I'd love to see how the banning of VPNs interferes with businesses lmao. I work for an MSP and like all of our clients have VPNs for business critical stuff.
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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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.
Any law that contains the word "morals" or "morality" in the title terrifies me. They 100% of the time are a net negative for society.
Especially when morals vary and are just someone's opinion. Morals should only be involved when it's based on the most popular opinion. Moral laws should 100% be voted on by the people not just some old people that are out of touch with society.
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
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Porn for me but not for thee.
Ironic that the party of fucking pedophiles wants to block pornography because it’s indecent. But raping little children is OK by them so long as you’re sufficiently rich and well-connected enough to avoid any consequences.
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How do they plan to ban VPNs? Not on the legal side - they’ll just say they’re banned.
But in the real world, I can disguise my packets to not look like VPN packets, and I can also use many different types of obfuscation to ensure my activity stays private.
So my question is: where are the epstein files?
Well the great Chinese firewall recently got involuntarily open sourced so they might take some notes from how they are blocking VPNs.
Well the Chinese firewall must not be very effective at blocking VPNs considering the numbers of Chinese players I see in various online games
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They don't, because every business uses one.
Michigan's bill would charge internet service providers with detecting and blocking VPN use, as well as banning the sale of VPNs in the state.
Sounds like they are basically planning to tell ISPs to just figure it out, and suing VPN companies that don't block people from their state.
Had me in the first half, NGL.
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.
Literal China surveillance state bill. How the fuck do I keep reading shit like this every day. What even is the US?
It’s becoming a mirror of the Middle East, not China.
They want the same type of Sharia like morality controls over the populace just in a ‘Christian Nationalism’ wrapper.
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.
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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.
you'll own nothing and be Happy
Heh, I allocated a ipv6 cidr to a dev to use for ha testing. He created 1 /48 subnet then came back and asked for another 3. Sigh.
[The bill] includes language that could ban not only VPNs but any method of bypassing internet filters or restrictions.
It sounds to me like I2P and tor would also be illegal.
It’s some sort of weirdo purity thing not a safety thing.
So... how do they plan to sell this idea to companies that require their employees to sign into their corporate VPNs when they're on the job?
Forced to work in their ~~private equity~~ buildings, like they’ve been doing forever?
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This won't survive lobbying by corporations who need VPN to work.
You can say that about alot of stupid trump laws, they just keep getting passed.
I sure as hell hope you're right.
Business is the number one user of vpn and the reason it was created.
BREAKING NEWS: It's time to jump ship
Friendship with VPN has ended.
New best friend is Proxy Server.
Can't catch me, FBI-man. I'm behind 7 proxies.
I learned this on Law and Order circa 2007.
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.
This is for Michigan and it will not pass. No wonder I have you tagged as a knee jerk flame fueler.
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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.
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