VPNs are just tools that sketchy people use for sketchy means. There's no legitimate use for someone who isn't trying to break the law. Allowing these tools let's underage people access porn, and do all manner of undesirable behaviors like accessing region locked content.
I have actually heard otherwise intelligent people say things just like that, including site operators who run nontrivial websites.
There are of course some people on the other side who think VPNs are a guarantee of privacy and secrecy on the internet, but that's pretty rare in my anecdatal experience. I largely blame the rampant ads on podcasts for this view.
I use a VPN to have access to my HomeAssistant instance at home, where I can control every aspect of the house. Without this, I would have to pay for a domain name, manage the certificates, and exposing myself to external attacks. So, for me, a VPN reduces massively the attack surface.
There is this law, where if you don't see the purpose of something, is probably because you never needed it. Which is fine, but don't gatekeep others wanting to use them.
Edit: OP forgot to format text, so my anger should be directed to however said the quote...
> I have actually heard otherwise intelligent people say things just like that, including site operators who run nontrivial websites.
First of all: thank you for using the word say, rather than think or believe or anything of that ilk. Too many of these discussions reduce to attributing or misattributing motivations to people.
That said, I still have issues with that statement. Let's assume that you are talking about an intelligent person who works in tech. Chances are something was taken out of context because they probably know what VPNs are for and that they have legitimate uses. Sometimes they miss context because they are not expressing their ideas clearly. Sometimes we miss context because we hear something we violently oppose to, and ignore the rest.
Another issue is that categorizing and vilifying people genuinely doesn't help the cause. At best, people will ignore the counter points. At worse, it will push people further away. We have to listen and educate based upon issues that are relevant to the audience.
Simplistic responses like, "freedom of speech" won't solve anything because those words have lost meaning. Too many people scream "freedom of speech" to excuse what they are saying, while they are active in suppressing the freedom of speech of others. Too many people use the freedom of speech as a tool to intimidate others, to restrict the speech or legal actions of others, because they are more interested in imposing their values on others rather than challenging the values of others. We should be illustrating ways that freedom of speech are relevant using examples that are relevant to the people we are speaking to. In the case of framing freedom of speech for people who are concerned with abortion: pro-life people may respond better to presenting freedom of speech as a safe stage to promote the sacredness of life, while pro-choice people may respond better to framing the freedom of speech as a safe way to seek out information relating to getting an abortion.
Likewise, people can see through simplistic attacks like accusing others of using children for leverage in an argument. Most of the people who say "think of the children" are trying to dismiss people who are trying, legitimately, to protect a vulnerable class. There are plenty of good reasons why the policy mechanisms to protect a vulnerable class may be objectionable, yet framing one's opposition with a reductionist interpretation of intent pushes people apart when they ought to be seeking out better solutions. For example: two people may agree that underage access to porn has to be dealt with, but disagree on the role that VPNs play in circumventing restrictions. So talk about how VPNs are not an age-based access control mechanism. Talk about the misclassification of information about gender and sexuality as pornography, assuming it is relevant to who you are talking to. Talk about the other benefits that VPNs offer in maintaining a free society. In other words, get them on your side and start seeking out better solutions.
This is a very brief blog blurb linking the original Tech Radar article that got fairly extensive discussion on HN a week and a half ago [0]. Potentially quite an important one though so a second go around may still be very justified for those who missed it last time. Amidst a lot of negative moves around the net recently it's nice to see some sanity at least once in awhile.
If I were a governmental body I would do everything I could to keep citizens using paid VPN's and big CDN's. Money trails are easy to follow and the majority of people are just paying with their bank. It makes people feel safe and more likely to expose certain behaviors. Paid VPN's can say they do not have logs whilst having real time lawful intercept API's. A handful of VPN providers become a one stop shop to get the data of what used to be hundreds or thousands of ISP's all over the world in many jurisdictions just as a few big DNS over HTTPS providers become a one stop shop to get the DNS of what used to be hundreds or thousands of ISP's all over the world in many jurisdictions.
Ban VPN's and people will fall back to the myriad of open source alternatives that can be a bit harder to peel back and get logs assuming any exist in the first place. This was a thing some time ago. Many of the malware and pirate groups were sharing Tinc meshes though as expected there would at times be one person in the group that would be the weakest link and expose the entire group. Expand the numbers of people doing this and the probability of a few groups using decent operational security will increase. This probably deserves it's own write-up.
