There are a category of things that are technically impossible until a burly man threatens to break your arm if you don't do them, and a category of things that are still impossible.
Doesn't help your arm, but when they're asking for things in that second category, it doesn't help them either.
I remember talking about voting fraud with an indian friend. He said it was more overt in india - a burly guy would grab your finger and make it press the "correct" voting machine button.
Government in Utah is essentially a Mormon theocracy. People voted for medical cannabis and the church lobbied and got the will of the people overturned. They have strange alcohol laws because their religion forbids alcohol. They're hostile to queer rights because their religion dictates such beliefs.
They ban municipalities from displaying pride flags and there are a lot of exemptions from legal protections, but I'll admit some of my data is obsolete and I was unaware of the protections added in 2014.
Would you have an issue with a law banning municipalities from displaying "anti-pride" flags? Why should taxpayer funds be directed to these types of causes?
No stranger to expecting to apply their morality to all people, even those who have a very different set of beliefs. Just a niche brand of christian nationalism seeking to subjugate everyone to their ways.
That has not been my experience. I was born and raised in it and come from generations of Mormons going back to the 1800s.
Every family member I know of that is still Mormon only votes MAGA. Same for 90% of the Mormons I know in my area.
They expressly want a world/govt where their kids are never exposed to people with different views or lifestyles (e.g. LGBTQA people).
None of this should be surprising for the only church to ever operate a theocracy in the US, and also the last major Christian sect to officially stop being racist (in 1978). It is in the cultural DNA.
I use VPN most of the time. My work requires it, and I like Mozilla VPN for personal privacy. (Note: it has ad blocking DNS built in which is nice!)
I occasionally get blocked by websites or services, especially streaming apps, if I'm on VPN. I suspect they're just looking out for Amazon/Microsoft/etc IP address blocks. It's very annoying
Mozilla VPN runs on Mullvad who are transparent and publish active server and IP lists https://mullvad.net/en/servers.so trivial to block them without blocking all of Azure/GCP/AWS[1]
There are also third party providers of IP annotations to classify known VPN address ranges that content providers typically subscribe to blanket block providers.
The reason for this aggressive approach is streaming apps all need your IP as core signal for tagging your region and all content licensing is region locked (even on YT).
Netflix are/were the most relaxed about it , and for long time would only buy content if they got global distribution rights, but not anymore. Many VPN ads specifically used to market that you can watch Netflix geolocked content.
[1] IME they block DC IPs too although not needed for blocking professional VPN, even self hosted OpenVPN on cloud box usually gets flagged.
That list is the IPs users connect to. It is entirely distinct from the list of IPs the VPN traffic egresses from. I doubt believe that they publish their egress ranges.
Don’t think there was ever a time since Netflix started streaming where they only licensed global rights to shows. For their own originals they get global rights but the majority of their content is licensed and has always been slightly different in different territories.
That's not the same. You get blocked because the IP address you're coming from is associated with a VPN list, not because they're analyzing the traffic in detail.
The simplest methods block known datacenter IP ranges like you thought. More will score it based on several heuristics and a reputation over time. If you get 100 different users connecting from a single IP, it's probably not someone's home internet connection.
You do not need to know "reliably". You can block everything remotely suspicious, and in case someone is blocked by mistake, they can file an application with all necessary documentation proving the connection is not a VPN.
We should also restrict access to foreign fake news websites that spread destabilizing propaganda. We can include an exception for academics, and thus will require a new accreditation and licensing scheme for them. Naturally we will then want to implement common sense guardrails for their conduct ... /s
Well no, because the laws for ISPs and VPNs are different.
Most ISPs are already VPNs. Your connection is tunneled from your router at home, through some expansive DSL/ATM or GPON/PPPoE network, to a box at a data center that serves five neighborhoods with a single link by establishing a tunnel to each individual consumer router.
But the ISP has to make sure the geolocation databases have accurate information about it, and it has to retain logs of which user used which IP address at which time because the law says so. That's why it's not a "VPN".
Detection can be based on the IPs themselves, no packet tricks required. Plenty of services can do that: https://focsec.com/
Now of course, if your VPN is a home-lab style VPN where you are connecting to a little wireguard box sitting in your own home, that is a totally different story.
This is such a common HN trope, and it's tiresome.
Yes, lots of things will at any point be beyond the technical ability of most people as long as they remain niche. But as soon as a sizable market exists(e.g one created by a law, like in this case), products and services that close that gap will appear.
Hell, there's even stuff for doing this already, which is not that hard for non-technical people to set up, like Tailscale. I can easily imagine a Tailscale-like product that easily allows friends to use eachothers networks as a VPN with zero configuration or Wireguard knowledge required. I mean, when you think about it it's just Tailscale but more streamlined for that particular purpose.
There's fears of bots and there's actual bots. My custom WAF blocks 500 requests per second, and let's through 2. There should be nearly zero false positives with the detection method I'm using.
The classic: ping the endpoint address, then “ping” the code. If the IP address comes back in 30ms but the JavaScript responds in 330ms, then the client is probably 300ms further away than they say they are claiming.
Or they’re on a computer that’s doing something intensive, swapping, or in low power mode. Or they have a browser extension that does stuff before scripts run. Or their cache is emptier than usual and they’re spending a long time doing an initial fetch of the latest ad tracking package your site installed. The list goes on. That’s far too noisy a signal to decide block-or-not based on. Good enough to try to sell someone faster gear, maybe, but not more than that.
except it is literally a VPN, actually. That's why it would have that characteristic. Except actually it wouldn't, because the test described only catches proxies at L4 and higher. It would catch a lot of CGNATs.
That was what the law attempted to do: Ban porn in Utah.
There is a very vocal anti-porn group in Utah. They do things like put up massive billboards that say "[Store name] sells porn." (Which is basically free advertising instead of shaming.)
Right, but if everyone serving porn did that (e.g., google image search, so I guess all of Google should ban Utah), then people would just send money out of state for vpn access, and probably remember the annoyance when it was time to vote.
People in Utah are different than the average American. I suspect they watch less porn. When I drove through in 2002, their "sex symbol" billboards involved a pretty couple with their kids in the background.
2009: "A new study [1][2][3] out of Harvard University seems to give Utah an unflattering distinction: No. 1 in the nation for pornography consumption." [4]
There are more recent studies that rank Utah in the bottom 10. [5]
>SB 73 burdens the rights of all internet users outside of Utah because it requires adult websites to either know every visiting user’s physical location, and then block those in Utah, or to verify every visitor’s age just in case they might be in Utah. The law’s “actual-location provision in practice requires an entity to perform age verification services for every user visiting its site from any location because the entity would violate the law if even one of those users happened to be obfuscating,” the court wrote.
In order to withdraw from Utah, they would be forced to block traffic from everywhere since it's possible that some kid in Utah used a VPN to make it look like they lived in Singapore.
It’s really simple, require Utah to remove all their land lines satellite dishes and towers. Anyone found connecting to the internet from Utah and you fine the state of Utah
Right, all you see is the IP address. And anyone in the world can set up an “individual” VPN just for them on a cheap VPS or cloud server anywhere else in the world. There’s no technical way to accomplish what they’ve mandated, only something approximating it like “block all connections from known commercial VPN services”.
This isn’t true. Hosting providers have known IP blocks. Spin up a hand rolled VPN through a VPS and you’ll get blocked by a lot of services, or at the very least, treated as highly suspicious.
