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Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

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Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#251

Post by senshan »

para_parolu wrote: post #246
senshan wrote: post #243

If the goal is to protect minors, then alcohol may be a better model: a) Alcohol is considered harmful for minors, hence b) It is unlawful for minors to posses and consume alcohol; c) It is unlawful to sell alcohol to minors; Similarly: 1) Internet may potentially contain harmful material, hence: 2) It is unlawful for minors access Internet; 3) It is unlawful to sell or provide to minors access to Internet or any dev…

Protecting minors is never a goal. But punishing VPN providers will be next step after banning usage.

Exactly, but each time any lawmakers wants to "protect the children", the "alcohol solution" needs to be brought up. While it is somewhat ridiculous when applied to Internet access, it bring in the right perspective -- the population as a whole does not need to be affected by the measure

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#252

Post by spwa4 »

_njyk wrote: post #215
imiric wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the government decides to ban all cryptography, or forcefully install their own certificates on every device, it should be possible to avoid any restriction attempts. If they're doing deep packet inspection to detect specific protocols, then those can be tunneled via encrypted protocols they do allow, such as TLS or SSH. This is certainly more inconvenient to use, but not impossible. If they're blocking all tr…

Technically it's easy to come around restrictions (for example, where I live, RT.com is fully censored "to protect me"). But from a lawmaker perspective, the topic is not technical. The question, at the end, is about the enforcement of the punishments that go with circumvention; and in some places there is punishment even when you are "just" trying to circumvent these restrictions. It's easy to break-in into someone'…

> It's easy to break-in into someone's place. What prevents you from doing it, is the punishment (and potentially ethics), not the physical barrier.

It's illegal to steal a macbook that has been abandoned on the train. Try leaving yours and see if the more important thing is the physical barrier or ethics/punishment/existence of laws.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#253

Post by brookst »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #239
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep citing, as an example of this, speed limits. You can literally break the law by just pushing your foot down harder. It's that easy! Therefore they're pointless. Or, the TSA. They might have taken away my knife, but putting a rock in a sock and hitting someone in the head is an easy workaround. Therefore it's pointless. (Arguing that the law is easy to break has no effect on whether the law is a good idea, shou…

Your examples are unlike each other. What stops people from speeding more than they already do is enforcement. The law isn't doing anything. But the TSA isn't a law. The TSA is, notionally, the enforcement. And it doesn't do anything either. So the TSA really is pointless. If you drive around at 30 mph over the limit, you're going to get a ticket, and this traffic cop presence stops people from speeding "too much". I…

The examples are similar in that they demonstrate that reducing probability is a reasonable goal, and it is a mistake to say anything imperfect is useless.

Your take on TSA seems to be in the imperfect=useless camp. There are good ROI, efficiency, and philosophical reasons to want to abolish TSA, but it seems naive to say there is zero value and their mere existence has not deterred anyone.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#255

Post by jamzer »

codedokode wrote: post #157
ktallett wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is tech isn't as simple as that, vpn's are key in many jobs, are they banned? It is the same issue when they ask for backdoors in every messaging app. It is rational if you don't think any deeper than surface level but once you dig an inch deep, it is clear why it isn't rational.

> they ask for backdoors in every messaging app Being a devil's advocate, you already entrust the government to register your property, issue your money, prosecute you for wrongdoing (including death penalty) and send you to the war. Your data is already collected and sold by thousands of data brokers. What are you losing by having a backdoor that would be used only in strict accordance with the law (laws being creat…

The issue being that governments in the west have repeatedly demonstrated they will implement blanket surveillance and not follow due process in using it.

Further those who do wish to break the law could still utilize cryptography to avoid backdoors so this would only really apply said surveillance to those not breaking the law.

Perhaps this is also different for digital activities due to the history of the digital space and the scale/ease at which if allowed it can be surveilled.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#256

Post by brookst »

autoexec wrote: post #123
willis936 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on if you are poor and/or considered a political enemy. Where is the party of small government?

The actual size of government doesn't much matter, it's what the government does and doesn't do that counts.

“Small government” is ambiguous. It used to mean exactly that — scope of powers. These days it’s become unclear and some people use it to mean headcount.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#257

Post by wartywhoa23 »

defanor wrote: post #140

> It Won’t Even Work I heard similar sentiments about censorship efforts in Russia, but it does seem to work, unfortunately. So far they have outlawed and blocked major VPN providers (and keep blocking more, including non-commercial ones, like Tor bridges, and foreign hosting companies' websites), blocked major detectable protocols used for those (IPsec, WireGuard), made usage of proxying ("VPN") an aggravating circu…

But then VLESS is thriving and the only way to stop this is by enforcing whitelists. Which is not something those scumbags are incapable of, of course.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#258

Post by spwa4 »

Gud wrote: post #216
colechristensen wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad." This is a pretty bold claim and I'm not sure it matches up with reality. Karl Marx said that in the first stage of communism there would be a required period of dictatorial control in order to transition from and dismantle capitalist institutions. This is exactly what happened…

Not really, because pre-Soviet Union wasn’t a capitalist society. Russia and China were barely industrial nations.

If buying and selling things internationally makes a country capitalist, then Soviet Russia was capitalist. Pre-Soviet Russia was mercantilist, which can be somewhat handwavyly described as capitalism-unless-I-can-kill-you, both between people within a nation and between nations themselves and is still not entirely dead.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#259

Post by flexagoon »

defanor wrote: post #140

> It Won’t Even Work I heard similar sentiments about censorship efforts in Russia, but it does seem to work, unfortunately. So far they have outlawed and blocked major VPN providers (and keep blocking more, including non-commercial ones, like Tor bridges, and foreign hosting companies' websites), blocked major detectable protocols used for those (IPsec, WireGuard), made usage of proxying ("VPN") an aggravating circu…

Is it working in Russia? I'm Russian and basically every single person I know has and actively uses a VPN with no consequences. WireGuard also works just fine - I was able to selfhost and use it without any extra obfuscation. They only blocked a few largest providers, but that's seemingly it.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#260

Post by Bender »

This will be an unpopular take, but... ban all the VPN's. Do it now.

Every time such a thing happens new technology is created out of necessity. The more totalitarian a regime is the more people are pushed under ground. This only hurts big companies and governments that benefit from having all the juicy delicious data flowing through cooperating CDN's and big centralized platforms where they can see it real time and with real identities.

Motivate developers to make easy-peazy tools to push the normies to Tor, SSH tunnels, hybrid open source VPN's, DNS tunneling, HTTPS piggy-backing, Obfuscated HTTPS websockets, Domain Fronting, Lora Relays, Laser Relays, open source user-space mesh VPN's like Tinc and watch the arms race unfold.

My super secret ulterior motive is that I despise the big platforms including all the big VPN platforms that have money trails or claim BTC is anonymous and claim to not log anything or have real time lawful intercept API's thus allowing them to claim no logs.

I octo-dog dare governments to ban VPN's.

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