Cool, so I can spin up a web crawler for the Utah gov site, route it through a VPN and let them fine themselves to oblivion?
It’s websites that are supposed to be inaccessible by children within Utah that the law would affect. Not sure if the Utah government website has any 18+ pages.
are they keeping a running list of the hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of porn sites that pop up every day? even if they set AI to the task (lol), actually trying to enforce the shit legally is going to require human interaction at some point, and there will be millions of false positives.
everything about this is paralyzingly stupid
If the premise is to prevent Utah kids from accessing things then good luck enforcing those extraterritorial fines, or if you try and fine sites daft enough to be hosting their site in a place like Utah, it’ll take a whole couple minutes to move.
Either way this comes out as theatrics at best, and losing money in top of it with pointless litigation or chasing away tax and service paying businesses
it was only a matter of time until these crusty desiccated old clueless fucks tried to go after VPNs. how are they proposing to prove that user X accessed a given site with VPN, while user Y didn’t? and how are they going to go after overseas sites? and good luck trying to get a single ISP on the planet to block all VPN traffic
morons. these are the same people who want to “move on” from epstein
They’re not intending to prove anything. The goal is to put the burden of risk on websites, to force them to just block VPNs completely. Even if it’s unlikely that a VPN user will get unmasked as being underage, the risk of being liable if it does happen will (in theory) be too great for them to ignore.
I imagine they will have conservative activists use VPNs to access these websites, and then pass that information onto law enforcement, who will then use that to try and bankrupt said websites and services.
conservatives look at porn just like everyone else. again, it was never about “protect the children.” it’s always been about surveillance and control. they’re using the “stop kids from looking at porn” rhetoric to justify removing every last shred of privacy there ever was on the internet.
they don’t give a flying fuck about kids. we’re talking about the party of epstein pedophile rapist con men.
USA really needs to replace the moron-class as their leaders.
Time to build up the darknet into the full place to be, rather than the dregs of the earth it is now.
Or build more off-net networks
Came here to say this.
It’s so damn easy to put a .onion alongside any website. Everyone should do it. And watch these lawmakers’ heads explode.
Actually, how does one put up a .onion?
https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/setup/
- have a website
- install tor
- edit torrc
- restart tor
For super extra fun, make a vanity .onion
this has been on my mind a lot. we have the means; it’s just used by bottom feeders.
Fediverse-over-reticulum-over-whatever would be good too, but i didn’t look too much at reticulum, but it seems good for this
The Internet really does threaten the people who are in power. They are currently realizing it and doing what they can to stop it. I just hope the Internet ends up winning. I used to be fairly optimistic about this in the mid-2010s when I hadn’t been hearing very much from the copyright industry anymore… then, in the late 2010s, attacks on the free and open Internet really started to get serious. I wonder how much they will escalate.
Shouldn’t there be some constitutional requirement, maybe under “due process” theory or otherwise, that US state laws cannot apply to anyone who has no way of knowing that they are even doing something (in this case: serving customers) in that state? Has anything similar been litigated before?
the internet is gonna be meshtastic…
Cool, then people will eventually realize they can easily use VPS’s with OpenVPN or Wireguard tunnels, or they can roll their own tailscale network. We’ll stop seeing VPN ads on youtube and start receiving ads for VPS hosting services and vloggers will post instructional videos on how to bypass Utah’s and other state’s draconian laws soon enough.
The small problem I see with using a personal VPS as a tunnel is that your IP is still unique to you specifically, albeit disconnected from your actual geolocation, rather than intermixed with thousands of other people. So they can see that “aha, it’s this guy again”. If you’re logging in with an account though then maybe that doesn’t matter.
True you lose the crowd anonymity of being on a server with thousands of others. But if sites go and ban VPN use or a state does, you’ll at least not look to be using one.
VPS hosting doesn’t allow you to pretend to be in other countries to view their TV or sites that are censored in your country (unless you pay again for a VPS in each country). So it won’t replace everything commercial VPNs do.
Very true
