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Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

tomshardware.com

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Re: Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

#211

Post by jmyeet »

lxgr wrote: post #159
jmyeet wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only baffling thing is taht it took this long. In the physical world, we can limit the types of businesses. We can limit access to them. Casinos, adult entertainment, drinking establishments, etc require efort to go to and there's enforcement (not always effective, obviously) to keep, say, minors out. The Internet has broken down that structure such that there are no limitations and, like it or not, that's really…

> The Internet has broken down that structure such that there are no limitations and, like it or not, that's really harmful. Widespread access to sports betting and crypto gambling [...] Your analysis disregards the evidence of several decades in which the Internet existed, but gambling was still broadly illegal and getting around those laws was anything but trivial (since blocking financial flows is, or at least use…

> Your analysis disregards the evidence of several decades in which the Internet existed, but gambling was still broadly illegal and getting around those laws was anything but trivial (since blocking financial flows is, or at least used to be, pretty effective).

I'm not sure what the point of this comment is because it basically translates to "getting around gambling restrictions used to be difficult but it no longer is", which is my point. What does it matter how things used to be if crypto in particular makes financial flows trivial so it's not that way anymore?

> This requires trusting the government in the first place. Easy in some places; not so much in others.

Well, here are you options:

1. No ID verification. A lot of people might consider that ideal but I think it's DOA;

2. A private company, which includes the likes of the Peter Thiel-backed company, verifying IDs; or

3. The government, which, again, is the entity that issues the IDs so, by definition, you're not giving them anything they don't already know.

The government is a strictly better option than a private company because, apparently I need to repeat this, they already have the information because they issued the IDs.

Re: Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

#212

Post by wartywhoa23 »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #199
2ndorderthought wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't had a single person in my life or social media inform me of a single thing I have missed out on since blocking Russia and several other hostile nations with my firewall. I've been doing this for about 15 years. No regrets so far. I understand your philosophy but it doesn't match my reality.

Warty. I doubt you personally are. But unfortunately your country has engaged in a lot of troublesome activities. We can connect through a 3rd party like we are now that's fine with me. I don't hate all Russians or anything like that. I see no reason to directly connect to any Russian Internet infrastructure though.

Well, thanks for that at least..

Re: Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

#213

Post by wartywhoa23 »

Modified3019 wrote: post #205
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I a hostile one for you, being a Russian who has to bypass both domestic blocks of the outbound traffic and (much more rare) "hostile nation" geoip blocks on the other side via VPNs just to read that damn article , mind you, not to hack anyone?

It’s for sure not fair for you personally. However it’s also not fair the rest of us have do deal with Russia’s hacking and propaganda organizations that are either directly state run or willfully tolerated. IP blocks don’t fix everything, but they do (or did at least) counter a good portion of the bots for no effort. You live in a country that is awful to itself and everyone around it, but that’s not something we ca…

A sad, utterly sad world to live in. Thanks for understanding the few of us who are not hackers, propagandists, or their victims..

Re: Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

#214

Post by homtanks »

Aurornis wrote: post #155
progval wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no evidence it is actually coming from Meta. The Reddit researcher the article cites generated their entire "analysis" in three days using Claude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659552 Their website also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is under "surveillance" because it got a few thousand reque…

The way that Reddit "researcher" had Claude bang out a GitHub repo in a couple days and single-handedly established the narrative throughout the internet is scary. When it was released I read a few of the reports in this repo and they didn't even support the claims made. Claude was admitting it couldn't find the evidence. It's terrifying how easily this misinfo operation established itself as fact on websites where u…

The users here are probably more misinformed than average on several topics, including this one, due to community flagging and downvoting behavior which has the effect of filtering out reasonable criticism, and restricting discussion to a narrow range of viewpoints.

Re: Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

#215

Post by somat »

rationalist wrote: post #57
butvacuum wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for the US- until the feds broke up Bell between 1974 and 82. but, there were no technical hurdles. Anybody have a toy whistle?

My understanding is that the phone company owned the phone, not the state.

And who gets to tell the phone company how to operate?

We try and segment it into governments and corporations. But really there is no real differences between the two. They are all governing policies for groups of people arranged in a sort of heirical pattern. The big top level group, the one that managed to gain control of physical territory is the nation-state or perhaps more accurately the Government(capital G) of which. allocating control to various lesser groups. Including physical sub territories and for profit enterprises (The incorporation).

