I.E. Are US ISPs, particularly big ones like Comcast, required to geolocate ISPs to the state where the person is actually in? What about mobile ones?
Where I live (not US), it is extremely common to get an IP that Maxmind geolocates to a region far from where you actually live.
estimator7292 · 42m ago
You pretty much just plug the IP into a geolocating API and hope. There's nothing else to do. Any collateral damage is on the legislation, not any individual site or admin.
As you say, IP geolocation is unreliable. Unfortunately that's the only option. If it is technologically impossible to comply with the law, you just gotta do the best you can. If someone in MI gets a weird IP, there's absolutely nothing any third party can do. That's on the ISP for not allocating an appropriate IP or the legislators for being morons.
selimthegrim · 40m ago
MI is Michigan.
phinnaeus · 35m ago
Right, they might get an MS IP and be blocked :P
kube-system · 41m ago
GeoIP services are not 100% accurate, but that doesn't mean they're completely useless.
The law in question requires "commercially reasonable efforts"
beefnugs · 21m ago
Remember that massive surveillance capitalism apparatus that has been created for years? Now everyone must pay for it to legally comply with whatever arbitrary bullshit no matter how expensive the data becomes
kube-system · 19m ago
The most popular GeoIP database has a free tier that would easily work for this. And there are many other options.
andybak · 1h ago
Between this and the UK Online Safety Bill, how are people meant to keep track?
Launch a small website and commit a felony in 7 states and 13 countries.
I wouldn't have known about the Mississippi bill unless I'd read this. How are we have to know?
bryant · 1h ago
Probably an area for Cloudflare to offer it as a service. Content type X, blocked in [locales]. Advertised as a liability mitigation.
stuartjohnson12 · 49m ago
Closely followed by the BETTERID act in response to sites using substandard identity providers, a set of stringent compliance requirements to ensure the compliant collection and storage of verification documentation requiring annual certification by an approved auditing agency who must provide evidence of controls in place to ensure [...]
Regulatory capture in real time!
contravariant · 25m ago
More to the point, why would anyone outside of Mississippi need to comply? What legal grounds do they have to dictate what other people do outside of their state?
dawnerd · 16m ago
I worry that as a mastodon server operator I could be found guilty of violating their state law and if one day I decide to visit or transit in the state I could be punished say by arrest.
Same goes for other countries as well. It’s insane.
zaptheimpaler · 1h ago
Any physical business has to deal with 100s of regulations too, it just means the same culture of making it extremely difficult and expensive to do anything at all is now coming to the online world as well, bit by bit.
Right. But if I open a physical business I only need to abide by the laws of that state. This is definitely an order of magnitude more regulation to deal with.
But yeah, this definitely sounds like a business opportunity for services or hosts.
Hamuko · 56m ago
Check your local laws and make sure never to travel outside your current state.
bee_rider · 45m ago
States should come together with their neighboring states to start passing identical model legislation for this sort of stuff, if we don’t have unity across the country. It could be easy and voluntary for the states to do.
The US doesn’t have 50 different cultures with totally different values, but probably has like… 7.
gapan · 13m ago
> States should come together with their neighboring states to start passing identical model legislation for this sort of stuff...
Yes! Make a union of states! How should we call that? States Union... Union of States... United States! Yeah, that should work.
lenerdenator · 38m ago
This sounds great, until those states hate each other and want to get one over on the other one, even if they're ideologically aligned.
Ah! Thank you. I was wondering why mjg59 needed to geo-block people on his blog. I had no idea dreamwidth was a platform and he was only a user of that platform. I don't think I've ever seen anyone else's content on that site. Now I feel dumb because I've been calling him "dreamwidth" in my head for years.
Thanks, I could not get by their really bad captha
mystraline · 13m ago
Well, we can blame the voters of Mississippi for their ass-backware representatives, who they evidently like, for these ignorant laws.
Cut the ignoramuses from the US internet until they can learn to be decent people. Serves them right, and well, legally.
WUMBOWUMBO · 1h ago
Clueless human, but what stops a company from ignoring these laws from certain states? How is this enforceable if a company doesn't have any infrastructure within that state?
dragonwriter · 1h ago
> Clueless human, but what stops a company from ignoring these laws from certain states?
The threat of lawsuits.
