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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

#171

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…

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.

I've never once heard of this, and I've spent years living in Turkey.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#172
post #40

If they did this for all social media I might pick up guitar

Unfortunately, the suggestive manual gesticulations required to finger your fretboard have caused guitar-playing to be banned in the state of Texas.

Not to mention those minor diminished sevenths that you've been playing recently. One more half-step towards microtonality, and you'll be looking at time in the slammer ...

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I see it as rape with a implied third party threat of violence instead of a first party one.

You may feel differently if you feel that men's bodies belong to the state to be used in wars.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, it's been operating for a while now without any major outages, no issues with torrents, exposes way more "techie" features than any other VPN I've used (customizable port forwarding, dynamic dns and customizable subdomain names on those ports, different device profiles, customizable dns filtering lists, all sorts of stat graphs for their various nodes, script generators for openvpn which allow choosing all sorts of protocol related details) works fine for bypassing region locks on the obscure music sites I care about and they've been completely fine with an anonymous Monero payment (well, as anonymous as you can be to what is effectively your ISP).

They have a good record of responding to various restrictive legislation around the world (eg pulling out of Italy after they passed an overly broad 'anti-piracy' law) and also haven't had any open scandals. That's about as good as I can really expect considering that I'm mostly just not interested in my local ISP knowing what I'm up to, and am not doing anything hugely illegal or pirating at a large scale.

For reference, the VPN I used before then offered no real controls besides a limited country selection and a randomly assigned port forward. It was bought up by a company owned by a guy known for running scams, after which I switched out. Now having seen all the customization I was missing out on, I can't really go back to a simpler VPN.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#176
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only the DNS lookups. Not the content of what you’re viewing over https. Everything after domain name is encrypted

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

I was just shopping for cpu cooling at OnlyFans?

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#177

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…

isn't 1.1.1.1 of limited utility from this perspective? The ISP can still see the IP address, and I know more than one IP address can map to a single domain, but you're still leaking information that would allow one's adversaries to guess at one's intent.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#178

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”?

> 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).…

> hat about if we change this to "Have sex with your boss or be fired?"

Definite coercion as stated.

But if the boss is already set on firing everyone in the department, but lets one or two people stay on if they have sex with him, I consider that to be a roundabout method of quid-pro-quo prostitution. Plus embezzlement. There's no retaliation if they say no, they go home like everyone else.

And the military example is similar, there's no retaliation, most men are doing the service. The offer of an alternate option, one that very few take, is not the problem here.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#180
post #51

Earlier 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.

They're not. Unless you've invented a new term "Layer3 Proxy", in which case : fine.
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