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

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/vpn/utah-becomes-first-us-state-to-target-vpn-use-with-age-verification-law

by GavinAnderegg • 3 months ago

235 275 3 months ago

OutOfHere8• 3 months ago

People need to do their best to stop paying so much in taxes to their state governments, failing which the governments get increasingly authoritarian. The state governments clearly have run out of real problems to solve, and when they do, they then attack basic freedoms. Keeping them strongly tax-constrained keeps them lean. As it stands, these governments are representing special interests, not the people. It doesn't matter how many places or where this is happening; the logic is the same. What happens is that the tax money is a prerequisite for strong enforcement. Without an excess in tax money, there isn't going to be substantial enforcement. I am not asking anyone to break tax law; only to aggressively hunt for exceptions to your advantage.

Outside of a W-2 salary for which taxes are pre-deducted, there are many ways, more applicable to businesses, also to independent contractors. Even for those with a salary, they ought to do their best to collect all the legally qualified benefits that they can. Lots of independent contractors get paid as W-2 when they could be getting paid as a corp, for which they could write off a portion of the taxes via deductibles and in various other ways. Lots of people could be ordering online at websites that don't deduct a sales tax. Using a Delaware corp for various transactions can also go a long way. Living in a geography where the property taxes are not absurdly high or rising also matters.

nephihaha9• 3 months ago

This is happening worldwide.

wartywhoa2315• 3 months ago

Kudos for highlighting this, because almost everyone here seems to be thinking of their own pot, not the whole kitchen.

OutOfHere8• 3 months ago

It is not happening in destitute countries, is it? If you have normalized and given up already, then your fight is already lost.

abustamam11• 3 months ago

You're saying that like we have a choice. If we don't pay taxes we get jailed. Simple as that.

kordlessagain• 3 months ago

Stop paying so much is not the same as not paying. Why are you making it otherwise?

OutOfHere8• 3 months ago

Outside of a W-2 salary, there are ways, more applicable to businesses, also to independent contractors. Even for those with a salary, they ought to do their best to collect all the legally qualified benefits that they can.

Lots of independent contractors get paid as W-2 when they could be getting paid as a corp, for which they could write off a portion of the taxes via deductibles and in various other ways.

Lots of people could be ordering online at websites that don't deduct a sales tax. Instead, they pay a substantial amount in sales tax.

Using a Delaware corp for various transactions can also go a long way.

functionmouse3• 3 months ago

so it's okay because we're just following orders?

dandellion• 3 months ago

Only if you're poor, the rich don't pay taxes just fine.

j0yb0y• 3 months ago

Representing special interests != too much tax money. Orthogonal. It’s a mind boggling leap.

OutOfHere8• 3 months ago

The tax money is a prerequisite for strong enforcement. Without an excess in tax money, there isn't going to be substantial enforcement. Think ahead.

wat100004• 3 months ago

How exactly am I supposed to do that?

dntrkv• 3 months ago

Yes because the countries with lower taxes are so free and democratic. Pretty sure the relationship is inverse if you take even 5 min of your time to look.

iLoveOncall• 3 months ago

Here's the website of Utah's governor if you want to access it via a VPN: https://www.votecox.com/

abustamam11• 3 months ago

https://www.votecox.com/fighting-federal-overreach

Fighting Federal Overreach

"The US govt can't overreach! That's my job!"

Lucasoato• 3 months ago

No GDPR banner, even if visiting the website from EU

ronsor• 3 months ago

Realistically domestic US politicians have no reason to care about EU regulations

M95D• 3 months ago

What GDPR banner? GDPR doesn't impose any banners. ePrivacy Directive did, and it's actually a choice: use tracking cookies with consent, or don't use tracking cookies and no consent is needed.

nephihaha9• 3 months ago

What a coincidence that Utah is following the same pattern as Australia, the European Union, Norway and the UK, while pretending they came up with it independently.

bryan_w2• 3 months ago

I wonder who's in common there?

nephihaha9• 3 months ago

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

gib4442• 3 months ago

Utah is actually trailblazing ahead of the UK here. It was only ministers possibly suggesting VPNs would be next in the firing line and AFAIK nothing has progressed beyond that yet

Yet articles about UK age verification stuff got HUGE amount of attention and backlash here...

nephihaha9• 3 months ago

There is a clear parallel to the Criminal Justice Bills brought in by Tony Blair supposedly to stop "terrorism" (even though terrorism had been a serious issue in the UK from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, especially in Northern Ireland.)

