The powers that be really don’t like the idea of unmonitored secure networks do they?
i guess we all should have fought back on internet censorship, rather than fallen back on “well i can still vpn”.
We really should have and we have had a good track record in doing so.
SOPA, PIPA targeting online piracy have not passed in the US because of the fighting efforts.
We shouldn’t be content just because we use a VPN. Companies are getting smarter about handling VPNs by putting pressure on the companies themselves.
Denmark is attempting Schrodinger’s VPN ban. Seems like every week it’s defeated and re-emerges. What a waste of administrative time.
Denmark is trying to implement a lot of straight up fascist laws lately…
maybe lemmy at large should see the commonalities between all govts of the world making these moves instead of picking on the most obvious example and taunting citizens to “do something”. It’s as if there’s a coordinated effort to lock the lower classes down before some kind of technology creates civil unrest worldwide.
But then again, I’m just a stoopid murican who should have fixed this by now. Not aimed at you, just a relevant jumping off point for the crap that floods these threads.
I notice this mainly from western countries. Asians and South Americans seem to recognize they arent immune from corruption and bullshit policy. Yet for some reason their western counterparts like to point the finger at other countries (namely the US) and diminish their VERY real problems. “You Americans elected a facist, what are you doing?!” Yet far right parties have been surging for the past decade in Europe and Australia.
Facism was literally birthed in the west yet they never think it will come back
Denmark seems to want to fuck everything up lately, what’s their problem?
They can’t understand each other. Because of their language.
Kamelåso?
🎯😂
There’s a good chance this guy is just a moron.
They already pulled back the part about banning VPNs last night, before this post was even made.
How do you “ban VPNs”? That’s not how software works, and VPNs are… you know, a key part of a bunch of online infrastructure. I get that they mean “ban them to bypass restrictions”, but the entire point of a VPN is you can’t tell from the outside what it’s being used for. You may as well ban thinking about butterflies. You can write it down, but you can’t enforce it.
VPN bans amount to only allowing private companies to operate vpns for the purpose of infrastructure and commerce. It wouldn’t ban vpns entirely, but no average person would have the means within his country to be able to purchase or use one… legally.
While it would be sorta bad, it’s like taking the top layer off of the cake while leaving the rest.
There’s ways out, still, and there always will be. They can’t ban buying a vps from next door, and putting wireguard on it.
I am a relatively cheerful if a bit offputting person, I do not mean to say this is good news by my tone. This fucking sucks lol. Sorry.
Precedent is already set by countries blocking them, it’s been done.
I actually want one country to ban VPNs just so every other country can see the fallout or complete lack of enforcement
VPNs are banned in some countries. At least in practice. China comes to mind and please nobody tell me „I have a friend in China and they use one!“ That friend is either breaking the law, or a state agent or foreigner where that law doesn‘t apply. Hotels have that as part of their service for tourists because why the hell would anyone travel to a country with basically no internet? Of course they are exempt.
But Chinese citizens are absolutely not allowed to use VPNs to break through the great firewall. The overwhelming majority wouldn‘t even know how. But of course most of them know at least one person who can.
So in theory the law is useless but in practice it‘s very effective to control information. Whatever the case it‘s nothing a democracy should pursuit. Ever.
Hotels are not exempt, not sure where you get your info
Let me tell how how much people actually follow laws in China.
I was born while the One Child Policy was in effect. My mother already gave birth to my older brother. Basically, my existence is illegal.
As you can see, clearly I’m not dead. They didn’t manage to kill me, just demanded my parents paid a massive fine and denied legal papers until they did so.
Honestly if you just browse and don’t post anything too serious, are they really gonna go after everyone who use a VPN. I mean, say even if just 1% uses a VPN. That’s 1,400,000 people. Are they gonna lock up a million people? Really? Surely they have bigger fishes to catch. (Edit: 1% of 1.4 billion is actually 14 million, good luck locking that many people lolz)
As for control of information, internarional phone calls aren’t blocked, you can send letters. My mom regularly call my aunts (aka: her sisters) in China. I heard the Covid QR codes being mentioned, afaik, the didn’t lose their teaching jobs nor ever got arrested.
The overwhelming majority wouldn‘t even know how.
It’s like adblocking. Do you know anyone irl that use adblockers? Seriously, I don’t know anyone that does except like maybe 1 perdon.
But here we are, on a platform where practically everyone uses adblockers.
Or in another analogy. Mainstream social media is like inside the GFW and Lemmy is like using VPN to bypass it.
