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
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?
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.
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
For profit VPNs I think is what everyone means. So people can get past region blocks or censorship. Since they offset very little else.
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.
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”?
Anything is possible. Except being free of course.
Just human things.
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.
Tor bridges exist for this don’t they?
Prohibition has never been a deterrent to consumption.
Yes they can ban it, you will face repercussions if you violate that ban just like if you violate the ban your country probably has on heroin or machine guns.
You can get around it by using doh and a http proxy configured in your web browser, not at the os level.
I imagine it’d be a jurisdiction issue for what you propose. If, say, the UK mandates that websites block VPN nodes, that will affect websites served from the UK (creating a Great Firewall of Britain). But what about websites served outside the UK? Those websites can’t possibly tell if a user is from the UK and using a VPN, vs outside the UK and using a VPN, so they can’t only block UK visitors—they’d have to block all VPN traffic, which is probably not worth it from a business point of view. I suppose the UK could then deem that website illegal in the UK and block them, but then that’d only block the website for non-VPN users in the UK… But if the website owner is outside the UK they can’t be punished for violating that law.
More probable (though I still think unlikely) is that a country could sniff for e.g. Wireguard packets and block those. But again that’s unlikely because of businesses using VPNs to let employees access company intranets at home.
These laws tend to effect any company that does business in the state or country. Any commercial service or company wanting to make money from UK customers will be required to implement the VPN block for all their customers.
Lol it would break so much shit they just couldn’t.
in my experience, community and people would always find work arounds
That is false. Everyone says that but where where the hacks for direct TV or the Nagra 3 for dish? They never came besides massive money sitting on the table for whoever did. Or modern console jailbreaking? Have the PS5 and latest XBox have hacks?
Yeah, next they’ll shut down computer servers
Stupid
To go a little further, I used the example of heroin and machine guns in my other reply, but there are lots of countries where people licensed to use these (or technology that’s similar like oxycontin) are allowed or there exist analogs (like bump stocks or binary triggers) that avoid the law.
Heck, in the us any knucklehead can get on the good boy list for heroin or machine guns they just need to pass a bunch of checks and submit to a series of audits and inspections.
The point of banning vpn use would be to keep people from using the technology to skirt identity laws, not to prevent the use of the technology altogether, so it’s likely any ban would take the form of legal wording that looks like “use of computer networking technology to conceal ones identity or aid or abet or perpetrate any crime is unlawful under this section.”
So again, yes they absolutely can do it and no it wouldn’t mean corporations would suddenly have to turn in all their edge devices.
I’m really surprised that on this instance no one has replied with the “laws are threats made by the dominant social economic class” copypasta. Fake ahh anarchists…
