“The internet is built to, and will always, route around censorship. If Utah successfully hampers commercial VPN providers, motivated users will transition to non-commercial proxies, private tunnels through cloud services like AWS, or residential proxies that are virtually indistinguishable from standard home traffic. These workarounds will emerge within hours of the law taking effect. Meanwhile, the collateral damage will fall on businesses, journalists, and survivors of abuse who rely on commercial VPNs for essential data security.
These provisions won't stop a tech-savvy teenager, but they certainly will impact the privacy of every regular Utah resident who just wants to keep their data out of the hands of brokers or malicious actors.”
A nice idea in theory, but would you seriously argue that all the Internet censorship in several countries has been completely without effects? A law doesn't need to be impossible to circumvent to cause great damage.
It can, right. One effect’s directly listed (“the collateral damage will fall on businesses, journalists, and survivors of abuse who rely on commercial VPNs for essential data security.”)
I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone to read Cory Doctorow's novel Attack Surface and to think deeply about the message contained within. He has something significant to say, IMO, about the need for people like "us" (that is, people who care deeply about these issues) to use our knowledge, resources, skills, etc. to help effect changes in public policy through the legislative process as opposed to trying to "out tech the bad guys". And that's rooted, as I understood it, in an argument that you can't "out tech the bad guys" over the long run, because they (the US government and other nation states) can always just beat you on resources and volume.
Anyway, I hate trying to summarize that, because I'm afraid I'll mis-state things and fail to do it justice. Seriously, just read the book. It's worth it.
And if you don't want to read the book, a reasonable proxy might be to suggest "just donate some money to the EFF".
Couldn't agree more. "I'll just work around it because I know how to" is the hacker's version of "I'll just pay my way out of it because I can afford to".
I haven't gotten to that one yet, but it's on my list! Actually, Attack Surface was my first (and so far only) Cory Doctorow novel, but after reading it, I'm definitely game to dig into more of his oeuvre.
This is the next part of the national Orwellian surveillance system that is "age verification". The first part installs spyware in every operating system. The second part makes it illegal to work around it or find any alternative means of privacy. The final step is a government-mandated ID for logging into these devices with the OS controls, so the government can track everything you do on every device.
This is the most wildly dangerous threat to liberty in this nation's history. And yes I know that sounds weird, but it's true.
People got too comfortable with the idea of just turning on a VPN to get around various bans and thought it'd be a permanent solution. OS level ID verification laws are already being passed. Countries that are often preferred as being "free" and the VPN regions of choice for those with censored internet are now passing insane restrictions. The usefulness of VPNs is coming to an end pretty quickly, as well as anonymity entirely.
And any time this is ever mentioned, it's always responded to with "Good. Anonymity was bad and I'm glad to see it gone" from people too cowardly to stand for their beliefs and post a scan of their ID with their posts.
We (in the tech industry) did this to ourselves. The internet my kids have is very different than the internet I had in the 90s. Algorithmically optimized short form video or other content in an infinite scroll is hurting children so much it borders on abuse. They have no brain capability to resist the micro-dopamine hits we are so scientifically delivering to them. The biggest tragedy is that it hits the lower income kids the worst - the ones whose parents are around less often to monitor their device usage.
Parents and policy makers have noticed that their kids attention spans are lower, their ability to read and reason is lower, and most alarming their ability to socialize suffers. Of course they are going to try and stop it. Requiring age verification, and putting the onus on the social media sites seems like a way to do this. We are able to verify ages for all sorts of things online, e.g. gambling sites, opening bank accounts, etc. It shouldn't be too hard for social media sites to figure out how to require age verification to create an account that can access their service.
Part of the reason we had the internet we did when we were kids was because it was so new and open. It still is just as new and open! It's mostly that large sites have emerged, and people have decided they like those more than forums, etc.
I have no idea why tbh! But I think an age gated internet is far worse a solution than parents simply enabling device management on mobile phones and filtering on their home networks.
As hyperbolic as it stands, right to privacy should be an amendment. As long as the internet continues to be an integral part of banking, insurance, healthcare, education, (name anything vaguely personal) we can't allow free, unmonitored transit around it to be curtailed. Imagine losing your health insurance because the rightspeak of yesterday became the wrongspeak of today. It's insane people can't grasp this.
The fourth amendment is already what you're asking for.
Unfortunately, it was worded to address the privacy concerns of the time and the Supreme Court over the years has watered it down significantly, not the least of which has been to allow the warrantless purchase of personal information from corporations who collect it from their customers, regardless of their consent or knowledge.
Notwithstanding whether there's a chance at being ratified, we could update the fourth amendment to modernize it and counter bad Supreme Court rulings as well, but I'm afraid it's going to have to be a repeated process of touching it up from time to time in the face of bad actors in government who want to chip away at its protections.
As hyperbolic as it stands, right to privacy should be an amendment.
I don't think it's hyperbolic at all. I think this is something that absolutely must happen, and that it's pretty obvious that it must happen. But then again, I often cite Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four as the most influential book I've ever read in my life, so I'm not exactly unbiased.
None of the amendments but the second do anything in 2026, and exercising that one is now sufficient grounds to be held down and executed on the sidewalk by a group of masked bandits.
I've said this before, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47127261 But I think – a few true believers aside – these bills are part of a systematic, global push to put the internet genie back into the bottle. It's actually a very boring, humdrum type of "conspiracy" being done out in the open by vendors pandering to the state.
It's easier to have it laid out when it's the outgroup. Here are a few resources on the topic from The Atlantic Council, the NBER, US officials, and The Economist talking about China's push to "export" its "surveillance state."
Of course, it's easier to point at the out group than the in group; so what's left unsaid is that we're doing it too. Because the charade of saving the children is really about power. Real power. Karp-ian "scare enemies and on occasion kill them" power.
I wrote this in the context of the Discord ID fiasco; but I invite people to examine the why and how these systems are being implemented. For example, why Discord? Why Twitch? Why now? These platforms aren't actually that important. Not as much as messaging platforms like Telegram and Whatsapp. So why them?
I think it has something to do with Nepal and the global, persistent fears of another Arab spring.
Discord's goose was cooked when 20-somethings and teenagers used Discord to overthrow the Nepalese government and elect a new PM.
It used to be that superpowers would export arms and fighter jets to align other states with their interests. It's how superpowers turn their customers into client states.
In the modern world, the surveillance state is starting to fulfil that role. If you buy a surveillance state from the US or China, you are now dependent on updates, maintenance and upkeep from US and/or China. You are also directly uploading all of your intelligence data to the US and/or China. And there's – of course – the nice little ancillary benefit of state aligned contractors making a bit of dough on the side.
Age verification keeps popping up everywhere, because connecting online activity to IDs is essential for establishing ground truth. If it's truly about age verification, then why don't they ask people to verify with a credit card?
Adult entertainment services have been doing tacit age verification this way for a very long time now. Seems to work just fine. Yes, minors can get credit cards in the US, but they can be identified by the block / number.
These age verification systems could also have been a new zero-knowledge proof system; and only that zkp system. Or, ideally, the formerly libertarian tech industry could have banded together to tell the authorities to get bent.
But that's not what's happening. Instead, we're getting the rollout of very specific asks, via Discord's documentation,
If you choose Facial Age Estimation, you’ll be prompted to record a short video selfie of your face. The Facial Age Estimation technology runs entirely on your device in real time when you are performing the verification. That means that facial scans never leave your device, and Discord and vendors never receive it. We only get your age group.
They're getting the user to move the device laterally to extract facial structure. The "face scan" (how is that defined??) "never leaves the device," but that doesn't mean the biometric data isn't extracted and sent to their third-party supplier, k-Id.
Even if that data is hashed, as the human face can only be so many values, you can brute force it and establish exactly who the user is with the help of the trillions of other images people have been uploading everywhere.
For some reason, people are still stuck in a human-first world. They assume that as long as it's not an image or it's not the whole text; it's fine. It's not.
We're anthropomorphising machines. A machine doesn't need pictures; "a bunch of metadata" will do just fine.
Collectively, the public imagination is still stuck in the era where the surveillance state would have required tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.
As inference gets more efficient, these capabilities will only expand. And now suddenly, everyone gets a personalized Stasi LLM looking over their shoulder, forever.
I think an early version of this has already seen operational use in places like Dubai. There were recently stories about people getting arrested for photos they shared in private group chats:
People were running around in paranoia that their friends are snitching on them to the authorities, but the number of cases and distinct groups were too large and too foreign for it to be Emirati patriots leaking it. A bunch of british flight attendants are very unlikely Emirati patriots. Or any of these groups,
According to official figures released alongside the announcement, the 109 arrests form part of a broader enforcement campaign that has seen 189 individuals detained since the beginning of the conflict on February 28. Of those arrested, 67 are UAE nationals, while 122 are foreign residents or visitors representing 23 different nationalities. The largest groups among the foreign detainees include Indian nationals (31), Pakistani nationals (22), Filipino nationals (18), Egyptian nationals (14), and British nationals (9). The remaining 28 detainees come from a mix of other nationalities including Americans, Canadians, Australians, and various European and Asian passport holders.
