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

802 points · 405 comments · hn_acker

  1. forshaper · · focus · HN ↗
    Can someone explain why it wouldn't work to have porn companies use only certain domains, and filter based on those domains, if people are so intent on blocking it?
    1. andrewflnr · · focus · HN ↗
      The smart version of this is that adult content providers send a header or something with every response that contains NSFW, and then you use parental controls on client devices to not show those responses. This even works for sites that show a mix of kid-friendly and adult content cough reddit cough. It offers fewer opportunities for general purpose censorship, though, so there's less interest.
      1. CamperBob2 · · focus · HN ↗
        NSFW where? Salt Lake City? New York City? Dubai? Turkmenistan?
        1. andrewflnr · · focus · HN ↗
          Haha, fair point, sort of. Probably as determined by the jurisdiction of the hosting servers, broadened a bit for error margin. But there's pretty broad overlap. The discrepancies are likely to be small. If they used the exact some logic that they currently use for age-gating, that would already be an improvement.

          The obvious enhancement is for the metadata to be a little more specific about the content, making it easier for them to just provide facts without making a judgment about whether the content is "appropriate" in any given jurisdiction/household/etc. Most obviously, we might want to treat medical images and historic art separately.

          1. simoncion · · focus · HN ↗
            > The obvious enhancement is for the metadata to be a little more specific about the content, making it easier for them to just provide facts without making a judgment about whether the content is "appropriate" in any given jurisdiction/household/etc.

            And because this mechanism would enable guardians to set up reasonably-effective automated censorship for the vulnerable humans in their care without requiring that they provide any information about those humans to any third parties, neither big "social media" companies nor the politicians into whose ears they whisper want anything to do with it.

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