Valery Fadeev, head of Russia's Human Rights Council, concedes that blocking circumvention tools would devastate businesses and banks

Head of Russia’s Human Rights Council admits banning VPNs is “impossible”

Attempting to block all VPNs would disrupt businesses and banks

The official still condemned citizens using VPNs to access blocked media

  • alakey@piefed.socialEnglish
    17·
    2 days ago

    Iran has switched to intranet and isn’t looking back. They now started selling foreign traffic at ridiculous prices and only to licensed companies, not consumers. Naturally, this created a black market with even more exorbitant prices, but that isn’t really a concern when it stops quite literally 99% of the traffic from reaching outside, and russia has already been planning to cut off foreign traffic as a whole in a similar fashion, except for now they are proposing that ISPs should provide the “internet+” plan to the regular users as well.

    All this to say - they aren’t saying “oh well, we can’t block VPNs anyway, so we give up”, they are justifying the upcoming internet blackout, with the best case scenario where ISPs can provide much more expensive plans for foreign traffic. Not a lot of people are going to have the finances and ability to go through the trouble of paying for the internet access, foreign traffic and a bleeding edge VPN to access youtube.

    Also lol @ him claiming internet censorship and restricting freedom of speech are different things, when a state newspaper recently published an article claiming that the iranian internet blackout is a massive attack on human rights and might lead to the end of the regime (check out Steve Rosenberg on YT if you are curious).

  • Brewchin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    Orly? You don’t say.

    The sooner UK PLC gets this into their thick, ideological skulls the better. 👀

  • x00z@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Russia has become very good in blocking all kinds of VPN and even obfuscated VPN traffic.

    My Russian friend is currently using VLESS to bypass the Deep Packet Inspection and it seems very promising.

    • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      It doesn’t work for the West because it relies on hiding behind CDNs like Cloudflare. If the West prohibits VPNs the governments in the West will cooperate with them.

      Russia could also catch them by tracking known VPN users. The unpopular CDN urls to which they connect are very likely the VPNs. They can block those connections and observe the reaction. Russia could also just buy the VPN service and know the target servers. Like adblockers for youtube, they accept escapes for the technological advanced to prevent them from taking other actions.

  • Krusty@quokk.auEnglish
    81·
    2 days ago

    SOCKS proxies are plentiful… Just find one using a non-standard port and it’ll likely not be detected.