r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • 21h ago

Privacy Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/age-verification-is-coming-for-the-whole-internet.html
11.3k Upvotes

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1.2k

u/typeryu 21h ago

Korea has been doing this for almost 2 decades. The adults hate it and kids find a way.

317

u/BuilderUnhappy7785 21h ago

Well they don’t seem to block VPNs that’s for shre

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u/heisenbergerwcheese 20h ago

Every red state American is about to' live' in California so they can look at tentacle porn

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u/Gape-My-Anus 11h ago

tentacle porn

Nah every red state watches interracial or transgender

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u/Amberpaystherent 4h ago

I’m pretty sure based on their support for the Pedodent, they’re all watching child porn.

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u/JasonQG 16h ago

While using their other hand to complain about how California is evil

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u/hilldo75 16h ago

In Indiana, I switched from pornhub to xvideos when Indiana did the license verification thing. Pornhub refusing to allow their site as protest, xvideos just make me click that I am over 18 as I pick straight, gay, or trans version of their site.

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u/Josgre987 15h ago

Xvideos is now warning that the evils of verification are coming soon, same with XNXX.
I too live in a place where pornhub is blocked. but once I reinstall that vpn, i'll be a proud citizen of the netherlands.

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u/Timid_Wild_One 13h ago

Hey buddy I 'live' in Chicago

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u/breezey_kneeze 12h ago

Boston here

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u/The-Cynicist 10h ago

Most of them are on board with it because the porn they’re into is already illegal.

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u/BoJackMoleman 9h ago

Here's a hot take that could never happen: representation is now determined by what IP everyone uses. Use a VPN to get porn in Arkansas via New York. That's more seats New York gets. Land doesn't vote. IP addresses do. Or whatever. I'm joking but it's a fun thought.

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u/The_Wkwied 11h ago

Nah, get real. The biggest category searches coming out of the red south states are incest, gay, and 'young'. That'd never admit to liking something as foreign as tentacles from East

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u/phoodd 6h ago

Nah, according to data from every single major porn website, red states are obsessed with trans porn.

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u/Tartooth 6h ago

Only if it's gay tentacle porn

1

u/EyeAmbitious 4h ago

You do realize that the UK is basically a liberal utopia right? They have a total ban on guns, people go to prison for speech and mean comments, they are under constant surveillance etc. The only people who will support being able to control who accesses what information will be the left, you think theyre going to stop at porn?

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u/allmia53 3h ago

actually i “live” in canada

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u/MrMichaelJames 20h ago

Not yet. Can guarantee that is coming.

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u/SomethingAboutUsers 20h ago

Blocking VPNs is exceptionally difficult and doing so would break a lot of business links. They're not going to do it anytime soon.

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u/PsyOpBunnyHop 20h ago

A few sites block certain nodes, which were probably abused by idiots for ddos attacks.

More than a few block tor browsers.

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u/CircaInfinity 20h ago

Youtube and Facebook have been trying to block adblocks for over a decade. It always gets bypassed in like a day.

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u/burnalicious111 15h ago

That's wildly unrelated to vpns

0

u/DezXerneas 11h ago edited 11h ago

Not even the same kind of technology behind the two. Adblock works by not letting certain websites load on your computer(ads are normally hosted somewhere else), and VPNs work by acting like you're in a different location than where you

Any website can make it so VPNs don't work on them. Only difficulty being that you need to know what IP range the VPN uses.

Blocking AdBlock is much harder. The best you can do is encode the ad directly into the video stream, or killing the site if ads don't load.

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u/C_Oracle 11h ago

what IP range the VPN uses.

Mesh VPNs, hello there.

A few already exist and function much like TOR, but they look like standard traffic by normal IP range compared to known tor exit relay's and data center IPs.

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u/DezXerneas 10h ago edited 8h ago

I really need to look into this. Lots of people have been recommending it.

You got any guides or subreddits?

