Macron wants social networks to detect and stop VPN users | Hacker News Reader

Macron wants social networks to detect and stop VPN users

linforme.com

35 pointsRaed66723 comments

Next step is to detect or forbid the use of a set of VPN providers at the ISP level. They already did it in 2009 for P2P file exchanges [0]

Anyway, the web is getting more and more restricted if you use a VPN and it is accelerating.

For example you just can't anymore:

- see the price of a product on Amazon,

- download most podcasts,

- or surprisingly, access https://forums.freebsd.org/

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law

I just did all those without a single issue

Depends on your VPN provider. Also on Amazon you will see the prices if you are logged in.

I tried both Mullvad and Google's VPN. I wasn't logged in

France is becoming less and less democratic, and more akin to an authoritarian regime, similar to what you would see in Singapore or Russia.

France was already on the top of the list for the countries banning content on Twitter[0], it recently passed a law allowing to use smartphone backdoors to spy on everyone (including lawyers).

A particularly infuriating evolution is the current push to require citizens to ask the permission to organize protests, and prosecute those who do not comply. For the record, this is textbook what Putin does to harass political opponents.

So currently, state-affiliated media will often talk about an "illegal protest", while everyone should know that protesting is free and doesn't require any permission. Actually, an authoritarian party coming to power today would have to change very little things to assert a full grip on the French society.

[0]:https://www.fastcompany.com/4032890/turkey-and-france-top-th...

This too, I recalled recently...

https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2023/06/26/france-browser...

> France is becoming less and less democratic

So is the rest of the world.

France is a bit different as the State has a lot of power there, and has had for a very long time.

There is a strong culture of adding new laws and requiring the State to solve every minor problem through repression and incentives. This culture is shared by the elites and the plebs, it's an alternative of learned helplessness.

That can't work. However X and Meta seem to be rolling down ways to authenticate people.

Instead of banning VPNs, they should find ways for people to identify themselves if they want to.

It's not because someone is behind a VPN that they should automatically be considered a pariah of the net. There are plenty legitimate reasons to stay behind a VPN.

That smells a bit autoritarian.

> That smells a bit autoritarian.

That's very much in character for him...

> That smells a bit autoritarian.

I'm from the EU and nearly the entire EU stinks like a softer version of the USSR (I'll agree though that France is one of the worst country to live in in the EU though: and I know it very well... My kid has been schooled in France for about 18 months but we did GTFO of that country).

What did you find problematic when you lived in France?

https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/16/amendements/1514/E...

"The people mentioned in paragraph 2 are required to put in place detection mechanisms to identify connections from a virtual private network used by users of their platform.

In the event of detection of a connection from a virtual private network, the people mentioned in 2 must block the user concerned from the opportunity to publish, comment or interact on the platform.”

later:

"These two articles have constitutional value and freedom of expression is a fundamental freedom. Nevertheless, this freedom still has limits"

You can say what you want as long as they agree with it.

Know this is early news but there's no english/other decent source for this report? Not seeing anyone writing about it

The only other place i have seen this being discussed is the french sub-reddit

https://old.reddit.com/r/france/comments/16jjgzo

Article (French) https://pastes.io/kpdm5ymini

Article (English - Google Translate) https://pastes.io/r9zrxwnay1

ok, but how ?

A given VPN provider will have some list of IP addresses from which traffic will exit. The detection would be an IP banlist and stopping would be refusal to serve requests.

Pretty much every company, and many homes run vpns. I guess those should also be added to the list.

I get the point but the reason a government will want to ban VPNs is that the VPN will provide some level of anonymity. A corporate VPN plausibly might run afoul of that want but a home VPN will pretty accurately identify at least the home from which a request was made. I'm sure that's sufficiently identifiable.

"VPN users" is a phrase which generally refers to "users of VPN services" and not "people who manage their home network".

They're probably going to be banning consistent connections coming from datacenter IPs. That was the impression I got from how other entities have handled this.

Once you rule out VPN usage, there are (probably?) very few reasons a post on TPFKAT should come from anything other than a residential or mobile device IP.

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