What’s the “this” that isn’t true in what I said? I was responding to
> Is it even possible to reliably know that a connection is from a VPN?
And I’m saying it’s not. Coming from a hosting provider IP block is far from a definitive sign that you’re using a VPN. A very plausible real world reason for that is that your company uses one of the large VDI providers, most of which egress from GCP or AWS.
> Is it even possible to reliably know that a connection is from a VPN?
No, it's not possible. You can only try to identify known protocols or suspicious patterns of data, timing or entropy. Theoretically, with a big enough collaboration, you could hide a VPN behind shaping traffic patterns and request order towards hundreds of different servers, and there's just no method of traffic analysis that can possibly identify that without prior knowledge.
Like, some firewalls try to identify an absence of connections outside the VPN, or an abnormal volume of data over a sustained period of time. But all that goes out the window when, say, you are connecting to hundreds of real servers at all times and only exchanging, say, basic HTTP requests with each one. For all they know you just have a million browser toolbars installed. They wouldn't know if the choice of request, order and timing encodes information because they wouldn't be able to prove what the client's intentions are in sending it or what the servers do with it.
I believe some VPN providers are beginning to play with things like this, but the problem is really that it's impossible to provide this. It only really works when you run it yourself, because that's the only way others don't know. So they're having to settle for compromises, like Mullvad's DAITA, which still uses a single server but tries to avoid showing tells of a VPN connection as opposed to something else like streaming.
maybe not reliably, but i was impressed by the effectiveness and sophistication of the GFW when i was traveling in China. ISP level filtering would likely also comply with the restrictions in this lawsuit.
It took quite a bit of finagling to bypass the GFW on my own and in some regions (Beijing) I was still randomly detected and throttled, it seemed.
The better question is can you ensure your traffic doesn't get funneled to utah? The answer is probably not. There is a huge nsa data center there... So it's not even a choice, it's do both impossible things.
>As we’ve said time and time again: the internet will always route around censorship.
Is this still true, or has it become a truism? It seems nations like Iran and China (and events like Kashmir come to mind) have progressed the state-of-the-art and playbook to where we can't actually say it definitively will route around it.
Now seeing that the US and EU are flirting with these similar restrictions it's making me wonder how we'll be able to keep hold of these principles.
Maybe my concern with that adage is ultimately its passive voice, since it takes 'active' action by people to give us those options, and will probably take more actions by more people to keep it alive now.
Is China that successful at it lately? I see a lot of posters and info from China getting around the great firewall, and my understanding was that they don't really care if 1% of users do that so long as it mostly holds and only the technical minded or really fixated will see it.
So there is a route around censorship, but maybe the public doesn't really care about it.
There is also the difficult reality that the government doesn't need to block vpn entirely, but just make it a credible risk of being detected. If you have to worry about the state police barging into your home, you are likely to decide it isn't worth the risk and self-regulate.
How I have heard it described is using a VPN in China is like smoking weed in the US. It’s widely done even if illegal and you’d have to be seriously unlucky to get in trouble. You’d at most get a warning.
People with more first hand experience can probably explain it better but it doesn’t seem that strict. China is not North Korea, their aims seem less about preventing people from learning about the world and more preventing non compliant foreign tech companies having Chinese users.
It absolutely is primarily about preventing people from learning about the world. You can’t run a system like China’s without controlling information. During the political meetings, they ramp up their blocking, and then they usually turn it down again after.
During the World Cup (2022, still zero covid in China), they started blurring out the crowd because people were noticing that nobody in the stands was wearing masks. They’d been told that the zero covid policy and draconian lockdowns were keeping them safe, and outside China was a Covid hell-hole. Protests followed four months later.
Nobody in China was told about western covid vaccines, much less allowed to get them.
VPNs aren’t widely used — there was a study posted here some months ago that estimated VPN use at around 1% of the population, too little to matter.
That’s why they’re a bit lax. They can afford to let some through to grease the wheels of commerce. You do have to be seriously unlucky to get into trouble.
(I was there during Covid, and some years before and after)
Do you write anywhere about your time there during covid? Seeing a foreigner's perspective during that time would be fascinating.
That's some interesting info anyways if not. It's funny that the absolute number of VPN users is large but negligible compared to the overall population.
Not publicly unfortunately. I still go back to visit from time to time, and some of the things I could write about would definitely get me harassed if the wrong person found it. That's self-censorship for you.
TL;DR: it was far better than the rest of the world in 2020, marginally better in 2021, but 2022 was a shit show. I still remember Dec 7 as the day zero covid ended.
I'm not sure whether it's 1% or 0.1% or only Xi Jinpin can access YouTube. China can adjust the surveillance level dynamically. It's a matter of cost and effect.
That's the way it was explained to me. Letting the fringe do what they're going to do anyway while inoculating the majority to outside influence is the goal and the difficulty setting is dynamic.
I’m pretty sure with Iran, and I assume other authoritarian nations, the state controls what traffic can and cannot leave their borders. When they go dark, they just effectively cut off access to the outside world entirely. Sure they may have their own state run servers that provide some services, but then they can inspect and manage all traffic being routed inside the country. Don’t have to try and find the VPN if there’s just no traffic.
I suppose Utah could impose some sort of strategy here, but would be so burdensome and anti-American I’m not sure they could pull it off. Instead of a blacklist of sites dictated by the site provider, you go the other way where all Utah ISPs maintain a whitelist of IPs permitted to Utah citizens. Any traffic attempting to reach a non-white listed IP, would be rejected.
The layer 2 and 3 of ISO/OSI stack does indeed "route around censorship". But the Internet as we know it is all Layer 7, and it's as centralized as it gets.
That's why regulators often aim straight at Layer 7 entities - companies providing consumer services over the web. Because no matter how unblockable the route between you and some server is, it doesn't mean anything when the server itself is refusing to talk to you.
What about p2p and less scrupulous actors like TPB? I guess in China the former is probably more effective but this sort of thing is immediately what I thought of when I read OP
The thing China can do, and does do: Kill your network connections, whether that's a TCP session, your ability to send or receive packets with some particular IP addresses, or at the extreme armed men show up and now it's not an Internet problem.
Things China can't do: Magically "downgrade", "decrypt" or "intercept" the secure protocols we use every day like HTTPS. Facts won't budge, the technology we are using does what it says on the tin.
The Internet can't route around you being thrown off a tall building by men with guns, but the IETF has for some years considered it to be extremely important to design the network protocols to prevent these shenanigans. BCP # 188 "Pervasive Monitoring is An Attack"
Russia's ROSKOMNadzor has been trying to get users to install its own Root CAs in recent years. About 10 years ago everyone in the west removed CNNIC (Chinese counterpart) roots after they were caught MITM-ing.
Browsers and TLS infrastructure have been solving that for a while now, via certificate transparency. Browsers can now reject any certificate that isn't publicly logged. So, yes, they could MITM, and burn an entire CA doing it.
If you're dealing with an authoritarian state they don't need to burn anything. They can:
1. Make it illegal to distribute a browser that distrusts their CA
2. Make it illegal to run a browser that distrusts their CA
3. Block all encrypted traffic that they can't MITM
Sure, a state can do that, and some have tried at various times. But even authoritarian states have a number of competing aims they have to balance. And CT makes authoritarian goals harder; they can no longer do as much surreptitiously.
