A New Bill Aims to Ban Both Adult Content Online and VPN Use. Could It Work?
On Sept. 11, Michigan representatives proposed an internet content ban bill unlike any of the others we've seen: This particularly far-reaching legislation would ban not only many types of online content, but also the ability to legally use any VPN.
The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people. It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.
Main issue I have with this article, and a lot of articles on this topic, is it doesn't address the issue of youth access to porn. I think any semi-intelligent person knows this is a parenting issue, but unfortunately that cat's out of the bag, thanks to the right. "Proliferation of porn" is the '90s crime scare (that never really died) all over again. If a politician or industry expert is speaking against bills like this, their talking points have to include:
- Privacy-respecting alternatives that promise parents that their precious babies won't be able to access that horrible dangerous porn! (I don't argue that porn can't be dangerous, but this is yet another disingenuous right-wing culture (holy) war)
- Addressing that vagueness in the bill sets up the government as morality police (it's right there in the title of the bill, FFS), and NOBODY in a "free" country should ever want that.
- Stop saying it can be bypassed with technology. The VPN ban in this bill is a reaction to talking points like that.
- Recognize and call out that this has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with a religious minority imposing its will on the rest of the country (plenty of recent examples to pull from here).
Unfortunately this is becoming enough of "A Thing" that the left is going to have to, once again, be seen doing "something" about it. So they have to thread a needle of "protecting kids," while respecting the privacy of their parents who want their kids protected and want to look at porn, and protecting businesses that require secure communications.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/how-a-new-bill-tries-to-ban-both-adult-content-online-and-vpn-use-and-if-it-could-work/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
Many countries are trying to figure out how to ban VPNs. I expect it will end up with big corporations and rich people being able to
pay a bribebuy a licence to use encryption and VPNs, while ordinary people will not be able to afford it. Or they will just require ISPs to block suspected VPN traffic from home connections. If people find workarounds it's still a pretext to arrest anyone inconvenient to the government and ban them from using the internet to organize.That’s a good thing Wireguard and OpenVPN are open source and available for free to everyone.
I mean, China and Russia have been on this mission for quite some time now and have failed over and over. Doubt the US will be any different.
It's not about buying the technology though: it's about buying the right to use it without being punished by the law.
Companies like L3Harris have to use VPNs just to access their emails because the securities required on government contracts. Whoever suggested this bill is just an idiot.
This is the right answer
Banning VPNs would be an unmitigated disaster and anyone who suggests that it's a good idea has absolutely no idea what they're talking about and should never be allowed to make tech policy again because they are a massive idiot.
Businesses, institutions, and even the government itself all require the use of VPNs to remain secure. VPNs are vital to functioning IT infrastructure everywhere.
Additionally, such a move wouldn't even stop people from accessing porn (which isn't even what VPNs are for), all it would really do is break IT security everywhere.
Yeah but people are really stupid and the economy is going to implode any day now anyways. It has nothing to do with porn and everything to do with criminalizing privacy and making mass surveillance more easy. They do not care how it affects people, they are rich and completely detached from reality. They will go live on Epstein Island or move to Ireland or something when America explodes. They rather be rich and connected then do anything that would actually help anyone, and Americans for the past 30 years have voted consistently for mass surveillance, destroying the constitution and fiat economics. This is what your average American wants by their voting habbits. People are just too stupid and brainwashed by this point.
That’s what revolutions are for when the government fails its social contract
It's not just the government. It's almost the entire human race.
Thats what revolutions are for just make sure you dont let the power dynamics of an economy dictate your future again or it is never going to change because you will just become the rich people inhibiting our species.
It's hard to have a revolution without the global powers interfering and trying to steer you down the path of international corporate pseudocapitalism, or authoritarianism. The history of communist revolutions is very interesting in this regard. The good communists always got crushed by the bad and authoritarian and well funded communists.
I remember walking into work one day and some agitated co-worker wanted to know what I knew about Colorado's libraries, because he knows I regularly use them. He was listening to hate radio on the way into work and became convinced that it was a huge problem that libraries were not tracking their Internet usage back to individuals. The idea of people doing things untracked (also, on "his" dime, LOL) was driving him crazy.
I had to laugh and try to calm him down by pointing out things like Tor (and i2p) and the fact that at that time anyway, you could wardrive and probably find a few dozen open Wifi connections within a few blocks, and use one of those if you were really up to something "nefarious" (whatever that might be). Not to mention go to some coffee shop.
He was much more annoyed that people might be watching porn at the libraries, though, as if all taxpayers have to endorse every single use of all things [1]...though I'm sure control freaks like this would be positively delighted at having the right people (read: Republicans) able to see all activity of all Internet users...
One guess what religion he is and what party he votes for...
[1] See for another example - how a certain type of person thinks they should get to decide what food stamps are spent on.
MAGA and republican...
Because people this obsessed with controlling others sure as heck ain't Christian by any logical definition.
I usually tell people that, if you think you are such a good person then you are probably not a good person. I also tell them that people are living things, and they deserve dignity and autonomy and privacy and that every culture in history that has been operated by people with their worldview has disintegrated into ashes, because nobody is wise enough to see everything and understand everything, and not be tempted by their own power to do wrong unto others.
I tell them that nature has likely figured out the most optimal path, and that nature is probably far older than even the earth is. Life has discovered that the best path is freedom, no rules, autonomy, and love and wonder for each other.
The only good king is a king of peace, a king of dissolving power, a king of balance. The only good democracy is a democracy of respect for others, a democracy of responsibility, a democracy of ensuring everyone else's freedom at the cost of your own.
They also want to control your mind and hack your mind. The sort of secret religion of silicon valley is to hack people's minds. There are all kinds of weird cults that are all about trying to manipulate people. It seems they are having some success on that front but lack the wisdom to know what to do with it, and hence, our society is dying, because there simply is no better path than to not play stupid games, respect people's autonomy and privacy, and let things work themselves out. Chaos isn't just a side effect, it is a necessary aspect of life.
A society which finds a way to stop chaos, to stop revolutions, to stop free speech, to stop progress, those societies die. Human beings like all living beings, cannot thrive unless they are free.
I want to see one state pass this (not mine ofc) just to see the carnage of an entire state full of companies that suddenly cease operations.
This is the first thing I thought about. Bills like these always allow for vulnerabilities that would affect the entire nation, themselves included. It’s extremely short sided.
I mean. They'd only enforce the ban on VPN providers that don't provide logs to the government. I get what you mean from a technology standpoint. But, in actual implementation of the law it would do exactly what they want. They're not gonna ban your work VPN. They just want to track what everyone is doing online.
That in itself introduces numerous security problems, still incredibly stupid and all this surveillance data makes for a hacker goldmine. Not like governments have a great IT security track record.
It's not government. It's about passing tech infrastructure entirely into the hands of the tech Oligarchs. Forcing VPN companies to sell or integrate Palantir/CIA/FBI backends in order to keep operating in the US.
You're thinking too much about how the legislation is worded. It doesn't matter when the actual implementation will just be to increase the ability for tech oligarchs to spy on all citizens. That's the material goal. Your security doesn't matter. The oligarchs will implement it to protect their own security and monopoly on data. That's it. That's all that this is meant to do. The old fucks in the legislative branch don't have to actually understand it or write that down. They will just pass it off to tech companies to implement how they see fit. And enforce it on providers when they are told to by the Oligarchs. It's not smart. It doesn't have to be. It's malicious handoff to tech oligarchs to handle and enforce as they see fit.
This is exactly the color of the issue. Everyone should read this.
The wording of legislation is how legislation works?
Might want to look up the Chevron deference. Something that was actually of topic in a recent 2024 supreme court ruling. Can rant about how and why the change to it occurred but that's a little off topic.
The TLDR is that federal agencies have the power to interpret and defer technical parts of legislation to experts within that agency to enact the "purpose" of the legislation.
In reality this is a good thing in a well operated federal government. The FDA doesn't have to defer to a judge for every specific implementation. But we are not in a well functioning federal government. We are passing off power tech Oligarchs to control things how they see fit.
WHEN, HOW, and WHO the law is enforced to is significantly more important that how legislation is worded when it passes. I'm trying to explain what the material result of the law will be to my best ability. The law will be enforced in favor of tech monopolies. It'll be another tool for them to use state power to their benefit.
Most VPNs do not use a separate VPN provided. What about places that host their own? My employer would never open their logs to the us government (hosted outside the us). I would never willingly open my own logs to the government - they have to not only physically invade my house but have to decrypt my drives, and hope they did it quickly enough that any incriminating logs haven’t been purged
It's not about stopping random people hosting their own VPN. It's about collecting data on the majority of the population. You're thinking too hard about it.
How do you even define a VPN? Is SSH tunnelling allowed then?
10 hour video of a woman encouraging you to be a better person.
yeah a vpn ban would fuck up networks
What the hell are rocks up to? Whats next, youre gonna tell me stones are up to no good.
For rock and stone!
The problem is that influencers have shilled stupid VPN services so much that even legislatures think they know what they are and think the primary use for the technology is circumvention and privacy.
They have no idea about all the IPsec tunnels providing site-to-site VPNs for all their businesses. Or how VPN protocols like GRE, which while providing no security on their own, are still very useful for tunneling protocols through different network stacks.
So what you are saying is this is a fantastic RTO strategy. /s
But yeah, I work for an international company, setting up the IT infrastructure so that each of those individual offices have a standard security policy and connection whitelists, and then requiring an on-site IT person to manage each of those sounds horrible.
VPNs is not just for remote workers. It's used by corporations who don't want to pay for a direct connect to federate with their work sites.
The only way a VPN ban is going to work is if they make a carve-out for corporations.
Which, let's face it, it's Republicans so there's a one-to-one chance that language will be there.
Couldn't a VPN service make a corporation and attain exemption?
VPNs are needed for way more than people working from home. It's hard to understate how spectacularly stupid banning VPNs would be in terms of business alone, never mind all the other problems it would cause.
You're right. Sadly, this have no bearing on the people actually deciding federal laws in the US, if I am to trust the news cycle from the last 10 or so months.
The damage that would stem from such things is guaranteed to span far and large :(
Take a look at the UK's current attempts to do similar.
Old bigots completely divorced from reality making the rules everyone (else) has to follow.
I suspect what will actually happen is this bill will go nowhere. If it starts to go somewhere, business interests will step in and squash it because of the many, many, many problems it would cause.
Is the extent of their knowledge on VPNs just what they heard from a NordVPN commercial? Not once in the article do they mention corporate VPNs.
I completely disagree with this sentiment and any Democrat that agrees with this isn't on "the left, but one more diet-Republican who exists solely to legitimize everything the right is doing at every turn.
