4 ms·

All the porn companies have handled this by simply blocking the sites in the states in question, just forcing people to use VPNs. If you ask for ID verification

All the porn companies have handled this by simply blocking the sites in the states in question, just forcing people to use VPNs. If you ask for ID verification to see NSFW content they know hardly anyone would provide it, and at the same time it opens you up to a lot of liability in handling extremely sensitive PII. The whole thing is just moralistic BS anyway. I'm sure most kids can figure out how to use a VPN better than adults.

chimeracoder 2y ago
> If you ask for ID verification to see NSFW content they know hardly anyone would provide it, and at the same time it opens you up to a lot of liability in handling extremely sensitive PII. Yes, and that is exactly why Morality in Media (the right-wing, evangelical group behind these laws) has been proposing them. Their goal is to outlaw pornography (and other "immoral" content) on the internet by making it so difficult to access or provide legally that nobody will bother. > I'm sure most kids can figure out how to use a VPN better than adults. You're making the mistake of assuming their goal is to prevent kids from being able to access pornography. It is not. Their goal is to make it so financially impractical to run any service that publishes (or allows people to publish) pornography, LGBTQ content, or anything that they deem "immoral" that nobody even tries. And it's working: many services which used to allow that content before 2017 no longer do, and it is much, much more expensive (and difficult) for the remaining folks to find platforms or hosting providers to continue to do so.
- azeirah 2y ago
  VPNs? Or children?
- Aromasin 2y ago
  This seems a little baffling to me because these evangelical groups are uniquely American. There would still exist a huge pornography industry globally, particularly within the EU, that would serve the US even if these groups achieved every goal. It's deluded to think it could be stopped.
  - chimeracoder 2y ago
    > This seems a little baffling to me because these evangelical groups are uniquely American. I'm referring to one of several groups that is behind a specific campaign in the US. That doesn't mean that there aren't other efforts to curtail this in other countries or globally. As mentioned elsewhere, there's a law that's about to go into effect in the UK which is actually way broader and draconian than any that has been passed anywhere in the US. There are more in other countries too. > There would still exist a huge pornography industry globally, particularly within the EU, that would serve the US even if these groups achieved every goal. And yet, when Tumblr and Imgur and Reddit[0] banned pornography, no EU-based competitor emerged to take their place. [0] Reddit's ban wasn't a total ban, but it was enough to effectively shut down many groups (which was the goal).
  - influx 2y ago
    Does the EU allow sales of pornography to minors?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - brimwats 2y ago
    No they're not; their roots are in the YMCA and the British society for the suppression of vice and earlier societies dating back to the 1700s. They originated when the church courts were shut down and are a feature of British evangelicalism that Americans turbocharged.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    EU guys are the same. Organizations like German state police are doing "crackdowns" of Internet contents in total disregard of jurisdiction. Targeting criteria is neither consumers nor producers but specific subjective quality of content itself: they never care who makes it or at what cost, but that it exists.
- caminante 2y ago
  I was curious about the origin. It may not be what you expect. > These bills didn’t originate from some evangelical PAC or conservative think tank. Their actual origin was, ironically, The Howard Stern Show. [0] While it seems like everyone has overwhelmingly sided against free speech advocates (ACLU) and porn sites, there are some interesting points about access/addiction. I'm less impressed if it's purely evangelical driven (at least now), but I'm sympathetic to arguments about access for minors (or their ability to post under-age content). I don't have the answer. [0] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/08/age-law-online-porn-00110148 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/08/age-law-on...