Now we have Keir Starmer promoting internet ID to stop minors accessing porn on the internet side, and supposedly against illegal migration on the non-internet side.

functionmouse3• 3 months ago

only the beginning

Nifty39294• 3 months ago

VPNs are on their way toward being banned and/or heavily regulated. I imagine what will happen is a requirement for VPN providers to "know your customer" just as banks do, and for them to be able to tie a particular traffic stream back to a specific human.

mrbluecoat• 3 months ago

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

wilkystyle• 3 months ago

"Utah to hold Cloud providers liable for failing to police self-hosted VPNs on their infrastructure"

kiba• 3 months ago

Seems like they will do that too.

thfuran4• 3 months ago

Ban them, demand GitHub et al take down the illegal repos, hit up Microsoft for records of everyone who ever downloaded them, hosting providers for customer records, and ISPs for lists of customers with VPN-shaped traffic between themselves and their hosting provider. Or if they’re lazy, just demand that the hosting providers sort it out.

lokar• 3 months ago

The question is not how will they ban it, they just pass a law.

The question is how and when will they enforce it. When they get access to your devices for some other reason, they will see it. It will give them another easy to prosecute law to use against you.

nunez3• 3 months ago

Easily.

Host them on the cloud providers? You get banned.

Host them in your homelab and the ISP finds out? You get your Internet cut.

How will either of them find out? IP addresses and/or DPI.

All it'll take is an executive order or an act of Congress.

leshenka• 3 months ago

Easy:

- know ip ranges of popular cloud providers and deny service. Not bulletproof but enough to make it a pain in the ass so people don’t bother

- make it illegal to offer this kind of service for the purpose of evading location detection. Put pressure on Apple and Google, force them to remove vpn apps

You guys need to start reading on Russia's war on internet and treat it as a cautionary tale

m463• 3 months ago

how will they ban the icloud proxy? Or is it not really a vpn?

or the firefox vpn?

eu• 3 months ago

is this even doable/enforceble?

kstrauser8• 3 months ago

Not even remotely.

functionmouse3• 3 months ago

no, they're inventing make-believe crimes they can accuse anyone they don't like of

dgrin91• 3 months ago

Sure, it would force sites to block traffic from vpns.

The fun part is when you post videos of yourself using a vpn to go to gov website or the candidate website and watch them do nothing

sammy2255• 3 months ago

That's called complying, not enforcing

righthand• 3 months ago

It also prohibits covered websites from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass age checks.

This country is led by idiots that do not enjoy or like freedom.

abustamam11• 3 months ago

Correction — rules for thee, freedom for me.

The people who lead our country love their own freedoms, as long as it allows them to infringe on everyone else's freedoms.

jitler• 3 months ago

This country is led idiots that do not enjoy or like freedom.

This country is populated by idiots that do not enjoy or like freedom. These people didn’t just seize power in a coup.

ndsipa_pomu• 3 months ago

Maybe a failed coup that ended up not being punished.

cosmicgadget4• 3 months ago

That'll get stuck down federally.

kstrauser8• 3 months ago

This is the stupidest idea I’ve heard recently. Way to go, Utah.

My home router has a built in VPN server. When I’m out running around, my iPhone can route traffic through my house. Pray tell, o sage Utah legislature chucklefucks, how is anyone expected to tell that I’m accessing a website from a hotel in Berlin instead of my house in California? (Which is why we used it last time: I configured my travel router to use that same VPN so we could watch American Netflix at night before bedtime when we just wanted something familiar to relax with.)

Honestly, this is the new “pi equals 3” legislation. “Let’s make laws codifying technical ideas we clearly have no freaking clue about”.

Again, way to go, Utah.

jeroenhd4• 3 months ago

how is anyone expected to tell that I’m accessing a website from a hotel in Berlin instead of my house in California

Remote attestation in combination with location access as a start. DPI on TCP/UDP timinings/round trip time measurements for distant locations, combined DNS leak detection to catch bad VPNs. Use browser APIs to detect WiFi vs mobile data to let some 2G users through. IPv6 accessibility checks to catch many other VPNs.

