Let me tell you about this video's sponsor, NordVPN. NordVPN lets you change your country of origin. I like to watch Sherlock on Netflix, but Netflix in the USA doesn't have Sherlock, so I switch my country to the UK, and look, there's Sherlock!
Yeah, it's going to be an easy sell to regulate VPNs more strongly when Nord and others actively advertise that they can be used to avoid regional licensing of content.
It seems like the problem here is the regional licensing of content. If people go to such length to get around it, we should just eliminate the enforcement of arbitrary rules that want to prevent this isn't a global economy.
I'm somewhat surprised that this hasn't occurred already. I suspect the reason is that there's not been a catalyzing event that governments usually need in order to make restrictions palatable to people.
This is probably designed to be that event. Enough people will buy the "think of the children" angle used to ban porn. And that legal framework can then be leveraged to regulate VPNs. First, to stop them from being used to bypass these porn restrictions, but then expanded to prevent content restriction bypassing, then to preventing online piracy, then preventing "subversive activities."
Yes it is, and it's not a coincidence that one of the few places with de-facto "free speech" (de-facto copyright laws non enforced) is Generative AI - which is also utilized extremely heavily for porn (see civit.ai)
I had hope for efforts like Freenet and Tor and I2P that are both censorship _and_ regulation resistant, but I've had hope for them for 25+ years and have yet to see them gain significant mindshare.
It's not contradictory to simultaneously hold the positions that (1) porn consumption is bad for minors, and (2) adults who watch porn should not be forced to upload identity documents to insecure systems managed by unwilling operators.
And that's just assuming the law could even be perfectly enforced! In reality, it will not be, and there will always be sites without the requirement (which will also be the "seedier" sites), or kids who work around it. So the end result is that kids end up watching even worse porn, while adults get their identities stolen and linked to their porn browsing habits.
I happen to love subversive behavior on the grounds that a certain amount subversiveness is good for society. It is the natural push and pull that keeps the ship of state gently trodding on the waves of history. I want more companies to engage in "taking their ball and going home". Good tactic - please do it more!
No, they're doing that because there's no way to actually do what is being demanded safely. Again, parents should be (1) explaining porn to their kids when they get to the age where that might matter, and (2) be involved in parenting their kids.
Alternatively, how would you propose a porn site do age verification that doesn't involve every porn site having giant databases of IDs and user photos? Moreover, as the big - trying to do things right - sites have repeatedly stated, all you're doing is ensuring that the only sites minors can access are the ones that have little to no controls on content.
I get that you may feel that hardcore porn is bad for children - I think the issue here is that that's the only stuff kids can access because less hardcore stuff generally has more aggressive access controls - but the solution here is to explain what pornography is, and how it does or does not match reality, etc. Pretending it doesn't exist results in kids accessing it (because hormones and failure to monitor what your kids are doing online) and not understanding that it does not accurately reflect how real relationships or sex work. It's similar to "protecting" children from sex by pretending it doesn't exist, and making it really bad/sinful, which is super effective at enabling abusers.
Yeah, but if you blame porn for the fertility crisis you don't have to figure out how to make housing and childcare affordable, which probably requires policy that makes assets go down. Can't have that! It is infinitely easier to blame the gays, or the trans, or tiktok, or porn.
> Again, parents should be (1) explaining porn to their kids when they get to the age where that might matter, and (2) be involved in parenting their kids.
Speaking strictly on behalf of my friends and I from junior high, it's pretty self explanatory.
Saying this really shows your naïveté to be honest. I mean that with no offence intended.
It really isn't all self explanatory. And most junior high students don't understand the depth, nuance and complexity of a lot of things until they're much older. And there is a lot to talk about in the realm of pornography.
Take it from me (completely anecdotal), i started watching porn at 13 and for just under a decade since I did not stop. I was completely addicted and I didn't even realise it was happening, and what it was doing to my brain. I didn't realise it was affecting my perception of women, of sex, expectations, I didn't realise id spend hours and hours watching it every day, I didn't realise it was essentially rotting my brain. Not to mention that the whole industry is scummy, and the actors are not treated well for the most part.
Now I am clean. And it was actually difficult to stop - another conformation it was addictive. But often I am STILL presented by imagery of the stuff I watched. This imagery in my brain is largely not under my control. It is disturbing that I cannot forget these things. And I often fear it will affect my sex life going forward.
Things you do not expect to have major consequences sometimes do.
Now, I'm not saying that you can't watch porn without being addicted, but i am saying at the time none of the downsides occurred to me until I was older.
And truth be told, if I were you, I would genuinely just steer clear of it in general. I personally don't think it's worth the risk, especially when you're so so young.
