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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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[–] 38 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (13 children)

So how do they plan on figuring out if any given user behind a VPN is in Utah?

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (9 children)

    Well while your isp can't see what you do when you use a vpn. They can see you use a vpn.

    So there is that. However you could use an isp that is not in utah

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

    That works from the ISP end, but this legislation makes websites themselves accountable. Even if it was about ISPs, as you said they can't see what you're doing to stop it and there's too many use cases for VPNs to just block the protocols outright.

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

    They can see you use a vpn.

    How? Deep package inspection?

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (5 children)

    There are known IP ranges for some VPN services. Plus even if they don't have that, they can see that all your traffic is going to one IP address and can guess/assume it's a VPN.

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

    they can see that all your traffic is going to one IP address and can guess/assume it’s a VPN

    Umm... What?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (3 children)

    Like with phone carriers, ISPs can see the numbers (IPs) you are connecting to. If you use a VPN, you're always connecting to the same IP, which is unusual from a regular user perspective and would tend to indicate VPN usage.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

    If you use a VPN, you’re always connecting to the same IP

    No, you're not. A VPN provider can have hundreds of thousands of IP:s.

    which is unusual

    OK, but not unheard of. And even a dynamic IP might remain the same for months, if not years, depending on the operator.

    would tend to indicate VPN usage

    No, it wouldn't.

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

    Congrats on technically understanding how a VPN can work while completely misunderstanding how most public ones work in practice!

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    You keep telling yourself that.

    Sure, there are some specialized anonymity-focused VPN providers that only have a few IP addresses in order to have as many users behind each IP as possible, but that's definitely not "most public ones".

    Here's the IP addresses I got from my provider just by reconnecting the VPN three times without even changing my virtual location:

    It's weird how eagerly people speaking completely out of their asses tend to double down when called out. Even if that would have been true, your original claim still would not work at all.

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