Comment by benreesman
7 days ago
This seems like a hard fight to win against determined network engineers without OFAC-level co-encorcement around spending money abroad.
I rent servers in Hong Kong, Switzerland, Tokyo, and many other places, and route tunnels among them all, and this is just mundane aboveboard stuff, many of the providers happily accept PayPal and crypto as well as CC and wire. I haven't even tried to design a system for evading this sort of thing, I can only imagine the ceiling is pretty high: QUIC and shit are increasingly the default.
I oppose this on principle, very much oppose it. I'm merely noting that until they're willing to start licensing the right to spend money abroad, they're going to have a tough time outlawing VPNs with any effect.
Maybe this pushes everyone to switch to Tor all at once: fucking with people's porno is a pretty quick way to move things around in the App Store ranking.
It would serve em right if this backfired massively by getting everyone to go cypherpunk by default.
They will block your tunnel. If you attempt to hide it you will be jailed once found out. Working encryption will be illegal.
I understand that arbitrary oppression is possible even with computers, there are regimes that come close today.
My point is that it will cost them a lot of money in lost economic activity to make it happen: we should seek to make that cost as high as possible and make sure that powerful people understand how high it is.