This is so ridiculous. We need to outlaw these age restriction rules, and parents need to take responsibility for their own damn children without letting them loose on the Internet and expecting...
This is so ridiculous. We need to outlaw these age restriction rules, and parents need to take responsibility for their own damn children without letting them loose on the Internet and expecting everyone else to confirm to what they want.
I'm sick of fucking censorship on all platforms too. Let people swear, and if you don't like it, don't let your kid watch it.
Or even better, don't give a shit about swearing cause that's how the real world is. Everyone swears all the time, you can't stop it. The kid will learn it eventually, why try to stop the inevitable?
this would also require giving parents the resources (i.e. time and money) to parent their children which is simply unthinkable at this stage of the neoliberal death spiral
this would also require giving parents the resources (i.e. time and money) to parent their children which is simply unthinkable at this stage of the neoliberal death spiral
I think supergauntlet's point was we have too many people who spend too much time working and not enough time parenting, so it's much harder to use personal responsibility as a rebuttal against...
I think supergauntlet's point was we have too many people who spend too much time working and not enough time parenting, so it's much harder to use personal responsibility as a rebuttal against the argument of "please think of the children" etc.
The neoliberal worldview is definitionally opposed to anything that hinders the capital class from gathering wealth, and that is especially inclusive of things like labor protections. In their view a free market would be enough protection for laborers because an abusive employer would lose employees to other, non-abusive employers. Of course we know this isn't how it works in practice, and that without government that represents working people enforcing boundaries, the capital class will exploit and extract from labor until people break.
I don't see any incompatible thoughts here. There are factions of religious people who want to ban porn for morality, factions who want to ban porn for health reasons, factions who don't really care but will ally with those factions, factions who want this kind of bill passed to restrict internet freedom generally and the porn ban is a vehicle for that, etc.
There are enough people with these factions to have passed these laws. Simultaneously we are living in a neoliberal deathspiral, the capital class continues to amass wealth and power while more and more people are unable to provide for their basic needs of housing, food, and healthcare, let alone a luxury like having free time to enrich your family or getting an education.
yes I am saying that it is a pipe dream to go "I would simply parent my children" when it is objective fact that conditions are worse for raising children than they were 30 years ago. if you want...
yes I am saying that it is a pipe dream to go "I would simply parent my children" when it is objective fact that conditions are worse for raising children than they were 30 years ago. if you want people to parent children that actively you also need to go back to 1970s-80s levels of inequality where you could feasibly raise a child on a single income. I am not arguing in favor of a porn ban.
I'm sorry, what? Are there any parents here that can chime in and say "I'm happy about these laws because don't have enough time and/or money to keep my kids away from porn?"
I'm sorry, what?
Are there any parents here that can chime in and say "I'm happy about these laws because don't have enough time and/or money to keep my kids away from porn?"
no, it's literally simple economics that parents have fewer resources than 30 years ago. you are expecting parents to do all this extra work when we have gone from it being reasonably feasible to...
no, it's literally simple economics that parents have fewer resources than 30 years ago. you are expecting parents to do all this extra work when we have gone from it being reasonably feasible to raise 2 kids on a single income to needing both parents working multiple jobs. neoliberals go into histrionics about this every time but a big reason for America's problems right now is the lack of parenting that most kids get because the system is designed in such a way that only rich kids get parented.
quibble about definitions all you want, but it is objective fact that austerity and capitalist acceleration as a result of lassez-faire economic policies (both core tenets of neoliberalism) have resulted in a world where double income households, where the iPad parents the child, are the expectation. is it any wonder parenting suffers when this is the case? I would like very much to live in a world where parents are given the resources to properly parent their children and make sure they don't get pornbrained and indoctrinated into rape culture. I'm just pointing out that people are quite often worse parents now because of very cold hard economic fact. I don't agree with porn bans, I think they're quite stupid. I'm just pointing out the obvious answer to "why don't parents simply parent their children?"
Do you have any data to back this up? Because most indicators are that the number of hours parents spend with kids has been steadily increasing across the developed world. There are dramatic...
it is objective fact that austerity and capitalist acceleration as a result of lassez-faire economic policies (both core tenets of neoliberalism) have resulted in a world where double income households, where the iPad parents the child, are the expectation. is it any wonder parenting suffers when this is the case? I would like very much to live in a world where parents are given the resources to properly parent their children and make sure they don't get pornbrained and indoctrinated into rape culture. I'm just pointing out that people are quite often worse parents now because of very cold hard economic fact.
Do you have any data to back this up? Because most indicators are that the number of hours parents spend with kids has been steadily increasing across the developed world. There are dramatic increases in amount of time spent by fathers, but even the time spent by mothers is increasing. It really seems like what’s giving is time parents have put into community and social life rather than time spent with children. If anything, expectations of active parenting have been increasing over time compared to previous generations where you’d just let your kids run semi-feral through the neighborhood as long as they got home by the time the street lights came on.
The “on demand” and ever present nature of the bad stuff is the thing that’s actually changed. You can’t let the kids run around because streets are designed for cars instead of people. You can’t let kids browse things on their own online because ad tech specifically targets kids in predatory ways. In the past we’d just happen upon a stash of stolen Penthouse and Hustler magazines in the woods while playing, and looking at them didn’t result in having Penthouse ads pop up in front of your eyeballs everywhere you go for the next 3 months. It’s the demands on parenting that are getting harder because society, as a whole, has given up on the idea that it has any responsibility whatsoever to ensure children are cared for and have proper virtues cultivated them. It entirely falls on parents in ways it never has before.
Alternatively, in a rural area, your playmates are your siblings and maybe your closest neighbors, because going anywhere else is too far away to want to do on foot or bicycle. There's not much...
Alternatively, in a rural area, your playmates are your siblings and maybe your closest neighbors, because going anywhere else is too far away to want to do on foot or bicycle. There's not much "society" to interfere (there are reruns on afternoon TV) and Mom is cooking dinner, so the kids took it for granted that they have to entertain themselves sometimes.
I’m a parent. I have enough time and money to parent-but that’s a privilege. Many parents do not. Even with sufficient time and money, I cannot watch my kids’ every move, and I don’t believe that...
I’m a parent. I have enough time and money to parent-but that’s a privilege. Many parents do not.
Even with sufficient time and money, I cannot watch my kids’ every move, and I don’t believe that would be healthy.
I bleived even before I wanted kids that it really does take a whole community working together to raise healthy kids, which in turn benefits the whole community.
This law may be ineffective and have unintended consequences, I don’t know. But I do know we ought to have society wide guardrails to protect the vulnerable (including most children, but not just them) when they cannot protect themselves.
Kids will do some stupid things with innocent intentions. And they don’t always have the means to properly contextualize what they experience. And that’s with “good”, involved parents.
Presumably if there are parents that fit that criteria, they aren't likely to be posting on Tildes. If they don't have both time and money and struggle with parental responsibilities, I doubt...
Presumably if there are parents that fit that criteria, they aren't likely to be posting on Tildes. If they don't have both time and money and struggle with parental responsibilities, I doubt they're thinking much about browsing/using Tildes.
"They're not here to answer your question so they obviously exist." isn't proof of anything any more than it's proof that god exists but can't be bothered to respond to a plea because she is too...
That's an extreme mischaracterization of what I said considering that I even led that statement with "Presumably if", I didn't even make a statement that started with an inherent assumption that...
"They're not here to answer your question so they obviously exist."
That's an extreme mischaracterization of what I said considering that I even led that statement with "Presumably if", I didn't even make a statement that started with an inherent assumption that they existed but instead started with not assuming they exist but if they did exist, would we expect to see them here? That's far more reasonable than what you started with, where you asked a question in such a way as though it would be confirmation what you thought was true if no one responded affirming they existed even though there are other reasons why you may not get a response and could leave your belief to be untrue.
So if we're going to stretch our characterization of what was said, you basically said god doesn't exist unless god responds to my comment.
