Pornhub blocks Montana and North Carolina as their age verification laws take effect | The website says the states’ ID requirement would put users’ privacy at risk::Montana and North Carolina are the latest to join the list of states with age verification laws for adult platforms.
I’m in a neighboring state and it’s about 50/50 that my ISP gives me an IP address that geolocates to NC. So right now I’m blocked from the site. I don’t go there often but it’s lame.
It also works the other way. A lot of people in state are going to have IP addresses that appear out of state.
All in all, using IP to establish a physical address is VERY imperfect. Especially if you’re targeting people over cellular networks or networks in larger commercial properties.
I look forward to watching people try to sue porn sites that are actively trying to block access to a state.
This is going to be a shit show. It’s a law passed by people who don’t understand the underlying tech.
How exactly would they have cause to sue? “I wasn’t able to wank, so I was harmed.”
Unless these are paying customers? But in that case, the ToS likely explicitly says PH has the right to pull access for any reason, or a specific list of reasons.
A company like PH has lawyers, guaranteed. They wouldn’t be making these moves if they weren’t absolutely certain they were covered legally. It’s not like it’s a mom and pop porn shop.
I meant that the state is going to be in court with PornHub, because PornHub is not able to fully comply with their dumb law.
Complain to your isp
I can barely get them to provide basically adequate service that doesn’t meet the FCC definition of broadband. They won’t care, lol.
I understand you shouldn’t have to do this but Its insanely easy to use a vpn nowadays. Download and run , paid and unpaid
Thats is unfortunate for those citizens with no access to a VPN.
So those without an android phone?
Iphones can run vpns
Or $5 for Mullvad
Or the browser Opera
Nothing quite like big government Republicans passing ineffective laws, while trying to claim they are the small government party. This only affects the big sites, the American sites, and the legally aligned sites. But hey, if they want more adults and children exposed to the shadier sides of the internet, so be it.
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Confused by your messaging, are you suggesting those types of porn are bad? Or attempting to point out their hypocrisy?
It’s the latter, obviously.
Is it okay to call out race when they’re “white”? You’re racist.
I’m usually all about treating everyone as equally as possible, but I think if you’re talking about something specific to the “race” (say now, how black women’s hair has to be styled differently due to physical differences) then it’s acceptable to mention “race”
If you’re looking at some kind of demographic, it’s also all right to mention it. Idk if it’s true that conservative white dudes like gay/trans porn more than anyone else, but I think it’s ok to mention that. Especially since the consumption of gay/trans porn on it’s own isn’t necessarily a negative (unless there’s anything non-consential going on ir someone is underage). It’s more the hypocracy of it all that gets peeps riled up
(I hate the term “race” which is why I shoved it in between quotation marks)
Agreed, but the sentiment I’ve been seeing is that white people = bad because most of the “rich white dude” politicians are somehow the root of our oppression, and them being white is important apparently. It’s not a “white” thing, but a rich politician thing. Every other color of politician and rich person is fucking us all the same, and the “white” thing is a distraction from what’s important and what matters–that our politicians and government aren’t working for the people, regardless of race. But it’s better for them if we’re all angry at eachother, so here everyone is chasing after somewhere easy to put their hatred. And here it is emerging as racism.
I see what you’re saying, yeah
12 down votes so far because I called someone out as racist, who is specifically calling out race for no reason. Why don’t these people respond and try to justify it? Because they can’t.
It’s trendy to hate white people, even nonwhite people acknowledge this these days.
This is basically the answer. It caught on somewhere and the people doing it are too stupid to realize that it’s a matter of economic and political “class” oppression, not “race” oppression. But let’s keep hating white people even though most of them are as helpless and economically destitute as every other race.
It’s amazing how much people don’t want to acknowledge this, as evidenced by the downvotes. A real disconnect from reality.
They should put the block in place before the law gets written to rally support against it
When the UK was dead set on rolling out verification for porn, wasn’t Mindgeek (Pornhubs parent company) pushing its AgeID technology?
