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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

#41

Post by exabrial »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33
exabrial wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because tax, in general is absurd. You're literally taking people's money under the threat of force. Just because it is done quite universally does not justify the practice. More specifically, taxes are abused near universally. From the sugar taxes in Seattle (unless you are Starbucks), or forced Union dues that fund political campaigns, the practice is abused. Meanwhile necessary services like police, firefighters,…

> You're literally taking people's money under the threat of force Money that would have no meaning, earned for work which would largely be impossible, without said threat of force.

That doesn't sound any better. So if I have an asset that I'm not using, it's morally just to take it from me because I'm not using it?

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

#42

Post by userchris »

ryan-c wrote: post #21
SomeRandomDev wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like China is good about public/shared VPN's. If you set up your own and keep the details to yourself I was under the impression that it'd work just fine. That being said I love to travel and can work wherever but haven't been to CN yet for this reason in particular.

From what I've heard second-hand (my SO has a friend who frequently travels to China), they do actually block people's private one-off VPN servers quite effectively. Have a look at https://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/116/archive/fall2016/ctang.pdf - it talks about GFW using machine learning with flow analysis to do this.

I took that class (comp 116) a few years ago! Just had some fun finding and rereading my own final paper from the archives (the one you linked to makes mine seem way less interesting). Ming is a really awesome and unique lecturer.

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

#44

Post by dev_dull »

rb808 wrote: post #10

I'm not sure why this tax should be labelled as absurd. Lots of countries tax TV, phone already. Taxing social media sounds weird only because no one else has done it yet.

Telephones have taxes, but has anyone tried anything like this?

    Calling mother: 15¢/minute
    Calling children: 3¢/minute
    Calling policy: 25¢/minute

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

#45

Post by scotty79 »

Nullabillity wrote: post #23
rb808 wrote: post #10

I'm not sure why this tax should be labelled as absurd. Lots of countries tax TV, phone already. Taxing social media sounds weird only because no one else has done it yet.

Would it be reasonable to tax meeting up in person? If not, how is this different?

It's more like taxing cafe's and bars by creating entry fee where there was none.

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

#46

Post by mullingitover »

exabrial wrote: post #26
rb808 wrote: post #10

I'm not sure why this tax should be labelled as absurd. Lots of countries tax TV, phone already. Taxing social media sounds weird only because no one else has done it yet.

Because tax, in general is absurd. You're literally taking people's money under the threat of force. Just because it is done quite universally does not justify the practice. More specifically, taxes are abused near universally. From the sugar taxes in Seattle (unless you are Starbucks), or forced Union dues that fund political campaigns, the practice is abused. Meanwhile necessary services like police, firefighters,…

> Because tax, in general is absurd. You're literally taking people's money under the threat of force. Just because it is done quite universally does not justify the practice.

They buy you civilization, which is great because it means you're not just immediately enslaved by your local warlord.

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

#47

Post by okmokmz »

have_faith wrote: post #12

We've got a sugar tax here in the UK as our newest form of indulgence tax. I wonder how a social media tax would go down with the public.

>We've got a sugar tax here in the UK as our newest form of indulgence tax.

We just got one in Seattle as well

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

#48

Post by callahad »

The title seems misleading -- looking at the image in the article, it appears that the tax isn't on social media per se, but on any service that provides mobile voice / messaging functions over cellular data.

Which is effectively a tax against cellular data being treated as a dumb pipe. Still not OK, but a fundamentally different beast than the title implies.

If you're a telco in Uganda, and you have sufficient sway with the government, why not go for broke and try to tax your way back into cellular voice / messaging revenue streams? They can be quite lucrative: in the UK, I'm paying about £1/GB of data, but a single MMS costs 43p. Turns out you can send a lot of group messages on WhatsApp before it uses 43p worth of data...

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

#49

Post by dev_dull »

ryan-c wrote: post #21
SomeRandomDev wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like China is good about public/shared VPN's. If you set up your own and keep the details to yourself I was under the impression that it'd work just fine. That being said I love to travel and can work wherever but haven't been to CN yet for this reason in particular.

From what I've heard second-hand (my SO has a friend who frequently travels to China), they do actually block people's private one-off VPN servers quite effectively. Have a look at https://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/116/archive/fall2016/ctang.pdf - it talks about GFW using machine learning with flow analysis to do this.

Indeed they do. It starts off working fine, but then eventually it stops. I assume they're running some AI/ML against the traffic pattern to determine if it's a VPN. I think they're light-years beyond simple traffic blocking and shaping.

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

#50

Post by xrisk »

parliament32 wrote: post #3

I'm interested to see how they go about filtering VPN traffic. AFAIK, running openvpn over port 443 is pretty much indistinguishable from normal TLS traffic.

My college Wi-Fi manages to do it... so I doubt that it can be too hard.
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