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Utah first state to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs — law goes into effect, designed to prevent bypassing age checks (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 23 points 6 months ago (11 children)

Easy solution: stick your website behind a CDN.

I would say the easy solution is to stop serving content to residents of the state

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  • [–] 24 points 6 months ago (10 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    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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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    You can still request Geolocation and if the computer has a prior record w/o IP, you can get a location up the chain.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago

    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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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    I also use that, and it's just all over the place.
    I've had issues with my carrier, so I just used foreign SIM in roaming for a while. €11 for 40GB is not that bad.

    And then I found I can't purchase a train ticket. For some reason, ZSSK (Slovakian passenger railway company) blocked IPs of Lifecell (Ukrainian MNO), but was fine with IP from RackNerd (Virginia).

    Oh, and the university I am at blocks IPs from "3rd world countries", the result of which was that Asburn, Virginia is fine, but somehow New York is a 3rd world country.
    Their instructions say to use any EU-based VPN.

    OneDrive uploads would only work for me over Mullvad without crashing.

    I also had Reddit block Czech T-Mobile IPs.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    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.

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