Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

https://www.popsci.com/technology/vpn-boom/

by geox • 2 years ago

207 287 2 years ago

popsci.com

CapitalistCartr• 2 years ago

Anyone here recommend a VPN, for personal information safety and security rather than hiding porn?

readyplayernull• 2 years ago

Tor Project.

vorticalbox• 2 years ago

The tor network is really not built for streaming and you slow it down for everyone else when you do.

jamesponddotco• 2 years ago

A VPN so you can hide your IP address and whatnot? Mullvad.

thih9• 2 years ago

How are these two use cases different? Are there vpn services that let you do one and not the other?

netsharc• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

raggi• 2 years ago

(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.

kornhole3• 2 years ago

ProtonVPN is easy for split tunneling on my Androidish device. Linux requires a little CLI configuration.

Dylan1680713• 2 years ago

I wish they had just disabled TCP port forwarding. Based on the description of bad actors it sounds like that would have been enough, and at least torrent clients would have continued to work.

heavyset_go2• 2 years ago

What are you trying to protect yourself from?

belorn• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

iCloud private relay

spacebanana7• 2 years ago

To those skeptical, it’s the only VPN / proxy like service you can use without frequently getting blocked trying to use online banking and stripe merchants. Captchas are less common than with Mullvad too.

It’s not for every use case, but it’s helpful for me.

ls612• 2 years ago

Can private relay be used by torrent clients? Or is it Safari only?

artsi0m• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

PIA

mdorazio• 2 years ago

Note that PIA constantly triggers captchas, even for basic google searches. And not the easy captchas; multi-step "no, you're wrong" ones. Can't speak to the prevalence of this with other services.

worik2• 2 years ago

Tor?

jupp0r• 2 years ago

They are usually equally suitable for both. Are you asking for a friend?

jnwatson• 2 years ago

The best VPN provider is one you control and is hard to ban.

I set up an OpenVPN server on DigitalOcean for a friend visiting China. It took 10 minutes with the template in the DO marketplace.

It even allows downloading a client with the parameters baked in.

anderber2• 2 years ago

I've been using Windscribe for several years and have no problem at all with them.

sdsd• 2 years ago

I rather enjoy using a pVPN (personal VPN) by just setting up wireguard on my server.

makeworld• 2 years ago

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/

buzzert• 2 years ago

Why not just AWS EC2? That's probably where most of these commercial VPNs are hosted anyway, just with an additional cost on top.

PicassoCTs• 2 years ago

Hardening societal infra-structure against democratic governments collapsing back into autocracies. Good times.

brink3• 2 years ago

Porn is not a liberating force. It's like being mad at the government for making it hard for you to smoke cigarettes.

exe34• 2 years ago

Cigarette causes lung cancer and a bunch of other things.

p00b• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

tennisflyi3• 2 years ago

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…

andy99• 2 years ago

s/cigarettes/weed/ and watch how many people suddenly get angry.

The problem is the government telling people what to do, period.

Der_Einzige• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

People would be mad at the government for the exact same reason if they made selling cigarettes illegal.

standardUser3• 2 years ago

Have you ever made your own porn? Very liberating.

halfcat• 2 years ago

”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• 2 years ago

But the kids!

waveBidder• 2 years ago

gp means they're accidentally getting people used to using VPNs etc by poorly implementing bans on popular things.

b8• 2 years ago

Usenet, DDL, and torrenting are alternatives too. I wonder if Cloudflare's free VPN would bypass state based blocking.

jimcsharp• 2 years ago

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.

phillc732• 2 years ago

Short session? The month is good.

winwang• 2 years ago

OP just needs a couple minutes of VPN

zamadatix• 2 years ago

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.

spondylosaurus• 2 years ago

Yep, a $5/mo Mullvad subscription pays for itself several times over if you snag even just a few movies or one cracked Adobe tool every year.

