E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents(foxcarolina.com) |
E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents(foxcarolina.com) |
What if the government kept a record of any or all of those checks? What if they arranged for third parties to commercialize that data so they could 'legally' end-run any restriction on domestic spying with a small ad targeting data service fee?
This is the sort of dystopia that librarians and others focused on liberty have been fighting for what seems like forever.
As a society I think we've accepted that some things (cigarettes, alcohol, sex, etc.) should be restricted from children. That's a far cry from requiring ID every time I go to the grocery store. But, as long as I've been alive, you have had to show ID to purchase alcohol, and the sky hasn't fallen.
Again, I think these types of laws are particularly poorly thought out, but I don't buy the "slippery slope into dystopia" arguments, and I think there are better arguments against it.
It's pretty insane that we have no check for an unlimited amount of free porn with all kinds of extremes.
It fucks up a lot of kids (and adults).
Showing porn to a random kid on the street would have you catch a charge if not something worse, but somehow on the Internet it's just fine?
1) entered a grocery store - No, at least not since peak-pandemic. Face recognition?
2) a library - Yes, to borrow books or on demand from security. Needed govt. id to get a library card.
3) movie theatre - Yes, mine no longer takes cash.
4) tracked each time you consumed a video - Yes. Every single streaming service.
5) a still image - Everything on the web. Every book w/ photos I buy. Can hypothetically still look at books we own, was given, found, lent, pirated or stole in privacy.
6) Audio - spotify, youtube etc.
7) a text message - Your phone IS a device you pay for and maintain which is designed and regulated to spy on you. Signal is the only possibility for any privacy at all here.
How is that fight going, do you think?
A Turnkey totalitarian state exists, who is going to turn that key?
A totalitarian that will be recognized as such.
The plausible deniability of the status quo is worth quite a bit.
Most people use a SIM card that is tied to same. Their web activity is similarly tied to ID.
Most USians voluntarily provide that payment card (with full name in the magstripe) whenever they shop at a grocery store or movie theater.
I’m not sure why people think this sort of surveillance isn’t occurring. We’ve known since before Snowden that the feds have been receiving this data in bulk in realtime for decades.
What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a bar, a strip club, or a (R-rated) movie theatre?
You already are.
I mean you mostly are already
I wouldn't vote for this policy but I get it. Lots of people don't want kids watching porn. And it's not just social conservativism, people across the political spectrum think porn is addictive, psychologically damaging, and leads to sexual dysfunction.
I think everyone acknowledges it can be, but it's a pretty distinct cohort that holds it necessarily is. Definitely not that it inevitably leads to sexual dysfunction, that's just patently untrue.
Most adults consume pornography, and for the vast majority of them it isn't a problem. Every adult who's sex life I know anything about, watches porn. They're fine.
whether or not you agree with the blocking of that sort of content, supporting these sort of restrictions on pornography means supporting a policy that lets the government gate content they deem objectionable behind an id check. i guarantee you there's at least some content out there that you're not going to agree with the government's definition of pornography. or even if you agree with the current government on all their content moderation choices, you might not agree with the next one.
We should focus on tools and systems that empower parents to guide their childrens' internet experience. Maybe a token of some sort sites can use to self identify as 18+ so parents can set up strong filters.
That said, yeah, I get the motivation. I put this in a similar category as the regulatory response to Airbnb/Ubers of the world: it seems like a better outcome may have been possible if the companies didn’t totally and flagrantly shirk their social obligations to begin with.
Eho decides what is porn? There is portln on Twitter, will all of twitter be monitored?
Kids suicides inceased 10x because they arent alliwed to go outside any more and have no friends - if we actually cared about kuds we'd be solving that.
Western boomers grew up in a better world than kids today
“Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children & teens to play, roam, & engage in other activities independent of direct oversight & control by adults.”
license to walk home alone from school dropped from 86% in 1971 to 35% in 1990 and 25% in 2010, and license to use public buses alone dropped from 48% in 1971 to 15% in 1990 to 12% in 2010.11
Homework, which was once rare or nonexistent in elementary school, is now common even in kindergarten. One study revealed that the average amount of time that US children in school, ages 6-8 years, spent at school plus school homework increased by 11.4 hours per week between 1981 and 2003, equivalent to adding a day and half to an adult’s work week.
those who could play freely in neighborhoods spent, on average, twice as much time outdoors, were much more active while outdoors, had more than twice as many friends, and had better motor and social skills than those deprived of such play"
Looks like it's unconfirmed but likely it was specifically named for monosodium glutamate. "This is where we keep the tasty content."
https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/E621
https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/e621/
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/e621
(Edit: Apparently there's a sister site called E926 to share SFW content. E926 is yet another food additive (Chlorine Dioxide) which is used to bleach food for a cleaner appearance.)
