Live data from Hacker News

Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

popsci.com

131–140 of 316 posts

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After mullvad disabled port forwarding, I switched to AirVPN and it works fine. I trust it slightly less than Mullvad but I'm avoiding copyright trolls, not three letter agencies.

I've been using AirVPN for a few years now, seems fairly trustworthy so far.

Not to sound snarky, because this is a genuine question, but what does that even mean? Unless you’ve been brazenly selling child porn over the VPN and been getting away with it for years, I don’t really know how you would establish a VPN is trustworthy vs you just haven’t been targeted for your minor torrenting, or whatever.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#133

Anyone here recommend a VPN, for personal information safety and security rather than hiding porn?

The best VPN provider is one you control and is hard to ban.

I set up an OpenVPN server on DigitalOcean for a friend visiting China. It took 10 minutes with the template in the DO marketplace.

It even allows downloading a client with the parameters baked in.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#134
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point Turkey is probably more free than the UK.

Can you elaborate please? The UK isn't blocking gay porn sites for example.

I think freedom of speech is an obvious example.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#135
post #14

Anyone here recommend a VPN, for personal information safety and security rather than hiding porn?

Mullvad is the best, but last I saw, they had to disable port forwarding due to bad actors ruining it for everyone else. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36113215 They also work with Tailscale which makes per-device setup easier: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/tailscale-has-partnered-with-mul... . Tailscale was using a bit too much of my iPhone battery last I tried it out, but they're at least aware of it.

ProtonVPN is easy for split tunneling on my Androidish device. Linux requires a little CLI configuration.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#136
post #14

Anyone here recommend a VPN, for personal information safety and security rather than hiding porn?

Mullvad is the best, but last I saw, they had to disable port forwarding due to bad actors ruining it for everyone else. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36113215 They also work with Tailscale which makes per-device setup easier: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/tailscale-has-partnered-with-mul... . Tailscale was using a bit too much of my iPhone battery last I tried it out, but they're at least aware of it.

I wish they had just disabled TCP port forwarding. Based on the description of bad actors it sounds like that would have been enough, and at least torrent clients would have continued to work.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DNS lookup are often enough. You can try to claim you were shopping for new shoes on pornhub.com, but not many people will buy it

There is no law against going to pornhub.com, the law is only concerned with dns blocking.

[flagged]

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#138
post #110

The major problem here is that our government is turning us all into criminals. Using a VPN doesn't make it legal for you to consume anonymously, even if doing so makes it harder to enforce, at least for now. Soon VPN use will be illegal in some states. Once again, hard to enforce. But these are things which, if for some reason the gov't decides to target you (in which case they can/will spend the effort to discover)…

"Our government" isn't doing it, some very specific ones are. And the people they represent are 100% behind all such laws. This is the democratic process working exactly as intended.

Constitutions are supposed to prevent laws like this. Because it is all too easy to make people forget the principles their democratic system is based on and without which it will degenerate into a tyranny of the majority.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#139
post #20

Also 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.

Depending on carrier, the parent can turn off data on the child's line and only allow it to be used for voice/text.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#140
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that for a large portion of the population, porn consumption is not considered immoral or even if it is immoral ; not an offence worthy of calling someone a criminal over. We all know that laws are not a good indicator of morality, but society is better when we try to align laws over time with our moral code.

The laws aren't against porn consumption or even anonymous porn consumption. They're about distributing porn to children, which most people are in alignment that we don't want to allow. These age verification laws all mandate that no identifying information be kept. The Texas law has a $10,000 penalty per instance for record retention. It's still perhaps not the best way to do it, but people are being very disingenuo…

It's still dangerous to share records that way. The structure of the law makes it be against porn consumption and anonymous porn consumption.
Post reply on HN