Currently, we ask that you not mention any specific VPN provider by name.
I attempted to allow some mention by names as long as P2P wasn’t listed, but that little experiment failed miserably, so I am going to stick by the current rules.
Where is this rule about not naming VPN’s? You’ve shown no evidence of one. Please don’t go back to claiming it’s a p2p service again.
The rule used to be no discussions about VPN, proxy servers, or anything else that could be used to hide your IP. I don’t know if this was ever actually written down in the formal rules, but it has been enforced here for years. I have already given you an example of that.
We had a discussion around the mod loop and decided that we would allow VPN discussions as long as no specific provider was mentioned. This is currently not written down anywhere. It probably should be.
No, you gave me a 16-year old example of a ban on discussing ip-spoofing, which is a completely different topic.
Even if there is a rule from that far back, do you not think it’s time to review it? VPN’s are a mainstream service now, with many media companies reccomending that everyone use one. There’s never been any issue in the past with members reccomending specific, legal (but non-VPN) services by name.
That is a complete misrepresentation of anything I have written.
I have not argued anything about what your rules are. I have only observed
(1) you continuously made strong editorializing statements and claims about the VPNs and have failed to respond to the challenge of actual fact and the at least partial refutations of the assertions you made on fact (this is not a position on your rules)
(2) the general attitude of you and the general moderators about this subject of the VPNs and this weird idea of them being principally for the copy right violations is apparently very outdated in the modern environment taking the evidence of the very media companies discussions
(3) that it is bizarre to treat the subject of the VPNs the way you do (on the excuse of the website owend by a media company) when the modern (and successful, not dying) websites owned by the media companies - mainstream ones also quite sensitive to copy right freely discuss, recommend and even name by name the VPNS among them the very ones you bizarrely ban the naming off.
(4) that the general comportement on the issues and the rules of the adminstration / the moderation here is one frozen in attitudes and the state of usage formed in 2001 (it is the indicative year).
I have not respresented any argument about what your rules are at all.
No, I have - out of the sheer irritation at the comportement - observed that the attitudes are illogical in comparison with the other websites also owned by the media companies. And supported that you might as well ban the conversation on the VPNs entirely, as why not?
Partial restrictions, the incoherent poorly supported rule on non-discussion that gives more incentives going off-board to competing websites for perfectly legal issues? Why not? It is in the perfect keeping with the decisions of the perfect manager that has has lead to the great success of this perfect platform and its flourishing and winning the new and expanding audiences…
The course is clear:
We must needs ban all talk of envelopes, as mail secreted in opaque containers is used for fraud, malfeasance, and crimes unknown, and we must ban all discussion of banking by mail, as the only reason to carry out financial transactions over the postal system is to further some criminal act. This rule is right up-to-date and both socially and technically sound, and shan’t be gainsaid by any bounders.
Can I also request we ban all discussion of horses (highway robbery), bank accounts (financial fraud) and people (nearly all crimes are committed by people)?
Especially when used by Vikings, because you know the old rhyme:
A horse for a Norse, of course, of course,
And nobody catches a Norseman’s horse,
Because, of course,
A Norseman’s horse,
Is used to run away!
It’s unfortunate that ignorance will have to prevail on this particular battle. VPNs (with and without logging) are routinely used for entirely legit purposes, though not by all.
I have a recommendation. Perhaps it would be permissible to inquire, “Where are there good consumer friendly discussions of VPNs on the web?”
My recommendation is bad and I should feel bad. Here’s another way of putting it. Thread: “Where can I find good recipes for Molotov Cocktails on the internet?” Or: “What websites have good discussions about drug dealing and larceny within a practitioner framework?” And: “Does my molotov cocktail thread belong in Cafe Society, GQ, or IMHO?” Maybe that last one would be ok.
I guess we’ll have to leave this fight to the good folk on the long-necked darkweb.
A little history lesson here, for both the SDMB and VPNs.
20 years ago, most folks who were using VPNs were people like me, who were typically accessing a VPN set up for work (or school or some other purpose). There weren’t that many VPN service companies like there are now, and the ones that were out there weren’t being used much for illicit purposes. So from the SDMB point of view, there was no need to restrict discussions of specific VPN companies.
