PeterNov 15
nixCraft 🐧

Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpns-and-they-have-no-idea-what-theyre-doing

I'm gonna be honest here: banning VPNs is not the solution. People who want to find content like porn will get it one way or another. It is going to harm legitimate users who use VPNs for security reasons, like on public WiFi or for getting inside a corporate network. I can't log into any of our servers/cloud w/o a VPN. All remote employees use a VPN. We replicate data between 2 data centers using a VPN

Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing

It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and bypass these invasive laws. Their solution? Entirely ban the use of VPNs.

Electronic Frontier Foundation
Nov 15 at 7:16pmWeb
Show threadSaupreiss #Präparat500 🗽Nov 15
@nixCraft Its Not about porn. Money is earned with porn, it’s just that everyone agrees that this smut must go. (Including consumers, who of course never consume it.)
Show threadFarhan AhmedNov 15
@nixCraft this sounds like big tech has their hands in this too 🫠 Can these morons be voted out?
Show threadNiels K.Nov 16
@macronaut @nixCraft Doesn’t big tech use VPNs so their staff can work? That would move them all back to the office though but nobody could really work anymore while traveling.
Show threadNiels K.Nov 16
@macronaut @nixCraft Wait - that article says that the porn-sites shall block vpn-users (what streaming-sites try so that users can‘t access content from other countries). This is stupid because it mainly coste the porn-sites money and will never 100% work.
I don‘t understand how the EFF goes from the porn-sites shall block VPN-users to banning the usage of VPNs.
Unfortunately the Wisconsin-links are unavailable. In the UK they proposed age verification on VPN-usage. (1/2)
Show threadNiels K.Nov 16

Only in Michigan they propose a complete ban.

I am against all those measures but the article of the EFF here is very misleading imho. (2/2)

Show thread`Da ElfNov 15

@nixCraft Right, so, I really want to know how they're going to do that from a Technical perspective.

1. I run my own OpenVPN because I use a lot of hostile networks (coffee shops, etc) and need to protect my work.
2. Corporate VPNs are just that. All remote Microsoft employees (as example) working remote are required to use MS's VPN.
3. SSH tunnels still work. Stop that.

I guess you can block (say) NordVPN and the big ones.

Wisconsin laws are very, very strange. It's a strange place.

Show threadMerospitNov 15
@nixCraft Even just for commercial VPNs that dare to offer privacy to the masses, blocking any VPNs that run through major cloud providers will be fun. They don't all go through Datacamp.
Show threadKeremNov 15
@nixCraft Turkiye has this. If they want to stoop lower than a political islamic state so be it I guess.
Show threadgri573Nov 15
@nixCraft knives can be used to kill people, so they should ban all knives!
Show threadArgieNov 16
@nixCraft I first read "lawnmakers" which my head then transformed to "lawnmowers" which made it weird. I mused if it has something to do with glass fibre cables from the street to the house or ...
Show threadWade RobertsNov 16
@nixCraft we need a steganographic VPN protocol, normalise plausible deniability of the true contents of transmission.