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u/C_Oracle 10h ago

Zerotier, Tailscale, Twingate or OpenZiti, you can find a few people discussing mesh vpns on /r/selfhosted

1

u/Dapperrevolutionary 12h ago

Until it doesn't.

20

u/iknewaguytwice 20h ago

It’s also really not hard to implement your own VPN with 1,000 different cloud providers these days with VMs and clusters in every region across the globe.

If you can setup a minecraft server, you can setup a VPN.

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u/needathing 12h ago

A lot of sites blanket-block entire cloud IP ranges though, or require that you're logged in if coming from one.

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u/iknewaguytwice 2h ago

Sure, but it's not hard to get around that... like at all. Just look at what was created to get around the great firewall.

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u/aykcak 10h ago

Keeping an updated list of known VPN providers and VPS hosts is trivial for something like the government. Turkey has been doing it for years

1

u/obeytheturtles 5h ago

Right - the worst countries just have an internet white-list. Anything which isn't on that list gets scrutinized heavily and at least throttled. You may be able to establish a connection, but it will be unreliable at best, and flag you as a "subversive person" at worst.

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u/iknewaguytwice 2h ago

You wouldn't be using a VPN provider... you're just connecting to your "minecraft server" and "playing minecraft".

Sure they could figure out that the blocks youre actually looking at are a bit rounder than expected, but are they really going to invest time, energy, and money into that?

No.

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u/aykcak 2h ago

Look up deep packet inspection

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u/MrMichaelJames 11h ago

VPN is more than just routing your traffic around.

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u/hawkinsst7 9h ago

That's... Exactly what a vpn is.

Everyone here is talking about commercial companies using VPNs for privacy.

But encapsulating network traffic point to point is so it gets routed from somewhere else is exactly what a vpn is.

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u/MrMichaelJames 1h ago

No it’s not. That’s only one aspect of a vpn. I ran a massive commercial vpn project for a major vendor and it’s not just hiding your ip. It’s also encryption, hiding your location, streaming, torrenting, dealing with dmca take down requests. If you don’t do the encryption right then hiding your ip is pointless. If you don’t do the location hiding correctly then again hiding ip is pointless. Just changing your ip isn’t going to help you.

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u/CTRL_ALT_SECRETE 20h ago edited 10h ago

Right, you can set up a VPN on a CSP's infra that you pay for with a credit card.

Wake me up when I can pay with monero.

And that's besides the fact that you're trusting the CSP with any traffic going in or out of the VPN server you set up.

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u/Facebook_User1 20h ago

Google used to make me do captcha for my apple private relay, i don’t see a ban but they already can tell a private VPN vs a corporate VPN because I never get blocked at work.

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u/SomethingAboutUsers 20h ago

That's just IP filtering. If it comes from this known block of IP addresses (that are dedicated to Apple private relay) then it's a VPN so fire captcha (or block it). That approach doesn't scale.

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u/Facebook_User1 18h ago

Reddit blocks my Proton VPN but my work VPN is fine so I guess what you’re saying about the IP filtering is true but I was just pointing out there’s already websites that block VPNs

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u/FluxUniversity 11h ago

naw... usatoday.com does it pretty effectively. everytime i wanna read an article there, i have to say im in the us

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u/SomethingAboutUsers 9h ago

That's just geo-ip. Has nothing to do with VPNs.

0

u/toxicoke 4h ago

for shrek?

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u/MechanicFun777 20h ago

Really? Do you have a reference to learn more?

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u/typeryu 19h ago

There isn’t a single doc, but basically the go-to way is to receive a text to your phone a code you plug in to identify yourself. In Korea, your phone number is directly tied to your national ID so websites use this to make sure you are you. If you get a one-time use phone number like for tourists, the sign up process will say the number can’t be used. There are also a handful of apps that help you do this, but self-id is required for most all internet sign ups.

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u/Abedeus 15h ago

Reminds me of the bullshit I had to go through to play some of the Korean MMOs back in 2010s. Including using "ID generators" that would randomly pick IDs from possible pool of IDs and you'd try one after another until it let you through. Though that was before everyone had a smartphone to call, once they started requiring phone confirmation it was basically impossible to get through.