  - chimeracoder 2y ago
    > I was curious about the origin. It may not be what you expect. As someone who's been following this for over a decade, I can assure you it is, in fact, what I expect. That article is absolute nonsense, which you can tell by the fact that it claims the clock starts in 2021, when these bills have actually been introduced multiple times before then. Furthermore, the article contradicts its own narrative, first claiming that a Howard Stern spot "started" it, then admitting two paragraphs later that the legislator was inspired by that radio show to contact... an anti-porn lobbyist that she had already known about for years. That's a really... interesting definition of "origin" that they're using.
    - caminante 2y ago
      Sure, but LA was the first to pass age verification for adult sites (and it wasn't until 2022-23). I don't know what the line is between that and other age verification (13+) or blanket anti-porn bills you're referring to. [0] I don't follow your point about contradiction. How is contacting a single-issue ally (who's on the opposite end of the political spectrum at that -- and not a "GOP Think Tank" or "evangelical") changing the origin? The person she reached out to is a pro-abortion, radical feminist. That is strengthening the article's key conclusion by a lot. It's a surprising turn for an origin story. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_verification_system#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_verification_system#United...
- southernplaces7 2y ago
  >Yes, and that is exactly why Morality in Media (the right-wing, evangelical group behind these laws) Sure, they're major culprits but let's not let the left get off the hook entirely on promoting moralizing censorship of porn too. There are segments of it, especially those in certain feminist camps that hate pornography with a victorian near-evangelical level of scorn and they have a loud voice of their own under different flags and reasoning.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    There are, but they're disorganised and poorly funded, and opposed by other feminists. (It's practically a law - for almost every feminist moral POV there is an equal and opposite feminist moral POV.) Meanwhile the organised and well-funded evangelicals and right-wingers ignore the constant stream of SA and CP convictions among youth pastors and other supposed moral authorities. The stats don't necessarily prove that religious states consume more porn, but porn is an existential problem for evangelicals in a way that it isn't for most progressives.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    Are there many and do they have any influence? I haven't heard anything from such groups. Have they gotten any laws passed, like the age verification laws the other groups have succeeded in passing in several states?
    - Digory 2y ago
      “ We believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone," Steve Jobs declared in an email to a customer. "Folks who want porn can buy an Android."
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Dalewyn 2y ago
Pedantic, but the word you're looking for is proxy, not VPN. A Virtual Private Network is a private network such as a Local Area Network created virtually on a Wide Area Network such as the internet. Tailscale, SoftEther, or Hamachi for the old boys are examples of VPN implementations. A proxy is a server that accepts and forwards traffic from clients through it, lending its IP address to clients as the traffic origin if desired. A proxy can exist in a private network, but it is not a requirement.
- rUsHeYaFuBu 2y ago
  Curious, does a proxy also tend to encrypt the data streamed between it and the end user like a VPN service would? That is, does the ISP have access to the information that's being accessed via the proxy? It was my understanding that proxies tending to mask where a request came from but does nothing significant with the data between it and the requester.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >does a proxy also tend to encrypt the data streamed between it and the end user like a VPN service would? It could, but it's not a hard requirement. A proxy server is just like any other server, encrypting the data en route is as desired. A VPN encrypts data as a part of securing tunnels, but it's not a hard requirement there either. As long as two computers can communicate over private IP address ranges on a WAN, it's a VPN. The Private in VPN indicates the scope of the network, not whether any data within is immediately accessible. See also: "Private" and "Public" IP address ranges. >does the ISP have access to the information that's being accessed via the proxy? The ISP providing internet to the proxy server will know what the proxy server requests and receives. >It was my understanding that proxies tending to mask where a request came from but does nothing significant with the data between it and the requester. Correct. Again, whether the data a proxy server receives and forwards was encrypted is tangential to the task of forwarding data.
