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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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The violence was already there. It's not a threat to say and honestly mean "otherwise nothing changes (99% of people pick this option)". The consent issues are all in the forced service itself, and apply to every man equally, whether or not they take the gay proof exemption.

The violence was not "already there." The violence is generated by the men who are not at risk of going to war. There's an old saying about two people of different nationalities: The difference between you and me is smaller than the difference between us and our respective leaders. Leaders must convince the public that some person in a far away land hates them and is coming to kill them, because otherwise no one give…

I meant that the violence is a combination of "already caused by the leaders" and "foregone conclusion".

If you opt not to take the gay sex exemption, your fate is the same as if you had never been asked.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#252

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…

Some people are reaching to really wrong conclusions from this post, so a couple of pointers

1. Gay porn is not specifically blocked in Turkey, porn is; so gay porn watchers would be mostly indistinguishable from any porn watchers via their evasion techniques

2. Not that it matters as you are free to be gay in Turkey

3. Not that it matters again, because access to blocked content is never prosecuted. No one ever receives letters from their ISP even for pirating

4. Calling the internet state controlled is a bit far imo, smaller ISPs don’t even apply some blocks and comparatively USDoJ can do domain seizures which is not too different from what happens there (websites being blocked via court orders and “administrative preventative measures”). Although I’d agree that the line for blocking is drawn too close.

5. I also wouldn’t call Mersin very conservative, the left CHP just won the municipal election with ~60% of the votes

One last thing, ISPs have moved on to using DPI to block websites so you might wanna suggest something like green-tunnel so they can up their game.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#253

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…

> 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'd be very careful giving security advice to someone in that situation - in fact, I probably wouldn't do it, even though I am an experienced professional who knows more than most people in I…

No shit they can safely watch gay porn, it isn’t Russia/Iran

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#254

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.

[flagged]

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#255
post #252

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…

Some people are reaching to really wrong conclusions from this post, so a couple of pointers 1. Gay porn is not specifically blocked in Turkey, porn is; so gay porn watchers would be mostly indistinguishable from any porn watchers via their evasion techniques 2. Not that it matters as you are free to be gay in Turkey 3. Not that it matters again, because access to blocked content is never prosecuted. No one ever rece…

Have you registered just to say that everything is a-ok in Turkey?

Not to be overly suspicious, but it sounds very much like government-sponsored astroturfing.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#256
post #213

[flagged]

> ...and I can assure you I was not harmed How do you know? I'm not arguing porn is harmful to minors, I have no idea what the data says. But people tend to be terrible at self-diagnosis.

I've never seen any research into the topic and I can't imagine you can have one, since you don't have control group.

So I will assume you are conjuring facts out of thin air.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#257
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that’s not right https://decoded.legal/blog/2021/06/must-all-uk-internet-acce...

> Don’t all ISPs have retention notices? Probably not (for the reasons above), but this is not public information, and ISPs and others subject to retention notices face statutory prohibitions on disclosure. > If all Internet access providers were subject to retention notices, wouldn’t it be easier to say that? There would be no need to dance around issues of secrecy, or explain why the list of notice recipients canno…

The people at my isp insist they don’t store anything other than bandwidth use (which is exposed to me so I know that already)

I don’t keep much data at work for that long

If it is a thing it’s either a massive conspiracy across thousands of network engineers or you could point to some technical details on how it’s implemented.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#258
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don’t all ISPs have retention notices? Probably not (for the reasons above), but this is not public information, and ISPs and others subject to retention notices face statutory prohibitions on disclosure. > If all Internet access providers were subject to retention notices, wouldn’t it be easier to say that? There would be no need to dance around issues of secrecy, or explain why the list of notice recipients canno…

The people at my isp insist they don’t store anything other than bandwidth use (which is exposed to me so I know that already) I don’t keep much data at work for that long If it is a thing it’s either a massive conspiracy across thousands of network engineers or you could point to some technical details on how it’s implemented.

It's not a conspiracy, they just can't say by law. Did you expect them to tell you if they have an order from the Home Office telling them to not divuldge this information under the threat of massive fines and jail time?

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#259
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are reaching to really wrong conclusions from this post, so a couple of pointers 1. Gay porn is not specifically blocked in Turkey, porn is; so gay porn watchers would be mostly indistinguishable from any porn watchers via their evasion techniques 2. Not that it matters as you are free to be gay in Turkey 3. Not that it matters again, because access to blocked content is never prosecuted. No one ever rece…

Have you registered just to say that everything is a-ok in Turkey? Not to be overly suspicious, but it sounds very much like government-sponsored astroturfing.

I had just contacted hn support to de-associate my posts from my username so I’d feel guilty about posting with my regular account again. Now it’s only posting with throwaways that I don’t even keep track of the passwords of (hence a new username now).

Everything is not ok in Turkey, there’s lots and lots of stuff that needs to be fixed re: gay rights and acceptance in general public plus millions more of other things which led me to leave the country; but having to hide gay porn habits from the government/my isp was not one of them. Again, it’s not Iran or Russia.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#260
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 excepti…

VPNs still make it possible to access everything. Gotta have to ban these as well.

It seems like regulatory overreach into something which in the grand scheme of things is a very small problem. Today it's porn sites, what will it be tomorrow? Once in place, such laws will be very hard to repeal out of "think of the children" concern. In reality, such laws are never just about children.

Also, what even counts as a porn site to begin with? Is Reddit one, since it has lots of well-known porn subreddits? Do classic web forums for a similar purpose, or Whatsapp groups or Facebook count too? (Don't know how strict their content policy currently is)

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