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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

#201

Post by neurostimulant »

simfree wrote: post #100
zamalek wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like torrenting will get you quickly shut down by the provider. My friend found this out while considering setting up their own seedbox.

Sounds like your friend was VPNing to the wrong jurisdiction. PulsedMedia (Finland), IHostArt (Romania) and many other seedbox server providers exist and will not shut you down.

iirc ihostart actually host their servers in their basement, which is bad for reliability but perfectly fine for this use case. The operator also claimed to be an 18 years old, not sure if it's true but if it does I applaud their entrepreneurship spirit at such a young age.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#202

Post by ssl-3 »

cayde wrote: post #57
miki123211 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've had a very cheap provider in the US for years that has unlimited tethering/hotspot, and unlimited everything else.

I've "only" ever used it for as much as 1 or 2TB in a month, though -- which is a ton for most individuals. (And only occasionally. It Isn't my primary connection, but sometimes it is a very useful connection.)

(They do attempt to throttle it, but that's been solvable for me with just a TTL hack on a client/router or a PDANet fix on my particular devices.)

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#203

Post by nunez »

skissane wrote: post #97
btbuildem wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not even haha, that's like 6/10 likely.

I doubt Texas will. How would they enforce it? And good chance the federal courts will rule it is pre-empted by federal law (the FCC). For historical (and arguably even political) reasons, federal courts give the states a bit more leeway when to adult content. But regulating general purpose content-neutral VPNs would really be stepping directly into the FCC’s domain, in a way which would directly impact interstate co…

Great Firewall of Texas.

I could legit see them investing insane dollars on this project.

I don't think this is federally illegal either

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#204

Post by [deleted] »

samatman wrote: post #59
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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#205

Post by theshackleford »

andrewflnr wrote: post #107
technion wrote: post #80

If vpns become positioned primarily about accessing porn, well I look forward to the day people acknowledge tls exists and we stop seeing misleading advertisements with the various claims everyone on a network can see the contents of your online banking.

I've already seen a shift in the ads from "hide your banking details from hackers" to more "hide your country from Netflix". I can't prove causation, but it did seem to date from when Tom Scott did his "Honest VPN ad" video.

"hide your country from Netflix" This is the advertising I have seen for what has to be close to a decade at this point.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#206

Post by datadrivenangel »

tennisflyi wrote: post #23
goalieca wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they can learn to use tor but most likely they’ll get sucked into shady free VPN services and suffer worse.

No way you’re streaming anything via Tor

It's not uncommon to be able to get a few MBps via Tor. The latency tends to be crap, but once everything is set up it can go pretty fast.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#207

Post by ndriscoll »

samus wrote: post #143
ndriscoll wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even assuming that an age check can be done in a privacy-preserving way*, it is naive to assume that such measures are effective prevent people from getting access to porn. Sex is one if the strongest human drive and we are not in the 80s anymore when magazines and videos were the primary medias for porn. *: are those verification schemes set up such that also the government doesn't get to see who accesses which site…

I don't think it's as intractable as people make it out to be: require porn sites to do some level of due diligence. "But what about sites outside of US jurisdiction (e.g. Russia)?" Require ISPs to have a setting for customers to opt into blocking them. The reality is no one in my household ever has any reason to communicate with Russian, Chinese, etc. or even almost any European servers (maybe there could be exceptions for news, government, and university orgs), so it makes sense for us to just block them.

There you go. You just eliminated pretty much all access for children to online commercial providers.

It's not perfect, but that's a silly reason not to do it. We don't let kids into adult bookstores just because they could (currently) easily get it online. We don't let them buy drugs and alcohol at stores just because they could find an older friend to get it for them. It is already illegal to provide porn to children. Businesses (mostly ad-based ones) have just been getting away with being completely negligent about it for the last 10-20 years.

The Utah law for example seems to specify that either the user provides a digital id, which seems to be a sort of signed message from the state that they've saved into a secure element (so not doing realtime checks with the government. It's not really specified how it works, but it says they can save an ID file to their phone), or use a commercial knowledge based auth solution. So yes, it seems that it's been specified such that the government does not get access to that information.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#208

Post by ssl-3 »

jowea wrote: post #129
ranger_danger wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very easy to bypass simply by increasing TTL by 1

And what's the very easy way to do that?

Unless your phone is rooted, TTL mangling happens on the hotspot-using client devices.

Specific details depend on what that client device uses for an operating system, and this makes it impossible to neatly summarize.

But it can be done fairly easily with things like OpenWRT or Mikrotik's RouterOS, or a regular stand-alone Linux box, and IIRC it's a simple one-liner on a Windows machine.

Because it can't be easily summarized, Google is your friend here. Generally, you want the TTL of all packets leaving the client (router, tablet, laptop, or whatever) to be set to 65 -- which is one more than the Android default of 64.

That's all the information you need to know to Google up instructions that work with your particular devices.

(I may or may not keep a Mikrotik-based hotspot-abuser in my work truck as a problem solver.)

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#209

Post by ssl-3 »

dijit wrote: post #115
77pt77 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? No one forces anyone to gamble.

Eh, Gambling disproportionately impacts poor people. It's as close to Sugar, Nicotine or Alcohol in terms of addiction as you can get without being chemical. Same reason we ban certain ads targeting kids.

I agree: We should make it illegal for children to gamble.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#210

Post by akdev1l »

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…

I wouldn’t be breaking the law under a repressive government without at least a VPN in the middle.

DNS queries still leak the domain unless the client is using DoH.

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