There are always technical means, as the more restrictive streaming services like to prove. There are many, many more ways websites can verify that users are not on a VPN that most websites don't bother with, and until they all do and people still use VPNs, legislators will find ways to punish websites.

The real end goal isn't to block content these people dislike within their state, of course. The goal is to go after the existence of adult websites and, in worryingly more common cases, websites discussing basic LGBTQ topics.

kstrauser8• 3 months ago

No. That’s how someone with pervasive access to Internet infrastructure could tell when I’m on a VPN. It’s impossible for a given website to tell that I’m accessing it over a VPN. Not difficult: impossible. It cannot be done.

lstodd2• 3 months ago

Technical measures while technically existing failed first in China and then in Russia lately, Russian authorities recently all but admitted that they can not block xray+reality-style VPNs (which were and are developed in China to go over their "great firewall") and now talk about a blanket ban on foreign traffic and basically a whitelist for internet.

The goal is always a perception of control of public narrative. Those people deeply care what "masses" think of them. That they measure mostly by sampling more or less public media (and I actually worked at a company in 2010s which was selling exactly that). And when they don't like what they see, they try to fix that by controlling that media, up to and including banning the whole world.

That is what is happening with all this protecting the children stuff.

mvdwoord5• 3 months ago

I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals... they feel dystopic and can seemingly only lead to brutal restrictions on the internet. What will we end up with? Only attested modems / endpoints in the home? With DPI? And a government issued smartcard to use it? It comes across as if this is what some legislators are actually after... they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them that the solutions they propose will not work and I am a bit worried they will morph the public discussion into enforcing at a lower level otherwise "the bad guys still circumvent"??

shaftoe• 3 months ago

I'm confused where all of this censorship is originating from. What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see.

OccamsMirror• 3 months ago

It's all coming from Meta: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...

Big tech wants regulatory capture.

2ndorderthought10• 3 months ago

It looks like a coordinated effort from multiple defense companies like meta, and I believe openai, and I think palantir.

mvdwoord5• 3 months ago

Maybe the desire is always there, but somehow the momentum is just in an upswing now?

Guestmodinfo• 3 months ago

My guess is bots. Govts and law makers are afraid of the barrage of bots DDOSing them so they are slowly and surely tightening the noose around the internet. I'm all for net neutrality and anonymity on the internet and I don't like the age laws one bit, but I too am afraid of the bots scorching the internet. I still hate these growing dystopian laws but I also want the bots to be driven away from the "human internet" .

verdverm• 3 months ago

Heritage Foundation, Meta, and generally the Oligarchy

bilbo0s2• 3 months ago

It's the inevitable culmination of their plan.

Pretend to be anti-censorship. Get voted in. Fast track all of the censorship and surveillance through congress.

When I saw certain billionaires talking up anti-censorship and anti-surveillance a few years ago, I knew we would be screwed. (I knew the same billionaires had large positions in censorship and surveillance tech.) No one ever talks against their own book unless they're planning on screwing you.

Aurornis2• 3 months ago

What wave of efforts is culminating? I can't really explain this from any movement I can see.

Look at any thread about social media, TikTok, smartphones, or porn sites on Hacker News: They are instantly filled with comments claiming that the internet is to blame for all of society's ills with younger generations. The HN threads fill with comments proposing that we ban children from having smartphones until they're 16 or 18 and similar ideas. Abstract ideas about banning kids from social media or porn sites are weirdly very popular even here, mostly from people who haven't thought about what that would mean for privacy for everyone.

These ideas have become pervasive, even inside tech communities. It was so easy to blame social media and the internet for everything for years, and now lawmakers are riding that wave for political points. It's "think of the children" built on top of the current moral panics.

wartywhoa2315• 3 months ago

Easy: from the fascist psychopaths at the whelm of the world.

People started to understand too much about who's the real enemy, and are not willing to kill and die in meatgrinders of the new world order for the interests of the unelect 0.001%.

deknos• 3 months ago

What will we end up with? Only attested modems / endpoints in the home?

you might laugh/cry, but there was a time in germany, when the telephone at home was owned by the state (the "Post") and you were NOT allowed to tinker with it.

personally, i guess, things like sneakernet, lorawan and hamradio will become a lot more popular over time.

butvacuum• 3 months ago

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

mvdwoord5• 3 months ago

Same in NL... we used to rent our telephones from the "PTT".

mr-wendel• 3 months ago

My pet theory is that network protocols will evolve to require some kind of certificate-based signing to uniquely identify individuals and groups. Hardware and operating systems will have legal mandates to enforce this. Penalties for carrying unsigned traffic will be stiff.

