What ISP are you on? BT blocks libgen but NordVPN seems to work just fine.
Of course if they block the whole VPN list you can just rent a tiny instance in a cloud somewhere, though that seems like enough work to bother most non techies.
I guess this is the point where you leave the general public behind. Lucky you.
Which fits fantastically in the discussion over at the San Diego Streetlight surveillance and the "Software engineers social responsibility"[1] vs. the fact that it will get worse if you make it mainstream.
Hopefully projects like Streisand [1] continue to be worked on - they automate a lot of the hassle of setting up services like this. Ideally they will eventually be easy enough for your grandpa to use.
Unfortunately the minor ISPs are almost 3-fold slower in most places, while being just as expensive. My options are between Virgin, which has speeds of up to 362mB fibre for £42/month, and the next best BT, which is 67mB for £39.99/ month. At uni, unless I wanted 30mB for a 7 person household, my only option was again Virgin.
It's difficult not to be on a major ISP when the minor ISPs can't contest on speed and value for money.
I spent years with 5 people on 12mbit ADSL2. I'd rather have that than virgin and blocking any day. I suffered Virgin for a couple of years and it was hell.
Now I'm on ~64mbit VDSL with no blocking at all on Zen. We pull 500G+ a month through it. Costs £37.49 a month.
They just rolled out 300mbit fibre as well so that's going in next month.
Speed isn't everything for me. I can QoS those problems away pretty well.
We switched service providers 3 times during that year. We started with a 30mbit connection through PlusNet, then 60 with EE, then 300 Virgin. The only one that was usable was Virgin Media. I wish that wasn't that case, but it simply was. Internet was a contentious topic in our house, but having 7 people either playing games, watching HD movies, or streaming simultaneously knocked most ISPs down swiftly.
I'm with Uno Broadband who sell BT fibre lines (so upto 70 down/20 up) for around £40 a month with no blocks or restrictions and a static IP. No download limits to speak of either as I can easily hit 2TB download a month.
To be annoying - milli Bels of speed? I've never seen anyone write it like this before, it's MB for megabytes, and Mb for megabits, mB is a different unit altogether.
This is what Merkel meant with "Neuland"(engl. uncharted territory) in 2013.
In Germany she is heavily mocked for not understanding the Internet. Of course, it's the bright populace of high class forums such as Facebook and r/de who know better than the Physicist Chancellor of a G7 nation...
In reality, she meant it is legal Neuland. That authorities and courts had little established ways of enforcing laws online, that even heavily illegal acts were difficult to process and prosecute.
Now we are getting there. The law catches up with the Internet. If we want a free Sci-Hub and free content sharing, then it's the law that we have to adapt. Because governments already adapt their procedures - the online Wild West is over.
Kind of feels like "civilization" creeping into the Old West.
Thing is, it's the fact that is a legal "Neuland" that it's a great place.
What if you use your phone line to organize a crime? Is that a problem? Should we add word recognition to phone line to make sure this doesn't happen? Should we limit it to a series of specific words?
This would break phone usage.
The same apply to internet, except that it can do even more. The only ways to make sure theses criminal activities doesn't happen would be to limit how it can be used which break everything.
> What if you use your phone line to organize a crime? Is that a problem? Should we add word recognition to phone line to make sure this doesn't happen? Should we limit it to a series of specific words?
Somewhere out there someone read this and thought "wow that's a great idea"
Isn't this what the "dark web" is for? True, some sites have been taken down but as I understand that was more due to poor opsec than a flaw with the technology itself.
I for one have no faith in educating the government as long as companies with multi-million-dollar lobbying budgets are free to sway politicians to legislate in their favor. Happy to be convinced otherwise, though.
not really. as a citizen of somewhere you'll always be subject to laws. dark web could help people evade the law a little longer but won't make it legal, as such law abiding citizen will not want to have themselves associated with it for the fear of repercussions down the road.
the only long term solution is to change the laws, not to work around them, but we don't have the economic power to balance the lobbies anymore.
My VPN was blocked recently and I had to go to my network provider with my ID to prove my age(?!) so I could access my VPN again. I was not impressed.