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
#2These niggers are so stupid.
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#3I'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.
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#4>I think it is very unwise to think that because the data consumption under VPN is very high, I think you’re aware of that.
nobody is going to call them out on this blatant lie?
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#5I'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.
Some VPNs go through extraordinary length for VPN over HTTP(S). It is not so trivial. Assuming that Uganda is likely buying blocking equipment from China.
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#6I'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.
By blocking a known set of IP addresses that belong to the most popular VPN providers or identifying these providers by traffic patterns? Surely a list of these IP addresses or technology to identify them must be floating around between the authoritarian governments.
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#7Someone needs to make a small sketch of the Uganda government with 7 year olds making up the laws.
Child 1 - "Let's tax people for being on social media to stop them from saying bad things about us" Child 2 - "Yeah that's a great idea. Plus we'll have more money for candy." Govenments notice - "Social media is hereby taxed. Your local ISP will be collecting the tax automatically." People - "Whatever, we'll just use VPN" Government Screams- "AND NO VPNs ALLOWED!"
So much for free speech.
Good luck stopping the tor network.
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#8I'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.
China's gotten pretty good at it.
OpenVPN running over port 443 is generally going to be using a CA that is not a public CA, and issues certificates directly rather than through an intermediate.
Even if you tunnel something over normal TLS, the type of traffic can potentially be determined by analyzing how much data flows in which direction and when.
If circumvention is seen as too widely spread, Uganda may simply decide that all TLS traffic leaving the country must be intercepted by a MitM proxy, and require everyone to trust their CA.
I'm sure there are plenty of companies that would be happy to get the contract to provide this service.
These blocks can often be circumvented by methods that do not scale, but if only tech savvy people who can afford to run their own VPN server on a VPS somewhere can circumvent the block, it's "mission accomplished".
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#9I'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.
As others have said, that's not true. It's actually pretty hard to hide VPN traffic from DPI solutions. And judging by bgp.he.net, ISP market in Uganda is monopolized and censorship friendly, the government can just ask the ISPs to install DPI equipment for censorship and they will comply no questions asked.
Re: Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
#10I'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.