> How is this enforceable if a company doesn't have any infrastructure within that state?
If you are intentionally doing business in a US state, and either you or your assets are within the reach of courts in the US, you can probably be sued under the state's laws, either in the state's courts or in federal courts, and there is a reasonable chance that if the law is valid at all, it will be applied to your provision of your service to people in that state. Likewise, you have a risk from criminal laws of the state if you are personally within reach of any US law enforcement, through intrastate extradition (which, while there is occasional high-profile resistance, is generally Constitutionally mandatory and can be compelled by the federal courts.)
That's why services taking reasonable steps to cut off customers accessing their service from the states whose laws they don't want to deal with is a common response.
0cf8612b2e1e · 1h ago
Now I am curious as well. Are there…extradition treaties between states?
umanwizard · 1h ago
The treaty in question is the Constitution. All states must grant extradition to any other state.
It would be pretty crazy if you could kill someone in Arizona and then just walk over the border to California and not be able to be prosecuted…
"The Zone of Death is the 50-square-mile (130 km2) area in the Idaho section of Yellowstone National Park in which, as a result of the Vicinage Clause in the Constitution of the United States, a person may be able to theoretically avoid conviction for any major crime, up to and including murder"
gjm11 · 1h ago
That's a separate thing -- it's not about being in a different state from where the crime was committed, it's about (supposedly) it being procedurally impossible to give you the jury trial you have to have, because literally no one lives in the relevant district.
dragonwriter · 1h ago
No, because no one lives in the relevant combination of state and district, hence why only portion of the District of Wyoming that is actually in the State of Idaho is affected.
lazide · 1h ago
Which really just means of anyone tried to exploit the loophole and wasn’t politically untouchable cough, everyone would just ignore the problem and assign them to some nearby district or whatever.
yardstick · 1h ago
Seems like the solution is to bus in new residents if such a trial was needed.
0cf8612b2e1e · 1h ago
Murder is a crime in all states. If the two states disagree on if a crime occurred, does the requesting state get to impose its laws on everyone?
dragonwriter · 1h ago
> Murder is a crime in all states.
Not by the same definition, no, its not, though there is a crime called "murder" in all states, and there tends to be significant overlap in the definitions.
>New York governor rejects Louisiana's extradition request for doctor in abortion pill case
cough
stronglikedan · 1h ago
Exactly. We don't have a problem with too few laws and regulations. We have a problem with enforcement and accountability.
bee_rider · 1h ago
It seems like a problem of states trying to pass laws that control things outside their borders. The jurisdiction of Louisiana courts is Louisiana.
I mean it would be absurd if an anti-death-sentence state started trying to extradite the executioners working in pro-death-sentence states for murder, right?
svieira · 1h ago
If the executioner did their work in the anti-death-sentence state it wouldn't seem to be absurd, no. E. g. if they had pulled the cord that activated the electric chair remotely from a pro-death-sentence state (tele-execution ... sounds very BlackMirror).
bee_rider · 51m ago
I’d expect that to result in a very confusing court case. Fortunately, despite all the other messes going on, we haven’t tried anything that silly.
stonogo · 1h ago
Yeah, that would be crazy, but the point here is that the "crime" is not being committed in Mississippi at all.
fencepost · 20m ago
Even if there aren't (there are cases where individuals fight extradition to other states though I have no idea if that's ever effective, and questions of conflict between states has come up recently regarding interstate prescribing of abortion medications, etc. with some states explicitly stating that they will not cooperate with Texasistan), a civil judgement against an entity operating in one state could likely be enforced without even interacting with the state where that entity exists - e.g. if they're using a bank with a presence in MS, the state might be able to simply go after their accounts held with the national-scale bank.
ratelimitsteve · 54m ago
There are certainly extraditions between states, so whether there's a treaty is rather academic
bcrosby95 · 1h ago
If they're able to elevate some of your charges to the federal level you're fucked. IANAL though so I don't know if/how that would happen.
dragonwriter · 50m ago
You can't "elevate" state criminal charges to federal charges, though the state can simply seek your extradition (which, if the receiving state resists, the federal courts can enforce, because it is a Constitutional obligation).