I don't understand how OP can say that second part with a straight face when this bill doesn't even have the support of more than a handful of Michigan House Republicans and seems to have zero chance of making it out of committee there
That second quote is what OP is saying here. They're trying to frame this debate in a light most favorable to Republicans, as if internet censorship is the forgone conclusion and it's just a matter of figuring out how to do it.
Sorry, I didn't even realize OP was the one who said that. Will edit. And I agree, this sentiment is awful
15 years ago it was unthinkable that we would be in the situation we are right now. Don't wave this away as not having any support today. This is their goal. When they lose this time, they won't forget. They won't stop. The goal is complete surveillance, porn is just the vehicle.
they don't understand it. How are you going to stop people from having a dedicated server outside the country and then setting up their own VPNs? Wireguard is free and easy to access, how do you stop that?
If I want to open up my personal VPN to a bunch of Americans to use for free then what? I'm not American, my server isn't in America, so why can't I just give access to a few Americans? Hell my server would be great cause it's located in a University so...student discounts!
I find this argument fascinating. The point isn't technological prevention. It's so they can punish you, if they choose to, if they find you using one. I'd wager they prefer that people doing illegal things do use vpn, so they can a) build and use tools to detect it, since then by definition only criminals will use it, and b) rack up criminal charges. And of course c) ignore it if they want (either for legit reasons, like corp vpn, or because the user is an in-group member or somebody they want leverage on)
“Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something in them to hang him". This just makes it easier to find something.
Tor won't be affected by this.
Tor bridges are virtually impossible for even major governments to detect, much less block.
Unfortunately it works like any other prohibition: when the regulated legal market goes away, the hard stuff takes over
The point still applies though. They can pick you up on suspicion of using a VPN or Tor, and if you can't prove you didn't they will punish you. It will be used to silence politically inconvenient people and prevent them organizing online. If you organize your left-wing protest online in cleartext they thwart your plans and maybe arrest you. If you organize it using encryption they arrest you and thwart your plans and imprison you and ban you from the internet.
All the "we can find a way around it" arguments duck the main point, which is that they know you'll be doing that and they'll have a perfect excuse to arrest you if they think you're worth stopping.
They can't do that because we have the presumption of innocence
If using a VPN is declared as a tag for being a terrorist, innocent until prove guilty doesn't apply.
That's not true
My point is that using a VPN is trivially easy to detect, and can be en masse, dragnet style
Tor usage (especially with a bridge) is difficult or impossible to detect, even for nation-states, and to the best of my knowledge is only tractable against specific targeted individuals/machines. It's not possible to "get a list of all suspected Tor bridge users", even if you are an ISP
Only if configured correctly. Public Tor Exit Nodes are detectible and I got some alerts about a user checking his email from Tor the other day.
Good point. The moment you leave Tor, you lose a lot of its protection.
In theory, exit nodes should completely hide the connection between you the end user and what goes thru the exit node. In practice, exit nodes can leak metadata/side channel info. And they are always susceptible to global network analysis that nation-states are able to use (albeit as far as I know only against targeted individuals, not in mass-surveillance mode)
Tor bridges are blocked in China
Source for this assertion?
China blocks old style bridges like obfs-4. They recently managed to detect some snowflake bridges, but again only against individually targeted users -- they can't find "all Tor users in Shanghai" for example.
I suggest some background reading
https://harpia.pages.torproject.net/support/censorship/connecting-from-china/
https://pastebin.com/ZLb7YaQe
I was able to access only one webpage before it stopped working, just the google page that said it detected suspicious activity
now nothing is loading
almost half an hour later I loaded the google front page, but after searching for something the next page won't come up. Maybe not true that it's "blocked", but it's not usable in any way
A lot depends on your Tor circuit. There are lots of very slow Snowflake nodes (FWIW I operate on an a VPS with high bandwidth and ~98% uptime)
A massive database of likely voters with party affiliation + the ability to find something on anybody they choose = easy election interference.
You ever tried setting up such a server anonymously in a way that can't be tracked by American authorities? It can be done, but they've already made that difficult and/or expensive.
Just buy a VPS with crypto? It's not expensive, it's a few bucks a month
Yeah it does look like maybe that's got easier since I looked into it, although the prices I see are maybe 3x the cost of the average VPN and of course being securely anonymous is still beyond the abilities of most of us.
I don't know about 3x, I run my VPS on $5 a month but there are even cheaper options around even paying with crypto
Bear in mind that paying with crypto doesn't make you anonymous unless you're careful about it and use monero or something. If you did that and avoided giving any other identifying info to the provider, I'd be curious to know where to sign up for that.
So... Use Monero and a fake name?
If you can block access to commercial VPNs and render anyone else using VPNs liable to prosecution you achieve what they want.
You can't block commercial VPNs. I can put a commercial VPN website up right now, it takes like a second. All I need is a crypto payment address and I'll share my VPN servers
Ok, and how are you going to tell people that it exists? Not through YouTube sponsor slots, because you'll get deleted quicker than you put it up.
So only a tiny number of people will know that your VPN exists. That's "good enough" for the censorious.
On Lemmy, of course!
Lemmy doesn't have that many users... How are you going to reach the people who aren't arch users ;)
Seriously though, tech enthusiasts live a technological solution but a ban is a societal thing and it doesn't have to be perfect. Look at China.
I'm using a VPN in China
Jesus.
As far as I can tell, you are arguing that it won't become impossible to use a VPN. But no-one has said that it will be, and what I and others are trying to point out, is that VPN usage will become more difficult and rare. The vast majority of people will be restricted from viewing the content that the government objects to, whatever that is.
If you have anything to say about that rather than repeating the point that, yes, for the knowledgeable, for the tech-literate, for the people with the will and the spare time and the energy, VPN usage will still be available, feel free to. Maybe you think that actually everyone will use a VPN - why? why won't a massive reduction in marketed options not reduce usage massively? Maybe you think that actually it doesn't matter - why? why does it not matter that the average person will be unable to get information censored by the government?
No shit, if you want to use a corporate vpn all you have to do is contact Barron trump, slip him 50k cash and he will have your vpn certified "Christian Morals Approved"
It's quite possible they will make an exception for corporate VPNs while banning them for the rest of us. There will be a big fee to buy a corporate encryption licence, unaffordable to the peasants.
Obviously will fail. Not because it blatantly violates the first amendment, or because banning VPNs is absurd: but because it would hinder republicans from secretly jerking it to femboys.
The love to crash grindr. Every convention, they have the servers glowing. Not a gay butthole unfilled. That should be their slogan.
Um, how the actual fuck are businesses supposed to operate where some regressive dumbfucks have outlawed VPNs?
Also, never underestimate the ability of a set of dumbasses doing some damage to this country - for one thing, see the asshole in the WH right now doing all kinds of self-owns to this country.
Secondly, I'm old enough to remember things like the V-chip and the Clipper chip and the government going after Phil Zimmerman. All of these things were rather stupid. And that was during the Clinton administration, which, sure, they were right-leaning as well....were not fucking crazy right wing.
Oh, businesses will get an exception for their company owned hardware, I'm sure. Suck it, pleb!
Hardwire connections in the office. Finally they'll be able to undo all the good things that came from covid!! I mean, who doesn't thrive in an environment where you'll be constantly monitored so they can sell your work behavior for privately targetted ads? (/s, but only partial)
I know a great many companies - especially larger ones - have forced people back to the office. I see also that the unhinged government has also force people to stop working remotely, for purely ideological reasons.
But there are still a whole lot of people working from home, either fully, or as part of a hybrid arrangement.
I'm assuming this regressive and idiotic bill would have carveouts for the "right" people to be "allowed" to use VPNs, but if they didn't....wow. The business use for VPNs are more than just working from home.
The trans bit is key here. First that, then anything “promoting homosexuality”. It’s in Project 2025 that the porn bans are about criminalising LGBTQ people and allies.
Sure, but the porn laws are specifically about targeting LGBTQ people.
It actually gets worse than I outlined above, because I was in a hurry when I wrote that.
So, you make porn illegal and you define “porn” as anything “pro-LGBTQ”. That’s all books which feature LGBTQ characters, all organisations which support LGBTQ people, all people who are openly LGBTQ themselves.
Now you’ve got a school librarian who purged the books she was told to purge but accidentally missed one. A student checks it out, his parents see it and recognise it, now that librarian is guilty of distributing pornography to a minor. If the book features an LGBTQ character who is a minor, then that librarian is guilty of distributing child pornography.
And that’s not even as worrying as it gets. Because everything above is in Project 2025, but that’s not the entire limit. Over the last couple of years Republican politicians have been floating (and even trying to introduce bills which would actualise) the idea of the punishment for sexual offenses involving minors to be the death penalty. They’re not there yet (and bills have thus far been defeated), but that’s the direction of travel. That’s the end goal. A pseudo-legal framework to justify executing people for being openly LGBTQ (held hands with your girlfriend in public? A 17 year old saw you holding hands. You are now guilty of a sexual offense involving a minor), or anything other than publicly anti-LGBTQ. Off to the camps with you!
So, yes you’re right that they’ll use whatever weapon they can against whichever group they can - historically, fascists often target LGBTQ people first, and at the moment it’s easier to start with trans people than explicitly going after gay people - yet.
But the anti-porn laws are explicitly about targetting LGBTQ people. And they’re only part of the way down the roadmap.
NO VPN!
And the corporate world comes to a screeching halt.
These fuckwads don't even understand anything about what they're trying to legislate.
When shit starts being monitored, I want to see the legislators' traffic public first.
In theory, businesses would be required to register their VPNs and... idk, this would limit access to them somehow?
Much like with the Assault Weapons Ban and the assorted online porn bans and strip club bans and dry counties and SEC rules on insider trading, etc, etc, etc a lot of this boils down to "how hard do you want to work in order to enforce this?"
And the short answer is "we only want an excuse to arrest people arbitrarily". So a VPN can quickly because a "everyone with an Internet connection is a criminal suspect". And then you just harass the people you want to harass under cover of "we thought you had kiddie porn" as an excuse
I once worked for a banking transaction company (or something like that, I did their network and telecom support, none of the actual business) and they had offices in Russia. I was told that since VPNs are more restricted there, but required for the business, they had to have a special application with the government to be allowed to have the site to site VPN work.
I imagine they'd try to do the same, as well as grant them another way to be in the pocket of or have some control over businesses. If the government has to approve your necessary security software, you'll want to stay on their good side.
That doesn't sound like they plan on any exceptions. That sounds like the end of all business in that state.
Oh my sweet summer child. Of course these laws won't apply to them.
And if they do, they will make up shit to use the dirt you dug up against them against you.
Kind of like how when a cop shoots a black guy they look for whatever parking ticket they got 10 years prior as proof he is a cracking smoking cap busting gangsta who was itching for a bullet. Never being slightly concerned for the cop's violent history or misconduct in various police forces.
Now now I didn't say they were going to allow that.
Corporate VPNs generally don't route www traffic, keeping that separate is kind of the point.
