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HiPhish 8 minutes ago [-]
> Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility
How does legislation work in the US? How can an impossible law pass? Is it just some boomer stomping his feet like a toddler "I know what I want, and I want it now" without consulting any technical experts, and then private organizations like the EFF and courts have to clean up the mess?
eschaton 4 minutes ago [-]
Is there actually any jurisdiction in which technocrats have veto power over legislation?
SoftTalker 17 hours ago [-]
> platforms are left with an impossible choice: completely block all VPN traffic nationwide or withdraw access from Utah entirely
Is it even possible to reliably know that a connection is from a VPN? Anyone can proxy through a random hosting provider.
greggsy 10 minutes ago [-]
Literally every TLS connection could be flagged as being a VPN connection.
happyPersonR 15 hours ago [-]
Requires the vpn provider to snitch and possible tag the ip frames or http frames lol
Folks would just host their own vpns various places and this would be pointless ….
hnlmorg 52 minutes ago [-]
> Folks would just host their own vpns various places and this would be pointless
I think that’s the GPs point.
Though some services do already block traffic originating from popular hosting providers like AWS out of fears of bots.
unglaublich 15 hours ago [-]
It's all just an effort to control the 90%.
pkilgore 15 hours ago [-]
It lawfare against porn. They don't want these companies to exist. They want it to be impossible to comply with the law to shut them down.
bigbuppo 15 hours ago [-]
It's lawfare against Constitutionally-protected speech. The "for the children" bit is just an appeal to emotion.
/Same as it ever was
HiPhish 3 minutes ago [-]
> It's lawfare against Constitutionally-protected speech.
Exactly. If they cared about the children, they'd be going after the Ep.-Class (no arrests yet), or a good 2/3rds regime in play right now.
ekianjo 40 minutes ago [-]
EP class are the lawmakers so good luck with that...
bozhark 9 hours ago [-]
It’s to control their Women
Kids are the misdirection
p-e-w 9 hours ago [-]
Please elaborate on how a law that targets websites that overwhelmingly skew towards a male audience is designed to “control their women”.
autoexec 9 hours ago [-]
Charitably, outlawing porn would put a lot of women out of work, and place a new limitation on what types of work they can get, and in the process limit what women did with their bodies (on camera, for money). It'd do the same for men too, but as you said the audience is primarily men and the content they're looking for is primarily women. The truth is it would suck for pretty much everybody.
pimeys 14 hours ago [-]
Why are people so upset about porn? It's probably still the biggest portion of internet traffic. Kind of like human nature, don't you think?
lokar 14 hours ago [-]
Assuming you are really asking, the two largest objections:
- religious/cultural. My beliefs forbid this, it makes people bad/worse in some hard-to-define way, so no one should be allowed to do it. Sometimes with an emphasis that the sellers are luring good people into sin/ruin.
- it harms women. Many of the participants are trafficked or coerced in some way (and further abused). The profits from the industry encourage more of this. It “warps” the mind of men who use it, leading them to mistreat and abuse women.
I see elements of truth in all these, but IMO they are ultimately not compelling, prohibition is unworkable and unduly infringes on willing participants and consumers.
brookst 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah both of those arguments would work fine for banning religion, but oddly that is shocking to proponents.
Rohansi 9 hours ago [-]
I thought the same. People would realistically be thinking "not my religion" but, even if that were true, that is the kind of thinking that leads to conflicts between religions. That can range from racism between individuals, to stuff like this, and even to entire wars. Despite all of this we specifically protect religion, which I'm fine with, but nobody should be forcing their religious beliefs onto others in any way. That has definitely harmed far more people overall.
germandiago 6 hours ago [-]
So in the absence of religion, there is no racism, no interests and no wars?
You seem to suggest that banning religion would end up wars or human nature.
And yes, noone should force everyone else, but not only om religious stuff. Sometimes there has been non-religious truths to which people are forced and that collides ireemediably with other thinkings.
I am not sure why one philosophical thinking should be better than other just bc it does not contain religion.
In fact, I consider a big part of most religious a compilation of wise advice about human nature. You can believe it or not, take it or not, that is a choice, but when not taken into fanatism I do not think it is harmful.
Again, that is not anreason to force a position to others. But there are a handful of things that are very controversial.
Dylan16807 3 hours ago [-]
> So in the absence of religion, there is no racism, no interests and no wars?
Nah. Between the two comments above there's an implication that in the absence of religion there would be somewhat less of those things.
306bobby 2 hours ago [-]
Saying something is a major catalyst is not saying it's the only catalyst.
Neither parent was being this black and white about it so I have no idea why you are
numpad0 53 minutes ago [-]
The way religion always comes up in these discussion makes me think that, there's a chance that the world sees what happened in the Uighur region of China as a right call, repeating it, not over the next 3-5 years but at 30-50 year history book timescale, just in trivially more humane manners.
It's just weird that people could just base decisions on religions and hide behind freedom of thoughts, when there are actions and consequences of what are supposedly thoughts. It only works when the accusing and accused shares the same beliefs, and effectively collude out of a shared interest, which is not just wrong but increasingly becoming not a workable strategy.
failbuffer 12 hours ago [-]
I would add:
- natalism. Some people worry about inverted demographic pyramids. They want to see more births, so they need more horny guys trying to form relationships instead of being content single. Sometimes there is a racist angle.
- industry. Anything that's "too fun" for young people disincentives education or working.
- addiction. (But people get addicted to shopping or eating dirt too.)
Some arguments against outlawing it include:
- free speech.
- a sizeable fraction of the population wants it to exist.
- better option for economically impoverished women than prostitution.
- societies that suppress it don't really seem better for women, or anyone.
- prohibition of a widely demanded product creates crime (and nothing is easier to smuggle than pure information).
AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago [-]
> natalism. Some people worry about inverted demographic pyramids. They want to see more births, so they need more horny guys trying to form relationships instead of being content single.
This one seems to have an obvious problem.
It's October, consider the traditional Halloween party for 20-somethings. Slutty costumes, college students making out on the couch, and those are the tame ones.
All of that stuff has been effectively banned from workplaces and official school functions and the like for a while now. Meanwhile people increasingly do their social interaction via social media. So what happens if you ban revealing images and sexual dialog from there too? Where are you leaving for people to actually do those things, if you want them to connect with each other?
germandiago 6 hours ago [-]
You could say natalism as opposed to maltusianism, or that is not a thing? One with a worse outcome IMHO given the aging of population and low birth rate.
Industry: agree.
Addiction: true, many things can be addictive, I think this is in big part a matter of education but there are some things that are more addictive than others also.
As for better option than prostitution. I would say this is kind of prostitution is some way.
autoexec 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
8 hours ago [-]
throwinthisaway 13 hours ago [-]
Frankly I believe the whole “warps the mind of men to abuse women” is total nonsense.
I’ve watched plenty of porn in my life, probably a bit more than average. I’ve never done anything out of the norm or unwanted to woman, let alone abuse one.
I think shitty people will be shitty people and it’s just a really easy thing to point at instead of taking responsibility for it. It’s also a convenient plausible sounding correlation for people who already want to ban porn to use.
krrrh 10 hours ago [-]
> I’ve never done anything out of the norm or unwanted to woman, let alone abuse one
Yeah the Dworkin contention that porn turns men into rapists has basically been disproven.
But there’s no reason to say “warps the minds of men” has to lean in that direction. Reading forums of young men who have porn addictions and grew up with HD hardcore porn it seems more like the opposite happened, they become more withdrawn, less likely to engage with women enough to develop social skills, less able to perform sexually irl and subject to porn-induced erectile dysfunction. When it was just magazines and socially stigmatized VHS rentals it was unheard of for college aged men to take viagra, now it’s widespread. Arguably warped minds led to this.
numpad0 41 minutes ago [-]
Fun fact: Japan now has the highest birth rate in East Asia, and everyone knows what it's best known for.
rootusrootus 9 hours ago [-]
> When it was just magazines and socially stigmatized VHS rentals it was unheard of for college aged men to take viagra
In the days of VHS, Viagra wasn’t a thing.
alpaca128 9 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of a study[0] I saw recently which concluded that antisocial behaviour from drunk people seems to stem mostly from antisocial people consuming alcohol.
This reminds me of the whole "playing video games causes violent behavior" stream of thought. Like people, I do not think CounterStrike is real nor do I want to engage in gun battles to the death in real life.
Ma8ee 7 hours ago [-]
I’m quite sure porn impacts what is considered “the norm”.
BobaFloutist 12 hours ago [-]
If you change the argument to "can warp the mind of some men", it becomes much harder to falsify.
margalabargala 11 hours ago [-]
Right, but only because it becomes vacuously meaningless. For example, your comment can warp the minds of men. As can mine here. As can a blade of grass waving in the wind.
schrodinger 13 hours ago [-]
Agreed. It’s like the argument that video games cause shooters.
Umm, I played plenty of GTA growing up and I’ve never stolen a car. People are actually very good at separating fantasy from reality, believe it or not.
autoexec 8 hours ago [-]
For those who aren't good at separating fantasy from reality literally anything can become the source of the voices in their head. Religion is as likely to drive them to violence as a video game would be.
lokar 13 hours ago [-]
I can see the argument for a “correlation vs causation “ argument, but I’m not a social scientist.
UltraSane 13 hours ago [-]
The "porn harms women" argument really seems to infantilize women and assumes that women can never want or enjoy sex for the sake of sex.
jonahx 12 hours ago [-]
This is not the claim. The claim is that, empirically, many (or enough) of the women who end up in porn are underage, trafficked, or psychologically coerced (due to poverty, drug addiction, abuse, etc) such that the choice is not really the free choice of willing participant.
I am all for individual freedoms, but I've read enough about this issue, and seen enough documentaries, that I think the claim is very well-founded. Of course, some porn stars are just willing adults doing something they want to do, but there are many who are not.
monksy 10 hours ago [-]
> of the women who end up in porn are underage, trafficked, or psychologically coerced (due to poverty, drug addiction, abuse, etc) such that the choice is not really the free choice of willing participant.
People who believe that are not aware how the industry has changed and the standards attached to that.
Additionally, that wasn't the draw of the industry. Using the "porn/stripping" preys on the poor is a far over simplification and a weasly thing to say.
swiftcoder 3 hours ago [-]
> People who believe that are not aware how the industry has changed and the standards attached to that.
This very much depends on where you look at. If you are only consuming Made in California™ porn from the big producers, then yes, a lot may have changed.
If you are searching out the raw shit from Russia/Eastern Europea/Asia, then no, the industry is still heavy on the abuse and intertwined with organised crime.
306bobby 2 hours ago [-]
But that's literally the same with virtually all industries in those regions. Porn isn't some sort of exception
serf 11 hours ago [-]
but you can apply this argument to almost any product or good on the market and get a similar ratio of 'willing participant' and 'pseudo-slavery' involvement. Across the board.
in other words I wouldn't ban oranges because some of the farmers have been found to have been enslaved; instead i'd investigate and penalize the enslavement and crimes taking place.
Similarly : I wouldn't ban pornography on some false pretense that it's to save someone, because quite honestly if I began that boulder rolling it shouldn't stop , every industry victimizes someone; it's a question of stopping and penalizing abuses and preventing victimization, not about regulating broad industries ( a move that worsens human rights violations by moving them into a highly lucrative black market, into the shadows ) .
jonahx 10 hours ago [-]
I never argued to ban pornography, and I'm not in favor of that.
That said, no, it's not like other industries. The amount of well-documented abuse is much higher. Degree matters.
autoexec 8 hours ago [-]
I'd be willing to bet that there are far more people who voluntarily make porn than people who voluntarily work on cocoa farms in Western Africa. Not that the existence of other industries where slavery and abuse are more prevalent make those problems in the porn industry any better, but at the very least a lot of work has been done to limit the amount of abuse in the adult entertainment industry and there are a lot of places where people who are being abused can find help and support, especially here in the US. You're more likely to be supporting slavery and abuse buying a Hershey's Bar or an iphone than by watching a video on pornhub.
rpdillon 2 hours ago [-]
How about phone battery manufacturing? Shall we do an accounting of abuses there? Phones warp minds, and have extensive slavery overseas in the supply chain. Societies love to claim the moral high ground by externalizing bad behavior, and importing the result. The US does this extensively with climate and labor laws, and Europe does it with pesticides. The difference with porn is its pretty girls, and its all on camera. I see some parallels with Missing White Woman Syndrome.