This is unnecessary, they already have the problem controlled better. They just outright block foreign services, and the domestic ones they can request data from freely.
Doesn’t require cracking crypto or any funny business around forcing people to install stuff.
“Make it illegal to…” that has never in human history prevented anything from happening. Cannot increase the risk? Of course, but laws do not stop humans from humaning.
Furthermore, doing any of the things you listed would isolate all legitimate network traffic as well as any undesirable traffic, fully shuttering all Chinese manufacturing businesses from global requests via the web. This hat would happen then? Phone calls, emails, and even physical mail would become the new norm and most of the Chinese economy would collapse under the weight of not being able to hop on a Zoom with a client that wants tooling made for its aluminum manufacturing molds.
So besides my point of the black market your hypothesis of total control misses all the other pressures that exist that make what you’re proposing infeasible on its face. Only a place like North Korea that is willing to be a pariah state is old be willing to take the economic and social costs associated with your proposal, and they’ve only been able to do that because their abominable regime was in place before the internet existed and they pre-built controls very late in the game.
Tl;dr simply because a country _could_ do something doesn’t mean it’s realistic for reasons outside of basic networking concepts.
> Things China can't do: Magically "downgrade", "decrypt" or "intercept" the secure protocols we use every day like HTTPS
I mean... They could, though, no? If they control the gateways they could drop any traffic that isn't encrypted with some root cert that allows them to decrypt in transit packets.
> If they control the gateways they could drop any traffic that isn't encrypted with some root cert that allows them to decrypt in transit packets.
I'm sure that works in a Hollywood movie, in the same way you could reverse the polarity of the lasers to enable you to travel inside the computer from a household video projector, or decrypt all the world's telephone calls using a device built into your batmobile - but this isn't a Hollywood movie and so traffic isn't in fact "encrypted with a root cert".
If for any of a variety of reasons the Chinese authorities don't want your connection to exist they'll terminate the connection, exactly as I described in my earlier comment.
If China has sufficient leverage over OS providers they could require government root CAs to be trusted in the OS cert store, and then MITM HTTPS traffic "at the border". Admittedly that isn't "encrypted with a root cert," I was sloppy with my language, but that's roughly how corporate HTTPS proxies and filtering work today anyway.
That said, your point that they're probably more interested in information control than spying on everyone's traffic is a good call out, and would change their methodology. My issue was more with your statement that they can't magically downgrade modern encryption; MITM via OS cert store 'compromise' isn't magic, but I think it's certainly possible in a threat model where your adversary is a nation-state.
Yes China will kill your network connections. And that is proof that Internet cannot route around censorship. Any time Internet routes around censorship China finds a new way to censor it.
Normal people don’t care about “downgrade” or “decrypt” or “intercept” they care about availability.
In times of low social unrest theyd rather create a list of dissidents than try to shut them down. Keeps unrest lower and then when they need to spin up the domestic security apparatus they already know who to watch
Until a time of "civil unrest" occurs, and suddenly your "super easy" VPN becomes entirely blocked at the very same moment you wish you had it the most.
They aren't stupid, they're not going to block everything right away and give clues to their detection techniques and scope. There's a bunch they can detect/guess which isn't "worth it" to block at the present moment.
If there's civil unrest, they can of course essentially turn off the internet, but there's a distinction between "the internet can route around censorship" and "the internet can be blocked in its entirety (or near entirety)"
They certainly pull levers during unrest that they don’t on a day-to-day basis, but China still does not have complete control over the Internet. The Chinese people on the server I frequent talk about this constantly.
They certainly don’t have total freedom, but they’re harder to squash than you think
With pre-approved commercial VPNs yes. Set up your own unapproved VPN whether it’s IPSec or Wireguard or plain old SSH port forwarding, and see how fast it gets killed.
But of course the easiest approved “VPN” is just data roaming.
> Over the last two years, Iran officials warned that wider use of the satellite internet service could make communication controls within the country "ineffective", adding the regime has failed to produce an adequate policy response.
> “I sometimes joke that we might as well turn the Ministry of Communications and the Supreme Council of Cyberspace into amusement parks, because they will no longer serve any purpose,” Hakami said.
It's certainly less true than it was. It depends on how Matt Prince feels on any particular day.
To a large degree, most of the internet today is ultimately controlled by a few people. If what you have to say pisses off these people, and someone is determined to keep you off the internet, you have a problem. Kiwi Farms is a well known example, and continues to suffer under regular DDOS attacks. Regardless of how you feel about KF, it's undeniable that a) this nonsense has streissanded the site enormously and b) it's speech you don't like that needs protection.
Also there was the whole covid "misinformation" garbage fire... I certainly do not want my government or some megacorp to decide what can and can't say or read.
And going beyond the internet, I just want to remind you Americans, that your 1st amendment is almost unique (to my knowledge). Enjoy and protect your offensive, hateful, blasphemous, extremist, and deeply unpopular speech.
It's true unless we let freedom of speech and the press be interpreted narrowly, as the right to flap our jaws and to press paper against ink. That is up to us collectively.
The internet will always route around censorship in principled western nations.
It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their laws. We make technology that completely nullifies their laws. They need to increase their tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end state is either a totalitarian government or an uncontrollable population.
I used to think that we'd find some kind of equilibrium along the way, that we'd eventually discover the government's limits: some principle they refuse to break, some line they refuse to cross...
These are just aspirational statements, similar to "the internet always remembers" etc, they've never been true. And the passive voice is duly noted, it indeed depends mostly on those social forces for the "internet" to "act"/"route"
> nations like Iran and China have progressed the state-of-the-art and playbook
That’s a rather shallow and naive perspective. I’ll try to keep this short, but the overt blocking oriented “censorship” ascribed to China, Iran, or Israel is actually not at all “state-of-the-art”, it’s an inherent rather coarse approach to censorship.
If you want the true “state-of-the-art“ you can look no farther than the USA, where the “state-of-the-art” is such that people don’t even realize it’s censorship, let alone that anything is happening at all.
China, Iran, or Israel may or may not engage in censorship at a kind of high level that is apparent and observable; however the censorship in the USA and by extension in its various vassals of its empire, is far more sophisticated and base level to such a degree that the system, the whole society is the censorship mechanism, censorship is not something done to the system, the system is the censorship. That is “state-of-the-art”!
Not sure what the impossibility is. VPN's have a set of exit relays. If traffic is coming from one of those exit relays, it's coming from a VPN, so adult websites can be required to block traffic from those exit relays. What am I missing?
It's impossible to have a full and complete list of VPN exit nodes, for the simple reason that no company publishes the full list, and also technically if you set up an OpenVPN server on digital ocean and connect to that you're also using a VPN but no one would know your address is hosting a VPN server.
I would think that requiring adult websites to essentially block all VPN traffic to be pretty heavy handed and hardly a solution. Especially considering there are many reasons to use a VPN.
The law likely violates the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on passing laws that significantly burden businesses and people outside Utah’s borders.
SB 73 burdens the rights of all internet users outside of Utah because it requires adult websites to either know every visiting user’s physical location, and then block those in Utah, or to verify every visitor’s age just in case they might be in Utah.
It's technically impossible to both implement Utah's law and respect the constitution. To make it technically feasible you'd need to either change the constitution or federalize the law.
The law is only meant to apply to citizens of Utah though. Blocking all exit relays would mean that absolutely anyone accessing that website would not be able to do so from a VPN which burdens people outside of Utah too.
