30 ms·
Uganda Bans VPNs to Prevent Users from Dodging Its New Social Media Tax
- yellow_toenail 8y agoThese niggers are so stupid.
- parliament32 8y agoI'm interested to see how they go about filtering VPN traffic. AFAIK, running openvpn over port 443 is pretty much indistinguishable from normal TLS traffic.
- tiatia123 8y agoSome VPNs go through extraordinary length for VPN over HTTP(S). It is not so trivial. Assuming that Uganda is likely buying blocking equipment from China.
- LinuxBender 8y agoProbably more like silicon valley. Bluecoat vars have been known to sell equipment to sanctioned countries and those that violate human rights.
- tiatia123 8y agohttps://www.voanews.com/a/iran-plans-its-own-sanitized-internet-with-chinese-help/1713638.html https://www.voanews.com/a/iran-plans-its-own-sanitized-inter...
- detaro 8y agoSure, but Iran is under embargo from the west. Uganda is not, and thus can freely buy censorship tech on the open market.
- tiatia123 8y agoNot sure why this gets downvoted. Good luck trying OpenVPN over 80 or 443 in China. If you want to build your own, use at least VPN that was developed in Japan. (Google)
- imbusy111 8y agoBy blocking a known set of IP addresses that belong to the most popular VPN providers or identifying these providers by traffic patterns? Surely a list of these IP addresses or technology to identify them must be floating around between the authoritarian governments.
- ryan-c 8y agoChina's gotten pretty good at it. OpenVPN running over port 443 is generally going to be using a CA that is not a public CA, and issues certificates directly rather than through an intermediate. Even if you tunnel something over normal TLS, the type of traffic can potentially be determined by analyzing how much data flows in which direction and when. If circumvention is seen as too widely spread, Uganda may simply decide that all TLS traffic leaving the country must be intercepted by a MitM proxy, and require everyone to trust their CA. I'm sure there are plenty of companies that would be happy to get the contract to provide this service. These blocks can often be circumvented by methods that do not scale, but if only tech savvy people who can afford to run their own VPN server on a VPS somewhere can circumvent the block, it's "mission accomplished".
- SomeRandomDev 8y agoI feel like China is good about public/shared VPN's. If you set up your own and keep the details to yourself I was under the impression that it'd work just fine. That being said I love to travel and can work wherever but haven't been to CN yet for this reason in particular.
- ryan-c 8y agoFrom what I've heard second-hand (my SO has a friend who frequently travels to China), they do actually block people's private one-off VPN servers quite effectively. Have a look at https://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/116/archive/fall2016/ctang.pdf https://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/116/archive/fall2016/ctang.pdf - it talks about GFW using machine learning with flow analysis to do this.
- userchris 8y agoI took that class (comp 116) a few years ago! Just had some fun finding and rereading my own final paper from the archives (the one you linked to makes mine seem way less interesting). Ming is a really awesome and unique lecturer.
- 8y ago
- zzzcpan 8y agoAs others have said, that's not true. It's actually pretty hard to hide VPN traffic from DPI solutions. And judging by bgp.he.net, ISP market in Uganda is monopolized and censorship friendly, the government can just ask the ISPs to install DPI equipment for censorship and they will comply no questions asked.
- xrisk 8y agoMy college Wi-Fi manages to do it... so I doubt that it can be too hard.
- gruez 8y ago>I think it is very unwise to think that because the data consumption under VPN is very high, I think you’re aware of that. nobody is going to call them out on this blatant lie?
- jk_danson 8y agoSomeone needs to make a small sketch of the Uganda government with 7 year olds making up the laws. Child 1 - "Let's tax people for being on social media to stop them from saying bad things about us" Child 2 - "Yeah that's a great idea. Plus we'll have more money for candy." Govenments notice - "Social media is hereby taxed. Your local ISP will be collecting the tax automatically." People - "Whatever, we'll just use VPN" Government Screams- "AND NO VPNs ALLOWED!" So much for free speech. Good luck stopping the tor network.
- schoen 8y agoThe Chinese government has had a lot of success blocking Tor (and VPNs) most recently. You may know that all of the normal relays are publicly listed in the Tor directory, making them trivial to block by IP address. That will then require Tor users to do extra work to find bridges or configure pluggable transports for censorship circumvention, which most users may not be motivated enough to do. Censors can also try to fingerprint and block some of the circumvention methods. In sum, Tor is not trivially or resoundingly winning the censorship arms race, even though it has some good work on censorship circumvention that's often effective in particular countries. Some good background on this is in https://www.bamsoftware.com/papers/thesis/ https://www.bamsoftware.com/papers/thesis/
- jk_danson 8y agoI doubt the Uganda has the infrastructure that the Chinese government has to implement such a complex system. They would have to tax more internet usage. Youtube is probably next. "For every video you watch there is an entertainment tax."
