Comment on Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told
x00z@lemmy.world 7 months agoYou can’t block porn completely without blocking VPNs. If you connect to a VPN that’s all they can see. They can not see what you use the VPN for.
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.
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!
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.
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.
You’re my kind of people! ᓚᘏᗢ
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.
Why do you think the telecoms got away with stalling upgrades and fiber roll outs for so long?
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.
Ban paper.
Kids could draw boobies on it.
You can’t block porn completely without blocking VPNs. If you connect to a VPN that’s all they can see.
This makes it sound like VPNs can ONLY access porn. lol
They can also access Excel spreadsheets from what I’ve heard. Hopefully the children aren’t aware of the fact.
he he he
jjlinux@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Depends on the VPN