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Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

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Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#361

Post by bluebarbet »

bogdan wrote: post #282
pxc wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>So I don't know what you're talking about

All this did was to inject venom into an otherwise civil exchange.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#362

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #357
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize every single country has similar procedures? The only difference in my experience flying out of LHR (London) this year and flying out of ATL is that you don’t have to remove your shoes and they allow liquids to pass through security after a secondary screening. SJO (Costa Rica) was about the same earlier this year except they also don’t aloud liquids. You also have to go through screening and metal detect…

> You realize every single country has similar procedures? The US has a way of setting bad precedents or pressuring other countries to adopt its inanity, yes. Another reason not to do it here. > If NY gets disrupted - no one cares outside of New York. The very large number of people in New York probably care though. Also, why would someone blowing up a train in New York be less scary to people in DC than someone blow…

If you haven’t noticed, “the people in DC” right now don’t care about the US outside of red states. And the reason a plane is different because people think it could happen to them if they got on a plane. If you don’t live in NYC, it’s easy to avoid the NYC train system. If I want to get from ATL to Seattle - what am I going to do drivers two or three days?

>Less than a quarter as many people as get stuck when the NYC subways are offline, presumably.

There plenty of ways to get from Manhattan to Queens if the train system went down then to get from California to Florida.

Is it really that hard to see the difference between a localized transportation system in NYC and a worldwide network of planes? Especially since airline security doesn’t just affect domestic flights it also affects flights leaving the US.

And you think the US pressured England of all places to have higher security? Did you forget about all the bombing they use to have? Did they also irsssye countries to have higher security security measures for domestic flights and their internal train system?

Or do you think that Israel would have less security if it weren’t for US pressure or Central America?

Why would the US care for instance if there were screenings to get on the baby Sansa propellor plane that flies from San Jose Costa Rica to Manual Antonino?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quepos_La_Managua_Airport

The plane they use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_208_Caravan#Variants

Yes the terminal is a hut and I’ve flown into there before.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#363

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #358
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guns? If you don’t have security. It’s a lot easier to overpower someone with knives than guns

Are you suggesting that TSA can reliably stop being from bringing guns onboard? The only thing preventing that is that people mostly don't want to bring guns on board. It's a pointless exercise that accomplishes basically nothing .

Are you saying metal detectors don’t work? Why is it that absolutely every airport in the world has similar security - as well as Brightline in Florida and the Chunnel between London and France?

As far as people not wanting to bring guns on planes - did you forget what country this is? 2nd Amendment people get their panties in a knot anytime they can’t bring a gun anywhere.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#364

Post by baranul »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #286
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 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…

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

The problem is that authoritarianism has been allowed to become attractive to many politicians, because they are allowed to be bought by corporate money, even if it harms their constituents. Rights, freedom, and privacy has become secondary to money and the blind lust for power.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#365

Post by GeoAtreides »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #286
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 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…

I'll be honest, I'm struggling to understand how your reply addresses the points made in OP's comment.

OP's points were:

completely banning VPN is difficult

significantly reducing VPN usage is a win for (totalitarian) govs

it's enough to make it difficult for the layman to achieve govs' goal

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#366

Post by ianburrell »

SirMaster wrote: post #64
TZubiri wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPs are geolocatable yes, not with a perfect accuracy, but with a jurisdictional accuracy. First of all, IP addresses are issued in blocks and the IPs are distributed within regional proximity. This is how connections are routed, a router in say, Texas, knows that it can route block, say 48.88.0.0/16 to the south to mexico, 48.95.0.0/16 to the west to Arizona, and so on. whois/RDAP data will tell you the precise juri…

How is that accuracy when it comes to IPv6 though?

There is no difference with IPv6. IPv6 64-bit prefixes are allocated like IPv4 addresses. I suspect that a lot of ISPs allocate them together. The 64-bit local part is irrelevant.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#367

Post by drdaeman »

eutropia wrote: post #348
drdaeman wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 da…

Why and how is your homelab distributed like this?

Well... It all started from a single-location homelab 20-ish years ago, while I was still living at my parents' place (although I had a 1/4 stake in ownership). Then I moved around but kept the server at the old place and added a second machine. Just because I'm self-hosting my email, and residential connections aren't best in terms of availability I thought having a HA system would be fun and useful - and so it was (although not always fun, of course). Few more moves later, I've ran a bunch of servers on residential connections all around the world. Some were demoted to VPSes for consensus and backups, as I moved out, some are still there.

There's a Wireguard-based mesh (static routing, but declarative centrally managed setup using Nix) with Shadowsocks for traversing hostile borders. Runs a few private/personal services for myself, family, and friends - email, messaging, media library, the commonplace homelab stuff. Certainly not the best design - things never are, there's always room for more and more improvements, no matter how much you work on it, but I'm pretty happy with it overall.

There's no real reason why is it like this. I could've done it more conventionally and probably avoid a lot of downsides - but it's a fun little exercise that allows me to play with various technologies, and I like that the system is truly mine, hardware and premises it's on, all built by my own hands (random fun fact: I was a founding engineer at the ISP that two of my nodes are on).

tl;dr: Had a single home server, moved around and added a few more. No particular reason, it's just a fun geeky toy for me. :-)

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#368

Post by Filligree »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #363
idiotsecant wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that TSA can reliably stop being from bringing guns onboard? The only thing preventing that is that people mostly don't want to bring guns on board. It's a pointless exercise that accomplishes basically nothing .

Are you saying metal detectors don’t work? Why is it that absolutely every airport in the world has similar security - as well as Brightline in Florida and the Chunnel between London and France? As far as people not wanting to bring guns on planes - did you forget what country this is? 2nd Amendment people get their panties in a knot anytime they can’t bring a gun anywhere.

> Are you saying metal detectors don’t work?

Every time they've tested it, the testers were able to get 70-80% of their weapons past the TSA; which, yes, includes guns.

I don't know precisely how they achieved that, but they certainly did.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#370

Post by flexagoon »

drdaeman wrote: post #292
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.

> 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 da…

Have you tried AmneziaWG? From what I know, it's specifically designed to bypass protocol-level blocking of WireGuard

> decent VPN providers

You'd be surprised by the amount of people I know who use random "VPN services" which are literally just WireGuard configs you can buy through a Telegram bot for like 100₽/month

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