The “upsides” will be plentiful! User verification schemes will be streamlined like never before. If you think there are downsides… well, just think of the kids, damn it!

redman25• 3 months ago

Doesn’t ham radio not allow transmissions to be encrypted by law? That rules out most of the internet.

throw848tjfj2• 3 months ago

We will end with correct and desired behaviour. If you misbehave, you get internet ban, and lose your livelihood. Driving licences, passports, electricity, banking... etc already work this way.

Technical details are irrelevant.

You should not be able to criticise current or previous government!

peddling-brink• 3 months ago

What previous government? We have always been at war with Eurasia.

dgellow• 3 months ago

they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them that the solutions they propose will not work

I would expect they mostly listen to special interests advocating for those laws. They don’t come from nowhere

2ndorderthought10• 3 months ago

Utah hosts I think the biggest nsa data center.

Honestly, I would like my ISP to block all traffic to and from Utah if this law passes. I can't think of anything I want or need that involves that state.

mvdwoord5• 3 months ago

Without it being good or bad (long term, second order effects), I do think all of these (proposed) laws and where we are heading will balkanize the internet. Alternative tech may sound appealing to the tinkerers, and they may keep certain important channels alive (think radio amateurs... they know this game) but for the masses? I already happily block entire countries or regions to my VPS as there is zero benefit for me to not drop them at the FW level.

Bender• 3 months ago

Unfortunately it does not work that way unless perhaps I am misunderstanding your comment. The traffic monitored by the NSA will pass through their collection points in each state and will be silently mirrored to them regardless of the routing of your ISP. Even if your specific ISP does not mirror data the traffic will very likely pass through ISP's that do.

paulddraper• 3 months ago

Skiing

mannanj3• 3 months ago

Remember the conspiracy theorists talking about this for decades? I do. This is the goal of a bourgeois class of people who want to save their livelihoods and status in the world though don't want any circumstances they can't control - legislators are out of touch with the majority of people as they are funded by any really serve those bourgeois.

gilrain• 3 months ago

The country is descending into fascism. If you’ve previous endulged in the politics of “I don’t care about politics”, it’s time to stop and look around you.

pyaamb• 3 months ago

when can we hold lawmakers personally responsible for any consequences resulting from passing bad laws?

bluecheese452• 3 months ago

You can.

red-iron-pine3• 3 months ago

you can hold them responsible on election day.

you can hold them responsible by taking time out of your day to knock on doors, protest, hold up signs, or get involved.

you can hold them responsible by donating to parties, movements, and organizations that back consequences for passing bad laws.

toss1• 3 months ago

>they must have some technical advisors who can explain to them that the solutions they propose will not work

You are assuming good faith on the part of those legislators.

That is an error.

There is no good faith to be had and they could not care less about physical restrictions, incompatibilities, or impossibilities.

Their goal is to maximize their power and minimize or eliminate people's power, regardless of whether it is legitimate or desired by the people they claim to represent.

You would be more productive summoning the ghost of Richard Feynman to explain quantum physics to a dung beetle than to have a network expert attempt to enlighten those pseudo-legislators.

hilbert42• 3 months ago

Try 'teaching calculus to a dog', it's easier to visualize.

morkalork• 3 months ago

We will end up with what China, Russia and Iran have. The American right has come to grips with the fact that their ideas and beliefs will not will not win on merit alone so they're moving to restrict and eliminate alternatives.

gnerd00• 3 months ago

LOL - its just "the right" eh?

Spooky23• 3 months ago

The people making these decisions are religious fanatics. They don’t care.

This is one of the reasons why the purge of the federal government and military has happened. Surveillance state stuff was pretty scary from day 1… doubly so now that the leadership is all toadies who will remain embedded for decades.

JumpCrisscross7• 3 months ago

they must have some technical advisors

I dare you to get half a dozen people with a technical background to call their electeds and explain why these rules are stupid. (And, if they insist on implementing age gates, as seems to be popular, the least worst ways to do it.)

rapnie• 3 months ago

I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals... they feel dystopic

Baffled? The whole country's democracy is diving off this cliff, seems to me.

martin-t3• 3 months ago

It's not just the US though, EU too.

