VPN, unlike Tor, doesn’t delay packets to hide your identity. VPN protocols were not even designed with anonymity in mind. They were designed to establish a private network between remote computers to share resources. Changing your IP is just a side effect.
An entity that can monitor your outgoing connections and match it with your incoming connections on the receiving node (your VPN provider) can compare the time the packets are sent and received accounting for latency. It can then be added up to calculate that the time you sent packets on your end, and they were received on your VPN providers end, and the final destination after being sent by your VPN provider, matches you as the original source of the data traffic.
This is ultimately what the NSA PRISM program does.
If a state actor is your adversary then a VPN connection will not be of much help. If you are doing small time stuff like breaking copyright laws and trolling online then you’ll be fine.
Regarding the Arab spring, they very much did succeed to shut down the internet. They simply pulled the plug on everything except two military uplinks.
During the Egyptian uprising, European internet activists of the Telecomix collective helped establish communication links with activists on the ground in Egypt using
fax machines, ham radio and dial-up modems.
The people found ways and means, sure, but over 95% of the country was offline. The information coming out was very limited. People would send Morse code messages to specific phone numbers which would translate them to text and post on Twitter. It was very limited communication, mostly updates about the situation on the ground which was critical because everybody was afraid of what the Egyptian government was planning to do.
VPN, unlike Tor, doesn’t delay packets to hide your identity. VPN protocols were not even designed with anonymity in mind. They were designed to establish a private network between remote computers to share resources. Changing your IP is just a side effect.
An entity that can monitor your outgoing connections and match it with your incoming connections on the receiving node (your VPN provider) can compare the time the packets are sent and received accounting for latency. It can then be added up to calculate that the time you sent packets on your end, and they were received on your VPN providers end, and the final destination after being sent by your VPN provider, matches you as the original source of the data traffic.
This is ultimately what the NSA PRISM program does.
If a state actor is your adversary then a VPN connection will not be of much help. If you are doing small time stuff like breaking copyright laws and trolling online then you’ll be fine.
Regarding the Arab spring, they very much did succeed to shut down the internet. They simply pulled the plug on everything except two military uplinks.
During the Egyptian uprising, European internet activists of the Telecomix collective helped establish communication links with activists on the ground in Egypt using [url=https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-12322948]fax machines, ham radio and dial-up modems[/url].
The people found ways and means, sure, but over 95% of the country was offline. The information coming out was very limited. People would send Morse code messages to specific phone numbers which would translate them to text and post on Twitter. It was very limited communication, mostly updates about the situation on the ground which was critical because everybody was afraid of what the Egyptian government was planning to do.