SOPA to affect VPN services and Proxies
Even though the President made his statement that stopped SOPA and PIPA in their tracks, bill authors are saying that the issues he was concerned with could be ironed out and fixed. And stopping online piracy is a good thing…damaging the way the internet works, isn’t. The Presidents message said that the potentially damaging parts should be removed, amended, or adjusted to accommodate online inovativeness, and promote the economic values of the U.S., and the global economy, but he didn’t say anything about the privacy and security that the potential laws will interfere with.
VPN’s And Proxies Attacked
After the fiasco of the British courts ordering an internet provider, British Telecom to blacklist a Usenet search provider, Newzbin2. What made this order such the joke was the fact that before the order even went into effect, (BT was given some time to implement the action,) Newzbin2 had already produced an evasion technique and given it to their members that wanted to continue the service. In the meantime, our legislators were paying close attention, we surmise here that it’s possible that some of the bill drafters got the Newzbin2 update that avoided the censoring action and examined the way it worked…then they put measures in the bills to outlaw the VPN’s and Proxy methods that were used.
Not The Only Law With This Kind Of Thing
Although the SOPA bill was shot down and tabled, (for the time being,) the bills PIPA, OPEN, and the Protecting Children From Online Pornographers, contain the same measures…presumably to insure that another BT fiasco doesn’t happen again. In these bills they included measures to insure that all anonymity and privacy tools and software was included. They did admit to the necessity of the products, and allowed that the services could continue…if filtering capabilities were included in the softwares. The bills do mention SSH, or Secured Shell, which is the securest method of doing any kind of business on the internet. But SSH could potentially be used for censorship evading, so is under close scrutiny also. Banks, and many other businesses use this for daily financial and other transactions.
Big Trouble For Developers Too
The measures set forth in these bills will not only be a severe inconveniences and security risk for the internet users needing the anonymity and privacy, but for the hundreds of companies that produce the software, open source developers, and top level domain TLD’s and DNSSEC writers. The bills aren’t just concerned with the piracy and child pornographers, but these bills will attack every bit of privacy, security, and anonymity that users have so vehemently requested from the software companies and developers.
In The End
All these bills are ill conceived invasions of our, (and the worlds,) privacy. Stopping piracy is a great cause, all internet professionals agree on that…and stopping child exploitation is an even greater cause than that. The bills addressing piracy, these measures will be ineffective, and as observed by the President they will inhibit online innovation and economics. The bill addressing child pornography, well, the bill barely even touches on the subject, but instead sets up the entire U.S. internet community for I.D. theft at the very least.
If want to get ahead of the curve you might consider choosing a VPN provider that is not based in the USA like HideMyAss. UK based VPN provider or PureVPN an Hong Kong based VPN Service provider. They are only responsible and under the jurisdiction of British and Singapore laws respectively and while the UK and Sinagpore may have some silly Internet regulations they have nothing that comes close to SOPA.
List of popular non US based VPN Providers
- HideMyAss. UK based VPN
- PureVPN an Hong Kong based VPN
- Overplay UK Based VPN
- Private Internet Access – UK based VPN
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