(It is possible for state charges existing to make other actions federal crimes, though, e.g., there is a federal crime of interstate travel to avoid prosecution, service of process, or appearance as a witness. But state charges themselves can't get "bumped up" to the federal level.)
hopelite · 1h ago
You can’t elevate something to federal charges that is not a federal crime, mostly committed across state lines (at least not in a just system); and the interstate commerce clause and possibly the free speech clause would likely be where that gets hung up.
There is a certain group in the USA that is working hard on undermining the rights of the people of America, the enemies, foreign and domestic, per se; and this is part of their plank to control speech through fear and total control and evisceration of anonymity.
I support controlling access to porn for children, especially since I know people who were harmed and groomed by it, but these types of laws are really just the typical liar’s wedge to get the poison pill of tracking and suppression in the door.
I hope some of the court cases can fix some of these treasonous and enemy acts by enemies within, but reality is that likely at the very least some aspects of these control mechanisms will remain intact.
If it really was about preventing harm against children, then they would have prevented children from accessing things, not adults. But that’s how you know it’s a perfidious lie.
This MS situation is just another step towards what they really want, total control over speech, thought, and what you are able to see and read.
This MS situation is just a kind of trial balloon, a probe of the American people and the Constitution and this thing we still call America even though enemies are within our walls dismantling everything.
As you may have read, in MS they are trying to require all social media companies to “…deanonymize and age-verify all users…” …… to protect the children, of course. So you, an adult, have to identify yourself online in the public square that is already censored and controlled and mapped, to the government so it can, e.g., see if you oppose or share information about the genocide it is supporting … to protect Mississippi children, of course.
next_xibalba · 50m ago
Apparently, U.S. statutory and case law establish that a business has an "economic nexus" in a state can be made subject to that state's laws. An economic nexus doesn't require a physical presence, just sufficient economic activity. Sufficient economic activity is usually defined, by each state, according to revenue or volume of transactions. Another test for an economic nexus is something called purposeful availment, which is whether a business is targeting the residents of a jurisdiction. So it seems like, "Are you intentionally selling to Missouri residents?"
To enforce all this, states can sue companies and they can take steps to ensure companies can't do business in their state (so like maybe force ISPs to block Dreamwidth?).
VWWHFSfQ · 1h ago
> How is this enforceable if a company doesn't have any infrastructure within that state?
It's a good question. Maybe something with interstate commerce laws?
petcat · 1h ago
There used to be the "Oregon sales tax loophole" where residents of neighboring states (Washington, California, Idaho) would make large purchases (car) just over the border in Oregon where there was no sales tax.
That loophole got closed once inter-state data sharing became possible and Oregon merchants were required to start collecting those out-of-state taxes at the point of sale.
lotsofpulp · 54s ago
> That loophole got closed once inter-state data sharing became possible and Oregon merchants were required to start collecting those out-of-state taxes at the point of sale.
First, Oregon merchants are not required to collect sales tax for any other jurisdictions outside of Oregon. And they don’t, any non Oregonian can go to any merchant in Oregon right now, and you will be charged the same as any other customer who lives in Oregon.
chrismcb · 1h ago
That wasn't a loophole. It was just a bunch of people evading taxes.
petcat · 1h ago
> people evading taxes
Avoiding taxes. It's different. It was always perfectly legal to travel to another state to buy something expensive and bring it back home. No crimes were committed.
It was a loophole that you could buy in Oregon specifically to avoid $1,000s in sales taxes.
dragonwriter · 41m ago
> It was always perfectly legal to travel to another state to buy something expensive and bring it back home.
It was legal to do that. If it was purchased out of state with the intent of bringing it back home, then (assuming the home state was California) California use taxes were always owed on it. Other states with sales taxes also tend to have similarly-structured use taxes with rates similar to the sales tax rates.
They were legally avoiding sales taxes, but also illegally evading use taxes, and, moreover, there is very little reason for the former if you aren't also doing the latter, unless you just have some moral objection to your taxes being taken at the point of sale and the paperwork and remittance to the government being done by the retailer instead of being a burden you deal with yourself.
