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> It Won’t Even Work I heard similar sentiments about censorship efforts in Russia, but it does seem to work, unfortunately. So far they have outlawed and bloc

by defanor 10mo ago

> It Won’t Even Work I heard similar sentiments about censorship efforts in Russia, but it does seem to work, unfortunately. So far they have outlawed and blocked major VPN providers (and keep blocking more, including non-commercial ones, like Tor bridges, and foreign hosting companies' websites), blocked major detectable protocols used for those (IPsec, WireGuard), made usage of proxying ("VPN") an aggravating circumstance for the newly-introduced crime of searching for "extremist" information. That seems to deter many people already, and once the majority is forced to use the local approved (surveilled, censored) services, it is even easier to introduce whitelists or simply cut international connections (as is already practiced temporarily and locally), at which point the ban is successfully applied to everyone.

LadyCailin 10mo ago
It won’t even work* *without resorting to complete Russian style government control The US is not (yet) Russia. The rule of law is definitely being destroyed as we speak, so who knows 5, 10 years down the road, but there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban.
- forgotoldacc 10mo ago
  Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."
  - jhrmnn 10mo ago
    Can you name some examples?
  - vinay427 10mo ago
    From my reading, the GP comment isn’t claiming otherwise, but just that that sort of VPN ban isn’t enforceable in advance of some of those changes. They do directly suggest they don’t know how long this will remain the case.
    - LadyCailin 10mo ago
      Exactly. I’m not saying don’t fight this, you should, tooth and nail. But losing doesn’t mean VPNs will stop working.
  - colechristensen 10mo ago
    >Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad." This is a pretty bold claim and I'm not sure it matches up with reality. Karl Marx said that in the first stage of communism there would be a required period of dictatorial control in order to transition from and dismantle capitalist institutions. This is exactly what happened in China and the USSR... there just never was a phase 2. That's not quite "this will never happen here", more like premeditated dictatorship that never ended because the ruling class preferred being a ruling class rather than return themselves to "communist paradise".
    - mananaysiempre 10mo ago
      If we’re exhuming odious corpses, Lenin did say the first step would be to control the telegraph and telephone exchanges. Control over the spread of information was understood to be crucial even then. (Admittedly in Lenin’s case he was also talking about battlefield coordination inside a city, what with the absence of portable radios.) As far as Marx, well, he didn’t provide a recipe for phase 2 either—he just kind of assumed that things would fall into place naturally after the revolution (that needed to be global! the whole communism-within-a-country thing was a later invention / post-hoc rationalization, lampooned masterfully by Voinovich’s Moscow 2042). The entirety of the nascent social sciences field (which Marx was performing to the contemporary standards of, however disastrously that turned out) was rather high on the whole natural law thing around that time. Turns out that, if you created a power vacuum, it would be filled by people who had most ruthlessly optimized for capturing power, as opposed to fairness, your preferred ideology, or anything else. Which at first meant Lenin and then ultimately Stalin, in whose purges died the last true (if at that point very, very bloody) believers. (Notice also how there are very few mentions in history of the eponymous soviets, councils [of workers and peasants], deciding anything whatsoever.) Also most of the intellectual backbone of the nation and the national liberation movements of multiple peoples, but who’s counting.
    - Gud 10mo ago
      Not really, because pre-Soviet Union wasn’t a capitalist society. Russia and China were barely industrial nations.
  - catlover76 10mo ago
    [dead]
  - estimator7292 10mo ago
    That's a tautology, and not even an interesting one.
  - nurumaik 10mo ago
    Every country that hasn't begins with same
- mananaysiempre 10mo ago
  Don’t exaggerate the level of control required. For all that things are bad and getting worse, Russia has not reached the North Korea percolation point where every facet of government control is tied to every other one. (Neither has Russia reached a NK-style total war economy, partly through bureaucratic dysfunction and partly by design; but I digress.) The things that it does are still pretty modular and don’t require $YOURCOUNTRY becoming Russia in its entirety. Hell, London had more outdoor surveillance than Moscow until after Covid. As far as Internet censorship, here’s what the playbook was: 1. Have a dysfunctional court system. (Not a powerless one, mind you; it’s enough that it basically never rule against the government. It would probably even be enough if it never ruled against any of the following.) 2. Mandate page-level blocks of “information harmful to the health and development of children” (I wish I were joking) for consumer ISPs, by court order; of course, that means IP or at least hostname/SNI blocks for TLS-protected websites, we can’t help that now can we. The year is 2012. 