The only reason the UAE and other nations you’re referring to have success in their ban campaigns is because they have steep consequences for breaking the law by bypassing government restrictions - that is, assuming you’re just some random citizen and not a connected Sheik or family member or political/church leader. They have public whipping, amputation, and death by firing squad (UAE) / decapitation (Saudi Arabia) in the long list of draconian punishments available to their judiciary, and they are known for making examples of people.
What makes you think the UAE uses deep packet inspection on their entire outbound Internet links? That would be very expensive computationally, latency-wise, and of course in hardware and power costs. More likely they just have a team that tracks commercial VPN services server IP addresses and adds them to a block-list. Much cheaper and 99% as effective.
The only reason the UAE and other nations you’re referring to have success in their ban campaigns is because they have steep consequences for breaking the law by bypassing government restrictions - that is, assuming you’re just some random citizen and not a connected Sheik or family member or political/church leader. They have public whipping, amputation, and death by firing squad (UAE) / decapitation (Saudi Arabia) in the long list of draconian punishments available to their judiciary, and they are known for making examples of people.
What makes you think the UAE uses deep packet inspection on their entire outbound Internet links? That would be very expensive computationally, latency-wise, and of course in hardware and power costs. More likely they just have a team that tracks commercial VPN services server IP addresses and adds them to a block-list. Much cheaper and 99% as effective.
i thought i had read that, but i may well be wrong. might look it up later, but either way thanks a lot for the additional context. you’re very right