  - mhitza 2y ago
    Depends on the proxy. If you have an SSH server you can open a local socks5 proxy, that when configured in your browser sends all the traffic through your server. Since its a proxy over SSH it's all encrypted till your server, then whatever protocol the website uses. VPNs are better (as in more ergonomic) in practice, since large sites tend to block access from known hosting providers (looking at YouTube not rendering video when accessed from a Hetzner server).
ETH_start 2y ago
It's 100% bullshit. The parents themselves are responsible for letting their children browse the internet unsupervised. The culture of over-reaction to danger that has taken over the political domain is creating a nanny state where it's impossible to avoid crosssing red lines and doing something wrong. It's paralyzing society by instilling inaction as the only safe path.
- itake 2y ago
  > The parents themselves are responsible Parents give their kids access to guns and we all know how that ends. If we can't hold parents accountable for their children's violence, I seriously doubt we can do anything about parents failing to parent their kids on this topic. What are we going to do? throw the single mom with 2 jobs and 5 kids in jail because she didn't pay $20/mo for parental controls on her kids devices?
  - ETH_start 2y ago
    >throw the single mom with 2 jobs and 5 kids in jail because she didn't pay $20/mo for parental controls on her kids devices? If she wants to have children out of wedlock or with a man who are not financially capable of being a provider, then she and her children should bear the consequences of that, not everyone else who know has to have government take over the internet and mandates identity disclosures for perusing adult content.
    - itake 2y ago
      Society pays the consequences either directly from government or the impact the kids have on everyone else that has to live with adults that discovered porn as a kid before they could understand it. Kids that discovered porn at an early age will not understand how to process it properly and this will impact their relationships in the future. It is their future partners that suffer along with the kids and family.
      - ETH_start 2y ago
itake 2y ago
> just forcing people to use VPNs Does this really even work? The law isn't "if the user's ip address appears to be from this state, then you must require id". Properly enforcing georestrictions like this costs money and destroys businesses, but that is kinda the point.
- azernik 2y ago
  It provides plausible deniability. "We did our best, judge"
  - moate 2y ago
    It's not even plausible deniability, it's literally "how are we supposed to know what location people are in other than ISP?" That's the de facto determinate of location online. The government hasn't taken the position that a bar checking driver's licenses to confirm someone's age provides "plausible deniability", but rather that they're doing their part to comply with the law, even if some users are going to use fake IDs to cheat the system.
    - itake 2y ago
      1/ block data center connections / require users to connect via a residential IP, not cell phone. 2/ request GPS location from the device. 3/ request WiFi location from the device. 4/ require billing address to be out of state. (States collect sales tax based on billing address, not where the service or product is bought. So I think this is fair.)
- svnt 2y ago
  I’m sorry but business success aside, how else do you propose to do it? Require them to go outside and take a panoramic video including their face that somehow also captures third-party information about the date and time and then feed it into geoguessr?
  - harimau777 2y ago
    I think the problem is that laws that are trying to force morality on people.