This is what I was missing. Demanding that porn sites block VPN traffic (or only accept residential traffic) would mean that everyone everywhere using a VPN gets blocked not just in Utah.
I still suspect there's some kind of solution. Like Utah could tell VPN providers that if they service a customer in Utah then the VPN provider can't route traffic to adult sites. Or put the burden on the VPN provider to do age verification if porn is gonna be available through the VPN.
Come to think of it, I'm still a bit confused as to why VPNs are even relevant because it would seem to me that age verification would be done through some kind of having-credit-card type scheme which VPNs are entirely irrelevant to. I even read the article and I'm still confused. Oh well.
Self-hosting one's own VPN is completely ineffective for anonymous browsing, but solves--obscure my geographic location--just fine.
If I lived in Utah, and had a friend in California, then we could privately setup a VPN that made it look like I was browsing from California, and we could do it today without any fanfare or announcement.
How would the web site blocking VPN end points have any idea it was a VPN in that case?
And the law makes that website liable for this case, even though it is impossible to detect.
| An individual is considered to be accessing the website from this state if the individual is actually located in the state, regardless of whether the individual is using a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to disguise or misrepresent the individual's geographic location to make it appear that the individual is accessing a website from a location outside this state.
But how can any site check if a client is a) a VPN client (typically this can be known because VPN exit node IPs can be learned), __and__ b) in Utah?
The impossibility lies in (b). Effectively this forces any affected companies having a nexus to the state of Utah to forbid VPN clients. I think that's a bit too far-reaching. It would be much more practicable instead to ask VPNs to disallow Utah client exits to affected sites w/o age checks -- VPN services aren't free, so VPNs basically can do age checks.
Given that this could have been written to be feasibly implemented, either this text was written to cause a controversy, or this text was written by people who don't know how things work. Either way, this text cannot be enforceable as written. The Utah legislature can easily modify this to be enforceable (see above), so it's not like a court striking this down might be playing partisan games just by striking it down.
Probably that “all VPNs” and all commercial VPN providers are two vastly different things. You can literally just make your own VPN if you have access to hosts on two different networks.
"The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia." - Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Minister (at the time) of Australia
The people who wrote it and the people who ratified didn't seem to think it was absolute. The First Amendment was not intended to create a new right of speech. It was intended to prevent the new federal government from abridging the existing right as it was under common law and state law.
Under state and common law at the time many kinds of speech were routinely regulated or even criminalized, such as defamation and blasphemy.
They weren't short on ink. If they wanted to add additional conditions and tweaks, they would have. What they thought, or what they wrote down elsewhere, doesn't matter.
The constitution did not apply nationally originally, it only applied to the federal government.
It wasn't until the 14th amendment that the constitution started overriding state constitutions/laws.
Idaho did in fact add additional ink to the freedom of speech [1]. In fact this is why so many states have a bill of rights similar to the federal constitution in their own constitutions.
Indeed they were not short of ink, so if they wanted to create some sort of free speech right that differed from what people at the time (including themselves) understood "freedom of speech" to mean they would have used a different term and explained the scope of the new right.
Businesses (despite common belief) have less free speech power when engaging in commerce. If they said, "Utah law XYZ violates the constitution, call your state legislator", almost certainly protected. Versus: "Here are instructions on how to violate the law" (whether eventually upheld or not), much less sturdy ground.
Rice v. Paladin Enterprises, it isn’t automatically first amendment protected to tell people how to effectively commit crimes. It isnt open and shut, but the first amendment isn’t a get out of jail free card.
> Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech
Note that it does not define what that means. At the same time, it is well established that some forms of speech do come with consequences. I'm sure you can think of commonly accepted examples.
Laws do not exist outside of courts who interpret them. They made an extra court to do that for the constitution. That's a feature!
Reality is fuzzy. The problem with insisting on "verbatim" readings of texts is that there is always wiggle room and edge cases, and nobody can fucking agree on what that one, true reading is.
So, yeah, the first amendment might not say what you think it says, because it only says what it says, and not what it does, because it can only say, and it takes people to do. And that's the way it will ever be.
What's the point of having a constitution if things you think should be illegal can just be redefined to not be covered by it? The constitution was supposed to provide hard red lines.
I can only repeat what I wrote before: There are no hard red lines, only mostly hard, mostly red, and mostly straight lines, not in law, and not even when looking at literal lines that somebody drew or printed.
Trying to define something simple and universally applicable is a fool's errand, because people will disagree, and even if it's just you, reality will hit you with exceptions and curveballs if you look hard or wait long enough.
The point of the constitution is not to satisfy a need for simple, unchangeable rules that need no interpretation whatsoever.
If you look for the point of the constitution, here's one explanation from the horse's mouth:
> We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It's ground rules. They will necessarily require interpretation, as all rules do. What that interpretation should be and how far it should go is part of that, and has been ongoing ever since, as would be expected.
They seem to know what they're doing here. A website can comply as long as they perfectly geofence (impossible) or do "reasonable" age verification. "Reasonable" only for the latter. So they basically want these sites in any US state to do age verification.
> Section 47. No person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood shall be permitted to marry any white woman of this State, nor shall any white man be permitted to marry any negro woman, or any woman having one-eighth part or-more of negro blood, and every person who shall knowingly marry in violation of the provisions of this section, shall, upon conviction thereof, be imprisoned in the State’s prison not less than one, nor more than ten years, and be fined not less than one thousand nor more than five thousand dollars.
There are some interesting (to me) side-stories to the various attempts to redefine pi as a rational number.
First, the confounding quote from the Torah/Bible: "He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it." (1 Kings 7:23)
From this, some people (stupidly) claim that God's divine and infallible word says that a circle has a circumference 30/10 the length of its diameter; i.e. pi = 3.
First, a rabbi answered this question with a great dodge: he asserted that the diameter was measured between the outer rims of the pool, while the circumference was measured inside the perimeter wall. From this, he calculated the pool's wall thickness to be 0.33 cubits (about 6 inches/15 cm). Hella conspicuous consumption of bronze, but math is not falsified.
The second is the phrase "circular in shape", which is also translated as "round". The early Latin phrase was "ad labium rotundum", which often means circular, but may mean merely rounded. IOW, the cast bronze pool walls may not have been perfectly circular, and the dimension given may be the major axis/greatest diameter. But that's really a silly argument; why would they make an elliptical pool?
Of course, if you derive your morality from a niche detail about a long-destroyed handwashing basin, you lack practical morals.
I'm not in California and DraftKings blocks me connecting with a VPN, so they just don't seem to be distinguishing whether a VPN user is in California (which is the impossible part of this law).
Utah argues that websites can "age assure VPN-using Utahns, [so] any decision by Aylo to instead age-verify all users would be a voluntary business choice, not an effect forced by Utah law" because if the former is impossible (which it is) then the latter would be forced by the Utah law, making the law in violation of the Dormant Commerce Clause (which it was found to be).
I think "The Church" (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) is trying to keep Pornhub from publishing stats of how many ~people~ ~righteous Church members~ Melchizedek Priesthood holders are whacking to "cosplay porn" and "lesbian porn".
Seems like rather than messing with this nonsense there needs to be some challenge to the concept that they have any jurisdiction at all. Your citizen sent bytes to a place that is not in your state to initiate an interaction. That is not our problem.
