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'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

remysharp.com

101–110 of 185 posts

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#101

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 co…

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Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#102
post #62

First question that need to asked from everyone including ownself , why you need VPN?

I just loaded up Bluesky this morning to discover it demanding proof of my age bc I live in Texas. First thing I did was turn on my out-of-state vpn and try again. not today, satan!

Instead of an out-of-state vpn, why not an out-of-state home? Why do people put up with the lack of freedom there? People complain about European countries but then praise states like Texas.

(Realistically, moving is easier said than done, of course.)

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#103
post #50
post #39

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 th…

Most of the big VPN companies known from advertisments all over the internet are probably honeypots of the usual countries.

Not probably - most of them are confirmed.

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#104
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of VPNs often is hiding in the mass. Rolling your own kind of defeats that purpose.

Even very basic browser fingerprinting will still identify you. The IP address is just one of many data points.

The point isn’t to hide yourself from the destination.

It’s to hide along the journey there.

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#105
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the big VPN companies known from advertisments all over the internet are probably honeypots of the usual countries.

if you didn't roll it yourself you need to assume that someone is snooping on you maybe mullvad is legit but their leadership keeps leaning to dubious causes

If you did roll it yourself, you definitely aren't anonymous because there is only one user of the VPN IP address.

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#106
post #16

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. ---- 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?…

Yeah, please could everyone not pile in and start re-hashing the extensive comments that have already been made only a week and a half ago. Whatever you're thinking of posting has almost certainly already been said more than once on the original HN discussion.

Yeah I'd hate for multiple comments re-hashing the exact same comments that people already made before, but sometimes there's value in it...I'm sure you'd agree?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49109440#49109857

Is it even preferable to necro an 8-day old topic? New developments are going to lead to new talking points, right?

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#107
post #39

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 th…

Interesting theory. My own theory is that the big corporations want to siphon off more data from people. That is, I think, the main agenda. See android recently stating that everyone has to give up their age. Next step will be ID (though probably, in order to verify the age, one has to give up the ID anyway, so age sniffing could be called ID sniffing).

The age thing is because of laws mandating it

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#108

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

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#109

Discussion on 21-jul-2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997221 141 comments

Yeah. In particular for "hot" topics like this people should use the search function at the bottom of every HN page before rushing into post. The last thing everyone needs is yet another duplicate post with hundreds of comments re-hashing the exact same comments that people already made before. It is not helpful for anyone.

TIL there's a search function at the bottom of every HN page. Only took me 10 years to find out it exists!

Re: 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

#110
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the big VPN companies known from advertisments all over the internet are probably honeypots of the usual countries.

if you didn't roll it yourself you need to assume that someone is snooping on you maybe mullvad is legit but their leadership keeps leaning to dubious causes

What do you mean with "leaning to dubious causes?" I was under the impression mullvad was fine.
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