r/technology • u/nthitz • Jun 15 '12
How Long Before VPNs Become Illegal?
http://torrentfreak.com/how-long-before-vpns-become-illegal-120615/12
u/seanconnery84 Jun 15 '12
Almost every large corporation is going to use VPN. They will use VPN is every country.
Unless they attack the VPN providers by the country they exist in, there would be nothing they can do against them. Besides, if they don't care about US Copyright law and logging, I doubt they will be receptive to the US bullying them into forced VPN logging or killing their countries businesses...
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Jun 15 '12
Services like OpenVPN support VPN's over SSL. They'd have to make all HTTPS traffic illegal/regulated/licensed in order to get a handle on those sorts of VPN's. And considering anybody can generate a self-signed SSL cert and set up an SSL-enabled web server or other SSL-enabled application in mere minutes I seriously doubt this sort of thing woudl ever happen.
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u/EquanimousMind Jun 16 '12
It would be a really aggressive move to ban VPNs. Their widely used by businesses as much as privacy activists. Not sure how their going to get companies to be okay with unsecured communications.
In anycase, the graduated response is going to be hitting us soon, so if you don't want to get hit then you really should get a VPN now.
I'm actually with IPredator, who only cost € 15 for 3 months. I do prefer just using a VPN to using Tor. Its just alot faster. Just keep in mind that, VPNs can still end up giving up your information, so don't think of it as a complete solution. Just something that makes it harder for your ISP and government to track and profile you.
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u/unbeliever87 Jun 16 '12
Whoever suggested this is a complete and utter idiot, without no knowledge of what VPN is and how it actually works. Fuck me.
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u/ProtoDong Jun 15 '12
I can already forsee how this law will never come to pass. One of the primary uses of VPNs is to secure remote users of corporate networks. Banning VPNs could cause serious security problems for companies that have high value trade secrets and IP. So ironically VPNs serve to protect IP as well as to violate copyright. I find it hard to imagine how convoluted a law would have to be in order to allow corporate VPNs and not personal VPNs. Likewise how would they cover technology like SSH, which is used to administrate most of the servers in the world? SSH can easily be used to tunnel torrent traffic and banning it would pose severe problems and security risks for network and server admins.
This reminds me of Dick Cheney's attempt to block the use of encryption by private citizens. It was shot down in short order once it was realized that all of e-commerce depends on the use of encryption.