If you want to ban ISP's, or build a state firewall, or arrest your citizens, you are welcome to do so. What happens on servers outside your state that your state is choosing to connect to is clearly none of your business.
Being able to tie an IP to a rough physical location was, in retrospect, a huge Internet design mistake. IPs should be like random UUIDs. They should have been designed to get assigned randomly when you obtain one, rotated / thrown away periodically, with no hierarchical numeric relationship with the ISP that is assigning them.
It was much easier to assign blocks of IPs to an ISP rather than a 4.3B line lookup table. And how would you ensure that an address has been rotated? How do you determine who the real owner of an IP is when collisions occur? You're asking for a worldwide atomic database propagated to all routers in the days where a 32bit number was considered massive.
It's not practical because IPs are routed in blocks, and this is necessary for efficiency. Otherwise every single router on the internet would have to remember the locations of up to 100 billion connections, and when the internet surpasses this size every router will need to be replaced.
Fascism is on the march. Dirty pictures aren't the real reason governments want this level of control over the internet. You can be sure that we'll see worse. Glad we won this battle.
Can someone explain why it wouldn't work to have porn companies use only certain domains, and filter based on those domains, if people are so intent on blocking it?
Because you shouldn't get behind a thing that shouldn't exists. Technical solutions to societal problems are and will always be naught and fraught with unnecessary jump roping. In this case, the content itself isn't dangerous, what is dangerous is consuming it without the correct context, ie. education.
They don't care about education, they don't even care about consumption of content. They just want a Trojan Horse ("it's for the safety of our children!") in order to accustom people to censorship.
also the whole point of having .el is to be outside US jurisdiction so the US can't mess with their domains except for cutting off the whole country (which would splinter the internet).
The smart version of this is that adult content providers send a header or something with every response that contains NSFW, and then you use parental controls on client devices to not show those responses. This offers fewer opportunities for general purpose censorship, so there's less interest.
Haha, fair point, sort of. Probably as determined by the jurisdiction of the hosting servers, broadened a bit for error margin. But there's pretty broad overlap. The discrepancies are likely to be small. If they used the exact some logic that they currently use for age-gating, that would already be an improvement.
The obvious enhancement is for the metadata to be a little more specific about the content, making it easier for them to just provide facts without making a judgment about whether the content is "appropriate" in any given jurisdiction/household/etc. Most obviously, we might want to treat medical images and historic art separately.
> The obvious enhancement is for the metadata to be a little more specific about the content, making it easier for them to just provide facts without making a judgment about whether the content is "appropriate" in any given jurisdiction/household/etc.
And because this mechanism would enable guardians to set up reasonably-effective automated censorship for the vulnerable humans in their care without requiring that they provide any information about those humans to any third parties, neither big "social media" companies nor the politicians into whose ears they whisper want anything to do with it.
Easy, no one seems to care about nude men so all you need is an indication of the range of women's skin shown
* Face showing - banned in middle Eastern Muslim countries
* Bellies showing - banned in south east Asian Muslim countries
* Ankle showing - banned in India
* Shoulders showing - banned in catholic countries
* ...
* Nipples showing - banned in US
* Genitals showing - banned in Japan
* Personal name mentioned without a personal data release form - banned in Germany
* (End of list)
If necessary can be supplemented by a range of the commonly accepted levels of male nudity
* Any skin showing - banned in Vatican
* Penis showing - banned in US
* (End of list)
So we have a binary numerical code, or a ternary if you add also practices (ranging probably from female eye contact with the camera and male-female touching over male-male intimacy up to bestiality).
(Hope clear that this is sarcasm.. do not build the torment nexus!)
You can use different codes to specify what the page contains. Airlines support more meal codes than they actually stock because meals for multiple categories - every VGML (vegan) meal is valid for someone who requests VOML (vegetarian with eggs and milk allowed). And every page with no human skin showing is valid for someone whose filtering rules are no skin except the face!
The US Congress evaluated [1] the legality of forcing adult websites onto certain TLDs in the 2000s and it was determined to be legally ambiguous and would almost certainly face substantial 1st amendment challenges. So they didn't pursue it.
I assume it's Server Name Indication, which sends hostnames in plain text. A better approach is Encrypted Client Hello, or ESNI (I'm not sure how they differ, probably like Betamax and VHS, one allows porn).
Sometimes HN commenters will try to argue in favor of SNI as if it's not possible to host multiple HTTPS sites on one IP address
It is possible
Consider all the sites hosted at 199.36.58.100 for example. Over 1,620 such sites have been submitted to HN in the past few years
ESNI is encrypted SNI, ECH is Encrypted Client Hello. The Client Hello packet contains the SNI. For a time ESNI was available on all Cloudflare sites. Not anymore. ESNI, whatever its flaws, worked well enough that some censorship regimes blocked connections that used it. IMHO, ESNI and ECH are overcomplicated proposed solutions to a relatively simple problem: gratuitous use of SNI. For example, so-called "modern" browsers will send SNI to those 1,620+ sites even though it's not required
Sometimes HN commenters will mistakenly believe or perhaps intentionally try to pretend that ECH is in widespread use and has replaced plaintext CH
However the truth is that ECH is generally not being used by HTTPS websites. CH is generally not encrypted and surveilllance and/or censorship via SNI continues to work
It's so that, when judgement day comes, our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth has a concrete record of what you've been doing with your semen. It's very important, you see. God's work, even.
I mean, in some cases it seems alright to want to try to prevent VPN usage (in certain scenarios).
Utah is one of a few states that bans gambling. It is logically consistent for them to want to prevent people from using VPNs while in Utah to get around that to do things like access gambling websites, sports books, or prediction markets.
That said, it is fairly difficult (and almost impossible for self-made VPNs/tunnels...). The court was right, but it kind of sucks for Utah in this case. They should have the right in some way to uphold their gambling laws.
Sorry, but if you haven't seen how bad some people and places can be when it comes to that stuff, you probably won't get why.
If you are rate limited it's because the algorithm believes you are a person who habitually spams bad content. Accounts start out un-limited. Once an account is limited it is not possible to get un-limited.
nah it always did that. every once in a while it decides I am posting too fast even though I was not. It seems to be arbitrary, with no exact number or time pattern. HN bug perhaps. my old account did not used to and I have never spammed.
> Yes, but they have the uncomfortable reality of having to police the results of it
I'm not against adding some friction to certain behavior deemed undesirable by society, but at the end of the day people are going to do what they will. Vice predates the Internet by thousands of years and will not and can not be "solved" by technical means.
This is true but it seems there is no consequence for disobeying the context of the anti-gambling law in Utah for anyone but those who are not disobeying (they pay taxes, they have increased crime, they are forced to create programs for problem gamblers, insurers cannot really create accurate actuarial tables, so on). Seems all the Utah government can do is attempt fines.
when i had a significant portion of my life invested in Utah (great quiet places still there), I was somewhat annoyed by the liquor laws (wine requiring a liquor store, malt beverages and beer not; mail ordering wine required a drawn out process with the postal shipping company. People sometimes went to neghboring states for lottery tickets; not as destructive as some other things... I only sorta minded the idea of online casinos there; it created problems but most were nuclear family types of problems. I suspect sports books and prediction markets are the worst of them (people trick themselves into inaccurate beliefs the easiest in the latter two, and the overlap with hubris, just one more kinda thinking and AI is vexsome..
> Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility
How does legislation work in the US? How can an impossible law pass? Is it just some boomer stomping his feet like a toddler "I know what I want, and I want it now" without consulting any technical experts, and then private organizations like the EFF and courts have to clean up the mess?
I think ultimately we're headed for locked device attestation for age and physical location, and legislation like this is going to be a driving force. If that wasn't bad enough, I think most people are ultimately in favor of this. The future is bleak.
Even if that were the case this is still happening. The groundwork is being laid for Apple and Google to provide age signals for things like adult websites (and not just porn). It's not a big leap to see location signals being the next thing.
Reminds me of a funny story of how russian government faced the same paradox, and they solved it in the most elegant way, all foreign traffic equals VPN, so foreign traffic is essentially forbidden. Russian people outside of russia literallt can't access state services without a "reverse-vpn" now.
If you think they will stop at a mere "technical impossibility" I have bad news for you folks, they will just ban all the traffic they can't track, in Utah, UK, anywhere;)
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 50.3 ms ] threadDoesn't help your arm, but when they're asking for things in that second category, it doesn't help them either.
Would you have an issue with a law banning municipalities from displaying "anti-pride" flags? Why should taxpayer funds be directed to these types of causes?
Every family member I know of that is still Mormon only votes MAGA. Same for 90% of the Mormons I know in my area.
They expressly want a world/govt where their kids are never exposed to people with different views or lifestyles (e.g. LGBTQA people).
None of this should be surprising for the only church to ever operate a theocracy in the US, and also the last major Christian sect to officially stop being racist (in 1978). It is in the cultural DNA.
Is it even possible to reliably know that a connection is from a VPN? Anyone can proxy through a random hosting provider.
I use VPN most of the time. My work requires it, and I like Mozilla VPN for personal privacy. (Note: it has ad blocking DNS built in which is nice!)
I occasionally get blocked by websites or services, especially streaming apps, if I'm on VPN. I suspect they're just looking out for Amazon/Microsoft/etc IP address blocks. It's very annoying
There are also third party providers of IP annotations to classify known VPN address ranges that content providers typically subscribe to blanket block providers.
The reason for this aggressive approach is streaming apps all need your IP as core signal for tagging your region and all content licensing is region locked (even on YT).
Netflix are/were the most relaxed about it , and for long time would only buy content if they got global distribution rights, but not anymore. Many VPN ads specifically used to market that you can watch Netflix geolocked content.
[1] IME they block DC IPs too although not needed for blocking professional VPN, even self hosted OpenVPN on cloud box usually gets flagged.
The simplest methods block known datacenter IP ranges like you thought. More will score it based on several heuristics and a reputation over time. If you get 100 different users connecting from a single IP, it's probably not someone's home internet connection.
Or, their so-called "smart" TV is acting as a proxy without their informed consent.
In some parts of the world hiding (NAT) entire neighborhoods behind one public IP is normal practice.
Let’s block traffic on the internet blindly just in case someone is looking at an adult website.
Most ISPs are already VPNs. Your connection is tunneled from your router at home, through some expansive DSL/ATM or GPON/PPPoE network, to a box at a data center that serves five neighborhoods with a single link by establishing a tunnel to each individual consumer router.
But the ISP has to make sure the geolocation databases have accurate information about it, and it has to retain logs of which user used which IP address at which time because the law says so. That's why it's not a "VPN".
It’s starting to get annoying that things aren’t working. They’re shooting themselves in the foot though.
If they didn’t block VPNs, they would at least know what category to group them in.
Folks would just host their own vpns various places and this would be pointless ….
Now of course, if your VPN is a home-lab style VPN where you are connecting to a little wireguard box sitting in your own home, that is a totally different story.
In the real world, very few people have that capability.
Yes, lots of things will at any point be beyond the technical ability of most people as long as they remain niche. But as soon as a sizable market exists(e.g one created by a law, like in this case), products and services that close that gap will appear.
Hell, there's even stuff for doing this already, which is not that hard for non-technical people to set up, like Tailscale. I can easily imagine a Tailscale-like product that easily allows friends to use eachothers networks as a VPN with zero configuration or Wireguard knowledge required. I mean, when you think about it it's just Tailscale but more streamlined for that particular purpose.
I think that’s the GPs point.
Though some services do already block traffic originating from popular hosting providers like AWS out of fears of bots.
They’re not mutually exclusive statements ;)
Who is going to check anyway? You need significant technical leverage AND law leverage for the people doing that.
There is a very vocal anti-porn group in Utah. They do things like put up massive billboards that say "[Store name] sells porn." (Which is basically free advertising instead of shaming.)
It's a fun place to visit!
There are more recent studies that rank Utah in the bottom 10. [5]
[1] Edelman, Benjamin. "Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 23, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 209–220.
[2] http://www.benedelman.org/publications/redlightstates.pdf
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2009/07/14/Top-US-States-For-Online-Por...
[4] https://www.ksl.com/article/news/utah/utah-not-necessarily-n...
[5] https://www.yahoo.com/news/narrative-utah-leads-nation-porno...
>SB 73 burdens the rights of all internet users outside of Utah because it requires adult websites to either know every visiting user’s physical location, and then block those in Utah, or to verify every visitor’s age just in case they might be in Utah. The law’s “actual-location provision in practice requires an entity to perform age verification services for every user visiting its site from any location because the entity would violate the law if even one of those users happened to be obfuscating,” the court wrote.
In order to withdraw from Utah, they would be forced to block traffic from everywhere since it's possible that some kid in Utah used a VPN to make it look like they lived in Singapore.
On the other hand, using Masque for TCP transfers will probably fool a server to believe the MSS is 1500.
No, it's not possible. You can only try to identify known protocols or suspicious patterns of data, timing or entropy. Theoretically, with a big enough collaboration, you could hide a VPN behind shaping traffic patterns and request order towards hundreds of different servers, and there's just no method of traffic analysis that can possibly identify that without prior knowledge.
Like, some firewalls try to identify an absence of connections outside the VPN, or an abnormal volume of data over a sustained period of time. But all that goes out the window when, say, you are connecting to hundreds of real servers at all times and only exchanging, say, basic HTTP requests with each one. For all they know you just have a million browser toolbars installed. They wouldn't know if the choice of request, order and timing encodes information because they wouldn't be able to prove what the client's intentions are in sending it or what the servers do with it.
I believe some VPN providers are beginning to play with things like this, but the problem is really that it's impossible to provide this. It only really works when you run it yourself, because that's the only way others don't know. So they're having to settle for compromises, like Mullvad's DAITA, which still uses a single server but tries to avoid showing tells of a VPN connection as opposed to something else like streaming.
It took quite a bit of finagling to bypass the GFW on my own and in some regions (Beijing) I was still randomly detected and throttled, it seemed.
Is this still true, or has it become a truism? It seems nations like Iran and China (and events like Kashmir come to mind) have progressed the state-of-the-art and playbook to where we can't actually say it definitively will route around it.
Now seeing that the US and EU are flirting with these similar restrictions it's making me wonder how we'll be able to keep hold of these principles.
Maybe my concern with that adage is ultimately its passive voice, since it takes 'active' action by people to give us those options, and will probably take more actions by more people to keep it alive now.
So there is a route around censorship, but maybe the public doesn't really care about it.
People with more first hand experience can probably explain it better but it doesn’t seem that strict. China is not North Korea, their aims seem less about preventing people from learning about the world and more preventing non compliant foreign tech companies having Chinese users.