I doubt folks from the Philippines are also feeling the Emirati nationalist fervor. Here's a more likely hypothesis,
Fact 2) They are clearly somehow identifying drone damage photos and videos shared in private chats and using that to arrest people.
But the Emirati population isn't that large. They import their labor. So I doubt they have humans going through the millions of messages that their system captures. Or, viewing these images and videos one at a time.
My hypothesis is that this is the first publicly recognizable case where a state actor has used a multi-modal model for mass surveillance.
I think models are being used to flag photos and conversations; and flagging them so that the senders can be imprisoned.
This is the future. That's what this is all about. The perfect watchers watching everyone everywhere forever. And yes, of course, it needs your ID.
IIUC Citizens United basically defended the freedom of people to donate anonymously to political campaigns. Do I have that wrong, or could you explain what liberties trampled by C.U. outweigh those it maintained?
IMO, this is one of the main strengths of the US: you have 50 different options to live according to your values and beliefs, and relatively little friction if you decide to move to a state that better reflects them.
People make tradeoffs when it comes to where to live. You can surely move, but that assumes you have the financial means (if finding a new job is possible for you and your partner, and your children aren't at a point in their lives where moving would be detrimental), the support system, the friend circles, the third spaces and accompanying social systems, the kind of nature and access to that nature that you've grown used to.
Yes, there are 50 states. But besides some superficial differences, they tend to cluster in terms of policy. So, as a state slides further towards one extreme, it's not easy to decide which straw will break the camel's back. Because it could always be worse elsewhere, and is it really worth the trouble?
I think people who aren’t or haven’t been poor often don’t realize that moving to another state — or even away from your hometown — is a privilege that is cost prohibitive for many Americans.
This is definitely something lost in an echo chamber like HN. Moving out of state is quite expensive. Most jobs do not provide moving expenses as a perk of the new job and receiving them shows just how privileged you are. For the foreseeable future the fuel costs of moving will also contribute to that expense making it worse. Some family connections make it very difficult for some to break away. For those that can, it is hard to understand.
That word "relatively" is doing a lot of work in this phrase. 50 options sounds great until you think about the realities of it. As someone who's moved around a half dozen times, shared "values and beliefs" pales in comparison to the practical concerns of jobs, family, climate.
A lot of people underestimate the effect of shared values and beliefs on their happiness, though, and would be better served by taking a lower-paying position to live in an area that fits their values better.
Right? That's a ludicrous assertion. Here's what's required to move somewhere else within the US:
1. Move.
At some point, you have to get a new driver's license in your new state and transfer your car registration there to use their license plate instead of your old state's. Those are "mechanical" paperwork transactions, though. You show up at the Department of Motor Vehicles with proof of your new address and they scowl at you and then issue the new one. You don't have to ask permission: so long as you meet the local requirements to do those things (like pass the local driving test, have a car that passes the appropriate inspections), and have the right paperwork (like proof of address, proof of ownership of the car, etc.), you'll get it. And that's the "hard" part.
I've moved between states multiple times. With the sole exception of car-related stuff, the only difference between moving between a different apartment in the same complex and moving across the country is that you have to pay your taxes somewhere different the next year.
> and relatively little friction if you decide to move to a state that better reflects them.
True when compared to emigrating to another country, which is much harder than most assume.
Moving is extremely disruptive if you have a lot of family and friends nearby, though. You go from having a huge community and social circle to almost nothing. Maybe some work friends to begin seeding a new social life, but everything has to be rebuilt.
This is why “if you don’t like it, you can leave” (the parent commenter didn’t claim this, I’m being it up separately) is not a good argument for tyrannical government decisions that get imposed on citizens of a location. They are invested in that place and have built lives there. Telling them to abandon it all and start over somewhere else is not a reasonable response. Some things have to be fought.
For context, states within 100mi of Salt Lake City are:
- Wyoming
- Idaho
100mi doesn't get you into the population center of either state. the western US is BIG, really you're talking like 1k miles to get anywhere that's meaningfully different from utah. Depending on where you live in utah, that might not get you out of the state either.
Colorado is 150 miles away as the crow flies, and Nevada is 120 miles.
It's true that both cases will get you to parts of the state that are probably more conservative than Salt Lake City, or in Nevada's case, have literally nothing there. But Boulder is about an 8 hour drive from Salt Lake City, and has a dramatically different culture and political climate. If you look at past instances of people fleeing political repression, most of them would be thrilled to be able to drive a day without crossing a national border and live in a completely different situation.
Also, how high are the chances that these two states will never pass similar laws?
As far as I can tell for similar laws (e.g. age verification), once one state moves ahead on some controversial issue and gets away with it at the Supreme Court level, others follow suit very quickly, and then your odds quickly go to 50:50 when you thought you were picking out the best of 50.
I hate slipper slope arguments, but the march to tyranny is a very shallow slope of ice. Tomorrow it's "move 100 miles." Next year it's "pay $100 for the exit toll." In 2030 it's "we only allow 100 people to exit per day."
Right, this doesn't work in sovereign nations, only in federalism where there's a federal government that can guarantee some minimal set of freedoms to everyone (like the freedom to move to another state without impediment). Otherwise you just get the Berlin Wall.
The fact that moving is looked at this way, rather than as a chance for transformation is one of the biggest reasons for the current day malaise. Intra-country movement is in most of the developed world at an all time low, yet it's one of the most straight forward ways to change your life.
Culturally, especially in the US, the idea of packing up your bags, going somewhere else, or even to a new frontier used to be a big part of its appeal even and national identity. This isn't in contrast to fighting for things, in fact people do neither and that's probably related because both involve a level of risk and starting over that's now entirely foreign.
Especially in a world that is changing as fast as ours does now not being able or unwilling to start new or reinvent yourself is a big problem. It was the internal superpower of the US compared to other countries that it had so many people who were just willing to go and build a city, or even a state or a new religion somewhere just for the sake of it.
As a Canadian citizen, this is one of the things I envy about the USA the most: having 50 different choices. There is currently a lot of tension in Canada between provinces like Alberta and Quebec which want very different things but are bound by the same set of laws. In Canada you are given some choice regarding geography (although the vast majority of population lives within 100km of the southern border, so in reality if you want to live in a city there isn’t much choice), but very little choice when it comes to laws and general governance.
I personally would love to live in a western state like oregon, arizona, or new mexico where I feel like there is an appropriate balance between freedom, geography, and government for my lifestyle.
There's also some double standards. If you walk from Ecuador to Texas, passing through the Darien Gap and one of your kids gets ripped into some river never to be seen again, finally showing up in El Paso to sleep under a bridge until the heat exhaustion goes away, then you are a glorious immigrant who put it all on the line to give your family a better life.
If you hitch-hike from California to Vermont while feeding your kids whatever rats and river water you can dredge up and then set up a tent in the forest until you can score a job at Dollar General, then you are an evil neglectful bastard and the state will be on your ass and take your kids away.
You might be better off actually moving countries if you are broke. Because for whatever reason it is better tolerated because you can just say you were broke and your children went through hard times because the last country was evil or something.
> you are a glorious immigrant who put it all on the line to give your family a better life
According to whom?
The immense hardship endured by migrants isn't a badge of glory, but the direct result of a global economic system designed to extract wealth from the global south to enrich the global north.
The current economic disparity between the United States and the countries to its south is not an accident. The wealth of the United States, like much of the Western Hemisphere, was built on a foundation of 500 years of ongoing theft—specifically through the colonization and theft of indigenous lands, and the mass kidnapping and wage theft of the Atlantic slave trade. The governments and agencies that now police the borders are institutions built on this stolen land.
The US imposition of NAFTA allowed heavily subsidized American agribusiness giants to flood the Mexican market with cheap corn, which decimated Mexican agricultural communities, drove small farmers off their land, and triggered massive waves of migration.
In Central America, the CIA sponsored the 1954 coup in Guatemala to overthrow a government that was attempting land reforms that threatened the profits of the American-owned United Fruit Company. The US government also heavily funded brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala that committed massacres and genocide against their own citizens. The US government effectively bankrolled the destruction of these countries, and then militarized its border to punish the survivors fleeing the devastation.
The migrant walking from Ecuador is not a "glorious immigrant" immune to state violence; they are treated as walking meat by human trafficking cartels and hunted by authorities.
Name a single case of a parent being prosecuted for negligence, or even having their children taken away by the state for the dangers endured in the Darien Gap. They are treated like kid gloves compared to how a US parent is treated if they exposed their children to such risks in moving. No one is claiming the US didn't fuck up South/Central America, your point there is a red herring (US also spent hundreds of years stealing from its own poor too, and especially the slaves who might be the ancestors of those looking to move, so join the club).
It's not that they haven't suffered risks and dangers and "500 years" of historical grudges. It's that the main risk a broke American parent has of moving their children while broke is that they're going to run afoul of negligence and abuse laws of the US that don't allow you to live in the rough while hopping freight trains or however broke people are crossing the continent. If your kids get ripped away in a river you are going to jail, if you're caught living in tents in the forest or desert then child services is going to be contacted. Immigrants get to bypass this on the way to the US -- if their children dies in a river in the Darien it either gets ignored by greater society or written in a news blurb about how brave and unfortunate they were (maybe alongside your sad story about NAFTA -- your sob story narrative makes my point). This means they can actually move while broke and they might actually be able to get away with it in the eyes of the state.
