As a guy from Russia, I must admit that vpns are not a big problem for censors. They can be easily blocked, including self-hosted ones by protocol detection. And DNS would not do much with IP and clienthello-based blocks. And most users are not enough tech-savvy to constantly switch to new protocols as old ones get blocked.
You have no rights in Russia.
VPNs can’t be categorically banned in the US without major first amendment issues. It’s not a huge technical issue, but unless the courts just throw out the Constitution (a risk that we’re seeing too much of, but still a meaningful bar to cross), there are huge legal barriers to doing so.
Your government doesn’t need to care about legal barriers because you have a dictator who can act unilaterally.
VPNs are not categorically banned in Russia either. Just 95% of them. Categorical ban is not actually required here. Government can just create licensing procedure and license only those VPNs, which follow “rules”. I do not see how this is different from ISP bans.
Entirely unconstitutional restriction of speech.
The government can shut down specific illegal acts, such as sharing other people’s intellectual property. They can’t ban tools or protocols, or do things that are functionally bans. There’s plenty of precedent of the government trying to restrict encryption and being shut down. Removing the ability to communicate securely is a first amendment violation.
Even HTTPS-incapsulated? C’mon.
That most users won’t care enough - that’s true.
Https does not actually make difference here. You can still detect VPN usage by unencrypted clienthello, encryption-inside-encryption, active probing, obscure libraries that vpn protocol depends on, etc.
WTF? How are you going to look inside HTTPS?
Or is the word “encapsulation” (misspelled it first) unfamiliar to you in the network context? Maybe shouldn’t argue then?
obscure libraries that vpn protocol depends on
What? Are you an LLM bot? Answer honestly.
