Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers

[ThePythonicCow]

From Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers (TorrentFreak) (https://torrentfreak.com/mastercard-and-visa-start-banning-vpn-providers-130703/)

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Following the introduction of restrictions against file-sharing services, Mastercard and Visa have now started to take action against VPN providers. This week, Swedish payment provider Payson cut access to anonymizing services after being ordered to do so by the credit card companies. VPN provider iPredator is one of the affected customers and founder Peter Sunde says that they are considering legal action to get the service unblocked.

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There’s an unwritten rule that Mastercard and Visa don’t accept file-hosting sites that have an affiliate program and PayPal has thrown out nearly all cyberlockers in recent months.

It now turns out that these policies have carried over to VPN providers and other anonymizing services. Before the weekend customers of the popular Swedish payment service provider Payson received an email stating that VPN services are no longer allowed to accept Visa and Mastercard payments due to a recent policy change.

“Payson has restrictions against anonymization (including VPN services). As a result Payson can unfortunately no longer give your customers the option to finance payments via their cards (VISA or MasterCard),” the email states, adding that they still accept bank transfers as deposits.

The new policy went into effect on Monday, leaving customers with a two-day window to find a solution.

While the email remains vague about why this drastic decision was taken, in a telephone call Payson confirmed that it was complying with an urgent requirement from Visa and Mastercard to stop accepting payments for VPN services.

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More at Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers (TorrentFreak) (https://torrentfreak.com/mastercard-and-visa-start-banning-vpn-providers-130703/)

One by one, they are closing the doors to convenient anonymous Internet usage :).

[Ioneo]

Should be OK here in Japan for the time being .... we'll see .............

[Anchor]

The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

[ThePythonicCow]

The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
John Gilmore explains this in more detail, at http://www.toad.com/gnu/:




Things I've Said (That People Sometimes Remember)

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."


This was quoted in Time Magazine's December 6, 1993 article "First Nation in Cyberspace", by Philip Elmer-DeWitt. It's been reprinted hundreds or thousands of times since then, including the NY Times on January 15, 1996, Scientific American of October 2000, and CACM 39(7):13.

In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn't like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don't redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)

The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.

[Mulder]

The TOR browser is excellent for people to hide their IP, but a proxy IP address is much better as you can perform movie downloads, etc. without being found out. I wonder what these companies will do without credit card payments??

[sigma6]

Point is they are making a direct attack on individual rights to privacy... NSA probably hasn't perfected decoding VPN yet...

[Anchor]

Point is they are making a direct attack on individual rights to privacy... NSA probably hasn't perfected decoding VPN yet...

I'd say the issue is more to do with identifying the source and destination nodes easily. I am sure they can crack 128 bit SSL common in HTTP traffic and the TLS for email, after all that is what they let you use and allowed to become standard for most internet web traffic encryption. Strong VPN's may cause them more trouble because first they have to find out what method is being used - and the door is open for proprietary methods.

What I suspect is what they really want to know is who is talking to whom - and when that isnt easy to see, it gets them irritated.