Mastodawn

What are the options if my country makes VPN's illegal?

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45541973

What are the options if my country makes VPN's illegal? - SDF Chatter

I know it isn’t specific to just Linux but I use Linux anyway so my question is, Is there a way you could use a VPN without them knowing that? Or if they outlaw them is it really just game over? If they made VPNs illegal I suppose stuff like TOR would follow except TOR is partly funded by the US state department and the US is one of my countries closest allies (one of the five eyes). So surely they wouldn’t shut down something the US funds directly… Would they? I’ve read very very little about Gemini and other protocols like Gopher, would this be the way forward if they do this? And is that even remotely close to the security and potential anonymity you would receive from a VPN?

joshikyou Nov 13

“Making VPNs illegal” doesn’t stop you from using them.

They would have to implement north korea/iran levels of restrictions in order to prevent you from using VPNs.

Can your ISP not tell you’re using a VPN?

Would it not be easy for them to block access to VPNs if they outlaw them?

What do you do then?

I guess a better way to phrase the question is if they are outlawed how can I use one without my ISP knowing.

If your ISP can tell you’re using a VPN then yes, making them illegal would prevent me from using them right?

darklamer Nov 13

Would it not be easy for them to block access to VPNs if they outlaw them?

Not necessarily. It’s reasonably easy to keep long lists of known IP address ranges of known VPN providers and block access to these, but VPN traffic to a not well known IP address is generally impossible to distinguish from perfectly legal encrypted traffic such as a VPN connection to a corporate intranet. (There are also VPN protocols that are made deliberately hard to identify at all.)

It is distinguishable via deep-packet-inspection, China uses this

CameronDev Nov 13

A VPN wrapped in HTTPS would be basically undetectable. Yes, your ISP could start marking IP addresses as “VPN”, but that would be a wack-a-mole situation, and wouldnt scale at all.

Random Dent Nov 13

I can see the UK doing this, they love to implement ludicrously restrictive and impossible to enforce anti-privacy laws. My working theory is that they’re lobbied to implement them by IT consultancy firms, who then get hired to consult on, say, banning VPNs, take 10 years to investigate it at eye-watering cost to the public, then go “Yeah turns out you can’t ban VPNs, I don’t know what the previous government was thinking” and then use that money to lobby the new government to ban encryption or some other nonsense, then repeat.

webghost0101 Nov 13

There is some nuance to what exactly is banned.

I self host a vpn at my home that i use to connect to my home network on the go. This is a super common use-case and also cant be used to circumvent regional blocks.

Work also uses a vpn to securely tunnel company hardware to our servers.

A blanket ban on vpn software and technology would be ridiculously dumb. Almost as bad as blanket ban on encryption.

If they make exceptions and only ban vpn with intention to hide and circumvent the law, then you only need some legal excuse if someone comes asking and its more a morality guideline then a criminal law.

If they blanket ban “vpn technology” i would simply suggest ignoring it. Laws that stupid are too incompetent to take seriously. I recon its completely unenforceable.

Either way you’re unlikely to be investigated unless the government already has a reason to investigate you. In which case you’re probably fucked no matter how secure your internet.

DJ Putler Nov 13

spys.one

you don’t need to dl a vpn app, or even pay to use some vpns. Being german or american gets you treated the best by websites, except youtube which treats southeast asian countries better

TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe Nov 13

Banning VPNs is on the list of braindead government restrictions up there with banning encryption. The latter is basically a ban on math, just like in that book where 2+2 is sometimes 3, sometimes 5.

Random Dent Nov 13

As a person from the UK, I am fully expecting them to implement this in the next year or two, because ruining the internet seems to be the government’s top priority rather than say, fixing the economy or preventing Reform from taking over for some fucking reason.

I don’t know how any company I’ve worked for would operate, especially when headquartered in another country. They’ll just have to fire everyone in that country rather than compromise their security

I’d assume they’d give companies an exemption if they made private VPN use illegal. Doesn’t China do something similar to this?

chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them]Nov 13

I think the Chinese VPN ban is a bit exaggerated

They don’t really ban them, but there is deep packet inspection where they may throttle the connection or in my experience, cut it off after a period of time. Sometimes they block them during national occasions. I could probably try something better than OpenVPN. I only use it for personal use anyway and I am a foreigner, so they really wouldn’t care (if anything, it’s kind of expected waiguoren behaviour). If you are roaming on a foreign sim card and using mobile data, there is no censorship from my experience. Just needed the VPN for wifi

Deep-packet inspection exists. They can tell when vpns are being used generally. They kept shutting off my VPN in China ☹️

How does that work if the traffic is encrypted?

They can’t read the contents of the traffic but they can tell it’s a VPN

NigelFrobisher Nov 13

P2P tunnelling could be a thing, but obv there are issues with having a stranger’s traffic coming out of your home network range. I guess they can’t really lock out all traffic from AWS and Azure, so cloud data centres are an option.

communism Nov 13

Most popular VPNs have some form of obfuscation options in their apps. But if you’re using e.g. raw Wireguard you won’t be able to use their obfuscation function.

Btw technically they can’t really outlaw VPNs as a whole, only commercial/“privacy” VPNs. They couldn’t really tell if you’re e.g. using your friend’s PC as a VPN to access their LAN, since it’s a residential IP. Unless they’re looking for Wireguard packets, but that seems like an unlikely law since it’d piss off a lot of businesses that use VPNs to let their workers access the company intranet at home.

LeFantome Nov 14

The laws are entirely stupid (as in written by people that have no clue).

The ones I see do not make using a VPN illegal, they make it illegal for certain websites to receive traffic from VPNs.

As a website, how am I supposed to know if I am receiving traffic from a VPN?

I have to maintain a database of restricted IP addresses? How do I keep that up-to-date? How do I catch small players? Self-hosted stuff?

And even if I do all that, how do I tell where the actual user is? Because that is exactly what VPNs were designed to hide from me. So, I cannot apply it to residents of a state—I have to refuse VPN connections from the entire world.

It is impossible and pointless. Anybody actually doing anything wrong will get around it easily. So all it accomplishes is reducing the security and increasing the hassle for everybody else.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.