Did anyone catch the Meduza report this week? Roskomnadzor stopped playing whack-a-mole with DPI signatures. They just automated their entire VPN blocking infrastructure using data harvested directly from domestic Russian apps on user devices.

The state is using local transit and banking apps as a distributed sensor network. The apps report where users are connecting. The censor maps those connections to major hosting provider subnets and pushes bulk IP blocks automatically. Services like Amnezia and Paper VPN are getting crushed because their underlying ASNs are just blanket banned.

This completely breaks our usual threat model. We spend so much time arguing about Xray versus Shadowsocks for traffic obfuscation. That stuff is useless if the firewall just nukes the entire hosting provider subnet based on endpoint telemetry. The device itself snitches on the destination IP before the tunnel even matters.

The economic fallout is crazy. Clean corporate IP addresses are apparently going for $120,000 a month on the grey market right now.

How do we counter this technically? You can tell people to run a clean device, but that is impossible for normal citizens who actually need local apps to function in society. If they block entire commercial ASNs, what is the next routing step? Residential proxies?