> People who want to visit these websites will have to install an application for government-licensed digital certification on their mobile phones to prove that they are at least 18 years old. Sites which do not comply will risk being banned from publishing in France.
What a shitshow. I feel sorry for you, Frenchies. When this inevitably backfires, at least we’ll have an example to point to when some moron attempts to legislate this in a different part of Europe.
I'm not advocating censorship, but in today's world where YouTube and TikTok are the babysitter, porn sites are two clicks away. I was 8 years old scoffing at the "are you 18+" button. You asked, what issues are new? I would say, children watching porn is in itself a big, growing issue. This stuff isn't softcore, it's also rapeplay, incest, zoo, dark stuff. Is it confusing for you why we would want to shield children from that stuff?
I don't know if the dark stuff is something kids gravitate to by accident. The normal but adults-only stuff, for sure it's not an ideal situation but if you make it no longer two clicks away, it's three. It's extremely difficult to block content without using things like proxies and subscription services that update constantly the latest list of what-should-be-banned. And that has to be really at every edge. OK, next the government should ban or regulate all VPNs in this manner.
Something funny I recently discovered: If you map user overlap on Reddit, all the anti-porn subreddits end up highly correlated with strongly religious Christian subreddits, Catholic ones especially. Not the good empathetic progressive ones either, but the "tradcath" socially conservative ones that are anti-LGBT and still think unmarried adults having sex is bad and openly advocate for rewriting the Constitution to make the US a de jure Christian nation that rejects secular values.
The chatter about the supposed harms of pornography and masturbation basically never originate from the medical science community, or from a scientific domain at all.
Ever since I've put these pieces together I take anyone that comes along going on about how they think porn is so bad with a monumental grain of salt.
> Porn is ruining our boys, and social media are ruining our girls.
“<new thing of today> is corrupting our youth” is a complaint for which the documentary evidence is pretty much as old as records of writing go.
No one ever finds a solution, because before they do today has become yesterday, and the kids that were being “corrupted” are grown up and complaining about the new thing corrupting the new youth.
Porn might have issues like unrealistic portrayals of sex, but ultimately it's empowering for men. By helping guys to meet their sexual needs without depending on a relationship, this gives them greater freedom of choice. Without it, you would see a lot more guys staying in crappy relationships with people they don't like because they are dependent on them for sex.
Social media can make people depressed because they can more easily compare themselves with others. But ultimately, that's a good thing. When people advertise their success, it makes others more likely to emulate it. People see their friends making lots of money and traveling the world and it makes them feel bad, it makes them unhappy in the short term, but it also lets them know that they can do better and don't have to settle for what they have now.
You can buy VPN time with gift cards, crypto or your friends credit card that he sourced from a fake ID, or a stranger that you paid cash. You are not creative enough.
I'm more concerned about this than porn. I think everyone at least kind-of knows what porn isn't real, just as people know video games aren't real, or movies. Not saying these things can't affect people in various ways (which can be both positive and negative), but social media is presented as if it's real but it's often not, and the effects of this seem much worse.
AKA France moves to block access to pornography sites for everyone who doesn't install an invasive, government-run, lowest-bidder-produced software that requires your ID to prove you're not a minor
Personally being a teen with adhd pornography took away my high school life, made me socially awkward and dependent on the dopamine.I had no motivation for anything, not even adderall would help. Instead I would combine porn and adderall. To this day I don’t talk about the addiction.
Instead of that system, why just not say : "all phone sold/given to minors have a parental control enabled they cannot remove" ...
This way kids can't get around with a VPN, they can't get around by stealing their parents ID, and the rest of the society doesn't have to install a government spyware, and we're not building a extremely sensible database of people profile
Such a simple solution would be as, if not more, efficient while respecting everyone's privacy
The degree to which people underestimate children is always interesting to me, especially on a forum such as this one where your average teenager would probably run circles around such stuff and be more than happy to jailbreak their buddies phones as well.
Isn't it underestimating them even more to think they can't install a VPN in two clicks (which is the only thing needed to bypass this law).
Also I don't know from where you assume that an "average teen" can easily crack a manufacturer-imposed lock.
Who is the "average teen" that can take an IPhone and bypass FaceID or the Pin Lockscreen ? Which average teen can bypass a password protected secure-boot UEFI bootloader ? Which average teen finds an exploit to unlock a phone bootloader without the manufacturer key ?
If the a law would force the manufacturer to take it seriously, they could make the parental control far harder to bypass than this ridiculous and privacy invasive law
When I was 14 I used some parts from radioshack, "JTAG", and some of my mom's larger sewing needles to get my xbox 360 to play videogame content I downloaded off the internet and burned to discs. I hardly understood how, I just followed some instructions carefully.
