Anything can be made illegal. Enforcement is tricky. At the moment it is very easy to block Wireguard protocol at the ISP level, some even do it. But that would probably push Wireguard and others to invest more in obfuscation.

As a sidenote, it bugs me that Wireguard does not support obfuscation out of the box, and you have to put it on top of wireguard.

I have moments when I think “I might get banned for this”, this is one of those moments.

You may try to ban vpns but you can not really, people usually find ways around censorship. We are notorious for this stuff, as a species.

Its infuriating to me when people just roll over for the powers that be. They may ban some nodes, others will pop up, those will get banned too and so the cycle of cat and mouse begins.

You can host your own vpn with wireguard. It takes a bit of figuring out, sure, but you can literally do so with a raspberry pi. Stick it in a network of choice and voila.

Oh they may control stuff, but this is not a game that can be won, human repression is a futile effort, it may work for a while, but there is a reason why regimes fall. See the wall of Berlin and so many other examples.

Fret not friend, for hope dies last.

That would severely cripple remote work/collaboration, which is essential for all megacorps. Unless there’s some sort of carve out for that I don’t see it happening

The end goal is to either make encryption completely ineffective or get rid of it altogether. Remember the last few times lawmakers have tried “protecting the children”?

Anything is possible. Except being free of course.

Just human things.

Yes they can ban it, you will face repercussions if you violate that ban just like if you violate the ban your country probably has on heroin or machine guns.

You can get around it by using doh and a http proxy configured in your web browser, not at the os level.

Yeah, next they’ll shut down computer servers

Stupid

I imagine it’d be a jurisdiction issue for what you propose. If, say, the UK mandates that websites block VPN nodes, that will affect websites served from the UK (creating a Great Firewall of Britain). But what about websites served outside the UK? Those websites can’t possibly tell if a user is from the UK and using a VPN, vs outside the UK and using a VPN, so they can’t only block UK visitors—they’d have to block all VPN traffic, which is probably not worth it from a business point of view. I suppose the UK could then deem that website illegal in the UK and block them, but then that’d only block the website for non-VPN users in the UK… But if the website owner is outside the UK they can’t be punished for violating that law.

More probable (though I still think unlikely) is that a country could sniff for e.g. Wireguard packets and block those. But again that’s unlikely because of businesses using VPNs to let employees access company intranets at home.

It’s a law. Just words in a document. It doesn’t have to be realistic or even enforceable for them to pass a law.

in my experience, community and people would always find work arounds

To go a little further, I used the example of heroin and machine guns in my other reply, but there are lots of countries where people licensed to use these (or technology that’s similar like oxycontin) are allowed or there exist analogs (like bump stocks or binary triggers) that avoid the law.

Heck, in the us any knucklehead can get on the good boy list for heroin or machine guns they just need to pass a bunch of checks and submit to a series of audits and inspections.

The point of banning vpn use would be to keep people from using the technology to skirt identity laws, not to prevent the use of the technology altogether, so it’s likely any ban would take the form of legal wording that looks like “use of computer networking technology to conceal ones identity or aid or abet or perpetrate any crime is unlawful under this section.”

So again, yes they absolutely can do it and no it wouldn’t mean corporations would suddenly have to turn in all their edge devices.

I’m really surprised that on this instance no one has replied with the “laws are threats made by the dominant social economic class” copypasta. Fake ahh anarchists…