Live data from Hacker News

Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

popsci.com

261–270 of 316 posts

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#261

Pornography is one of the most powerful forms of control, because you cooperate in your own enslavement. Because of the deranging and darkening effect it has on the mind, you become increasingly less aware of what's actually happening to you, less conscious of the self-destruction you are employing against yourself. And because it functions this way, it has also been instrumentalized. Sexual "liberation" is political…

What you see wrt/ porn and liberation, including sexual liberation, is a step forward, not the end result. So it's not going to be perfect, it's going to have people abuse it and others through it, but the solution is not to go back, but to incorporate what we learned from it, and move forward. Respectfully, Wilhelm Reich is a pseudoscientist, I can't really take his thought on the matter seriously, especially on matters which evolved quite significantly since his observations.

People really do control other people through not just coercion. We can see a modern way of doing this in governments and corporations, currently being called Public Relations.

Consider that control cannot be exercised completely arbitrarily. Most of the time, people who want to control have to use what they have available, so that other people don't resist as much. This means that whatever is there, it will be used for control, but it doesn't mean that the thing exists for the main purpose of control. This is circling back to liberation of all sorts - these don't happen because they want to control us, liberation is happening as a large-scale social change and people who want to control co-opt it for their own purposes. Since it's happening either way, it's an opportunity for them to further their own goals as well.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think freedom of speech is an obvious example.

I think you are smoking crack if you think Turkey has more freedom of speech than the UK.

Do you have any data to support your assertion or are you just making things up?

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

My position is that the requirement was humiliating (a sibling comment says this has been discontinued, which is all to the good) and there's nothing consensual about mandatory military service. This was all explained to me in a verbal conversation, so I could be wrong about this part, but homosexuals didn't have to skip their military service, however many wanted to because they would be punished if caught in the act, so to speak. That makes deciding whether or not to submit photographic evidence into a pretty hard decision, but again, the nonconsensual part is being forced to serve in the military in the first place.

I would also guess that the number of men who submitted to anal intercourse on camera with someone they wouldn't normally have sex with is approximately zero, so it qualifies as consensual in the ordinary sense. I'm not sure calling the result "amateur gay porn" is the ideal way to put it, but it is in fact all of amateur, pornographic, and gay.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#266

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…

You clearly have no idea about Turkey and the situation. Watching porn isn't persecuted. The conservetive government just forced ISPs to ban them from their DNS. It was always available by using Google DNS and the whole country does this for like 15-20 years now.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#267
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 por…

The goal isn't to cut access. It's to cut access for children. And again, just because they can find a way doesn't excuse businesses doing exactly nothing to avoid serving them as customers, which they know is already illegal. Most children don't have the means to buy VPN access. There are also off-the-shelf routers that block common VPN protocols (though that may mostly only exist for business tier equipment right now).

Reddit is exactly the type of site that demonstrates the need for some regulation. They have major forums targeted at children (e.g. teenagers, roblox, minecraft) with millions of members, but half their site is porn, and there is no barrier between the two. You'd need to MITM and inspect which forum someone is on to figure out if it should be allowed.

You could say "just block the whole site", but if pornhub had a porn-free comment area labeled "teenagers" (for teenagers to discuss with each other, not for inappropriate images of teenagers, though reddit infamously had that too, and made a special "pimp daddy" trophy for the moderator that ran it), people would reasonably ask why a porn site has a kids section, and demand that even if the business wants to be in both spaces, the websites must be separated.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> and "foregone conclusion"

I'm unconvinced and be hard pressed to be.

> your fate is the same as if you had never been asked.

This is absolutely not true and is literally the entire reason people go to great lengths to do it. Not understanding this is probably why you're not understanding the rest. I'm not sure how you don't get it because if you're gay you're not going to military service and you're not going to jail. If you're not gay (or not faking) your choice is military service or jail. That's not "the same" no matter how you put it.

Re: Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to have to clarify what the misleading/disinformation/FUD is. Because I don't see it.

Just read Every Single Suggestion in your reply. > going to pornhub.com or definitelynotgayporn.net would arouse suspicion in a government that is banning such behavior dns blocking doesn't mean adults are banned from visiting porn sites. You start by contradicting your initial concession of assuming this is 100% accurate. > and could cause a person to be under higher scrutiny. So even if you're right that the DNS by…

One of us is very very VERY confused here
Post reply on HN