VWWHFSfQ · 24m ago
I think the point was that interstate data sharing closed the loophole on evading use-taxes. Now states report to each other about large purchases. It's no longer possible to buy a car or tractor in Oregon and never report the unpaid sales tax back to Washington or California. They will know.
dragonwriter · 19m ago
I was addressing the debate that that prompted over whether the situation before that was tax evasion or mere tax avoidance, but yes, the point about interstate data sharing is what that tangent spun off from several posts upthread.
kube-system · 31m ago
If you do not pay sales tax on items bought in neighboring states, you typically owe your state use tax on those items. Many people simply did not report these purchases however, and this is evasion.
quickthrowman · 59m ago
You are correct, virtually every state has a law that says “If you buy something in another state and pay less sales tax than we charge, you owe us the sales tax we would’ve charged you.”
It’s called a ‘use tax’. In practice, nobody pays (personal) use tax, myself included.
So, all of those people going to Oregon to shop without sales tax and not paying use tax were technically breaking the law, not using a loophole. I’m not judging them, I don’t pay use tax either :)
hopelite · 59m ago
Do you insist on paying your home tax rate if you go somewhere else and buy food or products?
I’ve never understood people like you that say anything and everything to increase taxes.
How does it make any rational or logical sense that you should pay higher taxes for something?
So when you go to Delaware that has 0% sales taxes, you make sure to log everything and pay taxes to your home state upon return?
kube-system · 26m ago
> So when you go to Delaware that has 0% sales taxes, you make sure to log everything and pay taxes to your home state upon return?
If you don't, you are technically violating the law. All states with sales tax also have a use tax.
For example, if you are a resident of neighboring Maryland, this is the form you'd need to fill out for purchases you make in Delaware.
That's probably what the wikipedia author meant to say
throwmeaway222 · 33m ago
so does that mean all of linkedin is exempt?
does that also mean that all social media platforms will start a small jobs board?
kube-system · 22m ago
Yes to your first question, and no to the second question... the law says it must "primarily function" in that respect.
Putting a small jobs board on instagram would not make instagram "primarily function" as a job application website. LinkedIn is primarily a professional networking website - it qualifies.
sebastiennight · 51m ago
Yeah the Wikipedia explanation has faulty grammar. I couldn't figure it out either.
My understanding is that this is similar to the law the UK passed recently except instead of verifying age of users for "adult" content, every platform needs to verify (and log) age of all users for all content?
It can't possibly be that ridiculous.
apt-apt-apt-apt · 1h ago
If you're using a VPN while inside Missxi and access the site without age verification, would that cause the site to be in violation of the law?
superfrank · 13m ago
NAL, but yes, I believe that it would still be a violation of the law. That said, laws aren't applied by robots and it's likely they would be given leniency if they could show they actually tried to respect the law.
If they make an honest attempt to comply and a small number of people using VPNs slip through the cracks, if they're ever reported, they'll likely be given a slap on the wrist at most. If they ignore the law or do some obvious half assed attempt to comply and thousands of Mississippi users are still using their site and they get reported, it's far less likely that a judge will be lenient.
mxuribe · 1h ago
IANAL but i don't think using a vpn matters...Because whether a user is using a vpn or otherwise or not, if the user is identified as from Mississippi, that would be the test for whether these guys would need to block or not. Like, if a user from Mississippi uses a vpn, and these guys don't know that and detect that this user's IP is from, say, Arkansas...how would they be held liable? Unless, i'm missing something, right?
wonderwonder · 1h ago
Seems to work without issue in states that require age verification for pornography sites. Would assume a site like pornhub has spent money on lawyers
hopelite · 53m ago
I don’t see how, but the people trying to implement total control of speech, thought, and communication in America are a diabolical and crafty bunch that will likely try putting someone through the wringer for that one day.
The end game here is total control and awareness of who is saying what at any time, in order to allow those messages to be thwarted.
Bender · 1d ago
Might it be sufficient to dynamically block anyone that has a registered home address in Mississippi for their payment method? Most ISP's span multiple states.
Google have additional information about IP addresses that updates dynamically based on cell phone, wifi and other magic usage so maybe ask them if they have some javascript that queries their site for more specific city/state details. Also call Pornhub and ask how they were blocking specific states to meet legal requirements.
jayknight · 1h ago
For the Bluesky ban, I'm not in Mississippi, but whatever IP Geolocation service they're use thinks I my home internet is in Mississippi. It's doubtless that lots of people inside Mississippi but near borders aren't being blocked, because that's just not a thing that's really possible.
groby_b · 1h ago
If I were in Dreamwidth's shoes, I'd be very much concerned with minimizing legal exposure, not number of users excluded. At 10k/user*day, it's a reasonable choice to block as broadly as makes sense.
