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Requires the vpn provider to snitch and possible tag the ip frames or http frames lol

Folks would just host their own vpns various places and this would be pointless ….

The classic: ping the endpoint address, then “ping” the code. If the IP address comes back in 30ms but the JavaScript responds in 330ms, then the client is probably 300ms further away than they say they are claiming.

Kinda.

I use VPN most of the time. My work requires it, and I like Mozilla VPN for personal privacy. (Note: it has ad blocking DNS built in which is nice!)

I occasionally get blocked by websites or services, especially streaming apps, if I'm on VPN. I suspect they're just looking out for Amazon/Microsoft/etc IP address blocks. It's very annoying

Depends on how you define "reliably". You can get pretty damn close by triangulating on traffic patterns and browser fingerprinting. There is a lot of research in this area. But it'll never be perfect.

It's hard to find a proxy or VPN that isn't flagged as such. People pay extra for residential proxies.

All it would take is for a major ISP in Utah to route everyone through a VPN, and boom, it's the same picture.

You do not need to know "reliably". You can block everything remotely suspicious, and in case someone is blocked by mistake, they can file an application with all necessary documentation proving the connection is not a VPN.

Not when the definition of VPN is subjective. I could proxy/VPN through a friend's house and nobody would ever know it wasn't them.

The internet will always route around censorship in principled western nations.

It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their laws. We make technology that completely nullifies their laws. They need to increase their tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end state is either a totalitarian government or an uncontrollable population.

I used to think that we'd find some kind of equilibrium along the way, that we'd eventually discover the government's limits: some principle they refuse to break, some line they refuse to cross...

But the truth is these tyrants have no limits whatsoever. They'll stop at nothing in their quest to control the flow of information.

The thing China can do, and does do: Kill your network connections, whether that's a TCP session, your ability to send or receive packets with some particular IP addresses, or at the extreme armed men show up and now it's not an Internet problem.

Things China can't do: Magically "downgrade", "decrypt" or "intercept" the secure protocols we use every day like HTTPS. Facts won't budge, the technology we are using does what it says on the tin.

The Internet can't route around you being thrown off a tall building by men with guns, but the IETF has for some years considered it to be extremely important to design the network protocols to prevent these shenanigans. BCP # 188 "Pervasive Monitoring is An Attack"

Is China that successful at it lately? I see a lot of posters and info from China getting around the great firewall, and my understanding was that they don't really care if 1% of users do that so long as it mostly holds and only the technical minded or really fixated will see it.

So there is a route around censorship, but maybe the public doesn't really care about it.

I’m pretty sure with Iran, and I assume other authoritarian nations, the state controls what traffic can and cannot leave their borders. When they go dark, they just effectively cut off access to the outside world entirely. Sure they may have their own state run servers that provide some services, but then they can inspect and manage all traffic being routed inside the country. Don’t have to try and find the VPN if there’s just no traffic.

I suppose Utah could impose some sort of strategy here, but would be so burdensome and anti-American I’m not sure they could pull it off. Instead of a blacklist of sites dictated by the site provider, you go the other way where all Utah ISPs maintain a whitelist of IPs permitted to Utah citizens. Any traffic attempting to reach a non-white listed IP, would be rejected.

It's never been true.

The layer 2 and 3 of ISO/OSI stack does indeed "route around censorship". But the Internet as we know it is all Layer 7, and it's as centralized as it gets.

That's why regulators often aim straight at Layer 7 entities - companies providing consumer services over the web. Because no matter how unblockable the route between you and some server is, it doesn't mean anything when the server itself is refusing to talk to you.

It's true unless we let freedom of speech and the press be interpreted narrowly, as the right to flap our jaws and to press paper against ink. That is up to us collectively.

It seems like Utah could do mostly do this by intercepting all consumer traffic.

There will always be >0 people who find a way around censorship, that's about it.

I hate censorship. I also don't like how these people keep saying it's both bad and ineffective. That's a contradiction. Of course it's effective, that's why we're worried about it.

> Over the last two years, Iran officials warned that wider use of the satellite internet service could make communication controls within the country "ineffective", adding the regime has failed to produce an adequate policy response.

> “I sometimes joke that we might as well turn the Ministry of Communications and the Supreme Council of Cyberspace into amusement parks, because they will no longer serve any purpose,” Hakami said.

https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/iran-official-says-starlink-...

It's certainly less true than it was. It depends on how Matt Prince feels on any particular day.

To a large degree, most of the internet today is ultimately controlled by a few people. If what you have to say pisses off these people, and someone is determined to keep you off the internet, you have a problem. Kiwi Farms is a well known example, and continues to suffer under regular DDOS attacks. Regardless of how you feel about KF, it's undeniable that a) this nonsense has streissanded the site enormously and b) it's speech you don't like that needs protection.

Also there was the whole covid "misinformation" garbage fire... I certainly do not want my government or some megacorp to decide what can and can't say or read.

And going beyond the internet, I just want to remind you Americans, that your 1st amendment is almost unique (to my knowledge). Enjoy and protect your offensive, hateful, blasphemous, extremist, and deeply unpopular speech.

There are a category of things that are technically impossible until a burly man threatens to break your arm if you don't do them, and a category of things that are still impossible.

Doesn't help your arm, but when they're asking for things in that second category, it doesn't help them either.

Huh? Is this comment referring to something specific or is it just a general swipe at a religion that's unliked around here?

Because we don’t like people doing it. Duh.

It is, but the first amendment isn't absolute.

DraftKings does it in a way that is good enough to comply with California law, which doesn't require perfection.

This Utah law requires perfection.

I'm not in California and DraftKings blocks me connecting with a VPN, so they just don't seem to be distinguishing whether a VPN user is in California (which is the impossible part of this law).

they want to stop VPN traffic. If it's a plain IP address it's easy. VPN makes it hard.

Being able to tie an IP to a rough physical location was, in retrospect, a huge Internet design mistake. IPs should be like random UUIDs. They should have been designed to get assigned randomly when you obtain one, rotated / thrown away periodically, with no hierarchical numeric relationship with the ISP that is assigning them.

They seem to know what they're doing here. A website can comply as long as they perfectly geofence (impossible) or do "reasonable" age verification. "Reasonable" only for the latter. So they basically want these sites in any US state to do age verification.

Wow, that is a wild read, thank you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill

The law is only meant to apply to citizens of Utah though. Blocking all exit relays would mean that absolutely anyone accessing that website would not be able to do so from a VPN which burdens people outside of Utah too.

The law requires blocking all VPN access.

It's impossible to have perfect knowledge of the entire set of VPN exit node addresses.

  The law likely violates the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on passing laws that significantly burden businesses and people outside Utah’s borders.
  SB 73 burdens the rights of all internet users outside of Utah because it requires adult websites to either know every visiting user’s physical location, and then block those in Utah, or to verify every visitor’s age just in case they might be in Utah.

I would think that requiring adult websites to essentially block all VPN traffic to be pretty heavy handed and hardly a solution. Especially considering there are many reasons to use a VPN.

It's impossible to have a full and complete list of VPN exit nodes, for the simple reason that no company publishes the full list, and also technically if you set up an OpenVPN server on digital ocean and connect to that you're also using a VPN but no one would know your address is hosting a VPN server.