> relatively little friction if you decide to move to a state that better reflects them.
Yes, moving is possible, and easier than switching countries. But the biggest strength of the U.S. is not that people can move, but that the blast radius is contained. The strength is being able to think later "I'm glad we didn't try that everywhere at once." The strength is being able to experiment, not necessarily have states aligned to with all there residents needs within a certain threshold.
The problem is when some states get full of themselves and try to regulate wants to remove the right for local kids to see adult content by pushing complex, unmeetable requirements onto all 50 states. Texas wants to block the other 49 from sending Federally-legal medicines to Texas residents. In general, "small government" states spent a lot of time and effort making other states implement their local experiments.
If Utah wants a firewall, they can erect one at their borders. It's crazy of them to expect everyone else to do their work for them.
That and we can observe how certain policies play out. I used to be a big decriminalize drugs guy but watching it play out in a few states has had me rethink that idea. I haven't done a 180 or anything but it is something I'd be more cautious about implementing.
In theory yes, but it’s not applicable to the vast majority of people. You have to be musk or bezos to have that flexibility.
Even then as you see with the abortion ban, the folks on that side will not be satisfied without a federal level policy and they are just whittling away state by state.
>IMO, this is one of the main strengths of the US: you have 50 different options to live according to your values and beliefs, and relatively little friction if you decide to move to a state that better reflects them.
Also a weakness. Utah, one of the most stunningly beautiful states in the union, is completely under the grip of a regressive theocracy that has controlled nearly every aspect of life there for over a century. Really sucks.
I've visited various parts of Utah in the last year. It doesn't particularly reflect my life choices and I doubt I would ever move there. But their cultural values seem to have resulted in a prosperous state compared to most other Mountain West states (or even most Midwestern states).
I think it's also doing well re: reproductive rate. I expect it to continue be a thriving place for years to come.
IN addition to everything else said downstream of your comment, I want to point out that there is a recent trend of legislation quickly being introduced across several states at once, as evidenced by the rash of "social media" teen bans and such.
It is unrealistic for many to move states or live in their ideal state, but we don't even live in the "50 different options" world anymore.
Corporate and NGO interest groups are seeing to it that your politicians and journalists are controlled from the municipal to national levels. Tribal two-party politics has reduced our world to "red" and "blue" states, and plenty authoritarian legislation has bipartisan support.
You also can't just keep playing whack-a-mole and uprooting your entire life each time a state you considered safe suddenly introduces legislation you disagree with.
Some would even argue that it isn't very patriotic to flee a community and allow it to rot instead of participating in its liberation.
Additionally, some of these "50 different options" should not exist, and only exist because of US colonialism and economic exploitation.
That's true in principle, but there's a lot of people trapped in red states who in a practical sense don't have the means to leave. I'm privileged to not have to worry about that friction, but I never forget that others do.
The "red" people in blue states are opposed to the freedoms people in blue states have, while the "blue" people in red states are denied freedoms people in blue states have.
So, while people are "trapped" in blue states, they generally aren't suffering by being denied rights.
You seem to forget that those states tend to have rural (red) populations that get affected by the laws the larger population in the cities pass at the state level.
This is true. I just mean that moving becomes less hard if you earn more due to the general higher level of wages in your area near a big and prosperous city.
Sure, but that doesn't work if you're in the scenario we are talking about - red person in a rural part of a blue state. They will still have restricted income.
It usually takes the form of rules and regulations that are well-intentioned in a big city but make zero sense in a self-reliant community of 100 people that all know each other.
ADA regulations are good example, and also a common punching bag of the rural right in a blue state. Making sure everything is handicapped-accessible is important in a restaurant in San Francisco with a visitor pool of about 7 millions. It makes zero sense when it is the only restaurant in a town of 100, none of whom are disabled*. Nobody's available to build the necessary accommodations, and nobody's going to use them.
Gun regulations too. When you come in contact with thousands of people routinely and some of them might wish to kill you, limiting the ability to buy guns is important. When hunting and scaring off wild animals is a large part of your lifestyle, you can go a week without seeing another human, and the local police department takes 2 hours to get to you? Now you're just taking away essential tools for survival.
Not really. Show me a state that can tax corporate landlords or charge a fee for private equity owned 'anything'.
Show me a state that will invalidate the "mandatory arbitration" clauses and let me sue Google (in small claims court) if they lock me out of my account or falsely take down my video on copyright grounds. You won't find that because it's impossible.
There are minor differences between states, like gun or drug ownership. Or various tax levels. But that's about it.
Unfortunately the 10th amendment has been undermined by disingenuous readings of the commerce clause and other fuckery, and states and people have whatever scraps of power congress / the feds don't feel like asserting. If you don't like it, well, lol, the civil war established the states cannot check federal power by seceding and as we are witnessing the sky is rapidly becoming the limit.
There's still plenty of difference between e.g. Texas and California.
There ought to be some significant level of cohesion between constituent states in a federation (like the US or India) or even a confederation (like the EU or Switzerland), else the common market and the common law system won't be able to function. It should not be overdone though.
Sure but there’s also a constitution. And inhibiting speech and expression by attacking anonymity and privacy is a violation.
Of course, SCOTUS may not see it that way. But clearly this is an imposition of the age verification strategy in project 2025, which is meant to be an imposition of Christian religious values on everyone.
> When Utah's Senate Bill 73 goes into force on May 6, websites subject to the state's age verification law will be legally barred from explaining how to use a VPN to get around age restrictions.
This will definitely work. It sounds like it's time for some "How not to use a VPN" articles.
Because you also cannot counsel anyone on how to rob a house, or steal a car, or commit arson.
You can teach them how to start a fire, and fire safety rules for the home, and you can teach them how to secure their cars and point out common vulnerabilities, but you can't actually counsel people on how to commit a crime or do something illegal.
Well, you can and I guess that is your "free speech" but the judge is also going to show you the schedule of fines and penalties.
Sure. But that means you can't make it illegal for a site to show you what a VPN is, how to use it, and explain that one shouldn't use it to circumvent a law but could, right?
Picking a lock is not necessarily illegal. You could be a locksmith in training; you could be picking your own locks. You could be just in a lab or a classroom or a manufacturer that does this stuff.
It's a liability to businesses not to know who may physically be in Utah so they should probably ban together to exclude Utah from all networks. I.e. ISPs caught dealing with Utah should have their peering revoked.
Let Utah implement a ban and crash itself out. Real damage will discourage imitators far more effectively than any volume of reasoned argument. No pain, no gain!
On the other hand, in addition to this draconian (and almost certainly unconstitutional, not that that's worth much these days) law, we also have a legislature that absolutely refuses to do anything the people want.
Back in 2018, Utah voters forced Prop. 2, an initiative to legalize medical cannabis, onto the ballot. The ballot initiative passed with 52% of the vote and polled with even higher support. Nevertheless, the Utah legislature, who somehow always knows better than the voters, replaced Prop 2 with their own, heavily modified and far more restrictive version, HB 3001.https://ballotpedia.org/Utah_Proposition_2,_Medical_Marijuan...
Also in 2018, voters passed Prop 4, which created an independent redistricting commission to create fair maps. The Utah legislature promptly gutted the commission, passing HB200 in an attempt to continue creating heavily gerrymandered maps. Fortunately, the Utah supreme court ruled that the legislature had overstepped their constitutional authority with HB200 and required the legislature to draw new maps or accept those proposed by the committee. When they refused, a judge put one of the committee's maps in place. Utah Republicans have been whining about this ever since. They tried to run a petition of their own, but could only gather signatures through fraud and deceit, with many signers reporting that signature gatherers told them they were signing in support of the judge's ruling when the opposite was true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Utah_Proposition_4
And then, on the other hand, driven by Utah's highly conservative Mormon mono-culture, there is a rich and thriving counter-culture ready and waiting to accept folks who don't fit the standard mold.
"Subject to the state's age verification law" -- does that mean any site hosted by a Utah ISP? Any site with a server in Utah? The boundaries get hazier the more you think about them. The intertubes are a global thing, how they gonna enforce that?
The headline leaves much to be desired. It has nothing to do with actually banning VPNs. The rule is that age-restricted websites aren't allowed to help you figure out how to use a VPN.
I remember watching the news right after the C. Kirk event and listening to governor Cox refer to social media as "worse than a cancer"
I pretty much foresaw this and much more that very moment. Not that I think social media isn't partly carcinogenic or worse, but I think monopolies and censorship are worse. And sometimes, for best results, we must accept some bad with the good...
It does. Journalists are rarely experts on the field they are reporting on (see also: Gell Mann amnesia) so even though the article's author is speaking authoritatively, he has no experience in law, but an MFA. (See the "About Sam" section at: https://tech.yahoo.com/author/sam-chapman-engadget/).
A more truthful take would be something like "Utah is the latest state to pass yet another law that conflicts with the constitution and will not go into effect".