14• 2 years ago

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

anderber2• 2 years ago

ControlD[1] will do that for you. 1. https://controld.com/

Shawnj22• 2 years ago

A lot of VPN plans have a traffic limit instead although a free VPN with no traffic limit is really cheap tbh

ndriscoll13• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Well they can learn to use tor but most likely they’ll get sucked into shady free VPN services and suffer worse.

tennisflyi3• 2 years ago

No way you’re streaming anything via Tor

danShumway10• 2 years ago

Good thing these laws specifically ban them from storing that information that they don't want to store.

Well... companies. They don't ban government agencies from retaining that data if they get access to it. But ignore that and assume for a second that they do.

The problem is that the laws kind of contradict themselves: "don't collect information that compromises privacy" and also "do this in a way that basically could only work if you collect information that compromises privacy."

Most of the bills I've read ban companies from saving this data, but require them to collect it presumably in some way that's auditable? They also provide no real mechanisms for guaranteeing that data won't be stored or will be transmitted securely between services. In Louisiana's bill (https://legis.la.gov/legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=1289498) there is no penalty for retaining data other than that users can sue for "damages". But historically, proving damages from retained data tends to be difficult to do.

Of course the laws do not clarify how age verification is supposed to work under these restrictions, just that documents will be verified somehow: Texas's "example" of age verification explicitly refers to digital identification as information "stored on a digital network" (https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/pdf/HB01181F....). But sure, also make sure you don't store anything! /s

Presumably this all means that the information should be stored and transmitted until identification is done and then immediately deleted leaving no record of that identification other than that it happened (which hopefully will be sufficient evidence if the government ever accuses you of using a faulty verification method). But eventual deletion doesn't mean the information isn't still getting temporarily stored or that it's not passing between multiple hands, any of which could have rogue employees or leaks, or which could be storing "anonymized" data that turns out to later-on be identifiable.

----

One might argue that since the majority of these laws are proposed and backed by anti-porn organizations, the contradictions might kind of be advantageous to the goals of the backers -- if the law is functionally impossible to comply with and companies are forced to leave the state, well... that's exactly what these groups want anyway. Texas's AG is up-front about being pleased that porn companies are blocking the state. And despite the regular claim that this isn't about restricting porn generally, the vast majority of these bills have ties to religiously conservative groups that have public positions that porn should be banned for everyone.

But that's all besides the point: the point is it's just outright false to say that these laws don't require at least the transmission and collection of this data -- they just tack on "don't store it for too long, delete it afterwards." But that doesn't really mean anything: regular identity transmission over the web carries security and privacy risks even if companies could be trusted to reliably delete this data -- which in many cases, they can't. Advocates of these bills ignore that security researchers have an issue with collection and transmission of sensitive data in addition to storage, and so advocates point to narrow, non-specific language about long-term retention as if that solves all of the issues. It doesn't.

And to the extent that these laws include any real teeth like actual fines for data leakage, they don't really explain how companies can safely avoid those fines while still proving that their users aren't minors. It's a no-win situation.

Note as well, I'm leaving off the accusation I've seen online that this identification would need to be provided per-login/access, because I don't see any language in the bills that would suggest that to me. But of course if that were true, there would be obvious security risks from users providing that information repeatedly as part of regular access.

----

That's a social media law, not a porn law

The law in question explicitly exempts art sharing sites unless they allow specifically porn (https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title13/Chapter63/C13-63_202305032...):

(H) a professional creative network for showcasing and discovering artistic content, if the content is required to be non-pornographic;

Notably, general content harmful to minors like gore, hate-speech, etc is included in that exemption. So your creative gallery site doesn't count as social media and isn't subject to these child-restrictions if you allow nazi emblems or violent imagery, it's only a problem if you allow porn.

I will concede on this that conflating the exact language of "change or bypass restrictions on access" is a straightforward misreading of the bill, bad on the article for that. But I think it's being a little coy to act like there's no overlap between Chapter 63 and SB 287. Chapter 63 clearly views pornographic content differently than it views other content that is similarly harmful to minors.