So unless you can convince your job to provide you porn, you're out of luck.
Few corporate VPN's don't route www traffic. split tunnel in a large corporation It's an infoleak waiting to happen.
There sure are a lot of stupid fucking people then, huh?
Personally I think the left should hammer in on "The right are too lazy and incompetent to raise their kids. They want the government to do it for them. No one who's too unwilling or unable to spend time with their kids should be in government" or something like that. Just rub their noses in how stupid, lazy, and incompetent, the right is. Because they are. They are the worst people.
I mean... yeah? Seen any election results in the past few years?
The fact that Republicans get any votes past the year 2012 is enough to convince me that about 1/3 of Americans are dumber than a box of rocks.
Take the average person and remeber half the people are dumber then that.
Then there is an entire political group, dumber than THOSE people, at their best.
we built our national public education system around breeding compliant factory workers, then cut all the factory jobs.
So are the third that don't bother voting.
Amen to your point about rubbing their faces in it.
The absolutely stunning level of hypocrisy from the Republicans who claim to be the party of small government has become such a laughing stock. Or at least I would be laughing if they didn't have control of everything right now. Fuck.
Bro can we not?
I thought I got lucky to be born into a family that was able to leave China, and I could browse the internet freely in the US. What the fuck y'all? Just let me have my unlimited access to entertainment in peace mmkay?
So... fucking... cooked...
Blatent First Amendment violation.
I mean what even is gonna be the difference between fucking CCP and this BS.
(Canadaaa plssss lemmme innn? 🥺👉👈❓️
Australia? 👀)
You seem to be picking the absolute worst countries if you're looking for freedom, especially online. Australia is already worse than the US in many ways, and Canada not too far behind. How about Europe?
Most notably, I'd say the fact that the CCP is a competent government leading the country into its golden age, while the Republican US government is driving its country into collapse. We can all have differing opinions about the CCP, but at least we have to give them credit where it's due.
This is all your fault for sending those dmails :/
Can we get a list of the names of the representatives supporting this?
Any other identifiable information would be great as well.
Fuck this social contract.
how about their browsing histories?
What, and violate their privacy? Know your place peasant. /s
All vpns including ones for work? Not a snowballs chance in hell
What, you got something to hide bro?!
Sure, lots of spreadsheets with sales data.
With a name like that I would have figured some sort of mind map or Gantt chart
Huge tracts of sales data!
They'll start with banning all the personnal VPN providers to make it harder for people to acquire the service.
They will ban legitimate businesses in capitalism? Hmm... sounds like a lawsuit.
Nah, they'll start by banning everything, then realize why that doesn't work, then stumble over themselves trying to fix the mess they created.
Will it ban their Grindr access though?
Only for non-closeted gays. But for Republicans who only do it to remind themselves of the evils of gay sex it'll be readily accessible.
Lol, good luck with hat
Lol, good luck with that too, maybe ban HTTPS while you're at it?
Mind you though, this bill has diddly squat to do with porn. Republicans don't really care about that especially since they're usually too preoccupied with abusing their own children for their sexual needs. Blocking porn is just a cherry on the cake so that they have even more poetry and control
This is mainly about the VPN and encryption. Those are technologies that can be used to pass along true facts, true news, organize protects without them knowing.
You can't really break all types of encryption with one bill, but many aimed at the same goal just might do the trick
I feel that encryption should be enshrined as a human right
Make all their grindr accounts public
Just like they did with their Ashley Madison accounts.
Never. The administration continues to play keep-away precisely because they are afraid of the files coming out. And the sooner the files do, the less complete the stranglehold on power, the more damage the files being released would do.
The representatives proposing this bill must have some really embarrassing search history.
This fuck needs to be under a microscope.
"If you removed all the porn from the internet you would be left with one website, titled "Bring Back the Porn""
Scrubs was way ahead of its time.
It's never been about the children, either. It's been about reigning control and power which is why a lot of Liberals get on board with these bills too. One of the reasons i felt so disgusted to vote for Hillary Clinton was because of her stance on censorship in the 90's. Today it's succeeding in porn. Tomorrow it will start succeeding in literature.
The Clintons are actual shitstains who are part of this two-pronged approach to siphon as much power away from the people and into the hands of the ruling class as possible.
yup. businesses, military installations, federal government offices. all need to relocate out of michigan. don't even matter if it passes should assume it might come back up. Safer to get out and stay out.
Economic punishment for even floating the idea of such a bill.
This, even as a mere proposal with zero chance to pass, should be strongly repelled. Moving somewhere else ends up not being an option when everywhere decides to play the same game over time. And mandatory state surveillance and breach of privacy are really trending.
Well that and we have seen again and again that they will try again. I mean look at roe vs wade now. Best to locate elsewhere. But yeah also let all states know this will neuter your states prospects for a long time.
I don't think the author understands what a VPN is, or is trying to legitimize the proposed ban... Or maybe both.
That jumped out at me as well. Like VPNs don’t have a legitimate use outside of shielding your porn traffic! I would argue they’re more often used for secure commercial traffic than for evading porn bans. I’m sure those numbers are rapidly changing, though!
From that excerpt, it sounds like they understand what it is… for the general public. Take anyone on the street, if they know what a VPN is, they're likely to just know some brand name that sells "VPN" to end users. The same way to some people, github is git.
The idea that such ban/restriction would affect basically every business and a lot of individual out there doesn't matter if you just open with "VPN are used for illegal things" and just, stop there.
