Reminds me of a funny story of how russian government faced the same paradox, and they solved it in the most elegant way – all foreign traffic equals VPN, all foreign traffic is forbidden. Russian people outside of russia literallt can't access state services without a "reverse-vpn" now.
If you think they will stop at a mere "technical impossibility" I have bad news for you folks, they will just ban all the traffic they can't track, in Utah, UK, anywhere;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
If anybody is monitoring traffic patterns to this extent, it's not public knowledge. Even the NSA is unlikely to see traffic from one house to another in the same neighbourhood. And nobody except top terrorists gets prosecuted based on NSA intel because they have to reveal how they got the intel.
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.
> 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?
Nothing. Making laws that are impossible to comply with, then selectively enforcing them, is a favourite tactic of fascism because it allows you to imprison anyone you want, arbitrarily.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Well no, because the laws for ISPs and VPNs are different.
Most ISPs are already VPNs. Your connection is tunneled from your router at home, through some expansive DSL/ATM or GPON/PPPoE network, to a box at a data center that serves five neighborhoods with a single link by establishing a tunnel to each individual consumer router.
But the ISP has to make sure the geolocation databases have accurate information about it, and it has to retain logs of which user used which IP address at which time because the law says so. That's why it's not a "VPN".
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.
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.
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
You’re just rephrasing the problem and pretending that it makes your point for you. The parties aren’t magical hydras, they’re made of people running mostly their own campaigns and when they mess up badly states flip. See: Doug Jones in Alabama.
You’re also missing the entire dimension of primaries in which there’s intra-party competition. Honestly you’re missing more or less everything.
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.
1. There are laws already. It is an enforcement problem.
2. The Epstein-type crimes appear to be more prevalent in other branches of government and other parts of society than specifically in the legislative.
3. Enforcement problem is specifically in the executive, of which enforcement is a part.
I'm actually surprised that's the case. I'm not opposed to a willing adult making or consuming pornography, but honestly I don't see how most of it does not "appeal to the prurient interest" and "lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
That only leaves whether the material is "patently offensive" which is probably what is most open to interpretation.
This case is not the end of the saga -- it just defined the "Miller test" which established a three-pronged definition of obscenity. This test itself reads like an anachronism to any modern viewer. Subsequent cases further narrowed the definition of speech that can be restricted.
Ultimately, this is purely about the first amendment (which is why we learn it in high school). The fundamental principle is that the definition of "community standards" matters a great deal, and if you define obscenity too broadly, it becomes a loophole for censorship of all kinds.
Said differently, the fact that you don't see redeeming value to some form of speech is kind of the point. There are three hundred million other people with opinions in the USA, and if we let all of them have a say in what speech gets labeled offensive, then freedom of speech and expression is a farce. Only when you set extremely stringent standards for limitations on free expression - even when it is offensive to you - can you have a society where free expression is a right.
(For what it's worth, most cases about porn and the first amendment make very convincing counterarguments on the points you take for granted, as you might expect for arguments at the Supreme Court.)
Other lawfare has already stripped constitutional protection from this particular speech - judges unanimously agree the first amendment doesn't protect "obscenity" even though it clearly does by its wording.
As a lifelong student of religious cultures like Utah's (and often in particular Utah's), this isn't bad at a first approximation but could be elaborated better.
There is absolutely a class of Utah politicians that has little sincere personal investment in purity culture and associated culture war issues, but knows that they can be used for ingroup/virtue signaling. They also know that the dominant religious culture in Utah prepares the most significant statewide voting block to respond to such culture issues far more powerfully than any kind of attempt to engage on policy or detailed dialogue. This isn't that different from a common general strategy of running on symbolic issues and then devoting your time in office to favor trading/personal gain plus occasional personal pet policy issues, but the particular flavor is regional with a strong religious emphasis.
But there's also significant portion of regional religious leadership and membership with sincerely held purity culture beliefs. Some of this is rooted in psychological traits amplified via theology where adherents achieve a perceived state of purity/redemption by cleansing rituals and avoiding contaminants. Some of this is rooted in credences: the tradition makes moral claims about sexual contaminants and you have to sign on to be part of the ingroup (and also the tradition's leaders speak for God and are therefore wrong and if you challenge them you're not just outgroup, you're actually challenging the authority of the tradition which makes you opposed to God himself, so from this perspective there's little legitimate discourse about sexuality topics leaders have spoken about, there's mostly authority of religious leaders and individuals declaring of which side of the spiritual war they're on).
So, some people shaped under this culture over time do believe they are fighting crucial battles for the children, to the point where they have no problem with the erosion or even destruction of any secular treaties like those the 1st amendment supports (the fact that Latter-day Saints are quite vulnerable should secular treaties fall in a nation of much larger religious organizations that see LDS as blasphemous heretics is largely lost on most of the porn crusaders, there are some peculiar delusions that come with being a local majority with some national clout yet a national minority nonetheless).
And others know this sincere belief is a convenient lever for other power plays, and all you have to do is flatter the prejudices and signals of the ingroup in order to get broad permission for corruption and other antisocial advances.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 ) .
There is some of the bean to bar variety. Very different price class, though.
I'd also guess (not know, haven't researched that area at all) that some of the fair trade and similar certified labels you can find even in supermarkets have a good enough control for that.
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.
This is perhaps the clearest example of whataboutism I have ever seen. Sure, the porn industry is nasty, but have you seen the chocolate industry? Let's talk about that instead!
In this case it’s not because this subthread is specifically about comparing abuse levels in other industries and further whether the product should be banned or the abusive practice should be investigated and eliminated.
> 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
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Let’s replace a few categories of your argument and see how your logic holds up.
”This is not the claim. The claim is that, empirically, many (or enough) of the men who end up in construction jobs 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 construction workers are just willing adults doing something they want to do, but there are many who are not.
You could replace construction with mining or fishing or factory work. It’s pretty clear to me that outlawing fishing jobs isn’t going to solve the problem of forced labor.
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.
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...