> it's not like other industries. The amount of well-documented abuse is much higher. Degree matters.
It's certainly not that different in degree to the agricultural industry (undocumented workers packed into squalid working conditions, long hours in harsh climate, wage theft, constant threat of ICE...), and we're not out here trying to ban tomatoes
jonahx 2 hours ago [-]
You can honestly acknowledge what both industries do without "being out there trying to ban them." In any case, plenty of people want to improve working conditions in the agricultural industry. Probably the best you can do in both cases is imperfect regulation which at least tries to change incentives for the worst kind of abuse.
swiftcoder 2 hours ago [-]
Right, but I'm specifically pointing out here the difference in knee-jerk response (particularly in the political arena). Rampant worker abuses in porn leads to attempts to ban it entirely, while similar abuses in the agriculture sector engender a very lukewarm response
BEEdwards 8 hours ago [-]
Find chocolate that doesn't involve slave labor at some point in it's production and then say that again.
subscribed 9 hours ago [-]
All fast fashion comes from the trafficked or abused workers. All meat comes from the grave abuse of the animals.
It's still sold on the high street and advertised everywhere.
UltraSane 12 hours ago [-]
> The claim is that, empirically, many (or enough) of the women who end up in porn are underage, trafficked, or psychologically coerced (due to poverty, drug addiction, abuse, etc) such that the choice is not really the free choice of willing participant.
The main point of contention becomes what "enough" constitutes. Almost no women in commercial porn is underage as all countries that legally allow its production also require strict proof of age for the people actually having sex.
11 hours ago [-]
reilly3000 11 hours ago [-]
Admittedly hot take, but I think the existence of ubiquitous porn on-demand does take away power from people who would withhold sex as part of a negotiation in a relationship.
lokar 12 hours ago [-]
I’ve seen two arguments:
Women who do not provide fully informed and voluntarily consent are harmed
Porn makes some (or many, or all) men who consume it treat some (or many, or all) women badly
malfist 9 hours ago [-]
It also ignores gay porn.
UltraSane 9 hours ago [-]
It is amazing how comprehensively gay porn is ignored in these debates which I think supports my argument that the "porn harms women" argument fundamentaly removes female agency.
pimeys 3 hours ago [-]
Being the writer of the parent comment who started this discussion, gay porn was the open I was thinking about. Then it the whole discussion was about harming women.
BTW all the women I know in my age group watch porn too...
lokar 13 hours ago [-]
Some argue it harms all women who participate in, but others argue it harms some women who participate, which seems undeniable.
UltraSane 8 hours ago [-]
Almost all activities harm some of the people who participate in them.
fwip 12 hours ago [-]
True, and this is probably true of all work. Retail work has probably harmed many more women than sex work (by virtue of being much more common).
germandiago 5 hours ago [-]
Any intervention to protect adults with laws infantilize.
The cause is clear in my mind: the world outside is what it is. If you cannot take good decisions (whatever that is for you) and you need someone to get protrcted and you soend your day whining about your own problems bc the world is not perfect, then you did not become an adult, ever.
There are extreme cases: for example you cannot say aperson in a country with no weapons is infantilized bc the complain for being abused by an armed gang. Something like that is legit.
But for many things I see around I just see people complaining instead of changing strategy, solve a problem, change their choice or just plain skip things they do not want. Instrad of that they demand some kind of protection.
For a very narrow set of exceptions I would agree. For the rest, we sre just adults, we should know what to do.
GolfPopper 13 hours ago [-]
>Kind of like human nature, don't you think?
That's one reason why traditionists in power usually crack down on any sort of pornography or alternate sexuality. Sex is a huge driver for human behavior. And established power structures would prefer that the only way for anyone to get sex is via compliance with the existing power structures. It's not something where the establishment is ever going to be able to perfectly control things, but if they can make it more difficult to get any sort of sexual gratification that doesn't align with their preferred social structure that gives the establishment an advantage in holding on to power.
lazide 10 hours ago [-]
They want to protect their local ‘woman’ market, without them having to compete with porn expectations.
miohtama 13 hours ago [-]
The UK is doing it.
Ofcom is investigating PornHub even after PornHub installed age checks as Ofcom claims age checks not “robust” (read: VPN ban). So hand over your id to see porn.
The UK government is extremely socially conservative when it comes to sex/porn online, and they never let an opportunity to violate privacy rights go to waste.
The rest of the world would be better off to just block the UK from online platforms rather than risky complying with their increasingly insane demands.
miohtama 2 hours ago [-]
Blocking does not work either. Ofcom is drunk with their own juice under the current Labour government.
Ofcom fines you even if you block the UK because it is not "robust"
For the porn argument I mean, just generate your own locally on your own device, they tend to overlook that when they're shoving AI down everyone's throats. Like everything else techwise that's worthwhile in the last 30 years, it's been driven by porn culture.
pessimizer 15 hours ago [-]
They don't care about porn. The people who would vote for it in Utah do, and that's why Utah is being used as a vehicle by other people to bolster the need to root all computers.
EA-3167 14 hours ago [-]
How can you be that paranoid about one thing and so gullible with another? We’re surrounded by phones, cameras, smart cars, IoT, microphones and most people are on social media too.
The government demonstrably has the ability to break into your comms and data without going through any of this. Instead of a libertarian conspiracy theory have you considered that politicians chase power and re-election?
Taking a stand and making major changes is hard to pull off, costs a lot of political resources, and can backfire horribly. Doing symbolic, popular crap that’s popular with the (admittedly thick and ignorant) majority is an easy win. Moral outrage is an easy win. “Think of the children” is an easy win.
Ed: Corrected “comma” to “comms”
306bobby 1 hours ago [-]
I think the political landscape is too divided and not recognizing that actually makes you gullible. These people don't need to chase re-election individually as much as they just need to convince the populus to vote for their party
For years now Americans vote by party, not politician
HeatrayEnjoyer 14 hours ago [-]
Break into your comma? Google-fu is letting me down on this one
0cf8612b2e1e 14 hours ago [-]
I assume auto correct for “coms” or “communications”?
sylware 12 minutes ago [-]
And some VPN "services" could use some compromised systems here and there.
Who is going to check anyway? You need significant technical leverage AND law leverage for the people doing that.
campbel 13 hours ago [-]
You can do for free with tailscale exit nodes. Just have a friend in a different location host for you or buy some compute space somewhere
stingraycharles 12 hours ago [-]
Yes that’s the point the parent was making, although I don’t even think Tailscale is the easiest option if all you want is a relay.
mmooss 14 hours ago [-]
> Folks would just host their own vpns various places and this would be pointless
In the real world, very few people have that capability.
ddlsmurf 10 hours ago [-]
But also there's very little need today, it's very cheap to do, just complicated, a barrier that can be easily solved if there appears demand
mey 14 hours ago [-]
Do you have a friend/family out of state? Do they have a commodity router? Many have such a feature built in.
Less savvy individuals/business would also have no reason to obey these laws.
The limitation isn't access to the technology. There is endless OSS, it's probably built into many standard OSes, and there are many available products and projects that will deploy the whole thing for you.
The limitation is technical skill, even having enough skill to know that this is a solution.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 6 hours ago [-]
This is such a common HN trope, and it's tiresome.
Yes, lots of things will at any point be beyond the technical ability of most people as long as they remain niche. But as soon as a sizable market exists(e.g one created by a law, like in this case), products and services that close that gap will appear.
Hell, there's even stuff for doing this already, which is not that hard for non-technical people to set up, like Tailscale. I can easily imagine a Tailscale-like product that easily allows friends to use eachothers networks as a VPN with zero configuration or Wireguard knowledge required. I mean, when you think about it it's just Tailscale but more streamlined for that particular purpose.
sparkling 15 hours ago [-]
Detection can be based on the IPs themselves, no packet tricks required. Plenty of services can do that: https://focsec.com/
Now of course, if your VPN is a home-lab style VPN where you are connecting to a little wireguard box sitting in your own home, that is a totally different story.
compiler-guy 15 hours ago [-]
And still required by Utah law.
whimsicalism 26 minutes ago [-]
maybe not reliably, but i was impressed by the effectiveness and sophistication of the GFW when i was traveling in China. ISP level filtering would likely also comply with the restrictions in this lawsuit.
It took quite a bit of finagling to bypass the GFW on my own and in some regions (Beijing) I was still randomly detected and throttled, it seemed.
semiquaver 14 hours ago [-]
Right, all you see is the IP address. And anyone in the world can set up an “individual” VPN just for them on a cheap VPS or cloud server anywhere else in the world. There’s no technical way to accomplish what they’ve mandated, only something approximating it like “block all connections from known commercial VPN services”.
s__s 9 hours ago [-]
This isn’t true. Hosting providers have known IP blocks. Spin up a hand rolled VPN through a VPS and you’ll get blocked by a lot of services, or at the very least, treated as highly suspicious.
semiquaver 5 hours ago [-]
What’s the “this” that isn’t true in what I said? I was responding to
> Is it even possible to reliably know that a connection is from a VPN?
And I’m saying it’s not. Coming from a hosting provider IP block is far from a definitive sign that you’re using a VPN. A very plausible real world reason for that is that your company uses one of the large VDI providers, most of which egress from GCP or AWS.
not_a_bot_4sho 17 hours ago [-]
Kinda.
I use VPN most of the time. My work requires it, and I like Mozilla VPN for personal privacy. (Note: it has ad blocking DNS built in which is nice!)
I occasionally get blocked by websites or services, especially streaming apps, if I'm on VPN. I suspect they're just looking out for Amazon/Microsoft/etc IP address blocks. It's very annoying
Aurornis 16 hours ago [-]
That's not the same. You get blocked because the IP address you're coming from is associated with a VPN list, not because they're analyzing the traffic in detail.
The simplest methods block known datacenter IP ranges like you thought. More will score it based on several heuristics and a reputation over time. If you get 100 different users connecting from a single IP, it's probably not someone's home internet connection.
medvidek 3 hours ago [-]
> If you get 100 different users connecting from a single IP, it's probably not someone's home internet connection.
In some parts of the world hiding (NAT) entire neighborhoods behind one public IP is normal practice.
a4isms 15 hours ago [-]
> If you get 100 different users connecting from a single IP, it's probably not someone's home internet connection.
Or, their so-called "smart" TV is acting as a proxy without their informed consent.
manquer 16 hours ago [-]
Mozilla VPN runs on Mullvad who are transparent and publish active server and IP lists https://mullvad.net/en/servers.so trivial to block them without blocking all of Azure/GCP/AWS[1]
There are also third party providers of IP annotations to classify known VPN address ranges that content providers typically subscribe to blanket block providers.
The reason for this aggressive approach is streaming apps all need your IP as core signal for tagging your region and all content licensing is region locked (even on YT).
Netflix are/were the most relaxed about it , and for long time would only buy content if they got global distribution rights, but not anymore. Many VPN ads specifically used to market that you can watch Netflix geolocked content.
[1] IME they block DC IPs too although not needed for blocking professional VPN, even self hosted OpenVPN on cloud box usually gets flagged.
kevincox 15 hours ago [-]
That list is the IPs users connect to. It is entirely distinct from the list of IPs the VPN traffic egresses from. I doubt believe that they publish their egress ranges.
buckle8017 15 hours ago [-]
It's almost always in the same /24.
VanTheBrand 12 hours ago [-]
Don’t think there was ever a time since Netflix started streaming where they only licensed global rights to shows. For their own originals they get global rights but the majority of their content is licensed and has always been slightly different in different territories.
15 hours ago [-]
alnwlsn 17 hours ago [-]
My home internet is on a CGNAT, so I experience a lot of the same. Ironically, sometimes a VPN will get through.
tvbusy 2 hours ago [-]
Many VPN providers have servers in many places. Anyone in the US can just use a server in Canada to bypass everything.
ad_fontes 17 hours ago [-]
Depends on how you define "reliably". You can get pretty damn close by triangulating on traffic patterns and browser fingerprinting. There is a lot of research in this area. But it'll never be perfect.
babelfish 15 hours ago [-]
It seems like withdrawing from Utah is the obvious option
gwbas1c 14 hours ago [-]
That was what the law attempted to do: Ban porn in Utah.
