now, blocked servers can be accessed via vpn as many people pointed out, but a government that really wants to crack down on encryption would use deep packet inspection like the uae. this allows detection and blocking of vpns too, as long as they’re well known enough, just like with the encrypted chat servers. so, vanilla wireguard may be blocked, but the latest obfuscated wireguard mod may not.
with all that in mind, encrypted communication would probably be a constant cat and mouse game, unless everyone built their own very tiny encrypted communication. if the variety was large enough, it would probably be too resource intensive to block it all, but it would also be very resource intensive for everyone trying communicate. also, not everyone is a programmer, capable of creating their own encrypted messaging.
i’d be really curious what people would do unter the described, very restricted circumstances that partially exist in some places of the world.
i don’t really have an answer yet.
The only reason the UAE and other nations you’re referring to have success in their ban campaigns is because they have steep consequences for breaking the law by bypassing government restrictions - that is, assuming you’re just some random citizen and not a connected Sheik or family member or political/church leader. They have public whipping, amputation, and death by firing squad (UAE) / decapitation (Saudi Arabia) in the long list of draconian punishments available to their judiciary, and they are known for making examples of people.
What makes you think the UAE uses deep packet inspection on their entire outbound Internet links? That would be very expensive computationally, latency-wise, and of course in hardware and power costs. More likely they just have a team that tracks commercial VPN services server IP addresses and adds them to a block-list. Much cheaper and 99% as effective.
many people in the comments say that they’d keep using the banned apps, which is a fair thing to say since we said that they’re banned not blocked.
however, i would a assume that banned encryption eventually means blocked encryption. as is the case in russia where matrix and simpleX are blocked too https://merlinux.eu/press/2025-05-14-russia-deltachat.pdf
now, blocked servers can be accessed via vpn as many people pointed out, but a government that really wants to crack down on encryption would use deep packet inspection like the uae. this allows detection and blocking of vpns too, as long as they’re well known enough, just like with the encrypted chat servers. so, vanilla wireguard may be blocked, but the latest obfuscated wireguard mod may not.
with all that in mind, encrypted communication would probably be a constant cat and mouse game, unless everyone built their own very tiny encrypted communication. if the variety was large enough, it would probably be too resource intensive to block it all, but it would also be very resource intensive for everyone trying communicate. also, not everyone is a programmer, capable of creating their own encrypted messaging.
i’d be really curious what people would do unter the described, very restricted circumstances that partially exist in some places of the world. i don’t really have an answer yet.
The only reason the UAE and other nations you’re referring to have success in their ban campaigns is because they have steep consequences for breaking the law by bypassing government restrictions - that is, assuming you’re just some random citizen and not a connected Sheik or family member or political/church leader. They have public whipping, amputation, and death by firing squad (UAE) / decapitation (Saudi Arabia) in the long list of draconian punishments available to their judiciary, and they are known for making examples of people.
What makes you think the UAE uses deep packet inspection on their entire outbound Internet links? That would be very expensive computationally, latency-wise, and of course in hardware and power costs. More likely they just have a team that tracks commercial VPN services server IP addresses and adds them to a block-list. Much cheaper and 99% as effective.
i thought i had read that, but i may well be wrong. might look it up later, but either way thanks a lot for the additional context. you’re very right