I have been using Proton Mail and Proton VPN for over 3 years now. I firmly believe in the fundamental right of privacy online. Indian government has been taking steps like these for quite some time now. They previously asked VPN companies to log and gather every bit of information they could about their users including their name and address (effectively driving all VPN companies out of India)
Sometimes, I question the meaning of freedom in India. On paper we are free citizens, but essentially we never seem to get the benefits of living in a free country.
> On paper we are free citizens, but essentially we never seem to get the benefits of living in a free country
India has been mimicking Chinese and Gulf authoritarianism for a decade now. New Delhi is not truly authoritarian, but more an an elected federal government with autocratic powers, not dissimilar from the U.S. Both are mimicking China, to a certain extent, in ways good (industrial policy, moderating hyperindividualism like NIMBYism) and bad (suspending habeus, jingoism).
> Indian government has been taking steps like these for quite some time now.
In this instance though, this is from the High Court of the state of Karnataka and not the Indian Government. Karnataka isn't ruled by the same party at the center (imagine California and the current US Government). Again, the Government of Karnataka had nothing to do with this case either - it's the High Court.
Indian courts have done similar things forever. YouTube/FB etc quickly comply with court orders here; because judges would simply issue a blanket ban order on the website.
See Sanjay Gandhi's forced sterilization campaign at the behest of the World Bank and IMF. Tell me that reproduction is not a freedom. Tell me that Indira and Sanjay Gandhi weren't socialists.
There was also forced sterilization in the United States. Does that make the United States a socialist country? No, of course not.
The argument form "Bob did X, and Bob is an A, therefore all As do X" is nonsense.
This seems ineffective on a couple levels. One is that Proton users are a population that’s much more likely to be using a VPN anyway (they even offer a VPN service themselves). Another is that unless non-blocked providers reject email from Proton this doesn’t even solve the supposed issue. An Indian user of GMail is going to still receive and view email sent by Proton, so the goal of the block isn’t even achieved.
The point isn’t to block Proton as much as give prosecutors and investigators another tool to either target folks or simplify prosecution. If a search reveals a Proton email address (or you can show someone using one), you’re done.
> so far as I can tell, using protonmail isn't illegal yet?
Not an expert on Indian law. But we have a court order blocking Proton Mail across India. Circumventing the block could be found tantamount to wilfully violating the court order.
Steps like this are all the more reason the decentralized internet has to start being given more priority. It's only a matter of time until the open internet stops being a thing.
> Regulated and decentralized are not opposing ends on the same spectrum, under a mature government one can have both
The point is it's regulated irrespective of the government's maturity. If it only works under a mature government, it's superfluous as a social tool. (Technology usually is.)
Would you care to remind everybody how they can guarantee that the party they are interacting with is in fact Proton even though anybody watching or facilitating the interaction won't be able to know?
Today? Use their .onion address[0] over Tor and TLS. The TLS certificate is secure by the tor secret service key. No WebPKI or centralized CAs required.
For tomorrow we should keep exploring and adopting improvements. Pick your poison.
> On Tuesday, the Karnataka High Court directed the Indian government to block Proton Mail, a popular email service known for its enhanced security, following a legal complaint filed by New Delhi-based M Moser Design Associates. The local firm alleged that its employees had received emails containing obscene and vulgar content sent via Proton Mail.
How does this make any sense. Would the court block gmail if the same happens via gmail?.
India somehow is stuck in the worst of all worlds. There is no freedom like democratic countries and there is no good government like China.
To any westerners commenting, this is not same as think of the children. Government or courts mostly don't even need to give such excuses in India (max they might say to counter traitors). There is obscene amount of corruption in the country at every step from the local to the highest, and it is internalized by the citizens so much that everyone knows and nobody cares.
Edit: good government above means competent government
Have you ever really visited China? I would just say go to your preferred youtube channel and watch any chinese city and any indian city and then say the same thing as above.
Don't base your opinion of China on YouTube channels that show you a few modern places in Chongqing or the high-speed train and pretend that this represents all of China. They don't show you the homeless people, the abandoned half-built high-rises, the dirty parks full of plastic waste, the barred-up windows because break-ins are so prevalent.
And travel 30 minutes outside of any major city. You'll see people living in broken-down buildings without heating when it's below zero, roads that haven't been maintained in decades, and poor people trying to jump in front of your car for insurance money.
China is neither the technological wonder of the world portrayed in these videos nor a bunch of peasants. It's a vast, complex country with a lot of good and a lot of bad.
Exactly the same could be said about several 1st world democratic countries. The point is India level of development is far lower than its neighbor having a similar population size and having come from as far down, or worse than India. The difference is a government that provided (more) benefits to its population.
I would love to say the same of India but unfortunately India has all of those problems and even the best parts of India don't hold a candle to even tier 2 cities in China.
There are undeniably ways in which the command economy is simply more efficient. The party can decide that in 10 years they will be world leader in this or that, put resources toward it, and accomplish that goal. That doesn't mean the Chinese way is best for everyone, and there are certainly humanitarian issues, there are inefficiencies typical of a command economy, and there are unintended consequences, (tofu dreg, etc) but it's undeniable that they're currently getting stuff done.
Pro-Chinese sentiment has increased lately here in the West it seems, and part of that must be because the Chinese have managed to put their best propaganda forward. But I don’t see how we can have any sane discussion when one side of the argument can be bad-faith dismissed off the bat.
You can disagree with their motives and methods but it's undeniable that the Chinese government is working incredibly hard for themselves and their citizens. The sheer manufacturing dominance of China speaks for itself, as does their presence on the global stage, as does their looming influence over geopolitics.
And yeah, they put out a shit ton of propaganda too. But it being propaganda doesn't by virtue of that fact make it lies. One would argue the more effective kind of propaganda is the kind that's verifiable fact, even if ideologically slanted in delivery.