- schoen 8y agoThat's very true. The effectiveness of Internet censorship has depended a lot on the resources that governments have brought to bear, and I assume the Ugandan government won't have the resources the Chinese government does, maybe resulting in less effective Internet blocking programs. I remember a time when we used to make fun of governments' lack of understanding of the Internet and the unlikelihood that they would be able to control it. Unfortunately, that was a very different time.
- rb808 8y agoI'm not sure why this tax should be labelled as absurd. Lots of countries tax TV, phone already. Taxing social media sounds weird only because no one else has done it yet.
- chatmasta 8y agoCommendations for your bravery in raising that viewpoint. Assuming it’s a good idea to tax social media, do you also think it’s a good idea to implement the tax as a captive portal at the ISP level?
- tudorconstantin 8y agoIt might mean it's a bad idea to tax TV and phones.
- Nullabillity 8y agoWould it be reasonable to tax meeting up in person? If not, how is this different?
- scotty79 8y agoIt's more like taxing cafe's and bars by creating entry fee where there was none.
- feikname 8y agoBecause social media is simply one of the vast amount of websites on the internet, it's unfair to tax it alone. Either you tax the whole internet comsumption (e.g. every 5GB or something like that) or you don't. Imagine taxes specific to laundering machines that only apply when washing underwear, but not for any other clothes, it makes no sense. Also, the govt. snooping on what people access / banning use of VPNs raises privacy concerns (and even censorship ones).
- forinti 8y agoYou could argue that social media has a negative effect and that it should be taxed in the same way that alcohol (and soft drinks in some places) is taxed. I'm not arguing that social media has a net negative effect, but I can see how some internet sites could singled out and taxed.
- have_faith 8y agoWe've got a sugar tax here in the UK as our newest form of indulgence tax. I wonder how a social media tax would go down with the public.
- okmokmz 8y ago>We've got a sugar tax here in the UK as our newest form of indulgence tax. We just got one in Seattle as well
- jessaustin 8y agoProgressive communities love this particular regressive tax.
- jessaustin 8y agoI'd love to see an argument for why this tax is not regressive...
- spacerat3004 8y agoYou can be progressive and legitimately support regressive taxes
- jessaustin 8y agoFor some definition of "legitimate"... it would still be nice if some progressive expert could articulate particular reasons why regressive taxes are good if they have particular qualities, rather than just saying "we like this tax, but not other ones that seem similar to it". I'm not seeing hypocrisy, but rather a line of thought that hasn't been pursued all the way to its natural conclusion. If someone were inspired to make that pursuit, we could come to a better understanding. Although I am sympathetic to progressives, most would say I am unqualified to undertake that pursuit myself.
- claudiawerner 8y agoIsn't it only a tax on sugary drinks? And from my personal experience it just seems to be pushing people to buy Coke Zero/Diet Coke instead. Most people I know haven't complained much about it. I wonder if it will have the indended effets of reducing sugar consumption.
- NedIsakoff 8y agoThe government needs money, its gonna get it from you one way or another.
- tanilama 8y agoOr they use this social media tax as disguise to enforce internet censorship
- nyrosis 8y agoPathetic. If I put a sign in front of my home demanding money every time someone passes by that is considered illegal. Even if it's my road that I built. If a government does it it is considered a toll. Even if they didn't build the road. Should we pay for every hop on the internet? That is where this is going. Keep it up... This will only further private network development. We will be quite selective on who we give access this time.
- callahad 8y agoThe title seems misleading -- looking at the image in the article, it appears that the tax isn't on social media per se, but on any service that provides mobile voice / messaging functions over cellular data. Which is effectively a tax against cellular data being treated as a dumb pipe. Still not OK, but a fundamentally different beast than the title implies. If you're a telco in Uganda, and you have sufficient sway with the government, why not go for broke and try to tax your way back into cellular voice / messaging revenue streams? They can be quite lucrative: in the UK, I'm paying about £1/GB of data, but a single MMS costs 43p. Turns out you can send a lot of group messages on WhatsApp before it uses 43p worth of data...
- Matt3o12_ 8y agoWhile we are at it, I still pay 1€ a minute for international calls (EU/Switzerland/USA) but I can talk for hours on WhatsApp, and FaceTime audio before I come close to 1GB data. Telecoms don’t charge in propositions for what they are providing (the cost + small markup for profit), they charge what they think customers are willing to pay, and since there is no real competition (at least in my country), they can do pretty much whatever they want.
