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After Pornhub left France, this VPN saw a 1,000% surge in signups in 30 minutes
- ghusto 1y ago> A more technically sound approach would be content controls directly implemented on the devices parents chose to give their children Passive aggression level 10, and I approve.
- callamdelaney 1y agoThis is the only true solution. Parents need to take responsibility for what their kids are doing online, what they’re viewing and who they’re talking to. This generation of parents should be prepared for that but apparently not.
- amriksohata 1y agoThis never happens tho - parents dont sometimes even know how to use the tech. Its like giving a gun to a child and telling them its ok, just remember when you open the packaging to take the safety off. ...and oh yeh the safety software changes every few months so you will have to review it
- callamdelaney 1y agoApparently the average age of mothers is 30 - these parents should understand the risks of technology having be exposed to it themselves but we don’t seem to be seeing improvement in this area like we might expect.
- pishpash 1y agoA mother of 30 can't compete with shareholder interest working 24/7.
- godelski 1y ago> A 30yo mother can't compete (fify) Shareholders, super computers, psychologists, and a good portion of HN users!
- SpicyLemonZest 1y agoThe problem is that they also understand the benefits of technology. It's easy to limit "screen time" in the abstract, and not too hard to keep it going through toddlerhood if you want. It's much harder to tell your 12 year old that they're not allowed to stay connected with their friends when your own friends just sent you a meme in the group chat 5 minutes ago.
- sapphicsnail 1y agoA lot of us experienced the opposite problem. I had parents that restricted large parts of the Internet that probably would have been fine to access. The Internet has changed a lot. It wasn't until I took in a zoomer who grew up with unrestricted Internet access that I realized how damaging it could be.
- psychoslave 1y agoCould you elaborate?
- ulbu 1y agodefault to parental guidance enabled.
- godelski 1y ago> Its like giving a gun to a child and telling them its ok Might not be the best example if you visit the American South... I get your point and I think you're right, but I'd suggest a different analogy or lean in a bit more saying give it to a young child with no training. The irony is The South is where these porn laws are happening...
- stanford_labrat 1y agoI’m sorry who is who in this analogy. Because if internet/tech is the gun then the clear solution is “not giving your children guns”. Bad modern parents just give their kids an iPad.
- callamdelaney 1y agoYeah I just wouldn’t give them one
- neepi 1y agoI gave my kids iPads. But I also parented them.
- Ancapistani 1y ago> Because if internet/tech is the gun then the clear solution is “not giving your children guns”. Funnily enough, no. The clear solution is to ensure that you talk to your children about [gun|online] safety. Show them how to use the [gun|internet] safely. Make sure they know that they can ask to use your [gun|device] any time they'd like -- but only under your supervision. Take the mystery away through education and experience, and like anything else [guns|the internet] becomes just another part of adult life. Just one more thing that can be dangerous if used incorrectly.
- Dylan16807 1y ago> Make sure they know that they can ask to use your [gun|device] any time they'd like -- but only under your supervision. You could do that, but there's no particular need for it. "No guns until you're 16" works fine. You don't need to "take the mystery away". You need to use the internet a lot before you become an adult, you need to use a gun never before you become an adult. You need a lot of practice to build up internet safety skills, you need barely any practice to build up gun safety skills. Go ahead and have a basic gun safety talk, that's a good idea, but that's all you need.
- TacticalCoder 1y ago[dead]
- closewith 1y agoOkay, should bars and off licenses be able to sell alcohol to 10 year olds? Cigarettes? Should that be the responsibility of parents to control, too? Or do we continue with the long held legislative reality that you are responsible for the goods and services that you unlawfully provide to children?