> Any commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall...
That's a ridiculously vague standard. Google and Bing both distribute material harmful to minors in "substantial" quantities...
I hope it gets thrown out on judicial overview.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
US State legislators tend to be more politically extreme these days, AFAIK.
Or just good old "save the children," I guess? Where either party is afraid to make themselves look bad.
Perhaps one could even argue that it is beneficial, by helping dispel sexual repression or discomfort around sexual matters.
ಠ_ಠ
this was clearly meant to be a political stunt leading into the 2024 election year to make the democratic governor Roy Cooper appear as though he didnt care about children. No respectable republican voter would ever dream of submitting to a government database for something like this.
Cooper called the bluff, as did most of the minority Democratic legislature in the house and senate. i doubt this law will survive past the second quarter of 2024.
edit: e621 is certainly doing this; this is from their front page right now:
Dec 31st: Due to the current legal situation in North Carolina and the uncertainty surrounding it, we will be blocking access to e621.net from North Carolina until we can consult with our legal counsel on this matter. We did not come to this decision lightly and we will do what we can, as we can, to rectify and remedy this situation so that we can restore access to those users that are affected by this matter. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and will have an update as soon as possible.
Do they seek different entertainment?
Does it lead to more or less socially desirable/adjusted behavior?
I'd take you up on it, but there's absolutely no way to accurately measure this.
For who?
> As you may know, your elected officials in Virginia are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our...
Is this a reasonable point?
What?
> Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults.
> Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws
Using modern cryptographic techniques (such as blind signatures or zero-knowledge proofs) it is possible to design a system whereby you can prove your age to porn site P without P receiving any information they did not already have other than that you are older than their age threshold. In particular this would even work for anonymous users.
There would be another site V involved in the verification. You would have to give V your real identity and show them your proof of age documents, but V would not get any information about what site you trying to get verified for.
If V were a site that already has your real identity then using V for age verification would not be giving them anything that they didn't already have.
It might be possible for someone who obtains records of both P and V to get an idea of the real identities of porn site account owners by trying to match up the timing. This risk can be greatly reduced by having just one or two V sites, so that they are high traffic, and by having some random delays in the verification protocol.
That way someone trying to figure out if I was using say Pornhub might find out from V that I was doing the V side of a verification at say 2024-06-01 01:44:21, and they might be able to find out from Pornhub if they had any verifications using V that started within a few minutes before that and completed within a few minutes after that.
But with only one or two V sites, there will be way more verifications that happened at V at times compatible with those Pornhub verifications. They would not be able to tell if mine at 2024-06-01 01:44:21 is one of those Pornhub ones or one of the many more going on around that time for other sites.
It is a little counterintuitive, but the more sites that require age verification the better the privacy protection, and the fewer the number of V sites, the better the privacy protection.
That suggests that if we are going to require some sites to do age verification, to do it in the most privacy preserving way (1) it should be done nationally rather than as a patchwork of state verification laws, and (2) V should be a government site.
People are upset about the privacy and free speech aspects of this law, as well as the annoyance of having to hand over your personal information for something as basic to human nature as your sexuality. I think there's a 100% chance that there will be a data breach at some point and a bunch of people will have their porn habits leaked to the web. Not to mention the chilling effects when it comes to something like looking up more taboo kinks and not wanting your ID associated with that.
It's not just porn. I'm a member of the furry fandom. I regularly publish fiction in that community, I have life long friends in that community, it's a community that has helped me through a lot of dark places in my life, a community where I can explore taboo subjects in a safe setting. For most people it may just be 'porn', material they use to jerk off, but the fandom is a major part of my life. E621 and other sites aren't even necessarily 'pornographic', I rarely look at 'furry porn' to masturbate as a matter of fact. I'm being 100% honest when I say I follow the artists I follow for the art. It's just that in the furry fandom things like depicting sexuality aren't necessarily taboo.
Preventing other people from participating in this community, whether it's fear that their identity is going to be leaked correlated to their fursona, concern over increased tracking of possibly undesired sexual minorities, or just the pain in the ass required to take that first plunge and sign up for E6, feels like an attack on a major part of my life.
