Interested to hear opinions about various VPNs.

[engineer_comp_geek]

@DCTrekkie

Is it a new rule that legal services cannot be discussed on the SDMB, or is it just your personal opinion?

This is the appropriate section of the rules:

We construe discussion of P2P and file sharing violative of copyright laws.

From here:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=864546

Historically, discussions of anything even remotely related to P2P have been forbidden here. While there are legal uses for torrenting software, discussions of torrents are strictly forbidden on the SDMB. These are not my rules. They pre-date my tenure as a moderator by quite a bit.

If you go back 10 or 15 years, VPN discussions were generally about things like what I use a VPN for, accessing my work network. Those types of VPN discussions were always allowed.

VPN for the purposes of hiding your IP, whether it is for security reasons or otherwise, were strictly forbidden. In fact, if you go back 15 or 20 years, just accessing the SDMB from a VPN was grounds for being banned.

See this post from 2002 for example:

@bibliophage

We do not permit discussions of IP spoofing here. Using such a service to access the SDMB is grounds for immediate banning. Two posts in this thread giving links to providers of such services have been deleted.

bibliophage
moderator GQ

Technically, the term “IP spoofing” refers to a very specific technique used to hide your IP address, but moderators back then tended to use the term to refer to any type of IP hiding. The use of a foreign proxy server, for example, was commonly referred to as IP spoofing, even though someone with a lot of technical knowledge about internet protocols would never call it that.

Obviously, we don’t ban everyone who accesses the SDMB from a VPN or from a proxy server these days. Our current policy (or at least the way we have been enforcing this recently) is to not allow the mention of any specific VPN service that is used for P2P. If I were properly following those rules, only one of the VPN services mentioned so far would have been allowed. Instead of being the unreasonable hard-ass that you seem to think I’m being, it’s actually the opposite. I’m bending our rules a bit since I believe the OP is sincere in trying to keep everything legal. According to our rules, I should have deleted every VPN mentioned that has P2P on their web site. Instead, I only deleted the one that was posted by someone who was blatantly violating the SDMB terms of service (and I didn’t even issue a warning for that).

So no, it’s not a new rule, and no, this isn’t just my personal opinion.