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Porn restrictions are leading to a VPN boom
- PicassoCTs 3y agoHardening societal infra-structure against democratic governments collapsing back into autocracies. Good times.
- decremental 3y ago[dead]
- brink 3y agoPorn is not a liberating force. It's like being mad at the government for making it hard for you to smoke cigarettes.
- exe34 3y agoCigarette causes lung cancer and a bunch of other things.
- johannes1234321 3y agoEspecially also for bystanders. Porn is consumed mostly privately.
- p00b 3y agoRight, 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 3y agoPorn also doesn't give you cancer. It's pretty transparent that the restrictions on it originate from hyper-religiosity and conservatism, rather than some genuine concern about public health.
- tennisflyi 3y agoLiberating force is a bit too far but it’s not the demon people seem to think. It’s about all things in moderation. Porn = dopamine. Fast food = sugars/fructose and the ilk. SM = dopamine. Loot boxes = dopamine. Ad nauseam…
- thriftwy 3y agoCan I get a socially approved amount of porn then? Would there be porn rations?
- kibwen 3y agoJust like other addictive things (sugar, caffeine, video games, gambling), the "socially approved amount" is determined by a given individual's own limits on what they can consume while remaining a functioning member of society.
- tennisflyi 3y agoSome where in between not talking about it with your mom and dad but chopping it up with a friend briefly about whatever models is so attractive and had a great scene on whatever website
- andy99 3y agos/cigarettes/weed/ and watch how many people suddenly get angry. The problem is the government telling people what to do, period.
- Der_Einzige 3y agoIt 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 3y agoPeople would be mad at the government for the exact same reason if they made selling cigarettes illegal.
- standardUser 3y agoHave you ever made your own porn? Very liberating.
- brink 3y agoHave you ever tried abstaining? You'll find you're not as liberated as you thought.
- logicprog 3y agoHow very Christian. We're all "slaves to sin" and "idols" where "sin and idols" just means "anything people like doing", because it's hard to stop doing something you like.
- brink 3y agoIt means anything that destroys and leads to misery. Hopefully you see that someday.
- logicprog 3y agoHow very droll and condescending of you. The Golden Rule is to treat others how you'd like to be treated, so I can assume you want to be treated in a droll and condescending matter in turn, so allow me to oblige: A: What is sin? B: Anything that destroys and leads to misery. A: Do X or Y actually destroy or lead to misery, or is it moral panic, pseudoscience, misery more caused by socially enforced guilt caused by the belief that X or Y is bad, some combination of the above? [B and A engage in an interminable discussion, and eventually B's Heritage Foundation links are exhausted] A: it doesn't seem clear that any of these things "destroy" anything, or inherently cause misery. B: Well X or Y must be bad, because they're sin, so they seem gross and bad to me. There must be hidden detriments that scientists are unwilling to admit, or just haven't gotten around to proving yet. Just wait, when you grow up you'll think just like me. A: maybe.
- standardUser 3y agoYou sound like a sad sexless man.
- halfcat 3y 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 3y agoBut the kids!
- waveBidder 3y agogp means they're accidentally getting people used to using VPNs etc by poorly implementing bans on popular things.
- CapitalistCartr 3y agoAnyone here recommend a VPN, for personal information safety and security rather than hiding porn?
- readyplayernull 3y agoTor Project.
- vorticalbox 3y agoThe tor network is really not built for streaming and you slow it down for everyone else when you do.
- crtasm 3y agoGP didn't mention streaming.
- jamesponddotco 3y agoA VPN so you can hide your IP address and whatnot? Mullvad.
- thih9 3y agoHow are these two use cases different? Are there vpn services that let you do one and not the other?
- netsharc 3y agoPresumably 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.
- 3y ago
- b8 3y agoUsenet, DDL, and torrenting are alternatives too. I wonder if Cloudflare's free VPN would bypass state based blocking.
- jimcsharp 3y agoSurely it's overkill to pay for a whole month of constant vpn use. You could cook something up that provides access for a short session aaand we've circled back to dialers.
- phillc73 3y agoShort session? The month is good.
- winwang 3y agoOP just needs a couple minutes of VPN
- written-beyond 3y ago[dead]
- zamadatix 3y agoIt'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 3y agoYep, 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 3y ago4 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
- anderber 3y ago
- ndriscoll 3y 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 3y agoWell they can learn to use tor but most likely they’ll get sucked into shady free VPN services and suffer worse.
- tennisflyi 3y agoNo way you’re streaming anything via Tor
- InvertedRhodium 3y agoI used to leave porn downloading overnight over 56k in the mid 90s. They’ll just have to get a little more organised about it.
- jbigelow76 3y agoI used to leave porn downloading overnight over 56k in the mid 90s. Literal, delayed gratification.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
- bradly 3y agoAlso it is extremely common in middle and high school to use VPNs to get around school network restrictions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- miki123211 3y agoThat must be a US thing, over here in Europe, most people just use hotspots (or cellular data) instead. That was a thing even back in my day, when LTE availability was not a given and cellular packages were much less generous.
