and you can "ban VPNs" but then people just use VPNs to get around your blocks. You can't tell VPN traffic apart from regular-ass internet traffic most of the time.
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depends on the level of blocking, DPI on the provider side can easily tell if a user is using a basic VPN, and there's this arms race of DPI vs DPI-evading VPN/proxy protocols that try to mask as regular traffic (that still sometimes get banned by finding some pattern) pretty sure coming to EU soon
aug 23, 2025, 7:33 pm • 3 0 • view
in russia a lot of hetzner/digitalocean/aws ips are also range-banned for hosting vpns, and western countries can just put direct legal pressure on them if they will decide to do so
aug 23, 2025, 7:36 pm • 2 0 • view
Genuine question, if this is true how is YouTube TV able to serve me a "LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE ON A VPN" service block every time I try to use mine on any device?
aug 23, 2025, 7:28 pm • 2 0 • view
data center ip ranges are pretty well-known by all services that care good luck trying to watch japanese netflix with a vpn server that's not set up on a residential network (thank gods for tsukuba university)
aug 23, 2025, 7:39 pm • 5 0 • view
so that's the thing I'm not seeing people talk about. I mean, these kinds of blocks are terrible for a ton of reasons, free speech, censorship, puritanism, homophobia, etc... but not enough people are bringing up that THEY WON'T WORK
aug 23, 2025, 7:11 pm • 346 57 • view
it's so awesome how we're thirty years (at least) into the dominance of the net as a major piece of social infrastructure and it's STILL primarily governed by people who do not know how to touch a computer
aug 23, 2025, 7:14 pm • 24 6 • view
like i know the bozos in charge rn are deliberately illiterate etc etc but it's not as though the dems were ever particularly forward-thinking in this respect when THEY were in charge either. the road to hell was paved with "silicon valley seems to have it handled"
aug 23, 2025, 7:17 pm • 9 0 • view
Taking VPNs out of the equation, I don't think I can necessarily blame them for not knowing, at least initially. This is also a problem with 911 calls from cell phones.
aug 23, 2025, 7:56 pm • 1 0 • view
It's a series of tubes, didn't you know
aug 23, 2025, 7:29 pm • 1 0 • view
exactly!
aug 23, 2025, 7:16 pm • 5 0 • view
the internet doesn't work geographically along political boundaries. it works along routing tables and fiber optic cables. you can't just block a state from a site. it won't work. You'll block tons of people outside that state, and allow through tons of people in that state
aug 23, 2025, 7:13 pm • 329 40 • view
To what extent does this apply to Great Britain? Does the relative geographical isolation of being an island give a cleaner distinction. (I say GB not UK because presumably NI/RoI *are* intertwined.)
aug 23, 2025, 7:33 pm • 1 0 • view
Also, presumably China has... some opinions on this issue
aug 23, 2025, 7:33 pm • 1 0 • view
IP geolocation is usually fairly accurate at the country level because each country has a finite number of residential and mobile ISPs with their allocated IP ranges. How the ISP allocates the IP range across the country could be random or structured allowing further resolution to a county or town.
aug 24, 2025, 9:37 am • 0 0 • view
North Ireland's border says hello
aug 24, 2025, 3:47 am • 0 0 • view
true, but have you considered: your driver's license is now attached to an IPv4/IPv6 address in a central database everyone must interface with (owned by Peter Thiel) so that every site can know your exact address and date of birth
aug 23, 2025, 7:15 pm • 2 0 • view
and frankly it's politicians buying too much marketing hype to think this is even possible. The only way you can reliably block traffic is to turn off internet for a whole country (as has happened from time to time in lots of places around the world), and even that isn't perfect.
aug 23, 2025, 7:15 pm • 273 21 • view
Also, I think if they turned off the internet in the US the way they have in say, Iran... things would go south rather quickly, especially in the cities.
aug 23, 2025, 7:38 pm • 0 0 • view
cause it turns out there's geeks everywhere and they have a lot of spare networking equipment and when your oppressive government turns off the internet they're suddenly very motivated to set up mesh networks and satellite links and such.
aug 23, 2025, 7:16 pm • 336 36 • view
aug 23, 2025, 7:20 pm • 0 0 • view
so yeah. you should be against these bans/blocks for all the reasons people have been saying, but also please keep in mind that they're impossible. this can't be done. the internet just is not built for this
aug 23, 2025, 7:17 pm • 343 36 • view
and again, EVEN IF IT COULD, people would just VPN around it, and the hilarious part is that we've already made VPNs cheap and easy. there've been "get nordvpn and watch BBC iplayer! watch youtube in canada because $company blocked my video essay!" commercials everywhere for like a decade
aug 23, 2025, 7:23 pm • 281 19 • view
I once heard someone put it as, "The Internet sees censorship as system damage, and routes around it". It's stuck in my brain ever since.