chimeracoder 2y ago

> If you ask for ID verification to see NSFW content they know hardly anyone would provide it, and at the same time it opens you up to a lot of liability in handling extremely sensitive PII. Yes, and that is exactly why Morality in Media (the right-wing, evangelical group behind these laws) has been proposing them. Their goal is to outlaw pornography (and other "immoral" content) on the internet by making it so difficult to access or provide legally that nobody will bother. > I'm sure most kids can figure out how to use a VPN better than adults. You're making the mistake of assuming their goal is to prevent kids from being able to access pornography. It is not. Their goal is to make it so financially impractical to run any service that publishes (or allows people to publish) pornography, LGBTQ content, or anything that they deem "immoral" that nobody even tries. And it's working: many services which used to allow that content before 2017 no longer do, and it is much, much more expensive (and difficult) for the remaining folks to find platforms or hosting providers to continue to do so.

azeirah 2y ago
VPNs? Or children?
Aromasin 2y ago
This seems a little baffling to me because these evangelical groups are uniquely American. There would still exist a huge pornography industry globally, particularly within the EU, that would serve the US even if these groups achieved every goal. It's deluded to think it could be stopped.
- chimeracoder 2y ago
  > This seems a little baffling to me because these evangelical groups are uniquely American. I'm referring to one of several groups that is behind a specific campaign in the US. That doesn't mean that there aren't other efforts to curtail this in other countries or globally. As mentioned elsewhere, there's a law that's about to go into effect in the UK which is actually way broader and draconian than any that has been passed anywhere in the US. There are more in other countries too. > There would still exist a huge pornography industry globally, particularly within the EU, that would serve the US even if these groups achieved every goal. And yet, when Tumblr and Imgur and Reddit[0] banned pornography, no EU-based competitor emerged to take their place. [0] Reddit's ban wasn't a total ban, but it was enough to effectively shut down many groups (which was the goal).
- influx 2y ago
  Does the EU allow sales of pornography to minors?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- brimwats 2y ago
  No they're not; their roots are in the YMCA and the British society for the suppression of vice and earlier societies dating back to the 1700s. They originated when the church courts were shut down and are a feature of British evangelicalism that Americans turbocharged.
- numpad0 2y ago
  EU guys are the same. Organizations like German state police are doing "crackdowns" of Internet contents in total disregard of jurisdiction. Targeting criteria is neither consumers nor producers but specific subjective quality of content itself: they never care who makes it or at what cost, but that it exists.
caminante 2y ago
I was curious about the origin. It may not be what you expect. > These bills didn’t originate from some evangelical PAC or conservative think tank. Their actual origin was, ironically, The Howard Stern Show. [0] While it seems like everyone has overwhelmingly sided against free speech advocates (ACLU) and porn sites, there are some interesting points about access/addiction. I'm less impressed if it's purely evangelical driven (at least now), but I'm sympathetic to arguments about access for minors (or their ability to post under-age content). I don't have the answer. [0] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/08/age-law-online-porn-00110148 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/08/age-law-on...
- chimeracoder 2y ago
  > I was curious about the origin. It may not be what you expect. As someone who's been following this for over a decade, I can assure you it is, in fact, what I expect. That article is absolute nonsense, which you can tell by the fact that it claims the clock starts in 2021, when these bills have actually been introduced multiple times before then. Furthermore, the article contradicts its own narrative, first claiming that a Howard Stern spot "started" it, then admitting two paragraphs later that the legislator was inspired by that radio show to contact... an anti-porn lobbyist that she had already known about for years. That's a really... interesting definition of "origin" that they're using.
  - caminante 2y ago
    Sure, but LA was the first to pass age verification for adult sites (and it wasn't until 2022-23). I don't know what the line is between that and other age verification (13+) or blanket anti-porn bills you're referring to. [0] I don't follow your point about contradiction. How is contacting a single-issue ally (who's on the opposite end of the political spectrum at that -- and not a "GOP Think Tank" or "evangelical") changing the origin? The person she reached out to is a pro-abortion, radical feminist. That is strengthening the article's key conclusion by a lot. It's a surprising turn for an origin story. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_verification_system#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_verification_system#United...
southernplaces7 2y ago
>Yes, and that is exactly why Morality in Media (the right-wing, evangelical group behind these laws) Sure, they're major culprits but let's not let the left get off the hook entirely on promoting moralizing censorship of porn too. There are segments of it, especially those in certain feminist camps that hate pornography with a victorian near-evangelical level of scorn and they have a loud voice of their own under different flags and reasoning.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  There are, but they're disorganised and poorly funded, and opposed by other feminists. (It's practically a law - for almost every feminist moral POV there is an equal and opposite feminist moral POV.) Meanwhile the organised and well-funded evangelicals and right-wingers ignore the constant stream of SA and CP convictions among youth pastors and other supposed moral authorities. The stats don't necessarily prove that religious states consume more porn, but porn is an existential problem for evangelicals in a way that it isn't for most progressives.
- mmooss 2y ago
  Are there many and do they have any influence? I haven't heard anything from such groups. Have they gotten any laws passed, like the age verification laws the other groups have succeeded in passing in several states?
  - Digory 2y ago
    “ We believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone," Steve Jobs declared in an email to a customer. "Folks who want porn can buy an Android."
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Dalewyn 2y ago

Pedantic, but the word you're looking for is proxy, not VPN. A Virtual Private Network is a private network such as a Local Area Network created virtually on a Wide Area Network such as the internet. Tailscale, SoftEther, or Hamachi for the old boys are examples of VPN implementations. A proxy is a server that accepts and forwards traffic from clients through it, lending its IP address to clients as the traffic origin if desired. A proxy can exist in a private network, but it is not a requirement.