- sametmax 8y agoWeird. In france calls in in the eu and to the usa are free and unlimited on most contracts.
- hk__2 8y ago> Weird. In france calls in in the eu and to the usa are free and unlimited on most contracts. That’s because we have really good phone contracts in France compared to the rest of the World, and also because mobile roaming charges are forbidden in the EU [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaming#Roaming_between_European_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaming#Roaming_between_Europe...
- Tijdreiziger 8y ago
- wgerard 8y agoIt's interesting (that's my equivocating adjective, anyway) to note that "social media" doesn't just include Facebook/etc. here, it also includes things like: * LinkedIn * Skype which, while sure, are "social media" platforms, are also tools that you might use as a professional to do things like get jobs, or talk to clients, etc. I'm not sure how pervasive those platforms are in Uganda, but certainly something that could really harm aspiring professionals without much in the way of resources.
- temp-dude-87844 8y agoThe Uganda OTT tax is probably meant to stifle online political speech and organizing, but the concept itself, taxing most over-the-top communication mediums that use the mobile networks solely as an opaque data pipe (and typically only work with their captive apps) is a concept that merits more discussion than being patently called "absurd". These services aren't interoperable, they exfiltrate data to foreign countries (where they may be subject to foreign intercept), and they surface ads for whose placement these foreign companies are paid. This perpetuates a wealth transfer from Uganda to abroad. Then again, it's awfully convenient for the President that these services are places where one can organize an opposition against him, and he can use the excuse of rumours, lies, or "fake news" to justify legislating against them. The tax regime now sets up a wealth transfer from every Ugandan to the state, where it will be squandered I'm sure. What I find frustrating is that most coverage about this falls into the same tired tropes, like pointing out how little most Ugandans make in real US dollars as an insidious appeal to well-to-do westerners to envision the subjects of this tax as downtrodden poor who are being exploited by their (presumably) oppressive government. I thought we were beyond this kind of coverage, and recognize that people in less prosperous countries have the same agency, despite systemic problems with the 5-term Ugandan president's authoritarian tendencies, corruption, voter intimidation, lack of transparency, and poverty. What this tax will do is hasten the decline of civil society and respect for the current administration's law in Uganda. It will broaden the gulf between the cronies of the President and everyone else, leaving more and more people dissatisfied with the governing party that once promised (and, in fairness, delivered) real reforms. He obviously knows this, and has been making moves to prolong his power as he feels the winds of change shift around him.
- mar77i 8y agoAre you a history professor or a diplomat of some sort? You just delivered the kind of analysis I'd pay money to read in a paper.
- i_made_a_booboo 8y agoJust Read Why Nations Fail. This is part the course for almost all of history.
- olalonde 8y agoHow do you even define social media? Is HN social media?
- ptaipale 8y agoI'd guess the definition goes along the lines "El Presidente does not like what someone said on this platform, so it is social media and banned". It'll be highly arbitrary.
- j45 8y agoThe reasons being used to ban encryption, including VPN seems to be increasingly trivial and arbitrary.
- walrus01 8y agoAs a professional network engineer this is utterly preposterous. Ignorant government officials who know nothing about how the Internet actually works, trying to fuck with it because it's something beyond their petty attempts at control. When will people realize that blocking VoIP and blocking a ton of other stuff (Ethiopia and the UAE are great examples), in the long term and in aggregate, results in more economic damage and a poorer telecom/Internet ecosystem than allowing all traffic freely? They're short sightedly trying to raise revenue by taxing the mobile phone carriers, who are 95% of the data connections in the country, when they should be focused on allowing telecoms to build better pipes for domestic and international traffic. Quick edit: People who run major international ASNs and medium sized regional ASNs have a responsibility to not aid and abet this bullshit. Don't contract for government entities that want to implement filtering/blocking of stuff. Refuse to participate with network engineering and architecture decisions and implementation that hurt net neutrality. There is a finite pool of people with the real talent, clue and 15+ years of experience who can build carrier-grade ISP infrastructure. If people want to fuck up their domestic Internet in $COUNTRY, do not help them. No matter how lucrative it might appear at first glance. There is such a thing as ethics in network engineering, just as there is in software engineering. Think long and hard about what you think defines an ethical ISP. If you're asked to do something contrary to that, refuse to participate.
- pas 8y agoIncompetence at that level is malice. Short sightedness is nothing new in politics. As is fucking with the middle class. (I mean with those who understand the problem of blocking certain kinds of Internet traffic.)