Explaining porn and hoping it will not affect kids negatively doesn't help when there's such easy access to porn everywhere. It's like explaining drugs to kids and there are drug dealers at every corner and a society that encourages drug use. Doesn't work.
No, they’re doing this because they know that if people had to provide an ID to access porn than web porn consumption would fall (especially consumption of the more extreme stuff, which is the most lucrative).
They fear a rise of a porn black market which is non-monetizable.
> Believe that a large portion of their user-base is minors, and a ban would hurt their bottom line
How many people who are of age would hand over their personal information to a porn site unless they are already paying customers? Many people would not feel safe just handing over all of that information. They would lose both minors and adults who do not want to share that information.
I am curious, how would you suggest they roll out this digital check without hurting the users privacy? I have not seen a proposal that can scale across countries without becoming a privacy nightmare.
From my limited experience, most people are pretty onboard with blocking minors from accessing porn. The conflict always arises around the question of how you will achieve that.
option three is that they see this legislation as the first step of an aggressive anti-porn campaign by the christian right.
right now it's age-verification under the guise of protecting kids. but the next demand will be to remove all non-hetero content. and then they'll ban porn completely.
They might also be weighing the risk that some governments aren't actually operating in good faith, and this is just the first phase of running the same playbook against porn vendors that has been run against abortion providers, i.e. a quagmire of messy, ever-changing, and contradictory "safety" regulations that eventually makes compliance impossible [1].
> Are unable to cheaply and efficiently roll out the infrastructure to verify, and do these digital checks
this simply-phrased benign-sounding statement belies how terrifying it is to be the responsible party for doing digital checks at scale in production on _extremely_ PII like driver's licenses.
I'm very much over the age of 18 and I will not be giving out my ID or anything like that to browse content. There are some many reasons why I don't want to do it and many reasons why I think having that information at all is a bad idea.
They probably just don't want the nightmare of legal liability complying with the legislation would entail. They have decided jettisoning all revenue from Texas is the better option, which must hurt.
Is this not what Texas wanted? What I think will happen eventually is that the websites will cater to government restrictions in the name of profits. They may complain and protest but the money generated from pornographic viewing online is too great.
They wanted a list of names of people accessing these sites. Texas is the same state that tried to coerce out of state abortion clinics into giving up their medical data. The sites instead decided to not play spy games with their clientele. I'm sure the money would be fine, but you'd also have to build and maintain systems for every state that would want to invade the privacy of its residence, which is a headache.
Let's not make up things because you disagree with the politics.
There's nothing in the law about the state gathering data.
Texas is not the first state with such law. Louisiana, Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia have all passed laws mandating age verification for accessing adult content. I expect this will become even more widespread.
There's probably a market opportunity for the entrepreneurs of hacker news: creating an age verification service compliant with the law of those state, with a strong no-log privacy policy and an API that websites with age verification mandate can use
I think what they wanted was proof of age. Which isn’t wholly unreasonable. The problem is doing it in a way that protects privacy. These debates happened in the 90s too. Every porn site had an age verification or warning that you had to electronically assert you were age of majority plus.
I wish we could all agree that, this is important and we shouldn’t be allowing minors to watch pornography. The porn sites don’t want to be liable to verify age so they pull these stunts blocking a whole state that wants verification.
There must be a reasonable and non political way to protect minors. Cigarette machines aren’t around anymore due to age verification (and people quitting smoking). Why are we so against real age verification ? I’m 110% pro anonymous internet viewing and privacy protection. But perhaps when we want to view pornography we should be okay with some form of verification.
This kind of leads me to a moral Vision quest
1. It’s not the governments or anyone else’s business what I do on the internet.
2. Except my significant other, if I have to hide pornography viewing from my partner then I’m doing something wrong morally
3. More important than my ability to jack off to clown porn is the innocence of my children to not be completely corrupted by such porn at age 6
4. Privacy is important, it is not my employer or any marketing agencies business than my SO and myself wear wigs and green makeup when we fuck
5. How hard is a pro privacy age verification system? Leisure suite Larry conquers that in 1985
There's not a privacy preserving way because children are smart. I don't think we should enable more surveillance for the flimsy "think of the children " argument.
Speaking of "think of the children", I have a conspiracy theory that the PMRC[0] was less about Dee Snider and Cyndi Lauper and more about creating a labelling regime that could ensure english-lyric Eurodisco[1] tunes wouldn't get any US distribution.