Ironically, inaccurate journalism is a side effect of the freedom of speech that the first amendment grants us, but the benefits far outweigh the downsides, even if it means you need to dig around for better journalistic sources.
> A more truthful take would be something like "Utah is the latest state to pass yet another law that conflicts with the constitution and will not go into effect".
The law will go into effect probably. It may be negated later.
Technically, unconstitutional laws stay on the books, but they are not enforceable.
You could say that they are in effect when the law becomes official, but for all practical purposes, the prohibition on describing what a VPN is or how to use it is unenforceable and not in effect.
Many unconstitutional laws were enforced before negated. And laws negated specifically and a law you hope will be negated are not equivalent.
To negate a law consumes money and time. They are practical purposes. Or you predicted Utah will try to enforce the law never? Chilling effects are effects. And a reasonable person would not call someone untruthful because they predicted differently.
The headline was sensational. The law takes effect was not.
It very well could. See the restriction of fictional adult material depicting fictional minors just because there is a theory of those fake materials contributing to viewers becoming predators in the future. Same sort of harm to children logic could be used here.
We use a VPN to enable remote users to access our internal network for things we don't want exposed to the public at large. And we're not a tech company.
This really sounds like someone who has no fucking clue trying to legislate away all the loopholes to their other shitty legislation.
These are aspirational laws. They pass them to try to force innovative enforcement measures. Same thing with NJ and smart guns, NYC and 3D printing, TX abortion meds, etc.
Perhaps your CEO has less political capital than Meta’s.
Story goes they need proof of humanity for their business (advertising) survive. Pesky things like the continuity of businesses they don’t own, that can be figured out later.
How it works in Russia, if your corporate VPN is blocked by mistake, you can just submit the application to whitelist it, providing all the necessary documentation (we have pretty advanced e-government system so you can submit it online), and with high probability it would be accepted. If your VPN gets accidentally blocked again, all you need is to write to an on-duty officer and it will be unblocked.
Dont they just pass a bill saying you can use the state audited VPN as provided by SecUTAH for remote access. Submit your business requirements for review and oh we also know all the keys for anti terror reasons.
> It's official: Utah is the U.S. state closest to banning VPNs
> The law, which takes effect May 6, doesn't make VPNs illegal — but it's a blow to your rights, even if you don't live in Utah.
> websites subject to the state's age verification law will be legally barred from explaining how to use a VPN to get around age restrictions. They'll also be liable for enforcing age verification for any user within Utah's physical borders — regardless of their apparent virtual location.
I don't think so. How do you think they can implement your third quote with substantially undermining VPNs? Do you know of other states closer to banning them, either directly or indirectly?
There are many comments here that are confused about what the bill actually says. Headline very much implies something about a law banning VPNs. But that's not what the headline really means. So it's misleading.
The headline suggests that Utah is moving in the direction of banning VPNs, and is closer than other states. I don't see anything misleading about that, especially when you see the enforcement piece would fundamentally gut VPNs if implemented.
Seems like the first part of that law would be struck down on First Amendment challenges.
Second would be technically impossible, or the responsibility of VPN providers to somehow forward geo-location information for website operators to consume.
The current iteration of the Supreme Court has made it pretty clear they're going to decide whatever partisan truth they want, and that pesky Bill of Rights will not stand in their way.
"Seems like the first part of that law would be struck down on First Amendment challenges."
Should be, but I wouldn't bet on it. We can see what states have been doing about "child sex abuse material" and arresting people for fictional stories, animations, etc on the theory that it might contribute to viewers becoming predators. It's disgusting stuff to even think about in this principled context, but it's wild that something fake is treated basically the same as the real thing. That's a lot of maybes and what-ifs resulting in child abuse convictions for something fictional. Might as well start up the pre-crime division.
Edit: Why do people disagree? Is it just because it is repulsive? Or is there an actual legal theory and material harm you are thinking about? If it's just "gross", isn't that the basis for many people's anti-gay stances, and how is this different?
I usually hate weird laws like that, and I hate giving the government more control in general, but... I'm having a hard time really freaking out about just being barred from websites being told not to tell their users... how to bypass the law. This would be bad in many scenarios.
The concern with this law is that it's constructed in such a way that the only way to comply may end up being for VPN providers to ban Utah. Though that's not the same as Utah banning VPNs since private VPNs would still work, for most users it would be since setting a private VPN up is beyond most people.
Plus the issue of compelling otherwise fully lawful speech around providing VPN instructions.
The law has a lot more stuff. I wonder what this part is all about:
> if a person suffers damages from a minor committing the same offense repeatedly on school grounds … the person may bring a cause of action against a parent or guardian with legal custody of the minor to recover costs and damages caused by the repeated offense … the court may waive part or all of the parent's or guardian's liability for costs or damages if the court finds … that the parent or guardian reported the minor's wrongful conduct to law enforcement after the parent or guardian knew of the minor's wrongful conduct.
And of course
> A person may not bring a cause of action against the state, an agency of the state, or a contracted provider of an agency of the state, under this section
I fail to see how making it illegal to tell people how to use a VPN isn't a blatant violation of the First Amendment, but I have a feeling the average Republican in my home state thinks Freedom of Speech only applies to them.
I assure you that the NSA has its own substantial backhaul infrastructure, so local policies don't really affect its operations in any way. I think Utah is just very politically receptive to the idea that citizens communications should be monitored. I guess sure, the NSA likes that position in general, but it doesn't really have anything to do with where they store the bits.
The current Supreme Court ?? I really doubt it will say these laws are illegal. They believe in "originalism", that means since the Internet did not exist in 1783, you have no rights to it and can be controlled in any manner the state of site owner sees fit.
That is not what "originalism" in regards to Constitutional interpretation means. An originalist will attempt to determine how a modern thing like the Internet would fit in to the original purpose of relevant parts of the Constitution. Something as broad as the "the Internet" falls into multiple areas. In regards to this story of the relevant area in the Constitution are the 1st and 4th amendments.
When the Bill of Rights was passed the purpose of those amendments was to restrict government action that may limit a person's ability to share ideas. I think that clearly makes anything that makes privacy online harder unconstitutional.
But, we also don't need the Supreme Court to weigh in on constitutionality. It is the responsibility of citizens to assert their Constitutional rights. That often looks like law suits against the State trying to infringe on our rights.
Too bad companies did not have 'ba*s' to block their sites from being accessed in Utah. If all companies did that, it would stop all these crazy laws instantly.
Where I live, one site I log into started asking for my birth date. That is in a State were age verification is not yet even being talked about. So my response is to never go to that site again. I believe it will change once users start dropping off that site.
I don’t understand how this is related. As I understand it, many of the websites affected by these laws did chose to blanket-ban those states from accessing them.
This VPN law is a weak attempt to claim that it’s not enough to geo-block people, similar to the UK governing bodies that are trying to go after websites that have geoblocked the UK because they don’t believe that’s sufficient.
From what I have heard, only porn and smaller sites did this. I am referring to facebook, twitter, blue sky, tiktoc and other such large sites. If those sites starts blocking States like Utah, you would see a big outcry and laws changing.
“The internet is built to, and will always, route around censorship. If Utah successfully hampers commercial VPN providers, motivated users will transition to non-commercial proxies, private tunnels through cloud services like AWS, or residential proxies that are virtually indistinguishable from standard home traffic. These workarounds will emerge within hours of the law taking effect. Meanwhile, the collateral damage will fall on businesses, journalists, and survivors of abuse who rely on commercial VPNs for essential data security.
These provisions won't stop a tech-savvy teenager, but they certainly will impact the privacy of every regular Utah resident who just wants to keep their data out of the hands of brokers or malicious actors.”
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulati... (incl. donation link)
Utah legislators should know the reason the EFF makes this statement is that it’s true.
A nice idea in theory, but would you seriously argue that all the Internet censorship in several countries has been completely without effects? A law doesn't need to be impossible to circumvent to cause great damage.
It can, right. One effect’s directly listed (“the collateral damage will fall on businesses, journalists, and survivors of abuse who rely on commercial VPNs for essential data security.”)
Perfect quote. Thanks for sharing it!
I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone to read Cory Doctorow's novel Attack Surface and to think deeply about the message contained within. He has something significant to say, IMO, about the need for people like "us" (that is, people who care deeply about these issues) to use our knowledge, resources, skills, etc. to help effect changes in public policy through the legislative process as opposed to trying to "out tech the bad guys". And that's rooted, as I understood it, in an argument that you can't "out tech the bad guys" over the long run, because they (the US government and other nation states) can always just beat you on resources and volume.
Anyway, I hate trying to summarize that, because I'm afraid I'll mis-state things and fail to do it justice. Seriously, just read the book. It's worth it.
And if you don't want to read the book, a reasonable proxy might be to suggest "just donate some money to the EFF".
Couldn't agree more. "I'll just work around it because I know how to" is the hacker's version of "I'll just pay my way out of it because I can afford to".
I felt the same way after reading "Little Brother".
I haven't gotten to that one yet, but it's on my list! Actually, Attack Surface was my first (and so far only) Cory Doctorow novel, but after reading it, I'm definitely game to dig into more of his oeuvre.
This is the next part of the national Orwellian surveillance system that is "age verification". The first part installs spyware in every operating system. The second part makes it illegal to work around it or find any alternative means of privacy. The final step is a government-mandated ID for logging into these devices with the OS controls, so the government can track everything you do on every device.
This is the most wildly dangerous threat to liberty in this nation's history. And yes I know that sounds weird, but it's true.
National is understating it. It's global.
People got too comfortable with the idea of just turning on a VPN to get around various bans and thought it'd be a permanent solution. OS level ID verification laws are already being passed. Countries that are often preferred as being "free" and the VPN regions of choice for those with censored internet are now passing insane restrictions. The usefulness of VPNs is coming to an end pretty quickly, as well as anonymity entirely.
And any time this is ever mentioned, it's always responded to with "Good. Anonymity was bad and I'm glad to see it gone" from people too cowardly to stand for their beliefs and post a scan of their ID with their posts.
We (in the tech industry) did this to ourselves. The internet my kids have is very different than the internet I had in the 90s. Algorithmically optimized short form video or other content in an infinite scroll is hurting children so much it borders on abuse. They have no brain capability to resist the micro-dopamine hits we are so scientifically delivering to them. The biggest tragedy is that it hits the lower income kids the worst - the ones whose parents are around less often to monitor their device usage.
Parents and policy makers have noticed that their kids attention spans are lower, their ability to read and reason is lower, and most alarming their ability to socialize suffers. Of course they are going to try and stop it. Requiring age verification, and putting the onus on the social media sites seems like a way to do this. We are able to verify ages for all sorts of things online, e.g. gambling sites, opening bank accounts, etc. It shouldn't be too hard for social media sites to figure out how to require age verification to create an account that can access their service.
Part of the reason we had the internet we did when we were kids was because it was so new and open. It still is just as new and open! It's mostly that large sites have emerged, and people have decided they like those more than forums, etc.
I have no idea why tbh! But I think an age gated internet is far worse a solution than parents simply enabling device management on mobile phones and filtering on their home networks.
As hyperbolic as it stands, right to privacy should be an amendment. As long as the internet continues to be an integral part of banking, insurance, healthcare, education, (name anything vaguely personal) we can't allow free, unmonitored transit around it to be curtailed. Imagine losing your health insurance because the rightspeak of yesterday became the wrongspeak of today. It's insane people can't grasp this.
The fourth amendment is already what you're asking for.
Unfortunately, it was worded to address the privacy concerns of the time and the Supreme Court over the years has watered it down significantly, not the least of which has been to allow the warrantless purchase of personal information from corporations who collect it from their customers, regardless of their consent or knowledge.
Notwithstanding whether there's a chance at being ratified, we could update the fourth amendment to modernize it and counter bad Supreme Court rulings as well, but I'm afraid it's going to have to be a repeated process of touching it up from time to time in the face of bad actors in government who want to chip away at its protections.
As hyperbolic as it stands, right to privacy should be an amendment.
I don't think it's hyperbolic at all. I think this is something that absolutely must happen, and that it's pretty obvious that it must happen. But then again, I often cite Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four as the most influential book I've ever read in my life, so I'm not exactly unbiased.
No amount of technology solves social, political, and ethical problems, unfortunately.
Absolutely agreed! We must show up and protest, via phone/email/social, and in person. Threatening to vote them out of office is our one card to play.
Thanks for laying this out. “The hill to die on“
Which in Utah might be a problem (or is it another state, I don't remember)
Hoo else could ya mean then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(geology) (beautiful state! see hoodoo pics)
Are you thinking of Kansas or Nebraska? Utah is famous for having big ass mountains that people ski on.
Kansas, but Google says the flattest is Florida (surprisingly - or maybe not)
From the outside, it's particularly ridiculous given your 1st Amendment and all. I hope the tide turns for you and everyone else.
None of the amendments but the second do anything in 2026, and exercising that one is now sufficient grounds to be held down and executed on the sidewalk by a group of masked bandits.
It's a major problem with no fix for it.
Doesn't even have to be OS, the infrastructure exists to lock it at a silicon to server level.
Yes, exactly.
I've said this before, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47127261 But I think – a few true believers aside – these bills are part of a systematic, global push to put the internet genie back into the bottle. It's actually a very boring, humdrum type of "conspiracy" being done out in the open by vendors pandering to the state.
It's easier to have it laid out when it's the outgroup. Here are a few resources on the topic from The Atlantic Council, the NBER, US officials, and The Economist talking about China's push to "export" its "surveillance state."
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/is...
https://www.economist.com/international/2025/11/13/chinas-cr...
https://www.chosun.com/english/world-en/2025/11/25/CPLM4FFKQ...
This paper talks about the numbers / shows the exports are occurring, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31676/w316...
Of course, it's easier to point at the out group than the in group; so what's left unsaid is that we're doing it too. Because the charade of saving the children is really about power. Real power. Karp-ian "scare enemies and on occasion kill them" power.
I wrote this in the context of the Discord ID fiasco; but I invite people to examine the why and how these systems are being implemented. For example, why Discord? Why Twitch? Why now? These platforms aren't actually that important. Not as much as messaging platforms like Telegram and Whatsapp. So why them?
I think it has something to do with Nepal and the global, persistent fears of another Arab spring.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/15/more-egalitarian-ho...
Discord's goose was cooked when 20-somethings and teenagers used Discord to overthrow the Nepalese government and elect a new PM.
It used to be that superpowers would export arms and fighter jets to align other states with their interests. It's how superpowers turn their customers into client states.
In the modern world, the surveillance state is starting to fulfil that role. If you buy a surveillance state from the US or China, you are now dependent on updates, maintenance and upkeep from US and/or China. You are also directly uploading all of your intelligence data to the US and/or China. And there's – of course – the nice little ancillary benefit of state aligned contractors making a bit of dough on the side.
Age verification keeps popping up everywhere, because connecting online activity to IDs is essential for establishing ground truth. If it's truly about age verification, then why don't they ask people to verify with a credit card?
Adult entertainment services have been doing tacit age verification this way for a very long time now. Seems to work just fine. Yes, minors can get credit cards in the US, but they can be identified by the block / number.
These age verification systems could also have been a new zero-knowledge proof system; and only that zkp system. Or, ideally, the formerly libertarian tech industry could have banded together to tell the authorities to get bent.
But that's not what's happening. Instead, we're getting the rollout of very specific asks, via Discord's documentation,
They're getting the user to move the device laterally to extract facial structure. The "face scan" (how is that defined??) "never leaves the device," but that doesn't mean the biometric data isn't extracted and sent to their third-party supplier, k-Id.Even if that data is hashed, as the human face can only be so many values, you can brute force it and establish exactly who the user is with the help of the trillions of other images people have been uploading everywhere.
For some reason, people are still stuck in a human-first world. They assume that as long as it's not an image or it's not the whole text; it's fine. It's not.
We're anthropomorphising machines. A machine doesn't need pictures; "a bunch of metadata" will do just fine.
Collectively, the public imagination is still stuck in the era where the surveillance state would have required tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.
Certain firms are already doing this for the US Gov, https://x.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351 / https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351
As inference gets more efficient, these capabilities will only expand. And now suddenly, everyone gets a personalized Stasi LLM looking over their shoulder, forever.
I think an early version of this has already seen operational use in places like Dubai. There were recently stories about people getting arrested for photos they shared in private group chats:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/03/31/expats-fle...
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15693741/Paranoid-Dub...
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15739739/airline-work...
People were running around in paranoia that their friends are snitching on them to the authorities, but the number of cases and distinct groups were too large and too foreign for it to be Emirati patriots leaking it. A bunch of british flight attendants are very unlikely Emirati patriots. Or any of these groups,
I doubt folks from the Philippines are also feeling the Emirati nationalist fervor. Here's a more likely hypothesis,Fact 1) We know the gulf states have access to Whatsapp messages, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/insight/dubai-police-use-what...
Fact 2) They are clearly somehow identifying drone damage photos and videos shared in private chats and using that to arrest people.
But the Emirati population isn't that large. They import their labor. So I doubt they have humans going through the millions of messages that their system captures. Or, viewing these images and videos one at a time.
My hypothesis is that this is the first publicly recognizable case where a state actor has used a multi-modal model for mass surveillance.
I think models are being used to flag photos and conversations; and flagging them so that the senders can be imprisoned.
This is the future. That's what this is all about. The perfect watchers watching everyone everywhere forever. And yes, of course, it needs your ID.
> This is the most wildly dangerous threat to liberty in this nation's history.
You better sit down before you look up “citizens united."
IIUC Citizens United basically defended the freedom of people to donate anonymously to political campaigns. Do I have that wrong, or could you explain what liberties trampled by C.U. outweigh those it maintained?
IMO, this is one of the main strengths of the US: you have 50 different options to live according to your values and beliefs, and relatively little friction if you decide to move to a state that better reflects them.
People make tradeoffs when it comes to where to live. You can surely move, but that assumes you have the financial means (if finding a new job is possible for you and your partner, and your children aren't at a point in their lives where moving would be detrimental), the support system, the friend circles, the third spaces and accompanying social systems, the kind of nature and access to that nature that you've grown used to.