3. Gradually expand the scope throughout the following steps. (After couple of particularly obnoxious opposition websites and against an unavoidable background of prostitution and illegal gambling, the next victim, in 2015, was piracy including pirate libraries. Which is why I find the notion of LibGen or Sci-Hub being Russian soft power so risible, and the outrage against Cloudflare not being in the moderation business so naïve.) 4. Make sure the court orders are for specific pieces of content not websites (as they must be if you don’t want the system to be circumventable by trivial hostname hopping), meaning the enforcement agency can find a particularly vague order and gradually start using it for whatever. Doesn’t hurt that the newly-blocked website’s owner will be faced with a concluded case in which they don’t even have standing. 5. Ramp up enforcement against ISPs. 6. Use preexisting lawful intercept infra at ISPs to ramp up enforcement even further. Have them run through the agency-provided daily blacklist, fine the offenders. Any other probe you can get connected to the ISP will work too. 7. Offer ISPs a choice (wink, wink) of routing their traffic through agency-controlled, friendly-contractor-made DPI boxes they will need to buy, promising to release them from some liability. (First draft published 2016, signed into law 2019.) 8. Mandate the boxes. 9. It is now 2021 or so and you’ve won, legally and organizationally speaking, the rest is a simple matter of programming to filter out VPN protocols, WhatsApp calls and such. Pass additional laws mandating blocks of “promotion” of block evasion if you wish, but the whole legal basis thing is a pretence at this point. For instance, you can de facto block YouTube absent any legal order by simply having the DPI boxes make it very slow, a capability not mentioned in any law whatsoever, then cheerfully announce that in the national press. See how very easy it is? How each legal or technical capability logically follows from very real deficiencies of the preceding ones so even a reasonable court would be disinclined to rule against them? Understand now why I’m furious when reasonable people on this forum defend the desires of their—mostly good and decent!—governments to control the Internet? (See also how most of this happened before “Russia bad” became the prevailing sentiment, and how most of it went largely unnoticed in the EU and US, aside from a couple of reputable-but-fringe orgs like RSF to whom very few listen because they cry wolf so much? The ECtHR didn’t even get to the cases, IIRC, before the trap snapped shut and Russia was drummed out of the Council of Europe to widespread cheering, making the matter de facto moot.) You know that road. You know exactly where it ends.
- nirui 10mo ago
  It's not just a VPN ban, the word VPN in the context means proxy, and you can setup a proxy with something as basic as a SSH command. It's basically a restriction on communication, i.e. the government decides who you're allowed to talk to, not just a privacy issue.
  - Spooky23 10mo ago
    Not really, that’s just the type the EFF gins up. The problem is the regulation of speech and requiring verification. The VPN stuff is a misapplication of security “best practices”. Tech companies are amoral and happily facilitate the use of their technology for oppression in other places.
    - spwa4 10mo ago
      I would argue it's more accurate to say tech companies take the "old-style" US approach. It's based on the idea that propaganda doesn't actually work. There weren't many actual communists in Russia, it was a dictatorship with mostly prisoners/hostages who were threatened into lying, and knew full well that they were threatened, and after the teenage phase is over, actually start asking "why are we being threatened over this?". So as soon as they left with little intention to return, they suddenly become the problem that socialists really hate to discuss: ex-Soviets hate socialism. It's like cults, or, if we're honest, there's other repressive groups and repressive ideologies that have loooooooooong lost their any usefulness and really only the repression remains. In other words, if tech companies show Chinese that non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there, then no amount of CCP censorship will ever actually convince those people that the CCP has good intentions. Judging by my conversations with Chinese, it's working.
      - bccdee 10mo ago
        > There weren't many actual communists in Russia What's this claim based on? Hierarchies are fractal; at every level of an ideological authoritarian society, comfort and influence are only granted in exchange for affirming and regurgitating state ideology. Cognitive dissonance forces people who take that deal to choose between losing self-respect and accepting the ideology. I think you'd be surprised how well this works. People always want to believe that they deserve the things they have. > ex-Soviets hate socialism Naturally, they change their minds when they leave. There's no longer any psychological incentive to believe. Besides, people who choose to leave have typically already broken with the ideology. You compare it to a cult, but the thing about cults is that the members generally do believe. > non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there Life in many authoritarian states is fine for most people. It is what it is; if you don't make a fuss, you can live pretty comfortably. Obviously many dictatorships are not like this, but China is fairly stable. For almost all of human history, people have lived under authoritarian governments. It's unpleasant to think about, but authoritarianism can be stable and durable. There's no guarantee that democracy wins.