TLDR: Okay sorry if my point isn’t concise, I guess my point is: NPCs will just follow the wind, those who have the will to dig deeper will probably be able to bypass the censorship (provided that it’s not completely cut off from the outside internet)
Thanks for posting this and I believe a lot of people think that when you’re online in China you’re CONSTANTLY monitored by someone assigned SPECIFICALLY to you or something.
There used to be like I guess a modern day old wives tale where if you’re playing an online game with someone from China and typed into in-game chat “Tianamen Square Massacre 1989” it would knock the person from China offline. I remember doing that a few years ago and the other guy, from China, took awhile to respond and when he did he simply said “that’s our history”.
It’s like you said, the vast majority will follow the rules and won’t use a VPN but others will just be like “ok, what are you going to do?” and do so. It’s like pirating stuff in the US. I’ve heard stories of people getting sued out the wazoo by movie studios for pirating and sharing but those stories are few and far between and generally the people doing it aren’t smart about it. I’ve been pirating content for decades and have never gotten a notice or email or letter about anything.
To add to your point, Xiaohongshu has plenty of people on it who aren’t Chinese as well. Loads. It’s not like they’re in cultural blackout.
This is such an important message. We should not lull ourselves into complacency. Banning vpns will be yet another step towards a closed, non-anonymous internet where governments (and by extension companies) will force you to give up access and control over your digital life
You are being absolutely ridiculous. VPNs may be de jure forbidden in China (idk about this even), but de-facto they’re absolutely allowed, nobody is prosecuted for using them, and every young Chinese person can tell you this. You haven’t talked with a Chinese living in China in your entire life.
From the article:
Ma [the one ordered to pay] said the police seized his phone, laptop and several computer hard drives upon learning that he worked for an overseas company, holding them for a month. He was later asked to provide details about his work, his bank details, his employment contract and other information, before being issued with the penalty in August
This person was not “using a VPN”, he was lying to the government about his working status and working for an overseas firm illegally.
When companies offshore dev or IT to China, do those employees get full VPN access with access to the “western” internet?
All company VPNs I’ve used limit the tunnel to the intranet, the internet doesn’t go through there. But that’s a matter of choice I guess.
Good question! I‘m not that deep into the technical aspects but Chinese companies that work with foreign companies would have to work with the government and other Chinese companies that control internet access in China to circumvent the firewall legally. The process is likely limited and heavily monitored by authorities. Same would go for Chinese companies with storefronts in the global web. They would need to access our internet regularly but I assume their access is limited to some degree.
I imagine unless you‘re a big player it can be quite the hassle so many Chinese companies would rather work with domestic companies than with foreign ones. I think this is one major reason why many contracts with Chinese companies can only be done through middlemen. As an outsider, you can‘t get full access to their industry because you have no means of contacting all these little manufacturers yourself.
But again, I don‘t actually know for sure what these processes look like. Maybe someone with actual experience can shine a brighter light on this.
Most likely split tunnelling
But idk anything
They’ll do what Russia does with their online services. Have a registration scheme with noncompliant VPNs being outright banned.
Simple when you know which dictator to copy.
I guess that works for VPN services offering servers outside the country. That’s not what VPNs are, though, and you still can’t ban the concept of VPNs having a connection outside the country. VPN software is available open source and all it takes for it to connect abroad is my phone with a VPN connection to my home computer being abroad.
I mean, Russia (and even China) still have people using VPNs all over the place. This (and a lot of the push for age verification and comms backdoors) reeks of barely understanding the desired result and entirely misunderstanding how the tech works.
They just block encrypted connections out of Russia to unknown servers
I believe China does statistical analysis to do stuff like detecting and blocking VPNs, suspicious looking ssh traffic, etc from home Internet connections not going to an approved business. It’s my understanding it’s very hard to get around the GFW at the moment, and pretty complex stuff is needed to mask VPN traffic to make it look normal (Project X, Xray, Reality, etc).
Yeah, I read about some of the tightening at the time and I’m not disputing that there are technical ways of… you know, making your country’s Internet a mostly separate bubble for non-techie users.
The point is it’s both hard and extremely invasive to get there. You can’t just wish upon a star for VPNs to not be used for a particular application without going to those extremes. Especially if the thing you’re trying to prevent is people watching Superman two weeks early or wanking to a mainstream porn page.
What the hell is happening in Denmark at the moment??
First forcing the chat control topic upon Europe, now this?
I looked up their government, would have expected far right or so, but it is liberal social democrat…
So what happens here?
I wonder how much it has to do with the success and subsequent loss of this operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield
Because it seems like a lot of countries in the west are pushing this kind of thing rover the last several years and there’s a heavy push right now. https://www.privacyguides.org/videos/2025/12/16/taylor-lorenz-on-kosa-the-screen-act-and-repealing-section-230/
The soc.dem. are not a left party anymore. The current government consists of three different center-right parties. And they have some weird priorities sometimes.
