You think UK would be the first country to ban VPNs? There are thousands of talented and very committed computer scientists in authoritarian countries tirelessly working to enforce internet censorship. They discovered many wonderful technical solutions to this problem.
All the mainstream VPN protocols like OpenVPN and Wireguard don’t even try to hide themselves and are easily detected no matter what port you use. They are useless if you country is seriously set to block VPNs.
There are different protocols specifically designed to circumvent censorship and they do so by masking their traffic to like something innocuous like HTTPS. However even they can be detected using advanced traffic analysis. For example, if a given machine only sends and receives HTTPS traffic to a single specific overseas server, it is safe to assume that it’s not actually a genuine website traffic but a VPN masquerading as HTTPS.
There is special hardware that all users’ traffic goes through that detects these patterns and automatically throttles/blocks these connections.
Maybe, depending on the game.
But your OS and running programs will still be making http requests to various servers. Microsoft’s, Google’s, Steam’s, etc. Modern devices and OSes phone home constantly.
If you have VPN all your traffic will go through a single server (unless you configure split tunneling to use VPN only for certain sites) and that’s easily detectable.
There also databases of known VPN IP addresses, and if you set up your own then analyzing hardware/software will still know see that you are communicating with a rented server in cloud and will flag you as suspicious.
Some P2P routing solution seems to be needed, along the lines of Tor or i2p but disguising its traffic. But no doubt they’ll be after any P2P communications next.
You think UK would be the first country to ban VPNs? There are thousands of talented and very committed computer scientists in authoritarian countries tirelessly working to enforce internet censorship. They discovered many wonderful technical solutions to this problem.
All the mainstream VPN protocols like OpenVPN and Wireguard don’t even try to hide themselves and are easily detected no matter what port you use. They are useless if you country is seriously set to block VPNs.
There are different protocols specifically designed to circumvent censorship and they do so by masking their traffic to like something innocuous like HTTPS. However even they can be detected using advanced traffic analysis. For example, if a given machine only sends and receives HTTPS traffic to a single specific overseas server, it is safe to assume that it’s not actually a genuine website traffic but a VPN masquerading as HTTPS.
There is special hardware that all users’ traffic goes through that detects these patterns and automatically throttles/blocks these connections.
What if you were playing a browser game for hours? Wouldn’t that also be HTTPS traffic to the same server all the time?
Maybe, depending on the game. But your OS and running programs will still be making http requests to various servers. Microsoft’s, Google’s, Steam’s, etc. Modern devices and OSes phone home constantly. If you have VPN all your traffic will go through a single server (unless you configure split tunneling to use VPN only for certain sites) and that’s easily detectable.
There also databases of known VPN IP addresses, and if you set up your own then analyzing hardware/software will still know see that you are communicating with a rented server in cloud and will flag you as suspicious.
At this point it sounds easier to rsync our porn collections with each other…
Some P2P routing solution seems to be needed, along the lines of Tor or i2p but disguising its traffic. But no doubt they’ll be after any P2P communications next.