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

remysharp.com

131–140 of 185 posts

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

#131
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.

Very odd take. Let's not discourage open discussion. I've not seen whatever original HN thread you're referring to.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps people missed that, and would like to start a new discussion? It didn't know there was a quota on discussions of any particular topic, perhaps we should give out tickets to the event in the future to ensure no-one misses their opportunity to join the discourse?

> It didn't know there was a quota on discussions of any particular topic It’s in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#reposts “Are reposts ok? If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.” Alternately, here are comments by moderator dang that mention reposting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&…

Sometimes reposts get the attention of the second-chance pool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

I had one such post that deserved comments but didn't get any, then someone reposted it and dang put the original back into the pool.

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

#133
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No need to roll your own. There are many open source VPN's, proxies and much more. When dozens, hundreds or thousands of people share and forward load balance their traffic across hundreds of self hosted networks it gets a lot harder to perform attestation and attribution. The reason to cycle through many VPN/proxy networks would be the assumption that a percentage of them are vigilante owned and operated. That's the…

by rolling your own they don't mean write a VPN from scratch, but host a VPN on a VPS.

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

#134
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably should have put a `>` before the first paragraph, because it reads like an 8/8 bait and most people won't continue to the next one. Regarding the misleading podcast claims, at least all the podcast and youtube ads made the VPNs popular on the mass market so now they are more difficult to be silently outlawed.

Oops yes, definitely should have done that. Looks like it's too late to edit though

Haha, if it wasn't even on purpose that makes it more funny.

Your comment was even dead for a while, before I (and others?) vouched for it.

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

#135
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.

Of all possible scenarios this seems one of the least bad. Government is less likely to sell you out and they can't really use the information to prosecute you legally without revealing "oh btw we were behind that VPN", which is kind of a one time trick.

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

#136
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…

> 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.

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

#137
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to roll your own. There are many open source VPN's, proxies and much more. When dozens, hundreds or thousands of people share and forward load balance their traffic across hundreds of self hosted networks it gets a lot harder to perform attestation and attribution. The reason to cycle through many VPN/proxy networks would be the assumption that a percentage of them are vigilante owned and operated. That's the…

by rolling your own they don't mean write a VPN from scratch, but host a VPN on a VPS.

The term "rolling your own" as it applies to the internet means writing your own code. For example, "rolling your own encryption" would mean writing your own protocols, algorithms, ciphers, hash formulas, etc...

Hosting something on someone else's servers is "server or VPS renting". Self hosting implies running something on your own servers you own and fully control.

So lets run with they mean running it on a VPS. That is still better than all the delicious eggs in one big basket but it's also risky as there is a money trail and most VPS providers can live-clone, live-migrate a VM to capture and perform forensics all memory contents without impacting performance. If going this route I would try to get one of the cheap "gaming" physical servers and try to find a way to pay that is hard to track. One can at least update the firmware, change all the IPMI accounts and lock it down a little bit.

On a bigger scale one can get their own colocation space. KimDotCom for example had a massive colo in Equinix in Ashburn, VA that ran for a very long time.

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this StackOverflow now, where it's forbidden to discuss something if someone else had a similar discussion before?

Part StackOverflow, part Reddit ... it's getting dicey around here.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this StackOverflow now, where it's forbidden to discuss something if someone else had a similar discussion before?

Ever I'd hope not, but it would make sense to check if a discussion was already started a week ago and add to it rather than start separate ones constantly for each new piece of news - but not as a strict requirement, just an ask. After enough time there tends to be additional development/information which makes using the old conversations useless.

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

#140
This will also come in handy, when ISPs in Spain turn off VPNs when football plays on the screen:

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...

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