And you know, I'm also biased as an American currently living under the "group of incompetent jackasses" administration, but I'd love for my government to do anything besides shutting down departments that make business owners mad and handing out tax breaks to the richest assholes here every fuckin day.
Yeah, but maybe it is a powerful country because it has a lot of hard-working people with improving conditions, not because it has a communist government. I mostly think that the Chinese government harmed Chinese development in the future with their shortsighted policies, like the one-child policy.
Also, does the government really work for its citizens if they are doing a genocide of one nation in the country?
Yeah, I agree that the Trump situation is frustrating and idiotic, however, we should not resort to shifting towards totalitarians. That's problematic thinking.
I highly doubt GDP numbers in China are falsified, but GDP per capita doesn't matter much when median household incomes in China remain in the $250-350/mo (EDIT: $400-500/mo, good callout, needed to update priors from covid) range according to Chinese government statistics.
This is why Chinese overproduction exists - incomes are too low for most Chinese consumers to purchase higher value goods that are made in China, because you aren't upgrading your cellphone or car every year when your household income is in that range.
And where are you getting your information? The most interesting thing is how U.S. politicians often use the phrase 'Chinese Communist Party' when talking about China, invoking Cold War-era connotations of communism. But everyone knows that the only things still 'communist' about China are the party's name, its symbols, and the flag.
I’ve been to both the U.S. and China. There's significantly more propaganda about China in the U.S. than there is about the U.S. in China. Stop blindly believing what others say—go see for yourself. In the coastal and Tier-1 cities, you’ll witness how a population the size of the entire United States enjoys a higher standard of living than the American middle class, with greater affordability, and clean, safe, and beautiful urban environments (with infrastructure that is way ahead of US).
It seems clear above commenters are referencing that China performs better at accomplishing certain tasks, such as large scale infrastructure development, that isn’t comparable to other countries that “do stuff”.
Protonmail did not comply with Chinese law. I can't say I'm a fan, but this wasn't targeted at Protonmail, it was the same with Google. China requires this because China is a target for U.S. imperialism and must protect itself. The internet, mainly owned by the USA, is basically like radio free asia dot com.
Protecting Chinese technology firms also allowed China to grow highly competitive national companies, a phenomenon we don't see as much anywhere US technology companies were allowed free reign.
> The applicable Chinese law is the China Internet Security Law which came into force in 2017. The law essentially stipulates that foreign companies which operate in China and process the private information of Chinese citizens, must store such data in China and make it available to Chinese authorities upon request. An example of a company which has had to comply with this law is Apple, which has extensive operations in China. A similar law went into effect in Russia back in 2015 (known as Federal Law No. 242-FZ).
Explain how the "internet [is] mainly owned by the USA."
The robust Chinese technology sector is no doubt a reflection of smart and industrious Chinese people. Those smart and industrious people include those in the CPC engaged in wholesale industrial espionage.
The largest technology companies are headquartered in USA and have extensive ties with the US state??? I don't understand how you can think Europe, Africa, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are unable to develop comparable technology, it's simply that the market opportunities are gobbled up by behemoths grown where the internet was invented backed by US diplomacy.
Here "good" means "is competent and calculating" I suppose. China's government wouldn't even blink blocking Proton Mail or any other non-Chinese technology without even giving a reason, though.
Yeah that is a good tradeoff (IMHO) if it gives the citizens a tradeoff of infrastructure and social services. Indian government can jump through hoops to do the same thing but somehow can never do all that when it comes to rapid infrastructure development.
Isn't 100km per day their goal while their record is at 37km on a single day? That's impressive by itself, but it's not quite the same (and those 5 year numbers would take them less than one year at that speed).
I wouldn't consider ghost cities and wasteful expenditure on infrastructure to just prop up GDP as good governance. As the saying goes not all that glitters is gold.
Democracy is messy, but there is some kind of transparency (freedom of press) that brings up issues out in the open.
Let's not be impatient with Democracy lest we lose all that we valued without us realizing it.
A lot of the ghost cities news has been debunked as of late. When the news stories were coming out, a lot of the cities were just recently built. A decade+ later, a lot of the areas have been filled in...
Interesting. As a Brit, I imagine (possibly ideally) by the time I'm an old man in 20-30 years that India will be a beacon of democracy and freedom in the East, given its historical Western ties and a large English speaking population.
But your argument against their ruling speaks for itself, IMO.
There will come a point where India has to lead on this kind of thing.
India is as the commenter said, the worst of both worlds. The government managed to drive a comedian into hiding, for a make a crude (non political) joke about sex with parents. The government drove another comedian into hiding, for making a political joke and closed down the bar where he was performing, for the sole crime of hosting him. The government regularly censors movies, bans books, censors speech etc. At the same time we get no development, the drain outside my house is still not covered. It’s just arbitrary authoritarianism on the most pointless use cases.
India should have just been given to a monarch who liked the country and its people unlike the British or the Mughals
India's legal system is based on the paternalistic British judicial system from the mid-19th to mid-20th century.
India, Malaysia, and Singapore all share the same common judicial origins because they were forked off in the 1940s to 1960s, and never saw the reforms that the UK, Canada, Australia, and NZ saw in the 1980s-90s.
Furthermore, civil libertarianism is more of an American judicial innovation, and even European countries are aligned with the primacy of the state over platforms.
The Scottish Enlightenment never took hold in much of the UK though. That's why America was so "revolutionary" for the 18th and 19th century.
The British system remained paternalistic for a long time (eg. universal male suffrage only happened in 1918, collective bargaining was only legalized in 1945)
It definitely took hold. It was an act of political union, albeit the democratic vote was heavily biased towards a larger English population, but the Scottish influence is imprinted in UK law, US law and any ex-colony.
The works of Adam Smith and David Hume arguably shaped the modern capitalist world which India is part of and branched off from.
Maybe there are nuanced arguments why it's less of a democracy, but I'm fairly sure nowadays every democracy has similar arguments.