- deleted 10mo ago
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- Alex2037 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 10mo ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
    - Alex2037 10mo ago
      I'm sorry, comrade commissar. I'll go stand in the corner now.
      - dang 10mo ago
        No need! Just please use HN in the intended spirit. It's fragile and easy to harm without intending to.
- pessimizer 10mo ago
  > there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban. Ah, the "institutions." I didn't think about those. Very convincing.
cedws 10mo ago
I think us software people tend to think in absolutes. Yes, completely banning VPNs is very difficult. But for a totalitarian government, reducing VPN usage by say 60% is a win. You only have to make it difficult enough for the layman.
- gjsman-1000 10mo ago
  I keep citing, as an example of this, speed limits. You can literally break the law by just pushing your foot down harder. It's that easy! Therefore they're pointless. Or, the TSA. They might have taken away my knife, but putting a rock in a sock and hitting someone in the head is an easy workaround. Therefore it's pointless. (Arguing that the law is easy to break has no effect on whether the law is a good idea, should exist, or is effective.)
  - thaumasiotes 10mo ago
    Your examples are unlike each other. What stops people from speeding more than they already do is enforcement. The law isn't doing anything. But the TSA isn't a law. The TSA is, notionally, the enforcement. And it doesn't do anything either. So the TSA really is pointless. If you drive around at 30 mph over the limit, you're going to get a ticket, and this traffic cop presence stops people from speeding "too much". If you smuggle explosives onto an airplane, you may die in the crash, but that would have happened regardless of the TSA. The TSA hasn't added any value.
    - brookst 10mo ago
      The examples are similar in that they demonstrate that reducing probability is a reasonable goal, and it is a mistake to say anything imperfect is useless. Your take on TSA seems to be in the imperfect=useless camp. There are good ROI, efficiency, and philosophical reasons to want to abolish TSA, but it seems naive to say there is zero value and their mere existence has not deterred anyone.
      - maxbond 10mo ago
imiric 10mo ago
Unless the government decides to ban all cryptography, or forcefully install their own certificates on every device, it should be possible to avoid any restriction attempts. If they're doing deep packet inspection to detect specific protocols, then those can be tunneled via encrypted protocols they do allow, such as TLS or SSH. This is certainly more inconvenient to use, but not impossible. If they're blocking all traffic beyond their borders, then that's a separate matter, but usually such restrictions are more annoying than absolute.
- _njyk 10mo ago
  Technically it's easy to come around restrictions (for example, where I live, RT.com is fully censored "to protect me"). But from a lawmaker perspective, the topic is not technical. The question, at the end, is about the enforcement of the punishments that go with circumvention; and in some places there is punishment even when you are "just" trying to circumvent these restrictions. It's easy to break-in into someone's place. What prevents you from doing it, is the punishment (and potentially ethics), not the physical barrier.
  - spwa4 10mo ago
    > It's easy to break-in into someone's place. What prevents you from doing it, is the punishment (and potentially ethics), not the physical barrier. It's illegal to steal a macbook that has been abandoned on the train. Try leaving yours and see if the more important thing is the physical barrier or ethics/punishment/existence of laws.
- Lex-2008 10mo ago
  re: SSH - I once heard that in China they can throttle SSH speed so it's usable for terminal work, but not for copying files or browsing web.
- pxc 10mo ago
  Take a look at the tools Chinese people use to evade the national firewall. They're extremely sophisticated, and need to advance all the time because the GFW constantly becomes more sophisticated. There are a lot of encryption technologies that the government also allows to work until they block them at a critical moment. All of the VPNs you've ever heard of in some advertisement on YouTube or whatever are easily and totally blocked in China. Governments can make evading their censorship very difficult, painful, and risky, if they want to. It can have a huge impact.
wartywhoa23 10mo ago
But then VLESS is thriving and the only way to stop this is by enforcing whitelists. Which is not something those scumbags are incapable of, of course.
flexagoon 10mo ago
Is it working in Russia? I'm Russian and basically every single person I know has and actively uses a VPN with no consequences. WireGuard also works just fine - I was able to selfhost and use it without any extra obfuscation. They only blocked a few largest providers, but that's seemingly it.
- defanor 10mo ago