Tough for the neighbors, but nitpicking "resident" is not a good choice here.
andybak · 1h ago
From my perspective that means "the entire US". I don't live there and I have no idea how to not break this law.
omarspira · 54m ago
As an aside, it would be curious if deepening political polarization creates a trend of blocking IPs from specific states or regions for whatever reason... perhaps in such a scenario there would be interesting relations or comparisons between the digital and physical divides...
thelastgallon · 20m ago
>Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat.
Reminds me of Silicon Valley. PiperChat has grossly violated COPPA as there was no parental consent form on the app leading to a 21 billion dollar fine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3zU7sV4bJE
tick_tock_tick · 1h ago
How is this vaguely sufficient to meet the legal requirements of the law? They know geo-blocking is insufficient.
d4mi3n · 1h ago
IANAL, but there’s a question of reasonable burden. Not sure if that applies here, but it’s not unreasonable to say you simply don’t want to do business in a state where the regulations are cost prohibitive. Given they make a reasonable effort to not provide a service to MI, it’s not really on them to police people trying to circumvent a state’s local laws.
Pornhub and BlueSky have done similar in response to this legislation in Texas. Wikipedia and a few other sites blocked the UK to avoid being burdened by their Safety act. Pretty much every streaming platform implements regional geo blocking for licensing reasons.
I’ll be curious to see how things shake out in the long run given the current political climate.
Timwi · 57m ago
For the record, Wikipedia has not (yet) blocked the UK. They are awaiting official classification by Ofcom of the Wikipedia website. However, the uncertainty is definitely vexing, and the direction this is going is truly worrying.
madeofpalk · 1h ago
> Wikipedia and a few other sites blocked the UK
No? Wikipedia is not blocked in the UK.
kube-system · 13m ago
Is it insufficient? The law says they need to take commercially reasonable efforts to verify people's age in Mississippi. Geoblocking is a pretty commercially reasonable effort to identify who lives in Mississippi, and they don't provide service to those people.
dragonwriter · 46m ago
> How is this vaguely sufficient to meet the legal requirements of the law?
It may not be, if the law can be applied to them.
OTOH, may be sufficient to make it illegal to apply the law to them in the first place. US states do not have unlimited jurisdiction to regulate conduct occurring outside of their borders, but they do have more ability to regulate conduct of entities intentionally doing business within their borders.
mxuribe · 1h ago
IANAL, but if the actual legislation did not either recommend or dictate which method would be either good or even considered valid for purposes of enactment of the law, would it then be subject to interpretation?
Also, for the enforcement agency who is/will be tasked with checking things out here...do they know whether geo-blocking is valid method or not? Its a silly law, don't get me wrong...but if its enforcement validation mechanisms are not up to snuff, i wonder how things will play out - both here in dreamwidth's case and other folks in a similar boat?
kstrauser · 29m ago
Since some idiotic courts have ruled a website’s Terms of Service to be legally binding, why can’t I just say no one from Mississippi is allowed to access my site and be done with it?
I’m not being glib. Honestly, why can’t I? There’s precedent for saying that’s unauthorized access, so the feds (not the state; “Interstate Commerce Clause” and all that) should prosecute the visitor for violating my ToS.
superfrank · 19m ago
For the same reason a bars don't just ask people to sign a document saying they're 21 in lieu of an ID.
The laws are written in a way where the responsibility for enforcement falls on the operator of the business. In both cases, the business doesn't actually have to verify anything if they don't want to, but if it's found that they're allowing violations to happen, they will be held legally responsible.
kube-system · 12m ago
You can't contract away something that the law requires of you.
valbaca · 14m ago
sounds similar to how many remote job applications skirt around posting the actual salary range by not allowing residents of NY, etc. to apply
chris_wot · 24m ago
This is happening in Australia, and it's awful legislation.
jmclnx · 59m ago
Bluesky is doing the same in case people here did nor know
Eventually we're going to end up with freedom loving states and puritanical nanny states.
hopelite · 47m ago
I see the larger objective as total control over all speech, thought, and information in more circuitous and pernicious ways than something in one of the poster-boys of “tyranny”.