- healsdata 1y agoYour analogy is faulty and doesn't hold up to the basic scrutiny. Whoever is giving the child access is responsible, not the manufacturer. If a parent gives their child a device capable of accessing the internet with no restrictions, that's on the parent. Pornhub is manufacturing a product and making it available to the open market, just like Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels has no responsibility to ensure a bar is only providing access to legal patrons. In your analogy, the bar would be equivalent to a internet cafe or public library that has PCs available to patrons. Those types of businesses should definitely use physical IDs to verify patrons are of age. To make your analogy work for Pornhub, you'd also have to argue "why shouldn't Jack Daniels have to put age-verifying instant blood tests on their bottles in case a parent puts one in their unlocked liquor cabinet?" Because then the same concerns arise -- why should Jack Daniels be given access to my blood just to manufacture an age-restricted product? What will they do with it? Will they secure the data appropriately? How do I know it won't be used to negatively impact my future because my health insurance company doesn't like that I drank a bottle of JD?
- tzs 1y ago> Whoever is giving the child access is responsible, not the manufacturer. If a parent gives their child a device capable of accessing the internet with no restrictions, that's on the parent. Suppose a parent lets their 16 year old borrow the family car, the kid drives to a bar, and the bar serves the kid alcoholic drinks. By your logic would that be considered the parents fault for providing the kid with a means of transport that doesn't restrict where the kid can go rather than the bar's fault for not checking that their customer could legally use their product? > Pornhub is manufacturing a product and making it available to the open market, just like Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels has no responsibility to ensure a bar is only providing access to legal patrons. > To make your analogy work for Pornhub, you'd also have to argue "why shouldn't Jack Daniels have to put age-verifying instant blood tests on their bottles in case a parent puts one in their unlocked liquor cabinet?" That's a poor comparison, because with Pornhub the end user of their product gets it directly from Pornhub. With Jack Daniels most users get the product through resellers. It is the resellers that handle checking that the final sale to the end user is legal. Users can buy directly from Jack Daniels (jackdaniels.com) and for those sales Jack Daniels does check the buyer's age.
- ryeats 1y agoI tried to block YouTube when my kids were remote learning during the pandemic, it took several attempts and they were in grade school. They even got around Apple's considerable content controls I had to set up a DNS proxy.
- paxys 1y agoMy condolences, you are raising software engineers.
- bdangubic 1y agoall kids in 2025 are SWEs :)
- trilbyglens 1y agoBest way is to block at the router.
- number6 1y agoThey will just start to use the onion Router. Not even states can block internet access 100%
- lacker 1y agoAt my son's school they recently started blocking ChatGPT, not because kids were using it to cheat, but because kids kept asking ChatGPT how to get around the content controls, and it would constantly find new ways to proxy or evade.
- drivingmenuts 1y agoDid you tell them "Don't do that or there will be consequences" and then apply the consequences? Carrot and stick is a time-honored method that works.
- derefr 1y agoI think this approach made a lot of sense in the 2000s and 2010s, when consumer electronics with internet access were expensive things well out of reach of a child unless given to them by a parent. But we're in an era now where cell phones and tablets — especially used + low-spec ones — are something that even a young child can acquire en masse: from their friends at school, or from any mall kiosk or convenience store with their allowance, etc. You can put all the parental controls you like on the nice phone you buy your child — but how do you put parental controls on the four other phones you have no idea they own? (Before you say "search their room" — they could leave them in their desk at school, charging them with a battery bank they charged at home or got a friend to charge for them; and then use them with free public wi-fi rather than locked-down school wi-fi. This doesn't require any particular cleverness; it's the path of least resistance!) If you ask me "well, what do we do, then?"... I have no idea, honestly.
- zemvpferreira 1y agoLike with anything, you need to do a proper job educating your kids before trusting safeguards to keep them safe. That would be my bet for a scalable solution. Some kids will still drown, it’s unavoidable. But swimming lessons are much more effective at preventing drowning deaths than fences.