But from a judicial standpoint, most of the strengthening around civil liberties as mentioned in the Scottish Enlightenment only happened in the 20th century.
Indian (and Malaysian and Singaporean) jurisprudence largely forked off from British jurisprudence in the 1940s-1960.
A number of the reforms in jurisprudence that happened post-WW2 weren't incorporated in the judicial codes for most colonies at that point, so judicial norms remain paternalistic.
> Scottish influence is imprinted in UK law, US law and any ex-colony
In Canada sure (Scots were overrepresented in "anglophone" Canada), but not the rest of the Commonwealth.
You edited a bit but I appreciate your point and I'll defer to you as I don't know much about Indian Democracy or the behaviour of the current government. I suspect that the seed of self-determination has well and truly been planted though.
People often underestimate how much impact the education of certain aspect (Infrastructure in China and Democracy in Westerner countries) has made to their values to a government, and meanwhile the education is controlled by the government to certain degree.
people will get stuck on 'good govt china..' but I get what you mean. moving on to core message. Indian courts are some of the dumbest, red-tape laden, corrupt entities out there. for westerners, its common for basic things like property disputes or even divorces to run for decades (yes -s plural). In India the legal process is itself a punishment. plus there is no consistency in case law or precedent. people often perjure themselves and walk around like its nothing. it really is free for all with Indian judiciary so I am not surprised at-all that they will do something stupid like this.
One could call China’s government competent the same way one could say Stalin was a competent administrator. Nazis were also very “competent” and efficient. In no universe should that be considered “good government.”
1. An authoritarian government that can actually do things but also mess up and be harsh against anyone opposing it - China
2. A democratic government that can’t get anything done, citizens can’t rely on police for any crimes, courts for any justice, politicians for any development, where the politics of the nation just constantly seeks to divide on basis of caste, religion, language etc, and the nation as a whole wallows in mediocrity.
I agree. The fact that India is so behind China while not being a free country is just horrible. Add to that massive amounts of pollution. People cannot breathe and no clean water.
Related but India has been on a slow march to becoming a totalitarian surveillance state. Recently, we got public confirmation on govt. having backdoor access to WhatsApp to surveil on citizens when the FM talked about the Income Tax dept. scanning WhatsApp messages to catch offenders: https://m.economictimes.com/wealth/tax/is-the-government-alr...
That article doesn't confirm an Indian government WhatsApp backdoor?
> Due to WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, messages sent between two users are only readable by them; even the service provider cannot decrypt the contents of the messages. This prevents any third party, including service providers (WhatsApp, Telegram), from accessing the messages
> no verified evidence to suggest that the government is directly accessing private WhatsApp chats
> WhatsApp itself does not store message content, and it explicitly states that it cannot and does not produce the contents of user messages in response to any government request
Reading between the lines, it sounds like they're getting encrypted chat content directly from the phones (and also metadata from providers).
I can't comment on what they're doing or not doing. But if they're getting chat content directly from the phones, say for example by having arranged with the app to cooperate with that exfiltration, then that is, by definition, a back door.
You must admit the way GP framed it strongly implies Meta gave the Indian government carte blanche access to intercept decrypted messages. That is a massive, order-of-magnitude different story than the Indian Gov't hacking phones (installing spyware, etc.) to exfiltrate messages decrypted on device. They are very different stories with very different implications.
>But if they're getting chat content directly from the phones, say for example by having arranged with the app to cooperate with that exfiltration, then that is, by definition, a back door.
Keyword being "if". There's no indication such backdoors exist, as opposed to something like malware being placed, or the phone being physically being tampered with.
A backdoor would be a feature of the service (be it on server or clientside) that'd explicitly allow for data exfiltration. The service provider complying with metadata requests and having vulnerabilities in their software are not backdoors, unless you can demonstrate that the metadata are oversharing info, or that the vulnerabilities are intentional.
I mean, right above the stuff you quoted, there is mention that govt. does now have the provision to access under exceptional circumstances:
> However, as Ashish Mishra, Partner-Cyber Security, NangiaNXT notes, “As of now, the government has the provision to access the encrypted messages under certain exceptions such as legal request, court matters, surveillance, and criminal investigations. The DPDP (Digital Personal Data Protection) Act, along with the Telegraph Act and IT Act, gives the government power to request such data from service providers.”
Given the general attitude towards digital privacy from the govt, I think it’s safe to assume they do have means to request.
It's unclear whether the government actually have the ability to read/intercept e2e messages, or merely declared they have the right to. That's an important distinction, because the government can declare it has the right to access such messages, without the service providers (ie. whatsapp) being able to follow through with it. We've seen something similar in uk, where a bill passed a few years ago gave the government the right to access encrypted data, and forced tech companies to provide access, but Apple didn't actually implement a backdoor. They instead decided to (very loudly) disable encryption entirely for the uk market.
The problem here is the govt/courts here downplay/ignore even the most straightforward RTI public (Right to Info) requests on many of these matters, the pegasus one still ongoing in courts even after all this time. Meta (FB’s) track record on these situations is spotty at best. WhatsApp is pretty much central to everything happening in India, whether for chatting with close ones, running businesses or amplifying political propaganda. IDK what WhatsApp looks like outside India but every govt. org, political party have verified accounts and directly message folks like me using the Biz APIs even though I’ve NEVER given them consent to do so before and AFAIK, there’s ZERO controls from user’s end to stop these.
I’d also have given WhatsApp a fair pass but Meta/Zuck has never shown any concrete proof that they stand by their users and not the ruling govt’s desires.
That along with all these events, quotes from ministry should suffice to have a reasonable assumption to not put trust on these platforms for private messages.
Majority Indian citizen understand this but this is a risk they are willing to take against the pervasive corruption (almost 60 years). Whether it actually leads to reduction in corruption is of course debatable.