It does. This whole logical train of thoughts just fall apart without extremely sexist premises, disregard of agency and human rights and tons of other stuffs. It probably don't even support ideas of toxic masculinity for heterosexual males. It's just mild insanity.
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.
> For the rest, we sre just adults, we should know what to do.
We should. Yet a significant portion of mental health issues would be solved if psychiatry provided mother as a service: Teach interpersonal skills and to take care of yourself. They don't teach that stuff in school and parenting is a hit-or-miss.
The world indeed is what it is and your diagnosis is spot on: Most people didn't become adults as defined by being able to make consistently good decisions without support. Can either let them hang themselves or infantilize just a bit to let most dodge the worst pitfalls.
Don't really have a strong personal opinion on where the pragmatic optimum is, but surely a long way before banning porn. Tangentially it'd be far more ideal if that pragmatic optimum could cater to the ideal adult without catastrophic social consequences, but that'd literally be a generational effort.
- 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).
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.
> 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?
Birth rates are down. And you used "traditional Halloween party", yes that's what you think happens traditionally, but what if you just opened cosplay category on Pornhub and didn't go to the party to meet your potential mate? Seems easier right? That's what they are getting at.
It's not a full replacement, but it's enough to keep people content with the status quo.
Halloween has only been a major, marketed holiday for the millennials and later generations. As late as the beginning of the 1980s it was a kids’ holiday only for most of America. Spirit Halloween was founded in 1983; 80s horror films (like Halloween) helped build the holiday for adults.
Traditional ways of meeting a spouse don’t involve slutty costumes at once-a-year parties (Halloween is not a spouse-selection fertility festival), but family, church, and neighborhood connections that build over spans of time in 3d. Sometimes HN seems to miss slow, complex, physical-world interactions because of a focus on modeling transaction-like events or instants (like parties).
> Halloween has only been a major, marketed holiday for the millennials and later generation. Spirit Halloween was founded in 1983; 80s horror films (like Halloween) helped build the holiday for adults.
The people who were in college in the 1980s aren't millennials. If you were 22 in 1983 then you were born in 1961. That's not even Gen X, that's a boomer.
And Halloween in particular isn't really the point anyway. The decade associated with topless hippies and free love was before the 1980s. The Romans would dispute the notion that this sort of thing is a recent development.
> Traditional ways of meeting a spouse don’t involve slutty costumes at once-a-year parties (Halloween is not a spouse-selection fertility festival), but family, church, and neighborhood connections that build over spans of time in 3d.
The issue being that the neighbors are no longer renting a hall to have local discussion meetings because that sort of thing now happens on Facebook. And then if Facebook is a place where non-platonic sentiment gets you a ban, what happens?
> what if you just opened cosplay category on Pornhub and didn't go to the party to meet your potential mate?
The thing about imposing content restrictions via corporate intermediaries is that they're not that selective. If you're not banning cleavage and innuendo from the mass market services then they become the funnel to OnlyFans and escort services, but if you are then the result is a de facto ban on real people flirting with each other because they're afraid of having their account locked.
Consider what "chilling effects" implies in the context of sexual expressiveness.
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.
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.
I’ll take “Things You Learn In Introduction to Logic” for 500, Alex.
In places where supposedly most of the people are in engineering or software, I’m surprised how often 1) people have to point this out, 2) people are willing to loudly pronounce their lack of basic logical skills.
Religion acts as a mechanism for perpetuating and giving social acceptability to certain kinds of bigotry. If it didn’t exist, it’d be much more difficult to justify that kind of bigotry.
Institutionalized Othering, literally. This is my in group and we spend every Sunday morning talking about everybody else. Sometimes with extra separate classes for the children.
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.
There's basically no country that hasn't done at least one holocaust in recent history. They happen wayyyyyy more than you'd think. We just don't care about most of them. It's the same reason almost all politicians support Israel - nothing that's happening there is different from anything they want to do or have done in their own countries.
I don't mean that I think nations will start harassing "foreign" religions, but that someone is going to redefine the concept of religions and draws some line as to what parts of it a civilized nation could tolerate; there are dictator's autobiographies that are legal to possess, read or study all you want, as speeches, but not to follow or to worship. What I'm thinking is that similar thing might happen to religious materials and organizations.
I don't think it is a good idea to operate a society totally on the basis of reason. Religion exists as a framework for people rationalize their intuitions.
That being said, I don't think religion as we know it will be a powerful force in the future, so there will be little reason to persecute the religious. The framework of religion is built to deal with perrenial problems of human nature, and we are in a dynamic time. People may not see religion as adequate for answering modern questions
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.
So you produce pornography? Does your mother produce pornography? How about your sister or father or grandmother, do they produce pornography? So you consume their pornography since just regular and normal human nature?
What about pornography…the concentrated, focused depiction of sex acts…makes it human nature to you?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's fears of bots and there's actual bots. My custom WAF blocks 500 requests per second, and let's through 2. There should be nearly zero false positives with the detection method I'm using.
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.
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.
except it is literally a VPN, actually. That's why it would have that characteristic. Except actually it wouldn't, because the test described only catches proxies at L4 and higher. It would catch a lot of CGNATs.
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.)
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.
>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. The law’s “actual-location provision in practice requires an entity to perform age verification services for every user visiting its site from any location because the entity would violate the law if even one of those users happened to be obfuscating,” the court wrote.
In order to withdraw from Utah, they would be forced to block traffic from everywhere since it's possible that some kid in Utah used a VPN to make it look like they lived in Singapore.
It’s really simple, require Utah to remove all their land lines satellite dishes and towers. Anyone found connecting to the internet from Utah and you fine the state of Utah
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”.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The better question is can you ensure your traffic doesn't get funneled to utah? The answer is probably not. There is a huge nsa data center there... So it's not even a choice, it's do both impossible things.
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).
