alt Hacker News> The German courts entirely disregarded our use of geo-IP lookups on queries, and asserted that since tests via a VPN were able to resolve the domain, we were in breach of court orders
Seriously, what the fuck? So you're supposed to block VPNs as well? What's next, Tor exit nodes? New VPN and Tor nodes as they pop up? I really don't like where this is going.
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German federal LE agencies have been doing it for years. Threatening to put you on lists of wanted and sanctioned individuals as a basically islamic suicide bomber for not taking down tiny things globally.
That kind of thing isn't unheard of for police agencies with moral and oversight issues, though. Orgs start seeking for bigger reasons. A simple copyright issue creatively expounded into an imaginary global drug bombing cyber trafficking crime ring takedown creates a massive internal win. So they do that.
>So you're supposed to block VPNs as well? What's next, Tor exit nodes? New VPN and Tor nodes as they pop up?
Trivial to do nowadays: https://focsec.com/
>I really don't like where this is going.
German courts think the internet revolves around German laws. There are some really insane cases, sometimes they will consider a website to fall under German jurisdiction simply for having a German-language version (somehow ignoring that Austria and Switzerland exist, ignoring German-speaking minorities in other countries, ignoring that a fully automated translation in 100+ languages is now possible at the click of a button).
German courts and technology are not always the best friends
There's some irony in Germany using censorship for the purpose of ensuring people don't get into reading materials that might convince them to become... fascists who censor people
The entire point is that it can't be reasonably enforced with any granularity. Rights-holders want it to be like that so a copyright win in a single country means something has to be taken down globally.