Hello from Taiwan, while your heart's in the right place this meme actually plays into China's hands as it fits their one-china narrative. Taiwan considers itself an independent nation and hopes the wider international community will begin treating it as such.
Thing is, a VPN isn't just some magic tool that lets you view location-restricted content and hides your IP address. It's a relatively basic networking concept.
Essentially, it allows you to connect two or more local networks, i.e. LANs, as if they were one big LAN.
In particular, that means no firewalls in the way, no weird NAT behaviour, no need to deal with public IP addresses and so on.
And it secures the whole communication with encryption + implements a form of authentication, so that you can leave the individual services within the VPN relatively unsecured (assuming you don't separately expose them outside the LAN/VPN).
Or more concretely, my dayjob uses a VPN for the whole home office thing. And I've used VPNs plenty times just as a networking tool in my software developer job. Prohibiting the entire concept of VPNs makes many software solutions impossible or annoying to build, and will cause folks to expose insecure services to the internet.
Please stop. VPN + TLS is essential. VPN does not mean you're automatically L2 bridged with a local segment. Changing source headers because your exit gateway is somewhere else does not hide IPs in any way. Many consumer level protocols have original source IPs in the payload.
The UK government tried to restrict VPN usage (not that they ever explained what restrict meant in that scenario) but as with most stupid things that the UK government says, everyone just ignored them and then it didn't happen.
I suspect somebody with two brain cells to rub together explain to them the process and since it sounded complicated they gave up with it.
I believe Australia tried to ban encryption. Not just VPNs, but all encryption. Like, bruh good luck with that. Source: trust me bro (im an Australian and therefore too lazy to figure out if this is hyperbole or not)
Just to make it clear, the VPN restriction in Turkey is not enforced, nor hindered. Of course it was put in place as a form of restriction against people's protest organization via Twitter back in 2013 during the Gezi Park protests, but it is not enforced (at least widely, if at all). Even the leading opposition party has an official support for a VPN under their name.
Nevertheless, as far as the map's intent goes, it is an indicator of a dictatorship.
Pictures of playing cards on websites get entire subnets blocked for gambling in Turkey, so I'm surprised to learn they don't enforce rules against VPNs.
turkey is just terrible.
arresting tourists over the most simple thing, stupid eedo wife kissing tiny ppl thinking they are children, geocide against armenians and kurds....
go tell me....what NOT to hate about turkey.
small dick energy country like "oooh we wann be called turkyie or bharat but not turkey coz we so weak our finance minister has sex with presidents relatives..."
Can't speak for most of these places but I'm pretty doubtful in general.
I have no idea what it means for VPNs to be restricted in Turkey for example.. I use them almost every day. Personal, self hosted, commercial, corporate... Both using them while I'm in Turkey to get information from the outside and when I'm outside trying to get information from the inside.
I've never had any issue using them. Like literally ever.
In 2016, the Erdogan regime began blocking VPN services and Tor. Now Turkey is using deep packet inspection techniques, similar to China, to detect and block VPN and Tor traffic.
The use of a VPN connection in Turkey can also mark you out as a person of interest for law enforcement. Despite this, VPN usage in Turkey is quite widespread.
The website Turkey Blocks monitors internet censorship in Turkey.
This is such a hilarious concept to me. At my dayjob, we use a VPN for securely accessing our company's intranet. And our current project is to build a software which uses VPN as an essential component in our networking logic. VPNs are really useful and important. It's just so disconnected from the real world to prohibit VPNs.
I mean, ...pun intended. Obviously they do it, because they want to be disconnected from the world. But they're just massively hindering technological progress, too.