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
Sometimes HN commenters will mistakenly believe or perhaps intentionally try to pretend that ECH is in widespread use and has replaced plaintext CH
However the truth is that ECH is generally not being used by HTTPS websites. CH is generally not encrypted and _easy_ surveilllance and/or censorship via SNI continues to work
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Do you write anywhere about your time there during covid? Seeing a foreigner's perspective during that time would be fascinating.
That's some interesting info anyways if not. It's funny that the absolute number of VPN users is large but negligible compared to the overall population.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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"
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
“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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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)"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably just differing equipment. The Great Firewall isn't one giant firewall, it's just the sum total of a million different "plug in for censorship" rack-mount boxes, from several different brands, plugged into ISPs all over the country.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
> nations like Iran and China have progressed the state-of-the-art and playbook
That’s a rather shallow and naive perspective. I’ll try to keep this short, but the overt blocking oriented “censorship” ascribed to China, Iran, or Israel is actually not at all “state-of-the-art”, it’s an inherent rather coarse approach to censorship.
If you want the true “state-of-the-art“ you can look no farther than the USA, where the “state-of-the-art” is such that people don’t even realize it’s censorship, let alone that anything is happening at all.
China, Iran, or Israel may or may not engage in censorship at a kind of high level that is apparent and observable; however the censorship in the USA and by extension in its various vassals of its empire, is far more sophisticated and base level to such a degree that the system, the whole society is the censorship mechanism, censorship is not something done to the system, the system is the censorship. That is “state-of-the-art”!
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.
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?
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.
They don't care about education, they don't even care about consumption of content. They just want a Trojan Horse ("it's for the safety of our children!") in order to accustom people to censorship.
also the whole point of having .el is to be outside US jurisdiction so the US can't mess with their domains except for cutting off the whole country (which would splinter the internet).
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.
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.
> 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.
Easy, no one seems to care about nude men so all you need is an indication of the range of women's skin shown
* Face showing - banned in middle Eastern Muslim countries
* Bellies showing - banned in south east Asian Muslim countries
* Ankle showing - banned in India
* Shoulders showing - banned in catholic countries
* ...
* Nipples showing - banned in US
* Genitals showing - banned in Japan
* Personal name mentioned without a personal data release form - banned in Germany
* (End of list)
If necessary can be supplemented by a range of the commonly accepted levels of male nudity
* Any skin showing - banned in Vatican
* Penis showing - banned in US
* (End of list)
So we have a binary numerical code, or a ternary if you add also practices (ranging probably from female eye contact with the camera and male-female touching over male-male intimacy up to bestiality).
(Hope clear that this is sarcasm.. do not build the torment nexus!)
You can use different codes to specify what the page contains. Airlines support more meal codes than they actually stock because meals for multiple categories - every VGML (vegan) meal is valid for someone who requests VOML (vegetarian with eggs and milk allowed). And every page with no human skin showing is valid for someone whose filtering rules are no skin except the face!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rice v. Paladin Enterprises, it isn’t automatically first amendment protected to tell people how to effectively commit crimes. It isnt open and shut, but the first amendment isn’t a get out of jail free card.
> Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech
Note that it does not define what that means. At the same time, it is well established that some forms of speech do come with consequences. I'm sure you can think of commonly accepted examples.
Laws do not exist outside of courts who interpret them. They made an extra court to do that for the constitution. That's a feature!
Reality is fuzzy. The problem with insisting on "verbatim" readings of texts is that there is always wiggle room and edge cases, and nobody can agree on what that one, true reading is.
So, yeah, the first amendment might not say what you think it says, because it only says what it says, and not what it does, because it can only say, and it takes people to do.
What's the point of having a constitution if things you think should be illegal can just be redefined to not be covered by it? The constitution was supposed to provide hard red lines.
I can only repeat what I wrote before: There are no hard red lines, only mostly hard, mostly red, and mostly straight lines, not in law, and not even when looking at literal lines that somebody drew or printed.
Trying to define something simple and universally applicable is a fool's errand, because people will disagree, and even if it's just you, reality will hit you with exceptions and curveballs if you look hard or wait long enough.
The point of the constitution is not to satisfy a need for simple, unchangeable rules that need no interpretation whatsoever.
If you look for the point of the constitution, here's one explanation from the horse's mouth:
> We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It's ground rules. They will necessarily require interpretation, as all rules do. What that interpretation should be and how far it should go is part of that, and has been ongoing ever since, as would be expected.
"The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia." - Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Minister (at the time) of Australia
It's so that, when judgement day comes, our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth has a concrete record of what you've been doing with your semen. It's very important, you see. God's work, even.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.. :-)
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."
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).
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.
> 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?
It's not about veto power, it's about consulting technical experts to evaluate whether the legal proposal even makes sense. The EU Cyber Resilience Act is a good example: experts stepped in and made sure that the term "supplier" was accurately defined so some random Joe Shmoe could not be held liable for bugs in some piece of code he threw over the wall on GitHub. The law still got passed, but after being refined.
What if the technical experts tell the legislators something they don’t want to hear? Do you think the legislators will just go along with a bunch of egghead nay-sayers? Their constituents/donors/special-interests are demanding action!
What makes you think an "expert" was not consulted on this? Experts can be wrong too, regardless of credentials. That's why AI should be used to review and critique all new laws going forward, in order to prevent such mistakes from being made law. Hard /s, btw.
> it's about consulting technical experts to evaluate whether the legal proposal even makes sense
And that often comes down to people realising that they need to engage those experts. Instead many just assume "it makes sense to me, with the thinking I've done about it" means that it definitely actualy makes sense.
Also sometimes the very cynical view is true: people know technical experts will pick holes in something, so they find a way to rush it through quickly to not allow the chance for that. Sometimes they are quite honest about this with arguments based in "not letting perfect be the enemy of good". Once a rule is in place it then becomes someone else's problem to undo it, or at least fix the technical problems in-place. Meanwhile those that got it through get credit from those who agree with the emotive argument, and also don't care about the technical details & accidental implications, credit that they can try use to further the cause or their career.
I think ultimately we're headed for locked device attestation for age and physical location, and legislation like this is going to be a driving force. If that wasn't bad enough, I think most people are ultimately in favor of this. The future is bleak.
