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.””

    • @[email protected]
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      678 months ago

      Probably the politicians bought VPN stock just before this was ruled. Just like so many “randomly” happened to buy video conference stock just before the COVID lockdown?

      • @[email protected]
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        178 months ago

        I mean if you saw what was going on in Italy and had any clue about it, you’d have been smart and purchased it. There was a lockdown in Italy for like he saw it month before there was even talk of COVID coming to the states

  • @[email protected]
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    1088 months ago

    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.

    Same thing will happen when they ban Tiktok.

    Well done, You played yourself.

    • @[email protected]
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      558 months ago

      Definitely no shady VPNs run by white westerners though. Theyve all got impeccable morals through ans through. Glad you cleared that up.

      • @[email protected]
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        198 months ago

        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.

      • oce 🐆
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        138 months ago

        Reread the comment considering it’s taking the view point of a Republican in Texas who voted this law, it will make more sense.

      • @[email protected]
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        88 months ago

        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.

          • @[email protected]
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            58 months ago

            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.

            Hilarious. Wake up people.

            • @[email protected]
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              8 months ago

              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.

    • @[email protected]
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      148 months ago

      I dont think so, Texas finally solved the problem with porn, now nobody can watch it and everyones life (and children) are finally safe.

      /s

      • @[email protected]
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        268 months ago

        His argument is that the average person won’t know any better and will just take the first sponsored result for “free VPN” of Google

  • IninewCrow
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    858 months ago

    I’m sure the people who legislated all this into place were the first ones to access a VPN to get onto PornHub

  • @[email protected]
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    728 months ago

    At some point, Republicans will surely cross the line where their policies are so unpopular that people stop voting for them, right?

    • @[email protected]
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      398 months ago

      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.

      • Jackie's Fridge
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        248 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          168 months ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            8 months ago

            My candidate may not win, but damnit they will count my vote and know that I dissent.

            Which is the same exact reason I vote third party despite them mostly not winning.

            edit: keep downvoting me. I’m sure that will help convince me to vote for your team, just like the last 50 times it happened.

      • @[email protected]
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        18 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          28 months ago

          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.

    • billwashere
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      118 months ago

      Something something… Leopards … Face eating …

      I doubt it.

    • TheHarpyEagle
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      88 months ago

      They are trying their damndest with this and going after IVF, but so far it hasn’t moved the needle too much.

      • @[email protected]
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        8 months ago

        I am not associated with Mullvad VPN in any capacity and I have nothing to disclose, lol.

        Mullvad VPN doesn’t even offer a renewing subscription, that I know of, and I’m almost entirely certain that they used to and have since stopped doing so on principle. Their VPN service costs a little less than $5/month (USD) if you get their card off Amazon that’s good for a year, and that is literally a physical card sent through the mail—the kind you have to scratch off on the back to get to the number underneath, in other words—and so at least AFAIK, there’s no possible way for whichever unique card you happen to end up with, to ever be traced directly to that specific transaction on Amazon, even if you pay for it using your credit/debit card, and directly associate that purchase with your bank account in so doing. It’s even better than that if you pay them by means far less traceable to begin with, of course, and they make those options available as well. In fact, they prefer doing it that way as opposed to credit/debit card purchases, even of physical cards through Amazon, IIRC. At least AFAIK, they don’t even accept any form of payment directly traceable to a bank account on their own website, for every obvious reason.

        They actually do not keep logs like they claim not to, at least according to the one time they were ever affected by a search warrant, at which point it was discovered by law enforcement that said warrant in its entirety described information that did not exist because it never had.

        One thing I really like about (using) it, and I have no idea what other VPNs would also do something like this, if any: it sets up a SOCKS5 proxy for you internally, and you can use that anywhere that supports that, wherever you may need/want a killswitch properly—meaning to make said application unable to resolve hostnames in the event of your connection to the VPN being interrupted for some reason. I’m also pretty sure you can use their DNS-over-HTTPS no matter what, even if you don’t already use their VPN service. Anyway, especially if you already do, though, I always figure it’s never a bad idea to just use the same provider everywhere you can: use their encrypted DNS wherever possible, in addition to using the proxy provided by their VPN wherever possible, in addition to using their VPN anyway. I do that, and I also enable the setting (under Wireguard) to use multi-hop, which, albeit at the expense of some latency, even more thoroughly conceals my real external IP address from the ostensibly innocuous honeypots for people who are not lunatics of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, or whatever company doing business on that level of dystopia. It’s simply a technical matter that doing all of that will make nearly everything—excluding any/all abject OPSEC failure, browser fingerprinting, EXIF metadata, etc., which should go without saying—way more difficult to trace back to your real world identity than it otherwise would be. It has to be. I didn’t say “impossible” because I know better, and again, it’s never gonna protect anyone from themselves because it can’t. It’s good enough to be able to use the internet and also sleep, though, at least for me.

        It’s just so many consecutive layers of obfuscation contrary to the best interest of the boogeyman, especially for the price, that if I didn’t have immediate access to $60 in order to buy another year’s worth of Mullvad VPN, or immediate access to Mullvad VPN, I would literally beg and/or borrow, figuratively steal, or otherwise aquire.

    • Lemmy
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      8 months ago

      Wireguard is super fast compared to OpenVPN

        • @[email protected]
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          138 months ago

          It shouldn’t?

          I have wireguard on my phone 24/7 with no discernable battery difference

        • @[email protected]
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          28 months ago

          I had that with VPN unlimited, but now I use Nord VPN which is a lot less heavy on the battery.

    • @[email protected]
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      18 months ago

      A lot of my traffic goes to CDNs, and all of it is encrypted over https. Why should I pay for a vpn?

        • @[email protected]
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          28 months ago

          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.

  • @[email protected]
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      8 months ago

      To be fair, who gives a shit about age verification?

      I do not care what your child does on the Internet.

      • @[email protected]
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        258 months ago

        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?

    • @[email protected]
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      8 months ago

      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.

    • billwashere
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      78 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      48 months ago

      In the Netherlands we have this app that could be used for it https://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.

      • @[email protected]
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        38 months ago

        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

    • @[email protected]
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      48 months ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
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    278 months ago

    … 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!

  • Sagrotan
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    178 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      8 months ago

      ~~Whoa What the Fucking Shit! ~~

      2 people talking past each other, sounding ready for a fist fight. These people are scarry.

      Edit: I was wrong, feel free to downvote

    • Altima NEO
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      78 months ago

      The only Dallas Debbie is gonna be doing is Dallas, Oregon