SB 287 includes language that seems (to me) to explicitly protect VPN and network providers from liability, but it is not clear whether that kind of language will continue to appear in future bills: the majority of these bills so far have been largely copy-paste templates of each other, and in other Internet restriction debates states have expressed interest in going after actors that they deem to be "enabling" illegal actions. Notably, the copy-paste template that most states have been using doesn't protect sites that allow VPN access, they just protect the VPNs themselves. It's not clear to me from the text of the bills that states wouldn't view a porn site refusing to block all VPN connections as a violation of the law if they were ever interested in pushing enforcement past state lines (which again, in other Internet speech debates states have expressed interest in pushing enforcement across state lines).

The article's example of VPN restrictions is misleading and misrepresents the bills it's talking about -- but the general concern that VPN restrictions might come in the future (most likely through targeting companies that do not block VPNs from accessing their services) is a real concern, just poorly presented in this article.

ndriscoll13• 2 years ago

Why would they need to be auditable? That's not in any of the laws I've read, and in fact as you note, the law makes that impossible. If the law contradicts a requirement that you made up, and does not itself contain that requirement, then why would you presume that it has that requirement?

There's literally no reason to have e.g. a knowledge based auth or signed id request hit disk. It doesn't need to be saved for a "short time". It doesn't need to be saved on permanent storage at all.

"Let's assume for a moment that the law says the opposite of what it actually says". But it doesn't.

It's easy for the government to investigate whether you check IDs: open the site and see if you request ID information. Present fake info and see if you accept it. Just like they do in person.

bradly• 2 years ago

Also it is extremely common in middle and high school to use VPNs to get around school network restrictions.

miki123211• 2 years ago

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.

cayde2• 2 years ago

Tethering is idiot expensive in USA. Every provider will DPI and block it or throttle it. It's awful.

phillc732• 2 years ago

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.

ndriscoll13• 2 years ago

Depending on carrier, the parent can turn off data on the child's line and only allow it to be used for voice/text.

lelandfe• 2 years ago

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.

doubled112• 2 years ago

Bess can't go there.

Shawnj22• 2 years ago

A super common one from my time is to use google translate’s web translation feature as a proxy since google translate is almost never blocked

jwells89• 2 years ago

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.

willcipriano3• 2 years ago

"Start using cgi proxy"

rrr_oh_man3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

UK is also censoring porn sites...

77pt774• 2 years ago

At this point Turkey is probably more free than the UK.

sph2• 2 years ago

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.

gambiting2• 2 years ago

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.

chpatrick• 2 years ago

That way the ISP still sees what you're doing though.

acchow3• 2 years ago

Only the DNS lookups. Not the content of what you’re viewing over https. Everything after domain name is encrypted

heavyset_go2• 2 years ago

Set them up with some form of DNS over TLS.

samatman2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

this is basically that family guy episode where Quagmire tries to get out of his marriage to a hooker.

superb_dev3• 2 years ago

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

archon1410• 2 years ago

Apparently it doesn't happen anymore.

The system has been undergoing change for the past few years: Lambda Istanbul's lawyer Fırat Söyle 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.

kilroy123• 2 years ago

I've never once heard of this, and I've spent years living in Turkey.

noman-land2• 2 years ago

This story is oddly wholesome.

rrr_oh_man3• 2 years ago

Thanks haha

kornhole3• 2 years ago

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.

envy2• 2 years ago

Let's be realistic. Porn, the subject of this discussion, is not illegal in the US; this is about age verification laws that apply to the website operators, who then self-block users from particular states. No one is going after Cloudflare for this information as there is no crime committed by the user.

Given Cloudflare's logging policy (https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/privacy/public-dns...) and data disclosure practices, the only way US authorities would get anything worthwhile is if they had a specific individual target and a valid legal process. Cloudflare, like most of the big tech companies, is actually very good on this front; they have robust processes and are transparent (https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/slt3lc6tev37/Q1INAiyBub...) about the limited cases in which they do hand over any user data.

(I don't work at Cloudflare, but do work on these issues for another big US tech company.)

