Using a VPN could become a criminal offence under new CFAA interpretation

Re:Using a VPN could become a criminal offence under new CFA... by AnthonyMouse on Monday November 01, 2021 @11:26AM (#29067951)

> IP blocks (I'm thinking geo-blocks[0] for sites like Netflix) are sometimes necessary for the site to at least attempt to stay in contractual compliance with the content owners.

The entire thing is a farce. There has never been any way to know where an endpoint device is

And VPNs are often necessary to prevent the service from detecting it wrong.

Suppose I'm currently near an international border and my phone picks up a tower on the other side of the border. Now the IP address my phone gets is listed as being in the wrong country.

A lot of companies route all their traffic through a head office somewhere so they can inspect the traffic in a central location. It's not always in the same country where the users are.

Suppose I'm using a VPN for privacy reasons, not to bypass geographic restrictions, but I want it to be in a different country to maximize the inconvenience to anyone trying to violate my privacy, so now the country listed is the wrong one. I would have to use another VPN to get it back to being where I actually am.

The obvious solution to all of this is to forget about trying to tie locations to IP addresses, since that has never worked, and just ask the user's device what country it's in. The user can set it to a different one but that's no different than the status quo.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Using a VPN could become a criminal offence under new CFA... by nobody9999 on Monday November 01, 2021 @11:43AM (#29068238)

>The entire thing is a farce. There has never been any way to know where an endpoint device is

A good point. Note that I said:

   IP blocks...are sometimes necessary for the site 
   to at least *attempt to stay in contractual 
   compliance* with the content owners.

I never said that such blocks were a good idea, nor did I say that they work.

I merely suggested that such geo-blocks could be a result of contractual requirements between the distributors and the content owners.

Personally, I think it's dumb too.

But I'm not a content distributor or content owner. As such, my opinion has no impact on the legal contracts between such entities.

>The obvious solution to all of this is to forget about trying to tie locations to IP addresses, since that has never worked, and just ask the user's device what country it's in. The user can set it to a different one but that's no different than the status quo.

You won't get any argument about that from me.

[ Parent | on HN ]