[imiric]

Unless the government decides to ban all cryptography, or forcefully install their own certificates on every device, it should be possible to avoid any restriction attempts. If they're doing deep packet inspection to detect specific protocols, then those can be tunneled via encrypted protocols they do allow, such as TLS or SSH. This is certainly more inconvenient to use, but not impossible.

If they're blocking all traffic beyond their borders, then that's a separate matter, but usually such restrictions are more annoying than absolute.

[pxc]

Take a look at the tools Chinese people use to evade the national firewall. They're extremely sophisticated, and need to advance all the time because the GFW constantly becomes more sophisticated. There are a lot of encryption technologies that the government also allows to work until they block them at a critical moment. All of the VPNs you've ever heard of in some advertisement on YouTube or whatever are easily and totally blocked in China.

Governments can make evading their censorship very difficult, painful, and risky, if they want to. It can have a huge impact.

[crystal_revenge]

> All of the VPNs you've ever heard of in some advertisement on YouTube or whatever are easily and totally blocked in China.

Have you actually been to China? I was there not long ago traveling around a range of cities and never had trouble with either Mullvad or Astrill having used both hotel and residential networks. I have many friends who have similar experiences. In fact, I've never recalled anyone having trouble getting outside of the great firewall.

[InsideOutSanta]

The last time I was in China a few months ago, I used an off-the-shelf, popular VPN, and it worked perfectly fine.

[bogdan]

You can buy a Hong Kong esim in China that has access to everyrhing. You can use any vpn service and it just works. The only place I had trouble was the airport wifi but shadow proxy works fine. So I don't know what you're talking about

[bluebarbet]

>So I don't know what you're talking about

All this did was to inject venom into an otherwise civil exchange.

[whydoineedthis]

I dont think so. I run a VPN whitelabel and its parent company is based in China.

[rvnx]

Technically it's easy to come around restrictions (for example, where I live, RT.com is fully censored "to protect me").

But from a lawmaker perspective, the topic is not technical.

The question, at the end, is about the enforcement of the punishments that go with circumvention; and in some places there is punishment even when you are "just" trying to circumvent these restrictions.

It's easy to break-in into someone's place. What prevents you from doing it, is the punishment (and potentially ethics), not the physical barrier.

[spwa4]

> It's easy to break-in into someone's place. What prevents you from doing it, is the punishment (and potentially ethics), not the physical barrier.

It's illegal to steal a macbook that has been abandoned on the train. Try leaving yours and see if the more important thing is the physical barrier or ethics/punishment/existence of laws.

[SoftTalker]

The thing is, you're still breaking the original law, which is "you must prove your age to access this content."

Using a VPN, or any other technical workaround you can think of, doesn't negate that the law in your state says you must prove your age to access the content.

States require proof of age to purchase alcohol. You can ask someone who is of age to buy it for you, that doesn't make it legal for you to have it.

[senshan]

>You can ask someone who is of age to buy it for you, that doesn't make it legal for you to have it.

Not true for California, and probably many other states:

[0] https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/laws/minor-in-possessio...

[Lex-2008]

re: SSH - I once heard that in China they can throttle SSH speed so it's usable for terminal work, but not for copying files or browsing web.

[sidewndr46]

TLS and SSH obscure the exact data, not the usage pattern.