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Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

popsci.com

211–220 of 316 posts

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#212

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

You could say you were learning math: https://kotaku.com/on-pornhub-math-teacher-makes-his-mark-te... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28934711

Yeah. An oppressive government will for sure take your excuse of “I was just learning math on PornHub”.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#214

> experts told PopSci platforms also oppose the laws because they don’t want to be responsible for collecting and maintaining torrents of sensitive users’ data that could pose a ripe target for cybercriminals. Good thing these laws specifically ban them from storing that information that they don't want to store. The implication here is so strange. Kids generally don't have a way to buy VPN services (I suppose they c…

> Good thing these laws specifically ban them from storing that information that they don't want to store. Well... companies. They don't ban government agencies from retaining that data if they get access to it. But ignore that and assume for a second that they do. The problem is that the laws kind of contradict themselves: "don't collect information that compromises privacy" and also "do this in a way that basically…

Why would they need to be auditable? That's not in any of the laws I've read, and in fact as you note, the law makes that impossible. If the law contradicts a requirement that you made up, and does not itself contain that requirement, then why would you presume that it has that requirement?

There's literally no reason to have e.g. a knowledge based auth or signed id request hit disk. It doesn't need to be saved for a "short time". It doesn't need to be saved on permanent storage at all.

"Let's assume for a moment that the law says the opposite of what it actually says". But it doesn't.

It's easy for the government to investigate whether you check IDs: open the site and see if you request ID information. Present fake info and see if you accept it. Just like they do in person.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#215
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

Well, in some parts of the world the lie may be "I was watching 100% straight heterosexual porn, no homo". So a DNS lookup to pornhub.com does not reveal the lie.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#216
post #50

Tailscale exit node on a cheap vps and you're golden. Well as long as the stuff you're doing is "legal". It's still traceable back to you.

Which VPS provider did you go with?

I tried AlphaVPS and another and I had no luck with the traffic routing out of the VPS. Went with a droplet in DigitalOcean in the end that's managed through Portainer. Works a treat and equivalently cheap.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Misleading and disinformation also comes in the form of FUD, does it not?

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#218
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever made your own porn? Very liberating.

Have you ever tried abstaining? You'll find you're not as liberated as you thought.

There will be plenty of time to abstain from sex when I'm dead.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#219
post #208
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

Ok that does seems more viable than mangling it on the average Android phone. Unless of course you're tethering another smartphone by sharing the wifi hotspot, which in my personal experience is a common use case.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I feel like the type of places with heavy handed censorship are also not the type of places you want to go "well, actually..." to the government.

That approach is way too apprehensive.

Those idiots tried to block google docs once.

It didn't go well as you might imagine. ERs, research institutes and several government facilities responded with cordial letters about the court's mental state. Then it was unblocked.

The reason they get to keep the porn bans is because it isn't enforced upon adults, and it does serve as a thin layer of protection against minors.

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