• circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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      5 months ago

      Unfortunately they’ll go after that next.

      I’m legitimately surprised at the number of pro-government control comments in this thread, though. We are truly doomed because of the people in the back.

      • TehPers@beehaw.org
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        5 months ago

        I find it funny that the same people who are against government regulations and giving more power to the state are the ones voting for this. They also seem to be so poorly informed that they think it’ll stop anyone from watching this content lol.

        • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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          Yeah, well that’s the thing: they like the idea of being against government regulations, but if it is presented to them as a moral issue, they eat it up.

          Case in point: a comment in this thread loosely trying to pose PH’s response as being against states’ rights – in this case, due to the states tacitly regulating morality. I’m sure if the issue was e.g. raising state taxes, all of a sudden states’ rights wouldn’t matter.

          The right wing learned a while ago that if you can pose anything as morality, there is a whole class of people that will simply lick the boot.

      • Buttons@programming.dev
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        5 months ago

        There’s also websites hosted in countries that don’t care about US law. We can access those even without a VPN, for now…

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      As a Virginian, I hadn’t subscribed to a VPN until our legislators decided to pull this shit.

  • along_the_road@beehaw.orgOP
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    5 months ago

    Over the past year, Pornhub had to make the difficult decision to block access to users in numerous American states due to newly passed Age Verification laws (Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, Mississippi). In July 2024, we will unfortunately be blocking several more states who are introducing similar laws. (Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky and Nebraska.)

  • abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 months ago

    That’s basically the idea behind these laws.

    Conservatives want to make porn illegal, which isn’t easy under traditional means, so they’re taking the “Putin” approach as I put it, make viewing porn hard, unattractive or even dangerous and make delivering porn to people hard, unattractive and dangerous.

    Requiring an ID from the government to view porn means the government can tell who is watching what. If one of those people happens to run for office or get a little too campaigny, their porn history can be named and shamed.

    And porn providers know this, and know that will drive people away from their sites, and on top of this implementing this will likely be bureaucratic and likely expensive, so they’ll stop serving an area.

    And when this is applied to non porn sites that have porn like Reddit or twitter or Tumblr, well guess what’s going to happen, those sites will ban porn from their site.

    It’s basically banning porn by making it impossible to get porn in a way that doesn’t end up with you getting blackmailed. Children have nothing to do with it.

    • Wahots@pawb.social
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      5 months ago

      *human porn.

      Google can’t even block yiff with safe search, lol. AI has incredible difficulty with evaluating furry porn. Which means that Mitch McConnell is going to live out his final days looking at anthropomorphic hyenas that could benchpress a fridge and have 11 inches of freedom, lmao.

      Generations of southerners and people in the central US are going to be looking at considerable amounts of yiff if conservatives have their way.

    • Good_morning@lemmynsfw.com
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      5 months ago

      Only the biggest websites are even acknowledging this, it’ll get torn down as soon as it actually goes into effect, can’t keep the Mormons away from their porn.

    • Empathy [he/him]@beehaw.org
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      5 months ago

      Easiest solution IMO if you’re already using CloudFlare, even the free version: you can filter out certain countries. Otherwise, there’s probably other alternatives, even open source ones. Good terms to search for with your cloud provider or self hosted software may be middlewares, firewalls, serverless, edge functions, etc.

  • danhab99@programming.dev
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    5 months ago

    TBH I kinda agree with the states here… I started watching porn waaayyyy too early and it’s fucking me up… without a doubt… I shouldn’t have seen all the things I looked for and now I gotta put up with it.

    But I also agree with PornHubs decision. There is no way to verify age without exposing your identity. There isn’t even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone’s age.

    There really isn’t a middle ground, the only way to protect kinds (like little me) is to block the porn. But websites go on and offline every few minutes, VPNs and Tor are free and hard to blacklist.

    How do we censor internet porn?? ¯⁠\⁠(⁠°⁠_⁠o⁠)⁠/⁠¯

    • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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      5 months ago

      the only way to protect kinds (like little me) is to block the porn.

      This is false.

      Parents have a number of options available to them that do no need to involve the state.

        • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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          5 months ago

          Healthy parenting would go a long way. See some of the other comments in this thread.

          You can also have settings on your local network. If you’re afraid of your kid casually finding something inappropriate, you can set that up stuff locally without involving the government. A determined kid will still find a way to get stuff, so this is more a safeguard against accidental discovery.

          Investing in quality education would also benefit everyone.

    • TheFinn@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 months ago

      The issue here, I’m sorry to say, is that your parents dropped the ball. They were the ones responsible for your health and the safety of your environment.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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      There isn’t even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone’s age.

      It depends what you mean by this. If you mean in terms of a way to trust that the third party is doing its job correctly, that’s as simple as using the government itself to do the verification after seeing some proof of age.

      If you mean in terms of privacy, you can’t protect the privacy of the fact that someone got verified, but you can protect the privacy of their browsing after the fact. It’s a neat cryptographic trick called blind signatures. The end result is a token that the user holds which they can hand over to websites that tells the website “a trusted third party has verified I’m over 18” but would not have to reveal any more information about them than that. But even if the government was that trusted third party, and they asked the websites to hand over all their logs, the government would still not be able to trace your views back to you, because the token you hold is one they never saw.