aug 23, 2025, 8:40 pm • 10 2 • view
The Atlanta router problem is so real
aug 23, 2025, 7:31 pm • 2 0 • view
clearly the solution is to install a government-mandated invasive spyware on every device that can utilize gps to make sure they're getting accurate location info. maybe an activex control for ie6?
aug 23, 2025, 7:57 pm • 1 0 • view
“Is your neighbor spoofing GPS signals so they can watch BBC iPlayer? Get a more powerful spoofer to override their signal.”
aug 23, 2025, 8:15 pm • 2 0 • view
The end goal is to criminalize VPN use - already some UK government officials have started floating that
aug 23, 2025, 8:12 pm • 5 0 • view
But I can run my own VPN by spinning up an AWS instance based out of the US and routing all my local traffic through it. All they’d do is ban the commercial services - i.e. the ones they can identify and detect.
aug 23, 2025, 8:30 pm • 8 0 • view
Sure, same way you can make your own methamphetamine (it's just chemistry). Doesn't make it any less of a crime.
aug 24, 2025, 5:32 am • 0 0 • view
The UK has got the begging the public to not use a VPN stage which is also going to be a very effective advert for VPN's bsky.app/profile/jsra...
aug 23, 2025, 8:43 pm • 2 1 • view
routing all my porn habits through the isle of Lesbos
aug 23, 2025, 8:18 pm • 7 0 • view
Sappho saves us yet again!
aug 23, 2025, 9:11 pm • 5 0 • view
and yeah, the obvious next step in an authoritarian crackdown is to ban or otherwise discourage VPNs. but that won't work either. you can maybe yell at some big names to not make accounts in your country, but VPN traffic can't be reliably detected apart from other traffic.
aug 23, 2025, 9:13 pm • 165 7 • view
I assume the move is to pressure the payment providers and banks to blacklist private VPN companies.
aug 24, 2025, 7:13 am • 0 0 • view
Hasn’t China gone pretty far down this path?
aug 23, 2025, 9:16 pm • 1 0 • view
When I went to China, I like everyone else in my group downloaded a vpn and avoided the whole firewall.
aug 23, 2025, 9:49 pm • 1 0 • view
Indeed. The Great Firewall is hardly perfect (I'm in a chat server elsewhere with more than one mainland Chinese user subverting a declared GFW block), but it works well enough to keep the vast majority of Chinese away from barred sites.
aug 23, 2025, 9:42 pm • 4 0 • view
I'm more pessimistic, VPN traffic often has a distinct signature, that's how the Great Firewall detects and blocks VPNs at the protocol level. I expect the UK to regulate commercial VPN providers with age checks and logging reqs with IP bans and Payment blocks for those that are non-compliant.
aug 24, 2025, 9:53 am • 1 0 • view
I have a connection right now that goes from California to France. Am I accessing a website in France? Am I using a France-based VPN? Am I connecting to a server I rent in France, to do things on that server? Am I connecting through a server in France, to make it act like an ad-hoc VPN?
aug 23, 2025, 9:14 pm • 168 8 • view
It is very difficult to tell. You can make guesses based on traffic and I'm sure the NSA or CIA could figure out by hacking servers or subpoenaing hosts but you can't just tell a firewall somewhere "if connection_is_VPN(): block()"
aug 23, 2025, 9:15 pm • 157 7 • view
my connection is encrypted from my laptop to my wifi to my isp to their connections across the country to the undersea cables to the connections across france to the ISP of the datacenter housing the server I'm talking to. unless they infiltrate that datacenter's network or my laptop, it's opaque
aug 23, 2025, 9:19 pm • 146 7 • view
for wafrn, I have to manualy check the ips. it works great against stuff like nordvpn. #no-im-not-paying-for-the-api-lol #i-check-manualy-each-registration #i-got-too-many-cases-of-abuse #there-is-a-point-in-wich-you-see-so-much-gore-that-you-say-fuck-this-shit
aug 23, 2025, 9:15 pm • 2 1 • view
And it was explicitly designed to work around this
aug 23, 2025, 7:26 pm • 5 0 • view