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.
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.
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.
It's not practical because IPs are routed in blocks, and this is necessary for efficiency. Otherwise every single router on the internet would have to remember the locations of up to 100 billion connections, and when the internet surpasses this size every router will need to be replaced.
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.
If you are rate limited it's because the algorithm believes you are a person who habitually spams bad content. Accounts start out un-limited. Once an account is limited it is not possible to get un-limited.
> Yes, but they have the uncomfortable reality of having to police the results of it
I'm not against adding some friction to certain behavior deemed undesirable by society, but at the end of the day people are going to do what they will. Vice predates the Internet by thousands of years and will not and can not be "solved" by technical means.
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".
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
| 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.
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.
Reminds me of a funny story of how russian government faced the same paradox, and they solved it in the most elegant way – all foreign traffic equals VPN, all foreign traffic is forbidden. Russian people outside of russia literallt can't access state services without a "reverse-vpn" now.
If you think they will stop at a mere "technical impossibility" I have bad news for you folks, they will just ban all the traffic they can't track, in Utah, UK, anywhere;)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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?
"Suspicious" is not illegal, and neither is hosting.
Why would that be suspicious?
If anybody is monitoring traffic patterns to this extent, it's not public knowledge. Even the NSA is unlikely to see traffic from one house to another in the same neighbourhood. And nobody except top terrorists gets prosecuted based on NSA intel because they have to reveal how they got the intel.
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.
> 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?
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.
Common sense on the part of the judge presumably. Best effort and common practice will enter into it. Lots of regulation is like that.
Nothing. Making laws that are impossible to comply with, then selectively enforcing them, is a favourite tactic of fascism because it allows you to imprison anyone you want, arbitrarily.
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.
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
My home internet is on a CGNAT, so I experience a lot of the same. Ironically, sometimes a VPN will get through.
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.
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.
It's almost always in the same /24.
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.
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.
> 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.
One of the positive side effects of smart TV proxies: IP addresses become useless information.
> 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.
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.
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.
Next it will be illegal for anyone to visit an adult website from some states, even with proof of age, kinda like Prohibition..
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
Our politicians are affected by the same destabilising forces so that won't happen.
All it would take is for a major ISP in Utah to route everyone through a VPN, and boom, it's the same picture.
Yeah but the state of Utah could just tell them to knock it off because they're the state.
Isn't this kind of what Apple's Private Relay is?
Well no, because the laws for ISPs and VPNs are different.
Most ISPs are already VPNs. Your connection is tunneled from your router at home, through some expansive DSL/ATM or GPON/PPPoE network, to a box at a data center that serves five neighborhoods with a single link by establishing a tunnel to each individual consumer router.
But the ISP has to make sure the geolocation databases have accurate information about it, and it has to retain logs of which user used which IP address at which time because the law says so. That's why it's not a "VPN".
I don't think that's how it works.
It's hard to find a proxy or VPN that isn't flagged as such. People pay extra for residential proxies.
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.
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 ….
It's all just an effort to control the 90%.
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.
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.
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”
Break into your comma? Google-fu is letting me down on this one
I assume auto correct for “coms” or “communications”?
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
You’re just rephrasing the problem and pretending that it makes your point for you. The parties aren’t magical hydras, they’re made of people running mostly their own campaigns and when they mess up badly states flip. See: Doug Jones in Alabama.
You’re also missing the entire dimension of primaries in which there’s intra-party competition. Honestly you’re missing more or less everything.
It's lawfare against Constitutionally-protected speech. The "for the children" bit is just an appeal to emotion.
/Same as it ever was
It’s to control their Women
Kids are the misdirection
Please elaborate on how a law that targets websites that overwhelmingly skew towards a male audience is designed to “control their women”.
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.
> limit what women did with their bodies (on camera, for money)
like how murder laws limit what women did with their bodies (strangling people to death, with their hands)
Murder isn't a voluntary trade.
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.
EP class are the lawmakers so good luck with that...
Your comment is a bit inaccurate.
1. There are laws already. It is an enforcement problem.
2. The Epstein-type crimes appear to be more prevalent in other branches of government and other parts of society than specifically in the legislative.
3. Enforcement problem is specifically in the executive, of which enforcement is a part.
>The Epstein-type crimes appear to be more prevalent in other branches of government and other parts of society than specifically in the legislative.
Based on what?
> It's lawfare against Constitutionally-protected speech.
Obscenity is not protected as Free Speech.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/413/15/
...and porn isn't automatically obscenity. In fact, it rarely is. C'mon, this is the fundamental outcome of the case you're citing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v._California
We learn about this in high school.
I'm actually surprised that's the case. I'm not opposed to a willing adult making or consuming pornography, but honestly I don't see how most of it does not "appeal to the prurient interest" and "lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
That only leaves whether the material is "patently offensive" which is probably what is most open to interpretation.
This case is not the end of the saga -- it just defined the "Miller test" which established a three-pronged definition of obscenity. This test itself reads like an anachronism to any modern viewer. Subsequent cases further narrowed the definition of speech that can be restricted.
Ultimately, this is purely about the first amendment (which is why we learn it in high school). The fundamental principle is that the definition of "community standards" matters a great deal, and if you define obscenity too broadly, it becomes a loophole for censorship of all kinds.
Said differently, the fact that you don't see redeeming value to some form of speech is kind of the point. There are three hundred million other people with opinions in the USA, and if we let all of them have a say in what speech gets labeled offensive, then freedom of speech and expression is a farce. Only when you set extremely stringent standards for limitations on free expression - even when it is offensive to you - can you have a society where free expression is a right.
(For what it's worth, most cases about porn and the first amendment make very convincing counterarguments on the points you take for granted, as you might expect for arguments at the Supreme Court.)
I would claim that the vast majority of people in private don't believe the majority of porn is offensive
Other lawfare has already stripped constitutional protection from this particular speech - judges unanimously agree the first amendment doesn't protect "obscenity" even though it clearly does by its wording.
