60
UK government targets VPNs in new online safety consultation as Lords vote for ban (www.techradar.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[+] 16 points 9 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (9 children)
[deleted]
  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 9 child comments
    •
  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    You think UK would be the first country to ban VPNs? There are thousands of talented and very committed computer scientists in authoritarian countries tirelessly working to enforce internet censorship. They discovered many wonderful technical solutions to this problem.

    All the mainstream VPN protocols like OpenVPN and Wireguard don't even try to hide themselves and are easily detected no matter what port you use. They are useless if you country is seriously set to block VPNs.

    There are different protocols specifically designed to circumvent censorship and they do so by masking their traffic to like something innocuous like HTTPS. However even they can be detected using advanced traffic analysis. For example, if a given machine only sends and receives HTTPS traffic to a single specific overseas server, it is safe to assume that it's not actually a genuine website traffic but a VPN masquerading as HTTPS.

    There is special hardware that all users' traffic goes through that detects these patterns and automatically throttles/blocks these connections.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    What if you were playing a browser game for hours? Wouldn't that also be HTTPS traffic to the same server all the time?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    Maybe, depending on the game. But your OS and running programs will still be making http requests to various servers. Microsoft's, Google's, Steam's, etc. Modern devices and OSes phone home constantly. If you have VPN all your traffic will go through a single server (unless you configure split tunneling to use VPN only for certain sites) and that's easily detectable.

    There also databases of known VPN IP addresses, and if you set up your own then analyzing hardware/software will still know see that you are communicating with a rented server in cloud and will flag you as suspicious.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Most of them do that too a degree anyway. Credit cards are only available to over 18s, so if you pay with one of those, that's your ID. I guess this is mostly for free VPNs (although I've never found one that was any good) and people paying with debit cards or crypto.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •