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.
I realize all my traffic gets siphoned there regardless more than likely anyways.
I understand your philosophy but it doesn't match my reality.
I see no reason to directly connect to any Russian Internet infrastructure though.
You live in a country that is awful to itself and everyone around it, but that’s not something we can fix.
Big tech wants regulatory capture.
Their website also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is under "surveillance" because it got a few thousand requests from Google Cloud et al, most of them to a single page. This shows how low their standards are.
When it was released I read a few of the reports in this repo and they didn't even support the claims made. Claude was admitting it couldn't find the evidence.
It's terrifying how easily this misinfo operation established itself as fact on websites where users view themselves as being more informed than average on these topics, like Hacker News.
My personal view that social media should be age gated is caused by Meta. But broadly, polling shows a commanding majority (60+ percent) of Americans believe in restrictions for under 14s.
There is strong demand for regulation and low awareness of the surveillance consequences. We don’t have anyone advocating for a privacy-preserving solution, not effectively at least. Given the demand for something to be done, each jurisdiction is basically taking from the first available option.
These are policy polls. The sentiment has moved beyond vague notions that kids should be entrusted to Meta less.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/31/81-of-us-...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/poll-most-mass-voters-su...
Ironically I had to go into Google's AI mode and ask it three times not to use any TBOTE Project sources before it would give me the actual original source on this. But the article has a bunch of quotes from big tech lobbyists in support of California's age surveillance bills. Whether or not it was originally their idea is still up in the air, but given that the California, Colorado, and New York bills were largely identical, it's not crazy to say "maybe these were all Big Tech's idea".
I also have this Bloomberg article from 2025 (a year ago) claiming Meta funds the Digital Childhood Alliance[1], which has been pushing for "App Store Accountability Acts" that would mandate app stores do all the age verification (conveniently for Facebook).
Or maybe it was ALEC. :P
[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
The ones that stand to benefit the most are the governments themselves and their surveillance network.
Multiply that times tens of thousands of new sites not being created, tens of thousands of existing sites no longer existing or being accessible due to new laws, this occurring over multiple surfaces (content moderation, age verification, etc) and the positive impact for meta is meaningful.
If there are less sites, meta wins.
Even if they really did support a particular regulation, it could be to prevent a version of the same regulation that actually has teeth.
Or it could mean they hope to be consulted on the details of any regulation, which is more likely to happen if they sound constructive.
Corporations constantly navigate the political and regulatory landscape. You can't just take "supportive" statements like these at face value.
And finally there's the general fallacy of thinking that if B happens and A wanted it to happen then A must have caused B.
It's long been the dream of more than a few American companies to be the gatekeepers of the web.
Facebook and approved sites wouldn’t count towards your mobile bandwidth quota, but the rest of the internet does and requires a data plan.
Which raised net neutrality concerns.
It just sucks that that's all in sacrifice of our privacy.
Anything that makes it harder for a user to escape their dragnet is a win.
It’s just that
“Move fast, break things, regulate impossible to repair.”
There is a massive revenue stream that says this is completely off base.
The data they have is already extremely valuable.
We're being astroturf-ed guy.
The comment you're responding to. The comments responding to you. All shaped by influence campaigns from the beginning.
Meta, X, google, data based big tech, the billionaires, and the government were in on the plan from the start. We were always the ones kept in the dark as to the ultimate intent. Even the anti-censorship and anti-surveillance posts and content that we saw, were being paid for by the same puppet masters. Professional influence campaigns controlled by these same groups shaped the internet discussion of both sides.
And it seems a lot of us still haven't figured that out yet.
We got played. We'll continue to be played if we don't recognize that fact and act to prevent it in the future.
Because I can assure you, censorship and surveillance is not the endgame. And their endgame is very likely not to our benefit.
The antisemitic ones?
The Protocols should be read as the message from those who are absolutelty corrupt with absolute power and want to remain in that power forever, regardless of the mask they wear. And they always wear and drop multiple masks, to render all attempts to identify them futile.
It is their actions that identify their presence and persistence better than any labels, and those actions doubled down since 9/11 and quadrupled since 2020.
Orwell used the term "Big Brother", and that should suffice.
See, there are no extra-terrestrials, only very sophisticated and evil terrestrial humans of blood and flesh, the new world order has been discussed here on HN daily without almost anyone acknowledging it for what it is, and your DBA tactics are laughable.
Time to adjust your priors y'all. This is a concentrated effort toward surveillance, controlling who we talk to, and what information we're fed.
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.
