Technology

So, that's definitely better than nothing, but your browser isn't the only thing -- though these days, it is a very important thing -- that talks to the Internet. If, for example, you're using a lemmy client to read this, I'd bet that it's good odds that it doesn't have SOCKS support.

Though I wouldn't be surprised if someone has made VPN software that intercepts connections and acts as a proxy SOCKS client, which would make it work more like a traditional VPN if you can reach a remote SOCKS server, though maybe with a performance hit.

googles

Yeah, okay, looks like stunnel can do this on Linux. So it's a thing.

You don't need a 100% solution, though, to have a pretty big impact on society. Combine technical barriers with it just being easier to not think about what's going on outside, maybe some chilling effects from legally going after people who do start doing things that you don't like (viewing websites, spreading information, etc), and you can control people's information environment a lot. Make using circumvention solutions illegal -- okay, maybe you can bypass their system if you don't get caught, but do you want to risk it? Make creating or spreading circumvention solutions really illegal. Do you want to risk getting in a lot of trouble so that random other person can get unrestricted or unmonitored Internet access?

On that note, I was reading about the way North Korea does it in an article from someone who got out of North Korea. That is about as close as it gets to a 100% solution. Only a few thousand people are authorized to get Internet access. You need to apply to use the Internet with a couple of days lead time. Each pair of computers has a "librarian" monitoring what the Internet user on each side is doing, and every five minutes or so the computer will halt with whatever you were doing on the screen and require fingerprint re-authorization from the "librarian" to continue. Users are not allowed to view pages in Korean, just English and Chinese (I assume because most information out there that you'd have to go outside North Korea to get access to is likely available in either English or Chinese, and they definitely don't want people seeing anything out of South Korea).

That pretty much screws North Korea in terms of access to information, is a costly solution, but if you place an absolute priority on control of the information environment, North Korea does prove that it's possible to take a society there.

Unfortunately it would be trivial to block an SSH tunnel like this. I recall reading news 10 years ago (maybe even earlier) some foreign journalist tried this at a Beijing hotel room and got shut down in minutes. That was when people are still using PPTP and L2TP protocols to get around censorship, Wireguard and shadowsocks wouldn't be born for another couple years.

This is actually pretty interesting, thanks for sharing. Although i live in a third world country that doesnt care about anything at all including piracy, but this tunneling thing looks pretty handy

Couldn't you also just set the VPN to use port 443?

E: Apparently this isn't enough. IE, for Wireguard, you would need to find a way to obfuscate the handshake.

I'm not 100%, but I think you could set this up for free with an Oracle AlwaysFree tier VM.

(Boo Oracle, yes I know. Still very handy.)