As a lifelong student of religious cultures like Utah's (and often in particular Utah's), this isn't bad at a first approximation but could be elaborated better.
There is absolutely a class of Utah politicians that has little sincere personal investment in purity culture and associated culture war issues, but knows that they can be used for ingroup/virtue signaling. They also know that the dominant religious culture in Utah prepares the most significant statewide voting block to respond to such culture issues far more powerfully than any kind of attempt to engage on policy or detailed dialogue. This isn't that different from a common general strategy of running on symbolic issues and then devoting your time in office to favor trading/personal gain plus occasional personal pet policy issues, but the particular flavor is regional with a strong religious emphasis.
But there's also significant portion of regional religious leadership and membership with sincerely held purity culture beliefs. Some of this is rooted in psychological traits amplified via theology where adherents achieve a perceived state of purity/redemption by cleansing rituals and avoiding contaminants. Some of this is rooted in credences: the tradition makes moral claims about sexual contaminants and you have to sign on to be part of the ingroup (and also the tradition's leaders speak for God and are therefore wrong and if you challenge them you're not just outgroup, you're actually challenging the authority of the tradition which makes you opposed to God himself, so from this perspective there's little legitimate discourse about sexuality topics leaders have spoken about, there's mostly authority of religious leaders and individuals declaring of which side of the spiritual war they're on).
So, some people shaped under this culture over time do believe they are fighting crucial battles for the children, to the point where they have no problem with the erosion or even destruction of any secular treaties like those the 1st amendment supports (the fact that Latter-day Saints are quite vulnerable should secular treaties fall in a nation of much larger religious organizations that see LDS as blasphemous heretics is largely lost on most of the porn crusaders, there are some peculiar delusions that come with being a local majority with some national clout yet a national minority nonetheless).
And others know this sincere belief is a convenient lever for other power plays, and all you have to do is flatter the prejudices and signals of the ingroup in order to get broad permission for corruption and other antisocial advances.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can see the argument for a “correlation vs causation “ argument, but I’m not a social scientist.
If you change the argument to "can warp the mind of some men", it becomes much harder to falsify.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Fun fact: Japan now has the highest birth rate in East Asia, and everyone knows what it's best known for.
Godzilla?
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.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/alcalc/article/43/2/204/122225?logi...
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.
I agree, but maybe the problem people see with porn is people having that same attitude? "Relax, I don't want to have sex in real life."
I’m quite sure porn impacts what is considered “the norm”.
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.
Some argue it harms all women who participate in, but others argue it harms some women who participate, which seems undeniable.
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).
Almost all activities harm some of the people who participate in them.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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 ) .
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.
Find chocolate that doesn't involve slave labor at some point in it's production and then say that again.
There is some of the bean to bar variety. Very different price class, though.
I'd also guess (not know, haven't researched that area at all) that some of the fair trade and similar certified labels you can find even in supermarkets have a good enough control for that.
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.
This is perhaps the clearest example of whataboutism I have ever seen. Sure, the porn industry is nasty, but have you seen the chocolate industry? Let's talk about that instead!
In this case it’s not because this subthread is specifically about comparing abuse levels in other industries and further whether the product should be banned or the abusive practice should be investigated and eliminated.
> 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
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.
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome
> 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.
> 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.
But that's literally the same with virtually all industries in those regions. Porn isn't some sort of exception
Indeed, but it is treated as an exception in most political discussions
Sounds like call centers. People are trafficked, kidnapped and and forced to work in them, but nobody is trying to ban call centers.
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.
Let’s replace a few categories of your argument and see how your logic holds up.
”This is not the claim. The claim is that, empirically, many (or enough) of the men who end up in construction jobs 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 construction workers are just willing adults doing something they want to do, but there are many who are not.
You could replace construction with mining or fishing or factory work. It’s pretty clear to me that outlawing fishing jobs isn’t going to solve the problem of forced labor.
Never quite understood how that applies to drawn porn or nowadays AI porn.
It also ignores gay porn.
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.
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...
It does. This whole logical train of thoughts just fall apart without extremely sexist premises, disregard of agency and human rights and tons of other stuffs. It probably don't even support ideas of toxic masculinity for heterosexual males. It's just mild insanity.
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.
> For the rest, we sre just adults, we should know what to do.
We should. Yet a significant portion of mental health issues would be solved if psychiatry provided mother as a service: Teach interpersonal skills and to take care of yourself. They don't teach that stuff in school and parenting is a hit-or-miss.
The world indeed is what it is and your diagnosis is spot on: Most people didn't become adults as defined by being able to make consistently good decisions without support. Can either let them hang themselves or infantilize just a bit to let most dodge the worst pitfalls.
Don't really have a strong personal opinion on where the pragmatic optimum is, but surely a long way before banning porn. Tangentially it'd be far more ideal if that pragmatic optimum could cater to the ideal adult without catastrophic social consequences, but that'd literally be a generational effort.
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).
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.
> 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?
Birth rates are down. And you used "traditional Halloween party", yes that's what you think happens traditionally, but what if you just opened cosplay category on Pornhub and didn't go to the party to meet your potential mate? Seems easier right? That's what they are getting at.
It's not a full replacement, but it's enough to keep people content with the status quo.
Halloween has only been a major, marketed holiday for the millennials and later generations. As late as the beginning of the 1980s it was a kids’ holiday only for most of America. Spirit Halloween was founded in 1983; 80s horror films (like Halloween) helped build the holiday for adults.
Traditional ways of meeting a spouse don’t involve slutty costumes at once-a-year parties (Halloween is not a spouse-selection fertility festival), but family, church, and neighborhood connections that build over spans of time in 3d. Sometimes HN seems to miss slow, complex, physical-world interactions because of a focus on modeling transaction-like events or instants (like parties).
> Halloween has only been a major, marketed holiday for the millennials and later generation. Spirit Halloween was founded in 1983; 80s horror films (like Halloween) helped build the holiday for adults.