I don't like far fetched conspiracy theories but I really want to know where all this is coming from. Did politicians suddenly all get the same idea or are there groups lobbying for this who benefit in terms of money/power?

jmyeet2• 3 months ago

The only baffling thing is taht it took this long.

In the physical world, we can limit the types of businesses. We can limit access to them. Casinos, adult entertainment, drinking establishments, etc require efort to go to and there's enforcement (not always effective, obviously) to keep, say, minors out.

The Internet has broken down that structure such that there are no limitations and, like it or not, that's really harmful. Widespread access to sports betting and crypto gambling is just a negative. There is nothing positive about this. Gambling preys on desperate people and gambling addiction quite often leads to suicide.

So I think it was inevitable that lawmakers would get involved. The only question now is what kinds of restrictions we get, how they work and what the enforcement mechanisms are. Some will say "this is a parenting issue". That's shown to be completely insufficient.

My point is that fighting this is (IMHO) a losing battle.

There are a lot of predictable outcomes here. For example, Meta thinks age verification should be enforced at the OS level. Shocker. The company that has no OS thinks OS should be responsible and, more importantly, liable.

IMHO private companies shouldn't be trusted with verifying IDs. The government should do that because, you know, they're the ones who issued the IDs.

I also think the minors simply shouldn't be able to create Apple or Google accounts. Child accounts should belong to an adult account and that adult is responsible for setting the age correctly. The child account should become an adult account when they turn 18.

Attacking VPNs, as Utah is doing here, is... a choice. I don't think that's a winning strategy but we will see.

I also think that location of a user is going to be increasingly enforced and verified. NVidia actually does something like this to try and block their cards being used in China. The cards will ping various locations to try and establish location. I think sites will start doing that too.

Take social media sites like Twitter, for example. There are obviously bots. But there are also people in developing nations who have figured out they can monetize being controversial. I think it would actually be value if we know that Debra the MAGA influencer is actually in Nigeria.

lxgr2• 3 months ago

The Internet has broken down that structure such that there are no limitations and, like it or not, that's really harmful. Widespread access to sports betting and crypto gambling [...]

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

Now it's explicitly legal in many states, and I think this can explain for the recent boom much more than the availability of offshore on-chain betting.

IMHO private companies shouldn't be trusted with verifying IDs. The government should do that because, you know, they're the ones who issued the IDs.

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

wartywhoa2315• 3 months ago

Well, people who call a fascism a fascism are always wrong until they suddenly aren't.

nine_k3• 3 months ago

It's not the first time when people who despise liberty of others and want to force them jump through unreasonable hoops shoot themselves in their feet.

Saying "you're unwelcome here" to a large enough number of well-meaning people usually backfires. I hope this will be felt during the next elections in Utah.

CamperBob22• 3 months ago

I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals

Follow the money. Ten to one, it all leads back to Zuckerberg.

pseudosavant• 3 months ago

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

Barrin92• 3 months ago

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

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

altairprime• 3 months ago

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

Simulacra• 3 months ago

The end goal is a government license to access the internet. But I think it's less regulatory, and more poli-social. There are individuals within the political stratosphere that are adamantly against anonymity on the Internet because they want to be able to attach speech to specific individuals, and punish if necessary for wrong-think.

CamperBob22• 3 months ago

Also notice that even on here, a site ostensibly for "hackers" and other traditionally civil liberty-minded users, we don't tend to hear about these proposed laws until they're already passed or otherwise too late to stop.

Some might find that a bit odd.

bigbadfeline• 3 months ago

I am completely baffled by this wave of new laws and proposals...

I'm not surprised in the slightest, the direction's been clear for more than 20 years now, so I've stopped looking for technical solutions, they will always be stop-gap measures if politics isn't fixed.

pbasista2• 3 months ago

What is the motivation for such a measure? In other words, which problem is it trying to solve? And how it is supposed to do so?

I think that we should not carelessly invent laws that just "sound good" to some lawmakers but have no real fact checking done to support them and are not backed by science.

Because, in my opinion, then there is a high risk that these "good intentions" will backfire spectacularly. While not getting even close to achieve the desired effect.

tardedmeme6• 3 months ago

I believe the perceived problem is that people in Utah are watching porn.

pbasista2• 3 months ago

I see. Then I would ask a follow-up question: "Why is that a problem?"

