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Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

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Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#161

Post by willcipriano »

basil-rash wrote: post #160
superb_dev wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they’re forced to choose between military service or having sex on camera? I’m not sure I’d call that “amateur porn” if it’s not consensual

The Overton window has shifted such that two adults agreeing to engage in sexual activity in front of a camera can be in any way considered “non-consensual”? Wild. Do you think adult actors agreeing to engage in sexual activity in front of a camera, but only because they have chosen to do that for a living when other viable employment alternatives were available, is also “non-consensual”?

"Hey I made this guy really mad go fight him for me"

"No he will kill me!"

"Alternatively you could have sex and let me film it"

Consent.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#162

Post by godelski »

nurettin wrote: post #81
freedomben wrote: post #73

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.

Supposing this was 100% accurate, I'm sure that you could understand that going to pornhub.com or definitelynotgayporn.net would arouse suspicion in a government that is banning such behavior and could cause a person to be under higher scrutiny. So even if you're right that the DNS bypass isn't what would technically get them in trouble, I think you can understand the motivation to encrypt your DNS traffic to ensure that you don't get a target painted on your back. And given this, I hope how you can understand that your comment does very little to contribute to the actual conversation and can even potentially mislead others. A lot of communication is implicit (otherwise it'd be incredibly cumbersome)

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#164

Post by luuurker »

paxys wrote: post #103
77pt77 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For $12 a year you can get a VPS and just put OpenVPN there.

And who is going to pay for the bandwidth?

DigitalOcean, OVH, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode, [...], all include a certain amount of bandwidth (or unlimited with a speed cap) with their VPS.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#165

Post by spondylosaurus »

zamadatix wrote: post #29
jimcsharp wrote: post #8

Surely it's overkill to pay for a whole month of constant vpn use. You could cook something up that provides access for a short session aaand we've circled back to dialers.

It's <$5 per month. The economics start to be more about the general cost of managing transactions, accounts, and customer service than about paying for how much VPN you actually use.

Yep, a $5/mo Mullvad subscription pays for itself several times over if you snag even just a few movies or one cracked Adobe tool every year.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#166

Post by godelski »

basil-rash wrote: post #160
superb_dev wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they’re forced to choose between military service or having sex on camera? I’m not sure I’d call that “amateur porn” if it’s not consensual

The Overton window has shifted such that two adults agreeing to engage in sexual activity in front of a camera can be in any way considered “non-consensual”? Wild. Do you think adult actors agreeing to engage in sexual activity in front of a camera, but only because they have chosen to do that for a living when other viable employment alternatives were available, is also “non-consensual”?

> in any way considered “non-consensual”? Wild.

Consensual means without coercion and being of sound mind.

Let's put it this way, do you consider a quid-pro-quo scenario where a boss will promote or give a raise to a female employee if she has sex with him "consensual?" Obviously this is arguable in both directions (as we could say that this is a contract between two adults, but then again, prostitution is illegal). What about if we change this to "Have sex with your boss or be fired?" The latter case is less ambiguous, but both cases would generally be considered non-consensual in Western legal systems and has been that way for quite some time. This is nothing new...

If you understand the above but fail to think "You *must* enter the military service, for 3 years, and are likely to go to combat and have a high risk of being killed or seriously injured (physically or even more likely mentally), or you can go to jail, OR put your dick in some guy's ass" I think you can understand how that constitutes significant cohesion. If you are unable to understand this, I am here to inform you that you are overfit and not robust to general problems.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#167

Post by Dylan16807 »

willcipriano wrote: post #161
basil-rash wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Overton window has shifted such that two adults agreeing to engage in sexual activity in front of a camera can be in any way considered “non-consensual”? Wild. Do you think adult actors agreeing to engage in sexual activity in front of a camera, but only because they have chosen to do that for a living when other viable employment alternatives were available, is also “non-consensual”?

"Hey I made this guy really mad go fight him for me" "No he will kill me!" "Alternatively you could have sex and let me film it" Consent.

The problem is in line 1, not line 3.

There would be some serious issues with 3 if 1 was a fake threat meant to push you into 3, but it's not. The vast majority go along with 1.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#168

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

sph wrote: post #116
not_a_dane wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK is also censoring porn sites...

Only with crappy ISPs like Virgin, which has court-mandated DNS bans for many websites (like ThePirateBay) I use Zen which has no such restriction. Though for safety all my illegal activity is done via VPN because this is still a Five Eyes country.

EE also does this by default (you can turn it off, but you have to contact them)

EDIT: or is it Three? I can never remember which company provided the last "burner" SIM I got for each trip to the UK.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#169

Post by envy2 »

kornhole wrote: post #128
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #27

Anecdote: 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…

Configuring 1.1.1.1 is a great option for people outside the US whose countries are unable to pressure Cloudflare for information. A better option for those of us in the US is to run our own DNS resolvers. My DNS resolver runs on a little PFSense box that also has DNS blocking and a ton of other features.

Let's be realistic. Porn, the subject of this discussion, is not illegal in the US; this is about age verification laws that apply to the website operators, who then self-block users from particular states. No one is going after Cloudflare for this information as there is no crime committed by the user.

Given Cloudflare's logging policy (https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/privacy/public-dns...) and data disclosure practices, the only way US authorities would get anything worthwhile is if they had a specific individual target and a valid legal process. Cloudflare, like most of the big tech companies, is actually very good on this front; they have robust processes and are transparent (https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/slt3lc6tev37/Q1INAiyBub...) about the limited cases in which they do hand over any user data.

(I don't work at Cloudflare, but do work on these issues for another big US tech company.)

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#170

Post by spacebanana7 »

pokstad wrote: post #21
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #2

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

iCloud private relay

To those skeptical, it’s the only VPN / proxy like service you can use without frequently getting blocked trying to use online banking and stripe merchants. Captchas are less common than with Mullvad too.

It’s not for every use case, but it’s helpful for me.

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