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Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

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Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#291

Post by uhhuhnwhatdoes »

oscaracso wrote: post #268
spwa4 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Buying and selling things internationally does not make a country capitalist.

No True Scotsman applied to concept; fascinating.

Capitalism is circumlocutions of long dead people who provided little to society but the sound of their voice, vacuous writings.

So kind of the educated labor exploiters of the past to explain how the world must work. Very TINA of them.

Capitalism is people socially convincing each other there's a communal upside to capitalism. Sounds almost like socialist communist nonsense, this capitalism.

Strip away endless obfuscation the real economy is anything but physical statistics, it becomes clear capitalism is just empty rhetoric.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#292

Post by drdaeman »

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.

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

Good for you. I have a few machines around the world (a truly geo-distributed homelab lol), and my node on a residental connection in Russia (north-west, no clue about other regions) has pretty spotty vanilla Wireguard connectivity to the rest of the world - it works now and then, but packets are dropped every other day. My traffic patterns are unusual compared to usual browsing (mostly database replication), and something seem to trigger DPI now and then. Fortunately, wrapping it in the simplest Shadowsocks setup seems to be working fine at the moment.

But yeah, can confirm, VPNs are ubiquitous and work reasonably well for everyone I know who still lives there. Although I think all decent VPN providers have measures against traffic analysis nowadays, as plain Wireguard is not exactly reliable.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#293

Post by drysine »

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…

>simply cut international connections (as is already practiced temporarily and locally)

No, international connections are not cut.

The mobile internet gets cut locally and temporarily when the Ukraine attacks Russian cities trying to terrorize population. Several essential or popular Russian services are whitelisted. All the rest of Russian internet is as inaccessible as foreign servers.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#294

Post by giobox »

skeledrew wrote: post #31

And cue the rise of self-hosted VPNs. 1 click to get a VPS instance, install VPN software, and make a connection. Automatically destroy the instance with another click or after a certain amount of time.

I did this for years during the early 2010s, but given the IP ranges of most the major VPS players are widely known, many sites and services now just block them outright. It got to the stage I had to stop doing it. I suspect it has only gotten worse now many sites are trying to prevent scraping for AI training as well.

If your primary focus is just reaching region blocked content, Self hosted VPNs can work great if you have access to a residential IP in your target country- I've taken advantage of family member's domestic connections instead of VPSes now, as I was lucky enough to have family in the regions I wanted. Devices like the Apple TV can function as a Tailscale exit node too, which greatly simplified deployment.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#295

Post by owisd »

dabinat wrote: post #104

Part of the problem is that in order to prove your age you need to hand over a bunch of unrelated data about yourself. Why do they need to know my name, address, signature, and what I look like? They don’t even need to know my actual age, just that I’m over 21. Laws like this would go down a lot better if there were privacy-respecting ways of verifying age.

There are privacy-respecting ways, e.g. https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id... uses Zero Knowledge Proofs to just verify age without revealing any other personal data. If Online Safety was just a data collection Trojan horse than this kind of approach wouldn’t be allowed.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#296

Post by crystal_revenge »

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…

> All of the VPNs you've ever heard of in some advertisement on YouTube or whatever are easily and totally blocked in China.

Have you actually been to China? I was there not long ago traveling around a range of cities and never had trouble with either Mullvad or Astrill having used both hotel and residential networks. I have many friends who have similar experiences. In fact, I've never recalled anyone having trouble getting outside of the great firewall.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#297

Post by fn-mote »

JustExAWS wrote: post #287
ACCount37 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Eyeballing the data [1], it looks like total fatalities in the low 1000s, and roughly 20 hijackings per year 1980-2000. Let's value each human fatality at $1M, and - lacking any knowledge about the subject - cargo also at $1M/incident.

That's about $1B in human life loss and $20M/year in cargo.

The 2025 budget for ths TSA was over $10B, so we're spending 10x the loss to prevent it. Value each human life at $10M? Then the total value of lives lost over a 20 year span is about one year of TSA spending.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/airline-hijackings-...

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#298

Post by idiotsecant »

defanor wrote: post #281
flexagoon wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

Are you saying that it's reasonable to think fully half of YouTube traffic was Russian?

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#299

Post by pessimizer »

uhhuhnwhatdoes wrote: post #291
oscaracso wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying and selling things internationally does not make a country capitalist.

No True Scotsman applied to concept; fascinating. Capitalism is circumlocutions of long dead people who provided little to society but the sound of their voice, vacuous writings. So kind of the educated labor exploiters of the past to explain how the world must work. Very TINA of them. Capitalism is people socially convincing each other there's a communal upside to capitalism. Sounds almost like socialist communist n…

You said "if buying and selling things internationally makes a country capitalist," somebody told you that's not what capitalism is, and you said "no true scotsman."

You have to do better than this to convince people of things.

If you had said "Buying and selling things internationally makes a country capitalist" rather than posing a pointless hypothetical, you would have had to defend that, and you weren't ready to.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#300

Post by idiotsecant »

JustExAWS wrote: post #287
ACCount37 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Barely ever? I don't see any evidence to suggest that the TSA has any level of effectiveness in preventing them, either.
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