To go a little further, I used the example of heroin and machine guns in my other reply, but there are lots of countries where people licensed to use these (or technology that’s similar like oxycontin) are allowed or there exist analogs (like bump stocks or binary triggers) that avoid the law.

Heck, in the us any knucklehead can get on the good boy list for heroin or machine guns they just need to pass a bunch of checks and submit to a series of audits and inspections.

The point of banning vpn use would be to keep people from using the technology to skirt identity laws, not to prevent the use of the technology altogether, so it’s likely any ban would take the form of legal wording that looks like “use of computer networking technology to conceal ones identity or aid or abet or perpetrate any crime is unlawful under this section.”

So again, yes they absolutely can do it and no it wouldn’t mean corporations would suddenly have to turn in all their edge devices.

I’m really surprised that on this instance no one has replied with the “laws are threats made by the dominant social economic class” copypasta. Fake ahh anarchists…

Lol it would break so much shit they just couldn't.

Prohibition has never been a deterrent to consumption.

I imagine it'd be a jurisdiction issue for what you propose. If, say, the UK mandates that websites block VPN nodes, that will affect websites served from the UK (creating a Great Firewall of Britain). But what about websites served outside the UK? Those websites can't possibly tell if a user is from the UK and using a VPN, vs outside the UK and using a VPN, so they can't only block UK visitors—they'd have to block all VPN traffic, which is probably not worth it from a business point of view. I suppose the UK could then deem that website illegal in the UK and block them, but then that'd only block the website for non-VPN users in the UK... But if the website owner is outside the UK they can't be punished for violating that law.

More probable (though I still think unlikely) is that a country could sniff for e.g. Wireguard packets and block those. But again that's unlikely because of businesses using VPNs to let employees access company intranets at home.

VPN technology will never be banned, as most companies rely on it heavily, e.g. for remote work. The only thing I could see is ISPs keeping a blacklist of known addresses of commercial VPN providers, but that seems like an uphill battle

Tor bridges exist for this don't they?

Lots of places are applying that sort of regulation already. Problem is, how do you know which IPs are VPNs? There are some obvious ways, and many people block some VPNs already but you can't block every VPN. I can spin up a VPN right now and open it up to users in other countries. It's impossible.

The gov could theoretically maintain a repository of "known" VPNs that they could require sites to block, though. They could even force them to be blocked at the DNS level. This would probably be fairly effective.

But that's also most certainly going to be abused as well.

That would severely cripple remote work/collaboration, which is essential for all megacorps. Unless there's some sort of carve out for that I don't see it happening

It's theoretically possible but difficult to actually do. China has a large central government and surveillance state, VPNs are essentially banned there, and yet a large percentage of the population uses them daily to the point where it's commonplace.

I have moments when I think "I might get banned for this", this is one of those moments.

You may try to ban vpns but you can not really, people usually find ways around censorship. We are notorious for this stuff, as a species.

Its infuriating to me when people just roll over for the powers that be. They may ban some nodes, others will pop up, those will get banned too and so the cycle of cat and mouse begins.

You can host your own vpn with wireguard. It takes a bit of figuring out, sure, but you can literally do so with a raspberry pi. Stick it in a network of choice and voila.

Oh they may control stuff, but this is not a game that can be won, human repression is a futile effort, it may work for a while, but there is a reason why regimes fall. See the wall of Berlin and so many other examples.

Fret not friend, for hope dies last.

Anything can be made illegal. Enforcement is tricky. At the moment it is very easy to block Wireguard protocol at the ISP level, some even do it. But that would probably push Wireguard and others to invest more in obfuscation.

As a sidenote, it bugs me that Wireguard does not support obfuscation out of the box, and you have to put it on top of wireguard.

Anything is possible. Except being free of course.

Just human things.

You can always just route your traffic through a roll your own tunnel to some cheap cloud VM. Modern automation makes it even painless.

How can you ban a VPN (virtual private network)?

I have a VPN setup at home and at my parents home, I can connect either as if I was at either location physically. My office has VPNs for connecting between offices and connecting from remote locations. And dont get me started about being and to purchase a VPS in any country you want, and run a VPN on it.

Does this mean people and companies can no longer setup their own VPN's.

If this is about privacy and anonymity, evey bowsers on any device has a unique identifying fingerprint that allows it to be identifiable even using a VPN. So what is this ban even targeting?

The Hidden Tracking Method Your VPN Can't Block - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJOpHSPkWMo

The end goal is to either make encryption completely ineffective or get rid of it altogether. Remember the last few times lawmakers have tried "protecting the children"?

Yes they can ban it, you will face repercussions if you violate that ban just like if you violate the ban your country probably has on heroin or machine guns.

You can get around it by using doh and a http proxy configured in your web browser, not at the os level.

Yeah, next they'll shut down computer servers

Stupid

in my experience, community and people would always find work arounds