- derefr 1y agoI somewhat agree with your point, but I'd quibble with the analogy, and its implication about the usefulness/importance of fences. I'd argue that the Internet is less like water, and more like a freeway. (It is the "information super-highway", after all!) We do put (quite tall) fences up between freeways and residential areas (or between freeways and areas with wildlife!), and for good reason: unlike deep water (that both humans and animals have a vague instinct is an "unknown quantity" best to be approached cautiously), a freeway can, at a non-rush-hour time, look like a perfectly safe and quiet and predictable place — a place just like the calm, safe meadow or bike path or residential lane beside it — until, midway through crossing one, a truck sudenly whizzes over the horizon going 120mph and smashes right into you before the driver has time to react. And that's the Internet: a seemingly safe, predictable place — with unexpected trucks whizzing through it, ready to smack into you.
- psychoslave 1y agoAs a parent, I do agree with taking responsibility on it. My older children is 8, so not much computer for her now. Just a bit of dactylography before she can play Gcompris, mostly chess lately, nothing online so far. They did have some initiation at school (for context this is public school in France). That said, I do expect I won't be able to prevent them to reach inappropriate resources once they meet the point where they can browse online without me being there to inspect, so I'll rather invest time to explain them that can happen, make sure they are confident they can tell me if they faced something odd. Forbidding would be the best way to encourage, and any automatic system alone will have too shallow circumvention paths or too much burden of admin to follow for relevancy as a Parenthood tool.
- hoppp 1y agoHow? Keyloggers and spying? What if the parents hate gays but their kid is in the closet seeking help? Having uncontrolled access to information about sex and sexuality is a blessing not a curse. It saves lives. And I bet its much better having kids at home jacking off to porn than them having sex with girls early. Urges are normal, porn is good.
- callamdelaney 1y agoWeird that I can’t downvote this unhinged response. ‘Porn is good’.
- tonymet 1y agoHow is this passive aggression? “You’re not using porn, because I say so, and you’re not using a computer without a porn filter, because I bought it” That’s not passive aggression, that’s responsible parenting and clear boundaries.
- pishpash 1y ago"Because I say so" is a weak ass argument, no argument at all. "Because I bought it" is passive aggressive, because you do not intend to allow even if you did not buy it.
- LPisGood 1y agoIt’s not an argument it’s just a statement of fact. “You can’t do this because I bought it” explains what (you can’t do X without Y) and why (I own Y and can therefore control the use of Y). Now, it doesn’t explain why the decision was made in the first place to enforce a porn filter as a requirement for using the device, but again - it’s not an argument. I agree that it doesn’t provide a complete explanation because as you mention, if the child bought their own device there would still be restrictions, but that wasn’t the case being discussed.
- tonymet 1y agoIt’s not an argument, it’s a command. You’re not convincing your kids that you are right. You are reminding them of the consequences if they disagree.
- mdp2021 1y ago> You’re not convincing your kids that you are right. You are reminding them of the consequences if they disagree Very inadvisable. Raise them in view to being adults.
- Ancapistani 1y agoI absolutely do this, but there are times when "because I said so" is the actual answer. As an adult, there are plenty of situations where you are subject to the authority of others. Learning to deal with disagreement with that is also part of being an adult.
- walthamstow 1y agoFascinating that France is PH's second-biggest market, presumably after the US.
- sltkr 1y agoHow is that surprising? After the US, the three largest Western countries are Germany (which already banned Pornhub), the UK and France, but the UK and France are virtually tied in terms of population, so it was always going to be a tossup between the two.
- phit_ 1y agowhat makes you think it's banned in Germany?
- layer8 1y agoProbably this: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Munich-Administrative-Court-Pornhub-and-YouPorn-remain-blocked-for-time-being-10436645.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Munich-Administrative-Court-Por...
- sltkr 1y agohttps://netzpolitik.org/2025/porno-streit-vor-gericht-darf-die-medienaufsicht-pornhub-verbieten/ https://netzpolitik.org/2025/porno-streit-vor-gericht-darf-d... Skimming this it sounds like pornhub is/was at least partially blocked on the ISP level. Not sure about the extent of the blockage today but I could imagine that these blocks put a dent in their user numbers.
