I know it isn’t specific to just Linux but I use Linux anyway so my question is,

Is there a way you could use a VPN without them knowing that? Or if they outlaw them is it really just game over?

If they made VPNs illegal I suppose stuff like TOR would follow except TOR is partly funded by the US state department and the US is one of my countries closest allies (one of the five eyes). So surely they wouldn’t shut down something the US funds directly… Would they?

I’ve read very very little about Gemini and other protocols like Gopher, would this be the way forward if they do this? And is that even remotely close to the security and potential anonymity you would receive from a VPN?

  • markstos@lemmy.world
    5·
    9 hours ago

    Say you rented a server at Amazon and ran your own VPN server software on it. Not that hard. The server could expose an HTTPS endpoint.

    VPN software on your laptop connects to that.

    From the network level, it appears you spend a lot of time connected to the same random website, hosted on some IP not owned by a VPN company.

    • sunbeam60@feddit.uk
      3·
      4 hours ago

      It wouldn’t stand up to traffic pattern analysis:

      • VPN traffic tend to have very uniform traffic pattern
      • Most VPN traffic runs on UDP, not TCP
      • All VPN protocols that I’m aware of have characteristic handshake patterns, even wireguards extremely fast 1-RTT handshake.
      • HTTPS traffic is very bursts and TCP retransmission patterns look very distinct.

      But then I doubt an ISP would run deep traffic pattern analysis on all traffic. So you’d probably be fine.

      But yeah, setting up your own VPN server on some random 1-core/2 GB RAM server is extremely easy.