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Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax

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Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax

#151

Post by a1369209993 »

hamstercat wrote: post #78
sametmax wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. In france calls in in the eu and to the usa are free and unlimited on most contracts.

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…

It almost sounds like you could finance a brief vacation to France on the savings from canceling your local phone contract and buying a couple years worth of french SIM cards.

This suspiciously resembles a opportunity for arbitrage.

Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax

#152

Post by hamstercat »

a1369209993 wrote: post #151
hamstercat wrote: post #78

Earlier 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…

It almost sounds like you could finance a brief vacation to France on the savings from canceling your local phone contract and buying a couple years worth of french SIM cards. This suspiciously resembles a opportunity for arbitrage.

I wished, and very seriously thought about it. Unfortunately, after 4 months of out-of-France service they can cut your service. It would have made my day if it would have worked!

Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax

#153

Post by adamfisk »

purge wrote: post #119

I'm living in Uganda at the moment and have a couple of things to add: 1. VPNs still work fine (I'm using one right now, though its one I installed on a digitalocean instance - it's possible those receiving lots of traffic have now been blocked). 2. This tax is unaffordable for many Ugandans (it would be about 5% of the average wage here). Whatsapp is very popular here and this has impacted everybody I know. Most peo…

Have you tried Lantern? It’s free up to 500MBs per month and works well in many censoring countries around the world. It has lots of features that make it fast, such as automatically optimizing server selection and using BBR, and it does many things to stay unblocked, including the use of pluggable transports.

Full disclosure: I’m part of the team that builds it.

Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax

#155

Post by eftychis »

pas wrote: post #111
walrus01 wrote: post #106

As a professional network engineer this is utterly preposterous. Ignorant government officials who know nothing about how the Internet actually works, trying to fuck with it because it's something beyond their petty attempts at control. When will people realize that blocking VoIP and blocking a ton of other stuff (Ethiopia and the UAE are great examples), in the long term and in aggregate, results in more economic da…

Incompetence at that level is malice. Short sightedness is nothing new in politics. As is fucking with the middle class. (I mean with those who understand the problem of blocking certain kinds of Internet traffic.)

Politics is never about optimal or about doing what is financially sane. It is about staying in power... We do not elect or raise to power people with the best minds and intentions.

Yes it is malice. There is a joke I find descriptive: " Two young people discuss about their future. One of them says at some point that if they want to make money, it seems their only options are to become a thieves or politicians. The other responds: "Well I want to lead an honorable life, so I guess I will become a thief."

They just don't care to get informed or about the future. Simple. If there were time machines people would be coming back killing politicians en masse.

Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax

#156

Post by i_made_a_booboo »

mar77i wrote: post #84
temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #64

The 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…

Are you a history professor or a diplomat of some sort? You just delivered the kind of analysis I'd pay money to read in a paper.

Just Read Why Nations Fail. This is part the course for almost all of history.

Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax

#157

Post by purge »

adamfisk wrote: post #153
purge wrote: post #119

I'm living in Uganda at the moment and have a couple of things to add: 1. VPNs still work fine (I'm using one right now, though its one I installed on a digitalocean instance - it's possible those receiving lots of traffic have now been blocked). 2. This tax is unaffordable for many Ugandans (it would be about 5% of the average wage here). Whatsapp is very popular here and this has impacted everybody I know. Most peo…

Have you tried Lantern? It’s free up to 500MBs per month and works well in many censoring countries around the world. It has lots of features that make it fast, such as automatically optimizing server selection and using BBR, and it does many things to stay unblocked, including the use of pluggable transports. Full disclosure: I’m part of the team that builds it.

This is good to know about (and a great idea) - i'll take a look later. The other issue with using a VPN is people can no longer use the 'social pack' which is a cheap social media only data package available on all the networks.

Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax

#158

Post by DocTomoe »

hamstercat wrote: post #152
a1369209993 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It almost sounds like you could finance a brief vacation to France on the savings from canceling your local phone contract and buying a couple years worth of french SIM cards. This suspiciously resembles a opportunity for arbitrage.

I wished, and very seriously thought about it. Unfortunately, after 4 months of out-of-France service they can cut your service. It would have made my day if it would have worked!

Just get a penpal in France who keeps buying and sending you SIM cards?

Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax

#159

Post by purge »

walrus01 wrote: post #130
purge wrote: post #119

I'm living in Uganda at the moment and have a couple of things to add: 1. VPNs still work fine (I'm using one right now, though its one I installed on a digitalocean instance - it's possible those receiving lots of traffic have now been blocked). 2. This tax is unaffordable for many Ugandans (it would be about 5% of the average wage here). Whatsapp is very popular here and this has impacted everybody I know. Most peo…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Uganda has a somewhat reasonable diversity of domestic ISP AS that are connected to other east African AS for international connectivity outbound via Kenya and Tanzania. It's not like a single government controlled bottleneck situation (As in Iran, where all ISPs have to be downstream of the government AS, which operates all of the international L2 transport and L3 transit/peering connect…

I'm not sure about the peering connections but Uganda does have a good range of ISPs (outside of Kampala connectivity is mobile network only).

The mobile providers are:

- Africell (was orange)

- MTN

- Airtel

- Smile

- Uganda Telecom

Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax

#160

Post by mmsimanga »

walrus01 wrote: post #106

As a professional network engineer this is utterly preposterous. Ignorant government officials who know nothing about how the Internet actually works, trying to fuck with it because it's something beyond their petty attempts at control. When will people realize that blocking VoIP and blocking a ton of other stuff (Ethiopia and the UAE are great examples), in the long term and in aggregate, results in more economic da…

As someone in IT but not in networking I agree with your sentiments. As an African I have to let you know this is all about keeping the masses in check. The masses don't know enough about the technology to understand that this is a bullshit law. The government will prosecute a couple of high profile people and make it seem that they have more control. The 1-5 percent of us will ignore the law and do our thing but the majority will continue to tow the line. Thus keeping the dictators in power. Its all about power.
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