FrustratedMonky2• 3 months ago

Doesn't this seem impossible?

So if I have jo-blow web site.

And a user uses a VPN, how am I supposed to do anything about it. And why should i?

tedd4u• 3 months ago

Don't host your website in Utah and avoid having a business / tax nexus there.

cosmicgadget4• 3 months ago

I think you are okay:

Commercial entities that host "a substantial portion of material harmful to minors" are now prohibited from facilitating or encouraging the use of a VPN to bypass age checks.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulati...

kstrauser8• 3 months ago

I have an Amazon affiliate link on my website. Now it’s technically commercial.

I say things in support of my LGBTQ friends and neighbors. Now it’s technically harmful to minors.

This isn’t a slippery slope. It’s already an avalanche.

bradley132• 3 months ago

This is happening simultaneously in many Western countries. It is clearly somehow coordinated. You don't need a tinfoil hat to see the conspiracy.

Equally clearly, this is a first step to requiring identity, and ultimately government approval for your activities in the internet.

Somehow, we really must reign in the political class, before we truly land in a dystopia.

markus_zhang• 3 months ago

I guess this is just to accelerate the preparation for a total war.

wartywhoa2315• 3 months ago

One can't make all cattle pens fight to total mutual extermination without isolating them first, and blocking all information about the farm owners.

JumpCrisscross7• 3 months ago

It is clearly somehow coordinated

Well, yes—parents’ groups are coordinating. Similar to how drunk driving and cigarette rules were passed globally in about a generation. You don’t need reptiles when polling is so strongly against kids on social media.

frm88• 3 months ago

I think you might want to zoom out a bit: digital authorianism has been on the rise since (at least) 2022 and is subject to scientific study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5117399

This chapter explores the defining characteristics of digital authoritarianism as exemplified by countries such as China and Russia, identifying three primary pillars: information control, mass surveillance, and the creation of a fragmented, isolated Internet. Furthermore, this chapter emphasizes that digital authoritarian practices are not confined to authoritarian regimes. Democratic governments and technologically advanced private corporations, especially the dominant tech companies shaping the modern Internet, are also capable of adopting authoritarian tactics.

bradley132• 3 months ago

It's much more than parents' groups. This is coming "top down". For example, here in Switzerland the government decided E-IDs would be a great idea. The population killed the proposal the first time, with a referendum. So the government tried again, and we failed to kill it the second time.

hackernews682• 3 months ago

This. And the coordinated rollout of digital currencies. It is all a part of the control grid being prepared for us.

One would think this would be obvious to more HN readers, being the supposed technical “systems thinkers” they purport to be.

tekawade• 3 months ago

I understand the need for age verification. And better way to do this is have all device way to communicate the age set by parents to websites.

This is just one of the way. “The Anxious Generation”- Jonathan Haidt put it across. Rey well. It’s import at this day and age to check age online.

Banning VPN is not the way.

Even ChargePoint app does not work with vpn on I am baffled.

ijk3• 3 months ago

I don't understand the need for age verification.

I mean, I understand what it effects it has, and why many parties want to perfect their expanding panopticon, and why screaming think of the children makes politicians' brains turn off.

It won't fix children or social media. That's been apparent ever since Facebook defaulted to real names and people still posted everything they would have otherwise. It makes it easier to use social disapproval to destroy nonconforming individuals, I suppose. And to sell ads. And to destroy anyone who criticizes the government. So no real downside if you don't care about that sort of thing.

kstrauser8• 3 months ago

When I was a kid, I acquired long distance calling cards[0] so that I could dial into faraway BBSes and access a different variety of pictures of nakedness than I had access to locally. This notion that you can bar kids from accessing porn is highly amusing.

[0]Fictional; this is not a confession; I know my rights

tgv• 3 months ago

There is no need for age verification: ban all mobile devices and access to anything vaguely "social" (and possibly porn) for everyone under 18. Place heavy fines. But it requires more guts than governments have. They get lobbied, coerced by corruptible friends, and threatened, and we end up with the worst of all outcomes: addicted children without attention and lack of privacy.

nunez3• 3 months ago

So they're asking ISPs to build the Great Mormon Firewall, basically. Cool, cool cool, cool, cool.

