this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Say I rent a server in Canada and let all my friends connect to it. Then they use that server to watch porn. How would the Montana Jack-Off Police ever know that people from Montana are watching porn? All they would see is that a bunch of people from Montana are remotely connected to Canada. Maybe that's where my office is or were all just doing a remote LAN party.
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."