Torrents were the big thing (after Napster). The folks in charge here went to great lengths to ban all P2P and torrent discussions. The rules even specifically forbade all discussions of torrent software, legal or otherwise, except for debates about the legality. VPNs weren’t really part of the P2P picture at this point, so no biggie as far as VPN discussions were concerned.
Illegal file sharing became the largest percentage of internet traffic as a whole. Nothing else used as much internet bandwidth as illegal file sharing.
But then media companies started cracking down on torrents, and ISPs started sending out a lot more copyright infringement notices, and even sued some folks to make their point. What happened next was that torrent traffic went down dramatically, and VPN traffic went up dramatically. You won’t find any statistics about exactly what that VPN traffic was carrying, torrent or otherwise, because VPN packets don’t tell you what’s inside (that’s kinda the point). But you would have to be fairly foolish not to think that a good percentage of that VPN traffic was being used for torrents.
Of course, all of us legitimate users of VPN have all still been doing our thing. It’s not like the legal uses of VPN stopped just because the folks wanting to illegally watch movies and download games suddenly started using VPNs in much larger numbers.
VPN traffic has been continually increasing, in part due to security concerns, and in part due to the demise of net neutrality.
But the file sharing stuff is still going on. A lot of the torrent traffic over VPN has probably gone away as folks are watching their movies from illegal streaming sites instead of torrenting movies.
How much of this is going on? There were over a BILLION illegal downloads of the last season of Game of Thrones. That’s how much it is going on. Is everyone who illegally downloaded Game of Thrones using a VPN? No. Of course not. But it’s not that uncommon for people to use VPNs to prevent getting copyright infringement notices from their ISPs or to protect themselves from their ISPs and the original copyright holders when they stream movies or download games from illegal sites.
Those who think that VPNs are only used for legitimate purposes need to educate themselves on this. It’s much more common among millenials, but not so much among us old farts.
As torrents traffic moved to VPNs, VPN providers started springing up left right and sideways. They are all over the place now. Copyright holders started going after the VPN providers. In response, VPN providers started advertising that they did not log traffic at all, so that even a court order to turn over all of their files wouldn’t reveal who had been engaging in illicit activities.
Those who think that VPNs are primarily used for legitimate purposes also have no idea how many bad VPN services are out there. We deal with them a lot at the moderation level here on the SDMB because spammers love them. One of the reasons it has been so difficult for us to stop the streaming sports spams is that they are very fond of VPNs. We track down the VPN they are using, try to figure out what all IPs it has assigned to it so that we can ban them, and the spammers just switch to another VPN. Over and over again. I don’t even bother asking our admins to block their IPs any more. There are just too many VPNs out there providing service to spammers and file sharers. IP banning them all is hopeless. You just end up playing an endless game of whack-a-mole.
As VPNs have changed over the years, our rules have had to change to keep up. Contrary to popular belief, we aren’t a bunch of idiots who put rules in place 20 years ago and haven’t touched them since. A lot of these rules weren’t written down, because they fell under the broad P2P ban already in place. So it was more of a change in enforcement than an actual rule change.
Initially, we didn’t give two hoots if someone mentioned the name of a VPN provider. But as VPNs started being commonly used for file sharing, now suddenly we did have to care. As we started to restrict VPN discussions, some folks engaged in rules lawyering or other tricks like implying something instead of actually outright mentioning it so that they could talk about something that we asked them not to talk about. I remember one particular offender who was playing all kinds of games like that, pretending only to be asking about legal uses of VPNs, but he gave the game away when he sent me a PM asking if he could discuss a particular site. I took a look at that site and found that one of its prime advertised features was that it was located out of the United States (Moldavia, I think, IIRC) and was therefore not subject to U.S. copyright laws. If you don’t believe that this VPN site was advertising to file sharing folks, then I don’t think I can really help you understand the whole issue here at all.
After a few VPN threads where folks intentionally misbehaved, I got fed up with the whole thing and figured if folks were going to intentionally violate the spirit of the rules without actually violating the letter of the law, then I just wouldn’t allow VPN discussions at all (again, falling under the P2P rule, so no need to write an explicit rule here - it should also be pointed out that those misbehaving represented only a very small minority of SDMB users - most folks here obey both the spirit and the letter of the rules).
