This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This article seems a little misinformed: VPNs are still regularly used in business and are necessary for companies to function. That's still probably their primary use if I had to guess.
People who are trying to ban them clearly have no clue what they're doing as banning VPNs would be an absolute disaster, not just for privacy minded people or folks who want to watch something region locked, but for the basic tech functions of just about any sizeable business.
Very easy to write "except businesses" in legislation
In American anyone can run a business as a sole proprietor.
So that would essentially invalidate the law.
They would probably code the language to ban people selling access to a vpn, but not stop you from running your own.
Time to spin up a small business I guess
Them I am a business. Sorry pal.
I know dude, literally everyone ignores this. Its like an ostrich putting it's head in the sand.
If businesses are people then people are businesses.
Commercial VPNs are businesses too :)
When do governments do anything clever when writing legislation or laws or whatever?
"New legislation mandates that we no longer offer the VPN connections necessary for our remote workers to access the company intranet off premises. Starting immediately, all employees are to return to office 7 days a week. If this does not work for you, please reach out to HR and they will accept that as your resignation in lieu of a written document."
— Meta (the corp pushing the age verification laws), probably.
What about all of the site-to-site VPNs?
Legal, probably. Whichever corporations push that hypothetical bill are going to write it very specifically to ensure that it excludes their use cases.
Here's an example of how they could do it:
S.A.V.E.K.I.D.S:
Support Age Verification Environments Keeping Internet Detectable SignalsBlah blah pretext and background information...
Blah blah surface-level purported reason for the bill is to prevent kids from bypassing age verification checks by using a VPN to pretend they're a resident of another country...
No entity operating in or doing business within may provide services or make available technology that irreversibly redirects, masks, or otherwise obscures internet-destined traffic to appear as originating from any source other than the internet-connected network in which it was generated.
Site--to-site VPN? Fine, it's destined for the intranet.
NAT? Also fine, it is the originating internet-connected network.
HTTP reverse proxies? Still fine, they pass the origin IP along.
VPN that routes all traffic through it? You're getting locked up and they're throwing away the key.
I know right? Egypt, Tanzania, China, India, Iran, Iraq, Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan, Turkey, Turkminestan, The UAE, Belarus, and Russia all have laws outright banning or restricting (you know, not business but individuals [yes, they can do that]) VPN usage.
But it won't happen here! You can take that to the bank.
They're legally banned but that has not stopped the use of VPNs in the countries that tried to ban them, there are already multiple ways around the efforts to stop them.
Legally banned = electronics seized, fines, and jail time when they catch you circumventing it and decide they want to make an example out of you.
I'm sure that won't ever be used negatively or to target specific groups like investigative journalists and whistleblowers.
You not taking it seriously and trying to convince others to not take it seriously won't make a better outcome.
"Watch dis shit" - Governments around the world
I mean, they could just require businesses to register their gateways. That's a pretty easy caveat to implement.
You know they're banning foreign made consumer routers, right?
That sure didn't stop Russia from blanket banning VPNs.
They're not doing so great, but also, if someone really wants to use an encrypted connection there's ways around it even in places like Russia and China.
Ultimately the end goal is going to become using whitelists, as what some of the aforementioned countries have implemented/are implementing as we speak. Do not delude yourself into thinking that just because there will be at least some way to send a very short, lightweight message out into the world and receive a similarly small response while remaining undetected, then it has to mean that you as an everyday Joe will be able to browse yourfavourite.site as if it didn't get blocked. Stop this while you still can, don't count on incompetence or existing circumvention methods.
I am all for stopping it, but the politicians suggesting these bans have absolutely no idea what they're talking about or how damn near impossible it would be to actually accomplish: Fight it? Absolutely! It's stupid as hell and will be a complete waste of time and money. It will 100% not stop anyone with even moderate technical ability.
Good luck banning something that any computer in the world can run. You have wireguard vpn built into the Linux kernel. :)
And have you tried running said built-in wireguard on ISPs that block it? Spoiler: you can't.
That's why you need something more hidden like xray that can camouflage as an h2 site
Didn't they just announce creation of whitelist for gov approved routers?
The headline is a slippery slope argument in action.
If the Internet traffic becomes deeply surveilled, this won’t be by ”ban” means, but by the great firewall means. If it already isn’t surveilled this way.
Best guess about the downvotes: UK lawmakers have already discussed VPN crackdowns. Not sure at what stage the proposals are. So it's not a slippery slope argument. Such laws are part of what builds a Great Firewall.
At some point the argumemt that it's to "protect the children" rather than to control and monitor what adults do will fall flat when more and more difficult to use work arounds keep getting banned that realistically only adults would employ.
I have never denied the possibility of VPN ban, I have just pointed out the clickbait in the headline.
It’s not like some random article is going to save us from government oppression. Also, does anybody remember ACTA? It was a big deal like 15 years ago and was supposed to end digital piracy. lol
Either the governments don’t really care what we all click at on our personal devices or the technology develops at a faster pace than law. Either way, we are safe. That is, until the the more power-hungry people get in charge.
Why the downvotes?
