Hey guys, remember when these same countries ragged on China for being against freedom of expression?
The sad part is, banning VPNs for most users is extremely doable now.
Source: I have been to China not that long ago and VPNs are mostly cooked now :(
Luckily my state government seems to encourage VPN use (despite the federal government’s horseshittery): https://www.vic.gov.au/using-public-wifi-networks-safely
Not the “install a VPN to be safe on public wifi” again 😭
Install a VPN to be slightly safer on public WiFi
Let’s be clear here: lawmakers need to abandon this entire approach.
The answer to “how do we keep kids safe online” isn’t “destroy everyone’s privacy.” It’s not “force people to hand over their IDs to access legal content.” And it’s certainly not "ban access to the tools that protect journalists, activists, and abuse survivors.”
If lawmakers genuinely care about young people’s well-being, they should invest in education, support parents with better tools, and address the actual root causes of harm online. What they shouldn’t do is wage war on privacy itself. Attacks on VPNs are attacks on digital privacy and digital freedom. And this battle is being fought by people who clearly have no idea how any of this technology actually works.
If you live in Wisconsin—reach out to your Senator and urge them to kill A.B. 105/S.B. 130, and if you know someone who lives in Wisconsin—tell them to do the same. Our privacy matters. VPNs matter. And politicians who can’t tell the difference between a security tool and a “loophole” shouldn’t be writing laws about the internet.
If the government really wanted to protect children from the internet they’d provide locked down devices with spyware to each kid or they’d force parents to buy locked down devices. They’d punish parents if a child used a device that isn’t locked down. If they actually cared about protecting children they’d monitor their parents with spyware too. Why stop with government provided safe devices and spyware though, they could install cameras in every house that has kids just so they can monitor kids 24/7.
Obviously they’re not going to do any of that. There probably already is spyware in most devices and it’s not like they’re using it to protect them now. Banning VPNs for the sake of protecting children is just as stupid.
Safety is not what’s this about, it’s obviously control
I can‘t wait to get arrested for connecting to my PC via SSH because geriatric lawmakers are too far up their own ass and want to enslave everyone else. Yay!
Rich people want to control everything by locking down the internet. It’s time to create another form of connectivity that doesn’t rely on national infrastructure. I have no idea what that is, but it’s the only way to ensure our freedom.
another form of connectivity that doesn’t rely on national infrastructure. I have no idea what that is
l can tell you.
It’s the internet in its original form. A distributed network of independent nodes freely peering to each other over a decentralized infrastructure.First to go was the decentralization.
Main knots like DE-CIX are now the central connection points and single point of failure (and intrusion).Next went the independent distribution with hyperscalers taking over.
Currently the free peering is about to disappear.
E.g. my provider, a major one here in Germany, just announced to completely remove from free public peering and let a private company handle it for him instead.
This company then charges other peers based on bandwidth.The problem of looming governmental restrictions is just the tip of the iceberg.
The internet is already rotten from the infrastructural core and there is no easy way around that…Exactly this.
My humble approach to counter this development is self-hosting as much as I can for myself, my family and my friends. That includes everything useful from bookmark managers, media servers, file sharing, photo libraries and even a kiwix server for offline wikipedia etc.
That is great and I do the same (shoutout to my local NAS) and I also try to improve situation outside of my family by running a TOR server since things started to significantly deteriorate 20 years ago or so.
But that are just “waterdrops on hot stones” and have no impact on the 99% of people who don’t have the means or expertise to do likewise.
Main focus must be to steer politics away from deciding such laws and to implement regulation against monopolies and closed infrastructure instead. I know that’s tedious and probably neverending work, but the only viable long-term option I see.The Internet can grow from its roots again. It started out with two nodes connecting to each other. Run a link to your friend. Wired or microwave link. In 75 years we might have a whole second internet going on. :D
We already have Internet2
“An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices”. “Meshtastic® is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!”
I tried to invent a similar concept before finding out that there are already several implementations 😅
It lacks the bandwidth for actual Internet use unfortunately.
The Internet used to lack the bandwidth for actual Internet use. Let’s go back to html and small css files at most for private websites.
I used to do everything on a 2400 baud modem (though admittedly it sucked pretty hard until 28.8k).
Yeah I wasn’t gonna over explain but the intended use here is not live streaming. I’d go for a mesh trickle request and wait for it to download to your local node type of thinking.
Patience.
I suppose the use case would be for journalists, distributing banned books, and so on - pure text-based information. However, video footage is extremely useful in today’s media environment - how many current events do we see first from some tiktok or twitter video, rather than nightly news?
Until that gets regulated, too.
I mean I’m all for it but I don’t see how it can gain popularity yet remain out of the law’s reach.