- cayde 3y agoTethering is idiot expensive in USA. Every provider will DPI and block it or throttle it. It's awful.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ranger_danger 3y agovery easy to bypass simply by increasing TTL by 1
- jowea 3y agoAnd what's the very easy way to do that?
- ssl-3 3y agoUnless your phone is rooted, TTL mangling happens on the hotspot-using client devices. Specific details depend on what that client device uses for an operating system, and this makes it impossible to neatly summarize. But it can be done fairly easily with things like OpenWRT or Mikrotik's RouterOS, or a regular stand-alone Linux box, and IIRC it's a simple one-liner on a Windows machine. Because it can't be easily summarized, Google is your friend here. Generally, you want the TTL of all packets leaving the client (router, tablet, laptop, or whatever) to be set to 65 -- which is one more than the Android default of 64. That's all the information you need to know to Google up instructions that work with your particular devices. (I may or may not keep a Mikrotik-based hotspot-abuser in my work truck as a problem solver.)
- thriftwy 3y ago[flagged]
- nanocode 3y agoWhat you wrote sounds a bit like "As a minor I have lived in asbestos building and I can assure you I was not harmed". How do you know? As far as I know, there are many scientific studies that disprove what you've said - and that porn has, in fact, a harmful effect on young minds. Of course there are many other harmful things that we nevertheless accept, like alcohol, cars or cigarettes. So maybe we can, as a society, decide that letting kid watch porn is OK and not worth the alternative (privacy intruding regulations). But arguing that it's not harmful at all is not, I believe, scientifically justified.
- thriftwy 3y ago[flagged]
- moonchild 3y agoRespectfully: 1. I think censorship laws are abhorrent 2. It can be very difficult to tell what effect media has on you, and just because you do not (say) find yourself traumatised or find that your perceptions have been overtly altered does not mean you have not been negatively affected. And you will certainly never be unaffected by anything you experience or do. This is something that I've become more sensitive to and aware of as I've gotten older. And further, it is only through this sensitivity and awareness, and acceptance of the fact that I cannot just decide by fiat how things will affect me, that I have gained some measure of control.
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoAnecdote: 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 3y agoUK is also censoring porn sites...
- 77pt77 3y agoAt this point Turkey is probably more free than the UK.
- levidos 3y agoCan you elaborate please? The UK isn't blocking gay porn sites for example.
- imwillofficial 3y agoI think freedom of speech is an obvious example.
- rsynnott 3y ago… You think freedom of speech is worse in the UK than in Erdogan’s Turkey? Just what do you think is going on in the UK?
- fullspectrumdev 3y agoI’ve noticed Americans get some… extremely weird and biased reporting about free speech in the UK. Extreme outlier cases like that Count Dankula guy get reported as the norm.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mvkel 3y agoHow did the industry get away with calling proxies "VPNs" anyway?
- Brainspackle 3y agoProxies and VPNs are different, that's why?
- donatj 3y agoYes, they are, and what gets sold to consumers as VPNs these days are just proxies.
- nanocode 3y agoI think we can split hairs and nitpick this a lot but... Nowadays most often setup is that you join a VPN (a very isolated one), and you use it for the same purpose as you would proxy. But from your machine's point of view, you're using a separate network for your default gateway. Using proxy is usually more involved, and you can configure it in your application. In fact, you can do both and sometimes it makes sense (like using tor socks proxy over vpn).
- Dylan16807 3y agoWhen you add the word "just", you make that statement false.
- paxys 3y agoNo, they are VPNs. They also include proxies in the same bundle, and sometimes it is easier to just use proxies rather than install an entire VPN client on your machines, but VPN (powered by Wireguard or OpenVPN) is what they are selling.
- ranger_danger 3y agoI think the distinction should be that if a private IP address is allocated for you, and hence this "tunnel" is forwarding layer3 packets or lower, then it's called a VPN. A proxy would not forward IP packets directly, but something at layer4 or higher.
- Nifty3929 3y agoThe major problem here is that our government is turning us all into criminals. Using a VPN doesn't make it legal for you to consume anonymously, even if doing so makes it harder to enforce, at least for now. Soon VPN use will be illegal in some states. Once again, hard to enforce. But these are things which, if for some reason the gov't decides to target you (in which case they can/will spend the effort to discover), can be used against you. This is not a technology problem, it's a legislative one. It's another example of some of us are using the power of the government to constrain other people's behavior.
- worik 3y agoYes That is the problem with vice laws Tough times
- zarathustreal 3y agoIsn’t “constrain(ing) other people’s behavior” kinda the point of law? If you’re trying to make a point you’re gonna have to be more specific. Preventing rape, theft, and murder are all instances of “behavioral constraint”, without any qualifiers you’re artificially inflating the magnitude of the situation
- dijit 3y agoThe issue is that for a large portion of the population, porn consumption is not considered immoral or even if it is immoral; not an offence worthy of calling someone a criminal over. We all know that laws are not a good indicator of morality, but society is better when we try to align laws over time with our moral code.