Yes, there are 50 states. But besides some superficial differences, they tend to cluster in terms of policy. So, as a state slides further towards one extreme, it's not easy to decide which straw will break the camel's back. Because it could always be worse elsewhere, and is it really worth the trouble?
I think people who aren’t or haven’t been poor often don’t realize that moving to another state — or even away from your hometown — is a privilege that is cost prohibitive for many Americans.
This is definitely something lost in an echo chamber like HN. Moving out of state is quite expensive. Most jobs do not provide moving expenses as a perk of the new job and receiving them shows just how privileged you are. For the foreseeable future the fuel costs of moving will also contribute to that expense making it worse. Some family connections make it very difficult for some to break away. For those that can, it is hard to understand.
>relatively little friction
That word "relatively" is doing a lot of work in this phrase. 50 options sounds great until you think about the realities of it. As someone who's moved around a half dozen times, shared "values and beliefs" pales in comparison to the practical concerns of jobs, family, climate.
A lot of people underestimate the effect of shared values and beliefs on their happiness, though, and would be better served by taking a lower-paying position to live in an area that fits their values better.
Still easier to move country inside the EU, as an example.
What? That seems highly improbable. Moving to a different US state is pretty trivial.
Right? That's a ludicrous assertion. Here's what's required to move somewhere else within the US:
1. Move.
At some point, you have to get a new driver's license in your new state and transfer your car registration there to use their license plate instead of your old state's. Those are "mechanical" paperwork transactions, though. You show up at the Department of Motor Vehicles with proof of your new address and they scowl at you and then issue the new one. You don't have to ask permission: so long as you meet the local requirements to do those things (like pass the local driving test, have a car that passes the appropriate inspections), and have the right paperwork (like proof of address, proof of ownership of the car, etc.), you'll get it. And that's the "hard" part.
I've moved between states multiple times. With the sole exception of car-related stuff, the only difference between moving between a different apartment in the same complex and moving across the country is that you have to pay your taxes somewhere different the next year.
> and relatively little friction if you decide to move to a state that better reflects them.
True when compared to emigrating to another country, which is much harder than most assume.
Moving is extremely disruptive if you have a lot of family and friends nearby, though. You go from having a huge community and social circle to almost nothing. Maybe some work friends to begin seeding a new social life, but everything has to be rebuilt.
This is why “if you don’t like it, you can leave” (the parent commenter didn’t claim this, I’m being it up separately) is not a good argument for tyrannical government decisions that get imposed on citizens of a location. They are invested in that place and have built lives there. Telling them to abandon it all and start over somewhere else is not a reasonable response. Some things have to be fought.
Fair point, though I still think it's a pretty good backstop if the worst thing a tyrannical government can do to you is force you to move 100 miles.
For context, states within 100mi of Salt Lake City are:
- Wyoming
- Idaho
100mi doesn't get you into the population center of either state. the western US is BIG, really you're talking like 1k miles to get anywhere that's meaningfully different from utah. Depending on where you live in utah, that might not get you out of the state either.
Colorado is 150 miles away as the crow flies, and Nevada is 120 miles.
It's true that both cases will get you to parts of the state that are probably more conservative than Salt Lake City, or in Nevada's case, have literally nothing there. But Boulder is about an 8 hour drive from Salt Lake City, and has a dramatically different culture and political climate. If you look at past instances of people fleeing political repression, most of them would be thrilled to be able to drive a day without crossing a national border and live in a completely different situation.
Also, how high are the chances that these two states will never pass similar laws?
As far as I can tell for similar laws (e.g. age verification), once one state moves ahead on some controversial issue and gets away with it at the Supreme Court level, others follow suit very quickly, and then your odds quickly go to 50:50 when you thought you were picking out the best of 50.
Where are you moving to 100 miles from Salt Lake City?
I hate slipper slope arguments, but the march to tyranny is a very shallow slope of ice. Tomorrow it's "move 100 miles." Next year it's "pay $100 for the exit toll." In 2030 it's "we only allow 100 people to exit per day."
Right, this doesn't work in sovereign nations, only in federalism where there's a federal government that can guarantee some minimal set of freedoms to everyone (like the freedom to move to another state without impediment). Otherwise you just get the Berlin Wall.
The fact that moving is looked at this way, rather than as a chance for transformation is one of the biggest reasons for the current day malaise. Intra-country movement is in most of the developed world at an all time low, yet it's one of the most straight forward ways to change your life.
Culturally, especially in the US, the idea of packing up your bags, going somewhere else, or even to a new frontier used to be a big part of its appeal even and national identity. This isn't in contrast to fighting for things, in fact people do neither and that's probably related because both involve a level of risk and starting over that's now entirely foreign.
Especially in a world that is changing as fast as ours does now not being able or unwilling to start new or reinvent yourself is a big problem. It was the internal superpower of the US compared to other countries that it had so many people who were just willing to go and build a city, or even a state or a new religion somewhere just for the sake of it.
As a Canadian citizen, this is one of the things I envy about the USA the most: having 50 different choices. There is currently a lot of tension in Canada between provinces like Alberta and Quebec which want very different things but are bound by the same set of laws. In Canada you are given some choice regarding geography (although the vast majority of population lives within 100km of the southern border, so in reality if you want to live in a city there isn’t much choice), but very little choice when it comes to laws and general governance.
I personally would love to live in a western state like oregon, arizona, or new mexico where I feel like there is an appropriate balance between freedom, geography, and government for my lifestyle.
That mostly works when you're single and without any hard ties.
Uprooting a well grown tree isn't easy.
There's also some double standards. If you walk from Ecuador to Texas, passing through the Darien Gap and one of your kids gets ripped into some river never to be seen again, finally showing up in El Paso to sleep under a bridge until the heat exhaustion goes away, then you are a glorious immigrant who put it all on the line to give your family a better life.
If you hitch-hike from California to Vermont while feeding your kids whatever rats and river water you can dredge up and then set up a tent in the forest until you can score a job at Dollar General, then you are an evil neglectful bastard and the state will be on your ass and take your kids away.
You might be better off actually moving countries if you are broke. Because for whatever reason it is better tolerated because you can just say you were broke and your children went through hard times because the last country was evil or something.
> you are a glorious immigrant who put it all on the line to give your family a better life
According to whom?
The immense hardship endured by migrants isn't a badge of glory, but the direct result of a global economic system designed to extract wealth from the global south to enrich the global north.
The current economic disparity between the United States and the countries to its south is not an accident. The wealth of the United States, like much of the Western Hemisphere, was built on a foundation of 500 years of ongoing theft—specifically through the colonization and theft of indigenous lands, and the mass kidnapping and wage theft of the Atlantic slave trade. The governments and agencies that now police the borders are institutions built on this stolen land.
The US imposition of NAFTA allowed heavily subsidized American agribusiness giants to flood the Mexican market with cheap corn, which decimated Mexican agricultural communities, drove small farmers off their land, and triggered massive waves of migration.
In Central America, the CIA sponsored the 1954 coup in Guatemala to overthrow a government that was attempting land reforms that threatened the profits of the American-owned United Fruit Company. The US government also heavily funded brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala that committed massacres and genocide against their own citizens. The US government effectively bankrolled the destruction of these countries, and then militarized its border to punish the survivors fleeing the devastation.
The migrant walking from Ecuador is not a "glorious immigrant" immune to state violence; they are treated as walking meat by human trafficking cartels and hunted by authorities.
Name a single case of a parent being prosecuted for negligence, or even having their children taken away by the state for the dangers endured in the Darien Gap. They are treated like kid gloves compared to how a US parent is treated if they exposed their children to such risks in moving. No one is claiming the US didn't fuck up South/Central America, your point there is a red herring (US also spent hundreds of years stealing from its own poor too, and especially the slaves who might be the ancestors of those looking to move, so join the club).
It's not that they haven't suffered risks and dangers and "500 years" of historical grudges. It's that the main risk a broke American parent has of moving their children while broke is that they're going to run afoul of negligence and abuse laws of the US that don't allow you to live in the rough while hopping freight trains or however broke people are crossing the continent. If your kids get ripped away in a river you are going to jail, if you're caught living in tents in the forest or desert then child services is going to be contacted. Immigrants get to bypass this on the way to the US -- if their children dies in a river in the Darien it either gets ignored by greater society or written in a news blurb about how brave and unfortunate they were (maybe alongside your sad story about NAFTA -- your sob story narrative makes my point). This means they can actually move while broke and they might actually be able to get away with it in the eyes of the state.
> relatively little friction if you decide to move to a state that better reflects them.
Yes, moving is possible, and easier than switching countries. But the biggest strength of the U.S. is not that people can move, but that the blast radius is contained. The strength is being able to think later "I'm glad we didn't try that everywhere at once." The strength is being able to experiment, not necessarily have states aligned to with all there residents needs within a certain threshold.
All the states are passing these laws, as part of a coordinated billion-dollar lobbying campaign.
The problem is when some states get full of themselves and try to regulate wants to remove the right for local kids to see adult content by pushing complex, unmeetable requirements onto all 50 states. Texas wants to block the other 49 from sending Federally-legal medicines to Texas residents. In general, "small government" states spent a lot of time and effort making other states implement their local experiments.