The people who were in college in the 1980s aren't millennials. If you were 22 in 1983 then you were born in 1961. That's not even Gen X, that's a boomer.
And Halloween in particular isn't really the point anyway. The decade associated with topless hippies and free love was before the 1980s. The Romans would dispute the notion that this sort of thing is a recent development.
> Traditional ways of meeting a spouse don’t involve slutty costumes at once-a-year parties (Halloween is not a spouse-selection fertility festival), but family, church, and neighborhood connections that build over spans of time in 3d.
The issue being that the neighbors are no longer renting a hall to have local discussion meetings because that sort of thing now happens on Facebook. And then if Facebook is a place where non-platonic sentiment gets you a ban, what happens?
> what if you just opened cosplay category on Pornhub and didn't go to the party to meet your potential mate?
The thing about imposing content restrictions via corporate intermediaries is that they're not that selective. If you're not banning cleavage and innuendo from the mass market services then they become the funnel to OnlyFans and escort services, but if you are then the result is a de facto ban on real people flirting with each other because they're afraid of having their account locked.
Consider what "chilling effects" implies in the context of sexual expressiveness.
Yeah both of those arguments would work fine for banning religion, but oddly that is shocking to proponents.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
I’ll take “Things You Learn In Introduction to Logic” for 500, Alex.
In places where supposedly most of the people are in engineering or software, I’m surprised how often 1) people have to point this out, 2) people are willing to loudly pronounce their lack of basic logical skills.
Religion acts as a mechanism for perpetuating and giving social acceptability to certain kinds of bigotry. If it didn’t exist, it’d be much more difficult to justify that kind of bigotry.
Institutionalized Othering, literally. This is my in group and we spend every Sunday morning talking about everybody else. Sometimes with extra separate classes for the children.
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.
There's basically no country that hasn't done at least one holocaust in recent history. They happen wayyyyyy more than you'd think. We just don't care about most of them. It's the same reason almost all politicians support Israel - nothing that's happening there is different from anything they want to do or have done in their own countries.
I don't mean that I think nations will start harassing "foreign" religions, but that someone is going to redefine the concept of religions and draws some line as to what parts of it a civilized nation could tolerate; there are dictator's autobiographies that are legal to possess, read or study all you want, as speeches, but not to follow or to worship. What I'm thinking is that similar thing might happen to religious materials and organizations.
I don't think it is a good idea to operate a society totally on the basis of reason. Religion exists as a framework for people rationalize their intuitions.
That being said, I don't think religion as we know it will be a powerful force in the future, so there will be little reason to persecute the religious. The framework of religion is built to deal with perrenial problems of human nature, and we are in a dynamic time. People may not see religion as adequate for answering modern questions
>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.
They want to protect their local ‘woman’ market, without them having to compete with porn expectations.
So you produce pornography? Does your mother produce pornography? How about your sister or father or grandmother, do they produce pornography? So you consume their pornography since just regular and normal human nature?
What about pornography…the concentrated, focused depiction of sex acts…makes it human nature to you?
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.
https://x.com/moo9000/status/2102726344975040565?s=20
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.
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"
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1osgyg4/the_ofc...
Then we should treat it like Afghanistan or North Korea, which do the same thing: ignore the ridiculous shit they say, and don't go visit.
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.
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.
And still required by Utah law.
> Folks would just host their own vpns various places and this would be pointless
In the real world, very few people have that capability.
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.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit
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.
How many out of state friends and family would you feel comfortable asking to set up a VPN for you so you can watch porn?
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
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.
Chinese people manage. Mostly by knowing someone who has the capability.
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
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.
> 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.
There's fears of bots and there's actual bots. My custom WAF blocks 500 requests per second, and let's through 2. There should be nearly zero false positives with the detection method I'm using.
what's this fool proof method?
I can't share the detection method for obvious reasons.
There’s no such thing as a fool proof method. Anyone who claims there is, is vastly exaggerating their capabilities.
> There's fears of bots and there's actual bots.
They’re not mutually exclusive statements ;)
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.
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.
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.
This will also catch a SIM card in roaming, which is not a VPN.
except it is literally a VPN, actually. That's why it would have that characteristic. Except actually it wouldn't, because the test described only catches proxies at L4 and higher. It would catch a lot of CGNATs.
It seems like withdrawing from Utah is the obvious option
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.)
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.
As the article explains - this was not an option.
>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. The law’s “actual-location provision in practice requires an entity to perform age verification services for every user visiting its site from any location because the entity would violate the law if even one of those users happened to be obfuscating,” the court wrote.
In order to withdraw from Utah, they would be forced to block traffic from everywhere since it's possible that some kid in Utah used a VPN to make it look like they lived in Singapore.
It’s really simple, require Utah to remove all their land lines satellite dishes and towers. Anyone found connecting to the internet from Utah and you fine the state of Utah
But you don't have the power to issue fines, because you are not the state of Utah
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”.
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.
What’s the “this” that isn’t true in what I said? I was responding to
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.
TCP MSS < 1500 bytes can be a tell, although it will sometimes falsely identify non-"VPN" tunnels.
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.
> 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.
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.
Of course it is. Half the services I try to access reject me with a notice saying they don't allow VPNs.
Many VPN providers have servers in many places. Anyone in the US can just use a server in Canada to bypass everything.
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.
Note that as a foreign visitor, the GFW rules are somewhat looser for you.
Literally every TLS connection could be flagged as being a VPN connection.
The better question is can you ensure your traffic doesn't get funneled to utah? The answer is probably not. There is a huge nsa data center there... So it's not even a choice, it's do both impossible things.
"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
To big to fail social media is a problem for this
There's no such thing. None of the current giants were first-generation.
> ... SNI which is a dead simple means of implementing censorship
Could you elaborate? What's "SNI", and how does it relate to censorship?
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).
ECH replaced what was called ESNI. Just was an evolving standard but it’s widely supported at this point, just rarely used.
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
ESNI has been replaced by ECH which Cloudflare supports just fine.
