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Pornhub Blocks All of Utah from Its Site
- jleyank 3y agoI suspect this is the preferred solution for the legislature. At no effort of their own the problem has disappeared. And disappeared in such a way that nobody can participate. (Dup)
- _zzaw 3y agoI also suspect that there are more legislators than you'd think becoming very well acquainted with VPNs right now.
- medler 3y agoWhat problem has disappeared? There are still millions of porn sites accessible by Utahans of any age, no? (This is a genuine question. I’m not trying to be snippy, or even to disagree, just seeking clarification).
- matteoraso 3y agoYes, but I imagine that other porn sites are going to block Utah as well. That being said, nothing's really going to change unless Utah bans VPNs as well.
- toyg 3y agoWebsites that already flaunt the law (typically on copyright, but also on adult content distribution) because they're not US-based, will continue to do so. Only US-based operations will go to the trouble of blocking Utah. Which means Utah citizens will likely resort to non-US, less-regulated sites, making everything worse (more extreme content, less protections for people appearing in content, etc etc).
- 1over137 3y ago>Only US-based operations will go to the trouble of blocking Utah. Apparently not, as Pornhub is Canadian.
- toyg 3y agoI expect Canada is not beyond the reach of US copyright law, in practice.
- arp242 3y agoOn paper PornHub seems headquartered in Cyprus, and parent company MindGeek in Luxembourg. Tax reasons both probably. But it doesn't matter because MindGeek also owns Brazzers, Reality Kings, and a bunch of other porn studios, and they operate out of the US ("porn valley") a lot. Simply ignoring US law can get them in to a lot of trouble. Even a EU-based outfit is relatively safe in comparison, never mind something located in Russia or whatnot.
- remram 3y agoUntil you can't type "porn" in Google and get it, immediately, for free, Utah has made no progress.
- Buttons840 3y agoSo, keeping score, that's 1 website that has chosen to block the entire state versus 0 that have decided to comply with Utah's strict social media regulations. I wonder if other companies might do the same?
- ngai_aku 3y agoYeah, it'll be much more interesting next year when the social media regulations go into affect.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoMakes sense. Utah is 1% of the population of the United States and .04% of the world.
- vlark 3y agoHow do state laws such as this not contradict federal interstate commerce laws?
- Spivak 3y agoSerious answer, because in order for federal law to supersede state law they have to make their own law that "occupies the field" [1] or explicitly says in the law that it preempts state law. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/occupy_the_field https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/occupy_the_field
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agoThere are many state laws that contradict a federal law. But they have to actually be challenged by a federal court in order to be nullified. States can make up all the hair-brained laws they want but if they never get sued by the feds then nobody cares. For instance, all the states legalizing marijuana right now in defiance of federal law.
- g42gregory 3y agoMany cryptocurrency websites refuse services country by country, and in the United States case, I saw service restrictions on state by state level. Many financial services (overseas hedge funds) websites refuse access to US persons.
- zamnos 3y agoThe Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) requires banks and other financial institutions comply with a bunch of regulation for they pleasure of having an American as a customer. Unless it's a particularly interesting market for a foreign bank, they, as you've seen, just won't do business with an Americans.
- etchalon 3y ago[flagged]
- weard_beard 3y agoI've been developing B2C and B2B sites for 15 years. There's state specific shipping, promotion, pricing, and exclusive service and products in nearly every site I've ever built. IF they do business outside the US at all they will nearly all block Russian and Chinese IPs. Money killed the inclusive open internet sometime around 2008. Apps spit on its grave.
- merpkz 3y agoI understand why you might want to block those specific countries, but in my personal cybersec experience, most of the malicious traffic actually comes from AWS and other big enterprises, mainly because of compromised servers hosted there. So I actually don't know what specifically you get by geo blocking, bad guys will still reach your internet hosted service.
- cornylisti 3y agoOnly a single-digit percentage of bruteforcin and scanning attempts gets to our servers once we blocked China and Russia. Going by pure volume they're overwhelmingly overrepresented. I don't know about attack quality, I just assume sophisticated attacks could originate from anywhere, so I just pick the lowest hanging fruit
- Freedom2 3y agoThis comment doesn't really align with the HN commenting guidelines.
- cornylisti 3y agoI'm not sure meta comments about comment quality do either
- govolckurself 3y ago[dead]
- readonthegoapp 3y agoi was curious what the splashy page looked like: https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/2023/05/01/pornhub-largest-porn-site-us/ https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/2023/05/01/pornhub-largest-po...
- laserbeam 3y agoLet's say, for some unexpected idiotic reason, ID age verification becomes widespread for more than just porn. Wouldn't that be the first thing people than start generating via midjourney and similar AIs? Fake ids to pass age checks?
- woodruffw 3y agoHow is an AI-generated profile picture going to circumvent an ID lookup? States aren't considering facial recognition for age verification; they're going to require affirmative proof in the form of a state or federal ID that can be looked up. (And note: on a policy level, this is fundamentally different from your neighborhood's bar having a conveniently broken ID reader: an online service can't meaningfully claim to lack the connectivity needed for ID lookups.)
- oarsinsync 3y ago> an online service can't meaningfully claim to lack the connectivity needed for ID lookups Partial connectivity outages happen literally every day. Most people don’t notice. Websites like “down for everyone or just me”, or uptime monitors that monitor from dozens of different source locations, exist because of this.
- woodruffw 3y agoI don't think this addresses the point: if you can connect to a service, then laws like this will require them to make an ID challenge. If you can't connect, then it's a moot point. The service itself can't say that it can't connect to you, because it's an online service and you're trivially connected to it.
- flangola7 3y agoYou can't Midjourney a valid matching name and government ID number
- formerly_proven 3y ago
- adamredwoods 3y ago>> In 2021, Cox signed a law that would require device manufacturers to add adult content filters on all smartphones and tablets sold in Utah. I know this isn't in effect, but won't this hurt only Utah? Just don't sell devices there. People will buy them across the border.
- TkTech 3y agoCalifornia does this all the time, and this actually works for California because, well, they matter. Businesses want access to their market. Utah has less people than my city, and produces 0.9% of the national GDP. Anyone attempting to do business there at any scale also quickly realizes that it is not a secular state government and you'll have to bribe/work around the Mormon church.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- amelius 3y agoThis is great news for VPN providers.
- prepend 3y agoSo Utah wins. I think the goal of these laws is to decrease porn usage primarily with any child safety benefit as secondary.
- viraptor 3y agoDo they win? Did the porn usage actually decrease? I'm not sure how you'd even measure that given common distribution areas like Reddit or Twitter. Unless someone does real research on this in a few months, I don't think anyone can be said to "win" here. Short-term I would expect the usage to be registered as higher while people interested in porn are now checking other sites to figure out what's available.
- kibwen 3y agoPornography is prohibited by Islam, and yet Islamic countries are among the largest consumers of pornography in the world. Humans need an outlet for sexual urges, and sexual repression only makes those urges more acute.
- varelse 3y ago[dead]