[HN Gopher] Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
        
       Author : geox
       Score  : 116 points
       Date   : 2024-04-06 20:18 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.popsci.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.popsci.com)
        
       | CapitalistCartr wrote:
       | Anyone here recommend a VPN, for personal information safety and
       | security rather than hiding porn?
        
         | readyplayernull wrote:
         | Tor Project.
        
           | vorticalbox wrote:
           | The tor network is really not built for streaming and you
           | slow it down for everyone else when you do.
        
         | jamesponddotco wrote:
         | A VPN so you can hide your IP address and whatnot? Mullvad.
        
         | thih9 wrote:
         | How are these two use cases different? Are there vpn services
         | that let you do one and not the other?
        
           | netsharc wrote:
           | Presumably GP's fear is that there are a lot of VPN
           | providers, and they all claim to offer security, etc (or if
           | you google for a "$VPN_provider_name review" there'll be
           | dozen of shill sites saying how secure this particular VPN
           | provider is, click here to get a discount using our referral
           | code), so it all feels like shady business.
           | 
           | For bypassing Sharia-state firewalls like Texas', any VPN
           | provider should be good enough, but GP is asking for
           | recommendations for providers who can be trusted to ensure
           | privacy.
        
         | kmfrk wrote:
         | Mullvad is the best, but last I saw, they had to disable port
         | forwarding due to bad actors ruining it for everyone else.
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36113215
         | 
         | They also work with Tailscale which makes per-device setup
         | easier: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/tailscale-has-partnered-
         | with-mul.... Tailscale was using a bit too much of my iPhone
         | battery last I tried it out, but they're at least aware of it.
        
           | DefineOutside wrote:
           | After mullvad disabled port forwarding, I switched to AirVPN
           | and it works fine. I trust it slightly less than Mullvad but
           | I'm avoiding copyright trolls, not three letter agencies.
        
             | dotnet00 wrote:
             | I've been using AirVPN for a few years now, seems fairly
             | trustworthy so far.
        
               | LadyCailin wrote:
               | Not to sound snarky, because this is a genuine question,
               | but what does that even mean? Unless you've been brazenly
               | selling child porn over the VPN and been getting away
               | with it for years, I don't really know how you would
               | establish a VPN is trustworthy vs you just haven't been
               | targeted for your minor torrenting, or whatever.
        
           | raggi wrote:
           | (Tailscalar here) I identified a big chunk of the background
           | drain on iPhone recently, and so drain just for being on in
           | the background is much reduced now. There's still more to do,
           | and we still end up with accounting for dns if you force dns
           | via us, but things are much improved.
        
         | heavyset_go wrote:
         | What are you trying to protect yourself from?
        
         | belorn wrote:
         | If the need is for passively visiting a few handful of websites
         | a week, I would recommend tor browsers. Takes a bit work to
         | learn when to refresh routes, and how to handle websites that
         | blocks public vpns, but easy to get started with. Pretty good
         | when visiting websites that deal with medical information since
         | tracing data from those are exceptional valuable to data
         | brokers.
         | 
         | If it is for more regular use or if the occasionally
         | slowness/vpn blocking is too much, I would likely pick mullvad
         | but I have not used their services. They do seem to spend some
         | money on pro-privacy activism, so that is at least a point in
         | their favor.
        
         | pokstad wrote:
         | iCloud private relay
        
         | artsi0m wrote:
         | I use VPN for bypassing blocks created either by government of
         | the country I currently live in or established as a sanctions
         | by another governments.
         | 
         | I set up wireguard and unbound on VPS in Amsterdam and share
         | with 10-15 people by posting wireguard config in private
         | telegram channel.
         | 
         | Ironically enough, but I block porn access using StevenBlack
         | hosts converted into Unbound config by awk script, so porhhub
         | dot com will return REFUSE dns response from unbound.
         | 
         | I know, that is not impressive idea of how to utilize computing
         | power of the VPS, but I also used it for running tor snowflake
         | (disabled because of eating too much ram), running tor
         | obfs4_proxy (would also eat much ram, but that can be adjusted,
         | I don't remember clearly why I disabled it at one point) and I
         | used it as a server for Postgres that I tried to use for uni's
         | coursework on databases.
         | 
         | Maybe I am too lazy to setup tools like zapret for bypassing
         | deep packet inspection locally on my laptop or on router. But
         | still there should be a ton of things that can be done on the
         | same vps.
        
