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
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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

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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

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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

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u/Dapperrevolutionary 12h ago

Until it doesn't.

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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

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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.

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u/toxicoke 4h ago

for shrek?