If Utah wants a firewall, they can erect one at their borders. It's crazy of them to expect everyone else to do their work for them.
How's this any different than CA telling merchants across the country they can't ship in all manner of products?
That and we can observe how certain policies play out. I used to be a big decriminalize drugs guy but watching it play out in a few states has had me rethink that idea. I haven't done a 180 or anything but it is something I'd be more cautious about implementing.
In theory yes, but it’s not applicable to the vast majority of people. You have to be musk or bezos to have that flexibility.
Even then as you see with the abortion ban, the folks on that side will not be satisfied without a federal level policy and they are just whittling away state by state.
>IMO, this is one of the main strengths of the US: you have 50 different options to live according to your values and beliefs, and relatively little friction if you decide to move to a state that better reflects them.
Also a weakness. Utah, one of the most stunningly beautiful states in the union, is completely under the grip of a regressive theocracy that has controlled nearly every aspect of life there for over a century. Really sucks.
I've visited various parts of Utah in the last year. It doesn't particularly reflect my life choices and I doubt I would ever move there. But their cultural values seem to have resulted in a prosperous state compared to most other Mountain West states (or even most Midwestern states).
I think it's also doing well re: reproductive rate. I expect it to continue be a thriving place for years to come.
AFAIK only Swiss and USA have a real federal estate. Good thing.
What do you mean by real? Germany, Russia are federation, what makes them not real ones?
IN addition to everything else said downstream of your comment, I want to point out that there is a recent trend of legislation quickly being introduced across several states at once, as evidenced by the rash of "social media" teen bans and such.
It is unrealistic for many to move states or live in their ideal state, but we don't even live in the "50 different options" world anymore.
Corporate and NGO interest groups are seeing to it that your politicians and journalists are controlled from the municipal to national levels. Tribal two-party politics has reduced our world to "red" and "blue" states, and plenty authoritarian legislation has bipartisan support.
You also can't just keep playing whack-a-mole and uprooting your entire life each time a state you considered safe suddenly introduces legislation you disagree with.
Some would even argue that it isn't very patriotic to flee a community and allow it to rot instead of participating in its liberation.
Additionally, some of these "50 different options" should not exist, and only exist because of US colonialism and economic exploitation.
That's true in principle, but there's a lot of people trapped in red states who in a practical sense don't have the means to leave. I'm privileged to not have to worry about that friction, but I never forget that others do.
There are lots of people “trapped” in blue states too, if that is how you want to put it.
Yeah, but the trapping is far different.
The "red" people in blue states are opposed to the freedoms people in blue states have, while the "blue" people in red states are denied freedoms people in blue states have.
So, while people are "trapped" in blue states, they generally aren't suffering by being denied rights.
Blue states are mostly states with large coastal cities, and thus larger incomes.
You seem to forget that those states tend to have rural (red) populations that get affected by the laws the larger population in the cities pass at the state level.
This is true. I just mean that moving becomes less hard if you earn more due to the general higher level of wages in your area near a big and prosperous city.
Sure, but that doesn't work if you're in the scenario we are talking about - red person in a rural part of a blue state. They will still have restricted income.
I am trying to think of examples of blue state majorities oppressing rural populations.
Allowing gays to marry if they want, does that count as oppressing rural Christians?
It usually takes the form of rules and regulations that are well-intentioned in a big city but make zero sense in a self-reliant community of 100 people that all know each other.
ADA regulations are good example, and also a common punching bag of the rural right in a blue state. Making sure everything is handicapped-accessible is important in a restaurant in San Francisco with a visitor pool of about 7 millions. It makes zero sense when it is the only restaurant in a town of 100, none of whom are disabled*. Nobody's available to build the necessary accommodations, and nobody's going to use them.
Gun regulations too. When you come in contact with thousands of people routinely and some of them might wish to kill you, limiting the ability to buy guns is important. When hunting and scaring off wild animals is a large part of your lifestyle, you can go a week without seeing another human, and the local police department takes 2 hours to get to you? Now you're just taking away essential tools for survival.
If you actually want to look at this seriously, check out things like gun control, VA's redistricting, etc.
Not really. Show me a state that can tax corporate landlords or charge a fee for private equity owned 'anything'.
Show me a state that will invalidate the "mandatory arbitration" clauses and let me sue Google (in small claims court) if they lock me out of my account or falsely take down my video on copyright grounds. You won't find that because it's impossible.
There are minor differences between states, like gun or drug ownership. Or various tax levels. But that's about it.
Unfortunately the 10th amendment has been undermined by disingenuous readings of the commerce clause and other fuckery, and states and people have whatever scraps of power congress / the feds don't feel like asserting. If you don't like it, well, lol, the civil war established the states cannot check federal power by seceding and as we are witnessing the sky is rapidly becoming the limit.
There's still plenty of difference between e.g. Texas and California.
There ought to be some significant level of cohesion between constituent states in a federation (like the US or India) or even a confederation (like the EU or Switzerland), else the common market and the common law system won't be able to function. It should not be overdone though.
Sure but there’s also a constitution. And inhibiting speech and expression by attacking anonymity and privacy is a violation.
Of course, SCOTUS may not see it that way. But clearly this is an imposition of the age verification strategy in project 2025, which is meant to be an imposition of Christian religious values on everyone.
> When Utah's Senate Bill 73 goes into force on May 6, websites subject to the state's age verification law will be legally barred from explaining how to use a VPN to get around age restrictions.
This will definitely work. It sounds like it's time for some "How not to use a VPN" articles.
https://www.grapecollective.com/prohibitions-grape-bricks-ho...
How is this not a 1A violation?
It very likely is, but someone is going to have to pay lawyers tons of money and wait for years for it to go through the courts to stop it.
Time to go chuck a few bucks at the EFF...
Because you also cannot counsel anyone on how to rob a house, or steal a car, or commit arson.
You can teach them how to start a fire, and fire safety rules for the home, and you can teach them how to secure their cars and point out common vulnerabilities, but you can't actually counsel people on how to commit a crime or do something illegal.
Well, you can and I guess that is your "free speech" but the judge is also going to show you the schedule of fines and penalties.
Sure. But that means you can't make it illegal for a site to show you what a VPN is, how to use it, and explain that one shouldn't use it to circumvent a law but could, right?
yet there are plenty of sites with written or video instructions on how to pick a lock.
Picking a lock is not necessarily illegal. You could be a locksmith in training; you could be picking your own locks. You could be just in a lab or a classroom or a manufacturer that does this stuff.
You could even be a lawyer! https://www.youtube.com/@lockpickinglawyer
More seriously: what good an age restriction is if it can be circumvented by a VPN?
It's a liability to businesses not to know who may physically be in Utah so they should probably ban together to exclude Utah from all networks. I.e. ISPs caught dealing with Utah should have their peering revoked.
Let Utah implement a ban and crash itself out. Real damage will discourage imitators far more effectively than any volume of reasoned argument. No pain, no gain!
Living in Utah is so frustrating. On the one hand, we have a law that protects 'free range parenting': https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/03/2... as a parent, I genuinely appreciate this, especially when compared to stories from other HNers here of pearl-clutchers calling CPS for kids doing regular kid-stuff outside: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815127
On the other hand, in addition to this draconian (and almost certainly unconstitutional, not that that's worth much these days) law, we also have a legislature that absolutely refuses to do anything the people want.
Back in 2018, Utah voters forced Prop. 2, an initiative to legalize medical cannabis, onto the ballot. The ballot initiative passed with 52% of the vote and polled with even higher support. Nevertheless, the Utah legislature, who somehow always knows better than the voters, replaced Prop 2 with their own, heavily modified and far more restrictive version, HB 3001.https://ballotpedia.org/Utah_Proposition_2,_Medical_Marijuan...
Also in 2018, voters passed Prop 4, which created an independent redistricting commission to create fair maps. The Utah legislature promptly gutted the commission, passing HB200 in an attempt to continue creating heavily gerrymandered maps. Fortunately, the Utah supreme court ruled that the legislature had overstepped their constitutional authority with HB200 and required the legislature to draw new maps or accept those proposed by the committee. When they refused, a judge put one of the committee's maps in place. Utah Republicans have been whining about this ever since. They tried to run a petition of their own, but could only gather signatures through fraud and deceit, with many signers reporting that signature gatherers told them they were signing in support of the judge's ruling when the opposite was true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Utah_Proposition_4
And then, on the other hand, driven by Utah's highly conservative Mormon mono-culture, there is a rich and thriving counter-culture ready and waiting to accept folks who don't fit the standard mold.
The thriving counter-culture was a surprise when I visited several times last year.
"Subject to the state's age verification law" -- does that mean any site hosted by a Utah ISP? Any site with a server in Utah? The boundaries get hazier the more you think about them. The intertubes are a global thing, how they gonna enforce that?
How does this work with VPNing into work?
The headline leaves much to be desired. It has nothing to do with actually banning VPNs. The rule is that age-restricted websites aren't allowed to help you figure out how to use a VPN.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47997358
Speed running becoming Russia.