- phit_ 1y agoah they just changed their domain to dot org to get around the block, most users visit sites through their search engine so I doubt many noticed. as of now in germany the org is the first result on google
- dakiol 1y ago
- animanoir 1y ago[dead]
- JodieBenitez 1y agoBecause apparently french parents can't handle the education of their children.
- jaoane 1y ago[flagged]
- it_citizen 1y agoClearly they cannot. They had already banned selling alcohol to kids.
- mirekrusin 1y agoDrugs too. Doesn't seem to stop ones that want to do it though by looking at some neighbourhoods.
- mdp2021 1y agoGiven that incompetent families will always exist, you ban drugs because of the social consequences of the phenomenon - the damages are evaluated as high. For other indulgences, social damages may vary.
- mirekrusin 1y agoThe problem with this kind of thinking is that you're funelling large streams of money into pockets of criminals. You're also not solving anything, in practice people keep buying it - without actual minor controls (unlike ie. alcohol or tobacco) and with blurred perception (ie. same dude probably deals weed, cocaine, heroine, whatever). It is shifting market to black side with all negative consequences that come with it. It creates this disgusting alternative, unofficial layers in cities where law enforcement long ago gave up on enforcing this ban and ordinary people learn/know to stay the fuck out and ignore.
- nashashmi 1y agoIt does stop kids from being openly advertised drugs and makes it difficult for kids to get drugs. That is the whole point of legislation, not to eliminate but mitigate.
- jimbob45 1y agoIt’s smart to be using a VPN for any sort of adult internet use these days anyway. Vixen Media Group is extorting people by threatening to leak their identity if they don’t pay up[0]. And not by a 3rd-party collections company either - it’s their own parent company making the demands. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vixen_Media_Group#Legal_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vixen_Media_Group#Legal_action https://www.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/1d3wfiz/my_experience_with_a_strike_3_holdings_case/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/1d3wfiz/my_exp...
- david-gpu 1y agoWhy does anybody care that their porn viewing habits become public? To me it sounds as ridiculous as somebody threatening to publish a log of the food we eat or the music we listen to.
- macintux 1y agoPorn is considered a highly private activity for many reasons: societal disapproval, religious prohibitions...heck in some countries, watching gay porn is potentially a death sentence.
- david-gpu 1y agoI get wanting to keep illegal activities unknown to the authorities, so I'll concede that. But in the context of this thread, where a company was threatening to do this in a developed democratic country, that is not an issue, is it? Societal disapproval can be divided between people you interact with and strangers. Why would anybody what strangers think of them, particularly when those strangers would have to been rummaging into porn watching databases to begin with? As for coworkers, friends or family, why would they be interested in learning about your porn habits again? And if they bother you about it, wouldn't you want to rethink whether you want to keep them around? Personally, I don't keep in touch with people who seriously judge my life choices -- and that has only happened once, so it's not such a big deal either.
- throe83949449 1y agoLovely, people would go to prison, just to see some porn! > engaging in illegal activities while using a VPN remains prohibited under French law. https://medium.com/@green21/is-vpn-legal-in-france-exploring-the-french-approach-to-cybersecurity-and-privacy-in-2024-20d666d5f43e https://medium.com/@green21/is-vpn-legal-in-france-exploring... France has very stupid and strict laws, that apply accross borders! For example paternity test gets you two years, even when physically done in another country!
- outside1234 1y agoWait what? You can't do a Paternity test in France?
- 2716057 1y agohttps://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F14042?lang=en https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F14042?...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- throe83949449 1y agoAlso in Germany and probably some other countries.
- landl0rd 1y agoCorrect. I believe it has to be court-ordered and even then it's rare. DNA testing is also generally illegal unless for medical reasons. They claim this is to "uphold family peace" because "fatherhood is social, not biological". It seems incredibly wrong to me in that they are removing the father's right to choose whether to enter that social role when it is not biologically mandated.