         | wallstthrowaway wrote:
         | PIA
        
         | worik wrote:
         | Tor?
        
         | jupp0r wrote:
         | They are usually equally suitable for both. Are you asking for
         | a friend?
        
       | PicassoCTs wrote:
       | Hardening societal infra-structure against democratic governments
       | collapsing back into autocracies. Good times.
        
         | brink wrote:
         | Porn is not a liberating force. It's like being mad at the
         | government for making it hard for you to smoke cigarettes.
        
           | exe34 wrote:
           | Cigarette causes lung cancer and a bunch of other things.
        
             | johannes1234321 wrote:
             | Especially also for bystanders. Porn is consumed mostly
             | privately.
        
           | p00b wrote:
           | Right, but also porn is often a commercial engine for tech
           | innovation (even if indirectly, as in this case), which in
           | turn can be leveraged as a liberating force.
        
           | tavavex wrote:
           | Porn also doesn't give you cancer. It's pretty transparent
           | that the restrictions on it originate from hyper-religiosity
           | and conservatism, rather than some genuine concern about
           | public health.
        
           | tennisflyi wrote:
           | Liberating force is a bit too far but it's not the demon
           | people seem to think. It's about all things in moderation.
           | Porn = dopamine. Fast food = sugars/fructose and the ilk. SM
           | = dopamine. Loot boxes = dopamine. Ad nauseam...
        
             | thriftwy wrote:
             | Can I get a socially approved amount of porn then?
             | 
             | Would there be porn rations?
        
               | kibwen wrote:
               | Just like other addictive things (sugar, caffeine, video
               | games, gambling), the "socially approved amount" is
               | determined by a given individual's own limits on what
               | they can consume while remaining a functioning member of
               | society.
        
               | tennisflyi wrote:
               | Some where in between not talking about it with your mom
               | and dad but chopping it up with a friend briefly about
               | whatever models is so attractive and had a great scene on
               | whatever website
        
           | andy99 wrote:
           | s/cigarettes/weed/ and watch how many people suddenly get
           | angry.
           | 
           | The problem is the government telling people what to do,
           | period.
        
           | Der_Einzige wrote:
           | It is a canary in the coal mine litmus test for if you live
           | in a free society or not.
           | 
           | It is _absolutely_ a liberating force.
           | 
           | It's uniquely liberating right now since over half of all
           | free/open sourced AI models have an NSFW or unaligned focus
           | (nearly the majority in the diffusion model world).
           | 
           | Without the power of Waifus/booru websites ran by hentai
           | aficionados, a solid amount of the generative AI revolution
           | in the context of text to image models simply would not have
           | happened.
        
           | keybored wrote:
           | People would be mad at the government for the exact same
           | reason if they made selling cigarettes illegal.
        
         | halfcat wrote:
         | _"democratic governments collapsing back into autocracies"_
         | 
         | I feel this statement in my bones.
         | 
         | We have one side making all the laws, the other side doing away
         | with laws, both of them acting solely for political points.
         | 
         | No one in the middle is "radical" enough (by definition) to
         | push back. Hard to see how that doesn't end in major conflict
         | with a single winner, as you say.
        
         | f6v wrote:
         | But the kids!
        
       | b8 wrote:
       | Usenet, DDL, and torrenting are alternatives too. I wonder if
       | Cloudflare's free VPN would bypass state based blocking.
        
       | jimcsharp wrote:
       | Surely it's overkill to pay for a whole month of constant vpn
       | use. You could cook something up that provides access for a short
       | session aaand we've circled back to dialers.
        
         | phillc73 wrote:
         | Short session? The month is good.
        
           | winwang wrote:
           | OP just needs a couple minutes of VPN
        
         | zamadatix wrote:
         | It's <$5 per month. The economics start to be more about the
         | general cost of managing transactions, accounts, and customer
         | service than about paying for how much VPN you actually use.
        