> A handful of VPN providers become a one stop shop to get the data of what used to be hundreds or thousands of ISP's all over the world in many jurisdictions just as a few big DNS over HTTPS providers become a one stop shop to get the DNS of what used to be hundreds or thousands of ISP's all over the world.
This is backward.
How many ISPs do you have to choose from? Only a couple because there is limited and local infrastructure. How many have business entities in your country? All of them, because it’s a physical location based business.
How many VPN providers (not counting resellers) do you have to choose from? How many are not located in your country?
Most people aren’t using VPNs to commit crimes so significant that they need to be intercepted and unmasked by global law enforcement. Most just want privacy, but if crimes are committed it’s usually piracy or something similar. If we were seeing situations like you’re thinking where police are piercing through VPNs, we’d be seeing evidence of it. Parallel construction theories aren’t going to cover everything for all of time.
You’re also underestimating the difficulty of coordinating criminal investigations across countries. It’s really hard to arrange this and legally expensive. If VPN providers were getting constant requests from countries everywhere to intercept traffic it wouldn’t be a secret. We’d be hearing stories from VPN companies advertising it loudly as one of their selling points for being located in a country which doesn’t require international cooperation.
Governments would also be making moves to block payments or connections to VPNs in those exempt countries, diverting people to their compromised VPNs.
It’s not 4D chess. Connecting to a VPN in another country isn’t completely unbreakable legally, but the reason governments are going after it is because it makes it so much harder or impossible to unmask that it interferes with goals of being able to unmask internet users doing things they don’t want.
It is a sort of LAN network over the Internet. That way, you can connect to devices as if you were in the local network, but having them exposed to the internet.
Traffic is encrypted so there is noone knowing what you are sending, they can still trace that is coming to/from a specific node.
Why do online services need to know where I am? Why does my ISP need to know who I'm communicating with? For me, VPNs are about reducing privacy leakage. Most of the internet collects, aggregates, and sells knowledge about their users, and VPNs are an important tool for withholding that.
There is a big discrepancy here. EU courts babble about lawful xyz. While they are doing so, national legislation goes downhill, e. g. mandatory age sniffing and other restrictions to come (I claim the age sniffing will come on the OS level, Google recently announced Android will do so, so you can already see the corporate agenda being pushed into democracies here). So I consider the EU courts to just act as decoy, aka "look how everything is legal". Well, a few years later, VPN will be banned. And the EU courts will be in agreement with that.
This looks like a very narrow ruling regarding copyright. It doesn't guarantee that EU bureaucrats won't try to ban VPNs that don't verify user age (for starters to make NPCs support the bans, then they will inevitably attempt to enforce some kind of KYC or logging to "catch terrorists and pedos".)
In fact this makes it more likely. Now that a court has ruled that current copyright law does not make a VPN provider liable, the European Council (all heads of state of European countries) will propose a law that makes VPN providers liable for copyright-infringing traffic
Yes, they may just be laying the groundwork for introducing compliance requirements for VPN providers while the concept of VPN itself as a tool will always remain lawful by itself. Same as a messaging apps - they are completely lawful but France would arrest CEOs of businesses around them if they are not cooperative enough with "law enforcement".
Hurray and good. A technology shouldn’t be treated as unlawful simply because it can be used to bypass restrictions. Restrictions which are stupid in the first place in the majority.
I hope VPNs are not becoming the next battleground between online safety and civil liberties. I'm sick of the current ongoing attacks on civil liberties in the Western World under the fake veil of online safety.
You can't do much with VPNs these days, almost any website now has antibot systems and it's actually kid's play to detect whether you are on VPN or not.
I guess accessing a streaming service without permission is considered a copyright violation, but blanket-blocking them based on copyright infringement will be legally difficult now...
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 9.7 ms ] threadI have actually heard otherwise intelligent people say things just like that, including site operators who run nontrivial websites.
There are of course some people on the other side who think VPNs are a guarantee of privacy and secrecy on the internet, but that's pretty rare in my anecdatal experience. I largely blame the rampant ads on podcasts for this view.
There is this law, where if you don't see the purpose of something, is probably because you never needed it. Which is fine, but don't gatekeep others wanting to use them.
Edit: OP forgot to format text, so my anger should be directed to however said the quote...
First of all: thank you for using the word say, rather than think or believe or anything of that ilk. Too many of these discussions reduce to attributing or misattributing motivations to people.