I would like to understand exactly how are parents supposed to prevent our kids from accessing porn[1] or much worse things like communities full of predators[2]. The last time I mentioned...
I would like to understand exactly how are parents supposed to prevent our kids from accessing porn[1] or much worse things like communities full of predators[2]. The last time I mentioned parental controls on Tildes was inundated by "trust and educate your children instead", which makes me think some people forgot just how dumb 12-year-olds can be.
[1] Not that this will be specifically a main concern for me as a father...
Very few laws and restrictions completely eliminate the behavior they seek to prevent. An inability to completely eliminate a certain behavior is not sufficient to affirm the uselessness of a law....
Very few laws and restrictions completely eliminate the behavior they seek to prevent. An inability to completely eliminate a certain behavior is not sufficient to affirm the uselessness of a law.
We have laws against murder and theft. The fact that murder and theft still occur does not mean that those laws are useless. Perfect coercion is an unrealistic goal, and a lack of perfect, universal coercion does not mean that a law was badly conceived.
That said, I have no opinion on that specific law. I was merely commenting out of my understanding that "ugly" things like control and prohibition in regards to parenting shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
Honestly, yeah. I don't think it'll prevent all kids from accessing porn, but I think it'll prevent a lot of them. Most people, kids included, are not technically inclined enough, or just not...
Honestly, yeah. I don't think it'll prevent all kids from accessing porn, but I think it'll prevent a lot of them. Most people, kids included, are not technically inclined enough, or just not motivated enough to go through the trouble of installing a VPN to access porn.
Whether that's worth all the downsides is heavily up for debate though. But it's not like these laws will stop no one.
I wouldn't be so sure. A significant portion of my high school students have VPNs so they can Tik Toks at school. Awful, free VPNs that are certainly slurping up every byte of info they can get...
I wouldn't be so sure. A significant portion of my high school students have VPNs so they can Tik Toks at school. Awful, free VPNs that are certainly slurping up every byte of info they can get from them, but VPNs. If it's as easy as downloading an app, that's hardly a barrier at all to them, and they share the info with each other. I see it with VPNs on their phones, and for the latest unblocked domain for eaglecraft or shell shockers or paper.io or whatever other game of the week they're playing with their friends.
Porn is a high motivator, and I don't think we should underestimate the youth's tech saavy. It's a bit scary how easily my baby brother can navigate a tablet, searching for what videos to play...
Most people, kids included, are not technically inclined enough, or just not motivated enough to go through the trouble of installing a VPN to access porn.
Porn is a high motivator, and I don't think we should underestimate the youth's tech saavy. It's a bit scary how easily my baby brother can navigate a tablet, searching for what videos to play despite their reading being extremely simply.
Plus there's more than enough ads about VPNs and decades of forums to show them how to set that up. I wouldn't be surprised if in 5 years he could do all that and surpass my tech saavy at that time.
Yes. Honestly I haven’t used Pornhub in years, I prefer Xvideos, which is based somewhere in Central Europe (Czechia maybe?), so I haven’t even noticed.
Yes. Honestly I haven’t used Pornhub in years, I prefer Xvideos, which is based somewhere in Central Europe (Czechia maybe?), so I haven’t even noticed.
The net effect may end up being: no real change in the amount of pornography being ingested in these states, across all age ranges, but a marked increase in network and piracy savviness. If so......
The net effect may end up being: no real change in the amount of pornography being ingested in these states, across all age ranges, but a marked increase in network and piracy savviness.
Yeah too many people don't understand why these laws are actually making it through. As much as there's a very nasty/puritan component to it, there's a very real "well what the fuck can I do"...
Yeah too many people don't understand why these laws are actually making it through. As much as there's a very nasty/puritan component to it, there's a very real "well what the fuck can I do" angle. It's not unreasonable to say you don't want your kid to be exposed violence/sex/whatever or to at least have some controls on it.
Movies have a rating system, stores have to abide by certain advertising laws. The internet, in theory, abides by having you lie and say "yeah i'm 18" when you're not, but it's obviously the weakest of these systems as there's no accountability.
This ABSOLUTELY bumps into citizen privacy and internet privacy, but it's very clear that the equivalent real world analogues are being forced to play by rules that the internet sites do not need to. I feel like the "ideal" solution is somehow having an opt in system that flags "everything coming from my IP should require a password I set to view adult content".
Sites indicate what flags they apply (violence/sex/drugs/whatever), user configures what flags they want to trigger the pw on.
This is of course a stream of consciousness mock up but it's probably in the right direction. Of course that's also super unlikely to happen for all sorts of technical and political reasons.
That's really all there is to it. No politician is gonna risk the slander for arguing aginst such laws, no matter the learning. "Think of the Children" is effective like that. If they really...
As much as there's a very nasty/puritan component to it
That's really all there is to it. No politician is gonna risk the slander for arguing aginst such laws, no matter the learning. "Think of the Children" is effective like that. If they really wanted this solve, we'd copy some parts of the EU and pretty much all of Asia and enforce ID on a pretty much global scale. Anything not whitelisted would be subject to ID checks, from the kinkiest websites to a Wal Mart online vender to Reddit. (and anything whitelisted basically has a gigantic laser of regulations on them).
But I don;t think the US's thoughts on national ID (the only way to enforce this unless somehow all 50 states agree) has shifted that far in these decades.
Thankfully some states are challenging these laws as we speak.
the same way my mom did it 20-30 years ago? parental controls on the phone and computer. Does about 190% of the job these regulations are doing, and it's customized to their parental style. Those...
the same way my mom did it 20-30 years ago? parental controls on the phone and computer. Does about 190% of the job these regulations are doing, and it's customized to their parental style.
Those communities aren't the ones being targeted. That's the other crux of these laws that are showing that these are ideological rather than effective. Facebook doesn't need ID, Reddit doesn't , Tiktok doesn't (though that may soon solve itself, for all the wrong reasons), discord doesn't unless the channel is marked as such, Roblox isn't. these all have that content, and worse: the predators are almost guaranteed to be there compared to an 18+ site.
Hence the extra 100%, parent's can control these within their household. I only chipped off 10% because this does make it slightly harder for kids to use their friends devices. But only slightly.
The last time I mentioned parental controls on Tildes was inundated by "trust and educate your children instead"
That's the ideal solution in my head, because if a kid really wants to find something they will find it. Treating them maturely and teaching them the dangers and fake depictions will help in shaping how they choose to interact with that content.
But every parent is different, as is every child. If those are tools a parent wants to utilize, that's on them. There's no harm to the child (at least not directly), so I see no reason to judge their parenting.
That’s a good point about how social websites don’t need age verification. If a kid gets access to porn, they may become kinky, or at worst some sort of sex pest. But access to social media can...
That’s a good point about how social websites don’t need age verification. If a kid gets access to porn, they may become kinky, or at worst some sort of sex pest. But access to social media can make them antisocial in real world situations, radicalize them into ideologies, and at worst even get them to join terrorist organizations. We saw that happening with ISIS.
Pornography might be villainized as a bad vice, but it might not actually be as bad as the vices we are complicit to like social media and junk food.
Broader than that, there is so much salacious content on social media. Thirst traps everywhere, a huge number of porn subreddits... porn isn't in a tidy bucket you can easily label, it's the...
Broader than that, there is so much salacious content on social media. Thirst traps everywhere, a huge number of porn subreddits... porn isn't in a tidy bucket you can easily label, it's the substrate of the internet.
Yeah on Instagram (and I assume TikTok) a lot of normal content people might be into has stuff that is an obvious pipeline into porn. I tend to view a lot of cooking, travel, and workout videos...
Yeah on Instagram (and I assume TikTok) a lot of normal content people might be into has stuff that is an obvious pipeline into porn. I tend to view a lot of cooking, travel, and workout videos and all of them have creators who pop into my feed again and again that I have to intentionally avoid engaging with because it’s very obvious it’s going to start polluting my feed with OnlyFans models if I do. And I’m pretty savvy of how the algorithm works and put a lot of thought into what I click or even linger on to avoid that happening. I think I’m probably in like the 99th percentile of people for just being fastidious about my social media diet and it still hits me from time to time.
