3 ms·

> That made me actually laugh. Internet access is ubiquitous, parental digital literacy is often low, none of those are actually helpful suggestions that would

> That made me actually laugh. Internet access is ubiquitous, parental digital literacy is often low, none of those are actually helpful suggestions that would help address the symptom. I think that works both for and against your point though. For the very same reason, it's not likely there will ever be a way to reliably solve this technologically. So while we may need some technological measures, we also need to educate parents and kids about this at the same time. Anyone trying to sell a technological 'this will solve the porn problem' solution should be viewed with a very critical eye.

barbazoo 3y ago
> For the very same reason, it's not likely there will ever be a way to reliably solve this technologically. How did you arrive at this? Because I'm optimistic and think that if the government sets the ground rules, porn distributors will find a way to implement it reliably (using technology) and continue delivering porn to their consumers. We get age checked here in Canada all the time when we buy booze for instance. Why not enforce it here with something like an age verification?
- genocidicbunny 3y ago
  Because the internet does not end at the Canadian border, and porn companies operating from other countries have no reason to implement such systems. And you can't block access to them -- VPNs are trivial to access these days. > We get age checked here in Canada all the time when we buy booze for instance. Why not enforce it here with something like an age verification? Because to buy alcohol you have to physically show up at a store with a physical ID that needs to pass as real, and you need to present yourself passably as an adult. Even then, it's not terribly difficult to get around even that -- plenty of high-schoolers are able to reliably get alcohol with cheap fake ID's because they look old enough and the ID is good enough. Online delivery services are also not terribly hard to spoof for a dedicated enough teenager.
  - cherioo 3y ago
    Then the next step is to ban VPN. It also doesn’t matter that the ban is not 100% effective, as long as it deters majority of the uses. Arguing whether or not it CAN be blocked feels pointless. The question needs to start from whether it SHOULD be blocked or not.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      You said the quiet part out loud. The next step is banning VPNs. For the children of course.
    - rangestransform 3y ago
      The closet authoritarians have really come out of the woodwork during the pandemic and haven’t been kicked back into submission
- happyopossum 3y ago
  >Why not enforce it here with something like an age verification? While I'd love this technical utopia, the Internet is a global construct. All it takes is someone in another country to decide they'd like to prey on kids by selling them porn, and your age verification goes out the window. To use your analogy, if the government can't even stop licensed stores in fixed physical locations from selling alcohol to kids (because it does happen), then how is one country going to enforce this in a globally distributed, virtual space?
- kelnos 3y ago
  We get carded in the US all the time when we buy booze too, but that system is still flawed: fake IDs often work, store clerks sometimes don't care as much as they should, underage people can sometimes get a random adult passing through to buy booze for them in exchange for 20 bucks, etc. And it's a lot easier to enforce rules when an interaction is in-person. How can you believe that porn blocking on the internet would ever actually work? (If blocking online TV/movie/music copyright infringement hasn't worked, why would you expect something like this to be successful?) All it takes is for one site to ignore the rules (porn sites based outside of Canada will not care to implement any kind of age verification), and for teens to use a VPN or some other trick to bypass ISP-level blocking. Then you have to ban or heavily regulate VPNs. At one point do you start realizing that you live in a Chinese-style internet censorship state?
- dotnet00 3y ago
  This is also missing the glaring fact that dedicated porn distributors are not the only sources of pornographic material. There are plenty of users on social media who post nsfw content or borderline nsfw content. So next you end up having everyone dox themselves to the site just to 'protect the children'. But then you have things like the fediverse and torrents, where obviously Canada can't really force much. At that point what are you going to do? Cut off global internet access? Start banning everything? Start heavily regulating software development past even what GDPR does?

barbazoo 3y ago

> For the very same reason, it's not likely there will ever be a way to reliably solve this technologically. How did you arrive at this? Because I'm optimistic and think that if the government sets the ground rules, porn distributors will find a way to implement it reliably (using technology) and continue delivering porn to their consumers. We get age checked here in Canada all the time when we buy booze for instance. Why not enforce it here with something like an age verification?

genocidicbunny 3y ago
Because the internet does not end at the Canadian border, and porn companies operating from other countries have no reason to implement such systems. And you can't block access to them -- VPNs are trivial to access these days. > We get age checked here in Canada all the time when we buy booze for instance. Why not enforce it here with something like an age verification? Because to buy alcohol you have to physically show up at a store with a physical ID that needs to pass as real, and you need to present yourself passably as an adult. Even then, it's not terribly difficult to get around even that -- plenty of high-schoolers are able to reliably get alcohol with cheap fake ID's because they look old enough and the ID is good enough. Online delivery services are also not terribly hard to spoof for a dedicated enough teenager.
- cherioo 3y ago
  Then the next step is to ban VPN. It also doesn’t matter that the ban is not 100% effective, as long as it deters majority of the uses. Arguing whether or not it CAN be blocked feels pointless. The question needs to start from whether it SHOULD be blocked or not.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    You said the quiet part out loud. The next step is banning VPNs. For the children of course.
  - rangestransform 3y ago
    The closet authoritarians have really come out of the woodwork during the pandemic and haven’t been kicked back into submission
happyopossum 3y ago
>Why not enforce it here with something like an age verification? While I'd love this technical utopia, the Internet is a global construct. All it takes is someone in another country to decide they'd like to prey on kids by selling them porn, and your age verification goes out the window. To use your analogy, if the government can't even stop licensed stores in fixed physical locations from selling alcohol to kids (because it does happen), then how is one country going to enforce this in a globally distributed, virtual space?
kelnos 3y ago
We get carded in the US all the time when we buy booze too, but that system is still flawed: fake IDs often work, store clerks sometimes don't care as much as they should, underage people can sometimes get a random adult passing through to buy booze for them in exchange for 20 bucks, etc. And it's a lot easier to enforce rules when an interaction is in-person. How can you believe that porn blocking on the internet would ever actually work? (If blocking online TV/movie/music copyright infringement hasn't worked, why would you expect something like this to be successful?) All it takes is for one site to ignore the rules (porn sites based outside of Canada will not care to implement any kind of age verification), and for teens to use a VPN or some other trick to bypass ISP-level blocking. Then you have to ban or heavily regulate VPNs. At one point do you start realizing that you live in a Chinese-style internet censorship state?
dotnet00 3y ago
This is also missing the glaring fact that dedicated porn distributors are not the only sources of pornographic material. There are plenty of users on social media who post nsfw content or borderline nsfw content. So next you end up having everyone dox themselves to the site just to 'protect the children'. But then you have things like the fediverse and torrents, where obviously Canada can't really force much. At that point what are you going to do? Cut off global internet access? Start banning everything? Start heavily regulating software development past even what GDPR does?