249
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
249 points (99.6% liked)
Technology
81700 readers
732 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
How do you "ban VPNs"? That's not how software works, and VPNs are... you know, a key part of a bunch of online infrastructure. I get that they mean "ban them to bypass restrictions", but the entire point of a VPN is you can't tell from the outside what it's being used for. You may as well ban thinking about butterflies. You can write it down, but you can't enforce it.
I actually want one country to ban VPNs just so every other country can see the fallout or complete lack of enforcement
VPNs are banned in some countries. At least in practice. China comes to mind and please nobody tell me „I have a friend in China and they use one!“ That friend is either breaking the law, or a state agent or foreigner where that law doesn‘t apply. Hotels have that as part of their service for tourists because why the hell would anyone travel to a country with basically no internet? Of course they are exempt.
But Chinese citizens are absolutely not allowed to use VPNs to break through the great firewall. The overwhelming majority wouldn‘t even know how. But of course most of them know at least one person who can.
So in theory the law is useless but in practice it‘s very effective to control information. Whatever the case it‘s nothing a democracy should pursuit. Ever.
This is such an important message. We should not lull ourselves into complacency. Banning vpns will be yet another step towards a closed, non-anonymous internet where governments (and by extension companies) will force you to give up access and control over your digital life
When companies offshore dev or IT to China, do those employees get full VPN access with access to the “western” internet?
Most likely split tunnelling
But idk anything
Let me tell how how much people actually follow laws in China.
I was born while the One Child Policy was in effect. My mother already gave birth to my older brother. Basically, my existence is illegal.
As you can see, clearly I'm not dead. They didn't manage to kill me, just demanded my parents paid a massive fine and denied legal papers until they did so.
Honestly if you just browse and don't post anything too serious, are they really gonna go after everyone who use a VPN. I mean, say even if just 1% uses a VPN. That's 1,400,000 people. Are they gonna lock up a million people? Really? Surely they have bigger fishes to catch. (Edit: 1% of 1.4 billion is actually 14 million, good luck locking that many people lolz)
As for control of information, internarional phone calls aren't blocked, you can send letters. My mom regularly call my aunts (aka: her sisters) in China. I heard the Covid QR codes being mentioned, afaik, the didn't lose their teaching jobs nor ever got arrested.
It's like adblocking. Do you know anyone irl that use adblockers? Seriously, I don't know anyone that does except like maybe 1 perdon.
But here we are, on a platform where practically everyone uses adblockers.
Or in another analogy. Mainstream social media is like inside the GFW and Lemmy is like using VPN to bypass it.
TLDR: Okay sorry if my point isn't concise, I guess my point is: NPCs will just follow the wind, those who have the will to dig deeper will probably be able to bypass the censorship (provided that it's not completely cut off from the outside internet)
Thanks for posting this and I believe a lot of people think that when you're online in China you're CONSTANTLY monitored by someone assigned SPECIFICALLY to you or something.
There used to be like I guess a modern day old wives tale where if you're playing an online game with someone from China and typed into in-game chat "Tianamen Square Massacre 1989" it would knock the person from China offline. I remember doing that a few years ago and the other guy, from China, took awhile to respond and when he did he simply said "that's our history".
It's like you said, the vast majority will follow the rules and won't use a VPN but others will just be like "ok, what are you going to do?" and do so. It's like pirating stuff in the US. I've heard stories of people getting sued out the wazoo by movie studios for pirating and sharing but those stories are few and far between and generally the people doing it aren't smart about it. I've been pirating content for decades and have never gotten a notice or email or letter about anything.
You are being absolutely ridiculous. VPNs may be de jure forbidden in China (idk about this even), but de-facto they're absolutely allowed, nobody is prosecuted for using them, and every young Chinese person can tell you this. You haven't talked with a Chinese living in China in your entire life.
That's not true either
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/09/chinese-programmer-ordered-to-pay-1m-yuan-for-using-virtual-private-network
From the article:
This person was not "using a VPN", he was lying to the government about his working status and working for an overseas firm illegally.
There's nothing illegal about working overseas
They'll do what Russia does with their online services. Have a registration scheme with noncompliant VPNs being outright banned.
Simple when you know which dictator to copy.
I guess that works for VPN services offering servers outside the country. That's not what VPNs are, though, and you still can't ban the concept of VPNs having a connection outside the country. VPN software is available open source and all it takes for it to connect abroad is my phone with a VPN connection to my home computer being abroad.
I mean, Russia (and even China) still have people using VPNs all over the place. This (and a lot of the push for age verification and comms backdoors) reeks of barely understanding the desired result and entirely misunderstanding how the tech works.
They just block encrypted connections out of Russia to unknown servers
That'd block google and youtube, even outside a VPN.
They can selectively allow connections to those hosts. They already block ECH connections anyway