this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
1102 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
59647 readers
3100 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They will see you connecting to the VPN and use it as an excuse to seize your computer if they want to. It likely won't be a thing they do to everyone. Just like in China, that will enforce the laws primarily against people who don't toe the party line.
The purpose is not to ban porn. They don't actually care about that morality. The purpose is to create a framework to suppress dissent.
If connecting to a computer in Canada is sufficient excuse seize someone's computers, then banning VPNs won't make a difference. There's no way for them to know that it's a VPN. It'll just look like any other internet traffic.
There are many ways of seeing if a host is running a VPN, and then sniffing out VPN handshakes. China does an automated scan of basically every unfamiliar host on the internet when someone inside China connects to it, specifically to check for VPNs and the like.
It is possible to set up tunnels which are difficult to detect by using pre-shared secrets and obfuscated transport, but right now this is uncommon and takes significant effort and still isn't legally or technologically bulletproof.
Remember, my doomsday scenario here is that a Republican gets elected president and can leverage the NSA to assist states in "enforcing their laws."