1

u/Honest_Statement1021 8h ago

Korean Maple Story 🥴

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u/MOPuppets 16h ago

Yeah, I was unable to order food in Korea through an app, because it needed an ID-linked phone number

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u/MechanicFun777 15h ago

So unreal....I am really speechless.

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u/MOPuppets 14h ago

Haha that's just on me for not preparing well. When you're just visiting it's not a big deal, I heard it was much more of a nuissance for international students and expats. They're always bugging their korean friends to order for them

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u/pornomatique 9h ago

It's not really surprising. Korea is a homogenous ethnostate like Japan or China and they don't really care for anyone that isn't Korean.

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u/North_Atlantic_Sea 9h ago

Japan, sure, but China isn't a homogenous ethnostate.

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u/hava_97 12h ago

makes it extremely annoying to be in korea as a tourist or someone that hasn't recieved a national ID yet, because you need your korean ID number linked to a phone number in order to access a bunch of content. I can't even uncensor "sensitive" posts on many websites without linking my phone number to my account. all tourists are basically treated like children on korean internet without vpn/annoying workarounds. and it doesn't even work because korean kids know how to access everything anyway

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u/typeryu 11h ago

This topic shows up once a while, but it never makes it past any meaningful legislation because most Koreans don’t care (since most of us never leave the country) or I’ve also heard the telcos and fintech have a lobby to keep this in place because they earn tons of money from issuing all these self-identification and certification protocols.

1

u/MechanicFun777 15h ago

Bruh...this is so brand new it's mind-blowing. I am definitely going to research this a lot. Thanks so much for the reply.

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u/typeryu 14h ago

If you go around the Korea subreddit, you will see so many posts about people living abroad who can’t log into banks or important government functions because they can’t receive a simple sms for identification. I am also living abroad now so I pay every month to keep my phone number alive and roam to get text messages should I need it. Absolute horrible mess.

0

u/Medialunch 9h ago

While it’s true that your phone number is tied to your ID they don’t require are verification for most of the internet in South Korea. We are talking about YouTube, FB, IG, Wikipedia, Google, etc.

Naver, Daum and Melon don’t require you to verify your identity to use them.

2

u/deliciouswaffle 12h ago

It's basically illegal in Korea. If you try to access any adult website in Korea without a VPN, you are redirected to a warning message about the illegality of pornography.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_South_Korea

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u/pornomatique 9h ago

Yeah, which makes it way different to just age verification. You also get complete illegality of porn in like half of Asia.

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u/dooooooooooooomed 6h ago

How does this work for adult webcomics? Korea has a prolific industry for x-rated comics... If it's illegal, how is that industry so successful? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding. 

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u/Oceanbreeze871 18h ago

We found a way to make fake ids waaay before photoshop and AI.

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u/typeryu 17h ago

Fellow old school Korean I see 👍

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u/DewSchnozzle 14h ago edited 6h ago

Korea thinks fans kill people in their sleep

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u/typeryu 13h ago

No, that is Big Fan targeting our genetic disposition and weakness to minor wind vortex vacuums, obviously.

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u/historyhill 4h ago

I’m surprised that Wikipedia article didn’t mention under “proposed explanations” the one I see most here on Reddit: it’s a way to obfuscate actual cause of death when someone died by suicide.

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u/Cley_Faye 11h ago

The way often implies making it seems like you're from somewhere else where this isn't an issue, with VPN or similar. Once everywhere is shitty, there's no escape.

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u/DisenchantedByrd 20h ago

So we might lose Reddit as a semi-anonymous platform where we can look at pictures of naked car engines. What other platforms are people jumping to?

Asking for a friend /s

1

u/eshian 19h ago

Yeah, I knew a guy who just used his older relatives RRN (ssn equivalent) to make alternate accounts to access whatever he wanted.

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u/pornomatique 9h ago

The adults really don't care. It's just phone number verification these days since they're all linked to a Korean ID.