This is just the start and the trial balloons. The enemy within is a bit nervous about this attack on the most fundamental freedom that the Constitution is protecting, free speech, but they’re also very confident in themselves.
superkuh · 1h ago
Sometimes, often even, Dreamwidth can do the right thing like this. I fully support them in this fight and hope they win. But let's not pretend banning huge IP ranges for years at a time is new to them.
Dreamwidth has been at the forefront of banning large swaths of the internet. They started doing it years before anyone else. Before the for-profit corporate spidering of HTTP/S content even began causing issues. This is well trod territory and entirely familiar for them and their upstream network provider they like to blame their inability to fix it on.
kennywinker · 1h ago
For those of us unfamiliar with dreamwidth: huh??
trhway · 1h ago
it is just a new better Internet era - everybody to use VPN. Thanks to the conservatives for facilitating such a progress.
For example, these days in Russia awareness and usage of VPN is well beyond any normal country. With Facebook and IG for example blocked for Meta being officially branded an "extremist organization" (by the way Taliban was taken off that list recently, so what do you guys in Menlo Park are cooking what is worse than Taliban? May be some freedom of speech? :) people in Russia of all strata is still using it, now through VPN, many from mobile devices. The thing of note from USSR/Russia here is that habitual violation of unreasonable laws breeds wide disrespect for the system of law as a whole, and it i very hard to reverse the flow.
jmclnx · 22m ago
True, but the next thing, will VPNs be forced to age verify eventually ?
It is possible some US States and maybe the UK will end up like China.
trhway · 4m ago
>True, but the next thing, will VPNs be forced to age verify eventually ?
it is like age verifying current generic access to the Internet. Sure, we'll come to this too (the anti-utopias aren't fiction, it is future :), yet we still don't verify such a generic access because it isn't the time yet, the society isn't yet totalitarian enough.
As a preview - in Russia (i'm less familiar with China to comment on it) they do already attack VPN by making it illegal to advertise it, something like this.
reader9274 · 45m ago
Yes, respect the laws of the locations you operate in or leave. Stop crying about it
valbaca · 12m ago
Glad we didn't have you at the Constitutional Convention.
Also "operate in or leave" doesn't make a lick of sense on THE INTERNET
I.E. Are US ISPs, particularly big ones like Comcast, required to geolocate ISPs to the state where the person is actually in? What about mobile ones?
Where I live (not US), it is extremely common to get an IP that Maxmind geolocates to a region far from where you actually live.
As you say, IP geolocation is unreliable. Unfortunately that's the only option. If it is technologically impossible to comply with the law, you just gotta do the best you can. If someone in MI gets a weird IP, there's absolutely nothing any third party can do. That's on the ISP for not allocating an appropriate IP or the legislators for being morons.
The law in question requires "commercially reasonable efforts"
Launch a small website and commit a felony in 7 states and 13 countries.
I wouldn't have known about the Mississippi bill unless I'd read this. How are we have to know?
Regulatory capture in real time!
Same goes for other countries as well. It’s insane.
But yeah, this definitely sounds like a business opportunity for services or hosts.
The US doesn’t have 50 different cultures with totally different values, but probably has like… 7.
Yes! Make a union of states! How should we call that? States Union... Union of States... United States! Yeah, that should work.
Source: am from Kansas City.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44990886 ("Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi over Age Verification Law (wired.com)"—175 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamwidth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walker_Montgomery_Protecti...
Cut the ignoramuses from the US internet until they can learn to be decent people. Serves them right, and well, legally.
The threat of lawsuits.
> How is this enforceable if a company doesn't have any infrastructure within that state?
If you are intentionally doing business in a US state, and either you or your assets are within the reach of courts in the US, you can probably be sued under the state's laws, either in the state's courts or in federal courts, and there is a reasonable chance that if the law is valid at all, it will be applied to your provision of your service to people in that state. Likewise, you have a risk from criminal laws of the state if you are personally within reach of any US law enforcement, through intrastate extradition (which, while there is occasional high-profile resistance, is generally Constitutionally mandatory and can be compelled by the federal courts.)
That's why services taking reasonable steps to cut off customers accessing their service from the states whose laws they don't want to deal with is a common response.