  > every single person I know has and actively uses a VPN I do know people who use no circumvention methods: some are simply not sufficiently familiar with technologies (including older people, who seem to think that something is wrong with their phones), for others it is a mix of regular shying away from technologies and being worried that it draws the government's attention. And then there are those who appear to genuinely support the censorship (or whatever else the government does). I also hear of people switching to local services as the regular ones are blocked. Anecdotal data is of little use to determine the extent though, and trustworthy statistical data may be hard to come by, but if you somewhat trust the Levada Center, their polls indicate that YouTube's Russian audience halved following the blocking, among other things. [0] > WireGuard also works just fine - I was able to selfhost and use it without any extra obfuscation. For both IPsec and WireGuard, I have both heard of the blocks [1] and observed those myself, particularly to servers across the border (which were otherwise available; there is a chance that I misconfigured something back then, but I recall it working fine with local servers). For IPsec, I have also observed blocks within the country (and RKN lifting those on request, confirming an intentional blocking that way, twice; also confirmed that those were for IPsec packets in particular, not any UDP). But possibly it does not affect all the foreign subnets: as with a recent blackout [2], when quite a few were affected, but not all of them. [0] https://www.levada.ru/2025/04/24/polzovanie-internetom-sotsialnymi-setyami-messendzherami-iskusstvennym-intellektom-i-drugimi-onlajn-servisami-mart-2025/ https://www.levada.ru/2025/04/24/polzovanie-internetom-sotsi... [1] One of the recently seen public mentions is at https://blog.nommy.moe/blog/exotic-mesh-vpn/ https://blog.nommy.moe/blog/exotic-mesh-vpn/ [2] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/490 https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/490
  - idiotsecant 10mo ago
hereme888 10mo ago
Russia is not even remotely similar to the U.S.A. in terms of freedom, rights, and infrastructure. Politicians will never be able to ban VPNs or vetted e2e encryption (like signal, and now X) in the US. Especially with this strongly pro-American, strongly pro-privacy admin and Supreme Justices on the watch.
- gilli 10mo ago
  Tell me another joke..
  - hereme888 10mo ago
    Here's one: How successful was the combined efforts of politicians + 3-letter agencies + universities, at banning computer encryption in the past? Not successful at all, hahaha.
    - bccdee 10mo ago
      Banning encryption proved infeasible, so they just switched to programs like PRISM instead. That was very successful.
      - hereme888 10mo ago
        Let me explain a bit further:governments lost the battle to ban code. Since then, no code can really get banned. And, nowadays we have vetted p2p VPNs even if all world govs try to ban vpn companies, and no prism or quantum computing programs can bypass their post-quantum e2e implementation.
        bccdee 10mo ago
        Code is already banned by anti-circumvention laws.¹ I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard, legislatively, to have VPNs classified as a tool for circumventing "digital locks." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention#Distribution_of_Circumvention_Tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention#Distributio...
porphyra 10mo ago
One time in China (in 2018) I ran my own OpenVPN instance on a Linode VPS in Singapore, and then it got blocked within a couple of days lol. I'm guessing it was deep packet inspection.
liveifsh 10mo ago
I'm from Russia, can confirm that. We are constantly trying to get around these blocks but no tech can help from cutting international connections. Also there is another issue: local browsers (Yandex and Atom from Mail Ru group) are using government certificates by default. That means that https encryption between sites inside the country becomes useless
drysine 10mo ago
>simply cut international connections (as is already practiced temporarily and locally) No, international connections are not cut. The mobile internet gets cut locally and temporarily when the Ukraine attacks Russian cities trying to terrorize population. Several essential or popular Russian services are whitelisted. All the rest of Russian internet is as inaccessible as foreign servers.
- yatopifo 10mo ago
  The name is Ukraine. There is no “the”.
- josephg 10mo ago
  > The mobile internet gets cut locally and temporarily when the Ukraine attacks Russian cities trying to terrorize population. It’s hard to feel sympathetic when Russian bombs have been “accidentally” hitting Ukrainian civilians since day 1 of the war. Has the war been affecting civilian life in Russia much? I hear Ukraine has been targeting the Russian power grid lately.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - drysine 10mo ago
    Why did you put "accidentally" in quotes?
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - mopsi 10mo ago
      The Kherson human safari leaves no other option to anyone. When Russian drone pilots have nothing better to show to their fans on the social media to raise funds, they are attacking men fixing a roof of a small home, elderly women returning from the city with grocery bags, people waiting at a bus stop, and in case you want to classify all of the former as disguised soldiers, they are attacking even stray dogs.