Giving the people responsible for corruption more power to suppress speech and communication will not stop corruption. It just gives them new tools to entrench themselves.
> Giving the government more unchecked power reduces corruption?
It's a weirdly-effective pitch! ("Drain the swamp.")
The stupidity of it is compounded by the fact that it's often not about giving the government unchecked power, but a subset of the powerful unchecked power.
Do you honestly believe that ? Almost all government adjacent people (politicians/ civil servants) own land holdings way beyond their means. Everyone knows that everywhere. If the government wants to crack down on corruption there is extreme low hanging fruit that doesn't require big brother watching you.
The trick the government has found is, just saying that gov can access messages is enough to make 99% of the whatsapp users to believe it, and make them scared of using tech for any goofy stuff. Why take risk? - wins always.
Sibling comment rightfully points out that a legitimate company will follow the laws. Proton is a legitimate company, so they follow the laws. This is detailed in their published threat model:
"“The Internet is generally not anonymous, and if you are breaking Swiss law, a law-abiding company such as Proton Mail can be legally compelled to log your IP address.” This cannot be changed due to how the internet works. However, we understand this is concerning for individuals with certain threat models, which is why since 2017, we also provide an onion site for anonymous access (we are one of the only email providers that supports this)."
And, in the case you are presumably talking about, Proton took it through the courts and ended up getting a ruling that "email services are not telecommunications providers. Consequently, email services are not subject to the data retention requirements imposed on telecommunications providers and are exempted from handing over certain user data in response to Swiss legal orders"
Which paints an incredibly different story than the one you are trying to paint.
Third, emails weren't handed over (nor were files, calendars, etc.). Which is another important distinction your comment does not mention.
Why parrot half of a story disparaging one of the only large email providers that fights in court to protect the privacy of its users?
How do you expect businesses to operate if they do not comply with legal requirements?
Proton is obligated to cooperate with authorities just like any other company. Proton has a distinction in that it also takes certain cases to court when it argues there is no legal justification.
Doubtful. The petitioner in this case is an international architecture firm, hardly a typical group to be used for a sham case. The judgement itself isn’t out so we can’t see the court’s reasoning.
This is a bit more comprehensive: https://www.barandbench.com/amp/story/news/karnataka-high-co... and the Delhi case in which the ban is previously mentioned is only peripherally about email (the mail used by one of the parties is proton). The court makes an observation there that it should already have been banned so how is it still around.
The built-in overreach makes it look like a structure set up in a way that encourage corruption, even though it won't happen in this case and is likely not even intended.
India lack technical capability to decrypt web traffic at scale or power to force companies to do it for them. Like what happened with Apple and Telegram.
I have been using Proton Mail and Proton VPN for over 3 years now. I firmly believe in the fundamental right of privacy online. Indian government has been taking steps like these for quite some time now. They previously asked VPN companies to log and gather every bit of information they could about their users including their name and address (effectively driving all VPN companies out of India) Sometimes, I question the meaning of freedom in India. On paper we are free citizens, but essentially we never seem to get the benefits of living in a free country.
> On paper we are free citizens, but essentially we never seem to get the benefits of living in a free country
India has been mimicking Chinese and Gulf authoritarianism for a decade now. New Delhi is not truly authoritarian, but more an an elected federal government with autocratic powers, not dissimilar from the U.S. Both are mimicking China, to a certain extent, in ways good (industrial policy, moderating hyperindividualism like NIMBYism) and bad (suspending habeus, jingoism).
> Indian government has been taking steps like these for quite some time now.
In this instance though, this is from the High Court of the state of Karnataka and not the Indian Government. Karnataka isn't ruled by the same party at the center (imagine California and the current US Government). Again, the Government of Karnataka had nothing to do with this case either - it's the High Court.
Indian courts have done similar things forever. YouTube/FB etc quickly comply with court orders here; because judges would simply issue a blanket ban order on the website.
Question the meaning of freedom in the whole world instead
People forget until how recently India was a socialist nation, and how easy it would be to slip back
Socialism is an economic policy. It has nothing to do with "freedom".
See Sanjay Gandhi's forced sterilization campaign at the behest of the World Bank and IMF. Tell me that reproduction is not a freedom. Tell me that Indira and Sanjay Gandhi weren't socialists.
There was also forced sterilization in the United States. Does that make the United States a socialist country? No, of course not. The argument form "Bob did X, and Bob is an A, therefore all As do X" is nonsense.
Isn't it still socialist per the Constitution?
This seems ineffective on a couple levels. One is that Proton users are a population that’s much more likely to be using a VPN anyway (they even offer a VPN service themselves). Another is that unless non-blocked providers reject email from Proton this doesn’t even solve the supposed issue. An Indian user of GMail is going to still receive and view email sent by Proton, so the goal of the block isn’t even achieved.
The point isn’t to block Proton as much as give prosecutors and investigators another tool to either target folks or simplify prosecution. If a search reveals a Proton email address (or you can show someone using one), you’re done.
>If a search reveals a Proton email address (or you can show someone using one), you’re done.
But so far as I can tell, using protonmail isn't illegal yet?
> so far as I can tell, using protonmail isn't illegal yet?
Not an expert on Indian law. But we have a court order blocking Proton Mail across India. Circumventing the block could be found tantamount to wilfully violating the court order.
You’re done with what though? What’s the penalty for using a Proton email address? Death?
Same old:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/5re9s1/h...
Steps like this are all the more reason the decentralized internet has to start being given more priority. It's only a matter of time until the open internet stops being a thing.
That’s a pipe dream. Like „untraceable, not-controlled-by-banks, decentralised currency bitcoin“. As soon as it becomes popular, it gets regulated.
Yes, it’s stupid. But it’s the reality of things.
Regulated and decentralized are not opposing ends on the same spectrum, under a mature government one can have both.