I say parental controls AND educate children. You have to set bound for them on technical terms (ie. using thing like Family Link on phone and set them properly), but you also have to trust them...
I say parental controls AND educate children. You have to set bound for them on technical terms (ie. using thing like Family Link on phone and set them properly), but you also have to trust them and educate them.
If you say you don't have time for anything I said, you shouldn't have had children in the first place. Kids are huge time and money investment and you should consider that when you are at the phase "I wand a kid".
You asked how parents are supposed to prevent kids from accessing porn or.pedators - maybe tell your kid internet is full of weirdos and evil people with only a handful that are actually good. But kids should consider all strangers and behave like they met such a stranger on a street - don't talk to them, don't react to them, go about own bussiness. I'm not saying make them afraid, but tell.them what it means if they post a picture on Facebook and how anyome can access it and not to rust setting it private (because that can be changed in the future terms of service or just be mismanaged on some software update and be mistakenly reset). Tell them they should own their own things and they should be careful with them (ie. if you buy your kid an iPhone, you tell the kid to be careful; if you set up an account for them, they should be similarly careful with it).
We are parents, we take responsibility for our kids and we also take responsibility on how they are raised by us. It is us who have to take care of their safety, there is nobody else to do it for us.
There are many children who have no parent available to help, educate, or set limits for them. As @lou said, no law or technical feature will 100% prevent access. But do we really want those kids...
There are many children who have no parent available to help, educate, or set limits for them. As @lou said, no law or technical feature will 100% prevent access. But do we really want those kids to have unfettered access to porn? Guns? Drugs?
Even for kids with decent parents, social restrictions are still needed
Communities benefit tremendously from healthy children growing into healthy adults, and suffer grievously from unhealthy kids and unhealthy adults. Communities can and should have a sizeable hand in supporting parents and raising g kids.
Edit: also, if you think parents should be restricted from having children unless they meet criteria, we should probably have a different, more urgent conversation.
There are ways to block websites and access on your home network. Also most devices have some kind of parental controls settings that can block sites on the device itself so if the kid is smart...
There are ways to block websites and access on your home network. Also most devices have some kind of parental controls settings that can block sites on the device itself so if the kid is smart enough to use a VPN or something they still can't get around the network settings.
I'm sure there are many more tools out there that can be used, just takes some time to learn how to set them up instead of trying to ban the Internet itself from doing what they don't want their kids to see
What is a statewide porn block going to do at a friends house that knows how to use a VPN? Nothing. There is no solution that will be perfect, but making a statewide block that invades privacy and...
What is a statewide porn block going to do at a friends house that knows how to use a VPN? Nothing. There is no solution that will be perfect, but making a statewide block that invades privacy and forces insecurity on people's privacy and personal information is way worse of an imperfection than the solution proposed in the comment you replied to.
That's the kicker with these types of law isn't it? They write them with nefarious purposes and a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet works, but they get to tack on "but think of the...
That's the kicker with these types of law isn't it? They write them with nefarious purposes and a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet works, but they get to tack on "but think of the children!". That way, anyone who tries to actually explain how this is a terrible law just gets hit with "what, so you want children watching porn? Wtf is wrong with you?!?"
It's extremely nefarious and harmful in every aspect.
I don't see this as conceptually any different from stores not letting kids buy cigarettes or alcohol. When I was a kid, I remember seeing vending machines were you could buy cigarettes. They...
I don't see this as conceptually any different from stores not letting kids buy cigarettes or alcohol. When I was a kid, I remember seeing vending machines were you could buy cigarettes. They don't have those anymore. Does anyone want to roll that back?
It's hardly foolproof, but it sets a norm.
The Internet creates new challenges, but in principle, we have the technology. Privacy-protected age verification isn't technically difficult. There should be robust third-party providers for age verification, much like we have for captchas and protection against DDOS attacks.
It will of course take a multi-year effort to define standards and get websites to use them. Even simple changes are harder at scale. Passing laws alone doesn't fix it.
It's checking an ID, which many services do, and then throwing away everything except a bit on the account that says "over 18." https://withpersona.com/blog/secure-age-verification...
It's checking an ID, which many services do, and then throwing away everything except a bit on the account that says "over 18."
Identity verification -- or anything really -- may be "technically" simple to implement; >40% of services will not implement it correctly for a variety of human reasons. The handful of times that...
Identity verification -- or anything really -- may be "technically" simple to implement; >40% of services will not implement it correctly for a variety of human reasons.
The handful of times that I've been forced to use something like CLEAR have only been incredibly frustrating to the point of it being dehumanizing--but all those times were for something that I needed. For a porn site I would just give up.
Also, I doubt US-style government auditing will allow for a system that deletes the records which were used to verify something.
Yeah, that's the part I don't trust. There's still bad actors to this day doing this even though my state has a GDPR-equivalent law against it. And you'd think I'd trust a porn site which already...
then throwing away everything except a bit on the account that says "over 18."
Yeah, that's the part I don't trust. There's still bad actors to this day doing this even though my state has a GDPR-equivalent law against it.
And you'd think I'd trust a porn site which already has pretty uphill ways to monetize to do this? Not particularly.
I'm imagining an age verification service where there's an intermediate layer like a VPN, so it doesn't know which websites it's providing age verification to. I read about a protocol recently...
I'm imagining an age verification service where there's an intermediate layer like a VPN, so it doesn't know which websites it's providing age verification to.
I read about a protocol recently that did a similar thing to hide sensitive IP addresses, but can't remember which one it was.
(This is sort of like onion routing, but without so many layers.)
I'm sure I'm missing several things here because it feels almost trivial from a technical perspective, which is often a bad sign haha. Still... Short version: There would need to be a standard for...
I'm sure I'm missing several things here because it feels almost trivial from a technical perspective, which is often a bad sign haha. Still...
Short version:
There would need to be a standard for how the user attribute requirements are written, including that responses are only given as true or false.
Authenticator services publish public keys for sites like PornHub to use. PornHub adds support for some of these by adding their public keys. The visitor must select one of them when authenticating. PornHub sends the visitor an authentication request to pass along to the authenticator. This includes the specific data request unencrypted so the visitor can see it (e.g. "The user is at least 18 years old") meaning the visitor can check what is being requested. It also includes some information encrypted by the authenticator's public key so that the visitor can't read it in plain text. This information includes a newly generated encryption key specifically for this request which the authenticator will use in the response.
The visitor passes it along to the authenticator service, authenticates as who they are registered as there, and gets a response. The response includes in plain text whether the result is true or false, so that the visitor can check what the response to PornHub would be. It also includes some data encrypted by the encryption key sent along with the request. This encrypted data can be used to ensure the visitor doesn't fake or alter the response (e.g. change false to true), and that the response is only valid for the specific request.
Long version
Alice - PornHub
Bob - A user
Charles - Some authentication service
Alice controls a resource that needs some for of user attribute validation. Charles says publicly that he can authenticate people and publishes a public key for any requests going to him. Alice trusts Charles so puts him on her list of trusted authenticators.
Bob trusts Charles enough to register and go through Charles' validation process to prove that he is at least 18 years old. Charles registers Bob and keeps that information on him.
Bob wants to access Alice's resource. Alice responds that Bob needs to prove some attributes, and the list of validators Alice accepts for this, including Charles. Bob responds to Alice that he wants to use Charles as the authenticator. Alice generates some data for this specific request, and sends Bob a bunch of data to pass on to Charles. This data contains:
An attribute specification according to some not-yet-written standard, specifying for instance that "The user is at least 18 years old".
A request identifier used as a cryptographic nonce, for instance a randomly generated 64-bit number, encrypted by Charles's public key so that only Charles can read the plain value.
One of two keys from a by Alice newly generated asymmetric key pair, encrypted by Charles's public key so that only Charles can read the plain value.
