How did the industry get away with calling proxies "VPNs" anyway?
Proxies and VPNs are different, that's why?
Yes, they are, and what gets sold to consumers as VPNs these days are just proxies.
Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
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Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
#52Also it is extremely common in middle and high school to use VPNs to get around school network restrictions.
Back in my day, it was about obscure web proxies. I remember one that was called something like abelincolnfacts.com, which looked like a blog about Lincoln. But clicking an icon of his face in the top right revealed a web proxy interface to browse the web unfettered.
Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
#53Imagine Texas bans private VPNs next. Haha.
Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Liberating force is a bit too far but it’s not the demon people seem to think. It’s about all things in moderation. Porn = dopamine. Fast food = sugars/fructose and the ilk. SM = dopamine. Loot boxes = dopamine. Ad nauseam…
Can I get a socially approved amount of porn then? Would there be porn rations?
Some where in between not talking about it with your mom and dad but chopping it up with a friend briefly about whatever models is so attractive and had a great scene on whatever website
Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
#55Anecdote: I stayed in the Airbnb of an (obviously gay) couple in the South-Eastern very conservative Turkish city of Mersin many years ago. The absolute joy they had when I showed them how to set up 1.1.1.1 on their Android TV, phones, and laptops… so they could watch unrestricted gay porn in their heavily censored and state-controlled slice of the World Wide Web… I still get a virtual greeting card from them once in…
Set them up with some form of DNS over TLS.
Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proxies and VPNs are different, that's why?
Yes, they are, and what gets sold to consumers as VPNs these days are just proxies.
I think we can split hairs and nitpick this a lot but... Nowadays most often setup is that you join a VPN (a very isolated one), and you use it for the same purpose as you would proxy. But from your machine's point of view, you're using a separate network for your default gateway. Using proxy is usually more involved, and you can configure it in your application. In fact, you can do both and sometimes it makes sense (like using tor socks proxy over vpn).
Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
#57Also it is extremely common in middle and high school to use VPNs to get around school network restrictions.
That must be a US thing, over here in Europe, most people just use hotspots (or cellular data) instead. That was a thing even back in my day, when LTE availability was not a given and cellular packages were much less generous.
Tethering is idiot expensive in USA. Every provider will DPI and block it or throttle it. It's awful.
Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
#58Hardening societal infra-structure against democratic governments collapsing back into autocracies. Good times.
Porn is not a liberating force. It's like being mad at the government for making it hard for you to smoke cigarettes.
It is a canary in the coal mine litmus test for if you live in a free society or not.
It is absolutely a liberating force.
It's uniquely liberating right now since over half of all free/open sourced AI models have an NSFW or unaligned focus (nearly the majority in the diffusion model world).
Without the power of Waifus/booru websites ran by hentai aficionados, a solid amount of the generative AI revolution in the context of text to image models simply would not have happened.
Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
#59Anecdote: I stayed in the Airbnb of an (obviously gay) couple in the South-Eastern very conservative Turkish city of Mersin many years ago. The absolute joy they had when I showed them how to set up 1.1.1.1 on their Android TV, phones, and laptops… so they could watch unrestricted gay porn in their heavily censored and state-controlled slice of the World Wide Web… I still get a virtual greeting card from them once in…
Reminds me of a... peculiarity in Turkey. Men are required to serve a mandatory term in the military, but are exempt if they're homosexual. However, to prevent this being used as a loophole to evade service, the men in question must prove that they're gay.
This has resulted in the Turkish military having a very large collection of amateur gay porn.
Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
#60Hardening societal infra-structure against democratic governments collapsing back into autocracies. Good times.
Porn is not a liberating force. It's like being mad at the government for making it hard for you to smoke cigarettes.
People would be mad at the government for the exact same reason if they made selling cigarettes illegal.