Changing your IP address to access a site that you've been banned from is now illegal

It's now illegal to access a site you've been banned from in the US. More info can be found here. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ess-public-website-ruled-violation-of-us-law/

This just in: SRB2 ban evading is now an illegal offence.

Majority of SRB2 user base is now scheduled for immediate jail time.

So we can finally cage that gosh darn cat now. Joy.

lol How can they find you if your ip is changed?

Your service providers probably can.

It is going to be interesting to see what comes from this since it is law now. I do wonder if this will deter the majority of people who get IP banned from changing their IPs?

I'd like to see them try to enforce this. It'll be a disaster.

glaber said:

I'd like to see them try to enforce this. It'll be a disaster.

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You really can't, and unless you're using ban evasion to hack into a bank's database, the government won't really care.

Frankly, I think the government has no right to tell me I can't run network oriented software on another computer whatever my intentions are (unless I'm jeporadizing national security). It's just typical government sticking their noses in other people's business, the thing that is actually scary is that this means that the government has an excuse to collect private data on questionable grounds. This law really seems like an excuse for the government to get their hands on private data because 'we want to make sure he wasn't ban evading' (when they obviously just want more control over our lives, and feel like they need to spy on their own citizens). I mean, this could turn into the next Patriot Act.

Anyway, I'd just love to watch a CIA agent burst into a kids home, put him to the ground and hold him at gunpoint asking: "Are you the kid that changed your IP to ban evade an SRB2 CTF game?!"

*using proxy from school to bypass school security*
Yea, they can't do anything until they physically see my proxy, that, and I've never been banned from anything anyway, so I'm unaffected to this.

As said before, this is simply a fail. But it might at least discourage it slightly (for the kids with no brain cells left from all the YTpoops or whatever kids do on the internet nowadays)

Is it just me or does anyone else feel like an old internet geezer sometimes?

I feel like an internet geezer when I look into Protocols like Telnet or IRC which have been around for forever but still have a use. You know, protocols like that (and HTTP actually) still use ASCII codes that refer to type-writers (Carrige Return and Form Feed).

And heck, if my school bans SRB2 or Minecraft, It's only a small project to write an ICMP-Tunnel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICMP_Tunnel) to break through the firewall, there's no way they'd detect that exploit without scouring everything that leaves and comes in anyway.

This seems like it's going to be more hassle than it's worth to enforce. I guess with large companies like Jagex it would make sense. I agree to how it's supposed to handle people who disobey punishments over the world wide web, but it feels a little drastic when one could just phone up the ISP responsible for the IP address and complain, where they can deal with it themselves. In a sense, I feel that ISPs will keep very quiet about these sort of issues, mainly because they don't want to feel hatred over the media. Not only will it be difficult to control, but only the groups who actually have the time to spare to deal with all these offenders will be large corporations or very serious groups. But for obvious repeat offenders (Like Cat) I can understand how this law finally makes sense.

I think you guys are really missing the entire issue here, which has nothing to do with ban evasion or anything technical at all: the people making the laws governing the internet do not understand how the internet works at all. This has been shown time and time again, with the constant attempts to make draconian anti-piracy legislation that would be more effective at stifling legitimate use of the internet than actually stopping piracy.

They can claim that ban evasion is against the law, but considering how such a thing is completely impossible to enforce, the practical result is that absolutely nothing has changed. Hell, it's easy enough to evade an IP ban unintentionally by doing absolutely nothing on your end. Claiming that an IP ban is an effective method of preventing a specific person from visiting a web site is laughable at best.

IPs are not really even connected to your machine, your IP can change even on the same machine if your ISP decides to reshuffle IPs. I think that the fact that banning is ineffective is actually a good thing, I think that web developers should focus more on preventing what the person did in the first place rather than just banning them, this gives incentive to fix problems instead of giving band-aid solutions. But this obviously doesn't work in all cases, but is quite effective with spam, abuse, etc.

But the issue is that Cyberspace is large and uncontrollable and will probably remain that way, everything is soooo hard to enforce as Mystic said.

And it doesn't help that internet and copyright laws contridict each other, like how SRB2's use of Sonic characters is using someones Copyright, but it's protected by the Fair Use Policy.

---------- Post added at 08:45 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:39 AM ----------

Mystic said:

Hell, it's easy enough to evade an IP ban unintentionally by doing absolutely nothing on your end. Claiming that an IP ban is an effective method of preventing a specific person from visiting a web site is laughable at best.

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This has been a problem with me, after I was banned on the IRC channel, SpiritCrusher told me that bans are cleared regularly. But since I can keep unintentionally dodging the bans, I really don't know when my ban has been legitimently dropped, lol.