Bob can here confirm for himself that the data being requested is something he would be OK with sharing with Alice. If so, Bob authenticates himself with Charles and sends the request to him. Charles can access all the data in the request using his private key. He checks the requested attributes for Bob, creates the appropriate response, and sends it to Bob. This includes:
The attribute validation response per the same not-yet-written standard, for instance a binary value "true".
A hash of the above, the attribute specification, and the cryptographic nonce, all encrypted by the key sent over in the request.
Bob can verify what the response data to Alice would be, and can abort the authentication if he wants to. Bob sends this to Alice. Alice can take the attribute validation response, go through the same hashing algorithm, then decrypt the hash using her private key to validate that the data has not been modified by Bob. If it's consistent, she uses the response to determine whether Bob should have access. If he should, a temporary session is created for him.
With this:
Alice can add support for any authentication providers she wants to trust.
Bob can register with any authentication providers he trusts.
Bob does not need to register any form of data with Alice.
Bob can on his own verify what of his data is being divulged to Alice.
Charles does not know who Alice is (unless Alice and Charles conspire).
Charles can implement any form of multi-factor authentication, or passkeys, or whatever that they decide is necessary.
Bob cannot reuse either the request data from Alice or the response from Charles to authenticate again, and thus cannot directly use it to allow someone else to authenticate.
Bob can however conspire with Dave to have Dave authenticate on behalf of Bob, by using Dave as a middleman between Bob and Charles.
That is basically the trivial design, but it is unfortunately a privacy abomination and I personally would avoid using it like the plague. When Charles gets compromised the infiltrator gets not...
That is basically the trivial design, but it is unfortunately a privacy abomination and I personally would avoid using it like the plague. When Charles gets compromised the infiltrator gets not only the data submitted to Charles, but a path to learning all sorts of problematic things about Bob. I consider that Charles even knowing that Bob uses Alice is bad on its own for whole bunch of reasons, most generally just that they shouldn't know.
It may be clunkier to use, but I would probably design it closer to how SSL certs work (not exactly the same, but some principals). In such a case Charles is your certificate authority. You go to Charles and say, "give me a certificate that is valid for 10 minutes that contains only you attesting that I am 18+." You then upload that to Alice and she can verify that it was in fact signed by Charles by using Charles's known public key, but without ever asking Charles specifically about Bob.
There are still be problems, but at the very least Charles now has no idea what Bob used the certificate for which solves some of the privacy problem. A fun problem that still exists though, and actually exists in basically all of the implementations that don't require you to stream a selfie video in real time, is what stops you from just using someone else's? With a practical example, what stops a child from just putting in their parent's info and just borrowing the verification documents from their parent's wallet?
How does Charles know Bob uses Alice in my example? The data Bob sends to Charles does not contain any information Charles can use to identify Alice, unless Alice conspires against Bob to send...
When Charles gets compromised the infiltrator gets not only the data submitted to Charles, but a path to learning all sorts of problematic things about Bob. I consider that Charles even knowing that Bob uses Alice is bad on its own for whole bunch of reasons, most generally just that they shouldn't know.
How does Charles know Bob uses Alice in my example? The data Bob sends to Charles does not contain any information Charles can use to identify Alice, unless Alice conspires against Bob to send Charles that data.
Yeah, shared accounts / credentials / fake IDs are a problem (just like they are for paywall websites) but I think it's okay as long as it isn't too easy and they expire or are revoked. It doesn't...
Yeah, shared accounts / credentials / fake IDs are a problem (just like they are for paywall websites) but I think it's okay as long as it isn't too easy and they expire or are revoked. It doesn't have to be perfect, just make cheating a hassle.
In any case, I think the point is that it's fairly easy to imagine a system but the real thing would need a standards committee and feedback from experts, like OAuth or passkeys. And probably the first version would have flaws and need to be improved.
But Internet protocols have been invented before. There needs to a consensus that making a standard for privacy-protected age verification is a good thing, and buy in from the industry.
I wanna know how many Trumpers didn't see this coming. Like the immigrants who voted for him but think they'll be safe from deportation "because he didn't mean me." Democrats didn't lean hard...
I wanna know how many Trumpers didn't see this coming. Like the immigrants who voted for him but think they'll be safe from deportation "because he didn't mean me."
Democrats didn't lean hard enough on "Republicans are trying to block you from porn."
The thing is, PornHub, for all its faults, is a safe-ish place to go for porn. Fly-by-night places that never registered with the state and have no interest in complying will still exist, and so...
The thing is, PornHub, for all its faults, is a safe-ish place to go for porn. Fly-by-night places that never registered with the state and have no interest in complying will still exist, and so people will just go to places with more malicious ads, catfishing, or other dangers. This doesn't stop porn on the internet, but it does lay the foundation for other censorship while endangering the citizens.
Trumpers voted for the incoming administration that is causing the changes that Pornhub is currently placing region locks for. It is perfectly valid to wonder what the Trumpers are currently...
Trumpers voted for the incoming administration that is causing the changes that Pornhub is currently placing region locks for. It is perfectly valid to wonder what the Trumpers are currently experiencing from this as that voter base is fully part of the problem. Skirting with technicalities about this being state level is a dangerous way to handle conversations going into the next four years.
I think emphasizing porn access would be a terrible strategy. When they are going for “the other guys are weird”, to then also say “with us, all the porn you want” would backfire. I’m not saying...
I think emphasizing porn access would be a terrible strategy. When they are going for “the other guys are weird”, to then also say “with us, all the porn you want” would backfire.
I’m not saying porn is necessarily bad, but it’d be like handing a loaded cannon to your enemy and saying “shoot me”.
It's basically the same reason sex work is illegal in the US except for Vegas. A well regulated sex work industry could increase safety in the industry for both workers and clients, but nobody...
It's basically the same reason sex work is illegal in the US except for Vegas. A well regulated sex work industry could increase safety in the industry for both workers and clients, but nobody wants to be that politician that is "pro prostitution". It would be career suicide.
Yes Washoe county. It's legal in like 10/17 counties but not necessarily everywhere in those counties. (And illegal in Carson City which apparently doesn't have a county. ) People just assume it's...
Yes Washoe county. It's legal in like 10/17 counties but not necessarily everywhere in those counties. (And illegal in Carson City which apparently doesn't have a county. )
I suspect a “well regulated” sex work industry in the US would end up resembling our “well regulated gambling” industry where most people don’t interact with it, some number do, and a worryingly...
I suspect a “well regulated” sex work industry in the US would end up resembling our “well regulated gambling” industry where most people don’t interact with it, some number do, and a worryingly large number of those who do end up engaging with it to an extremely problematic extent to the point where it destroys their families’ lives and visits severely negative consequences on society as a whole as a result.
This is because once there is big money in it, it becomes untouchable by regulators in any way that can curb all but the worst and most exploitative abuses. And unlike gambling, where the exploitation to wring money out of marks would be visited on racing dogs and horses, sex work would be visiting it on young women.
Yeah, conceptually I'm pretty radically pro personal freedom in theory, as long as the negative externalities of those personal choices are well managed. In real life, I don't have faith in the...
Yeah, conceptually I'm pretty radically pro personal freedom in theory, as long as the negative externalities of those personal choices are well managed.
In real life, I don't have faith in the United States to well regulate anything that's bad for a person. We have an absolutely prolific obesity epidemic because of absolute garbage in our "well regulated" diets, online sports betting is currently ruining more lives than illegal mob poker games ever had a dream of doing, nicotine usage is more popular now than it was 20 years ago, and drunk driving is still one of the leading causes of accidental death in the US.
The US is generally dogshit at regulation if it's something people like doing and if there's a lot of money to be made in the situation. I 100%, absolutely do not trust our government to regulate prostitution nearly as well as somewhere like the Netherlands, who have their own ball of wax regarding the industry there as well.