During the World Cup (2022, still zero covid in China), they started blurring out the crowd because people were noticing that nobody in the stands was wearing masks. They’d been told that the zero covid policy and draconian lockdowns were keeping them safe, and outside China was a Covid hell-hole. Protests followed four months later.
Nobody in China was told about western covid vaccines, much less allowed to get them.
VPNs aren’t widely used — there was a study posted here some months ago that estimated VPN use at around 1% of the population, too little to matter.
That’s why they’re a bit lax. They can afford to let some through to grease the wheels of commerce. You do have to be seriously unlucky to get into trouble.
(I was there during Covid, and some years before and after)
That's some interesting info anyways if not. It's funny that the absolute number of VPN users is large but negligible compared to the overall population.
TL;DR: it was far better than the rest of the world in 2020, marginally better in 2021, but 2022 was a shit show. I still remember Dec 7 as the day zero covid ended.
I suppose Utah could impose some sort of strategy here, but would be so burdensome and anti-American I’m not sure they could pull it off. Instead of a blacklist of sites dictated by the site provider, you go the other way where all Utah ISPs maintain a whitelist of IPs permitted to Utah citizens. Any traffic attempting to reach a non-white listed IP, would be rejected.
The layer 2 and 3 of ISO/OSI stack does indeed "route around censorship". But the Internet as we know it is all Layer 7, and it's as centralized as it gets.
That's why regulators often aim straight at Layer 7 entities - companies providing consumer services over the web. Because no matter how unblockable the route between you and some server is, it doesn't mean anything when the server itself is refusing to talk to you.
Things China can't do: Magically "downgrade", "decrypt" or "intercept" the secure protocols we use every day like HTTPS. Facts won't budge, the technology we are using does what it says on the tin.
The Internet can't route around you being thrown off a tall building by men with guns, but the IETF has for some years considered it to be extremely important to design the network protocols to prevent these shenanigans. BCP # 188 "Pervasive Monitoring is An Attack"
Doesn’t require cracking crypto or any funny business around forcing people to install stuff.
Furthermore, doing any of the things you listed would isolate all legitimate network traffic as well as any undesirable traffic, fully shuttering all Chinese manufacturing businesses from global requests via the web. This hat would happen then? Phone calls, emails, and even physical mail would become the new norm and most of the Chinese economy would collapse under the weight of not being able to hop on a Zoom with a client that wants tooling made for its aluminum manufacturing molds.
So besides my point of the black market your hypothesis of total control misses all the other pressures that exist that make what you’re proposing infeasible on its face. Only a place like North Korea that is willing to be a pariah state is old be willing to take the economic and social costs associated with your proposal, and they’ve only been able to do that because their abominable regime was in place before the internet existed and they pre-built controls very late in the game.
Tl;dr simply because a country _could_ do something doesn’t mean it’s realistic for reasons outside of basic networking concepts.
I mean... They could, though, no? If they control the gateways they could drop any traffic that isn't encrypted with some root cert that allows them to decrypt in transit packets.
I'm sure that works in a Hollywood movie, in the same way you could reverse the polarity of the lasers to enable you to travel inside the computer from a household video projector, or decrypt all the world's telephone calls using a device built into your batmobile - but this isn't a Hollywood movie and so traffic isn't in fact "encrypted with a root cert".
If for any of a variety of reasons the Chinese authorities don't want your connection to exist they'll terminate the connection, exactly as I described in my earlier comment.
That said, your point that they're probably more interested in information control than spying on everyone's traffic is a good call out, and would change their methodology. My issue was more with your statement that they can't magically downgrade modern encryption; MITM via OS cert store 'compromise' isn't magic, but I think it's certainly possible in a threat model where your adversary is a nation-state.
Normal people don’t care about “downgrade” or “decrypt” or “intercept” they care about availability.
They aren't stupid, they're not going to block everything right away and give clues to their detection techniques and scope. There's a bunch they can detect/guess which isn't "worth it" to block at the present moment.
If there's civil unrest, they can of course essentially turn off the internet, but there's a distinction between "the internet can route around censorship" and "the internet can be blocked in its entirety (or near entirety)"
They certainly don’t have total freedom, but they’re harder to squash than you think
But of course the easiest approved “VPN” is just data roaming.
> “I sometimes joke that we might as well turn the Ministry of Communications and the Supreme Council of Cyberspace into amusement parks, because they will no longer serve any purpose,” Hakami said.
https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/iran-official-says-starlink-...
To a large degree, most of the internet today is ultimately controlled by a few people. If what you have to say pisses off these people, and someone is determined to keep you off the internet, you have a problem. Kiwi Farms is a well known example, and continues to suffer under regular DDOS attacks. Regardless of how you feel about KF, it's undeniable that a) this nonsense has streissanded the site enormously and b) it's speech you don't like that needs protection.
Also there was the whole covid "misinformation" garbage fire... I certainly do not want my government or some megacorp to decide what can and can't say or read.
And going beyond the internet, I just want to remind you Americans, that your 1st amendment is almost unique (to my knowledge). Enjoy and protect your offensive, hateful, blasphemous, extremist, and deeply unpopular speech.
It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their laws. We make technology that completely nullifies their laws. They need to increase their tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end state is either a totalitarian government or an uncontrollable population.
I used to think that we'd find some kind of equilibrium along the way, that we'd eventually discover the government's limits: some principle they refuse to break, some line they refuse to cross...
But the truth is these tyrants have zero limits.
That’s a rather shallow and naive perspective. I’ll try to keep this short, but the overt blocking oriented “censorship” ascribed to China, Iran, or Israel is actually not at all “state-of-the-art”, it’s an inherent rather coarse approach to censorship.
If you want the true “state-of-the-art“ you can look no farther than the USA, where the “state-of-the-art” is such that people don’t even realize it’s censorship, let alone that anything is happening at all.
China, Iran, or Israel may or may not engage in censorship at a kind of high level that is apparent and observable; however the censorship in the USA and by extension in its various vassals of its empire, is far more sophisticated and base level to such a degree that the system, the whole society is the censorship mechanism, censorship is not something done to the system, the system is the censorship. That is “state-of-the-art”!
I still suspect there's some kind of solution. Like Utah could tell VPN providers that if they service a customer in Utah then the VPN provider can't route traffic to adult sites. Or put the burden on the VPN provider to do age verification if porn is gonna be available through the VPN.
Come to think of it, I'm still a bit confused as to why VPNs are even relevant because it would seem to me that age verification would be done through some kind of having-credit-card type scheme which VPNs are entirely irrelevant to. I even read the article and I'm still confused. Oh well.
It's impossible to have perfect knowledge of the entire set of VPN exit node addresses.
If I lived in Utah, and had a friend in California, then we could privately setup a VPN that made it look like I was browsing from California, and we could do it today without any fanfare or announcement.
How would the web site blocking VPN end points have any idea it was a VPN in that case?
And the law makes that website liable for this case, even though it is impossible to detect.
| An individual is considered to be accessing the website from this state if the individual is actually located in the state, regardless of whether the individual is using a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to disguise or misrepresent the individual's geographic location to make it appear that the individual is accessing a website from a location outside this state.
But how can any site check if a client is a) a VPN client (typically this can be known because VPN exit node IPs can be learned), __and__ b) in Utah?
