From the article: “Unsurprisingly, this skyrocketed searches for the best VPNs. According to a SlashGear report sent to Mashable, searches for “Texas VPN” jumped by 1,750 percent in the past day. It also spotted a 1,600 percent increase for the phrase “How to access Pornhub.””
What if it was just lobbying from the VPN industry this whole time?
Probably the politicians bought VPN stock just before this was ruled. Just like so many “randomly” happened to buy video conference stock just before the COVID lockdown?
I mean if you saw what was going on in Italy and had any clue about it, you’d have been smart and purchased it. There was a lockdown in Italy for like he saw it month before there was even talk of COVID coming to the states
VPN use likely spiked in South Korea recently as well, since being blocked by Twitch.
Lots of shady free VPNs out there from Chinese/Russian companies. Now instead of just letting people watch porn, they’ll send their data to a shady/foreign entity. The apps will ask all the permissions, and people who don’t know shit, will grant them.
Same thing will happen when they ban Tiktok.
Well done, You played yourself.
Definitely no shady VPNs run by white westerners though. Theyve all got impeccable morals through ans through. Glad you cleared that up.
Let me make it clear folks, nobody has better morals than white people, believe me. They’re tremendous, the best. They follow the rules, they respect authority, they’re just fantastic. I mean, look at me, I’m the best example of great morals, and I’m white, folks. White people, they’re winners, they know how to do things right, they’re tremendous patriots. So let’s make America great again with the incredible morals of white people leading the way.
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This is pure evil! You’re, like, evil incarnate!
Reread the comment considering it’s taking the view point of a Republican in Texas who voted this law, it will make more sense.
The outlook on everything on Lemmy is driving me away from the platform. I’m not saying other platforms are any better. I might just stop using it.
The same people who complain about government propaganda are the same people who type “Russia bad! China bad!” like it’s not decades of propaganda to make westerners hate these countries.
So the Ukraine invasion and the Uyghur genocide are both just propaganda?
When I see the same energy directed towards what shady activities UK/Israel/USA are doing in the Congo (child labor and genocide) or what USA/Israel is doing in Palestine (genocide) or whatever France is meddling with in Africa then I’ll see Lemmy as unbiased but it is a very biased social media website. When I see the same energy directed at the USA for killing millions of Iraqis by spreading lies and never finding weapons of masa destruction in Iraq then I’ll believe the narrative.
And please don’t mention the Uyghur and pretend to care about the muslims only when China does it but when Israel does it, it’s up for debate.
USA good. France good. UK good. China bad. Russia bad. Middle East bad.
Hilarious. Wake up people.
Uhh… most people I’ve seen on Lemmy are condemning the genocide in Palestine. Same for the war in Iraq. Where are you getting all those “USA Good” comments? I constantly see people complaining about it.
Just use proton VPN, the free tier should be enough.
His argument is that the average person won’t know any better and will just take the first sponsored result for “free VPN” of Google
I dont think so, Texas finally solved the problem with porn, now nobody can watch it and everyones life (and children) are finally safe.
/s
Shady American services are OK though.
I’m sure the people who legislated all this into place were the first ones to access a VPN to get onto PornHub
I suspect they invested in companies that sell VPNs.
Kape technologies comes to mind, which owns Private Internet Access, CyberGhost, and ExpressVPN, and is in turn owned by an Israeli billionaire
Is there a wesbite that hosts all these connections? I’m sure if we could see the web of relations there’d be a little but of reasoning on top of this dung pile.
Using a VPN that is beholden to shareholder’s mood swings let alone a publicly tradable company is dangerous
At some point, Republicans will surely cross the line where their policies are so unpopular that people stop voting for them, right?
They are heavily entrenched in Texas. They will have to badly piss off most people enough that they all go vote in the same cycle.
Our state government has actually been getting much more radical over the past few years, because the only people who vote are conservative radicals, because everyone else is either apathetic or aware that their vote won’t matter unless millions of people suddenly wake up tomorrow and vote.
Millions of people not voting because it would take millions of people voting to elicit positive change and nobody is doing that is one of the most frustrating things.
I refuse to be part of that group. I’m a democrat living in KS and I vote in every single election I can. My candidate may not win, but damnit they will count my vote and know that I dissent.
I look at it as earning my right to bitch about our elected officials
My candidate may not win, but damnit they will count my vote and know that I dissent.
Which is the same exact reason I vote third party despite them mostly not winning.
edit: keep downvoting me. I’m sure that will help convince me to vote for your team, just like the last 50 times it happened.