> Regulated and decentralized are not opposing ends on the same spectrum, under a mature government one can have both
The point is it's regulated irrespective of the government's maturity. If it only works under a mature government, it's superfluous as a social tool. (Technology usually is.)
Would you care to remind everybody how they can guarantee that the party they are interacting with is in fact Proton even though anybody watching or facilitating the interaction won't be able to know?
Today? Use their .onion address[0] over Tor and TLS. The TLS certificate is secure by the tor secret service key. No WebPKI or centralized CAs required.
For tomorrow we should keep exploring and adopting improvements. Pick your poison.
[0]: Discovery left as excercise for reader
And how exactly would that work?
This is just the best marketing for Proton Mail. I want to sign up for one immediately after reading it.
Good publicity for proton mail
Sounds like an endorsement of Proton Mail to me.
I mean this is just absurd.
> On Tuesday, the Karnataka High Court directed the Indian government to block Proton Mail, a popular email service known for its enhanced security, following a legal complaint filed by New Delhi-based M Moser Design Associates. The local firm alleged that its employees had received emails containing obscene and vulgar content sent via Proton Mail.
How does this make any sense. Would the court block gmail if the same happens via gmail?.
India somehow is stuck in the worst of all worlds. There is no freedom like democratic countries and there is no good government like China.
To any westerners commenting, this is not same as think of the children. Government or courts mostly don't even need to give such excuses in India (max they might say to counter traitors). There is obscene amount of corruption in the country at every step from the local to the highest, and it is internalized by the citizens so much that everyone knows and nobody cares.
Edit: good government above means competent government
> Good government like China
This is a bad joke. For starters, China blocked Proton Mail years ago.
I am not claiming China is free or democratic at all, just that Government in turn is able to use it's authoritarianism to do stuff for the country.
FYI, a good term for this is "state capacity"
If that's what you really believe, then I'd say Chinese government propaganda is working as intended.
Have you ever really visited China? I would just say go to your preferred youtube channel and watch any chinese city and any indian city and then say the same thing as above.
Don't base your opinion of China on YouTube channels that show you a few modern places in Chongqing or the high-speed train and pretend that this represents all of China. They don't show you the homeless people, the abandoned half-built high-rises, the dirty parks full of plastic waste, the barred-up windows because break-ins are so prevalent.
And travel 30 minutes outside of any major city. You'll see people living in broken-down buildings without heating when it's below zero, roads that haven't been maintained in decades, and poor people trying to jump in front of your car for insurance money.
China is neither the technological wonder of the world portrayed in these videos nor a bunch of peasants. It's a vast, complex country with a lot of good and a lot of bad.
Exactly the same could be said about several 1st world democratic countries. The point is India level of development is far lower than its neighbor having a similar population size and having come from as far down, or worse than India. The difference is a government that provided (more) benefits to its population.
I have traveled widely across both India and China. China is wealthier and better off across the board: HDI, GDP per capita, healthcare, you name it.
https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/china/india?sc=...
China has its problems for sure, but vast slabs of India remain mired in sub-Saharan Africa levels of poverty and squalor.
I would love to say the same of India but unfortunately India has all of those problems and even the best parts of India don't hold a candle to even tier 2 cities in China.
"But the trains ran on time."
There are undeniably ways in which the command economy is simply more efficient. The party can decide that in 10 years they will be world leader in this or that, put resources toward it, and accomplish that goal. That doesn't mean the Chinese way is best for everyone, and there are certainly humanitarian issues, there are inefficiencies typical of a command economy, and there are unintended consequences, (tofu dreg, etc) but it's undeniable that they're currently getting stuff done.
Yeah, more efficient in making suboptimal decisions for everyone in the country.
With freedom of thought and markets, you get competition of ideas, which ultimately selects a better solution than any central planner can plan.
Pro-Chinese sentiment has increased lately here in the West it seems, and part of that must be because the Chinese have managed to put their best propaganda forward. But I don’t see how we can have any sane discussion when one side of the argument can be bad-faith dismissed off the bat.
I used to believe the western propaganda "they are all peasants" - then I went to see with my own eyes.
If you are going to parrot western talking points then it would be insane conversation.
> then I went to see with my own eyes
Exactly the same here. I went to see with my own eyes, and the reality is very different from what I hear in some news outlets and from politicians.
You can disagree with their motives and methods but it's undeniable that the Chinese government is working incredibly hard for themselves and their citizens. The sheer manufacturing dominance of China speaks for itself, as does their presence on the global stage, as does their looming influence over geopolitics.
And yeah, they put out a shit ton of propaganda too. But it being propaganda doesn't by virtue of that fact make it lies. One would argue the more effective kind of propaganda is the kind that's verifiable fact, even if ideologically slanted in delivery.
And you know, I'm also biased as an American currently living under the "group of incompetent jackasses" administration, but I'd love for my government to do anything besides shutting down departments that make business owners mad and handing out tax breaks to the richest assholes here every fuckin day.
Yeah, but maybe it is a powerful country because it has a lot of hard-working people with improving conditions, not because it has a communist government. I mostly think that the Chinese government harmed Chinese development in the future with their shortsighted policies, like the one-child policy.
Also, does the government really work for its citizens if they are doing a genocide of one nation in the country?
Yeah, I agree that the Trump situation is frustrating and idiotic, however, we should not resort to shifting towards totalitarians. That's problematic thinking.
The poverty rate in China declined even outside Chinese propaganda.
So there are benefits for the Chinese population.
I mean the everyday people are happy and their GDP is high.
I have been under the impression that China has been lying about their GDP for years and years, I thought this was commonly known.
I have also been under the impression, for years and years, that it isn't a good idea to speak ill of the one-party regime, to anyone ever.
I highly doubt GDP numbers in China are falsified, but GDP per capita doesn't matter much when median household incomes in China remain in the $250-350/mo (EDIT: $400-500/mo, good callout, needed to update priors from covid) range according to Chinese government statistics.
