Linux

The laws are entirely stupid (as in written by people that have no clue).

The ones I see do not make using a VPN illegal, they make it illegal for certain websites to receive traffic from VPNs.

As a website, how am I supposed to know if I am receiving traffic from a VPN?

I have to maintain a database of restricted IP addresses? How do I keep that up-to-date? How do I catch small players? Self-hosted stuff?

And even if I do all that, how do I tell where the actual user is? Because that is exactly what VPNs were designed to hide from me. So, I cannot apply it to residents of a state—I have to refuse VPN connections from the entire world.

It is impossible and pointless. Anybody actually doing anything wrong will get around it easily. So all it accomplishes is reducing the security and increasing the hassle for everybody else.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

Say you rented a server at Amazon and ran your own VPN server software on it. Not that hard. The server could expose an HTTPS endpoint.

VPN software on your laptop connects to that.

From the network level, it appears you spend a lot of time connected to the same random website, hosted on some IP not owned by a VPN company.

Greetings Englishman!

They use connections to known VPNs as reported by the infrastructure that handles your requests. Use doh and a https proxy then connect to your vpn of choice.

You could rent a VPS in a neutral country and use ssh to create a SOCKS proxy to it, then use foxyproxy to add the proxy to firefox/librewolf/whatever and either allowlist certain sites you don't want your country knowing about or denylist websites you don't care if your country knows about (especially higher bandwidth sites that aren't controversial like YouTube).

At that point you'd have plenty of "real" traffic from the unproxied websites and any traffic the rest of your OS is using, and when you access the proxied sites you want to hide it'll look like you're using ssh and/or scp.

You could also create a proxy server with a tor connection on the server and use ssh port forwarding to access it locally. The Mullvad browser + foxyproxy would probably be your best bet for using that since it's basically tor browser without tor.

EDIT: Additionally, if you wanted to proxy an application that doesn't support SOCKS internally, you can configure proxychains with the proxy and then launch proxychains applicationname.

mullvad has wireguard obfuscation making it harder to detect vpn traffiic

If you go to dark(.)fail, go to Dread forums and head to c/OpSec, one of the top posts has information on how to bypass all Internet censorship. It's a super in-depth tutorial on bypassing censorship in countires like Russia, China, etc.

"Making VPNs illegal" doesn't stop you from using them.

They would have to implement north korea/iran levels of restrictions in order to prevent you from using VPNs.

I don't know how any company I've worked for would operate, especially when headquartered in another country. They'll just have to fire everyone in that country rather than compromise their security

You could buy a webserver outside the country and set up your own VPN software or something. I think there are forms that look like https.

You should probably try to tell at least one person a week to never vote for those people again and try to resist your oppressive state in every way you can without getting yourself in trouble or hurt.

Also try to do anything you can that they don't want. If the powerful people in your country want something, try to oppose them. Don't let them just shit on you and get away with it.

Until the "whitelist" principle is implemented for the network—you're fine. You'll be able to use stealth protocols, whose traffic is practically indistinguishable from regular HTTPS traffic to any website.

You might ask:

But won't the internet censor notice that suspiciously large amounts of traffic are going to a single IP and block it?

you'd be right, but only in the case where your server is configured incorrectly. nothing stops you from finding a hosting provider whose subnet contains YouTube caching servers and disguise your traffic as coming from there. then, to the censor, everything will look natural, since traffic is indeed going to YouTube.

Once you have your own proxy server, you can create proxy chains to well-known services like Mullvad, IVPN, Proton, etc. Your intermediate server won't see the traffic, so your privacy will be just as strong as when using these popular services directly—except with slightly higher ping.

You might say: what if they introduce those very whitelists, allowing access only to IPs within your country of residence? Like in North Korea?

I'll answer: first, it's unlikely to happen overnight, as it would be a fatal blow to the country's economy. Second, even with whitelists, there are ways around them. In Russia, many people rent Russian CDNs (content delivery networks that reduce ping to services) and use them as an intermediate layer between a foreign server and themselves.

Why can't the censor block them? Because large companies use them—so blocking these CDNs would also break taxi services, banks, and many other services included in the whitelist.

So it's not that bad. The main thing is to have the will to fight for your rights, for your freedom. And methods, one way or another, will remain even under the strictest regimes :)

Most popular VPNs have some form of obfuscation options in their apps. But if you're using e.g. raw Wireguard you won't be able to use their obfuscation function.

Btw technically they can't really outlaw VPNs as a whole, only commercial/"privacy" VPNs. They couldn't really tell if you're e.g. using your friend's PC as a VPN to access their LAN, since it's a residential IP. Unless they're looking for Wireguard packets, but that seems like an unlikely law since it'd piss off a lot of businesses that use VPNs to let their workers access the company intranet at home.

Banning VPNs is on the list of braindead government restrictions up there with banning encryption. The latter is basically a ban on math, just like in that book where 2+2 is sometimes 3, sometimes 5.

There are VPNs that operate in stealth mode so they don't look like VPN traffic as they're being used.

Still illegal, but not detectable. No riskier than being a political activist antagonistic to the state.

Deep-packet inspection exists. They can tell when vpns are being used generally. They kept shutting off my VPN in China ☹️

My recommendation would be Tor and use bridges. Bridges connect to Tor for you, and the IPs of bridges are secret. So no one really knows that you're connecting to Tor. They can only see you connect to a random IP. For extra security you can use the "tails" OS.

While not foolproof, should be good enough for any sort of "normal" people under mass surveillance. If you're special enough to have human attention on you, I don't know sadly.

It'd be a really bad situation. I mean we rely on VPNs and tunnels a lot. For half the people doing home-office, logging into the company's VPN is the first thing in the morning. Field crew relies on them. That's an additional layer of protection in the ATM of your bank...

It'd wreck half the economy in the process. Or "they" need to outlaw specific things. Like private VPNs. And gather a list of private VPN providers and ban them via a great firewall. That's possible. And would make life worse in a country. It's possible to circumvent these measures. And it's difficult to discern traffic and distinguish VPN traffic from other encrypted traffic so the country might want to implement some harsh measures as well. A police force knocking on people's doors if they suspect them to evade law and demand they show their computer and smartphones.

So in conclusion your best option is probably to move to a different place if you can afford to, once that becomes reality. (Edit: Maybe your best option is to protest this, do campaigns, call your representative and try to stop it. So we dont get into this situation in the fist place.)

this is exactly what's going on in China (PRC), bypass method depends on how hard the government implements it

Firstly, it depends on how illegal it is. Is it illegal like you shouldn't do it and we will try to block you? Or is it illegal like if we catch you do it, you can get arrested or worse?

Scenario A:

• just try shit out, try different VPNs. Some of them provide certain obfuscation. You can see if they work. If they don't work, you've got some more dedicated VPNs such as Tor with all kinds of Tor bridges (obfs4, snowflake, etc) Or psiphon

Scenario B:

• The risk is real and you might consider not doing it at all, but if you do, obfs4 is the only thing I can recommend, Psiphon is easily detectable (it's just good at bypassing blocks)

I don't see how any modern country could do it. It would close off all cloud things.

You could always get a friend in another country to host a VPN just for you (and then run that through a commercial VPN).

P2P tunnelling could be a thing, but obv there are issues with having a stranger’s traffic coming out of your home network range. I guess they can’t really lock out all traffic from AWS and Azure, so cloud data centres are an option.

Tor, i2p or a similar overlay network.

Proxying through a friend's connection abroad (using a wireguard implementation like headscale).

Risking lesser-known VPNs; and ISPs being bound to net-neutrality. YMMV.