- sunshine-o 1y agoSo even if requested by the mother? Because I was once shocked to learn how easily it is in some countries (like Portugal) for a woman to have the court force a man to submit to a paternity test [0]. I also heard (I guess a few decades ago) the courts would start automatically an investigation on their own when no man would recognise a child at birth. - [0] https://www.tpalaw.pt/xms/files/BANGA_Site/Paternity_investigation.pdf https://www.tpalaw.pt/xms/files/BANGA_Site/Paternity_investi...
- jpalawaga 1y ago(The VPN service is Proton VPN, for those coming directly to the comments.)
- pkkkzip 1y agowhy this VPN in particular?
- mplanchard 1y agoI’d guess many did, and this is just the one being reported on
- layer8 1y agoBecause this VPN provider tweeted about it.
- jajko 1y agoIts a Swiss one, so compared to some sites its probably in French out of box. Has a good reputation, located in country that doesn't take much bullshit from EU or given government (Albeit some of it is good, this is not). Also cares more about privacy than most other countries globally (if folks grokked what "numbered account" meant then there wouldn't be so much baseless hate about how "Swiss took all jewish and nazi money and profit from it till today and that's core of their prosperity". Couldn't be further from truth, I live here and watch these matters closely from both inside and outside perspectives.
- TiredOfLife 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
- GabensIntern 1y agoLikely because it's one of the few VPNs with a ~reliable free tier
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- diggan 1y ago> "and having offshore porn sites or any other third parties collect IDs from adults and becoming a repository of potential blackmail material comes with its own risks [...] A more technically sound approach would be content controls directly implemented on the devices parents chose to give their children" said the company's (Proton's) spokesperson While I agree with their second point, the first argument sounds a bit overly dramatic, considering how the implementation seems to work. They couldn't blackmail, as the information they receive is limited. As far as I understand how at least one of the methods for verification must be, is “double-anonymity” or "double-blind" protocol: the site never sees the user’s identity, the verifier never learns which site is being visited, and only a yes/no “18+” token is exchanged. Then other methods could be offered too. Although if we assume the average security competence with these types of companies, handling ID documents and stuff, they'll surely get hacked sooner or later. So maybe the link between porn site and identity isn't there, but your personal data that been submitted to them will yet again float out there.
- lucianbr 1y ago> “double-anonymity” or "double-blind" protocol: the site never sees the user’s identity, the verifier never learns which site is being visited, and only a yes/no “18+” token is exchanged. Isn't this an actually reasonable solution? I assumed age verification was supposed to be done by the site itself, and therefore it was considered a very bad idea. But this... what's the problem with this method?
- baby_souffle 1y ago> But this... what's the problem with this method? You're just hoping that there's never a leak of any UUID(s) that could be used to correlate things. The ad-tech industry has pioneered de-anonymization tech and they're very, very good at it. Tangential question: if the principal is divorced from the "is not a minor" signal, what prevents a thrifty youth from just buying/stealing somebody's token?
- Sayrus 1y agoWhat prevents someone from buying, stealing or photoshopping an ID card? I'd guess the same issue would be present with selling tokens.
- pkkkzip 1y agoI always wonder what it takes to start a VPN? It's super saturated yet there's clear winners. Also I wonder how the operator is able to side step liability for obvious illegal use cases. The internet has become a very hostile place and its not just surveillance but peer to peer political persecution where someone doesn't follow the script or believe the same thing they do and they lash out and try to censor them by mass reporting or DDOS I miss the old internet where we used to escape to avoid reality, now we go offline to avoid the internet.
- morkalork 1y agoSeems to be one of those commodities where some winners are only by virtue of advertising, if all the NordVPN sponsorship jokes are true. There's also sketchy providers that double-dip aren't there? Residential customers pay once for a VPN and commercial customers pay again for residential IPs used for scraping and proxying.
