The Supreme Court on June 27 upheld a Texas law requiring pornographic websites verify users are at least 18, in a case that pitted concerns about protecting minors against worries about violating the First Amendment rights of adults.

The court split 6-3 along ideologically grounds with the three liberal justices dissenting.

Eighteen other, largely conservative states have enacted similar laws in recent years as access toa growing cache of online pornography has exploded and the material has become more graphic.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      We’re a ways off from that, simply because VPNs have too much business utility.

      But we’re definitely moving in the direction of “Everyone who uses the internet has to show their ID first” as a means of tracking the bulk of retail web surfing.

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          18 hours ago

          Not if you’re just renting a server in a foreign country with different privacy laws and rolling your own VPN.

          Also some VPNs allow payment with cryptocurrency.

          Mullvad, for instance, accepts Monero, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Bitcoin Lightning.

            • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              17 hours ago

              True, but if you use a VPN and don’t use their DNS (and especially if you set up a recursive DNS server of your own) they have a lot less information about what you do online.

              • danA
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                15 hours ago

                don’t use their DNS

                As long as you use encrypted DNS, like DoH (DNS over HTTPS). Regular DNS is unencrypted, so the ISP can trivially collect data even if you use a custom recursive server (either your own or a public one like Cloudflare, Quad9, etc).

                Running a recursor on a VPS then querying it using DoH seems like a reasonable approach to me. I’ve got an AdGuard Home server on my home network that uses DoH for all upstream DNS queries, but I’m currently just using Quad9 rather than my own recursor.

        • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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          14 hours ago

          My ISP certainly doesn’t have my Social Security number. Why on earth would I give it to them? Why would they even ask for it?

    • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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      19 hours ago

      Probably going to see an uprise in things like lorawan or consumer-owned mesh networks.