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Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

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171–180 of 419 posts

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won’t even work* *without resorting to complete Russian style government control The US is not (yet) Russia. The rule of law is definitely being destroyed as we speak, so who knows 5, 10 years down the road, but there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban.

Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."

From my reading, the GP comment isn’t claiming otherwise, but just that that sort of VPN ban isn’t enforceable in advance of some of those changes. They do directly suggest they don’t know how long this will remain the case.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#172

A device-side IP filter locked behind a password that parents can configure in the device's settings would be much more effective and easier to implement than censoring the Internet. This should be the default solution, yet it's never brought up for whatever reason. Not to mention these online content censorship laws for kids are wrong in principle because parents are supposed to be in control of how they raise each…

IP filter? So what you do when you block the entire cloudflare, CloudFront, Amazon and Google cloud ip ranges? What's left? There are better solution than blocking IPs.

Yeah, we can have fancy NN-based filters, but I think even a simple IP blocker with some carefully-made presets would go a long way.

Anyways, the main point I was making is the filtering should be done on-device at the parents' discretion, if they really wanted to protect their children. We can give them that feature and eliminate an excuse for authoritarian laws at the same time. This doesn't even require legislation, we can just do it if enough people working on operating systems agree.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won’t even work* *without resorting to complete Russian style government control The US is not (yet) Russia. The rule of law is definitely being destroyed as we speak, so who knows 5, 10 years down the road, but there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban.

Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."

>Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."

This is a pretty bold claim and I'm not sure it matches up with reality.

Karl Marx said that in the first stage of communism there would be a required period of dictatorial control in order to transition from and dismantle capitalist institutions. This is exactly what happened in China and the USSR... there just never was a phase 2.

That's not quite "this will never happen here", more like premeditated dictatorship that never ended because the ruling class preferred being a ruling class rather than return themselves to "communist paradise".

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#175

A device-side IP filter locked behind a password that parents can configure in the device's settings would be much more effective and easier to implement than censoring the Internet. This should be the default solution, yet it's never brought up for whatever reason. Not to mention these online content censorship laws for kids are wrong in principle because parents are supposed to be in control of how they raise each…

Whether it's intentional or not, these laws open the door to mass surveillance under the guise of "protection"

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#177

A device-side IP filter locked behind a password that parents can configure in the device's settings would be much more effective and easier to implement than censoring the Internet. This should be the default solution, yet it's never brought up for whatever reason. Not to mention these online content censorship laws for kids are wrong in principle because parents are supposed to be in control of how they raise each…

The goal is controling the flow of information online. "protecting the children" may or may not be a sincere concern but ultimately censorship is what is desired here.

Yep, "think of the children" has become the go-to excuse for all kinds of overreach

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#178
post #95

After Wisconsin finds out how to reliably filter vpn, they can then teach Netflix and Akamai how to do it. Last time I checked modestly reliable geoblocking existed, and completely unreliable vpn blocking. A friend told me that when he comes across a site for which Nordvpn is blocked, he just changes IP. Latest the third one always works, even on YouTube (he is all about privacy).

It's like watching people try to duct-tape the internet into behaving the way they imagine it should

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal is controling the flow of information online. "protecting the children" may or may not be a sincere concern but ultimately censorship is what is desired here.

pedo and terror the 2 excuses

It’s almost like they need these to exist.

Re: Lawmakers want to ban VPNs

#180

Part of the problem is that in order to prove your age you need to hand over a bunch of unrelated data about yourself. Why do they need to know my name, address, signature, and what I look like? They don’t even need to know my actual age, just that I’m over 21. Laws like this would go down a lot better if there were privacy-respecting ways of verifying age.

Probably because the real priority isn't age verification it's data collection and control.
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