I'm more scared that there is a push to do this federally, as that will, effectively, be tantamount to establishing explicitly state-controlled media.

y-c-o-m-b• 3 months ago

I gather that's what all the sneaky bills introduced over the last decade banning encryption were attempting to do. They absolutely want this at the federal level.

bilsbie• 3 months ago

I really miss the 90s. Can someone make a new internet that’s like that?

Nifty39294• 3 months ago

Me too! Where is the wild-west? The independent sites and dark corners with weird stuff? Those were fun times. It felt like I was an explorer in a new place helping to also build and contribute to that place. Now it's basically like interactive TV or something.

Are BBS's still a thing?

davideg• 3 months ago

The bottom line:

if a website cannot reliably detect a VPN user's true location and the law requires it to do so for all users in a particular state, then the legal risk could push the site to either ban all known VPN IPs, or to mandate age verification for every visitor globally.

Clearly anyone slightly sophisticated can bypass restrictions like this. A quick search reveals https://github.com/shadowsocks. This only harms regular users who might benefit from privacy. The dystopia levels continue to rise...

bloppe3• 3 months ago

There's tension between this law and the 14th, 5th and 1st amendments.

Due process doctrine from the 5th and 14th establish unconstitutional vagueness. A law cannot be so vague as to be impossible to comply with. This law requires websites to enforce a ban based on information they don't have access to. Without explain how they might possibly achieve that aim, it can be considered unconstitutionally vague.

The 1st amendment requires that a law restricting free speech use the least restrictive means possible to achieve it's aim. Due to the vagueness of how to comply on a technical level, the only possible way to comply would be to require global identity verification based on Utah's standards. I don't think that would pass a least restrictive means test.

Nifty39294• 3 months ago

I'm not convinced. I use a VPN basically always, and frequently get blocked by VPN detectors. It's not perfect - sometimes switching VPN servers/providers gets me past it, but websites can employ VPN-detection technology. Then they just block you, which is what this is all about. Force companies to start blocking VPN traffic. It'll be at the individual site level for a while, then at the ISP level in a few years.

docjay• 3 months ago

In a single sentence you explained how trivial it is to get around the current technology, then said they can just use the same thing. It’s so simple, just make it perfect and use it?

bloppe3• 3 months ago

There are VPNs like Mysterium that specifically advertise being "unblockable" because they cycle through thousands of residential IPs instead of using a stable set of easily-blacklisted addresses. These will probably get more popular. Also, self-hostable proxies running on any cloud you want are already very easy to set up and use. And they can easily run on any platform large or small. It's just always going to be so easy to get around these rules for anyone who knows how to use a coding agent, which is basically as easy as using Google.

ChrisArchitect• 3 months ago

Related EFF coverage:

Utah's New Law Targeting VPNs Goes into Effect Next Week

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47969868

phendrenad2• 3 months ago

I'm tired of fighting this stuff. The forces allied against internet freedom are just too large for us regular Hacker News nerds to deal with. What we need is a mass awakening of normal people who see the effects of internet censorship and demand a reversal. And sadly, that might not be possible until the normal people get a taste of censorship to realize they don't like it. So now I think, the sooner we go full China the sooner we can get things back to normal.

burnt-resistor• 3 months ago

No, totally wrong. It's the accelerationist's fallacy because it will cause unnecessary suffering and damage that isn't undoable because polices, laws, culture, and attitudes aren't repairable like a broken machine or a zero sum game. Hence "burn it all down" brings terrorism rather than "renewal".

nunti• 3 months ago

The pornography addicts are not a large enough constituency to have any effect.

notepad0x90• 3 months ago

why are they building data centers in states that are hostile to hosting content there? can't be latency, because california has plenty of data centers and is close by.

ventana• 3 months ago

It is frightening to see how the latest anti-VPN developments in Russia [1] are somewhat replicated by some US states. For those not following, VPNs are widespread in Russia after the government started blocking popular messengers such as Telegram and websites such as YouTube, and a few weeks ago Russian government instructed major Russian websites (banks, VK social network, etc.) to stop serving users if the website detects the user uses VPN. I read this Utah news as something very similar: an attempt to reduce VPN usage by forcing the websites to collaborate. Feels very wrong to me.

[1] https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/russias-m...

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

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