Porn sites are banning Texas | Hacker News Reader

Porn sites are banning Texas

mysanantonio.com

42 pointsgeox54 comments

I think what they wanted was proof of age. Which isn’t wholly unreasonable. The problem is doing it in a way that protects privacy. These debates happened in the 90s too. Every porn site had an age verification or warning that you had to electronically assert you were age of majority plus.

I wish we could all agree that, this is important and we shouldn’t be allowing minors to watch pornography. The porn sites don’t want to be liable to verify age so they pull these stunts blocking a whole state that wants verification.

There must be a reasonable and non political way to protect minors. Cigarette machines aren’t around anymore due to age verification (and people quitting smoking). Why are we so against real age verification ? I’m 110% pro anonymous internet viewing and privacy protection. But perhaps when we want to view pornography we should be okay with some form of verification.

This kind of leads me to a moral Vision quest

1. It’s not the governments or anyone else’s business what I do on the internet. 2. Except my significant other, if I have to hide pornography viewing from my partner then I’m doing something wrong morally 3. More important than my ability to jack off to clown porn is the innocence of my children to not be completely corrupted by such porn at age 6 4. Privacy is important, it is not my employer or any marketing agencies business than my SO and myself wear wigs and green makeup when we fuck 5. How hard is a pro privacy age verification system? Leisure suite Larry conquers that in 1985

There's not a privacy preserving way because children are smart. I don't think we should enable more surveillance for the flimsy "think of the children " argument.

Speaking of "think of the children", I have a conspiracy theory that the PMRC[0] was less about Dee Snider and Cyndi Lauper and more about creating a labelling regime that could ensure english-lyric Eurodisco[1] tunes wouldn't get any US distribution.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center

[1] eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Boys_Blue

They dont want to validate age beacuse a lot of their best ad viewers aren't of age.

> a lot of their best ad viewers aren't of age.

Citation needed.

From Texas HB 1181[0]:

> (b) A commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material on an Internet website or a third party that performs age verification under this chapter shall require an individual to:

> (1) provide digital identification; or

> (2) comply with a commercial age verification system that verifies age using:

> (A) government-issued identification; or

> (B) a commercially reasonable method that relies

> on public or private transactional data to verify the age of an

> individual.

The issue is that:

- Asking porn sites (whose traffic is mostly nonpaying lurkers subsidized by very horny whales paying for EVERYTHING) to scan licenses, is technically non-trivial and extremely anti-privacy, and

- Leaving (B) undefined means means exposure to way more lawsuits

Reducing this law to "proof of age" misses a big part of what these govs are really trying to achieve (tar-and-feathering people who privately enjoy spicy entertainment)

So given the ubiquity of VPN services that users can use to actually privately enjoy the world's oldest form of entertainment, it is easier for Mindgeek et. al. to IP block and create an even bigger problem for these governments to deal with (introducing a semi-private communication channel to people who didn't know this was an option).

[0] https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/html/HB01181H...

The big difference between using an ID to buy alcohol and using your ID to access a site is data retention. I can get a drink by showing my ID, the person serving me doesn’t need to keep my information to keep an auditable record. Without an accountable third party auditing solution (some sort of accredited lab situation), I wouldn’t trust a website to take my ID and not save/redistribute that information for other purposes.

What is the result of this sort of regulation though? Now the sites which don’t operate in the US will simply skirt the regulation. What is Texas going to do, sue xHamster? Why would they bother to comply? Does Texas now start limiting the type of traffic allowed through the infrastructure within the state?

Nothing requires that they keep your info, any more than a bar or strip club is required to.

Nothing enforces that they don't keep the info or sell it to third parties.

Maybe they disclose it in a privacy policy. Maybe they say they don't, but do it anyway. It would be very hard to prove the negative in this case.

The Netherlands is banning library genesis, Spain was banning telegram.. soon the icky way to use the internet will be via 24/7 VPN.

