As a person with skin surrounding his skull, I don’t really get why that’s an issue.

You can feel the smart in these.

Why would the rich be part of this discussion? Not paying taxes, not giving loan to foreign countries.

I really want this to be true, because not only I believe that would be the immediate outcome, but also because it would be hilarious.

But a somewhat credible source that’s not wrapped in “allegedly” and old stories would really help drive the point home.

Automation with a lot of validation steps that are not very obvious. Because if they were, we’d have automated them away.

I’ll remind you that using strong encryption was not exactly legal not so long ago. For the general public anyway. To this day, in some countries, exporting software with cryptographic capabilities requires some declaration to state services.

Laws and regulations don’t have to care about reality of feasibility, unfortunately.

Banning VPNs would be an unmitigated disaster and anyone who suggests that it’s a good idea has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about and should never be allowed to make tech policy again because they are a massive idiot.

You’re right. Sadly, this have no bearing on the people actually deciding federal laws in the US, if I am to trust the news cycle from the last 10 or so months.

The damage that would stem from such things is guaranteed to span far and large :(

This, even as a mere proposal with zero chance to pass, should be strongly repelled. Moving somewhere else ends up not being an option when everywhere decides to play the same game over time. And mandatory state surveillance and breach of privacy are really trending.

From that excerpt, it sounds like they understand what it is… for the general public. Take anyone on the street, if they know what a VPN is, they’re likely to just know some brand name that sells “VPN” to end users. The same way to some people, github is git.

The idea that such ban/restriction would affect basically every business and a lot of individual out there doesn’t matter if you just open with “VPN are used for illegal things” and just, stop there.

Legally? Easy. Pass the law, boom. Done. They see encrypted traffic from your house/phone? That’s a paddling.

Technically? Well, sort of. A lot of VPN uses TLS for the encryption between their servers and the clients, so from the outside it could very well look like regular encrypted HTTPS traffic. So, depending on how such hypothetical (I hope) law is worded, it could just make all encryption illegal. It would not prevent anyone from using it, because that’s just math. You can’t prevent people from doing math with a computer. But you can certainly prosecute them if the law says so.

Of course, a more complete answer is that it is possible to masquerade as something else, depending on your available bandwidth and your will to side step the (hypothetical) law. If your traffic looks legitimate (and seems to be in plaintext), but you embedded some hidden meaning that the recipient can decipher, then you’re playing cat and mouse, and you can get away with thing. Wrapping DNS queries inside TLS made it easy to avoid DNS spoofing at ISP level, for example. But the point remain; such law are not made to make something technically impossible. They’re made to make something prosecutable. After all, there are laws against murder, but they don’t prevent murder, they merely incentivize people to not do it.

edit: I ignored the whole lot of other issue with banning encrypted communication as a whole, because it would break every business that have an online presence, including banking and trading. But, exemptions are a thing. Law for thee, not for me, this kinda move.

If it winks you should start running.

Little did you know, he have ten mattresses in a second room, that cycles regularly and are steam cleaned. Maybe.

That’s not a flashlight.

That’s a bit crowded. Is that a makeshift night stand? Clutter!

I honestly don’t mind as long as it’s down with permission

From Microsoft “fuck you now all your files are on onedrive”, sure, they can be trusted. After all, it’s not like microsoft “I’m wiping this bootloader for you” have done anything shady before. Microsoft “I’ll revert those default apps settings because you clearly wanted edge when you changed everything to firefox/chrome” is THE company that respects user decisions. Microsoft “I’ll update and reboot now, fuck you” really knows how to stay in line and not do the opposite of what users want.

Really, what could go wrong in believing that Microsoft “I shit you not, you want to open that link in edge even though you uninstalled it” will respect the end-looser checking or unchecking a checkbox.

First day using a microsoft product? Checkbox magically checking themselves is as old as my first baby wee windows update.

Their problem is that they were slower than some, their solution is half baked at best, and it’s prohibitively expensive

Sounds like a lot of company these days.

I was pondering about updating that dying w10 partition, just in case. Well, looks like someone else put the final nail in that coffin for me.

Money

Instead of opening your 200MB web browser to see this page, can I interest you in this 200MB separate app to see this web page embedded in a data collection app?