I remember watching the news right after the C. Kirk event and listening to governor Cox refer to social media as "worse than a cancer"
I pretty much foresaw this and much more that very moment. Not that I think social media isn't partly carcinogenic or worse, but I think monopolies and censorship are worse. And sometimes, for best results, we must accept some bad with the good...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
VPNs communicate via text.
Text is protected by first amendment.
Best of luck with your unconstitutional ban on speech.
"websites subject to the state's age verification law will be legally barred from explaining how to use a VPN to get around age restrictions"
I thought the US has free speech?
It does. Journalists are rarely experts on the field they are reporting on (see also: Gell Mann amnesia) so even though the article's author is speaking authoritatively, he has no experience in law, but an MFA. (See the "About Sam" section at: https://tech.yahoo.com/author/sam-chapman-engadget/).
A more truthful take would be something like "Utah is the latest state to pass yet another law that conflicts with the constitution and will not go into effect".
Ironically, inaccurate journalism is a side effect of the freedom of speech that the first amendment grants us, but the benefits far outweigh the downsides, even if it means you need to dig around for better journalistic sources.
> A more truthful take would be something like "Utah is the latest state to pass yet another law that conflicts with the constitution and will not go into effect".
The law will go into effect probably. It may be negated later.
Technically, unconstitutional laws stay on the books, but they are not enforceable.
You could say that they are in effect when the law becomes official, but for all practical purposes, the prohibition on describing what a VPN is or how to use it is unenforceable and not in effect.
Many unconstitutional laws were enforced before negated. And laws negated specifically and a law you hope will be negated are not equivalent.
To negate a law consumes money and time. They are practical purposes. Or you predicted Utah will try to enforce the law never? Chilling effects are effects. And a reasonable person would not call someone untruthful because they predicted differently.
The headline was sensational. The law takes effect was not.
It does. That isn’t going to survive judicial review.
It very well could. See the restriction of fictional adult material depicting fictional minors just because there is a theory of those fake materials contributing to viewers becoming predators in the future. Same sort of harm to children logic could be used here.
That's a very bold statement. What gives you the confidence to make it?
They have no valid reason to want to ban so - all illegal corporate laws. This is Palantir wanting to sniff after everyone.
Uh, that's not going to fly.
We use a VPN to enable remote users to access our internal network for things we don't want exposed to the public at large. And we're not a tech company.
This really sounds like someone who has no fucking clue trying to legislate away all the loopholes to their other shitty legislation.
I wonder if any of the lawmakers asked their IT how they work remotely before drafting any of this..
These are aspirational laws. They pass them to try to force innovative enforcement measures. Same thing with NJ and smart guns, NYC and 3D printing, TX abortion meds, etc.
Perhaps your CEO has less political capital than Meta’s.
Story goes they need proof of humanity for their business (advertising) survive. Pesky things like the continuity of businesses they don’t own, that can be figured out later.
How it works in Russia, if your corporate VPN is blocked by mistake, you can just submit the application to whitelist it, providing all the necessary documentation (we have pretty advanced e-government system so you can submit it online), and with high probability it would be accepted. If your VPN gets accidentally blocked again, all you need is to write to an on-duty officer and it will be unblocked.
> all you need is to write to an on-duty officer and it will be unblocked
What if the pretty advanced e-government system decides it will not be unblocked?
Not to defend the bill, but if I read the article right it only applies to websites subject to the state's age verification laws.
Dont they just pass a bill saying you can use the state audited VPN as provided by SecUTAH for remote access. Submit your business requirements for review and oh we also know all the keys for anti terror reasons.
> It's official: Utah is the U.S. state closest to banning VPNs
> The law, which takes effect May 6, doesn't make VPNs illegal — but it's a blow to your rights, even if you don't live in Utah.
> websites subject to the state's age verification law will be legally barred from explaining how to use a VPN to get around age restrictions. They'll also be liable for enforcing age verification for any user within Utah's physical borders — regardless of their apparent virtual location.
The title is disgustingly clickbaity.
Is that why this post is missing from the front page? But it doesn’t show flagged.
I don't think so. How do you think they can implement your third quote with substantially undermining VPNs? Do you know of other states closer to banning them, either directly or indirectly?
There are many comments here that are confused about what the bill actually says. Headline very much implies something about a law banning VPNs. But that's not what the headline really means. So it's misleading.
The headline suggests that Utah is moving in the direction of banning VPNs, and is closer than other states. I don't see anything misleading about that, especially when you see the enforcement piece would fundamentally gut VPNs if implemented.
Seems like the first part of that law would be struck down on First Amendment challenges.
Second would be technically impossible, or the responsibility of VPN providers to somehow forward geo-location information for website operators to consume.
The current iteration of the Supreme Court has made it pretty clear they're going to decide whatever partisan truth they want, and that pesky Bill of Rights will not stand in their way.
"Seems like the first part of that law would be struck down on First Amendment challenges."
Should be, but I wouldn't bet on it. We can see what states have been doing about "child sex abuse material" and arresting people for fictional stories, animations, etc on the theory that it might contribute to viewers becoming predators. It's disgusting stuff to even think about in this principled context, but it's wild that something fake is treated basically the same as the real thing. That's a lot of maybes and what-ifs resulting in child abuse convictions for something fictional. Might as well start up the pre-crime division.
Edit: Why do people disagree? Is it just because it is repulsive? Or is there an actual legal theory and material harm you are thinking about? If it's just "gross", isn't that the basis for many people's anti-gay stances, and how is this different?
I usually hate weird laws like that, and I hate giving the government more control in general, but... I'm having a hard time really freaking out about just being barred from websites being told not to tell their users... how to bypass the law. This would be bad in many scenarios.
Same category as banning HTTP links , it's an egregious violation of our natural free-speech rights.
The concern with this law is that it's constructed in such a way that the only way to comply may end up being for VPN providers to ban Utah. Though that's not the same as Utah banning VPNs since private VPNs would still work, for most users it would be since setting a private VPN up is beyond most people.
Plus the issue of compelling otherwise fully lawful speech around providing VPN instructions.
I'd be more concerned about the second part dealing with blocking. You'd have to undermine the tech to implement it.
The law has a lot more stuff. I wonder what this part is all about:
> if a person suffers damages from a minor committing the same offense repeatedly on school grounds … the person may bring a cause of action against a parent or guardian with legal custody of the minor to recover costs and damages caused by the repeated offense … the court may waive part or all of the parent's or guardian's liability for costs or damages if the court finds … that the parent or guardian reported the minor's wrongful conduct to law enforcement after the parent or guardian knew of the minor's wrongful conduct.
And of course
> A person may not bring a cause of action against the state, an agency of the state, or a contracted provider of an agency of the state, under this section
Is this standard stuff?
I fail to see how making it illegal to tell people how to use a VPN isn't a blatant violation of the First Amendment, but I have a feeling the average Republican in my home state thinks Freedom of Speech only applies to them.
This ban has got to be challenged in the Supreme Court for various reasons, not limited to the First Amendment and technological infeasibility.
It is quite the coincidence that the NSA has their datacenter in Utah.
I assure you that the NSA has its own substantial backhaul infrastructure, so local policies don't really affect its operations in any way. I think Utah is just very politically receptive to the idea that citizens communications should be monitored. I guess sure, the NSA likes that position in general, but it doesn't really have anything to do with where they store the bits.
It's because the mormons are squeaky clean and can be trusted to deal with state secrets. Intel agencies love them for this.
The current Supreme Court ?? I really doubt it will say these laws are illegal. They believe in "originalism", that means since the Internet did not exist in 1783, you have no rights to it and can be controlled in any manner the state of site owner sees fit.
That is not what "originalism" in regards to Constitutional interpretation means. An originalist will attempt to determine how a modern thing like the Internet would fit in to the original purpose of relevant parts of the Constitution. Something as broad as the "the Internet" falls into multiple areas. In regards to this story of the relevant area in the Constitution are the 1st and 4th amendments.
When the Bill of Rights was passed the purpose of those amendments was to restrict government action that may limit a person's ability to share ideas. I think that clearly makes anything that makes privacy online harder unconstitutional.
But, we also don't need the Supreme Court to weigh in on constitutionality. It is the responsibility of citizens to assert their Constitutional rights. That often looks like law suits against the State trying to infringe on our rights.
Too bad companies did not have 'ba*s' to block their sites from being accessed in Utah. If all companies did that, it would stop all these crazy laws instantly.
Where I live, one site I log into started asking for my birth date. That is in a State were age verification is not yet even being talked about. So my response is to never go to that site again. I believe it will change once users start dropping off that site.
I don’t understand how this is related. As I understand it, many of the websites affected by these laws did chose to blanket-ban those states from accessing them.
This VPN law is a weak attempt to claim that it’s not enough to geo-block people, similar to the UK governing bodies that are trying to go after websites that have geoblocked the UK because they don’t believe that’s sufficient.
From what I have heard, only porn and smaller sites did this. I am referring to facebook, twitter, blue sky, tiktoc and other such large sites. If those sites starts blocking States like Utah, you would see a big outcry and laws changing.
> 'ba*s'
Is this balls? You can curse here.
Surely it's 'barns'.
Could be bats.