And personally, I don't feel like I should have to take responsibility for some parent who freaks out every time their kid sees breasts, but isn't willing to install parental controls on their fucking computer.
/r/spaced*cks, ViolentaCruz, others I cant recall, and the infamous /r/cannibals controversy with a reddit founder and CEO.
Yeah, weird times - not its many bots - and interestingly, in the last year, a boatload of .in India subreddits for various aspects of their culture (like IdianMotorcycles, Weird train behavior, their version of /r/idiotsincars, lot of bollywood and movie and celeb gossip subs.
Maybe need a comment filter that hides anything that a non-sequitur or perhaps comments that have < (N) syllables, words or sentences?
I haven't come across the Indian version of this, but the default page (I don't have an account) now has a lot of posts from celebrity gossip subs, and the viciousness and hatred there is worse than what I saw in radical politics subs, or even 4chan.
At least the porn and NSFW stuff was hidden. This actually what made me block Reddit from my devices.
Armie Hammer?
i'm surprised that the app stores let them on though since it isn't that hard to view it
There would be close to no accurate test for the difference between an 17 year old and an 18 year old.
What country, which ages, and when?
That didn't happen in either the USofA nor Australia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crude_US_suicide_rate_by_...
https://viz.aihw.gov.au/t/Public/views/CoD_Tableaus_2022/S6a...
as "10x" would imply suicides per 100,000 rose from ~10 per 100K to ~100 per 100K (depending on country | age bracket, etc).
Of course, the irony is that only those that would label their sites as RTA already (so are already easily filtered) would comply with any ID requirement, so these kinds of laws achieve very little!
But in the effort you will send the message that there is no trust between you and your child, and they won't feel safe talking to you should they need to. If you take the attitude that sex is something illicit, they will take the message that it's something to keep secret from you.
Would be cool for a toggle in prefs/RES to only include certain domain tLDs/blacklist certain TLDs -- like maybe one doesnt want to see .cn, .in, .ir, .[STRING] ?
Regardless, granularity over feed is still tedious in /r/ and RES is still a slow solution.
You can edit RES files, but avg reddit viewer (Anyone who does Not use old.reddit) just get the same crappy 'modern' UX.
I wonder about engagement times on old.reddit vs www.reddit get - I cant even look at https://www.reddit - but thats due to me customizing me data density to my view.
https://i.imgur.com/XKMfMJO.png
https://i.imgur.com/MLnUEPc.png
---
Reddit should be ground/target|zero for sentiment/mind-mining (will never forget in an interview with Twitter when they were still on (howard) (near the AT&T spy room) -- Question:
"What do you think Twitter is?"
ME: "You are a global sentiment engine"
They did not like that comment... and asked me what physical publications I read to keep up on networking/DC Design/etc...
(Which I thought was ironic, except for seeing what publications they could exploit - but the truth was they wanted to usurp sentiment+discourse...
(Succeeded)
(similar with google interview (2006) "what would you say we do around here?" -- >>"Everyone thinks you're a search engine - but you're just an advertising company"
I think they would purge rather than confirm the presence of it in any way.
They just added: "No person shall knowingly while in a public space engage in indecent behavior, display, distribute, or broadcast indecent material, conduct indecent events, or facilitate any of the foregoing prohibited acts."
Problem was that the referenced indecent statue definition included homosexuality, which was then removed from the definition even before it blew up on social media
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/11/22/ten...
https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/nov/28/did-a-city-in...
I guess they get kudos for removing “homosexuality” from the definition of “indecent acts” in 2023!
In any case, the question is whether there’s reason to believe this will be a slippery slope. There’s obviously a pattern of increasing moral regulation throughout the country including book bans. That this particular instance of moral regulation was a bit complicated in its implementation and (allegedly) accidentally overzealous in its scope doesn’t negate the trend.
The attention economy overdid it. And corruption bloomed as a result. Which is typical for a totalitarian rise. Kleptocracies without checks and balances dont work and its quite visible to the outside.
Its just not a sensible path to go down on. Even looking past ethical and human perspective, totalitarianism is at its core dysfunctional.
I can drum up a couple more if you're looking for more data (the references in that study also contain a few).
My understanding is that, in addition to the Czech Republic, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sweden and the USA have also been studied and have similar results.
"Lastly, pornography use has been associated with an increased likelihood of committing both verbal and physical acts of sexual aggression.