There is a very vocal anti-porn group in Utah. They do things like put up massive billboards that say "[Store name] sells porn." (Which is basically free advertising instead of shaming.)
hedora 10 hours ago [-]
Right, but if everyone serving porn did that (e.g., google image search, so I guess all of Google should ban Utah), then people would just send money out of state for vpn access, and probably remember the annoyance when it was time to vote.
15 hours ago [-]
TeMPOraL 17 hours ago [-]
All it would take is for a major ISP in Utah to route everyone through a VPN, and boom, it's the same picture.
irenaeus 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah but the state of Utah could just tell them to knock it off because they're the state.
michaelbuckbee 16 hours ago [-]
Isn't this kind of what Apple's Private Relay is?
whatever1 6 hours ago [-]
The great firewall probes the host ip and if it suspects it is a vpn server (udp traffic etc) it just throttles to a halt the ip.
Tons of false positives, but they are non-domestic IPs so who (dares to) cares.
markdown 2 hours ago [-]
Of course it is. Half the services I try to access reject me with a notice saying they don't allow VPNs.
mahboi 16 hours ago [-]
It's hard to find a proxy or VPN that isn't flagged as such. People pay extra for residential proxies.
SV_BubbleTime 15 hours ago [-]
I’ve been using different VPNs for years for work. I’m starting to come around to the value of a residential proxy service.
It’s starting to get annoying that things aren’t working. They’re shooting themselves in the foot though.
If they didn’t block VPNs, they would at least know what category to group them in.
greyface- 14 hours ago [-]
TCP MSS < 1500 bytes can be a tell, although it will sometimes falsely identify non-"VPN" tunnels.
eptcyka 13 hours ago [-]
There are sooo many people out there who are clamped to something far lower than 1500. MTUs below 1280 are not that exotic either.
On the other hand, using Masque for TCP transfers will probably fool a server to believe the MSS is 1500.
16 hours ago [-]
codedokode 17 hours ago [-]
You do not need to know "reliably". You can block everything remotely suspicious, and in case someone is blocked by mistake, they can file an application with all necessary documentation proving the connection is not a VPN.
llama052 16 hours ago [-]
Sounds like the great firewall of China. Pretty wild how much we are regressing in the states to say this out loud.
Let’s block traffic on the internet blindly just in case someone is looking at an adult website.
hn_acc1 15 hours ago [-]
Next it will be illegal for anyone to visit an adult website from some states, even with proof of age, kinda like Prohibition..
fc417fc802 13 hours ago [-]
We should also restrict access to foreign fake news websites that spread destabilizing propaganda. We can include an exception for academics, and thus will require a new accreditation and licensing scheme for them. Naturally we will then want to implement common sense guardrails for their conduct ... /s
ranger_danger 17 hours ago [-]
Not when the definition of VPN is subjective. I could proxy/VPN through a friend's house and nobody would ever know it wasn't them.
EvanAnderson 16 hours ago [-]
A lot of law is adjudicated based on the intent, not the black-and-white definition. Proxying your traffic thru a friend's house (VPS in another location, etc) would be considered a "VPN" by a court. Definitional hacks, for the most part, don't fly with judges.
To handle the matter technically Utah would need a "great firewall of Utah" and a legislative mandate that all ISPs route thru it. Somehow they'd have to factor-in signals from cellular sites neighboring states and satellites.
irenaeus 16 hours ago [-]
This requires a lot of extra work though, and extra work is downward pressure on the behavior (underage people looking at pornography) that the state of Utah is trying to exert downward pressure on.
The inability to immediately and perfectly eliminate a behavior is not a good enough reason to be against any attempt to eliminate that behavior.
Rohansi 16 hours ago [-]
> The inability to immediately and perfectly eliminate a behavior is not a good enough reason to be against any attempt to eliminate that behavior.
So if you are legally required to block all VPN users and then fail to actually block all VPN users what is stopping you from being punished for not complying with the law?
fc417fc802 13 hours ago [-]
Common sense on the part of the judge presumably. Best effort and common practice will enter into it. Lots of regulation is like that.
mahboi 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that's the problem. But if they changed the law to not require all users to be blocked, it'd still have the outcome they want.
codedokode 17 hours ago [-]
Yes but isn't it suspicious that all your traffic goes to the friend's house and not to Facebook and Reddit? If you claim it is not a VPN does it mean your friend is providing illegal unlicensed hosting? That's even worse.
malfist 16 hours ago [-]
> does it mean your friend is providing illegal unlicensed hosting
Since when do you have to pull permits to put a server on the web?
ranger_danger 16 hours ago [-]
"Suspicious" is not illegal, and neither is hosting.
iAMkenough 17 hours ago [-]
Split tunnel is a thing, and in that instance the platform required to comply (like a porn site) doesn’t have any way to see all your traffic to determine if it’s a VPN/proxy connection or not.
codedokode 15 hours ago [-]
If you cannot determine the traffic type, you can block it and wait until someone appears with proper documentation and explains what they were sending.
306bobby 1 hours ago [-]
He said nothing about traffic type, that will always be HTTPS and websocket stuff. Nothing out of the ordinary to block there VPN or not
With cross tunneling all your normal traffic would go through your ISP usually and just your porn traffic goes through the VPN. Unless it's a major provider, as far as your ISP is concerned you're just connecting to someone's private server occasionally
iAMkenough 15 hours ago [-]
That's what the judge agreed with: it's unreasonable to require you to block all Internet traffic with the assumption it's all VPN traffic until proven otherwise.
Under Utah's law as written, a private business has to assume any single IP address could be operating a VPN/proxy.
17 hours ago [-]
zen928 15 hours ago [-]
Why would that be suspicious?
LoganDark 13 hours ago [-]
> Is it even possible to reliably know that a connection is from a VPN?
No, it's not possible. You can only try to identify known protocols or suspicious patterns of data, timing or entropy. Theoretically, with a big enough collaboration, you could hide a VPN behind shaping traffic patterns and request order towards hundreds of different servers, and there's just no method of traffic analysis that can possibly identify that without prior knowledge.
Like, some firewalls try to identify an absence of connections outside the VPN, or an abnormal volume of data over a sustained period of time. But all that goes out the window when, say, you are connecting to hundreds of real servers at all times and only exchanging, say, basic HTTP requests with each one. For all they know you just have a million browser toolbars installed. They wouldn't know if the choice of request, order and timing encodes information because they wouldn't be able to prove what the client's intentions are in sending it or what the servers do with it.
If you tried to identify it, you would block every real connection.
I believe some VPN providers are beginning to play with things like this, but the problem is really that it's impossible to provide this. It only really works when you run it yourself, because that's the only way others don't know. So they're having to settle for compromises, like Mullvad's DAITA, which still uses a single server but tries to avoid showing tells of a VPN connection as opposed to something else like streaming.
gorgoiler 15 hours ago [-]
The classic: ping the endpoint address, then “ping” the code. If the IP address comes back in 30ms but the JavaScript responds in 330ms, then the client is probably 300ms further away than they say they are claiming.
zbentley 12 hours ago [-]
Or they’re on a computer that’s doing something intensive, swapping, or in low power mode. Or they have a browser extension that does stuff before scripts run. Or their cache is emptier than usual and they’re spending a long time doing an initial fetch of the latest ad tracking package your site installed. The list goes on. That’s far too noisy a signal to decide block-or-not based on. Good enough to try to sell someone faster gear, maybe, but not more than that.
patrakov 9 hours ago [-]
This will also catch a SIM card in roaming, which is not a VPN.
1vuio0pswjnm7 13 hours ago [-]
"As we've said time and time again: the internet will always route around censorship."
It won't route around self-censorship that arises out of surveillance
Nor will it take a stand against SNI which is a dead simple means of implementing censorship that's in widespread use every day for years
pelican0 12 hours ago [-]
> ... SNI which is a dead simple means of implementing censorship
Could you elaborate? What's "SNI", and how does it relate to censorship?
Schiendelman 11 hours ago [-]
Nice try, bicycle-riding pelican.
I assume it's Server Name Indication, which sends hostnames in plain text. A better approach is Encrypted Client Hello, or ESNI (I'm not sure how they differ, probably like Betamax and VHS, one allows porn).
1vuio0pswjnm7 6 hours ago [-]
Sometimes HN commenters will try to argue in favor of SNI as if it's not possible to host multiple HTTPS sites on one IP address
It is possible
Consider all the sites hosted at 199.36.58.100 for example. Over 1,620 such sites have been submitted to HN in the past few years
ESNI is "Encrypted SNI", ECH is "Encrypted Client Hello". The Client Hello packet contains the SNI. For a time ESNI was available on all Cloudflare sites. Not anymore. ESNI, whatever its flaws, worked well enough that some censorship regimes blocked connections that used it. IMHO, ESNI and ECH are overcomplicated proposed solutions to a relatively simple problem: gratuitous use of SNI. For example, so-called "modern" browsers will send SNI to those 1,620+ sites even though it's not required
Alas, the people developing ESNI and ECH are not publishers or readers, the targets of censorship. They are "CDNs", hosting companies, intermediaries in the business of serving multiple HTTPS sites on single IP addresses. SNI has benefits for CDNs and costs for others
newsclues 13 hours ago [-]
To big to fail social media is a problem for this
usernomdeguerre 17 hours ago [-]
>As we’ve said time and time again: the internet will always route around censorship.
Is this still true, or has it become a truism? It seems nations like Iran and China (and events like Kashmir come to mind) have progressed the state-of-the-art and playbook to where we can't actually say it definitively will route around it.
Now seeing that the US and EU are flirting with these similar restrictions it's making me wonder how we'll be able to keep hold of these principles.
Maybe my concern with that adage is ultimately its passive voice, since it takes 'active' action by people to give us those options, and will probably take more actions by more people to keep it alive now.
tialaramex 16 hours ago [-]
The thing China can do, and does do: Kill your network connections, whether that's a TCP session, your ability to send or receive packets with some particular IP addresses, or at the extreme armed men show up and now it's not an Internet problem.
Things China can't do: Magically "downgrade", "decrypt" or "intercept" the secure protocols we use every day like HTTPS. Facts won't budge, the technology we are using does what it says on the tin.
The Internet can't route around you being thrown off a tall building by men with guns, but the IETF has for some years considered it to be extremely important to design the network protocols to prevent these shenanigans. BCP # 188 "Pervasive Monitoring is An Attack"
kccqzy 15 hours ago [-]
Yes China will kill your network connections. And that is proof that Internet cannot route around censorship. Any time Internet routes around censorship China finds a new way to censor it.
Normal people don’t care about “downgrade” or “decrypt” or “intercept” they care about availability.
anamexis 13 hours ago [-]
Have you been to China? It is still super easy to bypass the Great Firewall with VPNs.
whimsicalism 24 minutes ago [-]
very much depends on the region in my experience, i found it was a game of cat & mouse against their traffic pattern sniffers.
kccqzy 12 hours ago [-]
With pre-approved commercial VPNs yes. Set up your own unapproved VPN whether it’s IPSec or Wireguard or plain old SSH port forwarding, and see how fast it gets killed.
But of course the easiest approved “VPN” is just data roaming.
anamexis 12 hours ago [-]
I used Wireguard to my home residential internet almost exclusively the last time I was in China. 2 weeks, no issues.
kccqzy 12 hours ago [-]
You were probably using mobile data (roaming) or hotel WiFi for a hotel approved to host foreigners. Go do it from a residential network.
hellojesus 11 hours ago [-]
When I was living in China in 2009, my apartment came with wifi. I noticed I would get shut down often, and made a game of it based on what content I typed in chats to friends back home. But it got old quickly, and then I went to the router in my apartment to reset it and install some custom firmware when I realized the wifi pw they gave me wasn't to the router or modem in my apartment. I factory reset it and had much better access and was able to easily circumvent the great wall after that. Foreigner internet certainly exists, but in my experience it was much more limiting.
kccqzy 10 hours ago [-]
2009 was a different time. GFW didn’t work at all for IPv6 traffic or any IPv6 tunneling protocol. It also didn’t employ any statistical packet size analysis. You could go to SixXS and grab a V6 address, and enjoy the uncensored V6 internet. No encryption was needed.
kingforaday 10 hours ago [-]
Guess you weren't living near the Urumqi, Xinjiang rioting? Almost a year of severe internet restrictions.
hellojesus 10 hours ago [-]
That's correct. This was in Nanjing.
thaumasiotes 8 hours ago [-]
I was there in 2023.
