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.””
I just connected my VPN through texas and tried to access.
Yep! Good thing I don’t live there.
Proton VPN and Mullvad are both great choices.
If you’re stupid and still pay for regular streaming services, mullvad gets blocked by things like netflix and disney plus. But Mullvad is great for privacy and great for games, especially P2P online games.
Don’t let salty losers dox you, use a VPN when you do PVP online
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think at this point pornhub knows lots of its users are children. Because when the Louisiana state government required them to also do this there was no push back from PH I live in LA and when ever you want to access the site it has you verify with ID. Them disableding their site completely in Texas is a way of trying to make sure other states don’t follow in the same direction. There are lots of privacy problems with storing peoples IDs but then also watch porn isn’t a necessity.
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.
In the Netherlands we have this app that could be used for it 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
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.
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.
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.
… 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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