- littlestymaar 1y agoI don't even understand why people bother, given that there a millions of porn sites out there, why would you stick to pornhub in particular?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lofaszvanitt 1y agoA better way would be to only allow soft content for unverified users, so youngsters wouldn't be brainwashed and hooked by the excessive ram up a train in someone's arse kinda mindless, cromagnon like content. Politicians must be replaced with something more human centric. All they do is bring forth rules to deny something, instead of trying to cure the epidemic porn brings into the life of everyday people.
- mdp2021 1y ago> instead of trying to cure the epidemic porn brings into the life of everyday people Eh?! This makes no sense. Is it something like "smartphones bring addiction", i.e. the inability to deal with a tool normally as duly, because some people were left immature, is taken as an excuse to fall into bad logic? If everyday people faint in front of begonias, it's not the begonia. Treat the roots.
- lofaszvanitt 1y agoOf course since you have zero exposure.
- mdp2021 1y agoYou're still obscure. Poster would "see the OP making no sense because poster would have zero exposure to potentially addictive sources"? Is it that?
- brunoborges 1y agoI am surprised Pornhub hasn't acquired a VPN company yet...
- FlyingBears 1y agoThen you can prove collusion to circumvent whatever legislation is there.
- sitzkrieg 1y agoand im surprised pornhub is still the de facto normie smut site but here we are
- sandspar 1y agoI support banning porn. You've got coordinated "teams" of men, most of them diagnosable sociopaths, who work as a group to manipulate and destroy teenagers. For every one woman you see on a porn website, there's a network of 10 men who are working as a coordinated team to manipulate her. Most of the young women are from broken homes, many of them are low IQ, and many of them were sexually abused as children by male authority figures. The male pornographer teams work together to push the teenage women into harder and harder stuff, basically stuff that causes more permanent physical and psychological damage. Once the woman has reached her capacity for pain and humiliation, she's cast out of the scene, likely with a drug addiction, likely ending up in prostitution. Saying that porn is "sexual education" or "empowering" or whatever is like saying that factory farming is the same as James Herriot-type farms. They're different in kind: in brutality, scale, and automation. If you visit a website like Pornhub then you're complicit in this.
- mdp2021 1y agoYou should provide sources. And after that, you could be presented other sources that present much cleaner environments. It will depend. ...So, what you have said is "Shoes are made in sweatshops: ban shoes". -- Replying to the dead post below: yes, you have as if declared that "all shoe production is substantially like torturing geese for foie gras", but we note that "producing shoes does not necessarily involve torture", hence "you cannot ban shoemaking because of local abuses".
- sandspar 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- AngryData 1y agoIm sorry but you sound completely delusional to me. Whats next, rock and roll turns kids satanic?
- deleted 1y ago
- Weryj 1y agoI wouldn't worry about the VPN's, the 8 year olds aren't going to get one. On mass, it'll be successful, but I'd be more worried about social media than the usual porn sites for early exposure.
- nichol4s 1y agoAnother service which tries to fill this gap with a unique offering is https://getadultpass.com/ https://getadultpass.com/ They basically add 'verification headers' to the original website through a proxy solution, allowing visitors to browse sites with some level of age verification regardless of their location. They are more focused on the 'privacy aspect'.
- hk1337 1y agoMaybe it just seems like a lot but it’s interesting how much shit Texas got for its age verification law when other western countries either were doing similar or pushing for similar laws. UK, Canada, France, Australia, I think I saw someone in the comments say Germany has something similar. Pornography isn’t all that healthy but so is parents not stepping up and educating their kids on sex, even if it is awkward to talk about.
- roschdal 1y ago[flagged]
- AngryData 1y agoOh no, a Jewish person? Reminds me of that horrible horrible Jew they called Jesus Christ.
- anal_reactor 1y agoCMV: cocomelon and TikTok are much worse for children than porn
- tomat4d 1y ago[flagged]