You're describing exactly the opposite of what I found to be the facts on the ground. My connection to a residential address in the United States was allowed for a couple of days at a hostel, then blocked. It was never allowed over (Chinese) mobile data.
But it was completely fine over the internet service to my apartment. The home internet service and the mobile service were provided by the same company in a bundled plan. I was always curious what they were doing.
11 hours ago [-]
Terr_ 12 hours ago [-]
Until a time of "civil unrest" occurs, and suddenly your "super easy" VPN becomes entirely blocked at the very same moment you wish you had it the most.
They aren't stupid, they're not going to insta-block everything they can detect, giving away clues to people trying to evade it.
anamexis 12 hours ago [-]
What makes you so sure this is the case?
If there's civil unrest, they can of course essentially turn off the internet, but there's a distinction between "the internet can route around censorship" and "the internet can be blocked in its entirety (or near entirety)"
11 hours ago [-]
HDThoreaun 13 hours ago [-]
In times of low social unrest theyd rather create a list of dissidents than try to shut them down. Keeps unrest lower and then when they need to spin up the domestic security apparatus they already know who to watch
nazcan 16 hours ago [-]
My guess is if you are in China they can MITM you with their own root certs.
JoshTriplett 15 hours ago [-]
Browsers and TLS infrastructure have been solving that for a while now, via certificate transparency. Browsers can now reject any certificate that isn't publicly logged. So, yes, they could MITM, and burn an entire CA doing it.
ndriscoll 15 hours ago [-]
If you're dealing with an authoritarian state they don't need to burn anything or care about cert logging. They can:
1. Make it illegal to distribute a browser that distrusts their CA
2. Make it illegal to run a browser that distrusts their CA
3. Block all encrypted traffic that they can't MITM and notify police that you are running illegal software
Gigachad 11 hours ago [-]
This is unnecessary, they already have the problem controlled better. They just outright block foreign services, and the domestic ones they can request data from freely.
Doesn’t require cracking crypto or any funny business around forcing people to install stuff.
JoshTriplett 15 hours ago [-]
Sure, a state can do that, and some have tried at various times. But even authoritarian states have a number of competing aims they have to balance. And CT makes authoritarian goals harder; they can no longer do as much surreptitiously.
mrzimmerman 9 hours ago [-]
“Make it illegal to…” that has never in human history prevented anything from happening. Cannot increase the risk? Of course, but laws do not stop humans from humaning.
Furthermore, doing any of the things you listed would isolate all legitimate network traffic as well as any undesirable traffic, fully shuttering all Chinese manufacturing businesses from global requests via the web. This hat would happen then? Phone calls, emails, and even physical mail would become the new norm and most of the Chinese economy would collapse under the weight of not being able to hop on a Zoom with a client that wants tooling made for its aluminum manufacturing molds.
So besides my point of the black market your hypothesis of total control misses all the other pressures that exist that make what you’re proposing infeasible on its face. Only a place like North Korea that is willing to be a pariah state is old be willing to take the economic and social costs associated with your proposal, and they’ve only been able to do that because their abominable regime was in place before the internet existed and they pre-built controls very late in the game.
Tl;dr simply because a country _could_ do something doesn’t mean it’s realistic for reasons outside of basic networking concepts.
9 hours ago [-]
hnav 15 hours ago [-]
Russia's ROSKOMNadzor has been trying to get users to install its own Root CAs in recent years. About 10 years ago everyone in the west removed CNNIC (Chinese counterpart) roots after they were caught MITM-ing.
tenacious_tuna 15 hours ago [-]
> Things China can't do: Magically "downgrade", "decrypt" or "intercept" the secure protocols we use every day like HTTPS
I mean... They could, though, no? If they control the gateways they could drop any traffic that isn't encrypted with some root cert that allows them to decrypt in transit packets.
tialaramex 14 hours ago [-]
> If they control the gateways they could drop any traffic that isn't encrypted with some root cert that allows them to decrypt in transit packets.
I'm sure that works in a Hollywood movie, in the same way you could reverse the polarity of the lasers to enable you to travel inside the computer from a household video projector, or decrypt all the world's telephone calls using a device built into your batmobile - but this isn't a Hollywood movie and so traffic isn't in fact "encrypted with a root cert".
If for any of a variety of reasons the Chinese authorities don't want your connection to exist they'll terminate the connection, exactly as I described in my earlier comment.
nemomarx 17 hours ago [-]
Is China that successful at it lately? I see a lot of posters and info from China getting around the great firewall, and my understanding was that they don't really care if 1% of users do that so long as it mostly holds and only the technical minded or really fixated will see it.
So there is a route around censorship, but maybe the public doesn't really care about it.
Scaled 16 hours ago [-]
There is also the difficult reality that the government doesn't need to block vpn entirely, but just make it a credible risk of being detected. If you have to worry about the state police barging into your home, you are likely to decide it isn't worth the risk and self-regulate.
Gigachad 11 hours ago [-]
How I have heard it described is using a VPN in China is like smoking weed in the US. It’s widely done even if illegal and you’d have to be seriously unlucky to get in trouble. You’d at most get a warning.
People with more first hand experience can probably explain it better but it doesn’t seem that strict. China is not North Korea, their aims seem less about preventing people from learning about the world and more preventing non compliant foreign tech companies having Chinese users.
physicles 7 hours ago [-]
It absolutely is primarily about preventing people from learning about the world. You can’t run a system like China’s without controlling information. During the political meetings, they ramp up their blocking, and then they usually turn it down again after.
During the World Cup (2022, still zero covid in China), they started blurring out the crowd because people were noticing that nobody in the stands was wearing masks. They’d been told that the zero covid policy and draconian lockdowns were keeping them safe, and outside China was a Covid hell-hole. Protests followed four months later.
Nobody in China was told about western covid vaccines, much less allowed to get them.
VPNs aren’t widely used — there was a study posted here some months ago that estimated VPN use at around 1% of the population, too little to matter.
That’s why they’re a bit lax. They can afford to let some through to grease the wheels of commerce. You do have to be seriously unlucky to get into trouble.
(I was there during Covid, and some years before and after)
jason1cho 16 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure whether it's 1% or 0.1% or only Xi Jinpin can access YouTube. China can adjust the surveillance level dynamically. It's a matter of cost and effect.
hnav 15 hours ago [-]
That's the way it was explained to me. Letting the fringe do what they're going to do anyway while inoculating the majority to outside influence is the goal and the difficulty setting is dynamic.
snohobro 17 hours ago [-]
I’m pretty sure with Iran, and I assume other authoritarian nations, the state controls what traffic can and cannot leave their borders. When they go dark, they just effectively cut off access to the outside world entirely. Sure they may have their own state run servers that provide some services, but then they can inspect and manage all traffic being routed inside the country. Don’t have to try and find the VPN if there’s just no traffic.
I suppose Utah could impose some sort of strategy here, but would be so burdensome and anti-American I’m not sure they could pull it off. Instead of a blacklist of sites dictated by the site provider, you go the other way where all Utah ISPs maintain a whitelist of IPs permitted to Utah citizens. Any traffic attempting to reach a non-white listed IP, would be rejected.
hn_acc1 15 hours ago [-]
We have a data center in Utah.. And I'm sure some of our customers are storing "adult" material.. Are we now banned?
TeMPOraL 16 hours ago [-]
It's never been true.
The layer 2 and 3 of ISO/OSI stack does indeed "route around censorship". But the Internet as we know it is all Layer 7, and it's as centralized as it gets.
That's why regulators often aim straight at Layer 7 entities - companies providing consumer services over the web. Because no matter how unblockable the route between you and some server is, it doesn't mean anything when the server itself is refusing to talk to you.
mxkopy 16 hours ago [-]
What about p2p and less scrupulous actors like TPB? I guess in China the former is probably more effective but this sort of thing is immediately what I thought of when I read OP
EvanAnderson 16 hours ago [-]
Having the power of violence behind you makes technical hacks mostly irrelevant.
matheusmoreira 15 hours ago [-]
The internet will always route around censorship in principled western nations.
It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their laws. We make technology that completely nullifies their laws. They need to increase their tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end state is either a totalitarian government or an uncontrollable population.
I used to think that we'd find some kind of equilibrium along the way, that we'd eventually discover the government's limits: some principle they refuse to break, some line they refuse to cross...
But the truth is these tyrants have no limits whatsoever. They'll stop at nothing in their quest to control the flow of information.
eviks 6 hours ago [-]
These are just aspirational statements, similar to "the internet always remembers" etc, they've never been true. And the passive voice is duly noted, it indeed depends mostly on those social forces for the "internet" to "act"/"route"
12 hours ago [-]
TJSomething 17 hours ago [-]
It seems like Utah could do mostly do this by intercepting all consumer traffic.
jason1cho 16 hours ago [-]
Just buy the surveillance equipment from Russia and get it done.
iAMkenough 16 hours ago [-]
With some sort of whitelist of IP addresses that consumers, travelers, and business executives are allowed to connect to while in the state?
A VPN/proxy could exist at almost any single address at any given time.
abecedarius 16 hours ago [-]
It's true unless we let freedom of speech and the press be interpreted narrowly, as the right to flap our jaws and to press paper against ink. That is up to us collectively.
simlevesque 16 hours ago [-]
> Over the last two years, Iran officials warned that wider use of the satellite internet service could make communication controls within the country "ineffective", adding the regime has failed to produce an adequate policy response.
> “I sometimes joke that we might as well turn the Ministry of Communications and the Supreme Council of Cyberspace into amusement parks, because they will no longer serve any purpose,” Hakami said.
There will always be >0 people who find a way around censorship, that's about it. It's not bad AND ineffective, that's a contradiction.
encom 16 hours ago [-]
It's certainly less true than it was. It depends on how Matt Prince feels on any particular day.
To a large degree, most of the internet today is ultimately controlled by a few people. If what you have to say pisses off these people, and someone is determined to keep you off the internet, you have a problem. Kiwi Farms is a well known example, and continues to suffer under regular DDOS attacks. Regardless of how you feel about KF, it's undeniable that a) this nonsense has streissanded the site enormously and b) it's speech you don't like that needs protection.
Also there was the whole covid "misinformation" garbage fire... I certainly do not want my government or some megacorp to decide what can and can't say or read.
And going beyond the internet, I just want to remind you Americans, that your 1st amendment is almost unique (to my knowledge). Enjoy and protect your offensive, hateful, blasphemous, extremist, and deeply unpopular speech.
twiclo 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not looking to get into a debate on the law just curious why these websites can't force accounts for everyone just like the gambling sites do.
Panzer04 6 hours ago [-]
Same burdensome provision issue? Forcing everyone outside of Utah to do something just in case they're from Utah.
f6v 5 hours ago [-]
> why these websites can't force accounts for everyone
Idk why people think it’s a good idea to force everyone to provide their id to jerk off.
zdc1 4 hours ago [-]
They can, but any friction here means less ad revenue, as people will just go to a site with less friction
chriscrisby 6 hours ago [-]
They definitely can
kramer2718 15 hours ago [-]
Fascism is on the march. Dirty pictures aren't the real reason governments want this level of control over the internet. You can be sure that we'll see worse. Glad we won this battle.
rhcom2 16 hours ago [-]
> It even went so far as to prohibit websites from offering instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass these checks
How is that not a blatant first amendment violation?
MBCook 15 hours ago [-]
Because we don’t like people doing it. Duh.
blakeashleyjr 9 hours ago [-]
Businesses (despite common belief) have less free speech power when engaging in commerce. If they said, "Utah law XYZ violates the constitution, call your state legislator", almost certainly protected. Versus: "Here are instructions on how to violate the law" (whether eventually upheld or not), much less sturdy ground.
criddell 16 hours ago [-]
It is, but the first amendment isn't absolute.
rhcom2 14 hours ago [-]
I guess this could be speech integral to criminal conduct but seems like a stretch.