Other mods were allowing discussions in their forums though. So at some point we had a discussion around the mod loop so that we could at least have some consistency in the moderation here. We decided that we would allow legal discussions of VPNs as long as no one mentioned actual site names or linked to sites.
This has worked for quite a while, and has met our goal. Folks who have wanted to discuss legal uses of VPNs have generally been able to do so without restrictions (recommending actual sites doesn’t come up all that often), and the conversations to help people figure out how to illegally stream movies and not get caught have been pretty much stopped.
Those who are upset that there is no specific rule forbidding the naming of specific VPNs and think that our P2P explanation isn’t good enough, well, that’s where the restriction comes from, and that’s why there’s no explicit rule listed. It hasn’t been necessary to call it out as a specific rule.
Those who think that we are banning all legal discussions of VPNs are way off the mark. VPN discussions for legitimate purposes are allowed. The only thing we ask is that you not give out specific names, because we’ve had too many problems with that in the past. Most legal VPN discussions aren’t affected by this.
About the only legal VPN use that you can’t do is ask for specific site recommendations. I tried to allow that in Bear_Nenno’s thread, and it ended up being a disaster. I was hoping that we could relax those rules a bit, but after this shitstorm you can guarantee that won’t be happening now.
I have no argument with any of this. I agree that in the past VPN’s were a niche service, mainly of interest to businesses & filesharers.
This is the bit that I think you need to re-evaluate though. No-one’s denying that VPN’s are used for filesharing, but a few minutes reading articles on any tech blog shows that the legal uses (mainly privacy & security) far outweigh any illegal uses these days. VPN’s are now mainstream service. Someone linked to a news story about Mozilla adding a VPN to Chrome, do you think that’s just to enable filesharing? Or do you think maybe it’s because more and more people are concerned with online privacy these days.
Irrelevant. There’s no legal need for these services to keep logs, so it makes sense not to for privacy reasons. Just because the needs of legitimate and non-legitimate users coincide, doesn’t mean that the legal side should be ignored.
I can see why that would make things difficult, but there’s no reason why you should know someones ip address anyway. You have user accounts to identify users, other than that they should be able to access the site from any anonymous address they like. IP addresses have never been a reliable way to identify people as most ISP’s assign them randomly. Not to mention the fact that there’s many ways to change\fake your ip address with using a VPN. The security should be in stopping spammers getting accounts in the first place, and ways to do this have been suggested in the past. The decision has been made not to in case it puts of genuine users (which I agree with), but you have to accept the trade off of spammers being able to get in.
But they don’t (or at least shouldn’t) come under p2p anymore. This is where we’re saying you’re stuck in the past. VPN’s are no longer primarily for p2p. In fact, most people using p2p don’t use a VPN to do it.
What is the danger in mentioning specific services? Do you think spammers are reading our threads first to decide which VPN’s to use? It’s one thing to step in if someone’s recommending an obvious dodgy site, but NordVPN, the one that was mentioned in the previous thread, is completely legal, and recommended by mainstream tech sites. If anything it’s better if we can guide users to reputable sites, rather than leaving them to pick any random one they find.
To summarise, your idea that VPN’s & p2p are the same topic is outdated and should be reconsidered, as shown by multiple cites in both threads. VPN’s are now an important part of internet security, and in the interests of our members we should be able to freely discuss what they are and which services are worth using, including recommending specific providers.
Yes, VPN’s operating on the mainland require a license. That’s why we use VPN’s that aren’t on the mainland, where Chinese law doesn’t reach. There’s nothing in Chinese law about using VPN’s, only about operating a VPN.
And, roughly half the time, I did use a legal, mainland registered VPN in order to access the non-GFC’d internet. They’re not available to Joe Schmoe, but they’re available to large, Fortune 10 corporations.
Besides, the SDMB has made it quite clear on the past that it’s only american law that they are concerned with. Whether it’s against chinese law or not shouldn’t bother them.
Actually what you did was in addition to only guidance, to make a number of very aggressive editorializing assertions about the VPNs, their usage, their logics, and their interest - and then opened slightly the door.