"Anticorruption of Public Morals Act"
Fucking 1920s
1984
Could they even ban VPNs? Is that even possible?
Legally? Easy. Pass the law, boom. Done. They see encrypted traffic from your house/phone? That's a paddling.
Technically? Well, sort of. A lot of VPN uses TLS for the encryption between their servers and the clients, so from the outside it could very well look like regular encrypted HTTPS traffic. So, depending on how such hypothetical (I hope) law is worded, it could just make all encryption illegal. It would not prevent anyone from using it, because that's just math. You can't prevent people from doing math with a computer. But you can certainly prosecute them if the law says so.
Of course, a more complete answer is that it is possible to masquerade as something else, depending on your available bandwidth and your will to side step the (hypothetical) law. If your traffic looks legitimate (and seems to be in plaintext), but you embedded some hidden meaning that the recipient can decipher, then you're playing cat and mouse, and you can get away with thing. Wrapping DNS queries inside TLS made it easy to avoid DNS spoofing at ISP level, for example. But the point remain; such law are not made to make something technically impossible. They're made to make something prosecutable. After all, there are laws against murder, but they don't prevent murder, they merely incentivize people to not do it.
edit: I ignored the whole lot of other issue with banning encrypted communication as a whole, because it would break every business that have an online presence, including banking and trading. But, exemptions are a thing. Law for thee, not for me, this kinda move.
And if they don’t make encryption illegal, I guess there’s no way to stop it?
I think encryption illegal is insane since so many people use it for everything (banking, other things). But it sounds like what they want is for you to not be able to spoof your location. Not sure how that would be possible to prevent or monitor.
I'll remind you that using strong encryption was not exactly legal not so long ago. For the general public anyway. To this day, in some countries, exporting software with cryptographic capabilities requires some declaration to state services.
Laws and regulations don't have to care about reality of feasibility, unfortunately.
Practically? No.
Sure. Just ban TCP and encryption. Easy.
This is a test balloon. One state is needed to overcome all the technical hurdles like clearing VPNs for work. Once that is done it will be roled out everywhere.
Without ruling out VPNs, all the other internet laws don't make sense. So this step is necessary and almost inevitable.
Yup. It’s their strategy and they’ve used it multiple times with great success.
It seems quite obvious to me that this will, in fact, not work. I'd even argue that nobody wants it to work. Only to introduce a law that a lot of people will break at some point, to have an excuse to target them later in the future if the need arises.
No project like this will produce any significant results in any western country. It's simply impossible to implement without full supervision and control over the entire Internet. China was able to block all online porn due to having such infrastructure. And that was possible due to a vastly different culture. We don't.
In general, the issue of widespread pornography is very analogous to climate change. We've been warned about this for decades, and yet, have done nothing to prevent it. All we can, and in my opinion should be doing, is limiting its presence in our societies, especially in the context of children. This would no doubt involve online ID verification at some stage, though that can be done with respect towards privacy.
Also, what's up with targetting ASMR? It has no inherent relation to adult content. The transgender people part isn't surprising and we know where that's coming from.
No it can't. Data can be de-anonymized.
Of course. Any and all data, stored anywhere, either physically or digitally, can and will be accessed by third parties and bad actors. This is the harsh reality.
However, it doesn't stop us from collecting various information about our nations, including personal data. It also doesn't stop us from creating more and more digital national services. Are they perfectly secure? No, not even close. But the need for them and their benefits [usually] greatly outweigh the risks. Perhaps an online ID verification system is one such case.
It is possible to make it so that only the government has access to the ID itself, which it already does, obviously. If no other parties can access it, there seems to be minimal risk.
Losing the ability to anonymously criticize the government, the rich, and those in power is a non starter.
Worse, even if it somehow came to fruition it won't solve the problem of kids getting access to porn. You'll sooner get pornographic zines and sneakernet. This is a parenting failure, not an auth failure.
The goal here isn't to protect kids, its to silence dissent.
Have you lost that ability in your country? In my country, and in all of the EU (except Hungary), we have a ton of national and EU digital services. And yet, we can and very often do criticize our governments. Including online official channels, where they always know our identities.
How does parenting solve anything in a society where porn is everywhere, including on services made for kids, and where cities are filled with billboards depicting erotic ads? Do you propose we cut our children from all contact with the outside world and lock them in the basement?
There's only so much you can do as a parent faced with systematic issues. Even if you're the perfect parent, your child will still suffer from worse parents' children, from poor state policies, and from nearly all outside factors.
That's most likely true. No arguing about that.
I'm merely discussing a theoretical scenario, removed from the rot of our societies. Kind of like universal basic income. In theory, it may be a great concept that could solve many issues plaguing us today. However, in real life, it would no doubt lead to the erosion of our rights and freedoms, which largely stem from our contribution to society and the need for our labor.
This post is about it being attempted. See the OP.
This is a strawman argument.
You are talking about enabling fascism.
This is exactly what the UK has attempted. It doesn't work, either.
Porn is here to stay. "Children" covers a wide range of ages, and exposure to sex of some kind is not the debilitating thing it's made out to be. The approach should be to contextualize it and educate about it.
Humans reach sexual maturity as young as like 8 years of age in rare circumstances. Trying to act like humans arnt just fucking animals is bafflingly stupid.
You can't fucking hide humanity from humans. You want to prevent stupid kids from making more kids before they are ready? Or prevent them from easily being taken advantage of sexually?
TEACH THEM WHAT SEX IS, AND BE AS BLANTENT AS POSSIBLE.
