UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets
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Labour won't ban the use of Virtual Private Networks

Prominent backbench MP Sarah Champion launched a campaign against VPNs previously, saying: “My new clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to publish, within six months of the Bill’s passage, a report on the effect of VPN use on Ofcom’s ability to enforce the requirements under clause 112.

"If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.” And the Labour Party said there were “gaps” in the bill that needed to be amended.

    • imouto@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      Most conventional VPNs, e.g. OpenVPN, WireGuard, AnyConnect, PPTP/L2TP, IKEv2/IPsec, etc., actually don’t work in China. Technology-wise GFW is quite sophisticated and conventional VPNs are not designed for censorship circumvention anyway.

      You’ll have to use things like Shadowsocks or V2Ray, which is out of the reach of most people.

      • NateNate60@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 days ago

        The Great Firewall doesn’t block by protocol. If you set up your own OpenVPN server, you can still connect to it. I’ve done this many times in my trips to China, and it’s worked fine. That being said, they still do seem to throttle connections to international servers, though this happens to all servers, even those that are not blocked. There are many clandestine VPN operators in China who spin up their own VPN servers and sell the service. They are mostly OpenVPN-based.

        My university used Cisco AnyConnect, and I was able to successfully connect to the university VPN servers as well.

        The limited experimentation I have conducted seems to indicate that the Great Firewall blocks by IP and not by protocol.

        • imouto@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 days ago

          And how do they update that IP list? Manually? If you set up your own overseas server, it’s gonna be ok for a few days for sure. But they update the block list automatically so people had to e.g. use CloudFlare websocket as a jump host to avoid switching providers every other month. Of cos CF is mostly blocked these days too so it’s probably just easier to offload the work to those VPN operators you mentioned.

          Universities are a different matter. They use Edu network and there used to be no censorship at all in Edu IPv6. Nowadays it’s still relatively easy for them to get exemptions for their labs and whatnot.