Isn’t Texas getting more and more purple? I think Biden only Lots by 5 percentage points. Lots of tech people, California emigrants, and “east coast” educated types moved to the cities there (like Austin).
Granted Texas is huge so the cities play less of a role in the overall state picture.
It might not be a swing state yet, by I don’t know that it’s as entrenched red as it used to be.
I honestly think that a lot of the bullshit about abortion is an attempt to force those blue voters out of their state because they are scared they are losing their grip.
Yes, but actually no. In the federal election, it is trending that way.
Our state government has gotten both more corrupt and HARD right, mostly because the only people who care enough to vote in those elections are the crazies.
Not as long as the other guy is some dirty liberal who believes in socialist conspiracies like the holocaust having actually happened…
(Yes this is sarcasm, not actually saying the holocaust didn’t happen)
I’ve never really understood why they claim it didn’t happen, it’s not like they were the ones doing it so I don’t understand why they feel the need to protect themselves by claiming its non-existence.
Meanwhile the actual people who did do it fully acknowledge that it happened, was bad, and have taken steps to ensure it never can be allowed to happen again.
It’s a recruitment tactic mostly, they all know that it happened, but they hope they can reach those who pride themselves on being open minded by saying “What if it didn’t?” or “Hey, they seem to get REALLY made at people who are just harmlessly asking questions?”
So that they can be “Heard out”, and hope to indoctrinate you.
This tactic sadly works, and it’s why you can’t just “Debate them and challenge their idiocy in the free market of ideas.”
They simply won’t play the game fairly and in good faith. An honest debate is between two parties hoping to better make their positions understood, but if you’re not honest about what you believe in or why, the whole process has the rug pulled out from under it.
Unfortunately that isn’t how identity politics works.
Not as long as there are minorities to blame for everything.
Something something… Leopards … Face eating …
I doubt it.
the old guys with piles of old greasy porn mags grinning with their remaining teeth.
They are trying their damndest with this and going after IVF, but so far it hasn’t moved the needle too much.
I should register bringbacktheporn.tx.
To be fair current age verification is useless. We all know clicking a button does not verify anything.
Also we know that submitting personal data to a website to verify your age is terrible. Big no no.
I’m curious of what will happen in my country. Here in Spain government said that they will implement a new age verification system using Anonymous digital certificates. The government will issue those and you have to give your ID but the certificate itself it’s anonymous and the website won’t be able to know who is the person behind the certificate. While there’s no implementation yet, I hope they use the kind of anonymous certificates that, once expedited, the government also does not know who is using the certificate when serving as a certificate authority to validate its authenticity.
Let’s see how it goes. I’m afraid even while being privacy friendly with this system Pornhub will block access here to as a threat to other places. At the end is a private company and blocking minors from accessing their content cost them big money, and, of course, money is the only thing that matters to them.
To be fair, who gives a shit about age verification?
I do not care what your child does on the Internet.
Right. Why do I have to submit a retinal scan and 3 forms of ID to watch porn because parents can’t be bothered to learn basic computer skills and monitor their own children?
The right way to implement this is where they don’t even have any persistent identifier that could be used for tracking. They should only ever see a derived single-use signature that after verification gives them a yes/no answer and nothing more.
It IS possible from a technical standpoint to be able to do anonymous age verification. I can think of several methods that would work but the issue is I’d have to trust a company or the government with this information and trust them to not do something stupid with it like using it for nefarious purposes, selling it, or just not protecting it well enough. And with all the data brokerages and security breaches in the news there is no way I’d ever do that. Just not gonna happen. This data is just too valuable to trust any single company with it.
To me this is absolutely a 1st and 4th amendment issue. We are quickly devolving in an American religious state ruled by morality police.
In the Netherlands we have this app that could be used for it https://www.yivi.app/en it’s open-source, developed by an ngo in collaboration with a Dutch university. It’s not very widely used yet, but the idea behind it is really good.
Outside the issue of yet another competing standard to do the same thing, there’s an inherent issue with verification in these kinds of apps. That is, how the identity is actually verified for the account. Is it the government itself, a for-profit company partnered in some way with governments, something else? The issue begs the question, is this something we should have in the first place?
I don’t think so. And it seems to me that those who do likely don’t realize how much of a slippery slope it is to complete privacy erosion. Others are simply trying to live their life and this is very far down on their list of worries. Yet here we are, where services are built around the assumption that every user has a phone (and phone number).
Some relevant media to the topic: xkcd 927 Electric Dreams S1E9
The certificate may be anonymous to website hosts, but it won’t be to the Spanish government. Otherwise you copy Grandpa’s cert and pass it around school.
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There’s a certain argument that it might be preferable from a privacy standpoint if people used VPNs in general, though it sure isn’t ideal from a performance standpoint.
It also costs money. For many people, every monthly fee makes a difference.
I am not associated with Mullvad VPN in any capacity and I have nothing to disclose, lol.
Mullvad VPN doesn’t even offer a renewing subscription, that I know of, and I’m almost entirely certain that they used to and have since stopped doing so on principle. Their VPN service costs a little less than $5/month (USD) if you get their card off Amazon that’s good for a year, and that is literally a physical card sent through the mail—the kind you have to scratch off on the back to get to the number underneath, in other words—and so at least AFAIK, there’s no possible way for whichever unique card you happen to end up with, to ever be traced directly to that specific transaction on Amazon, even if you pay for it using your credit/debit card, and directly associate that purchase with your bank account in so doing. It’s even better than that if you pay them by means far less traceable to begin with, of course, and they make those options available as well. In fact, they prefer doing it that way as opposed to credit/debit card purchases, even of physical cards through Amazon, IIRC. At least AFAIK, they don’t even accept any form of payment directly traceable to a bank account on their own website, for every obvious reason.
They actually do not keep logs like they claim not to, at least according to the one time they were ever affected by a search warrant, at which point it was discovered by law enforcement that said warrant in its entirety described information that did not exist because it never had.
One thing I really like about (using) it, and I have no idea what other VPNs would also do something like this, if any: it sets up a SOCKS5 proxy for you internally, and you can use that anywhere that supports that, wherever you may need/want a killswitch properly—meaning to make said application unable to resolve hostnames in the event of your connection to the VPN being interrupted for some reason. I’m also pretty sure you can use their DNS-over-HTTPS no matter what, even if you don’t already use their VPN service. Anyway, especially if you already do, though, I always figure it’s never a bad idea to just use the same provider everywhere you can: use their encrypted DNS wherever possible, in addition to using the proxy provided by their VPN wherever possible, in addition to using their VPN anyway. I do that, and I also enable the setting (under Wireguard) to use multi-hop, which, albeit at the expense of some latency, even more thoroughly conceals my real external IP address from the ostensibly innocuous honeypots for people who are not lunatics of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, or whatever company doing business on that level of dystopia. It’s simply a technical matter that doing all of that will make nearly everything—excluding any/all abject OPSEC failure, browser fingerprinting, EXIF metadata, etc., which should go without saying—way more difficult to trace back to your real world identity than it otherwise would be. It has to be. I didn’t say “impossible” because I know better, and again, it’s never gonna protect anyone from themselves because it can’t. It’s good enough to be able to use the internet and also sleep, though, at least for me.
It’s just so many consecutive layers of obfuscation contrary to the best interest of the boogeyman, especially for the price, that if I didn’t have immediate access to $60 in order to buy another year’s worth of Mullvad VPN, or immediate access to Mullvad VPN, I would literally beg and/or borrow, figuratively steal, or otherwise aquire.
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Something something high seas something jellyfin
oh yes, routing all traffic into limited number of bottlenecks is excellent for privacy 🤣
You’ve got a lot more options by way of selecting a VPN provider than an ISP. Your ISP options are those who have physical infrastructure at your location. You can get VPN service from anyone.
You have to trust your VPN provider to about the degree that you do your ISP in a VPN-less environment, true enough, but VPN providers are in a more-competitive market. It’s a lot easier to switch away from a VPN provider that you don’t like.
For example, I would trust an EFF-provided VPN service to a pretty considerable extent; I already trust the EFF on a lot of privacy matters.
I mean, it is?
A lot of my traffic goes to CDNs, and all of it is encrypted over https. Why should I pay for a vpn?
encrypted over https
The TLS handshake will generally – through there are some ways to avoid this, and people are banging on it – expose hostnames in the clear. So even if the IP address that you’re talking to serves multiple virtual hosts, your ISP is likely to know who it is that you’re talking to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
Even if your browser is using DNS-over-HTTP, which it may or may not be doing, most software doesn’t, so outside of your browser, DNS is generally visible.
Some protocols still are not encrypted; I was looking at MUDs the other day, and few of them support encrypted connections. The networks that I’m most worried about are random WiFi access points, and VPNs solve that well.