The only thing that prevents people from doing something stupid is education and support . The only thing that stops people from letting others take advantage of them is education and support.
If you don't educate your fucked up on bother counts. If you don't support them you fucked up on both counts.
Pussy footing around, using complicated metaphors and flowery language does nothing but confuse children most of the time.
Kids are smart, give them the basic ass facts and they will understand.
Hell even teaching abstinence wouldn't be so God damn fucking problematic if it wasn't so wrapped up in religious bullshit to go along with it.
Just telling your kid what sex is, what porn is, that it's risky and shouldn't be done till they are older. But should it happen use a condom and talk to their parents about it. Would solve so many god damn fucking problems.
FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING PLEASE JUST TALK TO YOUR KIDS AND BE UPFRONT.
Something with "morals", I guess...
It makes them uncomfortable, and they can't tolerate anything that makes them uncomfortable. The entire world exists to make them happy.
No, it makes them horny, because they confuse intimacy with sexuality because they get neither without force or payment.
Someone check the browser history of the 6 GOPers pushing a "morality" bill.
Corporate media's job is to manufacture consent. Please do not accept their spin uncritically.
This has nothing to do with kids or porn, those are always easy bells for censors to ring. It's about control and tracking. They want to be able to tie anonymous online activity to your real identity.
Politically, we really need to stop accepting their framing that they're trying to protect kids. These bills are only about collecting data.
Taking one for the team.
but your proudest
Those anti-capitalist terrorists need to be reigned in though! /s
The rule of headlines is that if it asks a question in the title, the answer is assumed to be no.
No, it won't.
Betteridges law of headlines
Because if the answer was "yes" then the headline would be writen as a statement of fact. If its a question then the news agency cant be held to account if it is either yes or no because "we are only asking the question."
In Canada it is the same. And in Quebec carrying more than $3K Canadian is considered proof that you are up to no good and will get you arrested.
The news on this has been underplaying how bad this bill is. It requires ISPs to inspect traffic to ensure its no porn, meaning they would have to be able to decrypt the traffic. This makes a single point were hackers can access credit card data, personal information, and anything else you don't want to share with the world. This assumes the ISPs are willing to front the compute cost of decrypting then re-encrypting and not just banning encrypted traffic because its the easy and cheap way.
Can't do business or government without VPNs nowadays.
Come to think of it I was wondering how Elon Musk would go about turning Starlink, his massive international ISP, into a tool for oppression. Get the government to outlaw all the ways for its customers to shield themselves from its data collection, I guess.
Have you seen the articles about Starlink sending down signals on frequencies that are meant for sending data up to satellites? They’re coming from his satellites that are Starshield.
My conspiracy theory is that he’s using it to disrupt data from other nearby satellites as subterfuge.
Don't forget to ban renting servers, vps and cloud services by individuals.
I think Microsoft and Adobe might lobby against the latter... But if they could expand the ban to AI, I'd be in favor of banning all the other stuff as well. I mean, what good is banning and blocking smut, when you can just ask an LLM to generate whatever your perverted 13yo heart desires?
"Corruption of public morals" is such a shameless name to put on a bill that simply tries to enforce your own morals.
Republicans should attach their version of the bible to their version of the First Amendment. Make it official.
It's called Project 2025. At some point they will rename it to King Trump's Bible.
Didn't he already release a bible? I can't keep up with this timeline anymore....
Holy shit thought you were joking
https://godblesstheusabible.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Bless_the_U.S.A._Bible
Trump Bible wtf
Thank fuck/too bad I wasn't imagining it. I mean....yay.... brain still holding some information....boooooo for the Biff-timeline.....
Biff was directly based on Trump.
.....fuckme....of course he was....
I'm really shocked there isn't a push to go back to Latin Bibles.
When they started translating the Vatican was scared it would lead to commoners being able to not just read/write, but they'd actually be able to see what the Bible said instead of just taking the priest's word on it.
Most Christians don't read the Bible by choice, but that's still different from being literally unable to read it.
Many Americans are already unable to read it in English.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics
https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/literacy-rate-in-the-united-states/
aint need no edumaction to go work them factries BY GOD!
BOOTSTRAPS! MURICA! FUCK YEAH!
both sides are bible thumpers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_affiliations_of_presidents_of_the_United_States
only had one nonChristian maybe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson
There is a huge difference between "being religious" and "being a 'bible thumper'".
Where is the difference?
The last president we had was Catholic and stated he would go by what the church said
Roe v Wade fell on his watch but magically was the other teams fault entirely when in reality it took both parties working together at the marching orders of their check writers
Make it make sense
Honestly if you can't tell the difference between "person who has religion" and "bible thumper" already then I doubt I'm intelligent and patient enough to explain it to you.
Thumpers push religion on people and people who just have religion do not
Biden said he was going to go by what the church of his faith said
Republicans during and before have stuck to their guns on faith
Now we live in Christiandom
Where is the difference?
It’s the GOP/Christians. It won’t work at first but they’ll come back and make it work once they get the Supreme Court to agree.
It’s happened like this multiple times. This don’t be different.
Let's just shut the internet down then. Yet another face-eating leopard moment.
Why not going straight back to the 19th century? The good ol' times when uncle Sam rode through the prairie with a double-barreled shotgun over his shoulder to shoot bears, buffalos and anything else he didn't like.
