It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and bypass these invasive laws. Their solution? Entirely ban the use of VPNs.
    • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      1 year ago

      If you throw money at the problem, you’d still have a VPN.

      Heavily depends on what “outlawed” means.
      I am certainly capable of implementing low cost workarounds to purely technical anti-VPN-measures, but certainly would not risk going to jail just for trying it.

      Essentially boils down to the old saying:
      “If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.”

    • nforminvasion@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The moment billionaires coopted the internet was when it went downhill. They knew the threat it posed, the vision of the early cypherpunks, and made sure the internet wouldn’t do that to their power.

      Decentralization and accessibility are good things. Elitism and exclusionary practices do nothing good.

  • starman2112@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    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