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Comment by gonzalohm | Hacker News Reader

How would they even do that? A VPN is just a remote machine. Anything can be a VPN

Probably by forcing VPNs to only allow approved operating systems to connect to the Internet via hardware attestation, then those operating systems will only allow users to install signed apps, and only government-approved VPNs will be allowed.

And some including mullvad already accept payment in crypto, there will always be some dodgy VPN company in some dodgy jurisdiction that will take your BTC in exchange for an account.

I don’t think that will stop them trying though

mullvad would accept a cash envelope, i don't see how a government will stop that

Like in Russia

    - drop wireguard / OpenVPN packets crossing the country border
    - analyze https traffic to detect traffic patterns not matching https fully and block such connections

The state of the art, "xray-reality", is not blockable. It's a legit tls connection with data smuggled inside it.

Are you taking from the experience that this is not blockeable in Russia?

EDIT: I might be confusing vless/xray/reality but seems like there are no problems to block it based on ip reputation + tls fingerprint + amount of connections https://habr.com/ru/articles/1044396/

Of course this would block some valid websites but when has government cared about that

The IPs are Cloudflare, the TLS fingerprint is uTLS Chrome, and the number of connections with xhttp is the same as your normal browsing.

If you are willing to block browsing all ordinary web sites fronted with a CDN, then yes you can block reality/xhttp. You cannot, however, differentially block it via any of the three things you mentioned.

They are willing to break some cloudflare-fronted websites. That's already a reality in Russia.

The government (any government) hates its citizens and the freedoms it had to allow them

They can make it impractical for most people by repeatedly banning VPNs by IP address. Users have to pay upfront to figure out if their chosen VPN even works, then it could still break later.

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