Teenagers watching porn is not a big deal. Kids are not property to be molded and shaped into what people want them to be, not that it would ever work. They are human beings and have a right to access information and be thenselves. It's just stupid but what do you expect from the Republicans? Maybe this will finally convince the people in that state to stop supporting these moralizing politicians who try to pretend to care about morals when they are extremely corrupt and immoral in reality, and are just trying to distract people from their constant assault in privacy, the constitution and human rights.
Such freedom. Very murrica.
no. children get shot and killed at school on a monthly basis here and all the government can think to do is age-gate porn
No.
Reads like the idiot who tried to legislate pi is 3 because his old myth book about blood magic said so. How dumb or evil do you have to be to look around the US in 2025 and think the biggest source of corruption is porn and not politicians.
Hey ... I was a few months off
surely Michigan has no one who works over the internet
Won't work.
We need a steganographic VPN protocol, ideally with bonded heterogeneous multipath streams.
Hostile networks need to be exclusively treated as dumb pipes.
Like… tor? 🙂
Designed by the US Navy, and the bulk of exit nodes are run by the US federal government
basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it’s produced by the modial interaction of magneto reluctance and capacitive directance
This sounds awfully similar to the VX machine I have on my workbench...
Good old party of small government
Bans VPNs
Everyone loses access to their Ooma phones
slowclap.gif
I guess I’ll be out of work with plenty of time to stew about how to unfuck everything.
Back to the 19th century, of tent revivals and people like Carry Nation. If they can't make America be like Iran, they would try first with an entire state.
Biden is very heavy into the cult of Catholicism and him along with the Republican Christ lovers managed to get Roe v Wade to fall
Handmaids tale is coming yall. You think they'll go with the burgundy robes?
"Welcome to Michigan - The NoFap State"
"work"? Yeah it could "work".
Now, normally seeing a question in the headline suggests the answer to that question is "no"; but I'm not sure the "Now" is "normal"
Morality aside, have any of these chucklefucks considered the impact on businesses? You know, like how pretty much every business uses a VPN to allow people off site access to their secure systems? And how this bill would essentially end any of those businesses?
Not to mention VPNs between locations, or between on-site vs. things like AWS?
Then there are device manufacturers like Cisco and Fortinet?
is that it reads more like an ad for VPNs than anything else.
Interesting
With all threats that kids face world wide
With all threats that kids face in the USA
You focus on one of the lesser problems that should be fixed by the parents in the first place?
What's the number one cause of death for children in the USA? I mean, silly me, I would have thought that is a low hanging fruit easy subject to pick up and run with. Fix that, and you will have actually made the country better
Then again, a huge swath of Americans don't want a better country as they've been bombarded for two decades that they actually already live in the best country of the world whereas in reality they live inmonenof the worst
Even parents who are actively trying to prevent their children from viewing porn might find it a challenge, given the sheer amount of porn on the internet and the proliferation of Internet connected devices.
But what about the kids whose parents don't take steps to prevent their kids from accessing porn? Do the rest of us just say, "well kid, if your parents don't care then neither do I. Watch all the porn you want."? Or do the rest of us have a responsibility to try and protect those kids, even if their own parents won't?
We do not have a responsibility to try and protect those kids at the expense of everyone else.
Keeping kids from ever seeing porn isn't a realistic goal. Educating kids about sex and minimizing their exposure to porn is a realistic goal. This kind of legislation lets prudes avoid accepting the fact that kids need sex education while doing nothing to actually keep kids from seeing porn.
There's no "protecting" them from porn. That ship sailed 30 years ago. Parents are going to have to do some parenting. If the kid has shit parents, porn is not even going to be on the top 10 issues we should be worrying about.
What about them? We don't structure all of society to be kid-oriented. That's fucking stupid.
FUCK YES! You are not their parent! YOU DO NOT GET TO DECIDE what their kid gets to see! Porn is for adults to look at but if a kid sees it there's no danger. Kids don't drop dead because they saw some people fucking on the Internet!
How hard is this to understand‽
I actually work in education and this is genuinely a problem. There are children in elementary with unfettered access to the internet, and they are the kids with the most behavioral issues. These kids then grow into adults with issues and it genuinely does have a negative effect on our society. I do NOT want VPNs banned, because that is an obvious play at stopping adults watching whatever they want. What I do want is some way to stem the tide of hardcore porn being watched by young kids, which is currently the case. “Parents need to parent.” Yeah, good fucking luck with that. I’d encourage anyone reading this to reach out to your local educator and ask if too much internet access is fucking up these kids. I’m guessing I already know their answer.
You are seeing symptoms and assuming they are the cause. Porn doesn't cause behaviour issues; the inattentive parenting that allowed the access does. These kids with behaviour issues existed long before internet porn became widespread.
Im sorry, but are you a psychologist or other mental health professional that works with kids? The typical behavioral issues remain, with new ones now being correlated with unsupervised access to the internet. So let’s just do nothing to try and help our educators and society at large.
If I can't smack a parent for smoking in the car with kids or installing a car seat wrong then they can't tell me how I can use my Internet connection I am paying for. Two of those things pose an immediate danger to the kids and nobody else, meanwhile the other affects everyone. The point is, VPN and porn is the wrong hill to die on if they really cared about kids.
And how to you propose to do that without banning adults?
The issues you're describing have always existed, unfortunately some parents are shitty parents.
Actually subscribe to a porn site. These problems haven’t always existed either. The internet is filled to the brim with abusive porn that wasn’t just available at your fingertips. Pre-internet you had to find magazines or actual movies. It’s very convenient to just shrug your shoulders when you’re not the one dealing with the actual problems. Fuck me for caring about the fate of kids, I guess.
Completely agree.