This is why Chinese overproduction exists - incomes are too low for most Chinese consumers to purchase higher value goods that are made in China, because you aren't upgrading your cellphone or car every year when your household income is in that range.
maybe those numbers are right decades ago - now it is double that, in disposable income
https://www.statista.com/statistics/278698/annual-per-capita...
2024 - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202408/t202408...
income of $300-ish vs disposable income of almost $3k are quite different things :)
That's 3k per 6 months, so about $500/month disposable income.
And where are you getting your information? The most interesting thing is how U.S. politicians often use the phrase 'Chinese Communist Party' when talking about China, invoking Cold War-era connotations of communism. But everyone knows that the only things still 'communist' about China are the party's name, its symbols, and the flag.
I’ve been to both the U.S. and China. There's significantly more propaganda about China in the U.S. than there is about the U.S. in China. Stop blindly believing what others say—go see for yourself. In the coastal and Tier-1 cities, you’ll witness how a population the size of the entire United States enjoys a higher standard of living than the American middle class, with greater affordability, and clean, safe, and beautiful urban environments (with infrastructure that is way ahead of US).
You mean like the Stalin's 5 year plan from 70 years ago ?
Don't believe what any government pretend, especially communist ones. Chinese standard of living improved ? Absolutely.
Just like it did in previous emerging market, which were not ruled by communist party.
Every government is busy with some form of "do stuff for the country".
It seems clear above commenters are referencing that China performs better at accomplishing certain tasks, such as large scale infrastructure development, that isn’t comparable to other countries that “do stuff”.
I’m always skeptical of what I will call the admiration of “despotic efficiency / accomplishments”.
I’m not sure how efficient or how long accurate their success / failure rates are.
Especially when blocking a service would seem to have no impact on it…
What’s the relevance of authoritarianism? Is it necessary for the good government or is it neutral or other?
Chinese infrastructure is light years ahead of India and frankly a police surveillance state does make the streets safe.
Protonmail did not comply with Chinese law. I can't say I'm a fan, but this wasn't targeted at Protonmail, it was the same with Google. China requires this because China is a target for U.S. imperialism and must protect itself. The internet, mainly owned by the USA, is basically like radio free asia dot com.
Protecting Chinese technology firms also allowed China to grow highly competitive national companies, a phenomenon we don't see as much anywhere US technology companies were allowed free reign.
> The applicable Chinese law is the China Internet Security Law which came into force in 2017. The law essentially stipulates that foreign companies which operate in China and process the private information of Chinese citizens, must store such data in China and make it available to Chinese authorities upon request. An example of a company which has had to comply with this law is Apple, which has extensive operations in China. A similar law went into effect in Russia back in 2015 (known as Federal Law No. 242-FZ).
https://proton.me/blog/clarifying-protonmail-and-huawei
Explain how the "internet [is] mainly owned by the USA."
The robust Chinese technology sector is no doubt a reflection of smart and industrious Chinese people. Those smart and industrious people include those in the CPC engaged in wholesale industrial espionage.
The largest technology companies are headquartered in USA and have extensive ties with the US state??? I don't understand how you can think Europe, Africa, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are unable to develop comparable technology, it's simply that the market opportunities are gobbled up by behemoths grown where the internet was invented backed by US diplomacy.
Anyways, you can read more here: https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-...
> there is no good government like China
Here "good" means "is competent and calculating" I suppose. China's government wouldn't even blink blocking Proton Mail or any other non-Chinese technology without even giving a reason, though.
Yeah that is a good tradeoff (IMHO) if it gives the citizens a tradeoff of infrastructure and social services. Indian government can jump through hoops to do the same thing but somehow can never do all that when it comes to rapid infrastructure development.
> "[...] never do all that when it comes to rapid infrastructure development."
India is now building 100 km highway per day. It created 24,000+ km in the last 5 years. [0]
It has the second-largest road network in the world, second only to the US. [1]
[0]: https://pib.gov.in/PressNoteDetails.aspx?NoteId=151963&Modul...
[1]: https://www.financialexpress.com/business/roadways-indias-ro...
Yes the current government is doing some things well and that does include road development which has been extensive.
Isn't 100km per day their goal while their record is at 37km on a single day? That's impressive by itself, but it's not quite the same (and those 5 year numbers would take them less than one year at that speed).
Yes, "completely different from China's government" is really what's meant.
No, I did mean "competent"
I wouldn't consider ghost cities and wasteful expenditure on infrastructure to just prop up GDP as good governance. As the saying goes not all that glitters is gold.
Democracy is messy, but there is some kind of transparency (freedom of press) that brings up issues out in the open.
Let's not be impatient with Democracy lest we lose all that we valued without us realizing it.
Democracy needs patience and preserverence.
A lot of the ghost cities news has been debunked as of late. When the news stories were coming out, a lot of the cities were just recently built. A decade+ later, a lot of the areas have been filled in...
E.g. this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR4EYQ6JFUI
Yeah, that would be like the football lobby forcing the blocking of Cloudflare just because someone used it for unauthorized football streaming!
> The local firm alleged that its employees had received emails containing obscene and vulgar content sent via Proton Mail.
How bad is the 'vulgar content' that it warrants banning of the service? This seems like extreme snowflake behavior
Interesting. As a Brit, I imagine (possibly ideally) by the time I'm an old man in 20-30 years that India will be a beacon of democracy and freedom in the East, given its historical Western ties and a large English speaking population.
But your argument against their ruling speaks for itself, IMO.
There will come a point where India has to lead on this kind of thing.
India is as the commenter said, the worst of both worlds. The government managed to drive a comedian into hiding, for a make a crude (non political) joke about sex with parents. The government drove another comedian into hiding, for making a political joke and closed down the bar where he was performing, for the sole crime of hosting him. The government regularly censors movies, bans books, censors speech etc. At the same time we get no development, the drain outside my house is still not covered. It’s just arbitrary authoritarianism on the most pointless use cases.
