Governor Spencer Cox has signed a law stating that websites are accountable for determining if a user is physically located in Utah, even from behind a VPN.
This law is setup to be a liability trap to force websites to block VPN users regardless if they originate from Utah by making it technically impossible in practice to meet the laws requirments and, provide access to VPN users while ensuring none of them physcially reside in Utah.
WTF kind of community hides calling out discriminatory comments?! Also my reply is on topic.
Okay… getting back to the subject of the original post… from the article:
Blocking all known VPN and proxy IP addresses is a technical whack-a-mole that likely no company can win. Providers add new IP addresses constantly, and no comprehensive blocklist exists. Complying with Utah’s requirements would require impossible technical feats.
So… the next step would be for all VPN and proxy providers to publish their IP ranges in realtime. I truly worry that this will soon be required by law. Either that, or somehow require VPN/proxy services to indicate the ‘original region of origin’ of all connections, like at a protocol level or via some REST API lookup for their IP addresses.
Private relay will only use servers in your same region:
Private Relay is designed to protect users’ privacy, while maintaining sufficiently accurate location information to support a personalized experience on the web. It does not provide any methods to spoof location or circumvent regional content restrictions. The Relay IP addresses issued by Private Relay are representative IP addresses that map to the actual country or region the user is connecting from.
So it’s doable. It would be disappointing though. I’m not really sure how they would enforce this either, I feel like the big dogs in the VPN space would comply but smaller crappier ones wouldn’t, so people would be pushed to use worse options.
Private Relay is just one proxy, though. Surely other proxy services don’t have to be tied to your region… or are you saying that because Private Relay does work this way, then lawmakers could require that VPNs and other proxy services do this, too?
I believe WARP and probably Google’s VPN and Edge’s VPN all do the same thing.
Yes I’m saying it’s technically feasible.
China hasn’t managed to block Tor altogether. I somehow doubt the State Government of Utah will overtake them & rise to the technological forefront
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