by defanor 10mo ago

LadyCailin 10mo ago

It won’t even work* *without resorting to complete Russian style government control The US is not (yet) Russia. The rule of law is definitely being destroyed as we speak, so who knows 5, 10 years down the road, but there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban.

forgotoldacc 10mo ago
Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."
- jhrmnn 10mo ago
  Can you name some examples?
- vinay427 10mo ago
  From my reading, the GP comment isn’t claiming otherwise, but just that that sort of VPN ban isn’t enforceable in advance of some of those changes. They do directly suggest they don’t know how long this will remain the case.
  - LadyCailin 10mo ago
    Exactly. I’m not saying don’t fight this, you should, tooth and nail. But losing doesn’t mean VPNs will stop working.
- colechristensen 10mo ago
  >Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad." This is a pretty bold claim and I'm not sure it matches up with reality. Karl Marx said that in the first stage of communism there would be a required period of dictatorial control in order to transition from and dismantle capitalist institutions. This is exactly what happened in China and the USSR... there just never was a phase 2. That's not quite "this will never happen here", more like premeditated dictatorship that never ended because the ruling class preferred being a ruling class rather than return themselves to "communist paradise".
  - mananaysiempre 10mo ago
    If we’re exhuming odious corpses, Lenin did say the first step would be to control the telegraph and telephone exchanges. Control over the spread of information was understood to be crucial even then. (Admittedly in Lenin’s case he was also talking about battlefield coordination inside a city, what with the absence of portable radios.) As far as Marx, well, he didn’t provide a recipe for phase 2 either—he just kind of assumed that things would fall into place naturally after the revolution (that needed to be global! the whole communism-within-a-country thing was a later invention / post-hoc rationalization, lampooned masterfully by Voinovich’s Moscow 2042). The entirety of the nascent social sciences field (which Marx was performing to the contemporary standards of, however disastrously that turned out) was rather high on the whole natural law thing around that time. Turns out that, if you created a power vacuum, it would be filled by people who had most ruthlessly optimized for capturing power, as opposed to fairness, your preferred ideology, or anything else. Which at first meant Lenin and then ultimately Stalin, in whose purges died the last true (if at that point very, very bloody) believers. (Notice also how there are very few mentions in history of the eponymous soviets, councils [of workers and peasants], deciding anything whatsoever.) Also most of the intellectual backbone of the nation and the national liberation movements of multiple peoples, but who’s counting.
  - Gud 10mo ago
    Not really, because pre-Soviet Union wasn’t a capitalist society. Russia and China were barely industrial nations.
- catlover76 10mo ago
  [dead]
- estimator7292 10mo ago
  That's a tautology, and not even an interesting one.
- nurumaik 10mo ago
  Every country that hasn't begins with same
mananaysiempre 10mo ago
Don’t exaggerate the level of control required. For all that things are bad and getting worse, Russia has not reached the North Korea percolation point where every facet of government control is tied to every other one. (Neither has Russia reached a NK-style total war economy, partly through bureaucratic dysfunction and partly by design; but I digress.) The things that it does are still pretty modular and don’t require $YOURCOUNTRY becoming Russia in its entirety. Hell, London had more outdoor surveillance than Moscow until after Covid. As far as Internet censorship, here’s what the playbook was: 1. Have a dysfunctional court system. (Not a powerless one, mind you; it’s enough that it basically never rule against the government. It would probably even be enough if it never ruled against any of the following.) 2. Mandate page-level blocks of “information harmful to the health and development of children” (I wish I were joking) for consumer ISPs, by court order; of course, that means IP or at least hostname/SNI blocks for TLS-protected websites, we can’t help that now can we. The year is 2012. 3. Gradually expand the scope throughout the following steps. (After couple of particularly obnoxious opposition websites and against an unavoidable background of prostitution and illegal gambling, the next victim, in 2015, was piracy including pirate libraries. Which is why I find the notion of LibGen or Sci-Hub being Russian soft power so risible, and the outrage against Cloudflare not being in the moderation business so naïve.) 4. Make sure the court orders are for specific pieces of content not websites (as they must be if you don’t want the system to be circumventable by trivial hostname hopping), meaning the enforcement agency can find a particularly vague order and gradually start using it for whatever. Doesn’t hurt that the newly-blocked website’s owner will be faced with a concluded case in which they don’t even have standing. 