CamperBob2 15 hours ago [-]
It is, but our judges and legislators find it expedient to pretend it's not.
tzs 13 hours ago [-]
The people who wrote it and the people who ratified didn't seem to think it was absolute. The First Amendment was not intended to create a new right of speech. It was intended to prevent the new federal government from abridging the existing right as it was under common law and state law.
Under state and common law at the time many kinds of speech were routinely regulated or even criminalized, such as defamation and blasphemy.
CamperBob2 13 hours ago [-]
They weren't short on ink. If they wanted to add additional conditions and tweaks, they would have. What they thought, or what they wrote down elsewhere, doesn't matter.
Or at least it shouldn't.
cogman10 11 hours ago [-]
The constitution did not apply nationally originally, it only applied to the federal government.
It wasn't until the 14th amendment that the constitution started overriding state constitutions/laws.
Idaho did in fact add additional ink to the freedom of speech [1]. In fact this is why so many states have a bill of rights similar to the federal constitution in their own constitutions.
Indeed they were not short of ink, so if they wanted to create some sort of free speech right that differed from what people at the time (including themselves) understood "freedom of speech" to mean they would have used a different term and explained the scope of the new right.
forshaper 14 hours ago [-]
Can someone explain why it wouldn't work to have porn companies use only certain domains, and filter based on those domains, if people are so intent on blocking it?
andrewflnr 13 hours ago [-]
The smart version of this is that adult content providers send a header or something with every response that contains NSFW, and then you use parental controls on client devices to not show those responses. This even works for sites that show a mix of kid-friendly and adult content cough reddit cough. It offers fewer opportunities for general purpose censorship, though, so there's less interest.
CamperBob2 7 hours ago [-]
NSFW where? Salt Lake City? New York City? Dubai? Turkmenistan?
andrewflnr 7 hours ago [-]
Haha, fair point, sort of. Probably as determined by the jurisdiction of the hosting servers, broadened a bit for error margin. But there's pretty broad overlap. The discrepancies are likely to be small. If they used the exact some logic that they currently use for age-gating, that would already be an improvement.
The obvious enhancement is for the metadata to be a little more specific about the content, making it easier for them to just provide facts without making a judgment about whether the content is "appropriate" in any given jurisdiction/household/etc. Most obviously, we might want to treat medical images and historic art separately.
simoncion 6 hours ago [-]
> The obvious enhancement is for the metadata to be a little more specific about the content, making it easier for them to just provide facts without making a judgment about whether the content is "appropriate" in any given jurisdiction/household/etc.
And because this mechanism would enable guardians to set up reasonably-effective automated censorship for the vulnerable humans in their care without requiring that they provide any information about those humans to any third parties, neither big "social media" companies nor the politicians into whose ears they whisper want anything to do with it.
petcat 13 hours ago [-]
The US Congress evaluated [1] the legality of forcing adult websites onto certain TLDs in the 2000s and it was determined to be legally ambiguous and would almost certainly face substantial 1st amendment challenges. So they didn't pursue it.
Because you shouldn't get behind a thing that shouldn't exists. Technical solutions to societal problems are and will always be naught and fraught with unnecessary jump roping. In this case, the content itself isn't dangerous, what is dangerous is consuming it without the correct context, ie. education.
bell-cot 14 hours ago [-]
What's the enforcement mechanism if some porn company in Elbonia "forgets" and uses hothothot.el, instead of hothothot.porn?
kstrauser 12 hours ago [-]
Here my genius self sits, momentarily wondering what M-x hothothot does in Emacs.
A Utah state organ sues them in Utah court, obviously.
nikanj 16 hours ago [-]
Since when do lawmakers cared about technical impossibilities?
nadermx 14 hours ago [-]
Remember to renew your support for the EFF. They take on some interesting cases
mahboi 16 hours ago [-]
How is this impossible? DraftKings does it for California visitors.
compiler-guy 16 hours ago [-]
DraftKings does it in a way that is good enough to comply with California law, which doesn't require perfection.
This Utah law requires perfection.
mahboi 16 hours ago [-]
Oh I see, "An individual is considered to be accessing the website from this state if the individual is actually located in the state regardless of whether the individual is using..." as mentioned in the injunction https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/ay... So yeah the law would basically require everywhere to perform age verification, where the law says it only has to be "commercially reasonable."
Ukv 16 hours ago [-]
I'm not in California and DraftKings blocks me connecting with a VPN, so they just don't seem to be distinguishing whether a VPN user is in California (which is the impossible part of this law).
mahboi 16 hours ago [-]
Right, they just block all VPN users, which would comply with the law
Ukv 13 hours ago [-]
Utah argues that websites can "age assure VPN-using Utahns, [so] any decision by Aylo to instead age-verify all users would be a voluntary business choice, not an effect forced by Utah law" because regulating non-Utah users on non-Utah sites is not something the Utah law can constitutionally do under the Dormant Commerce Clause.
So in theory sites could block all VPN users (if you can somehow "perfectly (1) detect VPN/proxy users"), but if the law necessitates that nationally/globally then it's unconstitutional anyway. It's the age assuring of VPN-users specifically from Utah part that Utah are relying on being possible for the law the be constitutional.
randyrand 5 hours ago [-]
Easier said than done.
iAMkenough 15 hours ago [-]
I have no problem connecting via a VPN running on my VPS, so it's not all VPN users.
A VPN/proxy could exist on any given IP address at any time, which the California law recognizes but the Utah law does not.
abirch 16 hours ago [-]
they want to stop VPN traffic. If it's a plain IP address it's easy. VPN makes it hard.
mahboi 16 hours ago [-]
I understand. You can't use DraftKings via a VPN.
abirch 16 hours ago [-]
What stops me from using DraftKings.com from a VPN? I'm at the page right now, but I don't have an account. Will they verify that my IP and home address match or something?
hn_acc1 15 hours ago [-]
I've found that some sites (even like restaurants, for example) have no problem setting up an order when I connect via my VPN (from Linux) - my default browsing setup. But when I go to pay, their payment processor refuses to work properly / fails, so I can't actually transact any $$. Others work just fine WITH VPN on. Sadly, the former is increasing and the latter decreasing, to the point it's getting harder and harder.
Heck, Lowes and BestBuy are pretty unusable in general via VPN already.. (or maybe due to ublock, or privacy badger or eff, etc.. :-)
mahboi 15 hours ago [-]
They have an extensive blacklist of VPNs, and on top of that will require you to verify location on a phone if you don't have an obvious residential IP. Or maybe they just always do that? Of course if you have a sketchy proxy and a phone where you can spoof location and you can ensure they don't flag it as something "unverified" like GrapheneOS, you can get around it, and you'd be in a small minority.
Unfortunately know this because a gambler friend showed me.
calvinmorrison 16 hours ago [-]
In 1897 Indiana almost passed a law defining Pi as 3.2. These jurists have never cared about reality.
altmanaltman 12 minutes ago [-]
> Section 47. No person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood shall be permitted to marry any white woman of this State, nor shall any white man be permitted to marry any negro woman, or any woman having one-eighth part or-more of negro blood, and every person who shall knowingly marry in violation of the provisions of this section, shall, upon conviction thereof, be imprisoned in the State’s prison not less than one, nor more than ten years, and be fined not less than one thousand nor more than five thousand dollars.
They seem to know what they're doing here. A website can comply as long as they perfectly geofence (impossible) or do "reasonable" age verification. "Reasonable" only for the latter. So they basically want these sites in any US state to do age verification.
stonogo 14 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure your claim is backed up by the evidence you've provided (to wit, that Indiana did not pass the bill).
stefangordon 15 hours ago [-]
If you want to ban ISP's in your state, or build a state firewall, or arrest your citizens, you are welcome to do so - but what happens on servers outside your state that your state is choosing to connect to is clearly none of your business.
Seems like we need a fundamental challenge to the concept that you have any jurisdiction whatsoever.
ryandrake 15 hours ago [-]
Being able to tie an IP to a rough physical location was, in retrospect, a huge Internet design mistake. IPs should be like random UUIDs. They should have been designed to get assigned randomly when you obtain one, rotated / thrown away periodically, with no hierarchical numeric relationship with the ISP that is assigning them.
wildzzz 15 hours ago [-]
It was much easier to assign blocks of IPs to an ISP rather than a 4.3B line lookup table. And how would you ensure that an address has been rotated? How do you determine who the real owner of an IP is when collisions occur? You're asking for a worldwide atomic database propagated to all routers in the days where a 32bit number was considered massive.
jambalaya8 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, in some cases it seems alright to want to try to prevent VPN usage (in certain scenarios).
Utah is one of a few states that bans gambling. It is logically consistent for them to want to prevent people from using VPNs while in Utah to get around that to do things like access gambling websites, sports books, or prediction markets.
That said, it is fairly difficult (and almost impossible for self-made VPNs/tunnels...). The court was right, but it kind of sucks for Utah in this case. They should have the right in some way to uphold their gambling laws.
Sorry, but if you haven't seen how bad some people and places can be when it comes to that stuff, you probably won't get why.
EDIT: HN is ratelimiting my ability to reply to replies again, for some reason, so my response follows:
Yes, but they have the uncomfortable reality of having to police (I mean in the classical, community way, not an Orwellian way) the results of it -- with resources that are scarecely available, or unavailable. Crime goes up, domestic violence increases, rowdiness and noise complaints go up, fights increase, addiction increases, money problems and lenders get involved....
I never liked social issues being called "public health" issues but in some cases, where things are literally outlawed and more than a certain amount of people with certain predilections take advantage of opportunities to skirt the law more than a few times, it sort of becomes so...
Which usually means less other kinds of freedoms for the rest of the people in that location. Some places I have lived with large online gambling populations have been frankly disturbing.
luke727 4 hours ago [-]
> The court was right, but it kind of sucks for Utah in this case. They should have the right in some way to uphold their gambling laws.
They still have the right to legislate, just not the technical capability to enforce.
Ghanshyam9977 4 hours ago [-]
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farceSpherule 15 hours ago [-]
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JSR_FDED 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
roughly 17 hours ago [-]
There are a category of things that are technically impossible until a burly man threatens to break your arm if you don't do them, and a category of things that are still impossible.
Doesn't help your arm, but when they're asking for things in that second category, it doesn't help them either.
cwillu 17 hours ago [-]
But until you've broken their arm, you can't know which category you're in.
not_a_bot_4sho 17 hours ago [-]
Wait, we're the burly man?
recursive 16 hours ago [-]
I've always aspired to be burly. This is great news.
roughly 16 hours ago [-]
weird when people make that swap without noticing it, huh?
m463 15 hours ago [-]
I remember talking about voting fraud with an indian friend. He said it was more overt in india - a burly guy would grab your finger and make it press the "correct" voting machine button.
No stranger to expecting to apply their morality to all people, even those who have a very different set of beliefs. Just a niche brand of christian nationalism seeking to subjugate everyone to their ways.
cheesecakegood 14 hours ago [-]
Most Mormons are not Christian nationalists and in fact tend to oppose such, especially in comparison to most red states and evangelicals.
howunfortunate 15 hours ago [-]
Huh? Is this comment referring to something specific or is it just a general swipe at a religion that's unliked around here?
SauciestGNU 11 hours ago [-]
Government in Utah is essentially a Mormon theocracy. People voted for medical cannabis and the church lobbied and got the will of the people overturned. They have strange alcohol laws because their religion forbids alcohol. They're hostile to queer rights because their religion dictates such beliefs.
They ban municipalities from displaying pride flags and there are a lot of exemptions from legal protections, but I'll admit some of my data is obsolete and I was unaware of the protections added in 2014.
15155 1 hours ago [-]
> ban municipalities from displaying pride flags
Would you have an issue with a law banning municipalities from displaying "anti-pride" flags? Why should taxpayer funds be directed to these types of causes?
knicholes 15 hours ago [-]
I think "The Church" (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) is trying to keep Pornhub from publishing stats of how many ~people~ ~righteous Church members~ Melchizedek Priesthood holders are whacking to "cosplay porn" and "lesbian porn".
Henchman21 15 hours ago [-]
Let’s not forget that “dirty mormon girls” is a category on pornhub
bnteke 14 hours ago [-]
brb
irenaeus 16 hours ago [-]
Not sure what the impossibility is. VPN's have a set of exit relays. If traffic is coming from one of those exit relays, it's coming from a VPN, so adult websites can be required to block traffic from those exit relays. What am I missing?
