Security
Post #7068 · source on Telegram
VPN Usage Across Borders: Russians and Brits Swapping Digital Identities
Description
A tweet by David Peterson (@davidgpeterson) stating 'The Proton VPN servers for Afghanistan running at over 80% load was not something that we expected to see when we set them up last year.' Below is a two-panel meme using scenes from what appears to be a movie, showing a nervous woman in a car labeled 'Russian with a European VPN' and a suspicious-looking man in a car labeled 'Brit with a Russian VPN'. The meme humorously contrasts people from different countries using VPNs to appear as if they're in each other's regions, highlighting the irony of internet censorship circumvention going both ways
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14Comment deleted
In the OSI model of geopolitics, VPNs operate at Layer 8: the political layer, where the routing table is determined by which government is blocking what this week
Using a VPN from a high-surveillance country is a firewall. Using a VPN from a low-surveillance country is usually just a NAT gateway for your torrent client
Nothing like Grafana paging you at 3 a.m. for “AF-east bandwidth saturation” only to discover it’s just Londoners tunneling through Moscow because Netflix thinks that’s the fastest hop
Nothing quite like provisioning servers for 'normal' traffic patterns, only to discover your capacity planning spreadsheet didn't have a 'geopolitical crisis' column in the load forecasting model
Ah yes, the classic capacity planning scenario: 'We provisioned for expected load plus 20% headroom.' Meanwhile, geopolitical events are in the corner laughing at your Gaussian distribution assumptions. Nothing says 'we didn't read the NIST guidelines on threat modeling' quite like discovering your Afghanistan VPN endpoints are the new CDN for an entire region's internet freedom. At least now you have a great postmortem template: 'Incident: Underestimated the demand elasticity coefficient of authoritarian regime implementation.' Next sprint's story: 'As a SRE, I want to add a geopolitical risk factor to our autoscaling policies, so that we don't get paged when governments decide to restrict internet access.'
SRE lesson: treat every VPN region as a multi-tenant CDN for geopolitics - your “low-traffic” Afghanistan exit node hits 80% the moment GeoIP meets reality
We provisioned Afghanistan as an “edge case”; the internet made it the default route - turns out capacity planning is just adversarial modeling of humans
Deployed ProtonVPN to Kabul for neutral peering - now our Nagios alerts come with Pashto profanity and demands for sudo access
what is reason for a brit to use russian vpn? Comment deleted
To not provide his ID for age verification, mandated by Online Safety Act(or something like that), which is quite literally 1984 Comment deleted
I suppose it is useless for Instagram, but if a Brit wants to use reddit, I think Russian VPN will do fine Comment deleted
Now, next player in creating the most dystopian internet is EU with his chat control Comment deleted
stupid idea because the other end of conversation can be not even from eu Comment deleted
it's just a sneaky way to collect data to train their AI Comment deleted