The point being, even in the most rampant capitalist[1](an economic policy favoring freedom of operation in it's sub groups) nation the for profit enterprises are licensed and regulated and if needed(see world war 2) controlled by the state.

1. As opposed to communism, an economic policy favoring fairness of operation in it's sub groups. Or fascism, an economic policy where no one knows what it is but every one agrees is bad. fascism really is hard to pin down, used as the default bogey man by everybody, but original Italian theory suggests it favors having the most successful sub groups run the state, which would be in the capitalist corner. however the largest wielders of the theory(1930's Germany) used it as a social fairness issue, which is in the communism domain.

Re: Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

#216

Post by [deleted] »

michaelmrose wrote: post #208
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's all block whole countries just because our propagandists brainwashed us so, yay, what an Internet that'll be!

Russia and the US are currently attacking and threatening their neighbors in their respective wars of aggression.

[deleted]

Re: Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

#217

Post by altairprime »

mvdwoord wrote: post #16

I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals... they feel dystopic and can seemingly only lead to brutal restrictions on the internet. What will we end up with? Only attested modems / endpoints in the home? With DPI? And a government issued smartcard to use it? It comes across as if this is what some legislators are actually after... they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them tha…

One could infer that they’re trying to make porn illegal in their legislature’s desire to build the United and Puritanical States of America, which itself stems from the hope that increasing the internal sexual pressures in men will reverse the growing trend of intolerance for misogyny among both men and women. That reversal most benefits today’s adherents of misogyny, a population that is strongly represented in Utah, and comes at a cost — viewed as a net transfer of control from women to men — that is societally acceptable for them to make subservient women pay. (If this were various other states like South Carolina or Oregon, I’d point out the usual labor-economics connection to replacing more-illegal race-based slavery with less-illegal gender-based slavery now that the former’s illegal, but Utah’s home to a large religious group that has and remains focused on the gendered form first, so it doesn’t seem applicable here.)

Re: Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

#218

Post by Barrin92 »

pseudosavant wrote: post #179
mvdwoord wrote: post #16

I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals... they feel dystopic and can seemingly only lead to brutal restrictions on the internet. What will we end up with? Only attested modems / endpoints in the home? With DPI? And a government issued smartcard to use it? It comes across as if this is what some legislators are actually after... they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them tha…

When discussing Utah, you shouldn't ignore the role that Mormonism's theocratic authoritarian culture and embrace of the MAGA movement has had. Human rights, like right to privacy, will always be trampled by their desire to legislate their morality. The Utah territory was literally founded as a theocracy.

exactly, there's an entire commercial ecosystem for this too, so called 'shameware' (or in their own parlance 'accountability software') apps that exists to put you under religious surveillance (https://archive.ph/RkgYn)

I really hate this tinfoil hat nonsense you see here every day now, Utah is not censoring online content because of tech bros in California lol.

Re: Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

#219

Post by semiquaver »

nunez wrote: post #107
mrbluecoat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will they ban self-hosted VPNs? https://mrbluecoat.blogspot.com/2025/08/self-hosted-vpn-opti...

Easily. Host them on the cloud providers? You get banned. Host them in your homelab and the ISP finds out? You get your Internet cut. How will either of them find out? IP addresses and/or DPI. All it'll take is an executive order or an act of Congress.

"IP from a datacenter" doesn't work in practice to detect VPNs.

At work we set up a compliance-related service recently and used the AWS WAF rules to block known datacenter ranges with the goal of blocking bots and VPNs.

We had to disable that rule almost immediately because a large majority of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solutions are hosted in or at least egress from big cloud providers.

It wasn't possible to block AWS/GCP IP ranges without also blocking legit usage from real customers.

Re: Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

#220

Post by nephihaha »

croes wrote: post #74
nephihaha wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They obviously get the ideas from the same sources. Somewhere they don't invite ordinary people to like Davos or other conferences.

You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge.

At the same time? I don't think so. Almost everyone talks to each other and takes notes. We know they do. The World Economic Forum is real and has a website you can access. They talk about policies like this under their "Fourth Industrial Revolution" section and don't even hide it. The same policies are repeated across much of the world on everything from smoking to driving to digital ID, regardless of who gets voted in.
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