Dfiesl 16 hours ago [-]
The law is only meant to apply to citizens of Utah though. Blocking all exit relays would mean that absolutely anyone accessing that website would not be able to do so from a VPN which burdens people outside of Utah too.
irenaeus 13 hours ago [-]
This is what I was missing. Demanding that porn sites block VPN traffic (or only accept residential traffic) would mean that everyone everywhere using a VPN gets blocked not just in Utah.
I still suspect there's some kind of solution. Like Utah could tell VPN providers that if they service a customer in Utah then the VPN provider can't route traffic to adult sites. Or put the burden on the VPN provider to do age verification if porn is gonna be available through the VPN.
Come to think of it, I'm still a bit confused as to why VPNs are even relevant because it would seem to me that age verification would be done through some kind of having-credit-card type scheme which VPNs are entirely irrelevant to. I even read the article and I'm still confused. Oh well.
hellojesus 10 hours ago [-]
You can mail cash to mullvad.
gchamonlive 16 hours ago [-]
The law likely violates the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on passing laws that significantly burden businesses and people outside Utah’s borders.
SB 73 burdens the rights of all internet users outside of Utah because it requires adult websites to either know every visiting user’s physical location, and then block those in Utah, or to verify every visitor’s age just in case they might be in Utah.
It's technically impossible to both implement Utah's law and respect the constitution. To make it technically feasible you'd need to either change the constitution or federalize the law.
| An individual is considered to be accessing the website from this state if the individual is actually located in the state, regardless of whether the individual is using a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to disguise or misrepresent the individual's geographic location to make it appear that the individual is accessing a website from a location outside this state.
But how can any site check if a client is a) a VPN client (typically this can be known because VPN exit node IPs can be learned), __and__ b) in Utah?
The impossibility lies in (b). Effectively this forces any affected companies having a nexus to the state of Utah to forbid VPN clients. I think that's a bit too far-reaching. It would be much more practicable instead to ask VPNs to disallow Utah client exits to affected sites w/o age checks -- VPN services aren't free, so VPNs basically can do age checks.
Given that this could have been written to be feasibly implemented, either this text was written to cause a controversy, or this text was written by people who don't know how things work. Either way, this text cannot be enforceable as written. The Utah legislature can easily modify this to be enforceable (see above), so it's not like a court striking this down might be playing partisan games just by striking it down.
hedora 10 hours ago [-]
There are free vpns, but you could also just hop from Utah to an age check vpn to get out of Utah, then hop to a second vpn.
Aurornis 16 hours ago [-]
The law requires blocking all VPN access.
It's impossible to have perfect knowledge of the entire set of VPN exit node addresses.
nikanj 16 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a problem for those pesky, nasty porn websites, not a problem for the good christian lawmakers..
logicchains 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
15 hours ago [-]
pchristensen 16 hours ago [-]
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are indeed Christian.
neilo40 16 hours ago [-]
Mormonism is a branch of Christianity
gopher_space 15 hours ago [-]
We've agreed to not discuss this.
You need to understand that my branch considers Catholicism to be a pagan shame and the Mormons an actual sex cult. We just don't talk about our differences anymore because it always ended in death.
onraglanroad 15 hours ago [-]
I dunno. Describing the Mormons as a sex cult makes them seem far more fun than they actually are.
It's like I thought the Gospel Church in Northern Ireland would have better music. Turns out not.
gopher_space 15 hours ago [-]
I was trying to highlight the absurdities involved without just linking to "The Emo Philips Joke".
onraglanroad 14 hours ago [-]
Feel free to link it if you like. And I really did like the idea of the Gospel Church being more "oh happy day"...
If you're ever in San Francisco, Grace Cathedral is worth a visit.
mahboi 13 hours ago [-]
The difference is, there are a reasonable number of churches that recognize Catholic or Presbyterian as Christian, even if it's not all of them. Only LDS consider LDS to be Christian.
mahboi 16 hours ago [-]
According to Mormons
onraglanroad 15 hours ago [-]
It's not generally considered Christian because they have their own religious text which didn't originate from Christians of the time.
tavavex 15 hours ago [-]
But don't they still believe in other Christian texts, the same concepts, and the same god in the same way? It's probably more different than most other branches but it still seems like Christian DLC to me.
onraglanroad 14 hours ago [-]
I think they do in some ways. But they're not generally considered part of the wider Christian church. Perhaps unfairly but I think that's how it's considered.
mahboi 13 hours ago [-]
Same as Islam. Muslims aren't Christian, even if you ask them. They're probably actually closer to Christianity than LDS is.
hedora 10 hours ago [-]
Both points are also true of Bahai.
mcmcmc 10 hours ago [-]
They can’t, their book directly contradicts the old and new testaments. Claiming belief in both is a case of dishonesty or cognitive dissonance.
kstrauser 12 hours ago [-]
"It's complicated." I'm not LDS and haven't been a member of the Christian sect I was raised in for many years. I've had besties who were LDS, though, and we talked a lot whenever it came up in conversation. (Which tends to be surprisingly often, FWIW.)
The gist is that LDS members believe that the Bible is true when it has been correctly translated. But that's a gap big enough to drive a truck through. There are some very real irreconcilable differences between the Bible and the Book of Mormon.
For example, Mormons believe in the practice of "sealing"[0], which is basically marriage that lasts for eternity. However, Jesus himself explicitly says in the Bible[1] that this isn't so:
> The same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Him and asked Him, saying: “Teacher, Moses said that if a man dies, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were with us seven brothers. The first died after he had married, and having no offspring, left his wife to his brother. Likewise the second also, and the third, even to the seventh. Last of all the woman died also. Therefore, in the resurrection, whose wife of the seven will she be? For they all had her.” Jesus answered and said to them, “You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels of God in heaven.
Personally, it seems exceedingly unlikely to me that each one of the translations on the linked page are wrong in exactly the same way.
Anyway, that's why lots of LDS will say that they're Christians. If asked, they believe that the Bible is true where correctly translated, but in my (admittedly) limited experience, not many of them as a percentage have actually read the Bible themselves to know what it actually says about this. It's also why a lot of Christians say that LDS are not: they believe in lots of things that are not in the Bible, and believe that the Bible we have today has lots of mistakes.
NB: I'm not staking an opinion on any of this, or taking sides on the matter. I'm offering this in the same sense that I might share something I learned in history class about the French Revolution. It's interesting to read and learn about, but doesn't directly affect me and it's not anything I want to participate in. Especially do not take this chance to explain to me why the whole "left his wife to his brother" thing is f'ed up by modern standards.
krapp 12 hours ago [-]
Christianity as a whole began as a cult of a cult of Judaism and so Mormonism began as a cult of Christianity, and all of it is several cults removed from Zoroastrianism anyway, with a bit of Greek and Roman paganism for flavor. Arguing about which is "more legitimate" is as ridiculous as debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. A thousand years from now, assuming humans are still around, they'll probably be worshiping the Omnissiah or something.
It surprises me that Americans are so untrusting of Mormonism since it's such a quintessentially new world religion. You'd think that a ruthlessly capitalist and hierarchical brand of Christianity where the center of God's kingdom isn't someplace in the Middle East but the United States would appeal to American exceptionalism. They even banned black people and called them cursed by God until the 1970s. Mormonism embodies the American zeitgeist more fully than any old-world religion, it's a wonder it isn't more popular.
Maybe it's the magic underwear that creeps people out?
llama052 16 hours ago [-]
I would think that requiring adult websites to essentially block all VPN traffic to be pretty heavy handed and hardly a solution. Especially considering there are many reasons to use a VPN.
16 hours ago [-]
mcmcmc 10 hours ago [-]
Probably that “all VPNs” and all commercial VPN providers are two vastly different things. You can literally just make your own VPN if you have access to hosts on two different networks.
gambiting 16 hours ago [-]
It's impossible to have a full and complete list of VPN exit nodes, for the simple reason that no company publishes the full list, and also technically if you set up an OpenVPN server on digital ocean and connect to that you're also using a VPN but no one would know your address is hosting a VPN server.
irenaeus 16 hours ago [-]
So it would be possible if the state demanded that VPN companies provide adult sites with continuously updated lists of their exit nodes.
It also seems to me like Utah could just demand that adult sites only accept traffic from residential ips.
techjamie 16 hours ago [-]
You'd have to ask every non-residential host online to do the same. As above, you can get a DigitalOcean droplet and ssh -D to it, now you have a SOCKS proxy that for state's concern is doing the same as a VPN.
16 hours ago [-]
moate 16 hours ago [-]
Utah could demand the moon, it doesn't mean that the federal government would agree they have a right to that demand.
Utah can't tell businesses that service the country (or the world) how to do anything in this regard. You can't demand a list of the VPN exit nodes, because no VPN would ever give you that, and if they're outside of your jurisdiction, how could you possibly enforce it (assuming you got the Feds to agree with your law regulating interstate/international commerce now). You can't tell websites to only accept residential traffic, for the same reasons.
The internet sorta fucks states rights (in a good way).
gambiting 16 hours ago [-]
Why would a VPN company care about what Utah requires if they have no legal presence there(or in the US for that matter)?
Besides, there's no such thing as "residential" IPs. If I set a VPN gate at my mum's house, how would the porn company know?
The "impossibility" is in them saying "we cannot guarantee with 100% certainty that the user isn't using a VPN" and that's correct, they can't - but the law has no provision for that, they are risking fines over something they cannot control.
How does legislation work in the US? How can an impossible law pass? Is it just some boomer stomping his feet like a toddler "I know what I want, and I want it now" without consulting any technical experts, and then private organizations like the EFF and courts have to clean up the mess?
Is it even possible to reliably know that a connection is from a VPN? Anyone can proxy through a random hosting provider.
Folks would just host their own vpns various places and this would be pointless ….
I think that’s the GPs point.
Though some services do already block traffic originating from popular hosting providers like AWS out of fears of bots.
/Same as it ever was
Obscenity is not protected as Free Speech.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/413/15/
Kids are the misdirection
- religious/cultural. My beliefs forbid this, it makes people bad/worse in some hard-to-define way, so no one should be allowed to do it. Sometimes with an emphasis that the sellers are luring good people into sin/ruin.
- it harms women. Many of the participants are trafficked or coerced in some way (and further abused). The profits from the industry encourage more of this. It “warps” the mind of men who use it, leading them to mistreat and abuse women.
I see elements of truth in all these, but IMO they are ultimately not compelling, prohibition is unworkable and unduly infringes on willing participants and consumers.
You seem to suggest that banning religion would end up wars or human nature.
And yes, noone should force everyone else, but not only om religious stuff. Sometimes there has been non-religious truths to which people are forced and that collides ireemediably with other thinkings.
I am not sure why one philosophical thinking should be better than other just bc it does not contain religion.
In fact, I consider a big part of most religious a compilation of wise advice about human nature. You can believe it or not, take it or not, that is a choice, but when not taken into fanatism I do not think it is harmful.
Again, that is not anreason to force a position to others. But there are a handful of things that are very controversial.
Nah. Between the two comments above there's an implication that in the absence of religion there would be somewhat less of those things.
Neither parent was being this black and white about it so I have no idea why you are
It's just weird that people could just base decisions on religions and hide behind freedom of thoughts, when there are actions and consequences of what are supposedly thoughts. It only works when the accusing and accused shares the same beliefs, and effectively collude out of a shared interest, which is not just wrong but increasingly becoming not a workable strategy.
- natalism. Some people worry about inverted demographic pyramids. They want to see more births, so they need more horny guys trying to form relationships instead of being content single. Sometimes there is a racist angle.
- industry. Anything that's "too fun" for young people disincentives education or working.
- addiction. (But people get addicted to shopping or eating dirt too.)
Some arguments against outlawing it include:
- free speech.
- a sizeable fraction of the population wants it to exist.
- better option for economically impoverished women than prostitution.
- societies that suppress it don't really seem better for women, or anyone.
- prohibition of a widely demanded product creates crime (and nothing is easier to smuggle than pure information).
This one seems to have an obvious problem.
It's October, consider the traditional Halloween party for 20-somethings. Slutty costumes, college students making out on the couch, and those are the tame ones.