India should have just been given to a monarch who liked the country and its people unlike the British or the Mughals
I thought this 20-30 years ago.
India's legal system is based on the paternalistic British judicial system from the mid-19th to mid-20th century.
India, Malaysia, and Singapore all share the same common judicial origins because they were forked off in the 1940s to 1960s, and never saw the reforms that the UK, Canada, Australia, and NZ saw in the 1980s-90s.
Furthermore, civil libertarianism is more of an American judicial innovation, and even European countries are aligned with the primacy of the state over platforms.
A pretty good starting point considering the USA constitution was based much off Scotland's enlightenment 200 years prior.
The Scottish Enlightenment never took hold in much of the UK though. That's why America was so "revolutionary" for the 18th and 19th century.
The British system remained paternalistic for a long time (eg. universal male suffrage only happened in 1918, collective bargaining was only legalized in 1945)
It definitely took hold. It was an act of political union, albeit the democratic vote was heavily biased towards a larger English population, but the Scottish influence is imprinted in UK law, US law and any ex-colony.
The works of Adam Smith and David Hume arguably shaped the modern capitalist world which India is part of and branched off from.
Maybe there are nuanced arguments why it's less of a democracy, but I'm fairly sure nowadays every democracy has similar arguments.
But from a judicial standpoint, most of the strengthening around civil liberties as mentioned in the Scottish Enlightenment only happened in the 20th century.
Indian (and Malaysian and Singaporean) jurisprudence largely forked off from British jurisprudence in the 1940s-1960.
A number of the reforms in jurisprudence that happened post-WW2 weren't incorporated in the judicial codes for most colonies at that point, so judicial norms remain paternalistic.
> Scottish influence is imprinted in UK law, US law and any ex-colony
In Canada sure (Scots were overrepresented in "anglophone" Canada), but not the rest of the Commonwealth.
You edited a bit but I appreciate your point and I'll defer to you as I don't know much about Indian Democracy or the behaviour of the current government. I suspect that the seed of self-determination has well and truly been planted though.
People often underestimate how much impact the education of certain aspect (Infrastructure in China and Democracy in Westerner countries) has made to their values to a government, and meanwhile the education is controlled by the government to certain degree.
> Would the court block gmail if the same happens via gmail?.
I mean, G will happily cough up the data and so will other big corps. Proton doesn’t… unless they go through the Swiss relationship route?
But this decision is stupid and harmful regardless.
people will get stuck on 'good govt china..' but I get what you mean. moving on to core message. Indian courts are some of the dumbest, red-tape laden, corrupt entities out there. for westerners, its common for basic things like property disputes or even divorces to run for decades (yes -s plural). In India the legal process is itself a punishment. plus there is no consistency in case law or precedent. people often perjure themselves and walk around like its nothing. it really is free for all with Indian judiciary so I am not surprised at-all that they will do something stupid like this.
> no good government like China // good government means competent government
As someone that lived in China for 5 years, competent is the last adjective I’d use.
Sichuan Earthquake —> https://circa.art/ai-weiwei-recapturing-the-tragedy/
The Shanghai Lockdown —> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59890533.amp
Local Chinese government corruption —> https://thediplomat.com/2025/03/how-local-corruption-evolved...
Tai Lake pollution —> https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/taihu-green-wash-or...
Land seizures —> https://rightsandresources.org/blog/the-guardian-chinese-vil...
Xinjiang —> https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-xinjiang-uyghurs-musl...
One could call China’s government competent the same way one could say Stalin was a competent administrator. Nazis were also very “competent” and efficient. In no universe should that be considered “good government.”
It really is between 2 choices:
1. An authoritarian government that can actually do things but also mess up and be harsh against anyone opposing it - China
2. A democratic government that can’t get anything done, citizens can’t rely on police for any crimes, courts for any justice, politicians for any development, where the politics of the nation just constantly seeks to divide on basis of caste, religion, language etc, and the nation as a whole wallows in mediocrity.
For a moment I thought you might be the Brian Dear who wrote The Friendly Orange Glow (a fascinating history of the PLATO system).
I agree. The fact that India is so behind China while not being a free country is just horrible. Add to that massive amounts of pollution. People cannot breathe and no clean water.
Related but India has been on a slow march to becoming a totalitarian surveillance state. Recently, we got public confirmation on govt. having backdoor access to WhatsApp to surveil on citizens when the FM talked about the Income Tax dept. scanning WhatsApp messages to catch offenders: https://m.economictimes.com/wealth/tax/is-the-government-alr...
That article doesn't confirm an Indian government WhatsApp backdoor?
> Due to WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, messages sent between two users are only readable by them; even the service provider cannot decrypt the contents of the messages. This prevents any third party, including service providers (WhatsApp, Telegram), from accessing the messages
> no verified evidence to suggest that the government is directly accessing private WhatsApp chats
> WhatsApp itself does not store message content, and it explicitly states that it cannot and does not produce the contents of user messages in response to any government request
Reading between the lines, it sounds like they're getting encrypted chat content directly from the phones (and also metadata from providers).
I can't comment on what they're doing or not doing. But if they're getting chat content directly from the phones, say for example by having arranged with the app to cooperate with that exfiltration, then that is, by definition, a back door.
You must admit the way GP framed it strongly implies Meta gave the Indian government carte blanche access to intercept decrypted messages. That is a massive, order-of-magnitude different story than the Indian Gov't hacking phones (installing spyware, etc.) to exfiltrate messages decrypted on device. They are very different stories with very different implications.
(edit: you weren't GP)
>But if they're getting chat content directly from the phones, say for example by having arranged with the app to cooperate with that exfiltration, then that is, by definition, a back door.
Keyword being "if". There's no indication such backdoors exist, as opposed to something like malware being placed, or the phone being physically being tampered with.