5. Ramp up enforcement against ISPs. 6. Use preexisting lawful intercept infra at ISPs to ramp up enforcement even further. Have them run through the agency-provided daily blacklist, fine the offenders. Any other probe you can get connected to the ISP will work too. 7. Offer ISPs a choice (wink, wink) of routing their traffic through agency-controlled, friendly-contractor-made DPI boxes they will need to buy, promising to release them from some liability. (First draft published 2016, signed into law 2019.) 8. Mandate the boxes. 9. It is now 2021 or so and you’ve won, legally and organizationally speaking, the rest is a simple matter of programming to filter out VPN protocols, WhatsApp calls and such. Pass additional laws mandating blocks of “promotion” of block evasion if you wish, but the whole legal basis thing is a pretence at this point. For instance, you can de facto block YouTube absent any legal order by simply having the DPI boxes make it very slow, a capability not mentioned in any law whatsoever, then cheerfully announce that in the national press. See how very easy it is? How each legal or technical capability logically follows from very real deficiencies of the preceding ones so even a reasonable court would be disinclined to rule against them? Understand now why I’m furious when reasonable people on this forum defend the desires of their—mostly good and decent!—governments to control the Internet? (See also how most of this happened before “Russia bad” became the prevailing sentiment, and how most of it went largely unnoticed in the EU and US, aside from a couple of reputable-but-fringe orgs like RSF to whom very few listen because they cry wolf so much? The ECtHR didn’t even get to the cases, IIRC, before the trap snapped shut and Russia was drummed out of the Council of Europe to widespread cheering, making the matter de facto moot.) You know that road. You know exactly where it ends.
nirui 10mo ago
It's not just a VPN ban, the word VPN in the context means proxy, and you can setup a proxy with something as basic as a SSH command. It's basically a restriction on communication, i.e. the government decides who you're allowed to talk to, not just a privacy issue.
- Spooky23 10mo ago
  Not really, that’s just the type the EFF gins up. The problem is the regulation of speech and requiring verification. The VPN stuff is a misapplication of security “best practices”. Tech companies are amoral and happily facilitate the use of their technology for oppression in other places.
  - spwa4 10mo ago
    I would argue it's more accurate to say tech companies take the "old-style" US approach. It's based on the idea that propaganda doesn't actually work. There weren't many actual communists in Russia, it was a dictatorship with mostly prisoners/hostages who were threatened into lying, and knew full well that they were threatened, and after the teenage phase is over, actually start asking "why are we being threatened over this?". So as soon as they left with little intention to return, they suddenly become the problem that socialists really hate to discuss: ex-Soviets hate socialism. It's like cults, or, if we're honest, there's other repressive groups and repressive ideologies that have loooooooooong lost their any usefulness and really only the repression remains. In other words, if tech companies show Chinese that non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there, then no amount of CCP censorship will ever actually convince those people that the CCP has good intentions. Judging by my conversations with Chinese, it's working.
    - bccdee 10mo ago
      > There weren't many actual communists in Russia What's this claim based on? Hierarchies are fractal; at every level of an ideological authoritarian society, comfort and influence are only granted in exchange for affirming and regurgitating state ideology. Cognitive dissonance forces people who take that deal to choose between losing self-respect and accepting the ideology. I think you'd be surprised how well this works. People always want to believe that they deserve the things they have. > ex-Soviets hate socialism Naturally, they change their minds when they leave. There's no longer any psychological incentive to believe. Besides, people who choose to leave have typically already broken with the ideology. You compare it to a cult, but the thing about cults is that the members generally do believe. > non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there Life in many authoritarian states is fine for most people. It is what it is; if you don't make a fuss, you can live pretty comfortably. Obviously many dictatorships are not like this, but China is fairly stable. For almost all of human history, people have lived under authoritarian governments. It's unpleasant to think about, but authoritarianism can be stable and durable. There's no guarantee that democracy wins.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
Alex2037 10mo ago
[flagged]
- dang 10mo ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - Alex2037 10mo ago
    I'm sorry, comrade commissar. I'll go stand in the corner now.
    - dang 10mo ago
      No need! Just please use HN in the intended spirit. It's fragile and easy to harm without intending to.
pessimizer 10mo ago
> there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban. Ah, the "institutions." I didn't think about those. Very convincing.

