World News

I agree, the country is delving deeper into authoritarianism by each second. The children and minors is just another exploitable class to them.

Well you see... Despite what people say, the reasons behind these rules has very little to do with children. So they don't actually care if it solves the "problem".

My problem with all this nonsense is that it doesn’t actually solve the problem, while causing many more. You’d need to fundamentally rethink the basic design of the technology if you were to actually prevent children from accessing sexual material with it.

Absolutely - this always happens with these "save the children" laws.

That’s something they don’t want to do, however, presumably because they’re addicted to the power it offers them to spy on everyone, and exploit the population for profit.

Jesus Christ... You ever hear the phrase "never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance?" Politicians do this sort of "make the people feel like we're doing something" shit all the time. They rarely consider the ramifications beside appeasing parents.

I'm shy, I'll just dm you instead.

Visit pornhub in any state or country where its banned or censored via the Tor Network, Onion URL at http://pornhubthbh7ap3u.onion/.

-6 months

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/hack-age-verification-company-shows-privacy-danger-social-media-laws

Id give a rough estimate of > 3 years until some DB gets rocked due to infostealers or some shit.

It makes a lot more sense when you look at it in context, particularly in regards to trans and all LGBTQ+ people. These transphobic governments consider simply existing as trans to be pornographic, so they are trying to block access to educational information on us, while also compiling a list of anyone who does. It's the exact same shit America is trying to do with KOSA

And honestly the only negative side effect it had on me was having unrealistic expectations the first time I actually had sex.

And that is what we should be worrying about.

I told my kid that she can watch all the porn she wants, I don't care. Just don't expect actual sex to be like that.

Yeah, and actually I would say with confidence we are actually better off. It's true that unrealistic expectations is a big issue (well, might be more like, I think most realize that porn is not real after experiencing it so it's not a big problem really for most), but at least we do have a good understanding of the possibilities and what is safe and what is not... At the very least we have a more openminded and informed point of view on sex and relationships. Which doesn't mean either "let's show porn to the kids" of course, but it's such an overblown topic in society.

Let parents be the responsible ones of what kids watch, not the webpages...

Right? You can't stop the porn and these barriers is only to create an artificial market.

But whatever. The more people become anonymous on the internet, the better.

Germany had these kinds of laws since before the internet, that is, "are you 18?" questions simply weren't judged adequate to fulfil the pre-existing requirements.

Net result is that there's no German porn sites, and the big search engines filter their results. Which doesn't mean that you can't get porn everywhere, it just means that kids are learning a particular subset of the English lexicon quite early once they seek it out which is perfectly fine under German law as with anything youth protection it's not supposed to stop determined kids, once they're determined they're individually old enough, it's supposed to limit casual exposure.

The distinction Germany makes is "targeted at a German market/audience". So if your domain isn't on .de, if your payment options aren't Germany-specific, ideally if you don't even have a German UI translation, none of that stuff applies to you. Authorities will just ignore you.

Unless the UK is going down the Saudi route of blocking foreign sites, the exact same thing will happen. There's always going to be some jurisdiction with lax youth protection laws where porn sites can set up their legal headquarters.

The UK trots out legislation like this every few years.
So far, it's not gone through.
However, to paraphrase a parasomething, "You have to defeat the proposal every time, we just have to make it law once"

UK may be taking a slightly different path, but we'll both end up in the same shithole at the end. Incredible.

you're not wrong, but as the parent of a 7 year old, i find it impossible to keep them from things i didn't want them to absorb, because even one child at school can undo all the safeguards I've implemented at home. putting it all down to "parenting" is not the solution either.

In the case of Texas and places like that, age verification laws are about being able to call anything they want (like LGBT+ content) “pornographic.” Texas doesn’t care if it works.

Interestingly, Pornhub actually stayed in my state, Louisiana, because — according to their Supreme Court lawyers, yesterday — we have digital IDs and it was apparently trivial to do the checks via some sort of API. Texans would have to upload a photo of their driver’s license or something and there’s major privacy issues.

Also, Louisiana’s law didn’t work. Pornhub, which wants to be mainstream, does ID checks but sketchier sites in other countries don’t. It probably just caused more teens to get malware or be exposed to truly objectionable content (like CSAM).