BiteCode_dev• 2 years ago

Hopefully their country doesn't outlow watching porn itself, because in that case they are just accumulating evidences against them.

godelski9• 2 years ago

how to set up 1.1.1.1

I just want to mention a few things: Fallback, other DNSs like 1.* and Mullvad's free DNS with more options

    # Standard
    1.1.1.1
    1.0.0.1
    2606:4700:4700::1111
    2606:4700:4700::1001

    # Block Malware 
    1.1.1.2
    1.0.0.2
    2606:4700:4700::1112
    2606:4700:4700::1002
    
    # Block Malware & Adult Content (not useful for this case)
    1.1.1.3
    1.0.0.3
    2606:4700:4700::1113
    2606:4700:4700::1003

You can find cloudflare information here[0], and remember to make sure you setup DNS over DoT (TLS) or DoH (HTTPS). Especially for them they will want to have encrypted DNS.

Mullvad also offers *free* DNS[1], which also supports encrypted DNS

    # DoH is port 443 and DoT is port 853
    # Standard
    dns.mullvad.net
    194.242.2.2
    2a07:e340::2

    # Block Trackers
    adblock.dns.mullvad.net
    194.242.2.3
    2a07:e340::3

    # Block Trackers + Malware
    base.dns.mullvad.net
    194.242.2.4
    2a07:e340::4

Mullvad also has block for Adult + gambling and social media (so there are 6 total configurations). You don't need the Mullvad VPN to use these.

I should also mention, as this frustrated me a bit, that your browser may implement its own DNS and so just setting these in your router (or pihole) may not completely resolve the issue. In Firefox, go to Settings > Privacy & Security > (scroll all the way down) Enable DNS over HTTPS using > then under either "Increased Protection" or "Max Protection" you can set a DNS resolver (or turn it off). They have defaults for Cloudflare (default!) and NextDNS. While you're there, also check your settings at the top of that page about "Enhanced Tracking Protection"

I am *NOT* a network/security person and would greatly appreciate replies to this comment with additional information. Especially about setting up things like piholes, TVs, browsers, encrypted DNS (especially this!), host files, and so on. Technical forum, so let's get technical and learn ^__^

[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/ip-addresses/ - https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/setup/#dns-over-ht...

[1] https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

Terretta2• 2 years ago

And AdGuard ... which also blocks ads.

Plain DNS:

  # Default servers
  # AdGuard DNS will block ads and trackers.
  IPv4:
  94.140.14.14
  94.140.15.15
  IPv6:
  2a10:50c0::ad1:ff
  2a10:50c0::ad2:ff

  # Non-filtering servers
  # AdGuard DNS will not block ads, trackers, or any other DNS requests.
  IPv4:
  94.140.14.140
  94.140.14.141
  IPv6:
  2a10:50c0::1:ff
  2a10:50c0::2:ff

  # Family protection servers
  # AdGuard DNS will block ads, trackers, adult content,
  # and enable Safe Search and Safe Mode, where possible.
  IPv4:
  94.140.14.15
  94.140.15.16
  IPv6:
  2a10:50c0::bad1:ff
  2a10:50c0::bad2:ff

Adguard DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH)

  # Default server
  # AdGuard DNS will block ads and trackers.
  https://dns.adguard-dns.com/dns-query

  # Non-filtering server
  # AdGuard DNS will not block ads, trackers, or any other DNS requests.
  https://unfiltered.adguard-dns.com/dns-query

  # Family protection server
  # AdGuard DNS will block ads, trackers, adult content,
  # and enable Safe Search and Safe Mode, where possible.
  https://family.adguard-dns.com/dns-query

DNS-over-TLS

  # Default server
  # AdGuard DNS will block ads and trackers.
  tls://dns.adguard-dns.com

  # Non-filtering server
  # AdGuard DNS will not block ads, trackers, or any other DNS requests.
  tls://unfiltered.adguard-dns.com

  # Family protection server
  # AdGuard DNS will block ads, trackers, adult content,
  # and enable Safe Search and Safe Mode, where possible.
  tls://family.adguard-dns.com

See more: https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html

jgalt212• 2 years ago

isn't 1.1.1.1 of limited utility from this perspective? The ISP can still see the IP address, and I know more than one IP address can map to a single domain, but you're still leaking information that would allow one's adversaries to guess at one's intent.

wolverine8762• 2 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'd be very careful giving security advice to someone in that situation - in fact, I probably wouldn't do it, even though I am an experienced professional who knows more than most people in IT.

