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
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.
The Atlanta router problem is so real
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?
“Is your neighbor spoofing GPS signals so they can watch BBC iPlayer? Get a more powerful spoofer to override their signal.”
The end goal is to criminalize VPN use - already some UK government officials have started floating that
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.
Sure, same way you can make your own methamphetamine (it's just chemistry). Doesn't make it any less of a crime.
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...
routing all my porn habits through the isle of Lesbos
Sappho saves us yet again!
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.
I assume the move is to pressure the payment providers and banks to blacklist private VPN companies.
Hasn’t China gone pretty far down this path?
When I went to China, I like everyone else in my group downloaded a vpn and avoided the whole firewall.
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.
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.
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?
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()"
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
anyway I'm just saying that this is the sort of bad policy where we need to not just argue against it, but also point out that it's not possible. there's no world in which this is a doable thing unless we rebuild the entire internet to do it, which I do not see happening.
it's like if the government said they're gonna blow up the moon. yes, we can argue all day that it's a bad idea and they shouldn't blow up the moon, we need the moon for tides and asteroid deflection and moonlight and there'd be little chunks of moon crashing into the earth and blowing up vienna...
but also we'd need to remember that they can't do that. They can't blow up the moon. we as a species do not have that ability. we could make some scorch marks and a bunch of new craters at great expense, but we'd still fail
and these geographic censorship plans are the same way. they can make a bunch of sound and fury but in the end it won't work. we don't have the ability to reliably and accurately block people based on political boards on the current internet
and no one is yet suggesting we build a new internet that'll be easier to censor. I frankly don't believe that's possible. I've been a government contractor before. I don't think they could build an internet that would let them censor like that and still have it work.
This is all true and real. But I wouldn’t be surprised if my ISP sent me an email tomorrow warning me that we will be switching over to the Patriot Internet this year and many websites will no longer work unless approved by Governor Abbott’s Office of Internet Safety. Because it’ll just happen.
nah build an internet to do the opposite to be so hard to censor and control it might as well be super piratey! Hide servers up in orbit! Hide servers in the mountains! Hide the sumbitches in the oceans and up Bob's ass!
so yeah: internet censorship like this is a bad idea (like, you know, all censorship) but this kind is always going to be a fractal disaster, because it's just not technologically possible for it to work correctly.
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