      This is, in my opinion, still a bad idea. I am in no way advocating for this policy. There’s still the mere fact that you have to go up to someone and basically register yourself as a porn viewer, which is fucked up. Maybe if these tokens were used in other ways, like instead of showing your licence at bars, it could be less bad (though there are other practical reasons I don’t think that would work) because the tokens could be less directly associated with porn. But it’s still an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Not to mention the cost that adding all this would put on the government—or, if they charge for these tokens, the people using it—for what actual gain, exactly?

      I’m merely pointing out that from a purely technical perspective, this is quite different from when governments request back doors into chat encryption. This actually can be done. It just shouldn’t, for non-technical reasons.

    • azalty@jlai.lu
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      5 months ago

      You’ll never be able to properly block it

      You can just go to Reddit instead. Same thing.

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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    5 months ago

    Pornhub is only pulling out to punish the states for trying to stand up to them. In classic American monopoly fashion they go on the attack as soon as any legislation targets them.

    Pornhub claims the reason is because they dont to collect government ID but Pornhub collects user data and understands who their customers are. Adding government ID to their data would hardly be anymore of a privacy invasion and it’s not like they are forced to store it.

    • hanna@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      Imo this law is actually in a way pushing for a porn monopoly, if you by law need to provide an id, are you gonna trust some random site with that info or the big one everyone uses

      • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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        5 months ago

        OP’s claim here is just BS. PornHub is in no way a monopoly or even close. It reads like someone who has literally never searched for porn on the internet. Astroturf.

        • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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          PornHub is a monopoly. They own xnxx, redtube, xhamster, and several production companies such as brazzers. Their categorization system has also had some ranging impacts on actresses’ ability to get work after they turn 22. I highly recommend listening to The Butterfly Effect by Jon Ronson.

          ALSO so we’re clear, I’m not a fan of this legislation because its dumb as fuck and doesn’t help anyone, least of all sex workers. When people lose easy access to porn it usually results in WORSE conditions for sex workers because suddenly there’s more demand in places without safety infrastructure.

          • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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            Can you define what part of PornHub owning a lot of other porn sites makes them a monopoly? Part of being a monopoly is being anticompetitive. What has PornHub done in terms of lobbying or other anticompetitive practices which makes it more difficult for a new company sharing porn to take hold? Because there is a ton of porn online which is unrelated to PornHub.

            I’m all for calling out monopolies, but I legit don’t see one here. I’m open to being wrong.

            I don’t believe that the thing about actresses getting work after 22 is reliant on PornHub. Porn has worked that way for 50+ years my dude.

            • veroxii@aussie.zone
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              Yeah I was just in Utah for business and didn’t even realise there was a block. I didn’t go to pornhub but all my regular sites just worked. 🤷‍♂️🍆

              • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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                5 months ago

                With other industries, owning 5, 10, 15 other sites might be indicative of a monopoly. But there is a metric fuckton of porn online.

                Edit: pardon me, a *metric fucktonne

            • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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              Part of being a monopoly is being anticompetitive

              No it’s not. Being hit with antitrust laws requires first being a monopoly, but the monopoly state exists merely by virtue of size within the industry.

              Edit: to be clear the only point I am making here is in relation to that definition you provided. Nothing more.

    • Sina@beehaw.org
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      5 months ago

      Adding government ID to their data would hardly be anymore of a privacy invasion

      Are you listening to yourself?

      • IllNess@infosec.pub
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        5 months ago

        Lets put name to the IP address. Yup, that is the same as just the IP address that can be shared by multiple devices.

      • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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        5 months ago

        Law maker enacts legislation towards a company. The company is able to comply but instead the company pulls the service or severelyndegrades it. Then when users are pissed off the company will point to the law maker and say “they forced us to do this”. The law maker then suffers the blacklash of companies service withdrawal.

        Apple tried this with the EU usb c but eventually backed down. John deer tried this with right to repair. There are many cases where companies use these tactics to try and bully law makers away from regulating them and I think i know it’s legal and their right to do so but I find it gross.

        I don’t think the law makers should be solving the “problem” this way but I also don’t think pornhub should deny service from an entire state because they want an an ID check implemented.

        • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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          Apple tried this with the EU usb c but eventually backed down

          Umm, what? Apple was always going to move to USB-C. The EU regulations at most hastened that by a couple of years. Their tablets and even laptop computers were using USB-C before the EU even enacted that legislation. It was only a matter of time.

          But back on the subject at hand, this is nothing like that sort of bullying. This is a company being asked to build more infrastructure at their own expense, and then use that infrastructure to place its own users at risk. They’ve made a simple calculation that it’s better for their bottom line and their reputation to choose not to comply, and instead pull out of a few small markets.

    • PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca
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      Pornhub as a monopoly??? Wow lmao. Someone never got creative with the search bar and it’s very apparent.