Think about accuracy, which is correctness, completeness, and consistency:

Giving security advice to buddies trying to watch out-of-country sporting events has a much different accuracy requirement than advice for someone whose liberty, life, or pursuit of happiness (assets) are at stake. If your advice is incorrect, incomplete (you don't know or account for the entire picture), or inconsistent (different pieces of your advice don't line up) - these people don't miss their favorite team, the might go to jail, get tortured, lose their children, their careers, etc.

When I give professional security advice, I spend a lot of time on it. I make sure I know the whole picture, my advice is correct - rechecking old understandings, testing and retesting, etc. - and it's consistent. These people are trusting me. And then if I'm not sure of those things, I find someone who knows better than I do. I don't have time to do that at the Airbnb.

In this case, it seems to risk incorrectness and incompleteness: It may be incorrect because setting up DNS lookups so there are no leaks is tricky - I'm not even sure how to do it reliably. For example, some apps and OSes have DNS servers hardcoded; IME some just bypass your configuration (maybe the dev just didn't care to integrate with the system DNS settings); IIRC some have hardcoded fallbacks; sometimes the client overrides your config with the local gateway or the servers it supplies; also, DNS has a complex federated infrastructure. (My first stab at secure DNS is a secure VPN that doesn't leak - that seems much easier).

It's incomplete: the authorities might not see the DNS lookups but they will clearly see the IPs that the user accesses, including those of the porn websites.

These people are trusting you and you told them they could safely look at porn. Yikes, I would not want that responsibility without some serious work.

m3kw9• 2 years ago

If they aren’t technical enough to know your setup, they won’t know their current setup either. No big deal, keep it relaxed.

tawai2• 2 years ago

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

bgnn• 2 years ago

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

akdev1l2• 2 years ago

I wouldn’t be breaking the law under a repressive government without at least a VPN in the middle.

DNS queries still leak the domain unless the client is using DoH.

tawai2• 2 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rrr_oh_man3• 2 years ago

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

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

mvkel• 2 years ago

How did the industry get away with calling proxies "VPNs" anyway?

Brainspackle• 2 years ago

Proxies and VPNs are different, that's why?

donatj2• 2 years ago

Yes, they are, and what gets sold to consumers as VPNs these days are just proxies.

Nifty3929• 2 years ago

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.

worik2• 2 years ago

Yes

That is the problem with vice laws

Tough times

zarathustreal• 2 years ago

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

dijit3• 2 years ago

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.

paxys4• 2 years ago

"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.

samus3• 2 years ago

Constitutions are supposed to prevent laws like this. Because it is all too easy to make people forget the principles their democratic system is based on and without which it will degenerate into a tyranny of the majority.

braaileb• 2 years ago

If they did this for all social media I might pick up guitar

kibwen2• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, the suggestive manual gesticulations required to finger your fretboard have caused guitar-playing to be banned in the state of Texas.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 2 years ago

Not to mention those minor diminished sevenths that you've been playing recently. One more half-step towards microtonality, and you'll be looking at time in the slammer ...

interludead3• 2 years ago

It's important to always see the bright side

paulpauper• 2 years ago

VPNs: $12/month if you sign up for 200+ months for blocked IPs and slow servers and service. awesome.

aegypti• 2 years ago

Reality: €5/month if you sign up for 1 month, blocked IPs, ~10% reduction in Mbps

77pt774• 2 years ago

For $12 a year you can get a VPS and just put OpenVPN there.

paxys4• 2 years ago

And who is going to pay for the bandwidth?

karaterobot2• 2 years ago

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!

donatj2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Things like torrenting will get you quickly shut down by the provider. My friend found this out while considering setting up their own seedbox.

ranger_danger3• 2 years ago

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)

miohtama• 2 years ago

Nobody cares if it’s not terrorism or national security

throwaway918274• 2 years ago

1984.hosting

payable with Monero

k8svet2• 2 years ago

Do you know any similar hosts that attempt to provide shielded VMs?

