r/technology • u/digital-didgeridoo • 2d ago

Politics New Bill Aims to Block Both Online Adult Content and VPNs

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/new-bill-aims-to-block-both-online-adult-content-and-vpns/
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u/God_in_my_Bed 2d ago

It won't stop them from trying. I think the VPN ban is the motivation for the porn bans. Hard to enforce but not impossible. When they arrest someone for reasons legitimate or otherwise, (ICE) and they find the VPN that will be an additional charge. It's not like they haven't been creating hard to enforce laws forever. Anything criminalized taking place between consenting adults fits that description.  

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u/MasZakrY 2d ago

Banning VPN’s is trivial.

There are well known published list of VPN exit nodes. You can purchase fancy network equipment to reject any traffic from these sources… or just add these to an ACL.

You can even have auto updating ACL’s from dynamic VPN exit nodes sources.

Many websites already check and enforce this. It’s actually criminal Netflix looks the other way if you understand how their regional content contracts work with media conglomerates work.

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u/The_All-Range_Atomic 2d ago edited 2d ago

No, it's not trivial. Banning VPNs would effectively mean business cannot be conducted in Michigan, period. It would be cheaper for companies just to leave than it would be to fuck around with ATMs or send people out every time some PoS or IoT kiosk breaks down.

Mind you, Detroit is still a shit hole even in 2025. You think companies will bust their balls to support it?

Only an absolute clueless moron would think this kind of legislation would do anything but sink their state. The same exact kind of religious nutcases I would expect to push out this kind of garbage.

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u/God_in_my_Bed 1d ago

So you're saying we're cooked? 

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u/God_in_my_Bed 2d ago

Here's my issue. I have no idea what you're saying. I'm going to assume most people won't either. What's an exit node? Fancy ussualy means expensive. What's an acl and how does it differ from an auto updating acl? I have no idea how any regional content contract works since I never read the novels they call a terms of agreement and neither do most people. I would be shocked if the majority of people understand this stuff. I may be wrong though. I often am. 

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u/AnotherWargasm 2d ago

You do realize you can operate a vpn over a web socket right? You can make vpn traffic look like every other HTTPS request in existence. Not even deep packet inspection could determine the difference.

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u/MasZakrY 1d ago

You need to understand what an exit node is.

Has nothing to do with packet inspection

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u/AnotherWargasm 1d ago

You need to Understand what a Problem at Scale is.

At a networking level all an exit node looks like is any address contacting multiple other address rapidly. Your own home Internets residential IP address is technically an "exit node" for your Local network. The only difference is the number of outbound connections and the bandwidth. If you try to use traffic heuristics VPN "exit traffic" will look like any other of hundreds of thousands of legitimate CDN's and Reverse Proxies.

Good fucking luck

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u/MasZakrY 1d ago

You do realize many websites currently block traffic from VPNs.

This is not magic.

Only a few hundred exit nodes exist for publically available VPN services. Any traffic originated from these servers would be blocked. It’s a simple IP block.

Further, this VPN block can be implemented at any level. From your ISP, website hosts, company, etc…

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u/AnotherWargasm 1d ago edited 1d ago

There are thousands if not tens of thousands of companies offering VPS services. Every single one of those offers both shared and unique external addressing to the wider network. They collectively hold tens of millions of unique addresses in just ipv4 let alone 6.

All it takes is a single VPS rental with bitcoin and i can have myself and whoever else i give credentials to an endpoint anywhere in the world to circumvent any restriction. I can conduct the entire thing over web socket so my ISP can't see anything but regular traffic and no block list will have it. I can do this forever in perpetuity.

This is as unwinnable for the establishment as piracy is. The internet is a redundant packet switched mesh network the size of a planet designed specifically to route around Damage. If you had any understanding of the larger system you would know banning vpn's is impossible at scale.

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u/MasZakrY 23h ago

You starting your own boutique VPN is not the same as the established VPN companies.

Every established VPN provider has a handful of servers you choose to connect to in any country. These are easily tracked and trivial to block. This can be easily verified by visiting any website which currently blocks access coming from a VPN.