If I were a (well regulated) betting man in fact, I'd put money down that the US would royally fuck up legalizing prostitution, leading to more, not less, misery and suffering.
In theory, people should be able to make their own choices about what they do with their bodies, provided they are well educated on the risk, have access to support in case that risk occurs, and those choices are kept away from those who don't have the capacity to make an informed choice. I don't believe the United States has the capability of fulfilling any of those requirements.
we don't have a "well regulated gambling" industry. Gambling is de factor banned in pretty much on all US soil. Natives have a loophole own their land (with a bunch of astereisks, I'm sure) and...
we don't have a "well regulated gambling" industry. Gambling is de factor banned in pretty much on all US soil. Natives have a loophole own their land (with a bunch of astereisks, I'm sure) and not the US. Hence, Casinos.
where most people don’t interact with it, some number do, and a worryingly large number of those who do end up engaging with it to an extremely problematic extent to the point where it destroys their families’ lives and visits severely negative consequences on society as a whole as a result.
Sounds like Alcohol (except I will admit it's an uphill battle for me to prove "most don't engage with it"). That didn't seem to workout for whatever reason when the US tried banning it. the balanced ended up with a bunch of regulations to sell it, but still being able to sell it. Yes, there's still small and large scale illegal operations around it. Yes, there are some manipulative behavior towards it.
If we allow ourselves to destroy our liver, I don't see much difference with how humans choose to transaction sex.
Given the plethora of sports betting ads and half the restaurants and more of the gas stations in town having slot machines, I'm not sure that's accurate? It's certainly restricted in many ways...
Gambling is de factor banned in pretty much on all US soil
Given the plethora of sports betting ads and half the restaurants and more of the gas stations in town having slot machines, I'm not sure that's accurate? It's certainly restricted in many ways but is it banned and not regulated? Or is Illinois just an outlier. (Gods the sports betting stuff is bad and I don't even get much due to rarely watching anything but women's soccer. )
well, to be more precise, the federal government in general: more or less handles all inter-state disputes, including between the US and native territories and various offshore activity while not...
Given the plethora of sports betting ads and half the restaurants and more of the gas stations in town having slot machines, I'm not sure that's accurate?
well, to be more precise, the federal government in general:
more or less handles all inter-state disputes, including between the US and native territories and various offshore activity
while not banning internet gambling, regulates it to the point where it makes it very hard to accept payment from internet gambling.
Has a number of rulings on specific forms of gambling, especially in regards to sports betting.
Everything else is, as you guessed, down to the states. including more specific regulations of internet gambling within state borders, and even casino and lottery rules. Technically there's no age limit for entering a casino, but something like 40+ states have those typical rules in place. And I believe the rest only go down to 18 in specific contexts (e.g. no alcohol or sports betting in the establishment). On the other hand, I'm pretty sure almost all states allow State lotteries, for obvious reason.
States also decide whether to legalize and how to regulate internet gambling within their borders. States that allow online gambling include New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia.
But YMMV immensely and this is always a hot topic. That sports betting prop tries to pops up every 2 years in California, and so far it's rejected everytime. in 2024 it just missed being on the ballot.
So I was thinking about: Video Gaming (Gambling) laws as well. Many restaurants and gas stations (and liquor stores?) have slot machines. It doesn't feel banned even if there are a lot of...
So I was thinking about: Video Gaming (Gambling) laws as well. Many restaurants and gas stations (and liquor stores?) have slot machines. It doesn't feel banned even if there are a lot of restrictions like you said
Yean, the law's always behind on tech, and The Wire Act's weakening was the biggest victory for video game gambling. All that is more or less state by state and I wouldn't be surprised if many...
Yean, the law's always behind on tech, and The Wire Act's weakening was the biggest victory for video game gambling. All that is more or less state by state and I wouldn't be surprised if many states just don't have regulation for that. The only technicality there is that the ESRB makes all games with real gambling AO (i.e. you cannot sell on consoles), but that's gotten around by... not caring about ratings and just being unrated.
I thought you were just talking about lotteries with gas stations, but I didn't realize there were literal slot machines. I haven't seen that in California, so I suppose that's another state-by-state case.
Oh yeah, we have them everywhere In gas stations they're usually in a separate, locked, room for ID purposes but in restaurants they're often in part of the dining area. It's.... Weird? Local...
Oh yeah, we have them everywhere
In gas stations they're usually in a separate, locked, room for ID purposes but in restaurants they're often in part of the dining area. It's.... Weird? Local counter service restaurants are the most common but there are also "pizza places" that exist for the gambling
This is so ridiculous. We need to outlaw these age restriction rules, and parents need to take responsibility for their own damn children without letting them loose on the Internet and expecting everyone else to confirm to what they want.
I'm sick of fucking censorship on all platforms too. Let people swear, and if you don't like it, don't let your kid watch it.
Or even better, don't give a shit about swearing cause that's how the real world is. Everyone swears all the time, you can't stop it. The kid will learn it eventually, why try to stop the inevitable?
this would also require giving parents the resources (i.e. time and money) to parent their children which is simply unthinkable at this stage of the neoliberal death spiral
? Surely the neoliberal angle on the issue would be that porn websites should be allowed, and their fates left to the market?
I think supergauntlet's point was we have too many people who spend too much time working and not enough time parenting, so it's much harder to use personal responsibility as a rebuttal against the argument of "please think of the children" etc.
The neoliberal worldview is definitionally opposed to anything that hinders the capital class from gathering wealth, and that is especially inclusive of things like labor protections. In their view a free market would be enough protection for laborers because an abusive employer would lose employees to other, non-abusive employers. Of course we know this isn't how it works in practice, and that without government that represents working people enforcing boundaries, the capital class will exploit and extract from labor until people break.
I don't see any incompatible thoughts here. There are factions of religious people who want to ban porn for morality, factions who want to ban porn for health reasons, factions who don't really care but will ally with those factions, factions who want this kind of bill passed to restrict internet freedom generally and the porn ban is a vehicle for that, etc.
There are enough people with these factions to have passed these laws. Simultaneously we are living in a neoliberal deathspiral, the capital class continues to amass wealth and power while more and more people are unable to provide for their basic needs of housing, food, and healthcare, let alone a luxury like having free time to enrich your family or getting an education.
yes I am saying that it is a pipe dream to go "I would simply parent my children" when it is objective fact that conditions are worse for raising children than they were 30 years ago. if you want people to parent children that actively you also need to go back to 1970s-80s levels of inequality where you could feasibly raise a child on a single income. I am not arguing in favor of a porn ban.
“Neoliberalism” is when you dislike the outputs of cultural, regulatory, and market dynamics.
I'm assuming that's a facetious definition, but it seems more often "neoliberalism" is "whatever I don't like happening".
The same as today's use of the word 'capitalism', but for the thinking man.
I'm sorry, what?
Are there any parents here that can chime in and say "I'm happy about these laws because don't have enough time and/or money to keep my kids away from porn?"
no, it's literally simple economics that parents have fewer resources than 30 years ago. you are expecting parents to do all this extra work when we have gone from it being reasonably feasible to raise 2 kids on a single income to needing both parents working multiple jobs. neoliberals go into histrionics about this every time but a big reason for America's problems right now is the lack of parenting that most kids get because the system is designed in such a way that only rich kids get parented.
quibble about definitions all you want, but it is objective fact that austerity and capitalist acceleration as a result of lassez-faire economic policies (both core tenets of neoliberalism) have resulted in a world where double income households, where the iPad parents the child, are the expectation. is it any wonder parenting suffers when this is the case? I would like very much to live in a world where parents are given the resources to properly parent their children and make sure they don't get pornbrained and indoctrinated into rape culture. I'm just pointing out that people are quite often worse parents now because of very cold hard economic fact. I don't agree with porn bans, I think they're quite stupid. I'm just pointing out the obvious answer to "why don't parents simply parent their children?"