         | 14 wrote:
         | 4 or 8tb storage isn't even that much these days. You could
         | torrent thousands of gb of porn and just store it until later.
         | Heck if you lived somewhere that was getting really stupid and
         | cracking down you could even sell cheap dvds with porn in a
         | weird black market. The world gets dumber by the day
        
       | ndriscoll wrote:
       | > 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 could mail cash to
       | mullvad), so mission accomplished?
       | 
       | > Some of the anti-porn laws, like the one enacted in Utah,
       | already possess language explicitly prohibiting online platforms
       | from letting minors "change or bypass restrictions on access."
       | 
       | That's a social media law, not a porn law, and it's about
       | parental controls that the parent set up on an account that's
       | been marked as a child account (so only the parent account can
       | modify controls on the child account: duh!).
       | 
       | Absolutely garbage article. Didn't even link to the actual laws.
       | And people complain that no one will pay for "journalism" like
       | this.
        
         | goalieca wrote:
         | Well they can learn to use tor but most likely they'll get
         | sucked into shady free VPN services and suffer worse.
        
           | tennisflyi wrote:
           | No way you're streaming anything via Tor
        
             | InvertedRhodium wrote:
             | I used to leave porn downloading overnight over 56k in the
             | mid 90s. They'll just have to get a little more organised
             | about it.
        
       | bradly wrote:
       | Also it is extremely common in middle and high school to use VPNs
       | to get around school network restrictions.
        
         | miki123211 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | cayde wrote:
           | Tethering is idiot expensive in USA. Every provider will DPI
           | and block it or throttle it. It's awful.
        
             | ranger_danger wrote:
             | very easy to bypass simply by increasing TTL by 1
        
               | jowea wrote:
               | And what's the very easy way to do that?
        
             | vel0city wrote:
             | My $15/mo plan in the US can pull hundreds of megabits at
             | 20ms latency to most sites tethered. Tethering is baked
             | into most phone plans and from my experiences not throttled
             | any more than the regular phone data. Most plans have it,
             | even the cheap prepaid options.
        
           | phillc73 wrote:
           | Maybe it's also a generational thing. In the 90s, I remember
           | running my own squid proxy on a remote shared box somewhere,
           | in order to circumvent "things."
           | 
           | Granted, today, if it was just getting around general network
           | restrictions via blacklist, then tethering is very
           | convenient.
        
             | chgs wrote:
             | Ssh -D is quite handy
        
         | lelandfe wrote:
         | Back in my day, it was about obscure web proxies. I remember
         | one that was called something like abelincolnfacts.com, which
         | looked like a blog about Lincoln. But clicking an icon of his
         | face in the top right revealed a web proxy interface to browse
         | the web unfettered.
        
         | jwells89 wrote:
         | Though, circumvention of these things isn't always even that
         | involved, depending on the competency of IT.
         | 
         | At the religious private high school I attended, all it took to
         | make a student a "hacker" was popping open Internet Options on
         | the computer lab's XP boxes and disabling the proxy they were
         | using. Had to sneakily do this sometimes not to view blocked
         | stuff, but to just have a working internet connection to
         | complete assignments with because the proxy service was
         | provided by some terribly run local company that must've been
         | three Staples special Celeron Compaq Presarios and a Linksys
         | router in a shack somewhere, because they were constantly
         | having outages.
        
         | willcipriano wrote:
         | "Start using cgi proxy"
        
       | thriftwy wrote:
       | > sexual material harmful to minors
       | 
       | As a minor I have accessed sexual material all the time and I can
       | assure you I was not harmed.
       | 
       | I wonder why fake news regulations do not cover claims like
       | these.
        
         | nanocode wrote:
         | What you wrote sounds a bit like "As a minor I have lived in
         | asbestos building and I can assure you I was not harmed". How
         | do you know?
         | 
         | As far as I know, there are many scientific studies that
         | disprove what you've said - and that porn has, in fact, a
         | harmful effect on young minds. Of course there are many other
         | harmful things that we nevertheless accept, like alcohol, cars
         | or cigarettes. So maybe we can, as a society, decide that
         | letting kid watch porn is OK and not worth the alternative
         | (privacy intruding regulations). But arguing that it's not
         | harmful at all is not, I believe, scientifically justified.
        
           | thriftwy wrote:
           | Living in asbestos building is definitely better than not
           | living in any building. Porn was the only kind of sexual life
           | available to me for a while.
           | 
           | It is my internal state, I find your ideas that you may be a
           | better judge of it than myself revolting. WTH are you?
        
