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In the wake of a recent federal appeals court ruling, porn sites operating in the state of Texas must now verify that their users are adults with a government-issued ID or some other suitable method of proving their identity—which is not necessarily something you want to do every time you visit an adult site. Pornhub has gone dark there in protest, and a substantial number of Texans are now busy searching for the best VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to install on their devices so they can still access it.
Texas isn’t the only place it’s hard to watch Pornhub. Age verification laws have caused the adult entertainment site to withdraw from seven other states, including Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia. If you attempt to load the site in one of those states, you’ll see, in part, something like this message: “[Age verification] bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the hundreds of thousands of websites with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply.”
For its part, Pornhub says the recent Texas ruling will, “impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech” and that age verification generally, “is not an effective solution for protecting users online.” The company wants to see age verification handled at the device level.
As for the federal appeals court, it pointed to the age verification needed to buy old-fashioned, printed porn: Not applying the same rules to online content “implies that the invention of the Internet somehow reduced the scope of the state’s ability to protect children,” wrote Circuit Judge Jerry Smith in the ruling.
How to watch Pornhub if it’s blocked in your state
Whatever your position on age verification laws, remember that the best VPNs can connect your computer to a server in a different part of the world—making it look like you’re located somewhere other than where you actually are.
That’s just the start, though, when it comes to the benefits of installing a VPN. These software tools hide your browsing activity from governments, law enforcement agencies, and whoever is providing your internet. Generally, VPNs make it harder for companies to track you, and give you more security and privacy (though not anonymity) online.
With that in mind, Lifehacker has covered the best free VPNs, the best paid VPNs, and the best free VPNs for Android in the past, but I’d like to highlight a couple of recommendations here—if you want more suggestions for your internet browsing needs (adult site-related or not), follow those links above.
The best free VPN: Proton VPN
Proton VPN doesn’t put any bandwidth restrictions on free accounts.
Credit: Proton
We’ve written in glowing terms before about how good the free Proton VPN is, and it’s a great pick if you don’t want to spend anything. Its appeal starts with Proton itself: It’s committed to privacy, was started by scientists in Switzerland, and is siloed from the big tech names (like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft). It’s a name you can trust.
There are also surprisingly few restrictions for a free VPN. The two main limitations are you can only connect from one device, and you don’t get to choose which country’s servers you connect to. That’s it—it’s not painfully slow, like a lot of free VPNs. If you do need more flexibility in your VPN connections and features, there are paid upgrades available too.
Add in the ease of use you get with Proton VPN, and the support for a broad range of devices, and the reliability you get from servers around the world, and it’s difficult to beat in terms of a free VPN. Sign up here for a Proton account, if you don’t already have one.
The best paid VPN: NordVPN
You can connect to more than 60 different countries with NordVPN.
Credit: NordVPN
You’ve got a lot of excellent options to pick from when it comes to paid VPNs, and there’s no app that’s far and away above the others—but we’re going to highlight NordVPN here, which we recently compared to ExpressVPN. It’s fast, it’s flexible, and the software it offers across multiple platforms is more polished and intuitive than with a lot of its rivals.
You get lots of features with NordVPN, from split tunneling to DNS customizations to support for the super-private Onion network. While you can easily use the software with just a couple of clicks (or taps), there are numerous advanced features available if you want to dig a bit deeper—you can even have a dedicated IP address (though it costs extra).
Pricing for NordVPN starts at $11.95 a month, but you can get some pretty significant discounts if you pay for a year (or two years) up front. That’s enough to get you up to six simultaneous connections, and you can sign up here to register and download the apps.
