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Whatever you're thinking of posting has almost certainly already been said more than once on the original HN discussion.
It didn't know there was a quota on discussions of any particular topic, perhaps we should give out tickets to the event in the future to ensure no-one misses their opportunity to join the discourse?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49109440#49109857
Is it even preferable to necro an 8-day old topic? New developments are going to lead to new talking points, right?
Ban VPN's and people will fall back to the myriad of open source alternatives that can be a bit harder to peel back and get logs assuming any exist in the first place. This was a thing some time ago. Many of the malware and pirate groups were sharing Tinc meshes though as expected there would at times be one person in the group that would be the weakest link and expose the entire group. Expand the numbers of people doing this and the probability of a few groups using decent operational security will increase.
maybe mullvad is legit but their leadership keeps leaning to dubious causes
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.
It was widely covered (like at https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2217934/vpn-ban-table-july...) and tech sec. Liz Kendall is on the record with BBC talking about July.
I have actually heard otherwise intelligent people say things just like that, including site operators who run nontrivial websites.
There are of course some people on the other side who think VPNs are a guarantee of privacy and secrecy on the internet, but that's pretty rare in my anecdatal experience. I largely blame the rampant ads on podcasts for this view.
I hope VPNs are not becoming the next battleground between online safety and civil liberties. I'm sick of the current ongoing attacks on civil liberties in the Western World under the fake veil of online safety.
The detection tech has been around forever: https://focsec.com/
[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997221
It's a step-by-step strategy.
https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/gadgets-tech/v...
Use Brave search instead, Google search has terrible a privacy policy.
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.
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.
It's only because of your comment that I re-read the their post.
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!
Edit: missed the second paragraph
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
(Realistically, moving easier said than done, of course.)
Like, suppose I want to send a physical letter to my bank. I can either ensure it can't be opened (using TLS), or I can get a trusted mailman to bring it to the mail central (using a VPN or trused ISP), but only one of those measures are going to protect me against a malicious mailman carrying it from the mail central to the bank.
Meaning the poster finds it surprising that intelligent site operators would honestly think that.
* By default, only secure connections are allowed
* You have to enumerate allowed exceptions to this policy in your app manifest XML / Info.plist
* Exceptions are only permitted for specific use cases where mandatory encryption is infeasible, like browsers, podcast players, embedded device clients (which will also require the local network access permission), etc. If you're shipping a banking app and you exempt your own site from encryption, App Review will tear you a new one.
I'm not trying to break the law, I use it for my corporate usage, therefore it is legitimate use.
What are you trying to say?
Pretty sure they meant “second paragraph” instead of “second sentence”.
It’s in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#reposts
“Are reposts ok?
If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.”
Alternately, here are comments by moderator dang that mention reposting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
European countries have restrictions on freedom of speech which is a strongly held value in America.
That's the easy part. The harder part is to encourage people to be fearless, keep their mouth shut and let their lawyers do all the talking.