rUsHeYaFuBu 2y ago
Curious, does a proxy also tend to encrypt the data streamed between it and the end user like a VPN service would? That is, does the ISP have access to the information that's being accessed via the proxy? It was my understanding that proxies tending to mask where a request came from but does nothing significant with the data between it and the requester.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >does a proxy also tend to encrypt the data streamed between it and the end user like a VPN service would? It could, but it's not a hard requirement. A proxy server is just like any other server, encrypting the data en route is as desired. A VPN encrypts data as a part of securing tunnels, but it's not a hard requirement there either. As long as two computers can communicate over private IP address ranges on a WAN, it's a VPN. The Private in VPN indicates the scope of the network, not whether any data within is immediately accessible. See also: "Private" and "Public" IP address ranges. >does the ISP have access to the information that's being accessed via the proxy? The ISP providing internet to the proxy server will know what the proxy server requests and receives. >It was my understanding that proxies tending to mask where a request came from but does nothing significant with the data between it and the requester. Correct. Again, whether the data a proxy server receives and forwards was encrypted is tangential to the task of forwarding data.
- mhitza 2y ago
  Depends on the proxy. If you have an SSH server you can open a local socks5 proxy, that when configured in your browser sends all the traffic through your server. Since its a proxy over SSH it's all encrypted till your server, then whatever protocol the website uses. VPNs are better (as in more ergonomic) in practice, since large sites tend to block access from known hosting providers (looking at YouTube not rendering video when accessed from a Hetzner server).

ETH_start 2y ago

It's 100% bullshit. The parents themselves are responsible for letting their children browse the internet unsupervised. The culture of over-reaction to danger that has taken over the political domain is creating a nanny state where it's impossible to avoid crosssing red lines and doing something wrong. It's paralyzing society by instilling inaction as the only safe path.

itake 2y ago
> The parents themselves are responsible Parents give their kids access to guns and we all know how that ends. If we can't hold parents accountable for their children's violence, I seriously doubt we can do anything about parents failing to parent their kids on this topic. What are we going to do? throw the single mom with 2 jobs and 5 kids in jail because she didn't pay $20/mo for parental controls on her kids devices?
- ETH_start 2y ago
  >throw the single mom with 2 jobs and 5 kids in jail because she didn't pay $20/mo for parental controls on her kids devices? If she wants to have children out of wedlock or with a man who are not financially capable of being a provider, then she and her children should bear the consequences of that, not everyone else who know has to have government take over the internet and mandates identity disclosures for perusing adult content.
  - itake 2y ago
    Society pays the consequences either directly from government or the impact the kids have on everyone else that has to live with adults that discovered porn as a kid before they could understand it. Kids that discovered porn at an early age will not understand how to process it properly and this will impact their relationships in the future. It is their future partners that suffer along with the kids and family.
    - ETH_start 2y ago

itake 2y ago

> just forcing people to use VPNs Does this really even work? The law isn't "if the user's ip address appears to be from this state, then you must require id". Properly enforcing georestrictions like this costs money and destroys businesses, but that is kinda the point.

azernik 2y ago
It provides plausible deniability. "We did our best, judge"
- moate 2y ago
  It's not even plausible deniability, it's literally "how are we supposed to know what location people are in other than ISP?" That's the de facto determinate of location online. The government hasn't taken the position that a bar checking driver's licenses to confirm someone's age provides "plausible deniability", but rather that they're doing their part to comply with the law, even if some users are going to use fake IDs to cheat the system.
  - itake 2y ago
    1/ block data center connections / require users to connect via a residential IP, not cell phone. 2/ request GPS location from the device. 3/ request WiFi location from the device. 4/ require billing address to be out of state. (States collect sales tax based on billing address, not where the service or product is bought. So I think this is fair.)
svnt 2y ago
I’m sorry but business success aside, how else do you propose to do it? Require them to go outside and take a panoramic video including their face that somehow also captures third-party information about the date and time and then feed it into geoguessr?
- harimau777 2y ago
  I think the problem is that laws that are trying to force morality on people.