The Great Firewall doesn't block by protocol. If you set up your own OpenVPN server, you can still connect to it. I've done this many times in my trips to China, and it's worked fine. That being said, they still do seem to throttle connections to international servers, though this happens to all servers, even those that are not blocked. There are many clandestine VPN operators in China who spin up their own VPN servers and sell the service. They are mostly OpenVPN-based.

My university used Cisco AnyConnect, and I was able to successfully connect to the university VPN servers as well.

The limited experimentation I have conducted seems to indicate that the Great Firewall blocks by IP and not by protocol.

for those in the UK and/or Other places in Europe just know it's so painfully easy to either set up your own VPN or just use something like Mullvad.

I set up my own VPN this morning for the first time on my server and it took less than 10minutes. plenty of guides online on how to do it.

Prominent backbench MP Sarah Champion launched a campaign against VPNs previously, saying: “My new clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to publish, within six months of the Bill’s passage, a report on the effect of VPN use on Ofcom’s ability to enforce the requirements under clause 112.

"If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.” And the Labour Party said there were “gaps” in the bill that needed to be amended.

this is obviously such a dumpster fire that I can't help but wonder, "When will they realize how dumb this is and back out of it?"

then i remember that Brexit happened

fuckin stubbornness is a national identity for you blokes innit

Prominent backbench MP Sarah Champion launched a campaign against VPNs previously, saying: “My new clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to publish, within six months of the Bill’s passage, a report on the effect of VPN use on Ofcom’s ability to enforce the requirements under clause 112.

"If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.” And the Labour Party said there were “gaps” in the bill that needed to be amended.

Yeah, businesses will not accept this. Remote work and remote connections rely on VPN for ALL KINDS OF SHIT. If you must adhere to some kinds of government compliance, it is even MANDATED BY THE FUCKING GOVERNMENT. Explain to me how the hell that is going to just poof and not cause all kinds of problems.

We didn't have a referendum on this though, and if we had done I don't think it would have passed

Convert churches into museums for art and displaying the horrors of religion

Not all of them have pretty art. Just turn the boring looking ones into secular club houses or even just regular housing.

And how do they update that IP list? Manually?
If you set up your own overseas server, it's gonna be ok for a few days for sure. But they update the block list automatically so people had to e.g. use CloudFlare websocket as a jump host to avoid switching providers every other month. Of cos CF is mostly blocked these days too so it's probably just easier to offload the work to those VPN operators you mentioned.

Universities are a different matter. They use Edu network and there used to be no censorship at all in Edu IPv6. Nowadays it's still relatively easy for them to get exemptions for their labs and whatnot.

Prominent backbench MP Sarah Champion launched a campaign against VPNs previously, saying: “My new clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to publish, within six months of the Bill’s passage, a report on the effect of VPN use on Ofcom’s ability to enforce the requirements under clause 112.

"If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.” And the Labour Party said there were “gaps” in the bill that needed to be amended.

this is obviously such a dumpster fire that I can't help but wonder, "When will they realize how dumb this is and back out of it?"

then i remember that Brexit happened

fuckin stubbornness is a national identity for you blokes innit

Proxy is a step below VPN since it doesn't tunnelise data.

Anti-detect browsers. Do you mean Tor? It's a decent solution, albeit the slowest one.

What people use to bypass the great Chinese firewall is VPN with VLESS protocols. Unlike usual VPN protocols, those are specifically made to bypass censorship.

Same was said during Brexit.

We very much did have a referendum on brexit though

This makes me feel like they were in a bind here. The so called "online safety bill" was a tory concoction that took years to pass through the courts because of how invasive it is and how anyone could easily bypass it.

If labour want to stop it, they'll be accused of not wanting to protect children.

Whatever anyone thinks of labour, I'd ask people to ask themselves, if you were in that position, what option do they have other than to let it play out as the spectacular failure it was always going to be and making sure everyone knows who's fault that was afterwards?

That's a problem is for ISPs and content providers to figure out. I don't see why the government has to care other than laying out the ground rules - you must offer and implement a parental filter for people who want it for free as part of your service. If ISPs have to do deep packet inspection and proxy certs for protected devices / accounts then that's what they'll have to do.

As far as the government is concerned it's not their problem. They've said what should happen and providing the choice without being assholes to people over 18 who are exercising their rights to use the internet as they see fit.

I though the UK was a Western democracy. What the hell are you guys doing over there?

That’s a problem is for ISPs and content providers to figure out

No, there are very good technical reasons why this approach can't work.

ISPs ... deep packet inspection

There is no deep packet inspection on properly encrypted TLS connections. I know TLS termination and interception and recertifying with custom certificates is a thing, but even if it were feasible to implement this on millions of client computers that you don't own, it is an absolutely god awful idea for a million reasons and much worse for privacy and security than the age-gate problem you're trying to work around.

@arc99 @SpaceCadet thats basically allowing the Government to force ISP to build a solution which is able to sensor every content. Sorry there is alot of reasons why you should be against it.

Attached below is a Wireshark trace I obtained by sniffing my own network traffic.

I want to draw your attention to this part in particular:

Underneath "User Datagram Protocol", you can see the words "OpenVPN Protocol". So anyone who sniffs my traffic on the wire can see exactly the same thing that I can. While they can't read the contents of the payload, they can tell that it's OpenVPN traffic because the headers are not encrypted. So if a router wanted to block OpenVPN traffic, all they would have to do is drop this packet. It's a similar story for Wireguard packets. An attacker can read the unencrypted headers and learn

• The size of the transmission
• The source and destination IP addresses by reading the IP header
• The source and destination ports numbers by reading the TCP or UDP headers
• The underlying layers, up until the point it hits an encrypted protocol (such as OpenVPN, TLS, or SSH)