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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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In a world where there's VPN ads literally everywhere and even bitcoin ATMs, I'm sure that will be of tremendous effectiveness
Just like the pop up notice when you visit pornhub for the first time and asks you to click whether you are 18 or not.
Which makes me wonder what happens when you click that you're not.
I clicked it out of curiosity, once. It just took me to Google.
I'd like to try that too, but unfortunately I'm over 18.
You could get a child to click that button for you
So it would just be fair if all users on Google with wrong age would be linked to PH in return. (jk)
VPN bans are next.
How do you ban a VPN? If I connect to a server that's a big cloud provider, how do you know the connection is to a VPN or a website?
They just make it a law and use it against people at will. They make it the ISPs responsibility for blocking and tracking access. They ban vpn software and all the corporate OS makers obey.
You’re right in a way, how do they really have a 100% block? It’s not possible. But they can scare 90% of users away.
Again, how do you track a connection to a data center? VPN software is freely available on GitHub. Are you blocking GitHub too?
Even China can't do it fully
Again, if vpns are banned, and vpn software is banned, all US companies will have to abide or die. GitHub is American. Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. Windows, macOS, Android, could all be forced to report. The year of the Linux desktop!!
Your ISP knows where you go. They just pull the plug on IPs they know are VPNs.
No, nobody cares about Canadian law
How do you know an IP is a VPN? I can change the address of my VPS at any time
Pornhub might care about Canadian law, seeing as they’re a Canadian company
They will comply, but the users won't. Pornhub can't tell you're using a VPN
Jfc. If you’re running your own vpn then you’re fine. Unless your host is in the States, and then installing it would be a violation. Detecting the presence of vpn software on a vps would be cake.
Would they do it? Probably not.
It’s less about would it and more about could it. I think it would be hilarious to watch any government spend time on this instead of… actual shit.
It's a Canadian law, wouldn't affect America. America banning VPNs would be much more dire
Also having a VPN in the country where pornhub is banned would be pointless for the purpose of going to pornhub
Right, Canada. I mean Canada.
That's not feasible. A lot of companies have VPNs to protect their own networks. This increased with work from home during the pandemic. There are too many domino effects.
With SSH and an AWS instance, I can create my own VPN. It's not that hard with a bit of Linux experience. Canada would be about as successful at this as the US was at keeping PGP away from foreign exports.
Government can do whatever it wants.
Not really. The definition of failed state is when people openly ignore the government.
What is it called when the government openly ignores itself?
It's not feasible to prevent it completely, but you can certainly make it harder for the average person and discourage usage by simply outlawing it. That's what China is doing at least.
China is not successful in it, since you can still use a VPN in China. You can even self host
Somehow I knew when I wrote that comment that someone would interpret "it's possible to discourage VPN usage and make it harder for the layman" as "it's possible to prevent VPN usage completely and China is 100% successful at doing that". China hasn't gone all in on blocking VPN traffic either way, since corporations can still use them and tourists don't like having their internet connection dropped without warning (which they actually did at one point), but someday they might and it will probably be enough to prevent the majority from using VPNs to circumvent government censorship.
It's technically impossible without blocking cloudflare and breaking most of the internet. You can route your VPN through cloudflare, so there's that
With deep packet inspection they can detect a VPN protocol connection attempt and drop it. There are already countries utilizing this method.
Only works if you use a protocol that can be detected.
https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core/ has been defeating Chinese censors
Yes, my point is that banning protocols will kill all the commercial VPN offerings. Restricting a big size of the population. Obscure protocols like X-Ray can work but not everyone can set it up.
And I think you can also raise some suspicion if you use too much bandwidth on that connection. GBs of data consumption from MyTotallyLegitWebsite.me can raise eyebrows. And that would be the only thing needed for a court notice or a visit by the police, depending upon the country. And in anti-democratic countries you're guilty until proven innocent anyway.
There are commercial xray servers where you just share them with people for a subscription price and it automatically updates with the freshest info
GBs of data from a connection is not that uncommon. There's a thing called cloudflare and you might already be hitting those IPs for gigabytes per month. You can route the VPN through cloudflare so it just looks like you're visiting a lot of websites hosted by cloudflare
I gotta wonder if these people know that these kinds of laws will do nothing, and they are just pandering, or if they actually think this time they got it
I think they all just fundamentally don't understand how the Internet works and how it doesn't care about borders.
They approach it like companies are providing services to users directly like you just walked into a store and they're in full control of everything. Like companies are explicitly entering all the markets worldwide by being available on the Internet and providing their services to users. Obviously if you provide services to Canadian users you must be a company with a presence on Canadian soils.
Except you can't exactly put customs on the Internet like you can block sketchy imports from China when they arrive at the border. It literally crosses the border at the speed of light.
I'm reasonably certain that once enough governments jump on the "we need to control the internets" bandwagon, there will be a region specific convention adopted similar to country codes for phone numbers so that they can, in fact, apply customs to it...
I suspect it won't be in the name of righteousness though, more likely it'll be taxes, copyright, etc, on internet sales that trigger it.
Don’t IP addresses already provide you with region info?
America's IP addresses are governed by ARIN, how long until you see that name in headlines for controversy...
But somewhere down the line someone knows, either the lawmakers, or the advisors, or maybe they all know and it's just grandstanding to those of the public that don't know.
Really all this does is train the people with the drive or ability to learn things like DevOps to be even better at circumventing it, well this is not that hard, but generally, laws like this.