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Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility

802 points · 405 comments · hn_acker

  1. usernomdeguerre · · focus · HN ↗
    >As we’ve said time and time again: the internet will always route around censorship.

    Is this still true, or has it become a truism? It seems nations like Iran and China (and events like Kashmir come to mind) have progressed the state-of-the-art and playbook to where we can't actually say it definitively will route around it.

    Now seeing that the US and EU are flirting with these similar restrictions it's making me wonder how we'll be able to keep hold of these principles.

    Maybe my concern with that adage is ultimately its passive voice, since it takes 'active' action by people to give us those options, and will probably take more actions by more people to keep it alive now.

    1. snohobro · · focus · HN ↗
      I’m pretty sure with Iran, and I assume other authoritarian nations, the state controls what traffic can and cannot leave their borders. When they go dark, they just effectively cut off access to the outside world entirely. Sure they may have their own state run servers that provide some services, but then they can inspect and manage all traffic being routed inside the country. Don’t have to try and find the VPN if there’s just no traffic.

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

      1. hn_acc1 · · focus · HN ↗
        We have a data center in Utah.. And I'm sure some of our customers are storing "adult" material.. Are we now banned?
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