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.
Big tech wants regulatory capture.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Baffled? The whole country's democracy is diving off this cliff, seems to me.
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?
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.
Some might find that a bit odd.
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.
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.
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.)
I would expect they mostly listen to special interests advocating for those laws. They don’t come from nowhere
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.
Follow the money. Ten to one, it all leads back to Zuckerberg.
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.
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.
Technical details are irrelevant.
You should not be able to criticise current or previous government!
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
or the firefox vpn?
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.
One would think this would be obvious to more HN readers, being the supposed technical “systems thinkers” they purport to be.
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.
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.
> Fighting Federal Overreach
"The US govt can't overreach! That's my job!"
Yet articles about UK age verification stuff got HUGE amount of attention and backlash here...
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.
This country is led by idiots that do not enjoy or like freedom.
The people who lead our country love their own freedoms, as long as it allows them to infringe on everyone else's freedoms.
This country is populated by idiots that do not enjoy or like freedom. These people didn’t just seize power in a coup.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
[0]Fictional; this is not a confession; I know my rights
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.
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.
Are BBS's still a thing?
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...
[1]: https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/russias-m...
Utah's New Law Targeting VPNs Goes into Effect Next Week