         | moonchild wrote:
         | Respectfully:
         | 
         | 1. I think censorship laws are abhorrent
         | 
         | 2. It can be very difficult to tell what effect media has on
         | you, and just because you do not (say) find yourself
         | traumatised or find that your perceptions have been overtly
         | altered does not mean you have not been negatively affected.
         | And you will certainly never be unaffected by anything you
         | experience or do. This is something that I've become _more_
         | sensitive to and aware of as I 've gotten older. And further,
         | it is _only_ through this sensitivity and awareness, and
         | acceptance of the fact that I cannot just decide by fiat how
         | things will affect me, that I have gained some measure of
         | control.
        
           | thriftwy wrote:
           | Why is it my problem that you, a different human being, have
           | control issues? Perhaps your hardware is faulty and should be
           | selected away from the gene pool. Why is that a reason to
           | make _my_ life worse?
           | 
           | Anyways it's better to get you hooked up on porn than on
           | drive-by shootings or almost any other anti-social behavior.
           | 
           | It is not provable that I was negatively affected by
           | perceptions of I say I wasn't.
        
             | samus wrote:
             | Nor is it provable that you weren't. Which is the point of
             | the previous comment. Anyways, enjoy the nosebleed
             | material...
        
       | rrr_oh_man wrote:
       | 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 a while.
        
         | not_a_dane wrote:
         | UK is also censoring porn sites...
        
           | 77pt77 wrote:
           | At this point Turkey is probably more free than the UK.
        
             | levidos wrote:
             | Can you elaborate please? The UK isn't blocking gay porn
             | sites for example.
        
           | sph wrote:
           | Only with crappy ISPs like Virgin, which has court-mandated
           | DNS bans for many websites (like ThePirateBay)
           | 
           | I use Zen which has no such restriction. Though for safety
           | all my illegal activity is done via VPN because this is still
           | a Five Eyes country.
        
           | gambiting wrote:
           | Friendly reminder that all ISPs in the UK are required to
           | store your entire browsing history for a full year, and 17
           | government agencies, including the Department of Agriculture,
           | can access it without a warrant. Snoopers Act has been passed
           | and lives on for years now, and I'm yet to meet a person who
           | is even slightly bothered by it.
        
             | chgs wrote:
             | Except that's not right
             | 
             | https://decoded.legal/blog/2021/06/must-all-uk-internet-
             | acce...
        
         | chpatrick wrote:
         | That way the ISP still sees what you're doing though.
        
           | acchow wrote:
           | Only the DNS lookups. Not the content of what you're viewing
           | over https. Everything after domain name is encrypted
        
             | freedomben wrote:
             | 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
        
               | nurettin wrote:
               | There is no law against going to pornhub.com, the law is
               | only concerned with dns blocking.
        
         | heavyset_go wrote:
         | Set them up with some form of DNS over TLS.
        
         | samatman wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | leeoniya wrote:
           | this is basically that family guy episode where Quagmire
           | tries to get out of his marriage to a hooker.
        
           | superb_dev wrote:
           | 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
        
             | Dylan16807 wrote:
             | Wanting to get out of a pre-existing obligation that every
             | man has, and most don't get out of, should not qualify as
             | lack of consent.
        
               | noman-land wrote:
               | The obligation itself already lacks consent so anything
               | you feel forced to do to get out of it is similarly non-
               | consentual.
        
               | Dylan16807 wrote:
               | If by "similarly" you mean "equally bad at most", then I
               | can agree with that.
               | 
               | But I think most people would rate non-consensual sex as
               | _significantly_ worse than a non-consensual day job.
               | 
               | So if you say the sex on camera is not consensual, you're
               | implying a very different kind of consent violation than
               | is actually happening.
        
           | archon1410 wrote:
           | Apparently it doesn't happen anymore.
           | 
           | > The system has been undergoing change for the past few
           | years: Lambda Istanbul's lawyer Firat Soyle stated in 2012
           | that the rectal examinations, and the photographic evidence
           | of anal intercourse have been dismissed as requirements when
           | they gained worldwide and national media attention.
           | 
           | -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_certificate
           | 
           | But from when it did happen, it sounds... bad.
           | 
           | > "With the picture it was a bit difficult. The face had to
           | be recognizable as well as the penis and the ass. To put all
           | this into a square was a bit complicated. Twice I got cramps
           | because of the position. [...] I also got humiliated at the
           | selection, before they announce it [the final diagnosis].
           | There are about 12 military people, big ones, with uniforms
           | and everything. [...] They all looked one by one at the
           | pictures and I had to bring ten pictures, ten different
           | positions there. This is the difficulty of course, but I
           | managed to do it. And at every single picture they looked and
           | compared it with me. I was standing in the middle. And then
           | they asked me questions. For example which positions I like
           | and if I use this position they see regularly. Questions like
           | that." -- Irlenkauser, Julian. "Gender Identities and the
           | Turkish Military." Thesis. European University Viadrina /
           | Istanbul Bilgi University, 2012.
        
