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

Whatever you're thinking of posting has almost certainly already been said more than once on the original HN discussion.

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.

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.

You're likely referring to the line "Hopefully this draws a simple line in the sand for the UK government, ..."; the strictest interpretation of the metaphor is certainly muddled, but it is common in the UK to look to EU rulings and policy discussions for comparison to our own - politicians will be aware of them and will use them to help decide whether or not to test things in our own courts.

Traffic is encrypted so there is noone knowing what you are sending, they can still trace that is coming to/from a specific node.

You must be blessed to live in a country that has no website blocks.

Bypass censorship

Get treated the same by websites when traveling

Avoid bad laws

Gain good laws

The detection tech has been around forever: https://focsec.com/

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.

There is this law, where if you don't see the purpose of something, is probably because you never needed it. Which is fine, but don't gatekeep others wanting to use them.

Edit: OP forgot to format text, so my anger should be directed to however said the quote...

On my current fiber provider, I'm already behind a very large CGNAT install. To a large degree, de facto that's already a lot of the "non-sketchy" use cases for VPN covered for me. IP addresses are already one of the weaker signals for tracking people as it is. Mobile networks have been letting you shift IPs for years just by how they work. Other internet providers that don't slap thousands of people at a crack behind one IPv4 with CGNAT didn't necessarily guarantee stable IP addresses, hence the need for dynamic DNS for decades.

The hole VPNs plug is necessary, but not even remotely sufficient if you are trying to actually protect yourself from some attack. Slapping a default Windows 11 install on a VPN to a first approximation protects you from nothing.

And since the "non-sketchy" uses are rather dubious, that really does sort of leave just the sketchy ones. I don't think it's a coincidence that when they pay a YouTuber to advertise them, the YouTuber generally ends up talking vaguely about the protections but fairly concretely about the sketchy uses, with screen shots showing them using Netflix in a different country. The companies know what they're getting used for and what they can provide.

This is an illusion we really need to remove from our collective consciousness. Running a popular website while being an ops genius, being a neurosurgeon who saves lives every day or being the world's best architect doesn't mean someone has sound opinions on topics right outside their area of expertise.

In fact, nowadays it seems to be all about appeals to authority which IMHO makes us more ignorant because many people seem to not think critically anymore. Instead, it's just "an expert said so" - then you look into the "expert" and in many cases they either aren't actually an expert or they're a paid shill. But that's a topic for some other day.

You can't imagine how much crime I committed in my teenage years. You don't wanna end up like me, punks! Stay off that crap!

First of all: thank you for using the word say, rather than think or believe or anything of that ilk. Too many of these discussions reduce to attributing or misattributing motivations to people.

That said, I still have issues with that statement. Let's assume that you are talking about an intelligent person who works in tech. Chances are something was taken out of context because they probably know what VPNs are for and that they have legitimate uses. Sometimes they miss context because they are not expressing their ideas clearly. Sometimes we miss context because we hear something we violently oppose to, and ignore the rest.

Another issue is that categorizing and vilifying people genuinely doesn't help the cause. At best, people will ignore the counter points. At worse, it will push people further away. We have to listen and educate based upon issues that are relevant to the audience.

Simplistic responses like, "freedom of speech" won't solve anything because those words have lost meaning. Too many people scream "freedom of speech" to excuse what they are saying, while they are active in suppressing the freedom of speech of others. Too many people use the freedom of speech as a tool to intimidate others, to restrict the speech or legal actions of others, because they are more interested in imposing their values on others rather than challenging the values of others. We should be illustrating ways that freedom of speech are relevant using examples that are relevant to the people we are speaking to. In the case of framing freedom of speech for people who are concerned with abortion: pro-life people may respond better to presenting freedom of speech as a safe stage to promote the sacredness of life, while pro-choice people may respond better to framing the freedom of speech as a safe way to seek out information relating to getting an abortion.

Likewise, people can see through simplistic attacks like accusing others of using children for leverage in an argument. Most of the people who say "think of the children" are trying to dismiss people who are trying, legitimately, to protect a vulnerable class. There are plenty of good reasons why the policy mechanisms to protect a vulnerable class may be objectionable, yet framing one's opposition with a reductionist interpretation of intent pushes people apart when they ought to be seeking out better solutions. For example: two people may agree that underage access to porn has to be dealt with, but disagree on the role that VPNs play in circumventing restrictions. So talk about how VPNs are not an age-based access control mechanism. Talk about the misclassification of information about gender and sexuality as pornography, assuming it is relevant to who you are talking to. Talk about the other benefits that VPNs offer in maintaining a free society. In other words, get them on your side and start seeking out better solutions.

Edit: missed the second paragraph