It would be pretty crazy if you could kill someone in Arizona and then just walk over the border to California and not be able to be prosecuted…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Death_(Yellowstone)
"The Zone of Death is the 50-square-mile (130 km2) area in the Idaho section of Yellowstone National Park in which, as a result of the Vicinage Clause in the Constitution of the United States, a person may be able to theoretically avoid conviction for any major crime, up to and including murder"
Not by the same definition, no, its not, though there is a crime called "murder" in all states, and there tends to be significant overlap in the definitions.
>New York governor rejects Louisiana's extradition request for doctor in abortion pill case
cough
I mean it would be absurd if an anti-death-sentence state started trying to extradite the executioners working in pro-death-sentence states for murder, right?
(It is possible for state charges existing to make other actions federal crimes, though, e.g., there is a federal crime of interstate travel to avoid prosecution, service of process, or appearance as a witness. But state charges themselves can't get "bumped up" to the federal level.)
There is a certain group in the USA that is working hard on undermining the rights of the people of America, the enemies, foreign and domestic, per se; and this is part of their plank to control speech through fear and total control and evisceration of anonymity.
I support controlling access to porn for children, especially since I know people who were harmed and groomed by it, but these types of laws are really just the typical liar’s wedge to get the poison pill of tracking and suppression in the door.
I hope some of the court cases can fix some of these treasonous and enemy acts by enemies within, but reality is that likely at the very least some aspects of these control mechanisms will remain intact.
If it really was about preventing harm against children, then they would have prevented children from accessing things, not adults. But that’s how you know it’s a perfidious lie.
This MS situation is just another step towards what they really want, total control over speech, thought, and what you are able to see and read.
This MS situation is just a kind of trial balloon, a probe of the American people and the Constitution and this thing we still call America even though enemies are within our walls dismantling everything.
As you may have read, in MS they are trying to require all social media companies to “…deanonymize and age-verify all users…” …… to protect the children, of course. So you, an adult, have to identify yourself online in the public square that is already censored and controlled and mapped, to the government so it can, e.g., see if you oppose or share information about the genocide it is supporting … to protect Mississippi children, of course.
To enforce all this, states can sue companies and they can take steps to ensure companies can't do business in their state (so like maybe force ISPs to block Dreamwidth?).
It's a good question. Maybe something with interstate commerce laws?
That loophole got closed once inter-state data sharing became possible and Oregon merchants were required to start collecting those out-of-state taxes at the point of sale.
First, Oregon merchants are not required to collect sales tax for any other jurisdictions outside of Oregon. And they don’t, any non Oregonian can go to any merchant in Oregon right now, and you will be charged the same as any other customer who lives in Oregon.
Avoiding taxes. It's different. It was always perfectly legal to travel to another state to buy something expensive and bring it back home. No crimes were committed.
It was a loophole that you could buy in Oregon specifically to avoid $1,000s in sales taxes.
It was legal to do that. If it was purchased out of state with the intent of bringing it back home, then (assuming the home state was California) California use taxes were always owed on it. Other states with sales taxes also tend to have similarly-structured use taxes with rates similar to the sales tax rates.
They were legally avoiding sales taxes, but also illegally evading use taxes, and, moreover, there is very little reason for the former if you aren't also doing the latter, unless you just have some moral objection to your taxes being taken at the point of sale and the paperwork and remittance to the government being done by the retailer instead of being a burden you deal with yourself.
It’s called a ‘use tax’. In practice, nobody pays (personal) use tax, myself included.
Washington has a use tax: https://dor.wa.gov/taxes-rates/use-tax
California has a use tax: https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/use-tax/
Idaho has a use tax: https://tax.idaho.gov/taxes/sales-use/use-tax/online-guide/
So, all of those people going to Oregon to shop without sales tax and not paying use tax were technically breaking the law, not using a loophole. I’m not judging them, I don’t pay use tax either :)
I’ve never understood people like you that say anything and everything to increase taxes.
How does it make any rational or logical sense that you should pay higher taxes for something?
So when you go to Delaware that has 0% sales taxes, you make sure to log everything and pay taxes to your home state upon return?
If you don't, you are technically violating the law. All states with sales tax also have a use tax.
For example, if you are a resident of neighboring Maryland, this is the form you'd need to fill out for purchases you make in Delaware.
https://www.marylandcomptroller.gov/content/dam/mdcomp/tax/f...
