RANT: I hate the fact that my ISP can restrict access to certain sites
How can it possibly be, that an ISP, which I'm paying for gets to decid, which sites I'm allowed to have access to, and which not?
All the torrenting sites are restricted. I know, I can use VPN, and such... but I want to do it because of my privacy concerns and not because of some higher-up decided to bend over for the lobbying industry.
While on the other hand, if there's a data breach of a legit big-corp website (looking at you FB), I'm still able to access it, they get fined with a fraction of their revenue, and I'm still left empty-handed. What a hipocracy!!
What comes next? Are they gonna restrict me from using lemmy too, bc some lobbyist doesn't like the fact that it's a decentralized system which they have no control over?
Rant, over!
I didn't even know that my router was using my ISPs DNS, and that I can just ditch it, even though I'm running AdGuard (selfhosted)
I don’t know where you’re from and therefore don’t know what laws affect you but unless the ISP is involved in the media game (i.e HBO & AT&T) they don’t care about restricting access. In fact, they’re against it in most scenarios because if a competitor that doesn’t restrict access to piracy related websites exists, that competitor is likely to siphon customers from ISPs who impose restrictions.
On top of that, most ISPs do the absolute bare minimum to restrict your access so that you can bypass it easily, the most common being the modification of DNS records which you can easily bypass by changing your resolver.
My state of residence restricts access to certain sites. It's all bullshit.
Anyway... The ISP is either a common carrier or a content provider. Pick a fucking lane. You can't have half and half. Either you are responsible for ALL content provided or NONE.
If you choose none then you MUST NOT restrict access to any content.
If you chose ALL then you may restrict content based on what you are willing to take responsibility for. But in that case if someone does something illegal with content you provided you are liable.
Yeah this is government level. They tell the ISPs what to block and they do what’s ordered. ISPs want your money. All the legal crap they have to do is part of business.
Censorship is wrong. Every rational, adult human being should have the fundamental right to their autonomy, without third party intervention, with full awareness of the laws that apply to them.
If they decide to abuse that freedom and awareness by accessing illegal content (even CSAM), then they are taking the risk of being discovered, prosecuted, and punished accordingly. And, in many cases (like CSAM), I hope they are caught and punished.
Regardless of the outcome, it still starts with the freedom for that individual to make that decision for themselves.
Switch over to an ISP that doesn't do that. Leave record with your country's customer protection service and/or open press / open culture office that's why you did it. There. Done.
Counter rant: This is why we built encryption and VPNs many years ago. This is a solved problem, but rather than solving it you'd rather just complain ineffectually about it. The solution, the product of years of work of technical people and privacy people, is sitting right there staring you in the face available for you to use as a free service, a paid service, or your own self-hosted service. Use a VPN, that's what it's for.
"The 'net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" was a comment about #Usenet, a #federated / #P2P system with gossiped (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol) message exchange which wasn't particularly picky about its transport layer (indeed you could load a spool on a floppy and mail it), not the internet.