The network provider can still see which addresses and ports someone is connecting to and to where the traffic goes, and how much traffic is sent.
Some network providers blacklist material – as is the case in OP’s article. For example, one of my first experiences on the Threadiverse was kbin sending me to a random discussion on policy that Ada (the lemmy.blahaj.zone admin) was having with some gay user who lived somewhere in the Middle East. Lemmy.blahaj.zone had been blocked in that country – the country presumably didn’t like something related to the server having LGBT content. The Threadiverse is semi-resillient to that – they could still connect to a federated server and see comments. But it meant that images on lemmy.blahaj.zone were blocked in that country.
For another contemporary example, Russia has cracked down on politics online. Can’t block access to content without killing off VPNs, and they went after those too.
For people who maintain a long-running IP address, it’s possible to cross-correlate logs from various services. So, okay, let’s say that a given IP address has been logged downloading BitTorrent content. That same IP address is linked to, at various times, use of an app where a particular unique phone ID has shown up, or maybe that a user has logged into some account service on, which is linked to personal information. Even a party who is not someone’s ISP can cross-correlate logs using the IP. A VPN doesn’t absolutely avoid that, but it makes it harder.
Without a VPN, anyone can get at least a rough geographical location of a user by geolocating their IP address. IPv4 scarcity has made this harder than it once was, reduced geography/address correlation, but I expect that IPv6 will make it easier.
People don’t need to write their network software securely. Your cool multiplayer network game may-or-may not be encrypted and may-or-may-not be resillient to modified network traffic. If there are buffer overflows in how Quake or whatever handles network traffic, I’d rather not let the network provider be an attack vector. This has been exploited before, and while a typical ISP probably isn’t generally a real risk, I’d trust random WiFi networks a lot less. A VPN will get cleartext traffic off their network.
Probably more, but that’s some off-the-cuff.
My isp uses cg-nat, and many others do too, so source ip is hidden from most except for my isp, which I have a contract agreement with.
As someone that manages networks and security, you know what piques my interest? When I see hosts using vpn. I look up the host using the service, the service in use, and see what other interesting things are happening.
Go on, Texas, try to ban VPNs.
the porn must flow
POON. Muad’Deepthroat. Feyd-Rawdog. The story just lends itself to porn parody.
In the later books it’s not even a parody
The only thing that matters is texas loses
that can be understood more that one way.
… Then they banned VPNs. Thanks to the Republicans we have scorched sky’s… We don’t know who stroke first, but without Internet we are now a real communicative country with people who… Billy! Put your rocks down man! I’m trying to tell you s story about how important Republicans are to us and yet you choose to distract the entire class with your rock tossing game!
I wonder how many people here never saw porn before they were 18.
When I was a teenager, we got our porn the old fashioned way, by shoplifting it from the magazine rack at the convenience store.
No, sir I’ve never heard of it.
Saw what now?
They “right porn” to keep it entirely out of the public eye so they can follow their illegal and inhumane sexual shit in private. You’re searching for the real perverted bastards? The one’s who’s shouting against sexual freedom the loudest. Search their computers.
Just gonna leave this predictable comment right here: https://lemmy.world/comment/8449238
~~Whoa What the Fucking Shit! ~~
2 people talking past each other, sounding ready for a fist fight. These people are scarry.Edit: I was wrong, feel free to downvote
Texas is going to get a violent crime wave from all the pathetic loser incel rightwing men who are too dumb to figure out a VPN and too hateful to get another living breathing human being interested in getting naked with them.
The news stories will break that the violence is done by brown skinned immigrants who fought through poverty, uncertainty, cartels and any number of hardships to just get their fucking foot over the door into a place they dreamt to call home come but it will come out over and over again that it was done by another nauseating, bigoted, white dude lowlife who turned straight to violence after he couldn’t break up hatespeech orgies on gab with bouts of watching stolen porn on pornhub, pounding his member while yelling sexist slurs at the very people creating content to give him the tiniest, tiniest moment of pleasure.
I think Texas is one of the dumbest places on earth. Not the people, not the human brains within the geographical borders of Texas but rather the very concept of Texas as a white identity, a white story with white facts and white narratives.
The US is already so dumb it is hard to comprehend, but like a roller coaster where you think it can bring you anyyyyyyyy higher into the realm of self delusion in the service of hate, Texas kicks in another chain lift and drags you up up up into the sky.