- walrus01 8y agoOh, it's absolutely malicious. In a typical $RANDOM_DEVELOPING_NATION the amount of corruption and graft that goes on between the "Minister of Communications" and other government entities (quasi-state-owned telco in the UAE for example) is something that has to be seen first hand to be believed. Those who are in power have no interest in actually having something like a diverse IP transit and transport carrier ISP ecosystem (as the US, Western Europe do, take a look at how many carriers and ISPs are connected to the AMS-IX and DE-CIX). They care about their short term personal financial gain.
- purge 8y agoI'm living in Uganda at the moment and have a couple of things to add: 1. VPNs still work fine (I'm using one right now, though its one I installed on a digitalocean instance - it's possible those receiving lots of traffic have now been blocked). 2. This tax is unaffordable for many Ugandans (it would be about 5% of the average wage here). Whatsapp is very popular here and this has impacted everybody I know. Most people I've talked to are using a free VPN (they aren't aware of the risks here). I haven't done much analysis of the blocking yet but I will be doing a more in-depth post about this whole debacle in a few days.
- walrus01 8y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but Uganda has a somewhat reasonable diversity of domestic ISP AS that are connected to other east African AS for international connectivity outbound via Kenya and Tanzania. It's not like a single government controlled bottleneck situation (As in Iran, where all ISPs have to be downstream of the government AS, which operates all of the international L2 transport and L3 transit/peering connections).
- purge 8y agoI'm not sure about the peering connections but Uganda does have a good range of ISPs (outside of Kampala connectivity is mobile network only). The mobile providers are: - Africell (was orange) - MTN - Airtel - Smile - Uganda Telecom
- adamfisk 8y agoHave you tried Lantern? It’s free up to 500MBs per month and works well in many censoring countries around the world. It has lots of features that make it fast, such as automatically optimizing server selection and using BBR, and it does many things to stay unblocked, including the use of pluggable transports. Full disclosure: I’m part of the team that builds it.
- purge 8y agoThis is good to know about (and a great idea) - i'll take a look later. The other issue with using a VPN is people can no longer use the 'social pack' which is a cheap social media only data package available on all the networks.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoI agree with almost all of the frustrated comments here, and the premise of the article. I was also involved with a major F50 that was warily forced to deal with various regimes trying to filter content. But consider for a moment: 'Globalization' is having many nefarious effects on the world - and the 'openness' of the internet is generally only a mostly positive aspect from powers that are large and centralized. America is relatively free, and nobody 100x the size of America is going to come along and 'control your internet', and therefore potentially control your economic and political system. The ubiquitous internet means that a small or mid-sized nation that is not a G7 is at major risk of having the almost the totality of their nation overturned by foreign powers. Consider: Facebook, or Google, could very easily change electoral outcomes in many nations, possibly even by accident. A small change in their algorithm that suppressed some, and promoted others, an accidental ban of a political group, etc. - can happen. I don't suggest FB or G are interested in this, but remember they also do have relationships with the US Government, and it's reasonable for these nations to be very cautious. Moreover, an open Internet allows fully malicious actors (hacker groups, bad international enterprises, bad governments), to do some really quite dangerous things to other nations, most of whom are too small to be able to protect themselves. 'The Internet' is the new 5th column if you will, and to some extent it can have more power than government or the Supreme Court in many nations. If 80% of a nation is convinced of some truth/mistruth perpetuated by 'whoever' on the Internet, well, then legality hardly matters. It has more revolutionary potential than perhaps any historical ideology. Even on the economic front - Globalization means that all of the talent is getting sucked up like a vacuum into centres in the biggest economies. So many of the best go to America. So many European professionals flow into Germany or the UK - to their advantage. Both of these issues come to head with issues like journalism - it's one thing if 'American journalism' is concentrating in a few American outlets, but imagine if your country was losing most of it's journalistic opportunity and that centralization was happening in another country - a large country like America with whom your nation may not have a great history. Tax bases are a real thing - and though the Internet should in the long run provide more opportunity for local governments, in the present it's causing losses in tax revenues, or at least, those revenues created by new economies are not being realized locally. Recognize that these issues are a problem, and that the erstwhile 'open internet' which positioned as a very positive and aspirational aspect of global development by American/Western forces, does not necessarily represent the same opportunity in the rest of the world. So yes, so many corrupt and stupid leaders doing corrupt and stupid things to their own nations, but the answer is definitely not "Just let Google be the Ministry of Truth" for the nations of the world. Definitely not.
- goldenkey 8y agoQueue the Ugandan Knuckles memes...