The impossibility lies in (b). Effectively this forces any affected companies having a nexus to the state of Utah to forbid VPN clients. I think that's a bit too far-reaching. It would be much more practicable instead to ask VPNs to disallow Utah client exits to affected sites w/o age checks -- VPN services aren't free, so VPNs basically can do age checks.
Given that this could have been written to be feasibly implemented, either this text was written to cause a controversy, or this text was written by people who don't know how things work. Either way, this text cannot be enforceable as written. The Utah legislature can easily modify this to be enforceable (see above), so it's not like a court striking this down might be playing partisan games just by striking it down.
How is that not a blatant first amendment violation?
Under state and common law at the time many kinds of speech were routinely regulated or even criminalized, such as defamation and blasphemy.
Or at least it shouldn't.
It wasn't until the 14th amendment that the constitution started overriding state constitutions/laws.
Idaho did in fact add additional ink to the freedom of speech [1]. In fact this is why so many states have a bill of rights similar to the federal constitution in their own constitutions.
[1] https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idconst/ArtI/Sec...
> Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech
Note that it does not define what that means. At the same time, it is well established that some forms of speech do come with consequences. I'm sure you can think of commonly accepted examples.
Laws do not exist outside of courts who interpret them. They made an extra court to do that for the constitution. That's a feature!
Reality is fuzzy. The problem with insisting on "verbatim" readings of texts is that there is always wiggle room and edge cases, and nobody can fucking agree on what that one, true reading is.
So, yeah, the first amendment might not say what you think it says, because it only says what it says, and not what it does, because it can only say, and it takes people to do. And that's the way it will ever be.
Trying to define something simple and universally applicable is a fool's errand, because people will disagree, and even if it's just you, reality will hit you with exceptions and curveballs if you look hard or wait long enough.
The point of the constitution is not to satisfy a need for simple, unchangeable rules that need no interpretation whatsoever.
If you look for the point of the constitution, here's one explanation from the horse's mouth:
> We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It's ground rules. They will necessarily require interpretation, as all rules do. What that interpretation should be and how far it should go is part of that, and has been ongoing ever since, as would be expected.
https://www.pastpaperhero.com/resources/state-v-gibson-36-in...
This law did not "almost pass" but actually passed and remained in force till 1967.
You think they wouldn't try to fuck with pi?
First, the confounding quote from the Torah/Bible: "He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it." (1 Kings 7:23)
From this, some people (stupidly) claim that God's divine and infallible word says that a circle has a circumference 30/10 the length of its diameter; i.e. pi = 3.
First, a rabbi answered this question with a great dodge: he asserted that the diameter was measured between the outer rims of the pool, while the circumference was measured inside the perimeter wall. From this, he calculated the pool's wall thickness to be 0.33 cubits (about 6 inches/15 cm). Hella conspicuous consumption of bronze, but math is not falsified.
The second is the phrase "circular in shape", which is also translated as "round". The early Latin phrase was "ad labium rotundum", which often means circular, but may mean merely rounded. IOW, the cast bronze pool walls may not have been perfectly circular, and the dimension given may be the major axis/greatest diameter. But that's really a silly argument; why would they make an elliptical pool?
Of course, if you derive your morality from a niche detail about a long-destroyed handwashing basin, you lack practical morals.
A VPN/proxy could exist on any given IP address at any time, which the California law recognizes but the Utah law does not.
If you want to ban ISP's, or build a state firewall, or arrest your citizens, you are welcome to do so. What happens on servers outside your state that your state is choosing to connect to is clearly none of your business.
The obvious enhancement is for the metadata to be a little more specific about the content, making it easier for them to just provide facts without making a judgment about whether the content is "appropriate" in any given jurisdiction/household/etc. Most obviously, we might want to treat medical images and historic art separately.
And because this mechanism would enable guardians to set up reasonably-effective automated censorship for the vulnerable humans in their care without requiring that they provide any information about those humans to any third parties, neither big "social media" companies nor the politicians into whose ears they whisper want anything to do with it.
* Face showing - banned in middle Eastern Muslim countries * Bellies showing - banned in south east Asian Muslim countries * Ankle showing - banned in India * Shoulders showing - banned in catholic countries * ... * Nipples showing - banned in US * Genitals showing - banned in Japan * Personal name mentioned without a personal data release form - banned in Germany * (End of list)
If necessary can be supplemented by a range of the commonly accepted levels of male nudity * Any skin showing - banned in Vatican * Penis showing - banned in US * (End of list)
So we have a binary numerical code, or a ternary if you add also practices (ranging probably from female eye contact with the camera and male-female touching over male-male intimacy up to bestiality).
(Hope clear that this is sarcasm.. do not build the torment nexus!)
https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20080714_RL33224_1e6b93...
It won't route around self-censorship that arises out of surveillance
Nor will it take a stand against SNI which is a dead simple means of implementing censorship that's in widespread use every day for years
Could you elaborate? What's "SNI", and how does it relate to censorship?
I assume it's Server Name Indication, which sends hostnames in plain text. A better approach is Encrypted Client Hello, or ESNI (I'm not sure how they differ, probably like Betamax and VHS, one allows porn).
It is possible
Consider all the sites hosted at 199.36.58.100 for example. Over 1,620 such sites have been submitted to HN in the past few years
ESNI is encrypted SNI, ECH is Encrypted Client Hello. The Client Hello packet contains the SNI. For a time ESNI was available on all Cloudflare sites. Not anymore. ESNI, whatever its flaws, worked well enough that some censorship regimes blocked connections that used it. IMHO, ESNI and ECH are overcomplicated proposed solutions to a relatively simple problem: gratuitous use of SNI. For example, so-called "modern" browsers will send SNI to those 1,620+ sites even though it's not required
For example, one cannot use ECH when connecting to www.cloudflare.com
However the truth is that ECH is generally not being used by HTTPS websites. CH is generally not encrypted and surveilllance and/or censorship via SNI continues to work
For example, how does a www user connect to https://www.cloudflare.com using ECH
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9848.txt
The only HTTPS websites that have enabled ECH are generally sites for testing ECH Client and server software that "supports" ECH is available. But few HTTPS sites have actually enabled itDomain name for every HTTPS site still sent in plaintext
Would you let someone hand out pornagraphic images in a middle school? Obviously not, so why let it happen online.
Idk why people think it’s a good idea to force everyone to provide their id to jerk off.
A porn site does not.
Utah is one of a few states that bans gambling. It is logically consistent for them to want to prevent people from using VPNs while in Utah to get around that to do things like access gambling websites, sports books, or prediction markets.
That said, it is fairly difficult (and almost impossible for self-made VPNs/tunnels...). The court was right, but it kind of sucks for Utah in this case. They should have the right in some way to uphold their gambling laws.
Sorry, but if you haven't seen how bad some people and places can be when it comes to that stuff, you probably won't get why.
They still have the right to legislate, just not the technical capability to enforce.
I'm not against adding some friction to certain behavior deemed undesirable by society, but at the end of the day people are going to do what they will. Vice predates the Internet by thousands of years and will not and can not be "solved" by technical means.
How does legislation work in the US? How can an impossible law pass? Is it just some boomer stomping his feet like a toddler "I know what I want, and I want it now" without consulting any technical experts, and then private organizations like the EFF and courts have to clean up the mess?
If you think they will stop at a mere "technical impossibility" I have bad news for you folks, they will just ban all the traffic they can't track, in Utah, UK, anywhere;)