You need to do a DNS lookup to find the ECH key though.
Doesn't it? I don't post on HN about smoking weed (that's self-censorship) but there are other places where you can post about it.
Sometimes HN commenters will mistakenly believe or perhaps intentionally try to pretend that ECH is in widespread use and has replaced plaintext CH
However the truth is that ECH is generally not being used by HTTPS websites. CH is generally not encrypted and _easy_ surveilllance and/or censorship via SNI continues to work
For example, how does a www user connect to https://www.cloudflare.com using ECH
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9848.txt
The only HTTPS websites that have enabled ECH are generally sites for testing ECH
Client and server software that "supports" ECH is available. But few HTTPS sites have actually enabled it
Domain name for every HTTPS site still sent in plaintext
>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.
It seems like Utah could do mostly do this by intercepting all consumer traffic.
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.
Just buy the surveillance equipment from Russia and get it done.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Do you write anywhere about your time there during covid? Seeing a foreigner's perspective during that time would be fascinating.
That's some interesting info anyways if not. It's funny that the absolute number of VPN users is large but negligible compared to the overall population.
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.
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.
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.
We have a data center in Utah.. And I'm sure some of our customers are storing "adult" material.. Are we now banned?
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.
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
Having the power of violence behind you makes technical hacks mostly irrelevant.
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"
My guess is if you are in China they can MITM you with their own root certs.
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.
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.
If you're dealing with an authoritarian state they don't need to burn anything or care about cert logging. They can:
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.
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.
“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.
Useless. You still don't get the connection unless you trust the MITM. You either disable CT, or you don't get a connection.
That's a different case where they're not trying to be surreptitious. For that case, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937347 and my response.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Have you been to China? It is still super easy to bypass the Great Firewall with VPNs.
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
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.
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)"
They're probably sure because it has happened previously each time there was "civil unrest".
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.
I used Wireguard to my home residential internet almost exclusively the last time I was in China. 2 weeks, no issues.
You were probably using mobile data (roaming) or hotel WiFi for a hotel approved to host foreigners. Go do it from a residential network.
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.
Guess you weren't living near the Urumqi, Xinjiang rioting? Almost a year of severe internet restrictions.
That's correct. This was in Nanjing.
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.
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.
Probably just differing equipment. The Great Firewall isn't one giant firewall, it's just the sum total of a million different "plug in for censorship" rack-mount boxes, from several different brands, plugged into ISPs all over the country.
very much depends on the region in my experience, i found it was a game of cat & mouse against their traffic pattern sniffers.
China knows them all and allows it. Whenever there's a protest, they flip the "actually block VPNs now" switch and almost no bypass method works.
yes. buy a random esim card from trip.com whenever you visit china and problem is solved. it's also super cheap. 10Gb 30days for 5 bucks.
> 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.
https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/iran-official-says-starlink-...
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.
Kiwi Farms has caused people to die, and is blasé about it, even laughing - not a good example. We could say Autistici/Inventati instead.
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.
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.
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.
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"
> nations like Iran and China have progressed the state-of-the-art and playbook
That’s a rather shallow and naive perspective. I’ll try to keep this short, but the overt blocking oriented “censorship” ascribed to China, Iran, or Israel is actually not at all “state-of-the-art”, it’s an inherent rather coarse approach to censorship.
If you want the true “state-of-the-art“ you can look no farther than the USA, where the “state-of-the-art” is such that people don’t even realize it’s censorship, let alone that anything is happening at all.
China, Iran, or Israel may or may not engage in censorship at a kind of high level that is apparent and observable; however the censorship in the USA and by extension in its various vassals of its empire, is far more sophisticated and base level to such a degree that the system, the whole society is the censorship mechanism, censorship is not something done to the system, the system is the censorship. That is “state-of-the-art”!
Do you have examples? I'm thinking mass media ownership by billionaires, or the way Hollywood is only allowed to portray the military positively?
fox news is classified as entertainment and not news because if they were news they could be sued
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.
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?
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.
They don't care about education, they don't even care about consumption of content. They just want a Trojan Horse ("it's for the safety of our children!") in order to accustom people to censorship.
What's the enforcement mechanism if some porn company in Elbonia "forgets" and uses hothothot.el, instead of hothothot.porn?
Here my genius self sits, momentarily wondering what M-x hothothot does in Emacs.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
A Utah state organ sues them in Utah court, obviously.
also the whole point of having .el is to be outside US jurisdiction so the US can't mess with their domains except for cutting off the whole country (which would splinter the internet).
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.
NSFW where? Salt Lake City? New York City? Dubai? Turkmenistan?
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.
> 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.
Easy, no one seems to care about nude men so all you need is an indication of the range of women's skin shown
* Face showing - banned in middle Eastern Muslim countries * Bellies showing - banned in south east Asian Muslim countries * Ankle showing - banned in India * Shoulders showing - banned in catholic countries * ... * Nipples showing - banned in US * Genitals showing - banned in Japan * Personal name mentioned without a personal data release form - banned in Germany * (End of list)
If necessary can be supplemented by a range of the commonly accepted levels of male nudity * Any skin showing - banned in Vatican * Penis showing - banned in US * (End of list)
So we have a binary numerical code, or a ternary if you add also practices (ranging probably from female eye contact with the camera and male-female touching over male-male intimacy up to bestiality).
(Hope clear that this is sarcasm.. do not build the torment nexus!)
You can use different codes to specify what the page contains. Airlines support more meal codes than they actually stock because meals for multiple categories - every VGML (vegan) meal is valid for someone who requests VOML (vegetarian with eggs and milk allowed). And every page with no human skin showing is valid for someone whose filtering rules are no skin except the face!
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.
https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20080714_RL33224_1e6b93...
> 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?
It is, but the first amendment isn't absolute.
It is, but our judges and legislators find it expedient to pretend it's not.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idconst/ArtI/Sec...
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.
I guess this could be speech integral to criminal conduct but seems like a stretch.
Because we don’t like people doing it. Duh.
