Thoughts on the recent Swiss law that might require ProtonVPN to start blocking certain domains?
from CapitalNumbers@lemm.ee to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 20 May 2025 22:19
https://lemm.ee/post/64517824
from CapitalNumbers@lemm.ee to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 20 May 2025 22:19
https://lemm.ee/post/64517824
Seems that the Swiss legislature may pass a law requiring ProtonVPN to start banning certain domains from being access by French users (mostly illegal sports streaming sites)
For those using ProtonVPN, is the writing on the wall?
threaded - newest
Just more confirmation that centralized VPNs, and therefore basically all VPNs most people use, are doomed to fail in their purpose, and are sometimes worse than no VPN.
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i would say you want to route through as many jurisdictions as you feasibly can. For example, US investigators arent going to get any cooperation from Iran or North Korea; any trail that crosses into their borders is going to be a dead end for their investigation.
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Many sites got VPN IP list and just ban them. It’s more and more difficult with restrictions increasing subsequently.
The advertising for VPNs is do full of lies also.
Hail TOR and I2P!
I don’t know if it’s the same law but they’ve already said they’d move countries, anywhere with laws suitable for the service
Would they really though? Being in Switzerland is a huge part of their brand and marketing.
The only reason it’s part of their branding because Switzerland is notoriously respectful of privacy. If they stop being that then that’s no longer a selling point.
Why “notoriously” though?
I don’t know how to answer that.
I believe “notorious” is used in negative contexts, and was curious why Switzerland being respectful of privacy would be a bad thing.
no, that’s not what notorious means. It just means a lot of people know about it.
From Merriam-Webster:
You skipped the first definition.
Yeah. The word really just breaks down to, “having been noticed widely.”
You people are going to hate me for thid but it’s not a privacy concern if they block piracy domains ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It absolutely is.
Cool.
In other news, Swiss law makers claim opening and reading all mail sent to make sure it doesn’t include the phrase “monty bojangles” is “not a privacy concern”
My point is that in order to block a specific domain, you necessarily need to check it against a list of all legitimate domains being accessed
But this has nothing against privacy just piracy.
Privacy is what protects you against criminal charges or being banned by your ISP
This is a form of the “Nothing to hide” fallacy.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
Does anyone have thoughts on the IPv6 privacy extensions? They theoretically could help a lot with privacy
The idea is that your device has tons of temporary IP addresses that can be used for various tasks like surfing the web.
If anything just that it will break most tracking and surveillance systems that weren’t built for the tiny proportion of ipv6 hosts.
The question is, how can get a few tens of thousands of completely random and unrelated ipv6 addresses and pick one at random for every connection I make to outside my LAN
They are related but the prefix is shared unless you at some with your own router. (Even then your prefix probably isn’t static)
Well, I would like the whole address, from hour to hour, to have no correlation whatsoever, as many random numbers as possible.
That probably isn’t possible since routing on the public internet wouldn’t work.
Every single one of those temporary IP addresses has the same prefix, which traces back to you.
Its about as anonymous as adding an apartment number to your own street address.
Yes and no. The deal is your last part is your MAC. So when your extension changes they can still track you over any ipv6 connection. The privacy extension changes the last bit so you can’t be tracked over any connection.
the whole point of privacy extensions is that it replaces the MAC with a random something. the address is totally unrelated to the MAC
That assumes that the prefix is static which it isn’t. It also assumes that you are the only one with that prefix which isn’t necessarily the case. It makes it much harder to track compared to a static IP that is tied to your device.
If you are the only one using a static prefix then it is less useful but chances are that prefix is shared among lots of users and devices.
All of your temporary privacy addresses will be coming out of the same subnet, so it’s clear they all belong to the same people.
Ultimately the privacy extensions are just bringing IPv6’s privacy back in line with IPv4, because without the privacy extensions every single device has a separate IPv6 address based on its MAC address whereas in IPv4 most consumer networks have every device sharing a single IP.
