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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29550 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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A fine of 9000$ is quite something. A sufficiently determined tyrant will force ISPs to report connections to known VPN services. Can an ISP identify VPN endpoints by the nature of the traffic (not easily, I think)? What safer alternatives are there to the simple 'select VPN service, pay, connect'?

As far as I understand he didn’t ban VPNs, only VPNs used to access Twitter. That makes enforcement much harder.

That all your traffic is to a single endpoint is a pretty big clue that you’re routing it through a VPN. For popular services the IPs are also necessarily public since the clients need that information in order to establish the connection. So, identify all the single endpoint clients, then compare against a list of known VPN IPs, and you’ve caught a lot of violaters.

Though if you’re using something like AWS to provide your VPN service I suppose it would be trivial to add a feature that allocates a new IP just for you, just for the length of your session. Heck, you could have it switched it out every few minutes to confuse the government’s tracking effort. Or establish a dozen VPN tunnels and round robin packets through them.

Plenty of companies use VPN logins as security for remote connections though -- I don't think you can just ban this kind of traffic without a lot of collateral damage.

Back in the long-ago of the 2007-2009 era, various electronic freedom groups established and encouraged a wide variety of individual users to establish limited VPNs and forwarding services, as a parallel-but-less-fraught alternative to the then-new Tor network. I'm... not so optimistic we'll see a recurrence of that.

You could enforce a VPN licensing regime where only licensed companies are approved to run/access VPNs.

There's always Tor, or the dVPNs. But a sufficiently aggressive State can slowly figure out a list of badwrong IPs. To say nothing of more sophisticated techniques.

Ironically the one thing that defeats this is Starlink, since it's essentially impossible to jam and never interacts with local infrastructure. They can't take the sky from you.

The drawback is that the physical terminals are large and can be made illegal.

This is really no different from the numerous bans on satellite television by all sorts of tinpot dictators in the past. And even under such bans, dishes were super common because football.

The one practical way you can attack this is not technical but political, with states colluding to shut down Musk for undermining them. But this is a hard sell to the US because Starlink is critical military infrastructure.

Every time I've tried Tor, it was extremely slow to the point of being unusable.

Same. I would only ever use Tor to e.g. read The Great Replacement while I was in New Zealand, where I could leave it loading while I grabbed a sandwich. It's completely non-viable for something like Twitter or 4chan.

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