But in what jurisdiction? It seems like everyone is banning something now.

Let me tell you about this video's sponsor, NordVPN. NordVPN lets you change your country of origin. I like to watch Sherlock on Netflix, but Netflix in the USA doesn't have Sherlock, so I switch my country to the UK, and look, there's Sherlock!

Yeah, it's going to be an easy sell to regulate VPNs more strongly when Nord and others actively advertise that they can be used to avoid regional licensing of content.

They do, currently!

It seems like the problem here is the regional licensing of content. If people go to such length to get around it, we should just eliminate the enforcement of arbitrary rules that want to prevent this isn't a global economy.

Maybe some third world countries offers itself as a Internet Heaven.

Nobody likes international sanctions nor getting liberated.

VPNs will be highly regulated at some point.

I'm somewhat surprised that this hasn't occurred already. I suspect the reason is that there's not been a catalyzing event that governments usually need in order to make restrictions palatable to people.

This is probably designed to be that event. Enough people will buy the "think of the children" angle used to ban porn. And that legal framework can then be leveraged to regulate VPNs. First, to stop them from being used to bypass these porn restrictions, but then expanded to prevent content restriction bypassing, then to preventing online piracy, then preventing "subversive activities."

Pornography is at the vanguard of free speech.

Yes it is, and it's not a coincidence that one of the few places with de-facto "free speech" (de-facto copyright laws non enforced) is Generative AI - which is also utilized extremely heavily for porn (see civit.ai)

> VPNs will be highly regulated

I had hope for efforts like Freenet and Tor and I2P that are both censorship _and_ regulation resistant, but I've had hope for them for 25+ years and have yet to see them gain significant mindshare.

It's because they're such a sick cesspool. It puts off normal people just looking for a bit of privacy or a breath of air from all the restrictions.

Especially the onion verse is bad.

It's like the nazi bar. Once there's a few the bar gets a name and atmosphere and nobody else wants to do there anymore.

>I'm somewhat surprised that this hasn't occurred already.

A lot of VPNs keep logs, so they can be used to honeypot unsuspecting users.

VPN providers will make smarter VPNs.

Is this not what Texas wanted? What I think will happen eventually is that the websites will cater to government restrictions in the name of profits. They may complain and protest but the money generated from pornographic viewing online is too great.

No.

They wanted a list of names of people accessing these sites. Texas is the same state that tried to coerce out of state abortion clinics into giving up their medical data. The sites instead decided to not play spy games with their clientele. I'm sure the money would be fine, but you'd also have to build and maintain systems for every state that would want to invade the privacy of its residence, which is a headache.

Let's not make up things because you disagree with the politics.

There's nothing in the law about the state gathering data.

Texas is not the first state with such law. Louisiana, Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia have all passed laws mandating age verification for accessing adult content. I expect this will become even more widespread.

There's probably a market opportunity for the entrepreneurs of hacker news: creating an age verification service compliant with the law of those state, with a strong no-log privacy policy and an API that websites with age verification mandate can use

na; whales will just use VPNs and call it a day.

  All our exes live in Texas
  And Texas is a place we dearly love the men
  But all our exes live in Texas
  And that's why they must browse us by VPN

This sounds a lot like Sixto Rodriguez.

Thanks! I reckoned more Kraut&Western: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmxnYkfKIIQ

(lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwti7-cEHh8 )

Yay, another Sixto Rodriguez fan!

How do Starlink IPs work? States indexed by GPS lookup?

Maybe put pornhub on a lunar cluster. Bit of lag, but more old skool.

https://geoip.starlinkisp.net/feed.csv

lubbock is at the top of this list. while this city is very conservative, it is also the home of one of the biggest colleges in Texas (Texas Tech). so them topping this list is not at all surprising.

all of the other cities on this list are very (relatively) large east texas cities.

Thankfully my VPN provides unlimited connections. Everyone I know in Texas has my account now.

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