- ndriscoll 3y agoThe laws aren't against porn consumption or even anonymous porn consumption. They're about distributing porn to children, which most people are in alignment that we don't want to allow. These age verification laws all mandate that no identifying information be kept. The Texas law has a $10,000 penalty per instance for record retention. It's still perhaps not the best way to do it, but people are being very disingenuous in their characterization of these laws. It's not that much different from requiring people to show ID at the door of an adult store.
- braaileb 3y agoIf they did this for all social media I might pick up guitar
- kibwen 3y agoUnfortunately, the suggestive manual gesticulations required to finger your fretboard have caused guitar-playing to be banned in the state of Texas.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoNot 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 ...
- interludead 3y agoIt's important to always see the bright side
- paulpauper 3y agoVPNs: $12/month if you sign up for 200+ months for blocked IPs and slow servers and service. awesome.
- aegypti 3y agoReality: €5/month if you sign up for 1 month, blocked IPs, ~10% reduction in Mbps
- 77pt77 3y agoFor $12 a year you can get a VPS and just put OpenVPN there.
- paxys 3y agoAnd who is going to pay for the bandwidth?
- karaterobot 3y agoWhich one are you using? It's overpriced and it sounds like a bad experience. Fortunately most VPNs you'll find are cheaper and better than what you're describing!
- donatj 3y agoTailscale 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 3y agoHow well do subpoenas work across international borders, especially when the charge isn't illegal in the recieving jurisdiction? (asking for a friend, obvs)
- zamalek 3y agoThings like torrenting will get you quickly shut down by the provider. My friend found this out while considering setting up their own seedbox.
- simfree 3y agoSounds like your friend was VPNing to the wrong jurisdiction. PulsedMedia (Finland), IHostArt (Romania) and many other seedbox server providers exist and will not shut you down.
- reaperman 3y agoHighly recommend Whatbox.ca - i run a “pirate netflix” for all my family and friends off one cheap VPS. It also provides me with a more censorship-resistant VPN than most usual VPN providers. Many VPN services were blocked in GCC countries but not my private whatbox server VPN.
- neurostimulant 3y agoiirc ihostart actually host their servers in their basement, which is bad for reliability but perfectly fine for this use case. The operator also claimed to be an 18 years old, not sure if it's true but if it does I applaud their entrepreneurship spirit at such a young age.
- ranger_danger 3y ago
- zeroCalories 3y agoImagine Texas bans private VPNs next. Haha.
- btbuildem 3y agoThat's not even haha, that's like 6/10 likely.
- skissane 3y agoI 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
- nunez 3y agoGreat Firewall of Texas. I could legit see them investing insane dollars on this project. I don't think this is federally illegal either
- owenmarshall 3y ago> The Congress shall have power to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.
- skissane 3y ago> I don't think this is federally illegal either If the FCC wanted to overrule it, they could, and the Courts would likely be on the FCC's side. See https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46736 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46736 But I doubt it would ever get that far. It would be a huge burden on every large corporation operating in Texas, if interstate traffic had to go through some legally mandatory firewall or content filter. The Texas state legislature is generally pro-business, and if almost every major corporation in Texas would be lobbying them not to do something, I doubt they'll do it. And, in the very unlikely event the legislature ignored that lobbying and did it anyway, and the Governor didn't veto it – then those corporations would likely go straight to petitioning the FCC, and I think it is likely they'd succeed in convincing the FCC in overruling it.
- gigapotential 3y agohttps://UpVPN.app https://UpVPN.app for couple of minutes of VPN
- neurostimulant 3y agoThis 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 3y agoGambling should be banned. Not porn.
- 77pt77 3y agoWhy? No one forces anyone to gamble.
- karaterobot 3y agoI 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 3y agoAnyone have experience with Aura's VPN feature?
- technion 3y agoIf vpns become positioned primarily about accessing porn, well I look forward to the day people acknowledge tls exists and we stop seeing misleading advertisements with the various claims everyone on a network can see the contents of your online banking.
- andrewflnr 3y agoI'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 3y 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.
- andrewflnr 3y agoI mean, it's always been there, and the "security" claims are still out there, but the focus has shifted. In my experience.
- seanvelasco 3y agoone thing i noticed from vpn use recently: using a free vpn actually allows me to watch content otherwise inaccessible to due to geo restrictions. this was using a free vpn. for a second, i was really happy because i thought the office was finally available in my region.
- uconnectlol 3y ago[flagged]
- game_the0ry 3y agoWhen it comes to internet vs government censorship, internet wins. Every time. A lesson our baby boomer regulators will never, ever learn.
- interludead 3y agoIt's just a metter of time..
- lo_zamoyski 3y agoPornography 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 3y agoWhat 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 3y agoI am overnighting in North Carolina this evening. Can’t watch porn without providing a drivers license or passport. (But VPN works good.)
- apantel 3y agoWhack-it-a-mole.
- uconnectlol 3y ago[flagged]
- outside1234 3y agoHopefully also a boom in voting against these folks as well
- barryrandall 3y ago~80% of them will be reelected.
- stevenicr 3y agoI 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.
- interludead 3y agoI wonder why...
- kkkk 3y agosex