By the end of Albania's communist regime, as many as one in three people in Tirana worked for the secret police.
Thirty years later, I could still see the effects of surveillance on the Albanian psyche.
@aprajitanefes I have seen this kind of thing many times from the seat of a plane.
After flying through one trail, I had a cough and sore throat that lasted five days.
Commercial VPNs route your traffic through shared IP addresses. thousands of users on the same IP. those IPs are public, known, and listed. The government can block them the same way Netflix blocks them, one IP list. done.
A self-hosted VPN is different.
Your server. your IP. nobody else's traffic on it. there is no list to add it to. the government would have to identify and block your specific home address or VPS individually. that is not scalable. that is not what mass VPN bans do.
here's how to build one in under 10 minutes.
you need:
— a $5/month VPS (DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Vultr — any will work)
— Docker installed
— 10 minutes
step 1: get a VPS. pick any provider. Ubuntu 22.04. the cheapest plan works.
step 2: install Docker on it.
curl -fsSL https://get[.]docker[.]com | sh
step 3: run WG-Easy. one command:
docker run -d \
--name wg-easy \
-e WG_HOST=YOUR_SERVER_IP \
-e PASSWORD=your_password \
-p 51820:51820/udp \
-p 51821:51821/tcp \
--cap-add=NET_ADMIN \
--cap-add=SYS_MODULE \
--sysctl="net.ipv4.ip_forward=1" \
--restart unless-stopped \
ghcr[.]io/wg-easy/wg-easy
step 4: open your browser. go to YOUR_SERVER_IP:51821. log in. click "new client." download the config. import it into the WireGuard app on your phone or laptop.
that's it. you now have a private VPN that:
— nobody else uses
— isn't on any blocklist
— costs $5 a month
— logs nothing unless you tell it to
— uses modern cryptography the NSA currently cannot break
WireGuard is built into the Linux kernel. 4,000 lines of code. fully audited. faster than OpenVPN. no configuration mistakes that accidentally weaken your encryption.
They cannot ban your server.
VPN Bans loading🌀
🇬🇧 UK - called VPNs a "technical problem"
🇪🇺 EU - signaled VPNs are next
🇹🇷 Turkey -VPN licensing proposals
🇮🇳 India - ordered VPN compliance or lose protections
🇦🇺 Australia - age verification may lead to ban
🇩🇰 Denmark - anti-piracy law risks VPN use
Kind of hard to ban a decentralized VPN😉
@JeffreyPeel I find the wilful ignorance of ministers, MPs (and civil servants) scary.
This knowledge is not hard to find.
They have been widely advised a social media ban will not work.
There is the specific example of Australia.
This level of not-listening sociopathic.
🚨 BREAKING: Everyone who joined our NHS–Palantir campaign has now had a reply from NHS England's Data Protection Officer.
In writing, they confirmed:
▸ Palantir staff can access identifiable patient data before it's pseudonymised
▸ There is no opt-out from the Federated Data Platform
▸ Your Article 21 right to object has been formally refused
They've confirmed it. They won't change it.
Next step: a formal ICO complaint, citing their own response.
We're building a one-click escalation tool for campaign participants. Watch this space.
Very much worth listening to an expert and watching this in full.
Perhaps most notable is this:
‘I’ve told the government this over the last year. I know they have heard this from other influential academics and charities that the evidence base just isn’t there to support bans. But politically it’s popular because it seems like an easy solution, but it is not the nuanced one.’
So the government are acutely aware that the precedent in other countries illustrates that a wholesale ban doesn’t work and that the experts advise against it from a child safety and wellbeing standpoint. And yet they still went ahead with it.
👇Over the next decade, Canada, UK & much of Europe are on track to replace liberal citizenship w/ a highly dysfunctional but sweeping form of digital feudalism: an oikophobic, mean-spirited, paranoid, & centralized surveillance regime that fuses bureaucratic incompetence w/ digital anarcho‑tyranny, typified by pervasive monitoring, sporadic enforcement, and no clear avenue of accountability.