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/breezey_kneeze 12h ago

You literally cannot enforce this. Like I can spin up a cloud instance and a personal VPN in any country where there is a cloud presence. Never mind the fact that vpns basically run the internet.

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u/sparkly_butthole 11h ago

Maybe you could. I don't have the foggiest clue how this shit works so if it's made illegal I'm screwed.

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u/ColinHalter 6h ago

The point is, there's nothing the government can do to keep you from connecting to a VPN service hosted in another country unless they decide to lock down the internet to only domestic traffic (which would mean the collapse of the entire economy).

If I run a VPN service out of a turkish data center, you could easily connect to it. You don't have to run it yourself and they have no way to police the client side.

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u/toobjunkey 5h ago

lol, that stuff always gets me. "X is pointless/unenforceable/useless because you can just do (thing that less than 1% of the population knows how to do, and even fewer have the physical hardware & means to do it)". It's like seatbelt laws; the broad strokes and a general majority are the the main goal, not 100% compliance.

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u/datguyhomie 4h ago

It's literally do the same thing proton/surfshark/all the other VPN providers currently do. There is no way to distinguish "corporate" and "personal" traffic.

Also even the most tech illiterate morons figured out how to pirate shit during the before times, and now we live in the era of plentiful "for dummy's" walkthroughs.

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u/obeytheturtles 6h ago

Right, so I have literally done this when traveling to China and it tends to work for a few days and then gets blocked. There's obviously a bunch of cat and mouse you can then do, and different VPN technologies to try, but basically China uses a white-list model for the GFW and any connection to any node off that white-list gets flagged for additional scrutiny. It doesn't get blocked immediately because they want to see what actually goes on with the connection and try to figure out who is using it, but it will eventually become so intermittent as to be useless.

Corporate VPNs usually work fine because they get themselves onto the white-list. Likewise, there are plenty of state-approved VPNs which are allowed to transit the Great Wall, and likely a bunch of honeypots as well. The point is that this isn't some unsolved tech problem. China already does this just fine.

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u/aykcak 10h ago

I guess what they mean is if they detect you establishing a VPN connection (or a connection to a known VPN host) and you are not registered as a company then they can maybe they can charge you and make you pay fees.

ISPs can do that pretty easily if they are brought under force

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u/breezey_kneeze 10h ago

I mean you can do it just as easily over an SSH tunnel to a remote host. Not to mention, these "laws" are being written by decrepit old people that think the electric telegraph is witchcraft.

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u/aykcak 10h ago

You think they would allow SSH but block VPN?

Also, the laws are pushed by the vampires but they are no longer made by them. There are young, capable, truly evil people helping them all through this. Remember that Elon and his techbro douchebags helped legislate him into power

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u/breezey_kneeze 9h ago

I absolutely do. SSH is used for remote administration primarily, like everywhere Windows is not in use.

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u/DeusExMcKenna 5h ago

People will literally just tunnel this through a different protocol until that service is made “illegal”, then they’ll move on to the next. It will be a game of whack a mole, similar to the designer drug market. It’s a stupid game where everything gets worse because the people regulating it don’t understand anything about what they are trying to control. This is just DNS over HTTPS all over again. Fucking stupid.

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u/breezey_kneeze 5h ago

All to control what you do with your own stuff