Something is rotten in Denmark.
It isn’t just Denmark. You see it here in Sweden, too. I’d be surprised if you didn’t see it across Europe.
I’m not really happy with any of the big political parties here in Sweden. The Greens hate nuclear power so much they’d prefer to open up fossil fuelled power plants than keep nuclear ones up and running. The Left party work really hard to get out of the EU. These are both parties I align the best with.
The Social Democrats are just these milquetoast soft-core conservatives, pretending to care about issues but turning their coats the second they get the chance. Unfortunately they always end up leading any of the left-winged government coalitions, typically with the help from the Centre who then gets to dictate all the policies, so it just ends up being a centre-right government that sells out our welfare to private interests.
It’s been like this for well over a decade at this point. Useless bunch, the lot of them.
Yeah Sweden has been doing great strides toward a full surveillance state, it is creepy as fuck.
Don’t be fooled by the party names. You have to look at the policies and consequences. Danes like to feel progressive, have left leaning stuff like free education and totalitarian measures against stuff they fear. The social democratic party remained in power after Germany moved troops into Denmark in 1940. It should tell you a lot.
There are fascists subverting every location on the political spectrum, none of them are immune. We’ve been trained to think in terms of “left” or “right” but these fuckers are coming at us sideways and corrupting our whole politcal spectrum at once. Don’t fall for it, pay attention to actions, not labels.
Denmark resistance lasted for the whole 6 hours.
Yeah, the time it took to drive from Germany
My bet is on a lot of bigtech
bribeslobbyingBig Tech has no interest in chat control, though.
They vehemently opposed it from the start.
How the Danish are acting just doesn’t make sense…It’s more complicated than that as control acts as a barrier to entry preventing competitive start ups entering the market and disrupting it so established players probably don’t care as they can bare the cost of compliance if they have to.
But it would be the other way around:
Established players would have to completely break and rewrite their existant transport layer in the whole world, just to be able to also cover the EU. (Or leave.)While potential new competitors would be able to design it to comply right from the start.
The social democrats copied a lot of anti immigration talking points from the right because this seems to be just popular in Denmark. I guess they are just weird.
But these laws are not anti immigration, they are anti freedom in general.
True, my guess is as good as yours. It feels like they paired seemingly good intentions (I mean who is against fighting CSAM right) with a complete lack of technical understanding and proportion. Maybe that’s not a political spectrum kind of think but generational lol. Idk tho it still confuses me how people can be so ignorant to go through with this.
Gotta give Denmark credit, they’re really going for the Shittiest Western European Country Award. Granted, I’m from the USA and we’re obviously an unmitigated disaster, but like, what the fuck are you guys doing? Competing for attention?
The UK has entered the conversation, we will not be unseated in Europe. But yeah as hard as we try we pail in comparison to you guys, hopefully your inevitable implosion will serve as a warning to the rest of us aspiring authoritarianists… Probably not.
Are you kidding? Whatever collapse they are trying to cause over there will inevitably be done here too once they’re done. It’s like a concerted global fascist effort, and people are sleepwalking straight into it, it’s like they have some brain control machine.
Wait, shit, they do- the Internet.
Some US states are in the process of banning VPNs too, though. I’m afraid the USA remains the uncontested champion of being a shitty western country and it‘s not even close.
Once again, I would like to thank stupid politicians and greedy media conglomerates for their contributions to media piracy. If not for all their hard work, we would still be playing Russian Roulette with shitty DIVX rips on Limewire.
Until someone tells them how corporate IT works.
If the corporate VPNs keep logs and allow government access, they will be allowed. That’s how it works in some (authoritarian) countries.
What a terrible terrible idea
utskitet av kalk och vatten…
I mean, logically, it would make sense to push VPNs into illegality or create a lot of gray area there if you’re also planning to introduce the Aussie social media ban. Logically. I personally think both are no good.
I’ve read some headlines about illegal streaming being targeted and shut down in Europe. If there was lobby money invested, I suspect it is the likes of sports rights holders who would like you to pay them extortionate amounts of money and not sail the high seas for the price of a VPN.
Modstå, kære dansker.
If omnipotent deity of your choice forbid this ever lands at the ECJ I’m not sure they will side with the privacy/freedom of speech side of the argument.
Don’t worry, the EU would never let this happen…
The EU that seems to be considering the evil “chat control” law to spy on everyone’s private messages? Yeah, right. Von der Leyen is a snooper at heart.
Could you elaborate?
They’re probably referencing Chat Control (https://fightchatcontrol.eu/)
