly is.
Unless you are very vocal and high profile person no one will black bag you in a country of billion people, lol.
This is a bit of a misunderstanding about how things work in an authoritarian system. Sure, you might fly under the radar for awhile, but if you call attention to yourself (say, by getting caught trying to bypass the government firewall) and you are not high-profile, then it is very low-effort to make you disappear. Few will notice, and those that do will stay silent out of fear.
If you are more high-profile you still get black-bagged, you just get released after, with your behavior suitably modified.
Naomi Wu no longer uploads to YouTube.
Depends - how many family members do you have that the PRC might use against you? or who would miss you if the PRC black bagged you?
And there are hundreds if not thousands of them, plus a lot of automated tooling.
Or it plunges us back into the dark ages, where people believe things based on anecdotes and superstitions, and sources of factual information are rare and typically locked inside some walled garden or other.
This is just another form of control being asserted by the wealthy and powerful - knowledge is power. Removing effective access to knowledge keeps people in the dark, making them easier to manipulate.
Hold on to your public institutions. Fight for them tooth and nail. Collect books (unredactable, uneditable, un-paywall-able sources of information). Donate to libraries. Don’t patronize LLM systems. Prefer local storage and applications over cloud services.
And don’t romanticize ignorance.
Ostensibly, that’s what it’s for.
Of course, the online features are bait on the hook.
In which case anyone who wants to can read the message traffic and make changes to it before passing it on to the receiver.
No, you can’t conduct business this way.
No one can bank online without reliable encryption. No one can transact business online without reliable encryption.
Which part of Apex did they find inspirational?
Always buy local if you can. It has the lowest climate impact.
Even buying a less-green local product vs. a more eco-friendly import might have less climate impact due to resource extraction, production in areas with possibly less environmental protection regulations, and above all shipping.
Climate cost-benefit outweighs all other arguments for rational people.
Ah, but the shading on the boobs and the detail in the hair, that’s important.
The secret ingredient is poverty wages.
…your dream school romance
Did the food texture fail to load? What is even going on there? Is it a salad made of paper scraps?
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My point of view is that a human rights violation is a human rights violation regardless of the context in which it happens, and is therefore an important thing to discuss and give visibility to.
Labeling it as “political” and using that as an excuse to hide discussion of it feels like bootlicker behavior to me.
What’s your angle?