IANAL, but there is a passage in the swedish constitution regarding right of speech (yttrandefrihetsgrundlagen, SFS 1991:1469, which I re-read for this reason, just a few days ago) that prohibits laws being passed to outlaw equipment used for sending or receiving radio programmes or any form of recording of text, images and/or sound. It leaves a small hole for laws that require a license send things wirelessly, but is quite strict on things passing through wires.

Banning VPNs or even torrents is as far as I can tell, against the swedish constitution.

You can read it yourself here: http://www.riksdagen.se/templates/R_Page____6316.aspx

Chapter 1, article 3 prevents banning ownership and usage, on grounds of content, of tools needed for reception and parsing a message intended for the general public.
Chapter 3, article 10 would relate to ISP (common carrier) content filtering.

Funny thing the swedish parliament has passed so many stupid laws in recent years, when the constitution contains so many Good articles!

I'd rank the grand-parent informative and you a troll, sir, if that comment had been written half a million users ago.

A funny thing with this is the sliding window of what is humour on this site.

SanityInAnarchy has apparently not been doing a lot of development in a UNIX environment. While I don't blame him/her for potentially missing out on the ptrace syscall, as it's not mentioned in Stevens' Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, I do find it a bit sad that he/she makes such bold statements about the security of a computer system without checking at least the valid command line parameters to one of the tools he is referring to. Luckily an Anonymous Coward already told the world about two of these.

For those not familiar with the ptrace syscall, here is some info about linux ptrace:

• You have to have super-user privileges, CAP_SYS_PTRACE capabilities or be able to send signals to the process to "attach to". The first parts means you is or have the permission of the system administrator or compromised the system. The last part basically means that you can also poke around at will in "your own" (or all processes for the same user account you've hacked) processes.
• It is possible to read and write all process memory and registers. Basically, this means that you can run, you can obfuscate, but you cannot hide your crypto keys. Not from yourself or a particularly Evil sysadm, that is.
• Even if the traced process receives a signal from the tracing, it is already too late to do anything about it once it regains control over it's operation.

Detecting that you're being traced is possible, but it equally possible to circumvent possible detection by tracing at the correct time, deliver spoofed signals, modifying memory in the traced process to avoid being detected. In short: if you cannot trust your system administrator and yourself (at least all processes running as you) you are out of luck as to local security. Network security is one step worse, in that you have to trust even more persons.

Oh, and don't use trustno1 as password!