It's absolutely not weird. HN is the propaganda outlet for the geeks.
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%.
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.
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.
We try and segment it into governments and corporations. But really there is no real differences between the two. They are all governing policies for groups of people arranged in a sort of heirical pattern. The big top level group, the one that managed to gain control of physical territory is the nation-state or perhaps more accurately the Government(capital G) of which. allocating control to various lesser groups. Including physical sub territories and for profit enterprises (The incorporation).
The point being, even in the most rampant capitalist[1](an economic policy favoring freedom of operation in it's sub groups) nation the for profit enterprises are licensed and regulated and if needed(see world war 2) controlled by the state.
1. As opposed to communism, an economic policy favoring fairness of operation in it's sub groups. Or fascism, an economic policy where no one knows what it is but every one agrees is bad. fascism really is hard to pin down, used as the default bogey man by everybody, but original Italian theory suggests it favors having the most successful sub groups run the state, which would be in the capitalist corner. however the largest wielders of the theory(1930's Germany) used it as a social fairness issue, which is in the communism domain.
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.
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?
I'm sorry to tell this, but everyone will soon realize that the far-fetched conspiracy theories are in fact severly underestimated conspiracy practices.
If they still have any remaining gut to face the reality, that is.
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.
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
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.
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.
Some might find that a bit odd.
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.
I'm not sure what the point of this comment is because it basically translates to "getting around gambling restrictions used to be difficult but it no longer is", which is my point. What does it matter how things used to be if crypto in particular makes financial flows trivial so it's not that way anymore?
> This requires trusting the government in the first place. Easy in some places; not so much in others.
Well, here are you options:
1. No ID verification. A lot of people might consider that ideal but I think it's DOA;
2. A private company, which includes the likes of the Peter Thiel-backed company, verifying IDs; or
3. The government, which, again, is the entity that issues the IDs so, by definition, you're not giving them anything they don't already know.
The government is a strictly better option than a private company because, apparently I need to repeat this, they already have the information because they issued the IDs.
Technical details are irrelevant.
You should not be able to criticise current or previous government!
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...
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.
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.
China spends roughly $6.6B censoring their internet every year [1]. Much of that probably goes to "guiding" public opinion as opposed to simply removing undesirable content, but factoring in purchasing power parity of labor and parts, let's assume the US would spend roughly the same amount just to enforce a VPN ban mostly effectively. That doesn't sound like a position that will win elections.
[1]: https://jamestown.org/buying-silence-the-price-of-internet-c...
At work we set up a compliance-related service recently and used the AWS WAF rules to block known datacenter ranges with the goal of blocking bots and VPNs.
We had to disable that rule almost immediately because a large majority of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solutions are hosted in or at least egress from big cloud providers.
It wasn't possible to block AWS/GCP IP ranges without also blocking legit usage from real customers.
At some point the number of people who are going to be able to succeed is so small they might know who you are just by virtue of you continuing to compete.
It'd be a stupid future, but it's a stupid present so I'm not going to rule it out on those grounds.
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
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/russias-m...
Are BBS's still a thing?
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.
> Fighting Federal Overreach
"The US govt can't overreach! That's my job!"
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.
Edit: actually, not even then. In my home VPN scenario, the IP is a legitimate residential connection.
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.
This country is led by idiots that do not enjoy or like freedom.
This country is populated by idiots that do not enjoy or like freedom. These people didn’t just seize power in a coup.
The people who lead our country love their own freedoms, as long as it allows them to infringe on everyone else's freedoms.
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.
Utah's New Law Targeting VPNs Goes into Effect Next Week
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.
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
> (a) any material that the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest;
> (b) material that exploits, is devoted to, or principally consists of descriptions of actual, simulated, or animated display or depiction of any of the following, in a manner patently offensive with respect to minors:
> (i) pubic hair, anus, vulva, genitals, or nipple of the female breast;
> (ii) touching, caressing, or fondling of nipples, breasts, buttocks, anuses, or genitals; or
> (iii) sexual intercourse, mastu rbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation, flagellation, excretory functions, exhibitions, or any other sexual act; and
> (c) the material taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
Sounds reasonable enough, wouldn't you say?
I hope you would agree that children shouldn't be browsing these websites.
You're willfully ignoring the "culture war" aspects of "a" and "c".
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.
If you’ve had a successful career already, you may be able to “drop out” and find a place to live cheaply. I’ve heard good things about Panama.
If you can legally opt out, there’s no good reason to keep pouring tax dollars into a corrupt, possibly unfixable system.
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.
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