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Russia Passes Bill Banning Proxies, Tor, and VPNs
- Fej 9y agoSlightly misleading title. The bill has made it to Putin's desk but he has not yet signed it into law. He probably will, but hasn't yet. Who knows? People don't like it when you make it really hard to access porn. Putin is popular and I doubt he wants to lose any of that popularity. Again, though, who knows?
- drspacemonkey 9y agoEthics aside, how would this be implemented? The article says that ISPs have to "implement blocks", but is it even possible to block VPNs and TOR with deep packet inspection? Wouldn't that also hit a lot of false positives for SSL/TLS sites? The article also doesn't mention if there are exceptions to be made for corporate VPNs. Which leads me to wonder if the next step might be to prohibit SSL/TLS for any site that doesn't have a government-approved certificate. "To make enforcing the VPN ban easier".
- Fej 9y agoChina has spent two decades and still can't beat Tor. Bridges and pluggable transports beat it. What chance does Russia have? (At least, as long as Russia doesn't go completely 1984 and monitor all citizens all the time.)
- pavel_lishin 9y agoThe idea is probably not to prevent proxies, Tor and VPNs, but rather to give the government a tool with which to prosecute those parties it wants prosecuted - which may very well include ISPs as well.
- drspacemonkey 9y agoAh, that makes sense. Make a law that is unenforceable at scale, but can be used to punish individual entities that have pissed off the government in some other way.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoThis is, in fact, how corruption in Russia generally works. The laws as written are onerous, and then the enforcement arm of the government sets up a market in unofficial permission to flout those laws.
- blasieur 9y agoWhat about using a VPN for the sake of data security or simply to access an internal network, like for example a company that you work for? I have a VPN and that's all I use it for, never for anything malicious or would be deemed inappropriate. A sweeping ban seems unnecessary and a bit misguided.
- herbst 9y agoPretty sure they only ban public VPNs or am I wrong here?
- drspacemonkey 9y agoI wonder if SSH counts as a VPN in these circumstances.