Looks like there is a non-trivial opportunity for a VPN service that accepts bitcoins.
Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
11–20 of 113 posts
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#12And this is why technical solutions on their own are not enough. They'll just keep restricting and banning technologies they feel are too dangerous to their interests, whether by the legislature or the courts or by hitting up the payment processors themselves. Whether it's ITAR or SOPA or PIPA or ACTA or TPP, the net effect is the same. Political action must be taken. All of the forward secrecy and TLS and onion rout…
This is why the key is to make these types of services ubiquitous..... if everyone is using them for everything, then it becomes more difficult to infer anything from their use.
You can't infer anything from VPN use, and it's one of the most ubiquitous communications-security tools already.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#13Looks like there is a non-trivial opportunity for a VPN service that accepts bitcoins.
Several all ready do. The issue is that getting bit coins for the average web users is a non trivial exercise.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#14Bitcoin is going to be more popular but we still have to fight for it.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#15Does anyone have a list of VPNs banned thusfar? I run a proxy provider right now, and am branching into VPNs in the coming months. But I will be actively filtering against torrent traffic since it seems to be such an attractor of negative attention. I wonder if these bans apply mostly to torrent-marketed providers? Also, is it possible they were banned for other reasons? Eg high chargeback ratios? I can tell you from…
I spoke to a friend that owns and operates a VPN service and he says it is only iPredator at the moment, and that is conveniently left out of the torrentfreak article. To me it looks like MasterCard is just targeting the pirate bay peeps.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#16And this is why technical solutions on their own are not enough. They'll just keep restricting and banning technologies they feel are too dangerous to their interests, whether by the legislature or the courts or by hitting up the payment processors themselves. Whether it's ITAR or SOPA or PIPA or ACTA or TPP, the net effect is the same. Political action must be taken. All of the forward secrecy and TLS and onion rout…
Agreed AspensMonster, we need to support politicians who support our liberties.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#17This is exactly the problem with monopolised payment systems. There is absolutely no due process in these decision. These large corporations can change their so called 'policies' to financially cripple entities that they do not agree with. And it seems the burden of proof falls to the party that has been banned, which is absolutely ridiculous.
Or they got burned on charge back rates the same way porn sites did in the 90's. In which case, any payment system that offers charge backs likely would make the same call. Now digital currencies(which don't have charge backs typically), would solve that problem, but the lack of a main stream one of those is not clearly the result of a monopoly.
It makes little sense that the US gov had these guys banned because they were anonymous since they aren't. Mounting trafic coloration attacks against a VPN is trivial if you see everything going in and out ( same for Tor). Maybe the RIAA and MPAA had enough clout to do it, but why not usenet providers as well?
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#18As there is nothing remotely illegal or even nefarious about using a VPN, one can assume we've gone over the falls. The United States and its financial system exist to serve the interests of some truly disgusting people.
> As there is nothing remotely illegal or even nefarious about using a VPN
There's a reason every risk scoring tool for e-commerce highly weighs whether the connection is from a VPN or other type of proxy. Using a VPN is not illegal or nefarious, but public anonymizing VPNs (as opposed to private VPN-into-the-company-network VPNs) are used for illegal and nefarious purposes to a huge degree. The volume of fraud occurring through them is measured in billions of dollars a year.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#19Keep in mind that this is about chargeback risk, not implementing some secret government policy. "Anonymizing VPNs" are a high risk service -- the people signing up for them are more often "bad guys" than tech professionals looking for privacy -- and they're signing up with stolen payment information. There are far more hackers, crackers, carders, "script kiddies", spammers and other people that need to hide their lo…
> the people signing up for them are more often "bad guys" than tech professionals looking for privacy -- and they're signing up with stolen payment information That's a bold claim. Do you have any evidence of that?
Its really not bold at all.
If you drink that koolaid, Sounds like you would also believe megaupload was used 'primarily for non infringing use'
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#20As there is nothing remotely illegal or even nefarious about using a VPN, one can assume we've gone over the falls. The United States and its financial system exist to serve the interests of some truly disgusting people.
I so fucking hope you are overreacting, but I fear that you are not.
No need for the aggressive tone. And you're overreacting just as much to his/her reply.