MapPorn

China is part of Taiwan.

Or more precisely, PRC is rebelled provinces of China.

Nice try, Xi!

against who's law

The Tankies are baned Russia, apparently they are subversive. It seems that no one likes them very much.

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.

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)

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.

Inconsistently and only through relays

you can't use VPN were endpoint is used read censored materials. If it's within the country, than OK

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.

illegal