All of that stuff has been effectively banned from workplaces and official school functions and the like for a while now. Meanwhile people increasingly do their social interaction via social media. So what happens if you ban revealing images and sexual dialog from there too? Where are you leaving for people to actually do those things, if you want them to connect with each other?
Industry: agree.
Addiction: true, many things can be addictive, I think this is in big part a matter of education but there are some things that are more addictive than others also.
As for better option than prostitution. I would say this is kind of prostitution is some way.
I’ve watched plenty of porn in my life, probably a bit more than average. I’ve never done anything out of the norm or unwanted to woman, let alone abuse one.
I think shitty people will be shitty people and it’s just a really easy thing to point at instead of taking responsibility for it. It’s also a convenient plausible sounding correlation for people who already want to ban porn to use.
Yeah the Dworkin contention that porn turns men into rapists has basically been disproven.
But there’s no reason to say “warps the minds of men” has to lean in that direction. Reading forums of young men who have porn addictions and grew up with HD hardcore porn it seems more like the opposite happened, they become more withdrawn, less likely to engage with women enough to develop social skills, less able to perform sexually irl and subject to porn-induced erectile dysfunction. When it was just magazines and socially stigmatized VHS rentals it was unheard of for college aged men to take viagra, now it’s widespread. Arguably warped minds led to this.
In the days of VHS, Viagra wasn’t a thing.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/alcalc/article/43/2/204/122225?logi...
Umm, I played plenty of GTA growing up and I’ve never stolen a car. People are actually very good at separating fantasy from reality, believe it or not.
I am all for individual freedoms, but I've read enough about this issue, and seen enough documentaries, that I think the claim is very well-founded. Of course, some porn stars are just willing adults doing something they want to do, but there are many who are not.
People who believe that are not aware how the industry has changed and the standards attached to that.
Additionally, that wasn't the draw of the industry. Using the "porn/stripping" preys on the poor is a far over simplification and a weasly thing to say.
This very much depends on where you look at. If you are only consuming Made in California™ porn from the big producers, then yes, a lot may have changed.
If you are searching out the raw shit from Russia/Eastern Europea/Asia, then no, the industry is still heavy on the abuse and intertwined with organised crime.
in other words I wouldn't ban oranges because some of the farmers have been found to have been enslaved; instead i'd investigate and penalize the enslavement and crimes taking place.
Similarly : I wouldn't ban pornography on some false pretense that it's to save someone, because quite honestly if I began that boulder rolling it shouldn't stop , every industry victimizes someone; it's a question of stopping and penalizing abuses and preventing victimization, not about regulating broad industries ( a move that worsens human rights violations by moving them into a highly lucrative black market, into the shadows ) .
That said, no, it's not like other industries. The amount of well-documented abuse is much higher. Degree matters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome
It's certainly not that different in degree to the agricultural industry (undocumented workers packed into squalid working conditions, long hours in harsh climate, wage theft, constant threat of ICE...), and we're not out here trying to ban tomatoes
It's still sold on the high street and advertised everywhere.
The main point of contention becomes what "enough" constitutes. Almost no women in commercial porn is underage as all countries that legally allow its production also require strict proof of age for the people actually having sex.
Women who do not provide fully informed and voluntarily consent are harmed
Porn makes some (or many, or all) men who consume it treat some (or many, or all) women badly
BTW all the women I know in my age group watch porn too...
The cause is clear in my mind: the world outside is what it is. If you cannot take good decisions (whatever that is for you) and you need someone to get protrcted and you soend your day whining about your own problems bc the world is not perfect, then you did not become an adult, ever.
There are extreme cases: for example you cannot say aperson in a country with no weapons is infantilized bc the complain for being abused by an armed gang. Something like that is legit.
But for many things I see around I just see people complaining instead of changing strategy, solve a problem, change their choice or just plain skip things they do not want. Instrad of that they demand some kind of protection.
For a very narrow set of exceptions I would agree. For the rest, we sre just adults, we should know what to do.
That's one reason why traditionists in power usually crack down on any sort of pornography or alternate sexuality. Sex is a huge driver for human behavior. And established power structures would prefer that the only way for anyone to get sex is via compliance with the existing power structures. It's not something where the establishment is ever going to be able to perfectly control things, but if they can make it more difficult to get any sort of sexual gratification that doesn't align with their preferred social structure that gives the establishment an advantage in holding on to power.
Ofcom is investigating PornHub even after PornHub installed age checks as Ofcom claims age checks not “robust” (read: VPN ban). So hand over your id to see porn.
https://x.com/moo9000/status/2102726344975040565?s=20
The rest of the world would be better off to just block the UK from online platforms rather than risky complying with their increasingly insane demands.
Ofcom fines you even if you block the UK because it is not "robust"
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1osgyg4/the_ofc...
The government demonstrably has the ability to break into your comms and data without going through any of this. Instead of a libertarian conspiracy theory have you considered that politicians chase power and re-election?
Taking a stand and making major changes is hard to pull off, costs a lot of political resources, and can backfire horribly. Doing symbolic, popular crap that’s popular with the (admittedly thick and ignorant) majority is an easy win. Moral outrage is an easy win. “Think of the children” is an easy win.
Ed: Corrected “comma” to “comms”
For years now Americans vote by party, not politician
Who is going to check anyway? You need significant technical leverage AND law leverage for the people doing that.
In the real world, very few people have that capability.
Less savvy individuals/business would also have no reason to obey these laws.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit
The limitation is technical skill, even having enough skill to know that this is a solution.
Yes, lots of things will at any point be beyond the technical ability of most people as long as they remain niche. But as soon as a sizable market exists(e.g one created by a law, like in this case), products and services that close that gap will appear.
Hell, there's even stuff for doing this already, which is not that hard for non-technical people to set up, like Tailscale. I can easily imagine a Tailscale-like product that easily allows friends to use eachothers networks as a VPN with zero configuration or Wireguard knowledge required. I mean, when you think about it it's just Tailscale but more streamlined for that particular purpose.
Now of course, if your VPN is a home-lab style VPN where you are connecting to a little wireguard box sitting in your own home, that is a totally different story.
It took quite a bit of finagling to bypass the GFW on my own and in some regions (Beijing) I was still randomly detected and throttled, it seemed.
I use VPN most of the time. My work requires it, and I like Mozilla VPN for personal privacy. (Note: it has ad blocking DNS built in which is nice!)
I occasionally get blocked by websites or services, especially streaming apps, if I'm on VPN. I suspect they're just looking out for Amazon/Microsoft/etc IP address blocks. It's very annoying
The simplest methods block known datacenter IP ranges like you thought. More will score it based on several heuristics and a reputation over time. If you get 100 different users connecting from a single IP, it's probably not someone's home internet connection.
In some parts of the world hiding (NAT) entire neighborhoods behind one public IP is normal practice.
Or, their so-called "smart" TV is acting as a proxy without their informed consent.
There are also third party providers of IP annotations to classify known VPN address ranges that content providers typically subscribe to blanket block providers.
The reason for this aggressive approach is streaming apps all need your IP as core signal for tagging your region and all content licensing is region locked (even on YT).
Netflix are/were the most relaxed about it , and for long time would only buy content if they got global distribution rights, but not anymore. Many VPN ads specifically used to market that you can watch Netflix geolocked content.
[1] IME they block DC IPs too although not needed for blocking professional VPN, even self hosted OpenVPN on cloud box usually gets flagged.
There is a very vocal anti-porn group in Utah. They do things like put up massive billboards that say "[Store name] sells porn." (Which is basically free advertising instead of shaming.)
Tons of false positives, but they are non-domestic IPs so who (dares to) cares.
It’s starting to get annoying that things aren’t working. They’re shooting themselves in the foot though.
If they didn’t block VPNs, they would at least know what category to group them in.
On the other hand, using Masque for TCP transfers will probably fool a server to believe the MSS is 1500.
Let’s block traffic on the internet blindly just in case someone is looking at an adult website.
To handle the matter technically Utah would need a "great firewall of Utah" and a legislative mandate that all ISPs route thru it. Somehow they'd have to factor-in signals from cellular sites neighboring states and satellites.
The inability to immediately and perfectly eliminate a behavior is not a good enough reason to be against any attempt to eliminate that behavior.
So if you are legally required to block all VPN users and then fail to actually block all VPN users what is stopping you from being punished for not complying with the law?
Since when do you have to pull permits to put a server on the web?
With cross tunneling all your normal traffic would go through your ISP usually and just your porn traffic goes through the VPN. Unless it's a major provider, as far as your ISP is concerned you're just connecting to someone's private server occasionally
Under Utah's law as written, a private business has to assume any single IP address could be operating a VPN/proxy.
No, it's not possible. You can only try to identify known protocols or suspicious patterns of data, timing or entropy. Theoretically, with a big enough collaboration, you could hide a VPN behind shaping traffic patterns and request order towards hundreds of different servers, and there's just no method of traffic analysis that can possibly identify that without prior knowledge.
Like, some firewalls try to identify an absence of connections outside the VPN, or an abnormal volume of data over a sustained period of time. But all that goes out the window when, say, you are connecting to hundreds of real servers at all times and only exchanging, say, basic HTTP requests with each one. For all they know you just have a million browser toolbars installed. They wouldn't know if the choice of request, order and timing encodes information because they wouldn't be able to prove what the client's intentions are in sending it or what the servers do with it.
If you tried to identify it, you would block every real connection.
I believe some VPN providers are beginning to play with things like this, but the problem is really that it's impossible to provide this. It only really works when you run it yourself, because that's the only way others don't know. So they're having to settle for compromises, like Mullvad's DAITA, which still uses a single server but tries to avoid showing tells of a VPN connection as opposed to something else like streaming.
It won't route around self-censorship that arises out of surveillance
Nor will it take a stand against SNI which is a dead simple means of implementing censorship that's in widespread use every day for years
Could you elaborate? What's "SNI", and how does it relate to censorship?
I assume it's Server Name Indication, which sends hostnames in plain text. A better approach is Encrypted Client Hello, or ESNI (I'm not sure how they differ, probably like Betamax and VHS, one allows porn).
It is possible
Consider all the sites hosted at 199.36.58.100 for example. Over 1,620 such sites have been submitted to HN in the past few years
ESNI is "Encrypted SNI", ECH is "Encrypted Client Hello". The Client Hello packet contains the SNI. For a time ESNI was available on all Cloudflare sites. Not anymore. ESNI, whatever its flaws, worked well enough that some censorship regimes blocked connections that used it. IMHO, ESNI and ECH are overcomplicated proposed solutions to a relatively simple problem: gratuitous use of SNI. For example, so-called "modern" browsers will send SNI to those 1,620+ sites even though it's not required
Alas, the people developing ESNI and ECH are not publishers or readers, the targets of censorship. They are "CDNs", hosting companies, intermediaries in the business of serving multiple HTTPS sites on single IP addresses. SNI has benefits for CDNs and costs for others
Is this still true, or has it become a truism? It seems nations like Iran and China (and events like Kashmir come to mind) have progressed the state-of-the-art and playbook to where we can't actually say it definitively will route around it.
Now seeing that the US and EU are flirting with these similar restrictions it's making me wonder how we'll be able to keep hold of these principles.
Maybe my concern with that adage is ultimately its passive voice, since it takes 'active' action by people to give us those options, and will probably take more actions by more people to keep it alive now.
Things China can't do: Magically "downgrade", "decrypt" or "intercept" the secure protocols we use every day like HTTPS. Facts won't budge, the technology we are using does what it says on the tin.
The Internet can't route around you being thrown off a tall building by men with guns, but the IETF has for some years considered it to be extremely important to design the network protocols to prevent these shenanigans. BCP # 188 "Pervasive Monitoring is An Attack"
Normal people don’t care about “downgrade” or “decrypt” or “intercept” they care about availability.
But of course the easiest approved “VPN” is just data roaming.
You're describing exactly the opposite of what I found to be the facts on the ground. My connection to a residential address in the United States was allowed for a couple of days at a hostel, then blocked. It was never allowed over (Chinese) mobile data.
But it was completely fine over the internet service to my apartment. The home internet service and the mobile service were provided by the same company in a bundled plan. I was always curious what they were doing.
They aren't stupid, they're not going to insta-block everything they can detect, giving away clues to people trying to evade it.