They can’t control everything if they don’t know who or where we are.
Meshnet decentralized platforms.
It’s as if the USA and UK are locked in a perpetual “hold my beer” moment with their legislation.
Then again, Europe is also pushing some boundaries with it’s chat snooping laws.
A bad time to be an internet user really…
I feel like a lot of my European (EU citizen) friends are commentating from some high horse but in reality I feel European lawmakers are just watching how this plays out before deciding to follow suit.
They’re trying to introduce backdoors to various chat programs right now, so they’re likely going to be guilty of the same invasion of privacy soon.
A bad time to be alive really…
Better than being dead though.
I’m not so sure lately
Ehh…
They never fucking do. Governments as they are currently ran are becoming a failed concept
I think we need some kind of limiting principle applied to restrict what individual jurisdictions can do to fuck up national or global systems.
Overzealous lawmakers in Michigan or Wisconsin shouldn’t be able to force global companies to operate their websites differently.
California shouldn’t be able to force Glock to discontinue and re-tool its entire product line, etc.
California isn’t forcing Glock to do anything. Glock wants the central valley and orange county market so they do what they need to do.
(I actually have no idea about the specifics of this, but I’m assuming it falls in the general shape of California trying to restrict access to murder tools and the murder tool vendor responding by finding ways around the law rather than just admitting their hobby and business kills people)
It could be argued that this is a violation of the interstate commerce clause of the constitution.
The US can prohibit VPNs and encryption all it wants, doesn’t meant he rat of the world will
By the same logic social issues would be distributed to the states, civil rights. Which is what’s happening now. The interstate commerce act is a stroke of brilliance tbh, it allows the states to work as a greater system without there being a patchwork of laws and regulations. I don’t think dropping it would be wise just because we’ve reached this level of stupidity… time to suffer consequences.
Agree with you on network protocols. Your physical product example is bad.
Didn’t we have this discussion like, a month ago, when this happened somewhere else? And a month earlier than that? And another month earlier than that?
Hopefully, the pushback will keep coming alongside with it. That’s shitfuckery level of a stupid proposal.
It’s only a matter of time before some protocol is invented that bypasses all of this with some simple code or some plugin.
You can’t just ban your way to compliance.
There’s already several of them. You can even run things like cjdns which is entirely encrypted and p2p routed.
They can criminalize you for doing it. Would you take the risks?
Yes. You pirate anything?
Sure, but with a VPN. If my government wants to ban VPNs, I guess it’s pretty easy to see that 99,9% of my requests go to single IP that belongs to a VPN server
There are ways around that kind of stuff even for the most stringent of governments. Of course inherently there’s always a risk you asked me if I’m willing to take it and I said yes.
We just need to go back to point to point actual private networks. Fuck 'em
Yes, keep taking more and more away from people who have nothing to lose and nothing to live for.
I’m sure that will end well for them and their families.
That’s what they want so they can clamp all the way down and death star us into submission
Thank God I’m not in the USA, but it gradually gets worse everywhere.
The moment the average Joe could access the net, was the begin of its downfall. And it hurts me to see one of the greatest inventions of all time to get more shitty day by day.
Also, VPNs might be outlawed, but that just means vpns for the masses. If you throw money at the problem, you’d still have a VPN. Doesn’t even need to be much money, though that’s relative.
If you throw money at the problem, you’d still have a VPN.
Heavily depends on what “outlawed” means.
I am certainly capable of implementing low cost workarounds to purely technical anti-VPN-measures, but certainly would not risk going to jail just for trying it.Essentially boils down to the old saying:
“If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.”Fair point. Though using a PC you rent someplace foreign can’t be outlawed. Not even in the US. I’d argue the ban would be the usual kind that just has a list of banned IPs which are “shared devices”. Everything else would be death for all companies and whatnot. For me a reason to emigrate.
The moment billionaires coopted the internet was when it went downhill. They knew the threat it posed, the vision of the early cypherpunks, and made sure the internet wouldn’t do that to their power.
Decentralization and accessibility are good things. Elitism and exclusionary practices do nothing good.
Wouldn’t even pin the early problems on the billionaires. Every corpo smelled money in the net. Every scammer and similar dirtbag. That, in combination with the average joe being able to “surf” was a bad combo. Like everything else where a clueless mass meets greed.
The net is great, i love it. don’t get me wrong. Decentralization was kinda a core of the net. Usenet, IRC…everything was great, simple, redundant and fool-proof (i mean, it’s still there and kicking). Even google was great when they emerged.
Very nuanced. Thank you for your thoughtful response!
Fucking idiots!
Lawmakers
Want to Ban VPNs—And TheyHave No Idea What They’re DoingAt least where I’m from. Can’t imagine it being different elsewhere.