         | noman-land wrote:
         | This story is oddly wholesome.
        
         | kornhole wrote:
         | Configuring 1.1.1.1 is a great option for people outside the US
         | whose countries are unable to pressure Cloudflare for
         | information. A better option for those of us in the US is to
         | run our own DNS resolvers. My DNS resolver runs on a little
         | PFSense box that also has DNS blocking and a ton of other
         | features.
        
       | mvkel wrote:
       | How did the industry get away with calling proxies "VPNs" anyway?
        
         | Brainspackle wrote:
         | Proxies and VPNs are different, that's why?
        
           | donatj wrote:
           | Yes, they are, and what gets sold to consumers as VPNs these
           | days are just proxies.
        
             | nanocode wrote:
             | I think we can split hairs and nitpick this a lot but...
             | Nowadays most often setup is that you join a VPN (a very
             | isolated one), and you use it for the same purpose as you
             | would proxy. But from your machine's point of view, you're
             | using a separate network for your default gateway. Using
             | proxy is usually more involved, and you can configure it in
             | your application. In fact, you can do both and sometimes it
             | makes sense (like using tor socks proxy over vpn).
        
             | Dylan16807 wrote:
             | When you add the word "just", you make that statement
             | false.
        
             | paxys wrote:
             | No, they are VPNs. They also include proxies in the same
             | bundle, and sometimes it is easier to just use proxies
             | rather than install an entire VPN client on your machines,
             | but VPN (powered by Wireguard or OpenVPN) is what they are
             | selling.
        
             | ranger_danger wrote:
             | I think the distinction should be that if a private IP
             | address is allocated for you, and hence this "tunnel" is
             | forwarding layer3 packets or lower, then it's called a VPN.
             | A proxy would not forward IP packets directly, but
             | something at layer4 or higher.
        
       | Nifty3929 wrote:
       | The major problem here is that our government is turning us all
       | into criminals. Using a VPN doesn't make it legal for you to
       | consume anonymously, even if doing so makes it harder to enforce,
       | at least for now. Soon VPN use will be illegal in some states.
       | Once again, hard to enforce. But these are things which, if for
       | some reason the gov't decides to target you (in which case they
       | can/will spend the effort to discover), can be used against you.
       | 
       | This is not a technology problem, it's a legislative one. It's
       | another example of some of us are using the power of the
       | government to constrain other people's behavior.
        
         | worik wrote:
         | Yes
         | 
         | That is the problem with vice laws
         | 
         | Tough times
        
         | zarathustreal wrote:
         | Isn't "constrain(ing) other people's behavior" kinda the point
         | of law? If you're trying to make a point you're gonna have to
         | be more specific. Preventing rape, theft, and murder are all
         | instances of "behavioral constraint", without any qualifiers
         | you're artificially inflating the magnitude of the situation
        
           | dijit wrote:
           | The issue is that for a large portion of the population, porn
           | consumption is not considered immoral or even if it _is
           | immoral_ ; not an offence worthy of calling someone a
           | criminal over.
           | 
           | We all know that laws are not a good indicator of morality,
           | but society is better when we try to align laws over time
           | with our moral code.
        
             | ndriscoll wrote:
             | 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
             | disingenuous in their characterization of these laws. It's
             | not that much different from requiring people to show ID at
             | the door of an adult store.
        
         | paxys wrote:
         | "Our government" isn't doing it, some very specific ones are.
         | And the people they represent are 100% behind all such laws.
         | This is the democratic process working exactly as intended.
        
       | braaileb wrote:
       | If they did this for all social media I might pick up guitar
        
         | kibwen wrote:
         | Unfortunately, the suggestive manual gesticulations required to
         | finger your fretboard have caused guitar-playing to be banned
         | in the state of Texas.
        