Do you have any data to back this up? Because most indicators are that the number of hours parents spend with kids has been steadily increasing across the developed world. There are dramatic increases in amount of time spent by fathers, but even the time spent by mothers is increasing. It really seems like what’s giving is time parents have put into community and social life rather than time spent with children. If anything, expectations of active parenting have been increasing over time compared to previous generations where you’d just let your kids run semi-feral through the neighborhood as long as they got home by the time the street lights came on.
The “on demand” and ever present nature of the bad stuff is the thing that’s actually changed. You can’t let the kids run around because streets are designed for cars instead of people. You can’t let kids browse things on their own online because ad tech specifically targets kids in predatory ways. In the past we’d just happen upon a stash of stolen Penthouse and Hustler magazines in the woods while playing, and looking at them didn’t result in having Penthouse ads pop up in front of your eyeballs everywhere you go for the next 3 months. It’s the demands on parenting that are getting harder because society, as a whole, has given up on the idea that it has any responsibility whatsoever to ensure children are cared for and have proper virtues cultivated them. It entirely falls on parents in ways it never has before.
Alternatively, in a rural area, your playmates are your siblings and maybe your closest neighbors, because going anywhere else is too far away to want to do on foot or bicycle. There's not much "society" to interfere (there are reruns on afternoon TV) and Mom is cooking dinner, so the kids took it for granted that they have to entertain themselves sometimes.
It's a different world now.
I’m a parent. I have enough time and money to parent-but that’s a privilege. Many parents do not.
Even with sufficient time and money, I cannot watch my kids’ every move, and I don’t believe that would be healthy.
I bleived even before I wanted kids that it really does take a whole community working together to raise healthy kids, which in turn benefits the whole community.
This law may be ineffective and have unintended consequences, I don’t know. But I do know we ought to have society wide guardrails to protect the vulnerable (including most children, but not just them) when they cannot protect themselves.
Kids will do some stupid things with innocent intentions. And they don’t always have the means to properly contextualize what they experience. And that’s with “good”, involved parents.
Presumably if there are parents that fit that criteria, they aren't likely to be posting on Tildes. If they don't have both time and money and struggle with parental responsibilities, I doubt they're thinking much about browsing/using Tildes.
Not so sure about that. Even they have to poop at some point
"They're not here to answer your question so they obviously exist." isn't proof of anything any more than it's proof that god exists but can't be bothered to respond to a plea because she is too busy giving some boy on the banks of a river in Africa a parasite that'll cause him to go blind before he's five years old.
That's an extreme mischaracterization of what I said considering that I even led that statement with "Presumably if", I didn't even make a statement that started with an inherent assumption that they existed but instead started with not assuming they exist but if they did exist, would we expect to see them here? That's far more reasonable than what you started with, where you asked a question in such a way as though it would be confirmation what you thought was true if no one responded affirming they existed even though there are other reasons why you may not get a response and could leave your belief to be untrue.
So if we're going to stretch our characterization of what was said, you basically said god doesn't exist unless god responds to my comment.
I would like to understand exactly how are parents supposed to prevent our kids from accessing porn[1] or much worse things like communities full of predators[2]. The last time I mentioned parental controls on Tildes was inundated by "trust and educate your children instead", which makes me think some people forgot just how dumb 12-year-olds can be.
[1] Not that this will be specifically a main concern for me as a father...
[2] I do care about that
Do you think these laws and restrictions will actually prevent kids from accessing porn?
Very few laws and restrictions completely eliminate the behavior they seek to prevent. An inability to completely eliminate a certain behavior is not sufficient to affirm the uselessness of a law.
We have laws against murder and theft. The fact that murder and theft still occur does not mean that those laws are useless. Perfect coercion is an unrealistic goal, and a lack of perfect, universal coercion does not mean that a law was badly conceived.
That said, I have no opinion on that specific law. I was merely commenting out of my understanding that "ugly" things like control and prohibition in regards to parenting shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
Honestly, yeah. I don't think it'll prevent all kids from accessing porn, but I think it'll prevent a lot of them. Most people, kids included, are not technically inclined enough, or just not motivated enough to go through the trouble of installing a VPN to access porn.
Whether that's worth all the downsides is heavily up for debate though. But it's not like these laws will stop no one.
I wouldn't be so sure. A significant portion of my high school students have VPNs so they can Tik Toks at school. Awful, free VPNs that are certainly slurping up every byte of info they can get from them, but VPNs. If it's as easy as downloading an app, that's hardly a barrier at all to them, and they share the info with each other. I see it with VPNs on their phones, and for the latest unblocked domain for eaglecraft or shell shockers or paper.io or whatever other game of the week they're playing with their friends.
Porn is a high motivator, and I don't think we should underestimate the youth's tech saavy. It's a bit scary how easily my baby brother can navigate a tablet, searching for what videos to play despite their reading being extremely simply.
Plus there's more than enough ads about VPNs and decades of forums to show them how to set that up. I wouldn't be surprised if in 5 years he could do all that and surpass my tech saavy at that time.
I don't think most porn sites are complying with these bans, so presumably the kids are instead accessing even more sketchy sites.
They could simply access websites from other countries.
Yes. Honestly I haven’t used Pornhub in years, I prefer Xvideos, which is based somewhere in Central Europe (Czechia maybe?), so I haven’t even noticed.
The net effect may end up being: no real change in the amount of pornography being ingested in these states, across all age ranges, but a marked increase in network and piracy savviness.
If so... net positive?
Yeah too many people don't understand why these laws are actually making it through. As much as there's a very nasty/puritan component to it, there's a very real "well what the fuck can I do" angle. It's not unreasonable to say you don't want your kid to be exposed violence/sex/whatever or to at least have some controls on it.
Movies have a rating system, stores have to abide by certain advertising laws. The internet, in theory, abides by having you lie and say "yeah i'm 18" when you're not, but it's obviously the weakest of these systems as there's no accountability.
This ABSOLUTELY bumps into citizen privacy and internet privacy, but it's very clear that the equivalent real world analogues are being forced to play by rules that the internet sites do not need to. I feel like the "ideal" solution is somehow having an opt in system that flags "everything coming from my IP should require a password I set to view adult content".
Sites indicate what flags they apply (violence/sex/drugs/whatever), user configures what flags they want to trigger the pw on.
This is of course a stream of consciousness mock up but it's probably in the right direction. Of course that's also super unlikely to happen for all sorts of technical and political reasons.
That's really all there is to it. No politician is gonna risk the slander for arguing aginst such laws, no matter the learning. "Think of the Children" is effective like that. If they really wanted this solve, we'd copy some parts of the EU and pretty much all of Asia and enforce ID on a pretty much global scale. Anything not whitelisted would be subject to ID checks, from the kinkiest websites to a Wal Mart online vender to Reddit. (and anything whitelisted basically has a gigantic laser of regulations on them).
But I don;t think the US's thoughts on national ID (the only way to enforce this unless somehow all 50 states agree) has shifted that far in these decades.
Thankfully some states are challenging these laws as we speak.
the same way my mom did it 20-30 years ago? parental controls on the phone and computer. Does about 190% of the job these regulations are doing, and it's customized to their parental style.
Those communities aren't the ones being targeted. That's the other crux of these laws that are showing that these are ideological rather than effective. Facebook doesn't need ID, Reddit doesn't , Tiktok doesn't (though that may soon solve itself, for all the wrong reasons), discord doesn't unless the channel is marked as such, Roblox isn't. these all have that content, and worse: the predators are almost guaranteed to be there compared to an 18+ site.
Hence the extra 100%, parent's can control these within their household. I only chipped off 10% because this does make it slightly harder for kids to use their friends devices. But only slightly.
That's the ideal solution in my head, because if a kid really wants to find something they will find it. Treating them maturely and teaching them the dangers and fake depictions will help in shaping how they choose to interact with that content.
But every parent is different, as is every child. If those are tools a parent wants to utilize, that's on them. There's no harm to the child (at least not directly), so I see no reason to judge their parenting.