I’m not trying to defend this law, but I feel like there is a way to do this without invading privacy. Like selling a cryptographic key at stores for a few bucks at a store, which checks your id. IDK? I assume the goal is not actually to keep kids from watching porn but rather to have a chilling effect on it
The question is why. You can’t stop kids from watching it. People get it one way or another. This does nothing than cause mild dips in viewership.
And frankly the kind of stuff on law abiding sites like PH is not doing any noticeable harm anyway. Raising awareness on sexual education if anything.
Most kids begin watching/experimenting around 14. Around 16 is when they should have sex ed and 18 is adulthood anyway. What’s the point?
Not comparable but we are back to the “video games cause violence” nonsense.
Sometimes kids just dont need government protection. This is one of those times.
ACLU v Ashcroft and ACLU v Reno are really interesting to read, if you haven’t already.
Part of the conclusion of the court at that time was (at least regarding the CDA):
In order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the CDA effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another. That burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statute was enacted to serve
In ACLU vs. Ashcroft, the court ruled that less restrictive measures like Internet filters should be used, rather than the law in question (COPA).
I kind of think an argument exists that a system like what you mentioned with cryptographic keys could be a “less restrictive measures” given today’s technology. But I think we should still be careful, and keep in mind that nearly all pornography (with the exception of obscenity – a very narrowly defined category) is speech that enjoys strong protections under the First Amendment. So any decisions around restricting this free speech, regardless of our good intentions in protecting our children, can have unintended negative consequences around first amendment speech in general.
I assume the goal is not actually to keep kids from watching porn but rather to have a chilling effect on it
Probably a safe assumption. It’s difficult to tend towards other conclusions when the state of Utah has declared pornography a public health crisis, for example. Children are often just a means to an end in laws and public conversation. But don’t forget that most of these kinds of “protect the children” laws are often rooted in some sort of good intentions, so I can’t completely ascribe malice to the actions of these lawmakers. Evil is often wrapped in good intentions.
By the way, part of the Free Speech Coalition’s arguments in Utah was around the impossibility of actually implementing age verification as no system actually exists in Utah to enforce that. Utah’s law essentially ducks the first amendment by outsourcing enforcement to private action rather than government action. Scary stuff.
Thanks for the reply. It did help add some context for me.
So pornhub would rather let kids watch porn than comply with age verification laws
Please register your id, sexual preferences, and all your financial information with the government. We know from the history of governments this info would never get abused or leaked or used for something horrific.
When has an authoritarian right wing government ever used such information against its citizens? /s
I hate to break it to you, but teenagers have been circumnavigating around any law the government throws at them since the beginning of time.
This law is particularly ridiculous and poorly thought out. It is easily bypassed and only has potential downsides. It is ripe for abuse and it’s insane anyone supports this level of privacy intrusion.
So parents would rather let kids watch porn than comply with age verification laws
FTFY. Pornhub doesn’t have kids, parents and guardians do. Unlike schools, Pornhub has zero in loco parentis rights or responsibilities. Instead, parents and guardians do.
But in Utah and NC, recognizing the futility of being able to comply with the laws as written, Pornhub is OVERCOMPLYING.
In those states, Pornhub is ensuring that NO ONE of ANY age watches their content. (And you’re fooling yourself if you think this has fuck all to do with protecting minors anyway.)
The absolute dumbest of takes.
All anyone has to do is say, “…it’s for the children,” and you just line up, ready to sign away your rights and privacy.
No they’d rather people not have to upload copies of their photo ID to porn sites or participate in a system where such preferences will be easily stored in a government database. It opens the door for privacy violation, extortion, public humiliation, etc for engaging in legal but socially stigmatized behavior in the privacy of their own homes.
Even that would not be enough to protect Pornhub, too. Some kid gets on their parents’ account? Bam, lawsuit. Even the total ban is not enough. Some kid uses a VPN to access the site? Lawsuit.
