“We need to ban VPNs! To protect the Children!”

Government small enough to fit in your bedroom.

People seem worried that this will be applied to everyone. In reality what's going to happen is websites will just block Utah.

This has been proven with the age requirements in quite a few places.

I guess the only way to do this is to only allow users from the location that has age checks. I think the governments really want to have an internet segregated by nation.

This has been posted a lot. GOOD LUCK.

Another law passed by those who are clueless about what they're doing!

How is this even supposed to work?

Typo in the title: it should say, In an attempt to not be tracked by everybody and every company Is why they are using VPNs.

Stop using those websites. If the business stops, someone will make a replacement.

How does one use a vpn without their ISP seeing it in the traffic? I assume you’d encapsulate it in a tunnel that looks like https.

Cool, so I can spin up a web crawler for the Utah gov site, route it through a VPN and let them fine themselves to oblivion?

Time to build up the darknet into the full place to be, rather than the dregs of the earth it is now.

Or build more off-net networks

The Internet really does threaten the people who are in power. They are currently realizing it and doing what they can to stop it. I just hope the Internet ends up winning. I used to be fairly optimistic about this in the mid-2010s when I hadn't been hearing very much from the copyright industry anymore... then, in the late 2010s, attacks on the free and open Internet really started to get serious. I wonder how much they will escalate.

Shouldn't there be some constitutional requirement, maybe under "due process" theory or otherwise, that US state laws cannot apply to anyone who has no way of knowing that they are even doing something (in this case: serving customers) in that state? Has anything similar been litigated before?

Cool, then people will eventually realize they can easily use VPS’s with OpenVPN or Wireguard tunnels, or they can roll their own tailscale network. We’ll stop seeing VPN ads on youtube and start receiving ads for VPS hosting services and vloggers will post instructional videos on how to bypass Utah’s and other state’s draconian laws soon enough.

USA really needs to replace the moron-class as their leaders.

I mean, even if the website detected a vpn, they don't know it came from Utah...

They can't know it came from Utah, that's the whole point of a VPN.

The only way to actually block it, is for Utah to go after ISPs services in Utah. And try to force them to ban VPNs on their end.

Demanding every fucking website worldwide block vpns isn't gonna work. You'd have to be completely and totally ignorant of technology to think this could even work...

Lmao. Fascist shithole becomes more fascist shithole. We are becoming the nation that propaganda told us china and Russia are not so long ago.

I don't get how this kind of law goes all the way into law. Yes, there are many tech illiterate old people making laws, and yes there are a lot of powerful tech billionaires lobbying, but still, are there really no roadblocks for them?

This law is unenforceable, and it's going to be abused by authorities.

Someone needs to sue every State/County/City of Utah website for not correctly detecting if a user is on a VPN.

Those building codes and property tax records are too sexy for minors.

Sigh...

That'll get beat down the first time they try to enforce it.

when I think of Utah I think of pedophile Mormons and white women who put mayonnaise on their tacos.

Not web sites. Service providers. They mean ISPs. They aren't holding pornhub liable if you use a VPN and are located in Utah.

The law is also technically flawed, given that it assumes that a web provider can reliably detect VPN traffic and determine a user’s true physical location — they can’t. IP reputation databases such as MaxMind and IP2Proxy can flag traffic from known datacenter IP ranges, but commercial VPN providers rotate addresses constantly, and residential VPN endpoints are largely indistinguishable from standard home connections. Autonomous System Number analysis can catch traffic originating from datacenter networks, but can’t identify a personal WireGuard tunnel running on a cloud VPS, for example, which routes through the same infrastructure as ordinary web hosting.