If they are trying at great leghth to block IPs associated with piracy, it isn’t that much harder to get known VPN IPs blocked too especially when they could use the ‘why won’t someone think of the children’ card and claim VPNs are solely used for CSAM and drug markets.
The smart move would be to skip VPNs and move over to I2P. For those who don’t know I2P is kinda like if tor and torrents had a baby that was a VPN on crack. Unlike a VPN where your traffic is encrypted and sent to one centralized server, I2P encrypts and routes your data through multiple servers and unlike tor every client by default is a node that data can be routed through.
But at the same time I2P is still built upon TCP/IP so it’s still like encrypted yodeling. Finding out who’s likely yodeling down movies is rather easy. The protection instead lies in the high barrier to prove exactly which movie and when so as to pass the barrier for court admissable evidence.
Now don’t misunderstand me, I2P is great stuff and I’ve used it on and off for years, but it shouldn’t be treated as the holy grail of safe and secure communication. Nothing can truly be that if it’s built on TCP/IP for fairly obvious reasons.
It’s true, it’s not a silverbullet, but it’s probably the next step to piracy and illegal content, IF someday they find a working solution to break torrent over the clearnet.
They already found a simple elegant working solution for the common user: Block at the DNS level in the router. While this works for most non techy user, most of us already use a VPN or know how to change the default DNS server.
Yes, it’s the next step and an evolution because it is far more of a trust less approach. With VPNs you need to trust your provider. If they “give you up” then you’re well and truly fucked. For I2P there is no way for a malicious node operators to parse out who is doing what. And the source code you can vet yourself so no need to trust it. Still if you have actors working together in the nodes, the torrent provider and at the ISP level then you can most certainly find a way to break the layer of secrecy. The barrier is however vast and so far police haven’t spent that much effort on piracy because it isn’t a serious crime in the eyes of the law. And I don’t foresee that they will for many years.
It’s also far more accessible than say Usenet and VPN+private trackers. Which is a very good thing for privacy in general.
Ummm, have these numbnuts never heard of a VPN?
VPN is very available but this would probably still stop the majority. It’s like locks: it won’t keep everyone out, just enough not to try.
They didn’t even hear why this failed the first time.
why did it fail?
If they are trying at great leghth to block IPs associated with piracy, it isn’t that much harder to get known VPN IPs blocked too especially when they could use the ‘why won’t someone think of the children’ card and claim VPNs are solely used for CSAM and drug markets.
The smart move would be to skip VPNs and move over to I2P. For those who don’t know I2P is kinda like if tor and torrents had a baby that was a VPN on crack. Unlike a VPN where your traffic is encrypted and sent to one centralized server, I2P encrypts and routes your data through multiple servers and unlike tor every client by default is a node that data can be routed through.
But at the same time I2P is still built upon TCP/IP so it’s still like encrypted yodeling. Finding out who’s likely yodeling down movies is rather easy. The protection instead lies in the high barrier to prove exactly which movie and when so as to pass the barrier for court admissable evidence.
Now don’t misunderstand me, I2P is great stuff and I’ve used it on and off for years, but it shouldn’t be treated as the holy grail of safe and secure communication. Nothing can truly be that if it’s built on TCP/IP for fairly obvious reasons.
It’s true, it’s not a silverbullet, but it’s probably the next step to piracy and illegal content, IF someday they find a working solution to break torrent over the clearnet.
They already found a simple elegant working solution for the common user: Block at the DNS level in the router. While this works for most non techy user, most of us already use a VPN or know how to change the default DNS server.
Yes, it’s the next step and an evolution because it is far more of a trust less approach. With VPNs you need to trust your provider. If they “give you up” then you’re well and truly fucked. For I2P there is no way for a malicious node operators to parse out who is doing what. And the source code you can vet yourself so no need to trust it. Still if you have actors working together in the nodes, the torrent provider and at the ISP level then you can most certainly find a way to break the layer of secrecy. The barrier is however vast and so far police haven’t spent that much effort on piracy because it isn’t a serious crime in the eyes of the law. And I don’t foresee that they will for many years.
It’s also far more accessible than say Usenet and VPN+private trackers. Which is a very good thing for privacy in general.