With the UK apparently floating ideas of a VPN ban it’s got me worried about the future of anonymity online. Now people have already pointed out that a VPN ban doesn’t make sense because of all the legitimate uses of one and wouldn’t even be enforceable anyway, but that got me thinking.
What if governments ordered websites (such as social media sites) to block traffic originating from a VPN node? Lots of sites already do this (or restrict your activity if they detect a VPN) to mitigate spam etc. and technically that wouldn’t interfere with “legitimate” (in the eyes of the gov) VPN usage like logging onto corporate networks remotely
It’s already a pain with so many sites either blocking you from access or making you jump through a million captchas using VPNs now. I’m worried it’s about to get a whole lot worse
It’s a law. Just words in a document. It doesn’t have to be realistic or even enforceable for them to pass a law.
I have moments when I think “I might get banned for this”, this is one of those moments.
You may try to ban vpns but you can not really, people usually find ways around censorship. We are notorious for this stuff, as a species.
Its infuriating to me when people just roll over for the powers that be. They may ban some nodes, others will pop up, those will get banned too and so the cycle of cat and mouse begins.
You can host your own vpn with wireguard. It takes a bit of figuring out, sure, but you can literally do so with a raspberry pi. Stick it in a network of choice and voila.
Oh they may control stuff, but this is not a game that can be won, human repression is a futile effort, it may work for a while, but there is a reason why regimes fall. See the wall of Berlin and so many other examples.
Fret not friend, for hope dies last.
They could ban VPNs and not play cat an mouse. I always think China allows some VPN use when they could stop it completely. I always think of the Matrix with the option of leaving.
I had my Internet crippled in China in 2012 after I used Hamachi to log into my home computer in Australia.
The crippling got worse if I repeated my action eventually disabling the internet completely for about an hour.
I played this game a few times to pick up on the pattern.
Lots of places are applying that sort of regulation already. Problem is, how do you know which IPs are VPNs? There are some obvious ways, and many people block some VPNs already but you can’t block every VPN. I can spin up a VPN right now and open it up to users in other countries. It’s impossible.
The gov could theoretically maintain a repository of “known” VPNs that they could require sites to block, though. They could even force them to be blocked at the DNS level. This would probably be fairly effective.
But that’s also most certainly going to be abused as well.
Same as the stupid age verification, it will funnel people away from legitimate services to dodgy ones.
Small scale version. I heard from some kids that they wanted to play Roblox at school. IT had blocked it on the Wifi. The kids advice to each other was “go on the play store, search VPN, and install whatever one is free.” - IT absolutely isn’t making those kids safer.
Not to mention that it’s trivial to change your IP on most cloud providers. So if a VPN provider is using a cloud service for some of its gateways then it can quickly remember them if necessary.
They are only interested in retail, anonymizing VPNs. If you spin up your own VPN you are still 1:1 linked to that IP address. If you use a work VPN, they fully track everything. The anonymizing ones that dont track users and share an IP between many users are a threat to mass surveilance.
They are only interested in retail, anonymizing VPNs
Okay, and how will they know which ones those are?
If you spin up your own VPN you are still 1:1 linked to that IP address
I don’t think you read that entire sentence. I wasn’t talking about spinning one up for my personal use.
VPN technology will never be banned, as most companies rely on it heavily, e.g. for remote work. The only thing I could see is ISPs keeping a blacklist of known addresses of commercial VPN providers, but that seems like an uphill battle
A company can run their own VPN server. A third party need not be involved. The commercial VPN service providers can therefore be blocked by government without affecting those businesses.
Yes. By ‘VPN technology’ I mean e.g. wireguard, openVPN, which are infeasible to ban since companies probably use the same software stack.
I don’t know what a software “stack” is but government can packet sniff to see if that kind of software is used but the vendors in this cat and mouse game apparently can sometimes fool the packet sniffers.
China cannot block all VPN’s so it is looking good for us geeks. However we need to educate the masses.
However we need to educate the masses.
Well that’s kind of the earlier point, the working masses already know. What they might not understand is that they can use a VPN outside of the office and how it benefits them.
That would severely cripple remote work/collaboration, which is essential for all megacorps. Unless there’s some sort of carve out for that I don’t see it happening
They will only apply it to retail VPNs. You think capitalists play by the same rules?
It’s theoretically possible but difficult to actually do. China has a large central government and surveillance state, VPNs are essentially banned there, and yet a large percentage of the population uses them daily to the point where it’s commonplace.
If China can’t do it then nobody can. I’ll only be worried if China manages to successfully block out VPN use in their country.
I still believe they let it happen. Could be wrong but it reminded me of the Machines in the Matrix.
Snowflake or steganographic comunication, works even in North Corea, encrypted messages are not a solution, because they always cause suspicion in countries with strong surveillance and censorship. VPN are not the solution either, even in occidental coutries, there are a lot of webs which are not accesible with a VPN or Proxy, mostly streaming sites, eg. Rakuten and others.
That is not effective either and is easy to break. At least steganographic I know nothing about snowflake but if it’s similar it would be trivial.
Lol it would break so much shit they just couldn’t.
Anything can be made illegal. Enforcement is tricky. At the moment it is very easy to block Wireguard protocol at the ISP level, some even do it. But that would probably push Wireguard and others to invest more in obfuscation.
As a sidenote, it bugs me that Wireguard does not support obfuscation out of the box, and you have to put it on top of wireguard.
in my experience, community and people would always find work arounds
Yeah, next they’ll shut down computer servers
Stupid
How can you ban a VPN (virtual private network)?
I have a VPN setup at home and at my parents home, I can connect either as if I was at either location physically. My office has VPNs for connecting between offices and connecting from remote locations. And dont get me started about being and to purchase a VPS in any country you want, and run a VPN on it.
Does this mean people and companies can no longer setup their own VPN’s.
If this is about privacy and anonymity, evey bowsers on any device has a unique identifying fingerprint that allows it to be identifiable even using a VPN. So what is this ban even targeting?
The Hidden Tracking Method Your VPN Can’t Block - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJOpHSPkWMo
So what is this ban even targeting?
UK is one of the forerunners in regard to online ID checks, for example for porn sites. Brits now regularly use VPNs to escape those checks
Prohibition has never been a deterrent to consumption.
The end goal is to either make encryption completely ineffective or get rid of it altogether. Remember the last few times lawmakers have tried “protecting the children”?
