Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taxing TV and phone is like taxing internet connectivity. Is it? Then why do you pay taxes to use VOIP? Is internet not a carrier, while TV & phone are services?
I don't quite know about any VoIP taxes, but I am quite certain that no place puts taxes on the VoIP traffic itself over internet as a carrier. Services purchased that use the internet as a carrier may be taxed as any other financial transaction, but in that case, the internet itself is still a neutral medium that does not discriminate traffic. Being non-discriminatory does not mean that you cannot pay Netflix a mont…
Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
141–150 of 172 posts
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#142I'm not sure why this tax should be labelled as absurd. Lots of countries tax TV, phone already. Taxing social media sounds weird only because no one else has done it yet.
Telephones have taxes, but has anyone tried anything like this? Calling mother: 15¢/minute Calling children: 3¢/minute Calling policy: 25¢/minute
Here in Brazil there were plans where you can choose one or two numbers and calls to them will come off a separate monthly time quota.
Don't know if they still exist.
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#143We've got a sugar tax here in the UK as our newest form of indulgence tax. I wonder how a social media tax would go down with the public.
>We've got a sugar tax here in the UK as our newest form of indulgence tax. We just got one in Seattle as well
Progressive communities love this particular regressive tax.
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#144I'm interested to see how they go about filtering VPN traffic. AFAIK, running openvpn over port 443 is pretty much indistinguishable from normal TLS traffic.
China's gotten pretty good at it. OpenVPN running over port 443 is generally going to be using a CA that is not a public CA, and issues certificates directly rather than through an intermediate. Even if you tunnel something over normal TLS, the type of traffic can potentially be determined by analyzing how much data flows in which direction and when. If circumvention is seen as too widely spread, Uganda may simply de…
that's until tech-savvy people make a simple script/installer for the common folk. something like what happened with the LOIC. it's a cat & mouse game and i'm willing to bet there are far more hackers outside of goverment than inside it.
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#145The Uganda OTT tax is probably meant to stifle online political speech and organizing, but the concept itself, taxing most over-the-top communication mediums that use the mobile networks solely as an opaque data pipe (and typically only work with their captive apps) is a concept that merits more discussion than being patently called "absurd". These services aren't interoperable, they exfiltrate data to foreign countr…
exfiltrate data to foreign countries (where they may be subject to foreign intercept) If you're, say, a Ugandan dissident would you rather be spied on by the NSA or the Ugandan government? Tunneling all data out of the country may be safer for the majority of people, but maybe I'm falling for the trope of downtrodden poor who are being exploited by their (presumably) oppressive government.
Better that users be spied on by no one (like with Briar or Signal), but digital protectionism like what Russia and China do isn't infeasible.
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#146I'm interested to see how they go about filtering VPN traffic. AFAIK, running openvpn over port 443 is pretty much indistinguishable from normal TLS traffic.
China's gotten pretty good at it. OpenVPN running over port 443 is generally going to be using a CA that is not a public CA, and issues certificates directly rather than through an intermediate. Even if you tunnel something over normal TLS, the type of traffic can potentially be determined by analyzing how much data flows in which direction and when. If circumvention is seen as too widely spread, Uganda may simply de…
If circumvention is seen as too widely spread, Uganda may simply decide that all TLS traffic leaving the country must be intercepted by a MitM proxy, and require everyone to trust their CA.
In which case you start using stego. All you need is a tunnel to the "free world". Good luck trying to figure out whether someone's packets are saying what they're actually saying, or something else.
There is a hidden message in the above paragraph. ;-)
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> every time a certain show is broadcast on the TV. It seems like an obvious thing to tax the airing of a show on TV. I'm in favor of the taxation of every 30 minute slot on TV and Cable. This maybe makes sense to me because I'm a natural person (i.e. not a corporation), so everything I receive or produce or give away is taxed.
> I'm a natural person (i.e. not a corporation), so everything I receive or produce or give away is taxed. This sounds like a dystopian nightmare. Where do you live?
Most things in America that you can buy are taxed on the sale, and any money (or the monetary value of assets) you receive is taxed as income. If you produce anything, you're usually hit with licensing fees of some sort. I laughed out loud that you called out my description of this system a "dystopian nightmare".
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
France has it good. Here's my anecdote: I got a SIM card from France for my last trip for 20 euros (30$) all included. That was enough for what I needed it for. Fast forward, I come back to Canada, and I still have that SIM card. I can now use it locally, with unlimited text, calls and 25 GB of data, without paying a cent more. MMS included. My local phone contract is 70$ per months for 6 GB and a limited numbers of…
Just to add to this as I have done the same - the SIM I got game with 100gig of data, 25 if I used it outside of Europe (which included Britain!). As far as I could tell, you’re a caveman in France if you use SMS or cell calls as they use WhatsApp. That surprised me.
It was the same for me recently in Morocco, only WhatsApp, nobody wants to use SMS.
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Chinese government has had a lot of success blocking Tor (and VPNs) most recently. You may know that all of the normal relays are publicly listed in the Tor directory, making them trivial to block by IP address. That will then require Tor users to do extra work to find bridges or configure pluggable transports for censorship circumvention, which most users may not be motivated enough to do. Censors can also try t…
I doubt the Uganda has the infrastructure that the Chinese government has to implement such a complex system. They would have to tax more internet usage. Youtube is probably next. "For every video you watch there is an entertainment tax."
That's very true. The effectiveness of Internet censorship has depended a lot on the resources that governments have brought to bear, and I assume the Ugandan government won't have the resources the Chinese government does, maybe resulting in less effective Internet blocking programs.
I remember a time when we used to make fun of governments' lack of understanding of the Internet and the unlikelihood that they would be able to control it. Unfortunately, that was a very different time.
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The title seems misleading -- looking at the image in the article, it appears that the tax isn't on social media per se The title is not misleading at all - the purpose of the tax is to discourage the use of social media. The (likely) president-for-life Museveni has expressed his strong displeasure with social media (particularly when it was used to mock him in the run up to removing term-limits) well before this l…
Funny you mention easy access to MNO servers. This happened last night - https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/companies/telecoms-and-tec...
I am not surprised by this. The excuse they gave came from the left-field though ("investigating intrusion reported by anonymous sources"). I also wouldn't be surprised if there are Italian/Israeli/American "security consultants" doing the analysis behind the scenes in the mold of HackingTeam. A dictator's dollar is just as green, I guess.