cedws 10mo ago

I think us software people tend to think in absolutes. Yes, completely banning VPNs is very difficult. But for a totalitarian government, reducing VPN usage by say 60% is a win. You only have to make it difficult enough for the layman.

gjsman-1000 10mo ago
I keep citing, as an example of this, speed limits. You can literally break the law by just pushing your foot down harder. It's that easy! Therefore they're pointless. Or, the TSA. They might have taken away my knife, but putting a rock in a sock and hitting someone in the head is an easy workaround. Therefore it's pointless. (Arguing that the law is easy to break has no effect on whether the law is a good idea, should exist, or is effective.)
- thaumasiotes 10mo ago
  Your examples are unlike each other. What stops people from speeding more than they already do is enforcement. The law isn't doing anything. But the TSA isn't a law. The TSA is, notionally, the enforcement. And it doesn't do anything either. So the TSA really is pointless. If you drive around at 30 mph over the limit, you're going to get a ticket, and this traffic cop presence stops people from speeding "too much". If you smuggle explosives onto an airplane, you may die in the crash, but that would have happened regardless of the TSA. The TSA hasn't added any value.
  - brookst 10mo ago
    The examples are similar in that they demonstrate that reducing probability is a reasonable goal, and it is a mistake to say anything imperfect is useless. Your take on TSA seems to be in the imperfect=useless camp. There are good ROI, efficiency, and philosophical reasons to want to abolish TSA, but it seems naive to say there is zero value and their mere existence has not deterred anyone.
    - maxbond 10mo ago

imiric 10mo ago

Unless the government decides to ban all cryptography, or forcefully install their own certificates on every device, it should be possible to avoid any restriction attempts. If they're doing deep packet inspection to detect specific protocols, then those can be tunneled via encrypted protocols they do allow, such as TLS or SSH. This is certainly more inconvenient to use, but not impossible. If they're blocking all traffic beyond their borders, then that's a separate matter, but usually such restrictions are more annoying than absolute.

_njyk 10mo ago
Technically it's easy to come around restrictions (for example, where I live, RT.com is fully censored "to protect me"). But from a lawmaker perspective, the topic is not technical. The question, at the end, is about the enforcement of the punishments that go with circumvention; and in some places there is punishment even when you are "just" trying to circumvent these restrictions. It's easy to break-in into someone's place. What prevents you from doing it, is the punishment (and potentially ethics), not the physical barrier.
- spwa4 10mo ago
  > It's easy to break-in into someone's place. What prevents you from doing it, is the punishment (and potentially ethics), not the physical barrier. It's illegal to steal a macbook that has been abandoned on the train. Try leaving yours and see if the more important thing is the physical barrier or ethics/punishment/existence of laws.
Lex-2008 10mo ago
re: SSH - I once heard that in China they can throttle SSH speed so it's usable for terminal work, but not for copying files or browsing web.
pxc 10mo ago
Take a look at the tools Chinese people use to evade the national firewall. They're extremely sophisticated, and need to advance all the time because the GFW constantly becomes more sophisticated. There are a lot of encryption technologies that the government also allows to work until they block them at a critical moment. All of the VPNs you've ever heard of in some advertisement on YouTube or whatever are easily and totally blocked in China. Governments can make evading their censorship very difficult, painful, and risky, if they want to. It can have a huge impact.

wartywhoa23 10mo ago

But then VLESS is thriving and the only way to stop this is by enforcing whitelists. Which is not something those scumbags are incapable of, of course.

flexagoon 10mo ago

Is it working in Russia? I'm Russian and basically every single person I know has and actively uses a VPN with no consequences. WireGuard also works just fine - I was able to selfhost and use it without any extra obfuscation. They only blocked a few largest providers, but that's seemingly it.

