RetroFed
Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs
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The original was posted on /r/hackernews by /u/HNMod on 2026-05-03 15:29:58+00:00.
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Cool, so I can spin up a web crawler for the Utah gov site, route it through a VPN and let them fine themselves to oblivion?
It’s websites that are supposed to be inaccessible by children within Utah that the law would affect. Not sure if the Utah government website has any 18+ pages.
If the premise is to prevent Utah kids from accessing things then good luck enforcing those extraterritorial fines, or if you try and fine sites daft enough to be hosting their site in a place like Utah, it’ll take a whole couple minutes to move.
Either way this comes out as theatrics at best, and losing money in top of it with pointless litigation or chasing away tax and service paying businesses
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I imagine they will have conservative activists use VPNs to access these websites, and then pass that information onto law enforcement, who will then use that to try and bankrupt said websites and services.
They’re not intending to prove anything. The goal is to put the burden of risk on websites, to force them to just block VPNs completely. Even if it’s unlikely that a VPN user will get unmasked as being underage, the risk of being liable if it does happen will (in theory) be too great for them to ignore.
smegTime to build up the darknet into the full place to be, rather than the dregs of the earth it is now.
Or build more off-net networks
ORbituarythis has been on my mind a lot. we have the means; it’s just used by bottom feeders.
nymnympseudonymCame here to say this.
It’s so damn easy to put a .onion alongside any website. Everyone should do it. And watch these lawmakers’ heads explode.
TheMadCodgerActually, how does one put up a .onion?
https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/setup/
- have a website
- install tor
- edit torrc
- restart tor
For super extra fun, make a vanity .onion
Fediverse-over-reticulum-over-whatever would be good too, but i didn’t look too much at reticulum, but it seems good for this
schnurritoThe Internet really does threaten the people who are in power. They are currently realizing it and doing what they can to stop it. I just hope the Internet ends up winning. I used to be fairly optimistic about this in the mid-2010s when I hadn’t been hearing very much from the copyright industry anymore… then, in the late 2010s, attacks on the free and open Internet really started to get serious. I wonder how much they will escalate.
Shouldn’t there be some constitutional requirement, maybe under “due process” theory or otherwise, that US state laws cannot apply to anyone who has no way of knowing that they are even doing something (in this case: serving customers) in that state? Has anything similar been litigated before?
Cool, then people will eventually realize they can easily use VPS’s with OpenVPN or Wireguard tunnels, or they can roll their own tailscale network. We’ll stop seeing VPN ads on youtube and start receiving ads for VPS hosting services and vloggers will post instructional videos on how to bypass Utah’s and other state’s draconian laws soon enough.
cheeseburgerUSA really needs to replace the moron-class as their leaders.
I mean, even if the website detected a vpn, they don’t know it came from Utah…
They can’t know it came from Utah, that’s the whole point of a VPN.
The only way to actually block it, is for Utah to go after ISPs services in Utah. And try to force them to ban VPNs on their end.
Demanding every fucking website worldwide block vpns isn’t gonna work. You’d have to be completely and totally ignorant of technology to think this could even work…
thatsnothowyoudoitMost websites are voluntarily blocking VPNs. Reddit, cesspool that it often is, is one of them. I recently bumped into some sites that help sail the high seas blocking VPNs, which was rich.
So while I agree with your broader sentiment, I think many sites will just find themselves blocking VPNs for reasons other than laws or age verification bypass attempts.
That it looks like they’re complying with idiotic legislature is simply a side effect of pursuing other goals/ends.
So while I agree with your broader sentiment, I think many sites will just find themselves blocking VPNs for reasons other than laws or age verification bypass attempts.
It’s porn…
People hide even the most vanilla porn…
Banning vpns worldwide will never be done by porn companies, definitely not to keep Utah happy.
completely and totally ignorant of technology to think this could even work…
You have to be naive to believe that it doesn’t work.
It’s the same as in China, you can do everything as long as it doesn’t turn into a mass movement.
They don’t have the intention to block every website. It’s enough that they can find a teen from Utah on a VPN for any popular site. That allows them to shut down any service at any time if necessary. Only way out is a full identity verification which is enough to control any uprising.
quick_snailVPNs are not illegal. And they never will be
What they can do is make it illegal “for the purposes of bypassing age restrictions”
And that process looks like locking you in a cage and torturing you for a year (in the process you loose your job and home and possessions) while you wait for trial, which you have to pay your life savings on
Lmao. Fascist shithole becomes more fascist shithole. We are becoming the nation that propaganda told us china and Russia are not so long ago.
I don’t get how this kind of law goes all the way into law. Yes, there are many tech illiterate old people making laws, and yes there are a lot of powerful tech billionaires lobbying, but still, are there really no roadblocks for them?
This law is unenforceable, and it’s going to be abused by authorities.
Someone needs to sue every State/County/City of Utah website for not correctly detecting if a user is on a VPN.
Those building codes and property tax records are too sexy for minors.
TropicalDingdongThat’ll get beat down the first time they try to enforce it.
By “beat down” you mean that they’ll just drop the charges after putting somone in a cage and torturing them for months or years?
TacoButtPlugwhen I think of Utah I think of pedophile Mormons and white women who put mayonnaise on their tacos.
Not web sites. Service providers. They mean ISPs. They aren’t holding pornhub liable if you use a VPN and are located in Utah.
The law is also technically flawed, given that it assumes that a web provider can reliably detect VPN traffic and determine a user’s true physical location — they can’t. IP reputation databases such as MaxMind and IP2Proxy can flag traffic from known datacenter IP ranges, but commercial VPN providers rotate addresses constantly, and residential VPN endpoints are largely indistinguishable from standard home connections. Autonomous System Number analysis can catch traffic originating from datacenter networks, but can’t identify a personal WireGuard tunnel running on a cloud VPS, for example, which routes through the same infrastructure as ordinary web hosting.
FuglyDuck“We need to ban VPNs! To protect the Children!”
Government small enough to fit in your bedroom.
SeductiveTortoiseNot only into the bedroom, they even fit into your panties 💖
People seem worried that this will be applied to everyone. In reality what’s going to happen is websites will just block Utah.
This has been proven with the age requirements in quite a few places.
The new law basically says “We don’t care where the user appears to be from, you have to assume they are from Utah”. Blocking Utah doesn’t help.
CorkyskogThis has been posted a lot. GOOD LUCK.
Another law passed by those who are clueless about what they’re doing!
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Nah, that just serves the anti privacy groups that are funding these efforts. Instead make a law that everyone must use a VPN, and you are liable for not using one.
I guess the only way to do this is to only allow users from the location that has age checks. I think the governments really want to have an internet segregated by nation.
Typo in the title: it should say, In an attempt to not be tracked by everybody and every company Is why they are using VPNs.
How does one use a vpn without their ISP seeing it in the traffic? I assume you’d encapsulate it in a tunnel that looks like https.
TiralYes. They’re passing laws they don’t understand. I’m surprised they didn’t randomly toss in NFT, Bitcoin, and Blockchain as buzz words.
Depending on the VPN type it appears like a completely different type of traffic. GRE and ESP are different types of IP traffic (layer 3). WireGuard uses encrypted tunnels by encapsulating IP packets over UDP so it would be a little less obvious. There are VPNs that make all traffic look like SSL traffic but those are generally less secure. You could probably double up and create a separate encapsulated encrypted traffic stream inside the SSL but that’s a shit ton of overhead.
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