If the police seize control of the university, they can monitor / filter all traffic. The whole city can go dark.
I don't think that is true at all - at least not for the last 15 years.
Almost everyone co-located in HK is in a totally different physical location than the University (such as iAdvantage or HKCOLO, near LOHAS Park) and have independent connections outbound to the world.
We, for instance, are physically located inside HKCOLO and have a direct connection to he.net in Fremont, CA. If you traceroute rsync.net in Hong Kong, you typically don't leave he.net.
I'm not sure how seizure (or even shutdown) of the University would affect infrastructure at iAdvantage or HKCOLO or Dyxian, etc.
I feel that the monitoring of traffic is unlikely. To clarify, this is not about taking a pro-China side, but more on technical aspect. Most modern web traffic happens in some form of encryption (most commonly https/ssl) and some are end-to-end encrypted (various messenger apps). Filtering is certainly possible/likely (just like the great firewall), but monitoring seems difficult (in the case of https traffic) or impossible (in the case of end-to-end encryption... hopefully impossible at least?). There'd have to be hardware-level/low-level trojans planted in individual devices to make that possible. Which isn't to say it's unlikely (from what we've heard in the past few years), but only that it's unlikely to happen with just a hostage of HKIX.
https://tw.news.yahoo.com/%E6%B8%AF%E8%AD%A6%E6%94%BB%E4%B8%...
Of course explicitly controlling it and manipulating it is a bit different.
This is probably a better article than the Wikipedia:
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1269773/hong-kon...
https://tw.news.yahoo.com/%E6%B8%AF%E8%AD%A6%E6%94%BB%E4%B8%...
HN shouldn't be fueling this kind of unsubstantiated speculation.
Putting aside whether or not the claims are true, why are you reacting as if this is particularly damaging or shocking? It's factual that Beijing does seek to censor and control information everywhere in China, and it's factual that they're currently attacking CUHK.
You advocate for allowing unsubstantiated news to be spread just because it fits into your view of what China admittedly has done in the past?
Couldn't this story have been spread by the protestors to get people on their side with fake motivations?
I didn't say that. My comment was about your reaction.
> your view of what China admittedly has done in the past?
My view? The past?
> Couldn't this story have been spread by the protestors to get people on their side with fake motivations?
That very well could be. And if so they should keep that up. A Beijing supporter being upset about fake news and propaganda is giving me the giggles.
You could also have substantiated "This is pure conspiracy theory through "news" sources that have highly dubious credentials." by expanding on what makes those news sources so dubious they deserve scare quotes, since not everyone will be familiar with them.
Attributing the actions of one user to the whole community as in "HN shouldn't be fueling this kind of unsubstantiated speculation." isn't great either.