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Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

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Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#281

Post by defanor »

flexagoon wrote: post #259
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.

> every single person I know has and actively uses a VPN

I do know people who use no circumvention methods: some are simply not sufficiently familiar with technologies (including older people, who seem to think that something is wrong with their phones), for others it is a mix of regular shying away from technologies and being worried that it draws the government's attention. And then there are those who appear to genuinely support the censorship (or whatever else the government does). I also hear of people switching to local services as the regular ones are blocked.

Anecdotal data is of little use to determine the extent though, and trustworthy statistical data may be hard to come by, but if you somewhat trust the Levada Center, their polls indicate that YouTube's Russian audience halved following the blocking, among other things. [0]

> WireGuard also works just fine - I was able to selfhost and use it without any extra obfuscation.

For both IPsec and WireGuard, I have both heard of the blocks [1] and observed those myself, particularly to servers across the border (which were otherwise available; there is a chance that I misconfigured something back then, but I recall it working fine with local servers). For IPsec, I have also observed blocks within the country (and RKN lifting those on request, confirming an intentional blocking that way, twice; also confirmed that those were for IPsec packets in particular, not any UDP). But possibly it does not affect all the foreign subnets: as with a recent blackout [2], when quite a few were affected, but not all of them.

[0] https://www.levada.ru/2025/04/24/polzovanie-internetom-sotsi...

[1] One of the recently seen public mentions is at https://blog.nommy.moe/blog/exotic-mesh-vpn/

[2] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/490

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#282

Post by bogdan »

pxc wrote: post #226
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…

Take a look at the tools Chinese people use to evade the national firewall. They're extremely sophisticated, and need to advance all the time because the GFW constantly becomes more sophisticated. There are a lot of encryption technologies that the government also allows to work until they block them at a critical moment. All of the VPNs you've ever heard of in some advertisement on YouTube or whatever are easily and…

You can buy a Hong Kong esim in China that has access to everyrhing. You can use any vpn service and it just works. The only place I had trouble was the airport wifi but shadow proxy works fine. So I don't know what you're talking about

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#283

Post by ACCount37 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #224
cedws wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think us software people tend to think in absolutes. Yes, completely banning VPNs is very difficult. But for a totalitarian government, reducing VPN usage by say 60% is a win. You only have to make it difficult enough for the layman.

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…

TSA really is pointless, and airport "security" in general is an example of what you get when you keep sacrificing real freedom to fight imaginary threats.

If Trump administration was ever serious about reducing government waste, they should have dismantled the TSA.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#285

Post by dang »

Alex2037 wrote: post #276
dang wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I'm sorry, comrade commissar. I'll go stand in the corner now.

No need! Just please use HN in the intended spirit. It's fragile and easy to harm without intending to.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#286

Post by AnthonyMouse »

cedws wrote: post #211
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…

I think us software people tend to think in absolutes. Yes, completely banning VPNs is very difficult. But for a totalitarian government, reducing VPN usage by say 60% is a win. You only have to make it difficult enough for the layman.

> I think us software people tend to think in absolutes.

"Software people" have an above-average understanding of probabilities overall. It's politicians who tend to think in absolutes. If you tell them that the effectiveness of something is poor and vastly exceeded by its costs, they say "so you admit that its effectiveness is more than zero". And then people will instead have to say that something doesn't work when they mean it has low effectiveness or an underwater cost-benefit ratio.

Moreover, a lot of things with computers actually are absolutes. You can't backdoor encryption without a massive systemic risk to national security and personal privacy of someone bad getting the keys to everything. You can't allow people to send arbitrary data to each other while preventing them from communicating something you don't want them to -- the same string of bits can have arbitrarily many semantic meanings and that's proven with math, and software can do the math without the user needing to understand it.

And the most important one is this:

> But for a totalitarian government...

A totalitarian government is trying to do something different and illegitimate. Banning VPNs etc. has higher effectiveness as a means for censoring the general population than it does as a means to prevent crimes or limit contraband in a democracy, because criminals will take the required countermeasures when the alternative is being arrested or not getting their fix whereas laymen are less likely to when the alternative is "only" that they don't get to read criticism of the government.

"It works better for totalitarian regimes" is an argument for not doing it.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#287

Post by JustExAWS »

ACCount37 wrote: post #283
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…

TSA really is pointless, and airport "security" in general is an example of what you get when you keep sacrificing real freedom to fight imaginary threats. If Trump administration was ever serious about reducing government waste, they should have dismantled the TSA.

Are you really unaware of how often plane hijackings use to occur?

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#288

Post by alchemism »

stephen_g wrote: post #161
hellotheretoday wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 100% the response. I work with kids in mental health and the “kick the can to the parents” response is so shortsighted Apple and android controls aren’t that difficult to understand. Roblox parental controls aren’t that difficult to understand. Could it be simpler by unifying these things under one framework? Sure - I’ve worked with tons of parents who fall under the trap that Roblox is safe because they set…

Yes but massive censorship and the constant surveillance of children is also not good for the children ultimately. We need to bring the question of “does this help create a world that we want children to grow up in?” Are we really going to argue “since some parents won’t adequately parent their children, we’re going to create a massive censorship and surveillance apparatus and the Government will tightly control what…

I might dryly suggest that it is prudent preparation for the computing environments they will encounter in their future jobs. Like the way expensive prep schools have children wearing business casual...

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#289

Post by liveifsh »

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…

I'm from Russia, can confirm that. We are constantly trying to get around these blocks but no tech can help from cutting international connections. Also there is another issue: local browsers (Yandex and Atom from Mail Ru group) are using government certificates by default. That means that https encryption between sites inside the country becomes useless

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#290

Post by superkuh »

mr_toad wrote: post #170
superkuh wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the ban happens it'll be really easy to implement without requiring only government approved hosts or any such distributed measures requiring enforcement. Certificate Authorities. There are just a handful of corporations get to decide which websites are visitable every 90 days. Put a bit of legal pressure on the corporate certificate authorities and there's instant centralized control of effectively the entire w…

There’s a handful of commonly used CAs, but the full list of CAs is very long.

The full list of CAs with root certs in corporate browsers is fairly short. That's all that matters. If your CA isn't in $browser/$os cert root store then it's not going to be useful.

    $ ls -lathr /etc/ssl/certs/ | wc -l
    265
And of those far fewer are going to actually be giving out certs to human people. CAs are the chokepoint but I acknowledge that saying 'a handful' was hyperbolic. A few dozen.
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