This doesn’t accomplish what the legislature intends. It never does. For instance, in the US, Texas in all their wisdom that can’t keep an electrical grid running smooth without duct tape and bailing wire, has decided to ‘ban’ PornHub. It makes all the christofascist’s dicks hard because in their mind, they have rooted out evil and destroyed it. (See Satanic Panic in the 80s) However, their weak, little minds cannot comprehend the fact that for every technology, there exists an equal, yet undoing technology.
Do it for the children I hear them say, and I would agree in this example, that children should not be viewing porn. A better solution would be to make parents actually parent. You brought a service into your home that can be both highly detrimental and highly beneficial, and then you turn around give it all, including a cel phone, to a very inquisitive mind uninhibited, unmonitored, and uncontrolled in any manner. You’re the problem, not porn.
/end soapbox
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Get out of here with that logic and personal experience that contradicts the popular narrative!
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As a very tech savvy parent I have to say that setting up an inhibited, monitored and controlled internet for specific devices and users is insanely difficult. The average person stands no chance. But sure, blame the parents instead of the technology as it is sold and delivered.
Then give them dumb phones
Your notion of the modern world is terribly quaint
How so
How many internet connected devices do you think there are in a typical 2 adult 2 kid household, excluding phones? Here are TVs, tablets, Chromebooks, laptops, game consoles etc etc. Kids don’t jus have phones - mine don’t and there’s still a raw internet connection to almost all these devices.
And out of all of that only one has good controls for parents and believe me when I say this, setting it up was torture.
If you want to block YouTube to specific devices and not others its a really difficult thing to do. Especially when Big Tech is working against you - block the YouTube URLs on a Pihole and you’ll find that the play store also doesn’t work. There are plenty of dark patterns in all these things. Because these companies do not want to help by blocking access to the marketing bucks of kids.
There is no simple solution to all of it unless you either live in the past or you parent so 1984ly that it’ll exhaust you and alienate your kids from you.
So don’t give them access to every device you can put your hands on. I had one computer growing up and I didn’t die. You not being able to figure this out doesn’t obligate the rest of the world to be Sesame Street. You brought them into the world, and you are putting these devices in front of them. It is your responsibility, not everyone else’s.
My elders never hesitated to say no to me when the answer was no. They were not worried about “alienating” me in that way. They weren’t there to be my buddy, they were there to raise me. You can’t be both of those things 100% of the time. You often have to pick one at the expense of the other.
How difficult it is has a lot of variance. Unifi make it easy to get up and going for example.
Unifi Network, make network, content filtering: family, save. Make WiFi, assign to network, save. Then you can just never give you kids access to the default network. Or you can blacklist their devices. If you want to get more advanced firewall rules are fairly easy to add as well.
I’m not saying I support this legislation but I’m really sick of the “parents should be parenting” excuse. Parents can be doing a great job with their kids and those kids will still see porn because of the way platforms push things (not to mention the ease of access of porn, which just needs to be outright banned).
The only solution, barring well-written legislation, is to not allow your kid to have a smartphone until they’re late teenagers, and ensure their access to computers is restricted to a public room, with appropriate monitoring.
That’s my plan whenever I have kids. However, something tells me a lot of people on Lemmy will take issue with that approach.
I’d say the problem is education. Porn is only an issue because people do not get proper sex ed. The reaction to seeing a dick sucked in front of a child shouldn’t be shame, disgust, or terror but allowing the inquisitive mind to ask what is happening.
Sex is a completely normal occurrence that is the reason we are all here. There shouldn’t be any shame or stigma in explaining to a child (or any person for that matter) what it is, what it involves, why it is done, how to safely do it, what consent is, why it is stigmatised.
Want to protect children? Educate them.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Why !selfhosted@lemmy.world?
As in why is a post about VPNs on a self-hosted forum?
My thought is that people who dont like this will stop using proton vpn.
Firefox has a VPN. They are also releasing Thundermail.Com soon and will likely have an all in one yearly package.