That said, I still have issues with that statement. Let's assume that you are talking about an intelligent person who works in tech. Chances are something was taken out of context because they probably know what VPNs are for and that they have legitimate uses. Sometimes they miss context because they are not expressing their ideas clearly. Sometimes we miss context because we hear something we violently oppose to, and ignore the rest.
Another issue is that categorizing and vilifying people genuinely doesn't help the cause. At best, people will ignore the counter points. At worse, it will push people further away. We have to listen and educate based upon issues that are relevant to the audience.
Simplistic responses like, "freedom of speech" won't solve anything because those words have lost meaning. Too many people scream "freedom of speech" to excuse what they are saying, while they are active in suppressing the freedom of speech of others. Too many people use the freedom of speech as a tool to intimidate others, to restrict the speech or legal actions of others, because they are more interested in imposing their values on others rather than challenging the values of others. We should be illustrating ways that freedom of speech are relevant using examples that are relevant to the people we are speaking to. In the case of framing freedom of speech for people who are concerned with abortion: pro-life people may respond better to presenting freedom of speech as a safe stage to promote the sacredness of life, while pro-choice people may respond better to framing the freedom of speech as a safe way to seek out information relating to getting an abortion.
Likewise, people can see through simplistic attacks like accusing others of using children for leverage in an argument. Most of the people who say "think of the children" are trying to dismiss people who are trying, legitimately, to protect a vulnerable class. There are plenty of good reasons why the policy mechanisms to protect a vulnerable class may be objectionable, yet framing one's opposition with a reductionist interpretation of intent pushes people apart when they ought to be seeking out better solutions. For example: two people may agree that underage access to porn has to be dealt with, but disagree on the role that VPNs play in circumventing restrictions. So talk about how VPNs are not an age-based access control mechanism. Talk about the misclassification of information about gender and sexuality as pornography, assuming it is relevant to who you are talking to. Talk about the other benefits that VPNs offer in maintaining a free society. In other words, get them on your side and start seeking out better solutions.
----
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997221
Ban VPN's and people will fall back to the myriad of open source alternatives that can be a bit harder to peel back and get logs assuming any exist in the first place. This was a thing some time ago. Many of the malware and pirate groups were sharing Tinc meshes though as expected there would at times be one person in the group that would be the weakest link and expose the entire group. Expand the numbers of people doing this and the probability of a few groups using decent operational security will increase. This probably deserves it's own write-up.
This is backward.
How many ISPs do you have to choose from? Only a couple because there is limited and local infrastructure. How many have business entities in your country? All of them, because it’s a physical location based business.
How many VPN providers (not counting resellers) do you have to choose from? How many are not located in your country?
Most people aren’t using VPNs to commit crimes so significant that they need to be intercepted and unmasked by global law enforcement. Most just want privacy, but if crimes are committed it’s usually piracy or something similar. If we were seeing situations like you’re thinking where police are piercing through VPNs, we’d be seeing evidence of it. Parallel construction theories aren’t going to cover everything for all of time.
You’re also underestimating the difficulty of coordinating criminal investigations across countries. It’s really hard to arrange this and legally expensive. If VPN providers were getting constant requests from countries everywhere to intercept traffic it wouldn’t be a secret. We’d be hearing stories from VPN companies advertising it loudly as one of their selling points for being located in a country which doesn’t require international cooperation.
Governments would also be making moves to block payments or connections to VPNs in those exempt countries, diverting people to their compromised VPNs.
It’s not 4D chess. Connecting to a VPN in another country isn’t completely unbreakable legally, but the reason governments are going after it is because it makes it so much harder or impossible to unmask that it interferes with goals of being able to unmask internet users doing things they don’t want.
Bypass censorship
Get treated the same by websites when traveling
Avoid bad laws
Gain good laws
Traffic is encrypted so there is noone knowing what you are sending, they can still trace that is coming to/from a specific node.
https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/gadgets-tech/v...
It's a step-by-step strategy.
It was widely covered (like at https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2217934/vpn-ban-table-july...) and tech sec. Liz Kendall is on the record with BBC talking about July.
[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997221
I hope VPNs are not becoming the next battleground between online safety and civil liberties. I'm sick of the current ongoing attacks on civil liberties in the Western World under the fake veil of online safety.
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/la-ligas-...
I guess accessing a streaming service without permission is considered a copyright violation, but blanket-blocking them based on copyright infringement will be legally difficult now...