> (b) A commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material on an Internet website or a third party that performs age verification under this chapter shall require an individual to:
> (1) provide digital identification; or
> (2) comply with a commercial age verification system that verifies age using:
> (A) government-issued identification; or
> (B) a commercially reasonable method that relies
> on public or private transactional data to verify the age of an
> individual.
The issue is that:
- Asking porn sites (whose traffic is mostly nonpaying lurkers subsidized by very horny whales paying for EVERYTHING) to scan licenses, is technically non-trivial and extremely anti-privacy, and
- Leaving (B) undefined means means exposure to way more lawsuits
Reducing this law to "proof of age" misses a big part of what these govs are really trying to achieve (tar-and-feathering people who privately enjoy spicy entertainment)
So given the ubiquity of VPN services that users can use to actually privately enjoy the world's oldest form of entertainment, it is easier for Mindgeek et. al. to IP block and create an even bigger problem for these governments to deal with (introducing a semi-private communication channel to people who didn't know this was an option).
The big difference between using an ID to buy alcohol and using your ID to access a site is data retention. I can get a drink by showing my ID, the person serving me doesn’t need to keep my information to keep an auditable record. Without an accountable third party auditing solution (some sort of accredited lab situation), I wouldn’t trust a website to take my ID and not save/redistribute that information for other purposes.
What is the result of this sort of regulation though? Now the sites which don’t operate in the US will simply skirt the regulation. What is Texas going to do, sue xHamster? Why would they bother to comply? Does Texas now start limiting the type of traffic allowed through the infrastructure within the state?
lubbock is at the top of this list. while this city is very conservative, it is also the home of one of the biggest colleges in Texas (Texas Tech). so them topping this list is not at all surprising.
all of the other cities on this list are very (relatively) large east texas cities.
64 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadBut in what jurisdiction? It seems like everyone is banning something now.
I'm somewhat surprised that this hasn't occurred already. I suspect the reason is that there's not been a catalyzing event that governments usually need in order to make restrictions palatable to people.
This is probably designed to be that event. Enough people will buy the "think of the children" angle used to ban porn. And that legal framework can then be leveraged to regulate VPNs. First, to stop them from being used to bypass these porn restrictions, but then expanded to prevent content restriction bypassing, then to preventing online piracy, then preventing "subversive activities."
Pornography is at the vanguard of free speech.
I had hope for efforts like Freenet and Tor and I2P that are both censorship _and_ regulation resistant, but I've had hope for them for 25+ years and have yet to see them gain significant mindshare.
Especially the onion verse is bad.
It's like the nazi bar. Once there's a few the bar gets a name and atmosphere and nobody else wants to do there anymore.
A lot of VPNs keep logs, so they can be used to honeypot unsuspecting users.
*should the government tell websites to require age verification?
Governments require that for in-person adult entertainment, should they require it for remote as well?
(lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwti7-cEHh8 )
And that's just assuming the law could even be perfectly enforced! In reality, it will not be, and there will always be sites without the requirement (which will also be the "seedier" sites), or kids who work around it. So the end result is that kids end up watching even worse porn, while adults get their identities stolen and linked to their porn browsing habits.
Alternatively, how would you propose a porn site do age verification that doesn't involve every porn site having giant databases of IDs and user photos? Moreover, as the big - trying to do things right - sites have repeatedly stated, all you're doing is ensuring that the only sites minors can access are the ones that have little to no controls on content.
I get that you may feel that hardcore porn is bad for children - I think the issue here is that that's the only stuff kids can access because less hardcore stuff generally has more aggressive access controls - but the solution here is to explain what pornography is, and how it does or does not match reality, etc. Pretending it doesn't exist results in kids accessing it (because hormones and failure to monitor what your kids are doing online) and not understanding that it does not accurately reflect how real relationships or sex work. It's similar to "protecting" children from sex by pretending it doesn't exist, and making it really bad/sinful, which is super effective at enabling abusers.
Speaking strictly on behalf of my friends and I from junior high, it's pretty self explanatory.
It really isn't all self explanatory. And most junior high students don't understand the depth, nuance and complexity of a lot of things until they're much older. And there is a lot to talk about in the realm of pornography.
Take it from me (completely anecdotal), i started watching porn at 13 and for just under a decade since I did not stop. I was completely addicted and I didn't even realise it was happening, and what it was doing to my brain. I didn't realise it was affecting my perception of women, of sex, expectations, I didn't realise id spend hours and hours watching it every day, I didn't realise it was essentially rotting my brain. Not to mention that the whole industry is scummy, and the actors are not treated well for the most part.
