VPN, Tor (and similar, like I2P), every imaginable P2P network, proxies, all non-http protocols (smtp, ftp, nntp, xmpp and other instant messengers and so on) can all transfer any kind of data, porn included. And a ton of other things. Heck, I’m quite sure there’s a minecraft mod where you can assemble JPG-images out of the blocks and view them that way. And then you can use stuff like uuendoce where you can use anything that can move plain text to transfer binary data.
There’s no way to block all of that unless you shut the whole internet down. And even then you can still trade good old playboy-magazines with your friends. VPN in itself has very little to do with the actual problem, beyond that someone apparently noticed that their current “save-the-children” iteration had pretty large holes in it.
jim3692@discuss.online 13 hours ago
You can’t block VPNs without blocking the entire internet. You can block known VPN services, but you can’t prevent people from hosting their own.
Some known VPN protocols could be blocked, using introspection tools. However, this would just render corporate VPNs useless. VPN traffic is just bytes, and so is WebSockets. Good luck figuring out whether my HTTPS traffic is legitimate internet traffic, or masked VPN traffic.
piecat@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Good news, we closed that pesky loophole by banning encryption without backdoors.
If they can’t decode it, you better be ready to explain exactly what those bytes were!
ragas@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
Look at my cool new protocol that looks just like I am just loading a webpage about cat facts, which is actually a hidden VPN that I use to secretly look at webpages about cat facts.
jim3692@discuss.online 22 minutes ago
There is actually a technique called steganography, that does exactly that. It is used to hide arbitrary binary info inside images, while still fooling your eyes into thinking there is nothing sketchy there.
Ugh@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
You’re my kind of people! ᓚᘏᗢ
echodot@feddit.uk 7 hours ago
Even if they go that route, and frankly I think they to get lynched, before we got to that point, they can’t monitor every single connection. That just way too much traffic.
That’s why China has a firewall, because that’s the best option they can come up with because monitoring every Chinese persons data is an impossible task. They’re only option would be to go North Korea route and just close the internet but that would basically end their economy.