Slashdot Mirror
Pakistan Bans Encryption
An anonymous reader writes "After some rumors of this last month, Pakistan has now officially told all of the country's ISPs that they need to block all encrypted VPNs since content running over such services cannot be monitored by the government."
Save yourselves some money and some bother, and just disconnect yourselves from the internet! That way you'll be Safe (tm).
This has just prevented pretty much anyone who works for a Fortune 500 company from doing anything in Pakistan on company laptops. I dunno, maybe that's a good thing? I can imagine that now more than one "elected official" will point to Pakistan as a shining example to follow (just like what happened earlier with RIM and the Blackberry in India and Saudi Arabia and later everywhere) and VPNs will no longer be allowed because of course they could be the tools of terrorists. Damn, why did I have to wake up in this parallel universe 10 years ago.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Yeah, this is pretty much an unwinnable arms race. No matter how much deep packet inspection brute-force they want to employ - If they allow any protocols at all to run unrestricted, it'll be possible to tunnel data over it. Hell, give me an ICMP-only network and I'll encode data payloads into the TTL numbers.
Pakistan is gonna have to cut off its Internet backbones entirely if it's serious about shutting down encrypted communication.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
What about digital signatures?
eCommerce using SSL?
Password-protected files?
OS passwords?
Wearing pants should always be optional.
If all encryption is being banned, then it should make it trivial to start stealing passwords and bank card numbers from Pakistanis. We don't have an extradition treaty with them do we? Ready, set, crack!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Yes, I am sure that would go over real well:
Government: "What are you doing sending this encrypted data?!"
Citizen: "Encrypted?! That's just random bits that I was sending to my friend in America!"
Government: "Oh, never mind then. It's not like we have any reason to think that you would not be sending random bits to someone in America!"
Palm trees and 8
I smell a revolution brewing.
So do they. That's why they're putting the ban in place.