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Comment by prosody | Hacker News Reader

What's the motivation for blocking VPN read access for this and other services? Are AI scrapers using commercial VPNs to get around rate limiting?

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Legislation. If a country requires age verification, identity verification, moderation, etc, it's easy enough to either block that traffic or enforce the local laws. However users can easily circumvent this with a VPN. For some countries, this traffic is still in scope, and so the only real way to prevent it is to block or impose the restrictions on all VPN users.

Could also be spam/abuse prevention. Credential stuffing often goes through VPNs, signup over VPN is a strong signal for future abuse or issues in various ways.

Yeah, but age verification for _music_?

well, what if an artist put something controversial in the lyrics, like, something that radicalizes a minor into developing something maligned like, agency, or self awareness

Tipper Gore, is that you?

Were you around in the 90s? Remember when Marilyn Manson was blamed for Columbine?

I'm guessing you're on the younger side and don't remember: there was an enormous moral panic about music in the 90s. There were ostensibly serious, sober Congressional hearings about it. Multiple people (e.g. Tipper Gore) made it their specific political hobbyhorse. It was the thing corrupting the youth, before the pivot to video games after Columbine. It's why we still have those black-and-white stickers on CDs (to the extent anyone buys CDs anymore).

I'd like to like that won't come back, but voting rights for women are back on the table, apparently, and SoundCloud is apparently worth age-gating, so I guess not.

There is also age-requirement legislation for platforms that contain social media components or collect private information, which SoundCloud also does.

I suspect country level licensing, soundcloud I sometimes seen songs "not available in your country" or something along those lines

Yes mostly about this. I can't use SoundCloud (or Spotify) in Serato DJ Pro to connect and play songs, not available in my country. But Apple Music connected, so moving my archive there.

AI scrappers made it so much worse. Now most things completely block VPN users who aren't logged in. Reddit and Youtube will refuse to load anything until you log in if you are on a VPN.

It doesn’t really matter if they’re using commercial VPNs or the same upstream providers as commercial VPNs. Blocking an ASN is a million times more effective than blocking single IPs (at the risk of blocking genuine customers). I’ve had customers reach out to me asking to be unbanned after I blocked a few ASNs that had hostile scrapers coming out of them. It’s a tough balance.

VPNs often use providers with excellent peering and networking - the same providers that scrapers would want to use.

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