> However, it doesn't apply to news sources, online games or the content that is be made is by the service itself or is an application website.
What is an "application website"? I can't seem to find how they're defining that.
https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-45/chapter-38...
That's probably what the wikipedia author meant to say
does that also mean that all social media platforms will start a small jobs board?
Putting a small jobs board on instagram would not make instagram "primarily function" as a job application website. LinkedIn is primarily a professional networking website - it qualifies.
My understanding is that this is similar to the law the UK passed recently except instead of verifying age of users for "adult" content, every platform needs to verify (and log) age of all users for all content?
It can't possibly be that ridiculous.
If they make an honest attempt to comply and a small number of people using VPNs slip through the cracks, if they're ever reported, they'll likely be given a slap on the wrist at most. If they ignore the law or do some obvious half assed attempt to comply and thousands of Mississippi users are still using their site and they get reported, it's far less likely that a judge will be lenient.
The end game here is total control and awareness of who is saying what at any time, in order to allow those messages to be thwarted.
Google have additional information about IP addresses that updates dynamically based on cell phone, wifi and other magic usage so maybe ask them if they have some javascript that queries their site for more specific city/state details. Also call Pornhub and ask how they were blocking specific states to meet legal requirements.
Tough for the neighbors, but nitpicking "resident" is not a good choice here.
Reminds me of Silicon Valley. PiperChat has grossly violated COPPA as there was no parental consent form on the app leading to a 21 billion dollar fine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3zU7sV4bJE
Pornhub and BlueSky have done similar in response to this legislation in Texas. Wikipedia and a few other sites blocked the UK to avoid being burdened by their Safety act. Pretty much every streaming platform implements regional geo blocking for licensing reasons.
I’ll be curious to see how things shake out in the long run given the current political climate.
No? Wikipedia is not blocked in the UK.
It may not be, if the law can be applied to them.
OTOH, may be sufficient to make it illegal to apply the law to them in the first place. US states do not have unlimited jurisdiction to regulate conduct occurring outside of their borders, but they do have more ability to regulate conduct of entities intentionally doing business within their borders.
Also, for the enforcement agency who is/will be tasked with checking things out here...do they know whether geo-blocking is valid method or not? Its a silly law, don't get me wrong...but if its enforcement validation mechanisms are not up to snuff, i wonder how things will play out - both here in dreamwidth's case and other folks in a similar boat?
I’m not being glib. Honestly, why can’t I? There’s precedent for saying that’s unauthorized access, so the feds (not the state; “Interstate Commerce Clause” and all that) should prosecute the visitor for violating my ToS.
The laws are written in a way where the responsibility for enforcement falls on the operator of the business. In both cases, the business doesn't actually have to verify anything if they don't want to, but if it's found that they're allowing violations to happen, they will be held legally responsible.
https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-goes-dark-in-mississippi...
This is just the start and the trial balloons. The enemy within is a bit nervous about this attack on the most fundamental freedom that the Constitution is protecting, free speech, but they’re also very confident in themselves.
Dreamwidth has been at the forefront of banning large swaths of the internet. They started doing it years before anyone else. Before the for-profit corporate spidering of HTTP/S content even began causing issues. This is well trod territory and entirely familiar for them and their upstream network provider they like to blame their inability to fix it on.
For example, these days in Russia awareness and usage of VPN is well beyond any normal country. With Facebook and IG for example blocked for Meta being officially branded an "extremist organization" (by the way Taliban was taken off that list recently, so what do you guys in Menlo Park are cooking what is worse than Taliban? May be some freedom of speech? :) people in Russia of all strata is still using it, now through VPN, many from mobile devices. The thing of note from USSR/Russia here is that habitual violation of unreasonable laws breeds wide disrespect for the system of law as a whole, and it i very hard to reverse the flow.
It is possible some US States and maybe the UK will end up like China.
it is like age verifying current generic access to the Internet. Sure, we'll come to this too (the anti-utopias aren't fiction, it is future :), yet we still don't verify such a generic access because it isn't the time yet, the society isn't yet totalitarian enough.
As a preview - in Russia (i'm less familiar with China to comment on it) they do already attack VPN by making it illegal to advertise it, something like this.
Also "operate in or leave" doesn't make a lick of sense on THE INTERNET