Pornhub has been blocked in almost all of the US South, as reported by 404media.co.
While age verification and identity checks have legitimate reasons, the outcome leaves us with less privacy, especially without robust data privacy and data protection rights. Data brokers continue to operate with minimal regulation, raising concerns about the privacy of individuals.
For instance, concerns about TikTok are less credible when they can obtain similar data from data brokers. Legislators should prioritize improving data protection before implementing these regulations.
This is less about age verification than it is about trying to learn who exactly is browsing the internet and where they go online and what they do and with whom they communicate.
I am putting it very mildly and is a 10,000 ft view of what I think and read is going on.
Incidentally - I believe VPN companies should now develop and release a functionality within its apps where you can select to connect to locations and specific states or regions within select countries where you have 100% open internet and none of such blocks. This doesn’t necessarily have to do with NSFW sites but other things too.
I can see an increase in VPN usage across the board. followed by a slow recognition by state governments and the subsequent pass of laws trying to implement deep packet inspection. My bet of the first to do that is on Texas ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It works, depending on how much money are you willing to spend. That’s how Egypt blocks a lot of content and detect journalist/activist movements, or Russia. More like a cat and mouse game but I see no reason, other than laziness, for US states, particularly those who have started this whole thing, to try and force as much as possible the de-anonymization of users now that a new, kinda vindictive, administration is looming.
Well, I don’t know what details you’re looking for. But here’s as far as I know/understand:
DPI on encrypted traffic is extremely difficult (impossible today as far as I know) to perform even by nation states. This will especially be true for Mullvad, Proton, and IVPN because they are well made, audited, well maintained, and stupendously run by experts using open source tech.
Read here about DAITA:
This feature makes it even more difficult or almost impossible (for all intents and purposes) for any entity to analyze your internet traffic, even encrypted.
Furthermore on why it’s difficult:
Strong Encryption: Modern VPNs use robust encryption ciphers like AES-256, which are computationally infeasible to break with current technology for general-purpose decryption. Think of it as trying to pick a lock with billions of possible combinations. Brute-force attacks would take an astronomical amount of time and computing power.
Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS): Many VPNs use PFS, which means that even if an encryption key is compromised, it cannot be used to decrypt past sessions. This significantly limits the impact of any potential key compromise.
Short Key Lifespan: Regularly changed session keys limit the time window any given session is open to attack.
In other words, nothing to worry about for now and the near future if you are using the right tool implemented in the right way on your well secured computer preferably running macOS or Linux (mainstream distros with mainstream DEs - Fedora, Pop, Mint are all great options).
What you said does happen but not because of or due to DPI on encrypted VPN traffic. There are many other ways nation states can simply track people including physically and through meta data from apps and services they may be using. Not to mention sophisticated zero day malware like Pegasus.
Also, they heavily block VPNs (and/or Tor) altogether because they can’t get inside the encrypted traffic (to perform DPI) so many are forced to not use one in some extreme cases. Ergo, the tracking.
Well yeah. I went almost to the deep end of the pool right away. DPI is way too costly just to tell if a teenager is doing teenager things. But the absolute deep end is to think they will use Pegasus on the same scenario lol. It’s cheaper to use active query and block anyone using a VPN trying to access pornhub, like many sites already do with Tor IPs.