A proposed bill in Michigan has a broad reach that covers everything from adult AI content to manga and even depictions of transgender people. It includes a VPN ban to avoid workarounds.
On Sept. 11, Michigan Republican representatives proposed far-reaching legislation banning adult internet content.
The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people. It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.
The Anticorruption of Public Morals Act has not passed the Michigan House of Representatives committee nor been voted on by the Michigan Senate, and it’s not clear how much support the bill currently has beyond the six Republican representatives who have proposed it.
TL;DR: 6 Republicans in Michigan proposed a bill that won’t pass, as the Senate and Governor are Democrats.
Even if the entire state government were Republican, it wouldn’t pass. This bill is basically the definition of governmental virtue signaling
Businesses require VPNs to function. Banning them would decimate Michigan’s economy. The only thing these people truly value is money
Whether or not its realistic or functional has no real impact on a bill passing.
This is about power. It could easily pass with this regime
Businesses require VPNs to function. Banning them would decimate Michigan’s economy. The only thing these people truly value is money
I mean it’s not hard to see them carve out an exception for business uses, and allow them only on business-grade ISP plans. Tech won’t stump these people because they don’t care about it, when they can just force the people to play along.
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That’s one hell of a misleading headline. It should read ”Michigan Republicans Introduced a Bill…”
If it’s something shitty that the government is doing you can be assured, it’s a republican.
Except in the UK where the government is on the left. This seems to be one situation where both the right and the left are universally looking to screw over their citizens and there has to be some way we can stop it.
Wait until they find out that HTTPS traffic is encrypted
Don’t be naive and think they can’t block this stuff because of encryption. They just go after the business entities. Eventually you’ll only be left with super sketchy options that they’ll try to block by IP.
They probably won’t totally succeed, but they can make things far shitter than they are.
They can just make it a legal requirement to allow MITM, like Kazakhstan tried doing back in 2015. If every ISP requires you to have this cert installed before you can go online, you don’t have many options.
A middlebox can’t see the actual content but they know what sites you are visiting and how often if you are only using HTTPS - meaning they can also block you from accessing sites of their choosing
Huh.
So the UK has previously failed to block encryption. And somehow the Online Safety Act got pushed through to PrOtEcT ThE ChiLDrEn - requiring age verification for all adult content.
Resulting in a study by ministers on how VPNs stop OfCom from enforcing the OSA.
Which is a thing VPNs do. So it’s very likely VPNs get de-anonymised, regulated or outlawed.Seems like there is a war on the actual internet, owning device and services.
Why don’t they licence IP addresses? Require a change to IPv6 and just assign everyone a IPv6/48 block at birth. That means there are 281 billion birth assignments available, with everyone getting septillions of personal addresses - actually more than you could provision in a vibe coded k8s manifest.
If there are 200 million births per year (it’s apparently 135 million atm), thats well over 1000 years before we run out of IPv6/48 blocks (1400 years, to be slightly more accurate. At a constant 135m births per year, thats 2000 years. But conservatively, 1000 years before we reuse IPv6/48 blocks… If we don’t reduce the block size to represent year born or something)
Fuck.
The good internet is gone. The convenient internet is fading fast.Reading the bill, it’s pretty insane. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to ban pretty much all sexual content and all depictions of cross dressing, along with proxies and VPNs. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t show Monty Python, because they occasionally cross dress in their sketches.
Anticorruption of Public Morals Act. The name alone screams overreach.
But don’t you dare tell an American to rise up against this. They are so busy campaigning the next election, they don’t have the time and finance to insurrect.
So enjoy your Syrian internet.
Friendship with VPN has ended.
New best friend is Proxy Server.
Can’t catch me, FBI-man. I’m behind 7 proxies.
So how to evade a VPN ban?
TOR, I2P, tunnel via SSH, or any number of techs that tunnel VPN via HTTPS.
Wireguard recently released an update to enable VPNs via QUIC. QUIC is the transport layer of HTTP/3. So VPNs would be indistinguishable from HTTPS traffic, unless the filters had the root certificates to decode/intercept the traffic.It’s the root certificates that are the weakest spot, IMO.
When governments start attacking the globally trusted root certificates, we will be back to the 20th century of word-of-mouth (IE, sharing) root CAs that can actually be trusted, and will need to keep an eye on canary posts or whatever to know when those root CAs have been compromised.
Isn’t this similar to what the Brits are implementing?
Yes.
BREAKING NEWS: It’s time to jump ship
I did not see that coming.
