lawmakers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and beyond (UK). Please specify the place, the world is not us* centred
I can‘t wait to get arrested for connecting to my PC via SSH because geriatric lawmakers are too far up their own ass and want to enslave everyone else. Yay!
It’s as if the USA and UK are locked in a perpetual “hold my beer” moment with their legislation.
Then again, Europe is also pushing some boundaries with it’s chat snooping laws.
A bad time to be an internet user really…
I feel like a lot of my European (EU citizen) friends are commentating from some high horse but in reality I feel European lawmakers are just watching how this plays out before deciding to follow suit.
They’re trying to introduce backdoors to various chat programs right now, so they’re likely going to be guilty of the same invasion of privacy soon.
A bad time to be alive really…
Better than being dead though.
I’m not so sure lately
Ehh…
Let’s be clear here: lawmakers need to abandon this entire approach.
The answer to “how do we keep kids safe online” isn’t “destroy everyone’s privacy.” It’s not “force people to hand over their IDs to access legal content.” And it’s certainly not "ban access to the tools that protect journalists, activists, and abuse survivors.”
If lawmakers genuinely care about young people’s well-being, they should invest in education, support parents with better tools, and address the actual root causes of harm online. What they shouldn’t do is wage war on privacy itself. Attacks on VPNs are attacks on digital privacy and digital freedom. And this battle is being fought by people who clearly have no idea how any of this technology actually works.
If you live in Wisconsin—reach out to your Senator and urge them to kill A.B. 105/S.B. 130, and if you know someone who lives in Wisconsin—tell them to do the same. Our privacy matters. VPNs matter. And politicians who can’t tell the difference between a security tool and a “loophole” shouldn’t be writing laws about the internet.
If the government really wanted to protect children from the internet they’d provide locked down devices with spyware to each kid or they’d force parents to buy locked down devices. They’d punish parents if a child used a device that isn’t locked down. If they actually cared about protecting children they’d monitor their parents with spyware too. Why stop with government provided safe devices and spyware though, they could install cameras in every house that has kids just so they can monitor kids 24/7.
Obviously they’re not going to do any of that. There probably already is spyware in most devices and it’s not like they’re using it to protect them now. Banning VPNs for the sake of protecting children is just as stupid.
Hey guys, remember when these same countries ragged on China for being against freedom of expression?
The sad part is, banning VPNs for most users is extremely doable now.
Source: I have been to China not that long ago and VPNs are mostly cooked now :(
Luckily my state government seems to encourage VPN use (despite the federal government’s horseshittery): https://www.vic.gov.au/using-public-wifi-networks-safely
Not the “install a VPN to be safe on public wifi” again 😭
Install a VPN to be slightly safer on public WiFi
I think we need some kind of limiting principle applied to restrict what individual jurisdictions can do to fuck up national or global systems.
Overzealous lawmakers in Michigan or Wisconsin shouldn’t be able to force global companies to operate their websites differently.
California shouldn’t be able to force Glock to discontinue and re-tool its entire product line, etc.
California isn’t forcing Glock to do anything. Glock wants the central valley and orange county market so they do what they need to do.
(I actually have no idea about the specifics of this, but I’m assuming it falls in the general shape of California trying to restrict access to murder tools and the murder tool vendor responding by finding ways around the law rather than just admitting their hobby and business kills people)
It could be argued that this is a violation of the interstate commerce clause of the constitution.
The US can prohibit VPNs and encryption all it wants, doesn’t meant he rat of the world will
By the same logic social issues would be distributed to the states, civil rights. Which is what’s happening now. The interstate commerce act is a stroke of brilliance tbh, it allows the states to work as a greater system without there being a patchwork of laws and regulations. I don’t think dropping it would be wise just because we’ve reached this level of stupidity… time to suffer consequences.
Agree with you on network protocols. Your physical product example is bad.
They never fucking do. Governments as they are currently ran are becoming a failed concept
Yes, keep taking more and more away from people who have nothing to lose and nothing to live for.
I’m sure that will end well for them and their families.
That’s what they want so they can clamp all the way down and death star us into submission
We just need to go back to point to point actual private networks. Fuck 'em
It’s only a matter of time before some protocol is invented that bypasses all of this with some simple code or some plugin.
