this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Privacy

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah... Russians are known for their ability to reverse engineer and circumvent protections of all sorts... For good and bad...

I'm pretty sure it won't take long before there are easy ways to circumvent whatever VPN blocking Putin invests in...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Russia is already actively blocking VPNs both by restricting access to the servers and by blocking the UDP ports used by the VPNs. There is no solution except to choose the ports that are untouched yet or by using a VPS as a proxy. Going the TCP route cripples the maximum speed, so the ban is effective in forcing Russians to give up and connect directly.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Some VPNs use ports 443 or 80 which won't be blocked. There's also some which disguise the traffic to appear as HTTPS. It's a cat and mouse game but I don't see the cat winning.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It's the kind of game where nobody wins.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Russia already has national root TLS certificate that's must installed on all devices (basically government-mandated MITM). The next step is to start severely throttling (and optionally blocking) TLS connections that don't use it. Some popular foreign sites like Google can remain functional by replacing their certificate at ISP level (all ISPs are already controlled by the government).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

bruh what are you talking about, there are indeed national root certs but that's purely for Sberbank and similar government sites, I wouldn't put it past them to go further but we're a loooooong way off

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"the register of prohibited information",...

That just sounds to me like Russia has some powerful locked-up black magic.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Some. Putin won't fuck with the Pope though. You know why you never hear about Putin threatening to de-nazify Vatican city? That's right, the Secret Archives.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

They'll be coming for RuPaul next

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is the third post talking about this ban and it got me thinking.

Would it be possible to hide the VPN traffic in HTTPS traffic? Something like HTTPS bridges for Tor, but instead of Tor traffic going through the bridge, it would be VPN traffic?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean you can tunnel any traffic through SSH or SSL. Its pretty easy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good to know. My brain stopped working when I typed that... So I guess it would be very beneficial to spin up a spare server for my Russian friends to access western media after this goes live.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=AtuAdk4MwWw

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How this will impact piracy?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because you won't be able to get a VPN on RuStore anymore

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's like the Playstore. Lots of smaller countries have their own version of the store, for control or sanction reasons. RuStore in particular is mandatory to have installed by all Russian OEMs

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's all right there in the article bud/budette.