That’s a good point about how social websites don’t need age verification. If a kid gets access to porn, they may become kinky, or at worst some sort of sex pest. But access to social media can make them antisocial in real world situations, radicalize them into ideologies, and at worst even get them to join terrorist organizations. We saw that happening with ISIS.
Pornography might be villainized as a bad vice, but it might not actually be as bad as the vices we are complicit to like social media and junk food.
Broader than that, there is so much salacious content on social media. Thirst traps everywhere, a huge number of porn subreddits... porn isn't in a tidy bucket you can easily label, it's the substrate of the internet.
Yeah on Instagram (and I assume TikTok) a lot of normal content people might be into has stuff that is an obvious pipeline into porn. I tend to view a lot of cooking, travel, and workout videos and all of them have creators who pop into my feed again and again that I have to intentionally avoid engaging with because it’s very obvious it’s going to start polluting my feed with OnlyFans models if I do. And I’m pretty savvy of how the algorithm works and put a lot of thought into what I click or even linger on to avoid that happening. I think I’m probably in like the 99th percentile of people for just being fastidious about my social media diet and it still hits me from time to time.
I don’t believe porn would make anyone kinky or a sex pest.
I believe people who are kinky or sex pests are more likely to watch porn.
I say parental controls AND educate children. You have to set bound for them on technical terms (ie. using thing like Family Link on phone and set them properly), but you also have to trust them and educate them.
If you say you don't have time for anything I said, you shouldn't have had children in the first place. Kids are huge time and money investment and you should consider that when you are at the phase "I wand a kid".
You asked how parents are supposed to prevent kids from accessing porn or.pedators - maybe tell your kid internet is full of weirdos and evil people with only a handful that are actually good. But kids should consider all strangers and behave like they met such a stranger on a street - don't talk to them, don't react to them, go about own bussiness. I'm not saying make them afraid, but tell.them what it means if they post a picture on Facebook and how anyome can access it and not to rust setting it private (because that can be changed in the future terms of service or just be mismanaged on some software update and be mistakenly reset). Tell them they should own their own things and they should be careful with them (ie. if you buy your kid an iPhone, you tell the kid to be careful; if you set up an account for them, they should be similarly careful with it).
We are parents, we take responsibility for our kids and we also take responsibility on how they are raised by us. It is us who have to take care of their safety, there is nobody else to do it for us.
There are many children who have no parent available to help, educate, or set limits for them. As @lou said, no law or technical feature will 100% prevent access. But do we really want those kids to have unfettered access to porn? Guns? Drugs?
Even for kids with decent parents, social restrictions are still needed
Communities benefit tremendously from healthy children growing into healthy adults, and suffer grievously from unhealthy kids and unhealthy adults. Communities can and should have a sizeable hand in supporting parents and raising g kids.
Edit: also, if you think parents should be restricted from having children unless they meet criteria, we should probably have a different, more urgent conversation.
There are ways to block websites and access on your home network. Also most devices have some kind of parental controls settings that can block sites on the device itself so if the kid is smart enough to use a VPN or something they still can't get around the network settings.
I'm sure there are many more tools out there that can be used, just takes some time to learn how to set them up instead of trying to ban the Internet itself from doing what they don't want their kids to see
This might work at the kid’s house, but what about a friend’s house? Or a friend’s phone? Or any of a myriad other circumstances outside your control?
What is a statewide porn block going to do at a friends house that knows how to use a VPN? Nothing. There is no solution that will be perfect, but making a statewide block that invades privacy and forces insecurity on people's privacy and personal information is way worse of an imperfection than the solution proposed in the comment you replied to.
That's the kicker with these types of law isn't it? They write them with nefarious purposes and a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet works, but they get to tack on "but think of the children!". That way, anyone who tries to actually explain how this is a terrible law just gets hit with "what, so you want children watching porn? Wtf is wrong with you?!?"
It's extremely nefarious and harmful in every aspect.
I don't see this as conceptually any different from stores not letting kids buy cigarettes or alcohol. When I was a kid, I remember seeing vending machines were you could buy cigarettes. They don't have those anymore. Does anyone want to roll that back?
It's hardly foolproof, but it sets a norm.
The Internet creates new challenges, but in principle, we have the technology. Privacy-protected age verification isn't technically difficult. There should be robust third-party providers for age verification, much like we have for captchas and protection against DDOS attacks.
It will of course take a multi-year effort to define standards and get websites to use them. Even simple changes are harder at scale. Passing laws alone doesn't fix it.
Source?
It's checking an ID, which many services do, and then throwing away everything except a bit on the account that says "over 18."
https://withpersona.com/blog/secure-age-verification
https://stripe.com/identity
Identity verification -- or anything really -- may be "technically" simple to implement; >40% of services will not implement it correctly for a variety of human reasons.
The handful of times that I've been forced to use something like CLEAR have only been incredibly frustrating to the point of it being dehumanizing--but all those times were for something that I needed. For a porn site I would just give up.
Also, I doubt US-style government auditing will allow for a system that deletes the records which were used to verify something.
Yeah, that's the part I don't trust. There's still bad actors to this day doing this even though my state has a GDPR-equivalent law against it.
And you'd think I'd trust a porn site which already has pretty uphill ways to monetize to do this? Not particularly.
I'm imagining an age verification service where there's an intermediate layer like a VPN, so it doesn't know which websites it's providing age verification to.
I read about a protocol recently that did a similar thing to hide sensitive IP addresses, but can't remember which one it was.
(This is sort of like onion routing, but without so many layers.)
I'm sure I'm missing several things here because it feels almost trivial from a technical perspective, which is often a bad sign haha. Still...
Short version:
There would need to be a standard for how the user attribute requirements are written, including that responses are only given as true or false.
Authenticator services publish public keys for sites like PornHub to use. PornHub adds support for some of these by adding their public keys. The visitor must select one of them when authenticating. PornHub sends the visitor an authentication request to pass along to the authenticator. This includes the specific data request unencrypted so the visitor can see it (e.g. "The user is at least 18 years old") meaning the visitor can check what is being requested. It also includes some information encrypted by the authenticator's public key so that the visitor can't read it in plain text. This information includes a newly generated encryption key specifically for this request which the authenticator will use in the response.
The visitor passes it along to the authenticator service, authenticates as who they are registered as there, and gets a response. The response includes in plain text whether the result is true or false, so that the visitor can check what the response to PornHub would be. It also includes some data encrypted by the encryption key sent along with the request. This encrypted data can be used to ensure the visitor doesn't fake or alter the response (e.g. change false to true), and that the response is only valid for the specific request.
Long version
Alice - PornHub
Bob - A user
Charles - Some authentication service
Alice controls a resource that needs some for of user attribute validation. Charles says publicly that he can authenticate people and publishes a public key for any requests going to him. Alice trusts Charles so puts him on her list of trusted authenticators.
Bob trusts Charles enough to register and go through Charles' validation process to prove that he is at least 18 years old. Charles registers Bob and keeps that information on him.
Bob wants to access Alice's resource. Alice responds that Bob needs to prove some attributes, and the list of validators Alice accepts for this, including Charles. Bob responds to Alice that he wants to use Charles as the authenticator. Alice generates some data for this specific request, and sends Bob a bunch of data to pass on to Charles. This data contains:
Bob can here confirm for himself that the data being requested is something he would be OK with sharing with Alice. If so, Bob authenticates himself with Charles and sends the request to him. Charles can access all the data in the request using his private key. He checks the requested attributes for Bob, creates the appropriate response, and sends it to Bob. This includes:
Bob can verify what the response data to Alice would be, and can abort the authentication if he wants to. Bob sends this to Alice. Alice can take the attribute validation response, go through the same hashing algorithm, then decrypt the hash using her private key to validate that the data has not been modified by Bob. If it's consistent, she uses the response to determine whether Bob should have access. If he should, a temporary session is created for him.