defanor 10mo ago
> every single person I know has and actively uses a VPN I do know people who use no circumvention methods: some are simply not sufficiently familiar with technologies (including older people, who seem to think that something is wrong with their phones), for others it is a mix of regular shying away from technologies and being worried that it draws the government's attention. And then there are those who appear to genuinely support the censorship (or whatever else the government does). I also hear of people switching to local services as the regular ones are blocked. Anecdotal data is of little use to determine the extent though, and trustworthy statistical data may be hard to come by, but if you somewhat trust the Levada Center, their polls indicate that YouTube's Russian audience halved following the blocking, among other things. [0] > WireGuard also works just fine - I was able to selfhost and use it without any extra obfuscation. For both IPsec and WireGuard, I have both heard of the blocks [1] and observed those myself, particularly to servers across the border (which were otherwise available; there is a chance that I misconfigured something back then, but I recall it working fine with local servers). For IPsec, I have also observed blocks within the country (and RKN lifting those on request, confirming an intentional blocking that way, twice; also confirmed that those were for IPsec packets in particular, not any UDP). But possibly it does not affect all the foreign subnets: as with a recent blackout [2], when quite a few were affected, but not all of them. [0] https://www.levada.ru/2025/04/24/polzovanie-internetom-sotsialnymi-setyami-messendzherami-iskusstvennym-intellektom-i-drugimi-onlajn-servisami-mart-2025/ https://www.levada.ru/2025/04/24/polzovanie-internetom-sotsi... [1] One of the recently seen public mentions is at https://blog.nommy.moe/blog/exotic-mesh-vpn/ https://blog.nommy.moe/blog/exotic-mesh-vpn/ [2] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/490 https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/490
- idiotsecant 10mo ago

hereme888 10mo ago

Russia is not even remotely similar to the U.S.A. in terms of freedom, rights, and infrastructure. Politicians will never be able to ban VPNs or vetted e2e encryption (like signal, and now X) in the US. Especially with this strongly pro-American, strongly pro-privacy admin and Supreme Justices on the watch.

gilli 10mo ago
Tell me another joke..
- hereme888 10mo ago
  Here's one: How successful was the combined efforts of politicians + 3-letter agencies + universities, at banning computer encryption in the past? Not successful at all, hahaha.
  - bccdee 10mo ago
    Banning encryption proved infeasible, so they just switched to programs like PRISM instead. That was very successful.
    - hereme888 10mo ago
      Let me explain a bit further:governments lost the battle to ban code. Since then, no code can really get banned. And, nowadays we have vetted p2p VPNs even if all world govs try to ban vpn companies, and no prism or quantum computing programs can bypass their post-quantum e2e implementation.
      - bccdee 10mo ago
        Code is already banned by anti-circumvention laws.¹ I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard, legislatively, to have VPNs classified as a tool for circumventing "digital locks." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention#Distribution_of_Circumvention_Tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention#Distributio...

porphyra 10mo ago

One time in China (in 2018) I ran my own OpenVPN instance on a Linode VPS in Singapore, and then it got blocked within a couple of days lol. I'm guessing it was deep packet inspection.

liveifsh 10mo ago

I'm from Russia, can confirm that. We are constantly trying to get around these blocks but no tech can help from cutting international connections. Also there is another issue: local browsers (Yandex and Atom from Mail Ru group) are using government certificates by default. That means that https encryption between sites inside the country becomes useless

drysine 10mo ago

>simply cut international connections (as is already practiced temporarily and locally) No, international connections are not cut. The mobile internet gets cut locally and temporarily when the Ukraine attacks Russian cities trying to terrorize population. Several essential or popular Russian services are whitelisted. All the rest of Russian internet is as inaccessible as foreign servers.

yatopifo 10mo ago
The name is Ukraine. There is no “the”.
josephg 10mo ago
> The mobile internet gets cut locally and temporarily when the Ukraine attacks Russian cities trying to terrorize population. It’s hard to feel sympathetic when Russian bombs have been “accidentally” hitting Ukrainian civilians since day 1 of the war. Has the war been affecting civilian life in Russia much? I hear Ukraine has been targeting the Russian power grid lately.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- drysine 10mo ago
  Why did you put "accidentally" in quotes?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mopsi 10mo ago
    The Kherson human safari leaves no other option to anyone. When Russian drone pilots have nothing better to show to their fans on the social media to raise funds, they are attacking men fixing a roof of a small home, elderly women returning from the city with grocery bags, people waiting at a bus stop, and in case you want to classify all of the former as disguised soldiers, they are attacking even stray dogs.