Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
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Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
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Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#2As 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.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#3As 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.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#4And 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 routing and steganography and PGP and AES in the world counts for nothing if they'll just declare such technologies illegal and harass the users.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#5Does 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 experience that chargeback ratios in the anonymization industry are very high, for obvious reasons.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#6Keep 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 location or appear to be connecting from a different country than there are IT professionals interested in paying for extra privacy.
Adult sites, online pharmacies, ticket brokers are treated the same way, and that has nothing to do with evading the NSA. MasterCard added all internet services (the MCC -- merchant category code -- that covers ISPs) to a high risk tier earlier in the year; I got the letter from First Data in the mail myself.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#7And 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.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#8This 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.
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#9Keep 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?
Re: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
#10Keep 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?
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