Web services and websites should block all Utah IP addresses and redirect to page explaining that because they cannot tell who’s using a VPN, their only option is to block all of Utah.
Yes, I understand how dumb that is, but sometimes you have to fight stupid with stupider.
Porn sites have been doing that for years now.
And that’s exactly what they want.
They don’t want every website to do it though.
They don’t want every website to do it
Are you sure?
Even worse, that would not necessarily help. If someone’s accessing your website through a VPN that’s not located in that state, you would not block it… then become liable.
Better block everything at this point -_-
The great firewall of Utah, all your pron must be inspected by government officials prior to delivery…
So you’re saying we should blockade the blockade? /s
Web services and websites should block all Utah IP addresses
That won’t work on a VPN, though. The VPN will say the user is coming from outside the state. That’s the whole point of the VPN.
right, meaning everybody will need to get a VPN, defeating the purpose of the law
To date, the only countries that have made progress in blocking VPN traffic with some success are authoritarian regimes with ISP-level surveillance.
You know you’re on to something when the only playbook you can find was written by the Chinese government.
The horseshoe theory of mass surveillance
I don’t think it’s has anything to do with a horseshoe when they are just becoming a dictatorship as well. It’s just a line at that point.
These aren’t “age checks”…it’s identity tracking.
Absolutely! Journalists really need to start describing these as what they are rather than the marketing term. It is much more accurate to call them “ID Checks” or something like that.
But spoofing a phone number and harassing me all day isn’t worth solutioning. This Gov. is not representing us.
The Biden admin was about to regulate data brokers but then Trump happened.
Yet another Biden failure! When will that guy stop causing all our problems?! Thanks Biden! /s
I’ve learned a little bit of multiple languages to answer the phone in a foreign language. It absolutely fucks with the scammer on the other end because they are expecting an English speaker.
I mostly ignore calls from unknown numbers, but if I ever answer any I do something similar, but I use gibberish.
“Hello sir, I’m calling to see if you are aware of the latest energy deals in your area?”
I respond with something like: ‘Ha felth malak nakufi parament, cheeshan bah farkone.’
I then get very animatedly exasperated with them if they can’t understand me.
‘BISHAN TA FALAF TOOSH? MAIR PUNAN TA FALAS!!! EDGEKA, EDGEKA MALA!!!’
I never end the call, always keep going until they do, which is often pretty quickly these days unfortunately, because I’ve started to kind of enjoy playing with them.
Occasionally if it’s clearly a scam call rather than a spam call and I have time, I’ll actually pretend to play along dumbly to see how long I can keep them on the line. All time record is 49 minutes during the pandemic lockdown (I was bored). The guy finally caught on and released a barrage of expletives and wished me death. It was awesome!
If you do anything OTHER than ignore them, your number gets marked as “active” and then sold to other scammers. I roll my eyes at the people who gleefully brag about all the ways they “fuck with spammers” without realizing that by simply answering the phone, they have already given them what they want. Sure, the low level worker on the phone (who might actually be a slave) might want you to fall for a scam and give them money, but the people running these call centers are perfectly fine if all they get is confirmation that you have an active number which can then be sold to other call centers.
Stop answering spam/scam calls.
Remember when we told people “they’ll make it illegal to use a VPN” and we got snarky replies like “it’s not enforceable LOL”.
The fuck it isn’t. Traffic coming from a VPN? That’s a paddlin’, kiddo.
They’re not even trying to masquerade it as… oh, yes, they’re still trying to masquerade as a “think of the children!” measure. Those fuckers.
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The problem for most users is: they actually want to look like traffic from somewhere else…
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and we got snarky replies like “it’s not enforceable LOL”.
Not being enforceable hasn’t stopped a lot of bad laws from being enacted.
My housing complex has a 10km/hr speed limit, it is completely unenforceable (police aren’t going to put in a speed trap or monitor a road inside a housing complex). Doesn’t stop people getting all upset because they’re sure someone was going 15.
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I bet you a dollar that all of them are technologically illiterate.
i mean, how are we defining tech illiteracy? they have heard of the twitter, okay?
More ways to control our lives and track our movements.
“Party of small government”.
Personally, I would stop using any site that did this. We all know nothing matters in this country but money. Companies stop making as much, they’ll get legislation changed.
The pedophile class has the audacity to dictate access to a utility under the guise of protecting the children
Websites need to block all Utah traffic. If their leaders are going to be shitheads, then no traffic for you until you elect new leaders.
Traffic coming from Utah? Believe it or not, jail.
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It’s literally going to be easier for websites to just block all Utah IPs and Geolocations.
I’m ok with blocking Utah from the internet. That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make
But that doesn’t fix this. If someone actually from Utah uses a non-Utah IP to access data in a manner not approved by Utah, they can be held liable. The only way to get around this is, aside from the law being struck down, is for companies out to operate outside the legal reach of the state of Utah, or to act as if everyone in the world lives in Utah. It’s a really bad law.
If companies are blocking Utah they are already showing they have no interest in doing business in Utah so who cares if Utah charges them?
China can charge me because I said “Winnie the Pooh” in a post and a citizen might read it and might think I’m referencing dear leader, doesn’t mean I have to give a fuck or do anything about it.
Like if a company does not operate in the United States at all and they break a law (however poorly written) from any given state, maybe they can choose to not care, but maybe they still have to because of any number of treaties with the United States. Or because of the outsized number of us internet users. Even Italy is causing people headaches with some of their absurd internet censorship laws. It’s just a problem when governments try to pass excessively broad laws about internet services.
if they are so concerned about children, how about doing something about the mormon church and the fucking horrible crimes that are committed against women and children in it?