With this:
That is basically the trivial design, but it is unfortunately a privacy abomination and I personally would avoid using it like the plague. When Charles gets compromised the infiltrator gets not only the data submitted to Charles, but a path to learning all sorts of problematic things about Bob. I consider that Charles even knowing that Bob uses Alice is bad on its own for whole bunch of reasons, most generally just that they shouldn't know.
It may be clunkier to use, but I would probably design it closer to how SSL certs work (not exactly the same, but some principals). In such a case Charles is your certificate authority. You go to Charles and say, "give me a certificate that is valid for 10 minutes that contains only you attesting that I am 18+." You then upload that to Alice and she can verify that it was in fact signed by Charles by using Charles's known public key, but without ever asking Charles specifically about Bob.
There are still be problems, but at the very least Charles now has no idea what Bob used the certificate for which solves some of the privacy problem. A fun problem that still exists though, and actually exists in basically all of the implementations that don't require you to stream a selfie video in real time, is what stops you from just using someone else's? With a practical example, what stops a child from just putting in their parent's info and just borrowing the verification documents from their parent's wallet?
How does Charles know Bob uses Alice in my example? The data Bob sends to Charles does not contain any information Charles can use to identify Alice, unless Alice conspires against Bob to send Charles that data.
Yeah, shared accounts / credentials / fake IDs are a problem (just like they are for paywall websites) but I think it's okay as long as it isn't too easy and they expire or are revoked. It doesn't have to be perfect, just make cheating a hassle.
In any case, I think the point is that it's fairly easy to imagine a system but the real thing would need a standards committee and feedback from experts, like OAuth or passkeys. And probably the first version would have flaws and need to be improved.
But Internet protocols have been invented before. There needs to a consensus that making a standard for privacy-protected age verification is a good thing, and buy in from the industry.
I don't think it can be account-based because an account is easy to buy/sell/share
More porn for the rest of us then.
This is unironically the best comment on this topic, and I just wanted you to know that I appreciated it.
Mirror: https://archive.is/w9TcX
I wanna know how many Trumpers didn't see this coming. Like the immigrants who voted for him but think they'll be safe from deportation "because he didn't mean me."
Democrats didn't lean hard enough on "Republicans are trying to block you from porn."
The thing is, PornHub, for all its faults, is a safe-ish place to go for porn. Fly-by-night places that never registered with the state and have no interest in complying will still exist, and so people will just go to places with more malicious ads, catfishing, or other dangers. This doesn't stop porn on the internet, but it does lay the foundation for other censorship while endangering the citizens.
It doesn’t really have anything to do with Trump or Biden. Republicans, yes, but these are all at the state level. The president wouldn’t matter.
Trumpers voted for the incoming administration that is causing the changes that Pornhub is currently placing region locks for. It is perfectly valid to wonder what the Trumpers are currently experiencing from this as that voter base is fully part of the problem. Skirting with technicalities about this being state level is a dangerous way to handle conversations going into the next four years.
I think emphasizing porn access would be a terrible strategy. When they are going for “the other guys are weird”, to then also say “with us, all the porn you want” would backfire.
I’m not saying porn is necessarily bad, but it’d be like handing a loaded cannon to your enemy and saying “shoot me”.
It's basically the same reason sex work is illegal in the US except for Vegas. A well regulated sex work industry could increase safety in the industry for both workers and clients, but nobody wants to be that politician that is "pro prostitution". It would be career suicide.
This is your reminder that sex work is illegal in Las Vegas and in fact all of Clark county. It's just legal in the rest of Nevada.
It’s also illegal in the county that Reno is in as well.
Yes Washoe county. It's legal in like 10/17 counties but not necessarily everywhere in those counties. (And illegal in Carson City which apparently doesn't have a county. )
People just assume it's legal in Vegas.
I suspect a “well regulated” sex work industry in the US would end up resembling our “well regulated gambling” industry where most people don’t interact with it, some number do, and a worryingly large number of those who do end up engaging with it to an extremely problematic extent to the point where it destroys their families’ lives and visits severely negative consequences on society as a whole as a result.
This is because once there is big money in it, it becomes untouchable by regulators in any way that can curb all but the worst and most exploitative abuses. And unlike gambling, where the exploitation to wring money out of marks would be visited on racing dogs and horses, sex work would be visiting it on young women.
Yeah, conceptually I'm pretty radically pro personal freedom in theory, as long as the negative externalities of those personal choices are well managed.
In real life, I don't have faith in the United States to well regulate anything that's bad for a person. We have an absolutely prolific obesity epidemic because of absolute garbage in our "well regulated" diets, online sports betting is currently ruining more lives than illegal mob poker games ever had a dream of doing, nicotine usage is more popular now than it was 20 years ago, and drunk driving is still one of the leading causes of accidental death in the US.
The US is generally dogshit at regulation if it's something people like doing and if there's a lot of money to be made in the situation. I 100%, absolutely do not trust our government to regulate prostitution nearly as well as somewhere like the Netherlands, who have their own ball of wax regarding the industry there as well.
If I were a (well regulated) betting man in fact, I'd put money down that the US would royally fuck up legalizing prostitution, leading to more, not less, misery and suffering.
In theory, people should be able to make their own choices about what they do with their bodies, provided they are well educated on the risk, have access to support in case that risk occurs, and those choices are kept away from those who don't have the capacity to make an informed choice. I don't believe the United States has the capability of fulfilling any of those requirements.
we don't have a "well regulated gambling" industry. Gambling is de factor banned in pretty much on all US soil. Natives have a loophole own their land (with a bunch of astereisks, I'm sure) and not the US. Hence, Casinos.
Sounds like Alcohol (except I will admit it's an uphill battle for me to prove "most don't engage with it"). That didn't seem to workout for whatever reason when the US tried banning it. the balanced ended up with a bunch of regulations to sell it, but still being able to sell it. Yes, there's still small and large scale illegal operations around it. Yes, there are some manipulative behavior towards it.
If we allow ourselves to destroy our liver, I don't see much difference with how humans choose to transaction sex.
Given the plethora of sports betting ads and half the restaurants and more of the gas stations in town having slot machines, I'm not sure that's accurate? It's certainly restricted in many ways but is it banned and not regulated? Or is Illinois just an outlier. (Gods the sports betting stuff is bad and I don't even get much due to rarely watching anything but women's soccer. )
well, to be more precise, the federal government in general:
I will also note that a relatively recent ruling more or less weakened the wire act, basically saying that it does not cover non-sports betting
Everything else is, as you guessed, down to the states. including more specific regulations of internet gambling within state borders, and even casino and lottery rules. Technically there's no age limit for entering a casino, but something like 40+ states have those typical rules in place. And I believe the rest only go down to 18 in specific contexts (e.g. no alcohol or sports betting in the establishment). On the other hand, I'm pretty sure almost all states allow State lotteries, for obvious reason.
Unless there was a very recent bill passed, I don't think so
But YMMV immensely and this is always a hot topic. That sports betting prop tries to pops up every 2 years in California, and so far it's rejected everytime. in 2024 it just missed being on the ballot.
So I was thinking about: Video Gaming (Gambling) laws as well. Many restaurants and gas stations (and liquor stores?) have slot machines. It doesn't feel banned even if there are a lot of restrictions like you said
But thanks for the details
Yean, the law's always behind on tech, and The Wire Act's weakening was the biggest victory for video game gambling. All that is more or less state by state and I wouldn't be surprised if many states just don't have regulation for that. The only technicality there is that the ESRB makes all games with real gambling AO (i.e. you cannot sell on consoles), but that's gotten around by... not caring about ratings and just being unrated.
I thought you were just talking about lotteries with gas stations, but I didn't realize there were literal slot machines. I haven't seen that in California, so I suppose that's another state-by-state case.
Oh yeah, we have them everywhere
In gas stations they're usually in a separate, locked, room for ID purposes but in restaurants they're often in part of the dining area. It's.... Weird? Local counter service restaurants are the most common but there are also "pizza places" that exist for the gambling
"Pro personal freedom." "Minimal state interference in business."