You can’t just ban your way to compliance.
There’s already several of them. You can even run things like cjdns which is entirely encrypted and p2p routed.
They can criminalize you for doing it. Would you take the risks?
Yes. You pirate anything?
Sure, but with a VPN. If my government wants to ban VPNs, I guess it’s pretty easy to see that 99,9% of my requests go to single IP that belongs to a VPN server
There are ways around that kind of stuff even for the most stringent of governments. Of course inherently there’s always a risk you asked me if I’m willing to take it and I said yes.
Fucking idiots!
Safety is not what’s this about, it’s obviously control
Didn’t we have this discussion like, a month ago, when this happened somewhere else? And a month earlier than that? And another month earlier than that?
Hopefully, the pushback will keep coming alongside with it. That’s shitfuckery level of a stupid proposal.
Nobody’s reading tfa. They aren’t banning VPNs, they’re banning websites that allow access to users using a VPN. Which is stupid, of course, but it isn’t going to get in the way of your piracy. 1337x does not care about Wisconsin state law.
Websites subject to this proposed law are left with this choice: either cease operation in Wisconsin, or block all VPN users, everywhere, just to avoid legal liability in the state. One state’s terrible law is attempting to break VPN access for the entire internet, and the unintended consequences of this provision could far outweigh any theoretical benefit.
If anything, they’re effectively going to build a Great Firewall around Wisconsin. Much easier to just not serve the approximately 10 users from that state than it is to implement the measures they’re demanding
This is just step one of them trying to absolutely ban VPNs.
A website can’t determine VPN use very effectively, won’t be long until they “need the governments help” for compliance.
Edited to add: they aren’t going to ban business VPNs people use your critical thinking skills here.
China outlaws VPN use and has an exemption for businesses. It would be easy to follow the same guidelines anywhere else.
Yeah, they’ll absolutely ban VPNs and then literally every business that uses them will move out of the state. Do you think VPNs exist only for piracy and bypassing region restrictions??? Like literally every business uses them
You know how the FOIA isn’t applied to Congress?
It’ll be just like that, but with exemptions for businesses using VPNs.
China literally does this already. There is already a precedent set.
Everyone is always so obtuse when it comes to this discussion like they wouldn’t absolutely protect economic interests while fucking over the ability for the common man to use VPNs and similar technology.
lol. Good luck catching random VPSes running a wireguard server container.
I read tfa and banning use of VPNs is, in fact, a possibility to be compliant. Because how exactly do you determine a visitor to Pornhub is actually a VPN user from Wisconsin? The website can’t, presumably, trace the user’s location (defeating the entire purpose of the VPN), so that leaves VPN providers as the next responsible party.
Nothing in this bill would lead to the use of VPNs being banned. Any given website could hypothetically ban the use of VPNs to access it, but that’s not a ban on VPNs the way the headline makes it out to be.
how exactly do you determine a visitor to Pornhub is actually a VPN user from Wisconsin?
It’s impossible, which means that in order to be compliant, websites would have to simply stop serving Wisconsin, like they already have with several other US states. There is nothing preventing either you or Pornhub from sending whatever 1s and 0s you want to some random Mullvad server in Canada. They can’t even punish Mullvad for this, as the text of the bill explicitly “prohibits business entities from knowingly and intentionally publishing or distributing material harmful to minors on the Internet,” and any good VPN has no idea what material you’re accessing via their servers.
You’re making a very technical, logical interpretation of the bill. The problem is that the bill was written by illogical, naive people. This brand of government has already proven they want to hold VPNs accountable and have tried to force tracking into them. Having a bulletproof defense doesn’t mean governments can’t try to drag them through court anyway, especially when VPNs have already been publicly vilified as something only bad people use.
Once it happens there they will start copying it to every state they can.
The mythical “they.” I can’t wait for Kansas lawmakers to see Wisconsin’s complete isolation from the rest of the world and think “this will be popular among our constituents”
That’s the neat part, they don’t give a fuck what the constituents want.
*lawmakers is the they btw.
The “they” in these circumstances are lobbyists, not lawmakers.
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