A backdoor would be a feature of the service (be it on server or clientside) that'd explicitly allow for data exfiltration. The service provider complying with metadata requests and having vulnerabilities in their software are not backdoors, unless you can demonstrate that the metadata are oversharing info, or that the vulnerabilities are intentional.
Isn't the end to end encryption just not a default setting? It could be as easy as that.
WhatsApp does not have a setting without E2E encryption.
I mean, right above the stuff you quoted, there is mention that govt. does now have the provision to access under exceptional circumstances:
> However, as Ashish Mishra, Partner-Cyber Security, NangiaNXT notes, “As of now, the government has the provision to access the encrypted messages under certain exceptions such as legal request, court matters, surveillance, and criminal investigations. The DPDP (Digital Personal Data Protection) Act, along with the Telegraph Act and IT Act, gives the government power to request such data from service providers.”
Given the general attitude towards digital privacy from the govt, I think it’s safe to assume they do have means to request.
That’s not the only incident to draw this conclusion from btw: https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/supreme-court-s...
It's unclear whether the government actually have the ability to read/intercept e2e messages, or merely declared they have the right to. That's an important distinction, because the government can declare it has the right to access such messages, without the service providers (ie. whatsapp) being able to follow through with it. We've seen something similar in uk, where a bill passed a few years ago gave the government the right to access encrypted data, and forced tech companies to provide access, but Apple didn't actually implement a backdoor. They instead decided to (very loudly) disable encryption entirely for the uk market.
The problem here is the govt/courts here downplay/ignore even the most straightforward RTI public (Right to Info) requests on many of these matters, the pegasus one still ongoing in courts even after all this time. Meta (FB’s) track record on these situations is spotty at best. WhatsApp is pretty much central to everything happening in India, whether for chatting with close ones, running businesses or amplifying political propaganda. IDK what WhatsApp looks like outside India but every govt. org, political party have verified accounts and directly message folks like me using the Biz APIs even though I’ve NEVER given them consent to do so before and AFAIK, there’s ZERO controls from user’s end to stop these.
I’d also have given WhatsApp a fair pass but Meta/Zuck has never shown any concrete proof that they stand by their users and not the ruling govt’s desires.
That along with all these events, quotes from ministry should suffice to have a reasonable assumption to not put trust on these platforms for private messages.
Majority Indian citizen understand this but this is a risk they are willing to take against the pervasive corruption (almost 60 years). Whether it actually leads to reduction in corruption is of course debatable.
Giving the people responsible for corruption more power to suppress speech and communication will not stop corruption. It just gives them new tools to entrench themselves.
Giving the government more unchecked power reduces corruption?
> Giving the government more unchecked power reduces corruption?
It's a weirdly-effective pitch! ("Drain the swamp.")
The stupidity of it is compounded by the fact that it's often not about giving the government unchecked power, but a subset of the powerful unchecked power.
Do you honestly believe that ? Almost all government adjacent people (politicians/ civil servants) own land holdings way beyond their means. Everyone knows that everywhere. If the government wants to crack down on corruption there is extreme low hanging fruit that doesn't require big brother watching you.
The trick the government has found is, just saying that gov can access messages is enough to make 99% of the whatsapp users to believe it, and make them scared of using tech for any goofy stuff. Why take risk? - wins always.
Don't they already block internet access to certain regions in order to slow down the spread of information? I'm not very surprised by these actions.
I never wanted a Proton email address before now.
You probably still don't want one, given they've been known to divulge user info to various authorities in the past.
Sibling comment rightfully points out that a legitimate company will follow the laws. Proton is a legitimate company, so they follow the laws. This is detailed in their published threat model:
"“The Internet is generally not anonymous, and if you are breaking Swiss law, a law-abiding company such as Proton Mail can be legally compelled to log your IP address.” This cannot be changed due to how the internet works. However, we understand this is concerning for individuals with certain threat models, which is why since 2017, we also provide an onion site for anonymous access (we are one of the only email providers that supports this)."
And, in the case you are presumably talking about, Proton took it through the courts and ended up getting a ruling that "email services are not telecommunications providers. Consequently, email services are not subject to the data retention requirements imposed on telecommunications providers and are exempted from handing over certain user data in response to Swiss legal orders"
Which paints an incredibly different story than the one you are trying to paint.
Third, emails weren't handed over (nor were files, calendars, etc.). Which is another important distinction your comment does not mention.
Why parrot half of a story disparaging one of the only large email providers that fights in court to protect the privacy of its users?
How do you expect businesses to operate if they do not comply with legal requirements?
Proton is obligated to cooperate with authorities just like any other company. Proton has a distinction in that it also takes certain cases to court when it argues there is no legal justification.
I believe you can access proton mail at https://protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleegetolb73fuirgj7r4o4vfu7...
The best way to make sure they don't divulge information is to make sure they don't have information to divulge.
Are those essentially just sham cases orchestrated by the government to justify blocking an encrypted service?
It seems like such an insane over-reaction to an absolute non-issue.
Doubtful. The petitioner in this case is an international architecture firm, hardly a typical group to be used for a sham case. The judgement itself isn’t out so we can’t see the court’s reasoning.
This is a bit more comprehensive: https://www.barandbench.com/amp/story/news/karnataka-high-co... and the Delhi case in which the ban is previously mentioned is only peripherally about email (the mail used by one of the parties is proton). The court makes an observation there that it should already have been banned so how is it still around.
The built-in overreach makes it look like a structure set up in a way that encourage corruption, even though it won't happen in this case and is likely not even intended.
India lack technical capability to decrypt web traffic at scale or power to force companies to do it for them. Like what happened with Apple and Telegram.
So this is what they come up with.
I imagine now hackers using Gmail and outlook to spam Indian courts with all sorts of nice images
Please don't give them ideas. You can not underestimate the indian court. They almost ordered to block Wikipedia.
...Just use Proton VPN to access Proton Mail ;)
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