France has become a constant source of rather unnerving news lately. A short time ago many, including us, were deeply disturbed by a proposed law that would allow government to order web browsers and DNS resolvers to block any web page without a court decision. Now it seems that the focus shifted towards VPNs.
Not one, but two amendments were proposed by French politicians. One purports to outright ban all VPNs on social networking sites; luckily, it faced a ton of backlash and was withdrawn shortly.
The other one is less audacious but equally dangerous: it requires VPN providers to ensure that their services “do not allow access to an Internet network not subject to French or European legislation and regulations.” In practice, this would give government total control over the French internet. Reminds of something, doesn’t it?
While both initiatives have not become laws yet (and hopefully never will), this is a very concerning trend. If it continues, it’s only a matter of time until one of these amendments slips through the cracks of public attention and deals a heavy blow to the free web — we will have to see if it will become fatal.
“The new Indian VPN rule will come into effect on 27 June 2022 and will require VPN providers to store users’ real names, assigned IP addresses, and usage patterns, among other identifying data.”
ExpressVPN and Surfshark have already stopped their services in India.
Would this be totally unenforceable? You can set up your own VPN on a cheap remote system. Are they going to block connections to all IPs outside of France? Maybe I’m too dumb to see how it could be done.
True, but I doubt your everyday Joe (or maybe Pierre in this case) will be able and bothered enough to set up a VPS. And policing big VPN providers will be easy under such law.
They have a server here in India. Never used them. I have used PIA VPN for 2 years. Later, I switched to setting up my own OpenVPN server using Digital Ocean/Linode/Vultr.
Sounds interesting. It’s shitty knowing (if)windscribe is keeping logs & sharing them since they tweeted against this policy & said they won’t have server in India if law stays like this… anyways why did u switch PIA ? I haven’t used it however I also am thinking of setting up my own OpenVpn However I’m confused regarding speed & security…?
Speed is always good for me. I get a ping of 60ms. With a USA Linode server I get a ping of 250+ms.
For security, I set up a firewall on Linode for my server and then I disable SSH port 22. We can set up our own port number for OpenVPN. The default port number is 1194.
Next is DNS leak security. For this I install unbound DNS with PiHole or AdGuard Home.
For more security and logging related information, I’ll suggest looking at the below given URL:
Yeah but tor doesn’t have all sites which I would use. It works with .onion fs however ig there is no way using Twitter/telegram anonymously since if ur vpn doesn’t keep logs however social sites would keep for sure…
