Reddit beats film industry again, won’t have to reveal pirates’ IP addresses

Unruffled@lemmy.dbzer0.commod to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 712 points –
Reddit beats film industry again, won’t have to reveal pirates’ IP addresses
arstechnica.com

While we can be pretty confident that Reddit has its own motivations (i.e. self-interest) for fighting these lawsuits, this is still a good news story for pirates.

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And this is why you VPN.

MFW I went to upvote but couldn't because "error: VPN blocked" 😑

Huh, I exclusively browse Lemmy through a VPN and I've never seen that one.

He's probably talking about reddit They no longer allow vpn's or any user obfuscators to browse the site

No they don't. I use the site with a VPN often and it generally works

Are you logged in? I can't access Reddit with a VPN if I'm not logged in

I can access old.reddit.com with VPN. The new shitty layout will block you but there are browser extensions to automatically redirect. I'm never logged in since I deleted my accounts a few months ago.

Thanks! Confirmed that it works with old reddit, just doesn't work at all for me using regular new layout, which sucks anyway.

replace 'www' with 'old' in the address and it's fixed.

Thanks! Confirmed that it works with old reddit, just doesn't work at all for me using regular new layout, which sucks anyway.

No lmao, I tried to upvote his comment and Thunder spat out that error. A few subs have started doing that (or it's instance-wide but only for certain VPN servers) in the last week or so.

instagram definitely does this, reddit seems fine for me so far

Reddit blocks access to all major VPN services (on desktop for sure) when they click a link from a search engine (maybe even navigating directly to it but I don't do that). This has been happening for about a month now. There's a specific page it shows that basically says "come back without a VPN."

I don't think it does it if you're logged in and have cookies enabled.

Caveat: there is a simple way to bypass it, I'll let you old.heads figure that one out.

That would probably be because your instance is different. Lemmy.world has recently blocked VPN traffic apparently because of bad actors uploading CSAM behind VPN. I also had issues with Lemmy with my VPN this week and either need to split tunnel or need to browse Lemmy as view-only.

Those bad actors are really stupid, a VPN isn't going to protect them. You're not magically anonymous behind a VPN, and such material is obviously going to attract the attention of very skilled cyber security experts & law enforcements.
Idiots doing crimes never understand basic OpSec.

That doesn't help instance admins at all, though.

It helps admins help you stay anonymous by relieving them from having to cover for you.

I am not going to thank the unpaid volunteers who make the fediverse possible by getting them C&D letters/legal threats.

Well I appreciate that. But simply discussing piracy should be okay.

Not really, though. If they're ordered to turn over IPs, they'll turn over IPs. Whether those are legit or VPN IPs is another story, but the burden placed on the instance admin doesn't really change much.