Comment by BearOfaTime@lemm.ee on Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites

Hahahahaha

Unintended consequences - what are they going to do once 90% of connections are encrypted, include use of VPNs and encrypted DNS?

This is what they’re promoting.

Host your own encrypted DNS on a VPS in a non-compliant location, use a VPN to connect to it.

So many ways these idiots are cutting their own throats.

Also, let’s list the companies rather than say “Movie Industry”. Or let that be a link to a Wiki article listing all the companies and their holdings.

Fuck em all at this point. I go to maybe 2 movies a year, at most. And I’m cutting subscription services, down to 2 at this point.

As a guy from Russia, I must admit that vpns are not a big problem for censors. They can be easily blocked, including self-hosted ones by protocol detection. And DNS would not do much with IP and clienthello-based blocks. And most users are not enough tech-savvy to constantly switch to new protocols as old ones get blocked.

You have no rights in Russia.

VPNs can’t be categorically banned in the US without major first amendment issues. It’s not a huge technical issue, but unless the courts just throw out the Constitution (a risk that we’re seeing too much of, but still a meaningful bar to cross), there are huge legal barriers to doing so.

Your government doesn’t need to care about legal barriers because you have a dictator who can act unilaterally.

We are just a little behind trying to elect our new dictator…

But just for a day…

/S 🙄

VPNs are not categorically banned in Russia either. Just 95% of them. Categorical ban is not actually required here. Government can just create licensing procedure and license only those VPNs, which follow “rules”. I do not see how this is different from ISP bans.

Entirely unconstitutional restriction of speech.

The government can shut down specific illegal acts, such as sharing other people’s intellectual property. They can’t ban tools or protocols, or do things that are functionally bans. There’s plenty of precedent of the government trying to restrict encryption and being shut down. Removing the ability to communicate securely is a first amendment violation.

By the same logic they should not be able to force ISPs to ban sites, but here we are. If they can enforce bans with ISPs, why can’t they do the same with VPN providers?

They may or may not be able to require ISPs to block specific sites. Piracy isn’t protected speech. It’s going to be a moot point because it’s not something that can get actually passed.

They cannot require ISPs to block VPNs. General tools for/access to the internet are protected speech. They could require VPNs that have physical servers in the US to block exits to specific sites (if the first part is valid), but that doesn’t do anything when it’s trivial to have exit nodes elsewhere and structure your service/corporate structure so the exit nodes are not subject to US jurisdiction.

You realize the tik tok ban bill is also going to ban the use of VPN’s right?

CBaaS

Censorship Bypass as a Service, where your new updates are your [unique user ID].com

Let us manage your bypass for you! Payable in crypto or cash.

Even HTTPS-incapsulated? C’mon.

That most users won’t care enough - that’s true.

Https does not actually make difference here. You can still detect VPN usage by unencrypted clienthello, encryption-inside-encryption, active probing, obscure libraries that vpn protocol depends on, etc.

WTF? How are you going to look inside HTTPS?

Or is the word “encapsulation” (misspelled it first) unfamiliar to you in the network context? Maybe shouldn’t argue then?

obscure libraries that vpn protocol depends on

What? Are you an LLM bot? Answer honestly.

At first, please, be a little bit more patient and no, I am not a LLM.

All https traffic is https-encapsulated by definition. And you can look inside https just fine. The problem is that most of data is TLS-encripted. However, there is so-called “clienthello” that is not encripted and can be used to identity the resource you are trying to reach.

And if you are going to https-encapsulate it again (like some VPN and proxy protocols do) data will have TLS-encription on top of TLS-encription, which can be identified as well.

And about libraries: VPN protocol Openconnect, for example uses library gnutls (which almost no one else uses) instead of more common openssl. So in China it is blocked using dpi by this “marker”.

However, there is so-called “clienthello” that is not encripted and can be used to identity the resource you are trying to reach.

Yes, so how is it going to inform you that this is a VPN server and not anything else? You put your little website with kitties and family photos behind nginx on a hosting somewhere, and some resource there, like /oldphotos, you proxy to a VPN server, with basic auth before that maybe.

And about libraries: VPN protocol Openconnect, for example uses library gnutls (which almost no one else uses) instead of more common openssl. So in China it is blocked using dpi by this “marker”.

Ah. You meant fingerprinting of clients.

Banning everything using gnutls (which, eh, is not only used by openconnect) is kinda similar to whitelists.

Both applicable to situations like China or something Middle-Eastern, but not most of Europe or Northern America.

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Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites(arstechnica.com)

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