It is not physically possible to comply with these laws. (The NC one at least.)
The total ban should protect from lawsuits for vpn use. It’s a case of “we deny service to anyone who logs in from your jurisdiction. This individual logged in from outside that jurisdiction and there’s no way for us to tell that they aren’t” the vpn theoretically could get in trouble though
I look forward to the courts being very normal about that argument.
The law in NC (not sure about the Utah one) doesn’t care about where the login is coming from. It only cares about where the user is located. The user concealing that information, on purpose or by accident, does not mean the website can ignore its requirements under the law.
Yeah but it’s well established that states don’t have the right to prohibit transactions outside their borders. There will be legal questions about several aspects of this, but the worst I expect federal judges to rule on this is to declare a level of effort they need to put in to verify the viewer’s location. But at the end of the day, a reasonably good faith effort to deny service to those states should be sufficient in part because those states almost certainly don’t have the right to unilaterally force every other state to not get to use VPNs for sexually graphic materials
No. They would rather effective age verification that doesn’t negatively impact the privacy and liberties of their users. They want a solution, not just a ham fisted excuse to start building the foundations of a social credit system
While care is required, designing a system that only proves that someone is over a specific age is possible without leaking much additional information.
For example a request for age verification can be generated and signed by the porn site. All it needs is a unique ID and the signature. It should expire quickly and can only be used once.
The person identifying themself can send this request to a certifying party (the government in the EU where we trust governments, or I guess some terrible for profit company in the USA because they privatize everyday). The certifying party can sign the request, since they know how old the person is.
The person then returns this verification to the porn site.
In this scenario the porn site never learns anything about the user other than that they are above a given age. The certifying party only knows that the person has gotten an age verification, but not why or where.
There is still possible collusion between the porn site and the verifying party, but in that case the system is not really needed at all. Also metadata tracking is possible (like when a person gets a request and has network traffic to a porn site), but can be mitigated if a user is concerned.
oh fuck off with this shit
watch your own fucking kids
Do you watch your children every minute they are online? Poor kids!
not my job to raise your kids, neither is it strangers on the net
I’m not nearly as afraid of a porn site having information about people as I am about governments having a list of who watches porn on what sites
The problem is that if a porn site has the information they can be compelled to pass that information on, or it can be revealed by data breaches.
Bruh you really just reinvented tracking cookies
Did I? I’m not sure how. The person visiting would only use the verification request once. It’s only good for a single request. How could this be used for tracking?
You didn’t… If anything you’ve described something closer to OAuth or JWT. You’re just getting hit by people who don’t know how cookies actually work.
What are you talking about? They are blocking access in those states. They are literally doing the opposite of what you are suggesting.
It is not Pornhubs fault that the kids access the net unsupervised.
were you never a teenager?
Apparently the dumbest one ever
What is with this fucking dumbass, disingenuous campaign on Lemmy? And I recently saw some dumb cunt arguing that blue states are taking gun rights away from black people, too.
You fucktards really expect people to think that you care about kids or black people?
I assure you, we are not the idiots.
You do not start to watch porn at 18 , every adolescent watch porn stop with this "protect kid " bullshit
You know they are not doing it for the kids, they want to know if you are gay. By associating people ID to content type they know what YOU watch.
It’s partly but not just that. They want blackmail and they want enforced sexual modesty for all adults. Porn is against their religion and they believe their primary duty is to force others to follow their religion’s rules. And it creating sexually frustrated prudish adults is a plus to them.
I’m just not an authoritarian. I don’t like the government spying on us as it is. Why would I volunteer to give up even more privacy? Consider installing cameras in your home and give the government access to them if you want. Totes just to make sure the kids aren’t doing anything wrong. I’ll skip.
Party of small government!
What kind of a parent are you if you’re not blocking access to these kinds of sites on the devices of your kids?
It’s so easy.
Did your parents not have IDs when you were a kid? O.o
Get off of Lemmy, moron. You’re bringing down the average IQ of the entire platform.
lol
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