LilBytes• 2 years ago

Which VPS provider did you go with?

I tried AlphaVPS and another and I had no luck with the traffic routing out of the VPS. Went with a droplet in DigitalOcean in the end that's managed through Portainer. Works a treat and equivalently cheap.

zeroCalories• 2 years ago

Imagine Texas bans private VPNs next. Haha.

btbuildem• 2 years ago

That's not even haha, that's like 6/10 likely.

skissane2• 2 years ago

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

paxys4• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

https://UpVPN.app for couple of minutes of VPN

neurostimulant2• 2 years ago

This is exactly the kind of vpn that I need! I only need VPN for a few hours per month to get around some geo restriction or bad network quality.

Is this vpn provider trustworthy?

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

Gambling should be banned. Not porn.

77pt774• 2 years ago

Why?

No one forces anyone to gamble.

dijit3• 2 years ago

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.

karaterobot2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Anyone have experience with Aura's VPN feature?

technion• 2 years ago

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.

andrewflnr2• 2 years ago

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.

theshackleford• 2 years ago

"hide your country from Netflix" This is the advertising I have seen for what has to be close to a decade at this point.

seanvelasco• 2 years ago

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.

game_the0ry• 2 years ago

When it comes to internet vs government censorship, internet wins. Every time.

A lesson our baby boomer regulators will never, ever learn.

interludead3• 2 years ago

It's just a metter of time..

lo_zamoyski• 2 years ago

Pornography is one of the most powerful forms of control, because you cooperate in your own enslavement. Because of the deranging and darkening effect it has on the mind, you become increasingly less aware of what's actually happening to you, less conscious of the self-destruction you are employing against yourself.

And because it functions this way, it has also been instrumentalized. Sexual "liberation" is political control. Wilhelm Reich essentially wrote the playbook here, though we see plenty of precursors, and in the Enlightenment tradition, Marquis de Sade stands out (though he did not have access to mass media like we do).

As Chesterton observed, such "freedom" is the most transparent of all bribes that slavery can make to rob us of our freedom. Pleasure is far more effective than pain because it conceals the coercive nature of the act. Marcuse saw such things as a conservative force masquerading as "liberation", one intended as a distraction (like bread and circuses) and a way of sapping the attention and energies (and I would add intelligence) of those who partake that could otherwise be used toward criticism. The deranging effect is the worst effect of all, as such, but also because its effects can far outlast the period of consumption.

That people can use VPNs is not a substantive argument against bans or restrictions on pornography.

npteljes• 2 years ago

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

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

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

tamaharbor• 2 years ago

I am overnighting in North Carolina this evening. Can’t watch porn without providing a drivers license or passport. (But VPN works good.)

apantel• 2 years ago

Whack-it-a-mole.

outside12342• 2 years ago

Hopefully also a boom in voting against these folks as well

barryrandall• 2 years ago

~80% of them will be reelected.

stevenicr• 2 years ago

I have done some searches for age verifying services to plug into an adult site and not found anything that seemed reasonable (a few in Euroland and one that has contact for pricing, which means it's not affordable).

I am wondering how this can even be implemented with static html pages, I am guessing if a site was php there would be some session id kind of thing that could connect with a third party API..

If anyone wants to build some verify things I see a small side business brewing here, perhaps we should make a couple of things to implement,

even though I think these laws will be thrown out one they hit the supreme court, the tech could be used for other things like sales of age restricted things.

interludead3• 2 years ago

I wonder why...

kkkk• 2 years ago

sex

Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom

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