And in fact it was the very long, very aggressively worded multiple asssertions that other posters responded with the cites at the very least called into question the basis for the black and white assertions that then naturally provoked - because this is indeed the Board - the correcting responses.
If you had not made the long aggressively stated editorializing, it seems to me very likely not to have provoked the responses of the various posters who felt you misrepresented the subject of the vpns itself as it is in the modern usage.
It does not seem reasonable to me to expect to make certain assertions of the facts and not have a response to the actual assertions facts - this a different thing from the rules themselves.
So the conversation will end up being for the next several years when someone asks about the perfectly legal tool now widely recommended on the websites owned by these very large media companies: “sorry we can not discuss, please go to the REDDIT or the Wirecutter website or the New York Times or the PC magazine or [many other websites]” so and giving small cumulating incentives to go elsewhere.
It is a nice and effective way to continue the tradition of staying in the relevance to 2001 to build the readership and the traffic.
(it is though amusing to me the idea implicit that the mentioning of the VPN service has some kind of effect on what the actual spammers and others are choosing [as if they learn it here], it is like the superstiion chez the aroubiya of never saying the word cancer to avoid getting the cancer…)
Just an observation. This claim seems debatable and might make an entirely permissible GD thread. Speaking as a poster.
As a matter of logic, this is a little like discussing the best brands of water pipes (hookahs, bongs). That sounds fine to me, sort of. But when the discussion turns to active delivery efficiency of non-tar chemicals, that might be something that would require moderator attention, even if those chemicals could conceivably be legal. This goes quadruple for a topic that the boys upstairs care about. Certain types of indoor grow lights might be a better example.
If the water pipes were subjects being recommended by the main stream press for some reason this could be some kind of comparison…
But I do not think it is the case.
Yet for the VPNs, you have the New York Times and its associated site the wirecutter each making actual recommendations on the VPNs and discussing them.
It is not the ‘alternative paper’ on the fringes subject - that is clear.
Using the hookahs and bongs as the example implies the fringe subject.
But you can go to the very site of CNBC, owned by none other than Universal - the very type of entity very directly concerned by the things the engineer is so fearful of transgessing, and has the lawyers to supress - to read on How to Use a VPN to surf safely or how to surf the web with vpn and keep chrome from tracking you.
So, the website owned by Universal with the actual direct interests is not fearful of the subject - and I think Universal has the lawyers and the ownership to solve the problem of such a discussion… and in fact the article actually recommends a VPN which … oh my god the horror, it shows it is the P2P compatible and no-logging!
So I have to ask, what is the logic of the obscure web board sending people off to the competitors more in tune with the year 2018 when sites owned by the large media companies like Universal are not shy or ashamed of the topic and even make the very recommendations that the moderators here react in the fear to and censor…
Ramira - AFAICT neither of those 2 articles mention the issue of VPNs who keep a log and those that do not. That’s what they are trying to curb here.
In post 8 E_C_G said (bolding mine):
*I will concede that there is a security reason to want a lack of logging. That said, every single case where I have seen a VPN service advertise a lack of logging, they have advertised it along with P2P.
…
To clarify:
Discussions of VPNs in general are permitted on the SDMB.
P2P discussions are not permitted at all on the SDMB. This includes torrent software, illegal streaming, the specific mention of VPN services that advertise P2P for file sharing, and the specific mention of sites that host illegal files.*
He didn’t specifically say in this thread that VPNs that advertise a lack of logging aren’t allowed, just that those that do also advertise [something regarding] P2P.
The articles you’re commenting on do recommend a service that mentions P2P.
However, in a later post by E_C_G:
*Currently, we ask that you not mention any specific VPN provider by name.
I attempted to allow some mention by names as long as P2P wasn’t listed, but that little experiment failed miserably, so I am going to stick by the current rules.*
So, we’re allowed to discuss VPNs with limits…one being that we don’t name any.
Again though, the VPN in question doesn’t “advertise P2P for file sharing”. There’s one mention, right at the bottom of the page, along with 11 other features, saying that it allows p2p. Considering the many legal uses of p2p software that’s the bare minimum I would expect from a VPN, no different than saying they allow VOIP, or video streaming.