If there's civil unrest, they can of course essentially turn off the internet, but there's a distinction between "the internet can route around censorship" and "the internet can be blocked in its entirety (or near entirety)"
Doesn’t require cracking crypto or any funny business around forcing people to install stuff.
Furthermore, doing any of the things you listed would isolate all legitimate network traffic as well as any undesirable traffic, fully shuttering all Chinese manufacturing businesses from global requests via the web. This hat would happen then? Phone calls, emails, and even physical mail would become the new norm and most of the Chinese economy would collapse under the weight of not being able to hop on a Zoom with a client that wants tooling made for its aluminum manufacturing molds.
So besides my point of the black market your hypothesis of total control misses all the other pressures that exist that make what you’re proposing infeasible on its face. Only a place like North Korea that is willing to be a pariah state is old be willing to take the economic and social costs associated with your proposal, and they’ve only been able to do that because their abominable regime was in place before the internet existed and they pre-built controls very late in the game.
Tl;dr simply because a country _could_ do something doesn’t mean it’s realistic for reasons outside of basic networking concepts.
I mean... They could, though, no? If they control the gateways they could drop any traffic that isn't encrypted with some root cert that allows them to decrypt in transit packets.
I'm sure that works in a Hollywood movie, in the same way you could reverse the polarity of the lasers to enable you to travel inside the computer from a household video projector, or decrypt all the world's telephone calls using a device built into your batmobile - but this isn't a Hollywood movie and so traffic isn't in fact "encrypted with a root cert".
If for any of a variety of reasons the Chinese authorities don't want your connection to exist they'll terminate the connection, exactly as I described in my earlier comment.
So there is a route around censorship, but maybe the public doesn't really care about it.
People with more first hand experience can probably explain it better but it doesn’t seem that strict. China is not North Korea, their aims seem less about preventing people from learning about the world and more preventing non compliant foreign tech companies having Chinese users.
During the World Cup (2022, still zero covid in China), they started blurring out the crowd because people were noticing that nobody in the stands was wearing masks. They’d been told that the zero covid policy and draconian lockdowns were keeping them safe, and outside China was a Covid hell-hole. Protests followed four months later.
Nobody in China was told about western covid vaccines, much less allowed to get them.
VPNs aren’t widely used — there was a study posted here some months ago that estimated VPN use at around 1% of the population, too little to matter.
That’s why they’re a bit lax. They can afford to let some through to grease the wheels of commerce. You do have to be seriously unlucky to get into trouble.
(I was there during Covid, and some years before and after)
I suppose Utah could impose some sort of strategy here, but would be so burdensome and anti-American I’m not sure they could pull it off. Instead of a blacklist of sites dictated by the site provider, you go the other way where all Utah ISPs maintain a whitelist of IPs permitted to Utah citizens. Any traffic attempting to reach a non-white listed IP, would be rejected.
The layer 2 and 3 of ISO/OSI stack does indeed "route around censorship". But the Internet as we know it is all Layer 7, and it's as centralized as it gets.
That's why regulators often aim straight at Layer 7 entities - companies providing consumer services over the web. Because no matter how unblockable the route between you and some server is, it doesn't mean anything when the server itself is refusing to talk to you.
It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their laws. We make technology that completely nullifies their laws. They need to increase their tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end state is either a totalitarian government or an uncontrollable population.
I used to think that we'd find some kind of equilibrium along the way, that we'd eventually discover the government's limits: some principle they refuse to break, some line they refuse to cross...
But the truth is these tyrants have no limits whatsoever. They'll stop at nothing in their quest to control the flow of information.
A VPN/proxy could exist at almost any single address at any given time.
> “I sometimes joke that we might as well turn the Ministry of Communications and the Supreme Council of Cyberspace into amusement parks, because they will no longer serve any purpose,” Hakami said.
https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/iran-official-says-starlink-...
To a large degree, most of the internet today is ultimately controlled by a few people. If what you have to say pisses off these people, and someone is determined to keep you off the internet, you have a problem. Kiwi Farms is a well known example, and continues to suffer under regular DDOS attacks. Regardless of how you feel about KF, it's undeniable that a) this nonsense has streissanded the site enormously and b) it's speech you don't like that needs protection.
Also there was the whole covid "misinformation" garbage fire... I certainly do not want my government or some megacorp to decide what can and can't say or read.
And going beyond the internet, I just want to remind you Americans, that your 1st amendment is almost unique (to my knowledge). Enjoy and protect your offensive, hateful, blasphemous, extremist, and deeply unpopular speech.
Idk why people think it’s a good idea to force everyone to provide their id to jerk off.
How is that not a blatant first amendment violation?
Under state and common law at the time many kinds of speech were routinely regulated or even criminalized, such as defamation and blasphemy.
Or at least it shouldn't.
It wasn't until the 14th amendment that the constitution started overriding state constitutions/laws.
Idaho did in fact add additional ink to the freedom of speech [1]. In fact this is why so many states have a bill of rights similar to the federal constitution in their own constitutions.
[1] https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idconst/ArtI/Sec...
The obvious enhancement is for the metadata to be a little more specific about the content, making it easier for them to just provide facts without making a judgment about whether the content is "appropriate" in any given jurisdiction/household/etc. Most obviously, we might want to treat medical images and historic art separately.
And because this mechanism would enable guardians to set up reasonably-effective automated censorship for the vulnerable humans in their care without requiring that they provide any information about those humans to any third parties, neither big "social media" companies nor the politicians into whose ears they whisper want anything to do with it.
https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20080714_RL33224_1e6b93...
This Utah law requires perfection.
So in theory sites could block all VPN users (if you can somehow "perfectly (1) detect VPN/proxy users"), but if the law necessitates that nationally/globally then it's unconstitutional anyway. It's the age assuring of VPN-users specifically from Utah part that Utah are relying on being possible for the law the be constitutional.
A VPN/proxy could exist on any given IP address at any time, which the California law recognizes but the Utah law does not.
Heck, Lowes and BestBuy are pretty unusable in general via VPN already.. (or maybe due to ublock, or privacy badger or eff, etc.. :-)
Unfortunately know this because a gambler friend showed me.
https://www.pastpaperhero.com/resources/state-v-gibson-36-in...
This law did not "almost pass" but actually passed and remained in force till 1967.
You think they wouldn't try to fuck with pi?
Seems like we need a fundamental challenge to the concept that you have any jurisdiction whatsoever.
Utah is one of a few states that bans gambling. It is logically consistent for them to want to prevent people from using VPNs while in Utah to get around that to do things like access gambling websites, sports books, or prediction markets.
That said, it is fairly difficult (and almost impossible for self-made VPNs/tunnels...). The court was right, but it kind of sucks for Utah in this case. They should have the right in some way to uphold their gambling laws.
Sorry, but if you haven't seen how bad some people and places can be when it comes to that stuff, you probably won't get why.
EDIT: HN is ratelimiting my ability to reply to replies again, for some reason, so my response follows:
Yes, but they have the uncomfortable reality of having to police (I mean in the classical, community way, not an Orwellian way) the results of it -- with resources that are scarecely available, or unavailable. Crime goes up, domestic violence increases, rowdiness and noise complaints go up, fights increase, addiction increases, money problems and lenders get involved....
I never liked social issues being called "public health" issues but in some cases, where things are literally outlawed and more than a certain amount of people with certain predilections take advantage of opportunities to skirt the law more than a few times, it sort of becomes so...
Which usually means less other kinds of freedoms for the rest of the people in that location. Some places I have lived with large online gambling populations have been frankly disturbing.
They still have the right to legislate, just not the technical capability to enforce.
Doesn't help your arm, but when they're asking for things in that second category, it doesn't help them either.
Would you have an issue with a law banning municipalities from displaying "anti-pride" flags? Why should taxpayer funds be directed to these types of causes?
I still suspect there's some kind of solution. Like Utah could tell VPN providers that if they service a customer in Utah then the VPN provider can't route traffic to adult sites. Or put the burden on the VPN provider to do age verification if porn is gonna be available through the VPN.
Come to think of it, I'm still a bit confused as to why VPNs are even relevant because it would seem to me that age verification would be done through some kind of having-credit-card type scheme which VPNs are entirely irrelevant to. I even read the article and I'm still confused. Oh well.
| An individual is considered to be accessing the website from this state if the individual is actually located in the state, regardless of whether the individual is using a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to disguise or misrepresent the individual's geographic location to make it appear that the individual is accessing a website from a location outside this state.
But how can any site check if a client is a) a VPN client (typically this can be known because VPN exit node IPs can be learned), __and__ b) in Utah?
The impossibility lies in (b). Effectively this forces any affected companies having a nexus to the state of Utah to forbid VPN clients. I think that's a bit too far-reaching. It would be much more practicable instead to ask VPNs to disallow Utah client exits to affected sites w/o age checks -- VPN services aren't free, so VPNs basically can do age checks.
Given that this could have been written to be feasibly implemented, either this text was written to cause a controversy, or this text was written by people who don't know how things work. Either way, this text cannot be enforceable as written. The Utah legislature can easily modify this to be enforceable (see above), so it's not like a court striking this down might be playing partisan games just by striking it down.
It's impossible to have perfect knowledge of the entire set of VPN exit node addresses.
You need to understand that my branch considers Catholicism to be a pagan shame and the Mormons an actual sex cult. We just don't talk about our differences anymore because it always ended in death.
It's like I thought the Gospel Church in Northern Ireland would have better music. Turns out not.
The bit starts at 2:00
If you're ever in San Francisco, Grace Cathedral is worth a visit.
The gist is that LDS members believe that the Bible is true when it has been correctly translated. But that's a gap big enough to drive a truck through. There are some very real irreconcilable differences between the Bible and the Book of Mormon.
For example, Mormons believe in the practice of "sealing"[0], which is basically marriage that lasts for eternity. However, Jesus himself explicitly says in the Bible[1] that this isn't so:
> The same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Him and asked Him, saying: “Teacher, Moses said that if a man dies, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were with us seven brothers. The first died after he had married, and having no offspring, left his wife to his brother. Likewise the second also, and the third, even to the seventh. Last of all the woman died also. Therefore, in the resurrection, whose wife of the seven will she be? For they all had her.” Jesus answered and said to them, “You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels of God in heaven.
Personally, it seems exceedingly unlikely to me that each one of the translations on the linked page are wrong in exactly the same way.
Anyway, that's why lots of LDS will say that they're Christians. If asked, they believe that the Bible is true where correctly translated, but in my (admittedly) limited experience, not many of them as a percentage have actually read the Bible themselves to know what it actually says about this. It's also why a lot of Christians say that LDS are not: they believe in lots of things that are not in the Bible, and believe that the Bible we have today has lots of mistakes.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealing_(Mormonism)
[1]https://www.bible.com/bible/compare/MAT.22.23-30
NB: I'm not staking an opinion on any of this, or taking sides on the matter. I'm offering this in the same sense that I might share something I learned in history class about the French Revolution. It's interesting to read and learn about, but doesn't directly affect me and it's not anything I want to participate in. Especially do not take this chance to explain to me why the whole "left his wife to his brother" thing is f'ed up by modern standards.
It surprises me that Americans are so untrusting of Mormonism since it's such a quintessentially new world religion. You'd think that a ruthlessly capitalist and hierarchical brand of Christianity where the center of God's kingdom isn't someplace in the Middle East but the United States would appeal to American exceptionalism. They even banned black people and called them cursed by God until the 1970s. Mormonism embodies the American zeitgeist more fully than any old-world religion, it's a wonder it isn't more popular.
Maybe it's the magic underwear that creeps people out?
It also seems to me like Utah could just demand that adult sites only accept traffic from residential ips.
Utah can't tell businesses that service the country (or the world) how to do anything in this regard. You can't demand a list of the VPN exit nodes, because no VPN would ever give you that, and if they're outside of your jurisdiction, how could you possibly enforce it (assuming you got the Feds to agree with your law regulating interstate/international commerce now). You can't tell websites to only accept residential traffic, for the same reasons.
The internet sorta fucks states rights (in a good way).
Besides, there's no such thing as "residential" IPs. If I set a VPN gate at my mum's house, how would the porn company know?
The "impossibility" is in them saying "we cannot guarantee with 100% certainty that the user isn't using a VPN" and that's correct, they can't - but the law has no provision for that, they are risking fines over something they cannot control.