YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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

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

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

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

Kinda.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's never been true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's technically impossible to both implement Utah's law and respect the constitution. To make it technically feasible you'd need to either change the constitution or federalize the law.

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

The law requires blocking all VPN access.

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

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