       | paulpauper wrote:
       | VPNs: $12/month if you sign up for 200+ months for blocked IPs
       | and slow servers and service. awesome.
        
         | aegypti wrote:
         | Reality: EUR5/month if you sign up for 1 month, blocked IPs,
         | ~10% reduction in Mbps
        
         | 77pt77 wrote:
         | For $12 a year you can get a VPS and just put OpenVPN there.
        
           | paxys wrote:
           | And who is going to pay for the bandwidth?
        
             | 77pt77 wrote:
             | Those VPS come with like 1 TB a month of bandwidth.
             | 
             | It's storage and CPU that are kind of a premium.
             | 
             | Bandwidth is cheap.
        
         | karaterobot wrote:
         | Which one are you using? It's overpriced and it sounds like a
         | bad experience. Fortunately most VPNs you'll find are cheaper
         | and better than what you're describing!
        
       | donatj wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | fragmede wrote:
         | How well do subpoenas work across international borders,
         | especially when the charge isn't illegal in the recieving
         | jurisdiction?
         | 
         | (asking for a friend, obvs)
        
           | zamalek wrote:
           | Things like torrenting will get you quickly shut down by the
           | provider. My friend found this out while considering setting
           | up their own seedbox.
        
             | simfree wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | ranger_danger wrote:
           | very well as long as the country has an extradition treaty
           | with your home country (if US, almost all you'd ever travel
           | to does)
        
         | throwaway918274 wrote:
         | 1984.hosting
         | 
         | payable with Monero
        
           | k8svet wrote:
           | Do you know any similar hosts that attempt to provide
           | shielded VMs?
        
       | zeroCalories wrote:
       | Imagine Texas bans private VPNs next. Haha.
        
         | btbuildem wrote:
         | That's not even haha, that's like 6/10 likely.
        
           | skissane wrote:
           | 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 commerce, and I
           | doubt the courts would let them do that
        
         | paxys wrote:
         | Passing a law and actually enforcing a ban are very different
         | things. In the case of porn the big corporate sites have no
         | choice but to comply. VPN providers don't really care. Unless
         | the state of Texas can manage to find and block every IP
         | address of every VPN server worldwide, people are going to get
         | through.
        
       | gigapotential wrote:
       | https://UpVPN.app for couple of minutes of VPN
        
       | ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
       | Gambling should be banned. Not porn.
        
         | 77pt77 wrote:
         | Why?
         | 
         | No one forces anyone to gamble.
        
           | dijit wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | karaterobot wrote:
         | I think gambling is a much more destructive force in the world
         | than porn, but I don't think either should be banned. Don't
         | look at it like we have to ban a certain number of things.
        
       | sydbarrett74 wrote:
       | Anyone have experience with Aura's VPN feature?
        
       | technion wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | andrewflnr wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | seanvelasco wrote:
       | one thing i noticed from vpn use recently: using a free vpn
       | actually allows me to watch content otherwise inaccessible to due
       | to geo restrictions. this was using a free vpn.
       | 
       | for a second, i was really happy because i thought the office was
       | finally available in my region.
        
       | uconnectlol wrote:
       | this new porn legislation is the most irrational cancerous fear
       | mongering sheep bullshit i've head of in my life. fuck your
       | stupid children, stop wasting my tax money, and stop making laws
       | based on a completely invalid platform (the web) which wont exist
       | in 10 years. if youre a conservative in tech you should jump off
       | a bridge just as much as a liberal. this is coming from someone
       | who _fucking hates_ garbage websites like pornhub too.
       | 
       | > hurr durr my child has internet access its too easy for him to
       | find porn
       | 
       | you had the option to take away his internet bullshit _long_
       | before making new legislation and setting bad precedents. please
       | fucking kill yourself. and you have no idea what youre talking
       | about too, legally constraining one or two websites changes
       | nothing in a practical perspective, your child is still finding
       | porn. you are an irresponsible piece of shit who values fucking
       | over humanity over a slight inconvenience of your kid not being
       | in the cool club (if he didnt have a phone).
       | 
       | you have the same energy as some dweeb boomer who puts cameras on
       | his front door and lets amazon have a global CCTV of every city
       | in the world (what could ever go wrong), just to prevent a break
       | in that would have never happened in the first place. you
       | security theater buying loser
        
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