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.
Rice v. Paladin Enterprises, it isn’t automatically first amendment protected to tell people how to effectively commit crimes. It isnt open and shut, but the first amendment isn’t a get out of jail free card.
In other words the first amendment doesn't do what it says it does.
So what?
> Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech
Note that it does not define what that means. At the same time, it is well established that some forms of speech do come with consequences. I'm sure you can think of commonly accepted examples.
Laws do not exist outside of courts who interpret them. They made an extra court to do that for the constitution. That's a feature!
Reality is fuzzy. The problem with insisting on "verbatim" readings of texts is that there is always wiggle room and edge cases, and nobody can agree on what that one, true reading is.
So, yeah, the first amendment might not say what you think it says, because it only says what it says, and not what it does, because it can only say, and it takes people to do.
What's the point of having a constitution if things you think should be illegal can just be redefined to not be covered by it? The constitution was supposed to provide hard red lines.
I can only repeat what I wrote before: There are no hard red lines, only mostly hard, mostly red, and mostly straight lines, not in law, and not even when looking at literal lines that somebody drew or printed.
Trying to define something simple and universally applicable is a fool's errand, because people will disagree, and even if it's just you, reality will hit you with exceptions and curveballs if you look hard or wait long enough.
The point of the constitution is not to satisfy a need for simple, unchangeable rules that need no interpretation whatsoever.
If you look for the point of the constitution, here's one explanation from the horse's mouth:
> We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It's ground rules. They will necessarily require interpretation, as all rules do. What that interpretation should be and how far it should go is part of that, and has been ongoing ever since, as would be expected.
Since when do lawmakers cared about technical impossibilities?
"The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia." - Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Minister (at the time) of Australia
Remember to renew your support for the EFF. They take on some interesting cases
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.
They definitely can
Same burdensome provision issue? Forcing everyone outside of Utah to do something just in case they're from Utah.
> 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.
It's so that, when judgement day comes, our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth has a concrete record of what you've been doing with your semen. It's very important, you see. God's work, even.
Too bad the omnipotent wizard doesn't keep records himself.
They can, but any friction here means less ad revenue, as people will just go to a site with less friction
Gambling sites require an account because they need to know who placed the bet, who to charge for the bet, and where to send the money when you win.
A porn site does not.
But what if I win?
They're also required to identify the user with an address and ID. My understanding is some take your SSN
In 1897 Indiana almost passed a law defining Pi as 3.2. These jurists have never cared about reality.
Wow, that is a wild read, thank you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
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.
I'm not sure your claim is backed up by the evidence you've provided (to wit, that Indiana did not pass the bill).
> 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.
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?
How is this impossible? DraftKings does it for California visitors.
they want to stop VPN traffic. If it's a plain IP address it's easy. VPN makes it hard.
I understand. You can't use DraftKings via a VPN.
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?
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.
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.. :-)
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.
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."
that is the plan, to make everyone have to use utah law
underlying reason is hatred for free internet
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).
Right, they just block all VPN users, which would comply with the law
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.
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.
Easier said than done.
> 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?
Is there actually any jurisdiction in which technocrats have veto power over legislation?
It's not about veto power, it's about consulting technical experts to evaluate whether the legal proposal even makes sense. The EU Cyber Resilience Act is a good example: experts stepped in and made sure that the term "supplier" was accurately defined so some random Joe Shmoe could not be held liable for bugs in some piece of code he threw over the wall on GitHub. The law still got passed, but after being refined.
What if the technical experts tell the legislators something they don’t want to hear? Do you think the legislators will just go along with a bunch of egghead nay-sayers? Their constituents/donors/special-interests are demanding action!
What makes you think an "expert" was not consulted on this? Experts can be wrong too, regardless of credentials. That's why AI should be used to review and critique all new laws going forward, in order to prevent such mistakes from being made law. Hard /s, btw.
> it's about consulting technical experts to evaluate whether the legal proposal even makes sense
And that often comes down to people realising that they need to engage those experts. Instead many just assume "it makes sense to me, with the thinking I've done about it" means that it definitely actualy makes sense.
Also sometimes the very cynical view is true: people know technical experts will pick holes in something, so they find a way to rush it through quickly to not allow the chance for that. Sometimes they are quite honest about this with arguments based in "not letting perfect be the enemy of good". Once a rule is in place it then becomes someone else's problem to undo it, or at least fix the technical problems in-place. Meanwhile those that got it through get credit from those who agree with the emotive argument, and also don't care about the technical details & accidental implications, credit that they can try use to further the cause or their career.
I think ultimately we're headed for locked device attestation for age and physical location, and legislation like this is going to be a driving force. If that wasn't bad enough, I think most people are ultimately in favor of this. The future is bleak.
Nobody is in favor of this. Somebody might be in favor, only if they're completely ignorant.
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.
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.
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.
It's not practical because IPs are routed in blocks, and this is necessary for efficiency. Otherwise every single router on the internet would have to remember the locations of up to 100 billion connections, and when the internet surpasses this size every router will need to be replaced.
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.
> 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.
If you are rate limited it's because the algorithm believes you are a person who habitually spams bad content. Accounts start out un-limited. Once an account is limited it is not possible to get un-limited.
> Yes, but they have the uncomfortable reality of having to police the results of it
I'm not against adding some friction to certain behavior deemed undesirable by society, but at the end of the day people are going to do what they will. Vice predates the Internet by thousands of years and will not and can not be "solved" by technical means.
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".
Let’s not forget that “dirty mormon girls” is a category on pornhub
brb
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can mail cash to mullvad.
VPNs are relevant because Utah only has the power to require ages verification in Utah, and a VPN allows someone to pretend they're not in Utah.
The law requires blocking all VPN access.
It's impossible to have perfect knowledge of the entire set of VPN exit node addresses.
Sounds like a problem for those pesky, nasty porn websites, not a problem for the good christian lawmakers..
https://le.utah.gov/~2026/bills/static/SB0073.html
| 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.
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.
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.