I’m not an expert on internet security but I do know there is no way in hell to legislate around blocking internet. Even China’s great firewall isn’t working.
I guess by passing legislation like this you get most people to be compliant, but this is about pirates, who were already actively non compliant in the first place.
The folks who pirate the content are literally going to have to click one extra button or something like that to work around the vpns trying to block stuff…
Take this with a grain of salt, I am by no means qualified to say anything on this topic with total certainty.
All a VPN does is encrypt traffic between you and the VPN. The VPN Hub you’re connected to has to unencrypted your outbound traffic, fulfilling those requests, and then encrypting inbound traffic back to you. A VPN obscures traffic by allowing you to make your requests from a different location, where thousands of others also do it, all while hiding who is making any requests it fulfills, and hiding your activity from your ISP with encryption. A good VPN will also not keep logs of anything it does, and will have options to connect to Hubs outside of five eyes countries.
This would mean that while the VPN might not know who is making what requests, they would know what those requests are, so they could blacklist illegal content. All this to say a VPN >VPN >VPN > VPN still has a final VPN that has to make the request, and they will know where the request is going and what its for. But unless that final VPN company or Hub is actually inside of Italy they have no jurisdiction.
The real problem with this method is A) who determines what is blacklisted B) How do you enforce this blacklist C) How do you make the blacklist grow as fast as pirates spread out. This is a stupid law that wouldn’t do anything even if the entire world got on board.
I think there are plenty of people who would be pirates if it were more convenient, but I suspect the point of diminishing returns for legislation has already been passed. If you’re savvy and dedicated enough to use a VPN in the first place, then this probably won’t stop you. Non-tech-savvy people are already turned off of torrents for half a dozen different reasons.
DNS, though? That will block a lot of people from accessing things like Z-library, which is currently easy enough to access for anyone who knows how to use Google.
China’s measures have been largely successful, unfortunately. It’s still possible to VPN out, but it’s a risk a lot of people are unwilling to take since it could realistically get them in trouble. I’ve lost contact with some friends in China because we have no shared platforms and the increasing blocking measures over the past 10 years finally passed their tolerance threshold.
I guess I could figure out how to use iMessage, which AFAIK is the only end-to-end encrypted messaging service that still works (or at least the only moderately popular one). Makes me wonder how secure it really is if China hasn’t banned it…
Can’t you just vpn to another vpn ?
I’m not an expert on internet security but I do know there is no way in hell to legislate around blocking internet. Even China’s great firewall isn’t working.
I guess by passing legislation like this you get most people to be compliant, but this is about pirates, who were already actively non compliant in the first place.
The folks who pirate the content are literally going to have to click one extra button or something like that to work around the vpns trying to block stuff…
Won’t even have to. Just use any VPN provider outside of Italy that doesn’t have to comply with Italian law. lol.
mullvad doesn’t know where you live nor do they care.
Take this with a grain of salt, I am by no means qualified to say anything on this topic with total certainty.
All a VPN does is encrypt traffic between you and the VPN. The VPN Hub you’re connected to has to unencrypted your outbound traffic, fulfilling those requests, and then encrypting inbound traffic back to you. A VPN obscures traffic by allowing you to make your requests from a different location, where thousands of others also do it, all while hiding who is making any requests it fulfills, and hiding your activity from your ISP with encryption. A good VPN will also not keep logs of anything it does, and will have options to connect to Hubs outside of five eyes countries.
This would mean that while the VPN might not know who is making what requests, they would know what those requests are, so they could blacklist illegal content. All this to say a VPN >VPN >VPN > VPN still has a final VPN that has to make the request, and they will know where the request is going and what its for. But unless that final VPN company or Hub is actually inside of Italy they have no jurisdiction.
The real problem with this method is A) who determines what is blacklisted B) How do you enforce this blacklist C) How do you make the blacklist grow as fast as pirates spread out. This is a stupid law that wouldn’t do anything even if the entire world got on board.
I’m sure there will be workarounds.
I think there are plenty of people who would be pirates if it were more convenient, but I suspect the point of diminishing returns for legislation has already been passed. If you’re savvy and dedicated enough to use a VPN in the first place, then this probably won’t stop you. Non-tech-savvy people are already turned off of torrents for half a dozen different reasons.
DNS, though? That will block a lot of people from accessing things like Z-library, which is currently easy enough to access for anyone who knows how to use Google.
China’s measures have been largely successful, unfortunately. It’s still possible to VPN out, but it’s a risk a lot of people are unwilling to take since it could realistically get them in trouble. I’ve lost contact with some friends in China because we have no shared platforms and the increasing blocking measures over the past 10 years finally passed their tolerance threshold.
I guess I could figure out how to use iMessage, which AFAIK is the only end-to-end encrypted messaging service that still works (or at least the only moderately popular one). Makes me wonder how secure it really is if China hasn’t banned it…
China is a whole other can of worms. It’s not so much the firewall, but the regime.
Tor essentially
Tor is bad for piracy because it’s designed for low bandwidth applications. Maybe I2P?