Now I am clean. And it was actually difficult to stop - another conformation it was addictive. But often I am STILL presented by imagery of the stuff I watched. This imagery in my brain is largely not under my control. It is disturbing that I cannot forget these things. And I often fear it will affect my sex life going forward.
Things you do not expect to have major consequences sometimes do.
Now, I'm not saying that you can't watch porn without being addicted, but i am saying at the time none of the downsides occurred to me until I was older.
And truth be told, if I were you, I would genuinely just steer clear of it in general. I personally don't think it's worth the risk, especially when you're so so young.
Stay safe.
They fear a rise of a porn black market which is non-monetizable.
How many people who are of age would hand over their personal information to a porn site unless they are already paying customers? Many people would not feel safe just handing over all of that information. They would lose both minors and adults who do not want to share that information.
I am curious, how would you suggest they roll out this digital check without hurting the users privacy? I have not seen a proposal that can scale across countries without becoming a privacy nightmare.
From my limited experience, most people are pretty onboard with blocking minors from accessing porn. The conflict always arises around the question of how you will achieve that.
right now it's age-verification under the guise of protecting kids. but the next demand will be to remove all non-hetero content. and then they'll ban porn completely.
I would only wonder why a business would want to pay for something this stupid.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140825061919/http://www.dayton...
this simply-phrased benign-sounding statement belies how terrifying it is to be the responsible party for doing digital checks at scale in production on _extremely_ PII like driver's licenses.
Defendant: I’d rather just confess to the murder.
They wanted a list of names of people accessing these sites. Texas is the same state that tried to coerce out of state abortion clinics into giving up their medical data. The sites instead decided to not play spy games with their clientele. I'm sure the money would be fine, but you'd also have to build and maintain systems for every state that would want to invade the privacy of its residence, which is a headache.
There's nothing in the law about the state gathering data.
Texas is not the first state with such law. Louisiana, Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia have all passed laws mandating age verification for accessing adult content. I expect this will become even more widespread.
There's probably a market opportunity for the entrepreneurs of hacker news: creating an age verification service compliant with the law of those state, with a strong no-log privacy policy and an API that websites with age verification mandate can use
Maybe put pornhub on a lunar cluster. Bit of lag, but more old skool.
I wish we could all agree that, this is important and we shouldn’t be allowing minors to watch pornography. The porn sites don’t want to be liable to verify age so they pull these stunts blocking a whole state that wants verification.
There must be a reasonable and non political way to protect minors. Cigarette machines aren’t around anymore due to age verification (and people quitting smoking). Why are we so against real age verification ? I’m 110% pro anonymous internet viewing and privacy protection. But perhaps when we want to view pornography we should be okay with some form of verification.
This kind of leads me to a moral Vision quest
1. It’s not the governments or anyone else’s business what I do on the internet. 2. Except my significant other, if I have to hide pornography viewing from my partner then I’m doing something wrong morally 3. More important than my ability to jack off to clown porn is the innocence of my children to not be completely corrupted by such porn at age 6 4. Privacy is important, it is not my employer or any marketing agencies business than my SO and myself wear wigs and green makeup when we fuck 5. How hard is a pro privacy age verification system? Leisure suite Larry conquers that in 1985
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center
[1] eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Boys_Blue
Citation needed.
> (b) A commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material on an Internet website or a third party that performs age verification under this chapter shall require an individual to:
> (1) provide digital identification; or
> (2) comply with a commercial age verification system that verifies age using:
> (A) government-issued identification; or
> (B) a commercially reasonable method that relies
> on public or private transactional data to verify the age of an
> individual.
The issue is that:
- Asking porn sites (whose traffic is mostly nonpaying lurkers subsidized by very horny whales paying for EVERYTHING) to scan licenses, is technically non-trivial and extremely anti-privacy, and
- Leaving (B) undefined means means exposure to way more lawsuits
Reducing this law to "proof of age" misses a big part of what these govs are really trying to achieve (tar-and-feathering people who privately enjoy spicy entertainment)
So given the ubiquity of VPN services that users can use to actually privately enjoy the world's oldest form of entertainment, it is easier for Mindgeek et. al. to IP block and create an even bigger problem for these governments to deal with (introducing a semi-private communication channel to people who didn't know this was an option).
[0] https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/html/HB01181H...
What is the result of this sort of regulation though? Now the sites which don’t operate in the US will simply skirt the regulation. What is Texas going to do, sue xHamster? Why would they bother to comply? Does Texas now start limiting the type of traffic allowed through the infrastructure within the state?
Maybe they disclose it in a privacy policy. Maybe they say they don't, but do it anyway. It would be very hard to prove the negative in this case.
all of the other cities on this list are very (relatively) large east texas cities.