You only need one cracker. Friend-groups usually have someone patient enough to follow "tech recipes".
- ingredients/parts
- sequential process
- result
I have an 11 year old here that sometimes really amazes me with his knowledge and persistence and I have zero doubt that if he was motivated to bypass something like this he'd get there, eventually. Never underestimate the reserves of persistence in a teenager that is determined to get their hands on something. I wished I had that kind of focus.
I used to be against this sort of meddling into internet freedom, but I’m not anymore. What do we have to show for it? We got a bunch of walled gardens controlled by big corporations. We got an advertising powered internet. If the French government has public support for this, then let them do it.
Kids are much less technically capable these days. They grew up with iPads. They wouldn’t know a COM port from a hole in the ground. It will get bypassed for sure, but it’s not nuclear secrets. It’s enough to make it inconvenient for your average person.
With apologies to Camus - it seems rather than just imagining Sisyphus happy, we ought to see him as actually somehow optimistic that this time the boulder will stay at the top of the hill instead of rolling back down.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] thread> People who want to visit these websites will have to install an application for government-licensed digital certification on their mobile phones to prove that they are at least 18 years old. Sites which do not comply will risk being banned from publishing in France.
I'd use torrents before giving up my privacy for the government
Is something worse than 60 years ago that can be attributed to porn, if so what?
Without further commentary, the 'porn is ruining the children' was what pro-censorship religious groups argued in the 70s.
That's a wince for all of us non-paranoid folks.
They are not 'our' boys and girls. It's their parents boys and girls.
Every day there is an article about teenagers anxiety, how can they not be anxious if people won't ever let them rub (or jill) one out in peace?
The chatter about the supposed harms of pornography and masturbation basically never originate from the medical science community, or from a scientific domain at all.
Ever since I've put these pieces together I take anyone that comes along going on about how they think porn is so bad with a monumental grain of salt.
“<new thing of today> is corrupting our youth” is a complaint for which the documentary evidence is pretty much as old as records of writing go.
No one ever finds a solution, because before they do today has become yesterday, and the kids that were being “corrupted” are grown up and complaining about the new thing corrupting the new youth.
Porn might have issues like unrealistic portrayals of sex, but ultimately it's empowering for men. By helping guys to meet their sexual needs without depending on a relationship, this gives them greater freedom of choice. Without it, you would see a lot more guys staying in crappy relationships with people they don't like because they are dependent on them for sex.
Social media can make people depressed because they can more easily compare themselves with others. But ultimately, that's a good thing. When people advertise their success, it makes others more likely to emulate it. People see their friends making lots of money and traveling the world and it makes them feel bad, it makes them unhappy in the short term, but it also lets them know that they can do better and don't have to settle for what they have now.
Although I am sure there are tons of free options.
I’m pretty sure it scarred me in some fashion. I’m fine now, but it really did a number on me seeing some of that stuff way before I should have.
That said, I don’t support the government limiting the internet in any way. That’s the parent’s job.
I was curious and I satisfied my curiosity. I continue to satisfy my curiosity, lol.
In no small part because social media is an advertising medium for porn.
That aside, it looks like governments everywhere are looking to control what their citizens have access to, what they view and what they read.
This way kids can't get around with a VPN, they can't get around by stealing their parents ID, and the rest of the society doesn't have to install a government spyware, and we're not building a extremely sensible database of people profile
Such a simple solution would be as, if not more, efficient while respecting everyone's privacy
Also I don't know from where you assume that an "average teen" can easily crack a manufacturer-imposed lock.
Who is the "average teen" that can take an IPhone and bypass FaceID or the Pin Lockscreen ? Which average teen can bypass a password protected secure-boot UEFI bootloader ? Which average teen finds an exploit to unlock a phone bootloader without the manufacturer key ?
If the a law would force the manufacturer to take it seriously, they could make the parental control far harder to bypass than this ridiculous and privacy invasive law
You only need one cracker. Friend-groups usually have someone patient enough to follow "tech recipes". - ingredients/parts - sequential process - result
If Apple cares enough about locking something, no average person bypasses it easily
I used to be against this sort of meddling into internet freedom, but I’m not anymore. What do we have to show for it? We got a bunch of walled gardens controlled by big corporations. We got an advertising powered internet. If the French government has public support for this, then let them do it.
It won't be hard for them to bypass this, and that means they'll be spending all their time on porn websites willing to break the law.
It also means when these websites eventually get hacked, those hackers have access to a bunch of material to blackmail huge swaths of the population.
Overall seems like a bad move.