Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility (eff.org)

I use VPN most of the time. My work requires it, and I like Mozilla VPN for personal privacy. (Note: it has ad blocking DNS built in which is nice!)

I occasionally get blocked by websites or services, especially streaming apps, if I'm on VPN. I suspect they're just looking out for Amazon/Microsoft/etc IP address blocks. It's very annoying

Folks would just host their own vpns various places and this would be pointless ….

No, it's not possible. You can only try to identify known protocols or suspicious patterns of data, timing or entropy. Theoretically, with a big enough collaboration, you could hide a VPN behind shaping traffic patterns and request order towards hundreds of different servers, and there's just no method of traffic analysis that can possibly identify that without prior knowledge.

Like, some firewalls try to identify an absence of connections outside the VPN, or an abnormal volume of data over a sustained period of time. But all that goes out the window when, say, you are connecting to hundreds of real servers at all times and only exchanging, say, basic HTTP requests with each one. For all they know you just have a million browser toolbars installed. They wouldn't know if the choice of request, order and timing encodes information because they wouldn't be able to prove what the client's intentions are in sending it or what the servers do with it.

If you tried to identify it, you would block every real connection.

I believe some VPN providers are beginning to play with things like this, but the problem is really that it's impossible to provide this. It only really works when you run it yourself, because that's the only way others don't know. So they're having to settle for compromises, like Mullvad's DAITA, which still uses a single server but tries to avoid showing tells of a VPN connection as opposed to something else like streaming.

So there is a route around censorship, but maybe the public doesn't really care about it.

I suppose Utah could impose some sort of strategy here, but would be so burdensome and anti-American I’m not sure they could pull it off. Instead of a blacklist of sites dictated by the site provider, you go the other way where all Utah ISPs maintain a whitelist of IPs permitted to Utah citizens. Any traffic attempting to reach a non-white listed IP, would be rejected.

The layer 2 and 3 of ISO/OSI stack does indeed "route around censorship". But the Internet as we know it is all Layer 7, and it's as centralized as it gets.

That's why regulators often aim straight at Layer 7 entities - companies providing consumer services over the web. Because no matter how unblockable the route between you and some server is, it doesn't mean anything when the server itself is refusing to talk to you.

Things China can't do: Magically "downgrade", "decrypt" or "intercept" the secure protocols we use every day like HTTPS. Facts won't budge, the technology we are using does what it says on the tin.

The Internet can't route around you being thrown off a tall building by men with guns, but the IETF has for some years considered it to be extremely important to design the network protocols to prevent these shenanigans. BCP # 188 "Pervasive Monitoring is An Attack"

> “I sometimes joke that we might as well turn the Ministry of Communications and the Supreme Council of Cyberspace into amusement parks, because they will no longer serve any purpose,” Hakami said.

https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/iran-official-says-starlink-...

To a large degree, most of the internet today is ultimately controlled by a few people. If what you have to say pisses off these people, and someone is determined to keep you off the internet, you have a problem. Kiwi Farms is a well known example, and continues to suffer under regular DDOS attacks. Regardless of how you feel about KF, it's undeniable that a) this nonsense has streissanded the site enormously and b) it's speech you don't like that needs protection.

Also there was the whole covid "misinformation" garbage fire... I certainly do not want my government or some megacorp to decide what can and can't say or read.

And going beyond the internet, I just want to remind you Americans, that your 1st amendment is almost unique (to my knowledge). Enjoy and protect your offensive, hateful, blasphemous, extremist, and deeply unpopular speech.

It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their laws. We make technology that completely nullifies their laws. They need to increase their tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end state is either a totalitarian government or an uncontrollable population.

I used to think that we'd find some kind of equilibrium along the way, that we'd eventually discover the government's limits: some principle they refuse to break, some line they refuse to cross...

But the truth is these tyrants have no limits whatsoever. They'll stop at nothing in their quest to control the flow of information.

Could you elaborate? What's "SNI", and how does it relate to censorship?

Doesn't help your arm, but when they're asking for things in that second category, it doesn't help them either.

https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20080714_RL33224_1e6b93...

This Utah law requires perfection.

  The law likely violates the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on passing laws that significantly burden businesses and people outside Utah’s borders.
  SB 73 burdens the rights of all internet users outside of Utah because it requires adult websites to either know every visiting user’s physical location, and then block those in Utah, or to verify every visitor’s age just in case they might be in Utah.

It's impossible to have perfect knowledge of the entire set of VPN exit node addresses.

| An individual is considered to be accessing the website from this state if the individual is actually located in the state, regardless of whether the individual is using a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to disguise or misrepresent the individual's geographic location to make it appear that the individual is accessing a website from a location outside this state.

But how can any site check if a client is a) a VPN client (typically this can be known because VPN exit node IPs can be learned), __and__ b) in Utah?

The impossibility lies in (b). Effectively this forces any affected companies having a nexus to the state of Utah to forbid VPN clients. I think that's a bit too far-reaching. It would be much more practicable instead to ask VPNs to disallow Utah client exits to affected sites w/o age checks -- VPN services aren't free, so VPNs basically can do age checks.

Given that this could have been written to be feasibly implemented, either this text was written to cause a controversy, or this text was written by people who don't know how things work. Either way, this text cannot be enforceable as written. The Utah legislature can easily modify this to be enforceable (see above), so it's not like a court striking this down might be playing partisan games just by striking it down.