Nah they support that.
they will use this specifically to prosecute whoever they choose and will only enforce it for that reason
Wait… this is specifically about websites?
Easy solution: stick your website behind a CDN. That way, people are using a VPN to contact a CDN, and only the CDN ever connects to your website.
And if Utah thinks two degrees of separation isn’t enough… well, it’s likely that every legislator in Utah is two degrees away from someone who will break this law, so they should obviously be the first to be subject to its penalties.
Easy solution: stick your website behind a CDN.
I would say the easy solution is to stop serving content to residents of the state
Well that’s the problem. If you’re on a VPN, the site doesn’t know where you’re coming from. So either all VPN services ban Utah, or all websites ban VPNs. It’s a very insidious ploy to ban any anonymity on the internet. It’s essentially letting Utah set the rules for the entire network. And it doesn’t really work anyway. I can create a VPS and set up tailscale or something similar and all my traffic goes through that server. No block of knowable VPN IPs that a website can block. So either Utah blocks all services like tailscale, which is not going to happen, or this is just pointless.
If two computers are connected to the same network, there will always be a way around these sort of restrictions.
There is no way to know someone is connecting to you via a VPN. They just blacklist known IP addresses, so there isn’t really a way to implement this. Sure, you can blacklist well known VPN providers, but anyone can rent a PC in another location to VPN through.
Yeah this was exactly my point. And this only works if the IPs for the VPN are fairly static. I have no idea if they are. But given that I have heard discussions about doing this I assume that is the case. I mean I have done exactly this (using a VPS) to get around some of the restrictions I see.
Same here. Running WireGuard on a VPS in Seattle.
Paying $10 a month, but that’s just because I also use that VPS for OwnCloud as well.
Sorta the same but using headscale. So yeah wireguard with extra steps.
Precisely:
Therefore, they can now criminalize any website they want, for not blocking some VPN contact, that they couldn’t possibly have identified as VPN.
Perfect, isn’t it?
I read, decades ago, that in Communist CCCP, there was a tradition of secret laws … so people got disappeared, charged, convicted, & sentenced … on laws they weren’t permitted to know.
This is related.
Create laws that it isn’t possible to comply with,
then set about obliterating all the “enemy” you want, because now you can convict anybody you want, & there’s nothing anybody can do in defense.
This is one of the most-perfect machiavellianisms they’ve done, thus far.
( the one where the Washington DC bar-association got highjacked by the Republican party, so there won’t be any more Democrat lawyers in there … thereby limiting the pool of people who can practice law in Washington DC … that was another.
The elegance of it I admire, the alignment & intent is evil, which I want … removed … from our world. : )
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all websites ban VPN
I don’t think that’s technically possible under the current structure of the internet.
Now, if they move to: you must sign in with a state assigned ID before you access anything anywhere… that technically could work.
Shhh! Don’t give them freakin’ ideas!!! :)
Oh, they don’t need to be told this - it has been in the fascist state “papers please” handbook since long before WWII. Get very very worried when Fox News starts talking about “considering the possibility of…”
You can still request Geolocation and if the computer has a prior record w/o IP, you can get a location up the chain.
Geolocation sometimes mis-locates some netblocks.
I’ve seen complaints by people who can’t get any website to respect their proper location ( or often language ) because of GeoIP that was haywired for their IP address-block.
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There’s services that not only check for known VPN servers, but also for IPs in datacenter IP blocks. So using a VPS could in theory also be blocked.
Yeah, and you could also block all Albanians from shopping at your store by asking them as they come in: “Are you Albanian?” Yeah, you have a photo-catalog of known Albanians, and some general descriptions of what Albanians look like, but are you really going to actually, successfully block all Albanians? No. And the more you try, the more you’re going to block non-Albanians just because they “look like they might be an Albanian…”
Apologies to Albanians, you’re just an alphabetically early example - nothing about Albainia or Albainians in particular, the same could be said for Bulgarians, Croatians, Danish, Estonians, Finnish, Greeks, etc.
You’re right they could. But I’m a systems architect who deals with university wide networks so I know what a cluster fuck that would be. It would be absolutely unmanageable. I’d wager there is no way in hell they are gonna do that.
I’m hopeful that an adult in the room is going to show how unworkable this is gonna be but who knows.
It would be absolutely unmanageable.
They probably know this, and are pushing it anyway - for the votes and the lobbyist backing. (most) voters don’t know how ridiculous it is from the technical perspective, and the lobbyists are only looking for their own financial advantages which often come from chaos.
an adult in the room
They’re all adults, just not adults who care what they break.
I hate how true this is….
I set up a VPS as a VPN server just for me. There’s sites have definitely done this. Reddit for one. I get cloudflare captchas a lot as well.
I travel a lot for work, and use a cell modem as my primary internet source. Even when I’m at home, I get cloudflare captchas and sites requiring 2fa all the time, since my IP changes constantly.
I’m in SC, but constantly get geolocated in GA, AL, and NC.
I put up a VPS with WireGuard on it just to allow me to always be in Seattle for banking and business sites that constantly require 2fa due to location changes.
Oh those legislators are two degrees away from something being broken, and it ain’t this dumbass law.
Utah flexing those evil Mormon muscles huh? Well get bent Utah and get fucked Mormons.
You’ve added an extra ‘m’ to a couple words there.
Me: Ormon uscles? Huh? … Oh right 😅
This from the people who elected a notorious pedophile, “thinking” that he would find the real pedophiles.