With the correlation being significantly stronger for verbal rather than physical aggression, but both were evident."
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/606dc23be90e0...
Though I understand and respect furrydom, I'm not a furry... But in its niche of generating anthropomorphic people, I still find the model to be incredible. Its got to be one of the most extensively trained, tagged and coherent SD 1.5 finetunes out there, which doesn't even surprise me TBH.
Got a source for this? Because everything I look at suggests that much like alcohol, a relatively small number of habitual users account for the vast majority of consumption.
Both of these can be true, however. I imagine most adults sometimes drink alcohol too. Personally I might go weeks or months without watching porn, it's not something I generally do everyday. People who do would blow my usage out of the water (which, to be clear, is fine, you do you).
As a thought experiment - we all agree that lots of people watch porn, right? So if it leads to addiction or sexual dysfunction at even a rate of 1% or 2%, that would be an epidemic. If there are tens of millions of porn consumers in the US (which I think is very conservative), we'd expect hundreds of thousands of people to develop issues.
So - where are they? Do we have a source for that?
... In other words, PornHub.
Maybe the adjective is mismatched, but "people" is not necessarily a synonym for "human," right?
And... we still don't. Porn is available through a lot of channels to anybody who knows how to look, all the NC law (and others) is doing is applying pressure to a handful of businesses and encouraging bad practices in the form of having to handle IDs.
I'm the first to acknowledge it's sometimes worth doing something imperfect if it'll improve things, even if it's not 100% effective. But this isn't likely to be 10% effective, much less 90% or 100% effective. Anybody who wants to can dredge up tons of porn on any number of other sites, torrents, etc.
As others have said, it's one thing to have to flash an ID at a convenience store or to enter a business where there's nudity, etc., but here you're requiring people to pass their info online. That's bad policy, and I doubt it's even in good faith that the legislators really think it'll do anything to curb access by those under 18.
It's designed to target sites like PornHub and to give government a cudgel against all kinds of content that most wouldn't consider "porn" to begin with. And they want to go after LGBTQ+ content on the basis that it's LGBTQ+ -- not that it's necessarily adult in nature. [1]
There's little chance that you're going to come anywhere close to preventing motivated people from seeing porn on the Internet laws and policy like this. If you have kids that you don't want accessing porn, then you need to take steps to monitor their access and have the hard conversations with them.
(I am less alarmist about the "dangers" of kids accessing porn, but I will agree that unfettered access at a young age especially if parents aren't teaching their kids adequately about sexuality and that porn isn't a good representation is not great.)
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/17/masculine-policy-the-gop...
I think a reasonable analogy would be putting
TV's playing porn outside of a school and covered
them with a cloth and sign that said adults only.
Strongly suggest dropping the analogies entirely.
Like many digital concepts this just will never map cleanly to a real-world analogue.
This is like the millions of bad analogies related to music downloads back in the Napster days. Please, stop. This is an issue worth discussing, but every analogy is bad and every analogy pollutes and enshittifies the discussion.
Why should minors be allowed on the internet unsupervised at all?
Not to someone wearing a Google Glass device, taking a snapshot of it.
That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
Similar thing happened to Valve; people were trading gun skins, and regulators fined them for not having AML/KYC controls because the state argued "the business didn't do enough to stop money laundering."
This trickles out to porn companies (and the vendors that use them for identity verification), and implies that they need to store this data to prove that they didn't delete it to help terrorists.
Basically, if you only want to verify age, you open the app in age verification mode. It will display your picture and a qr code but not your address and other sensitive info typically present on a drivers license. The participating* alcohol vendor then scans the qr code which only contains data like "over 21" and some sort of verification that the qr code isn't forged. I'm a bit hazy on how this last bit works but it really all pivots on how this bit is implemented. Could be good for privacy or a total nightmare.
*there are only 3 locations participating in this test phase, afaik
1. There's a provider that already has your data (it could be the government, a bank, a phone carrier etc). If more than one provider is supported, there's a list of trusted providers somewhere.
2. Whenever a website needs an age check, it asks you to authenticate with one of the trusted providers. The provider gets a challenge (a random string).
3. If you authenticate successfully, the provider uses their public key to provide a cryptographic signature of the challenge. This signed challenge is then transmitted back to the website.
In a more advanced version of this system, the website also provides a boolean expression, like `country_of_residence not in forbidden_countries && (age > 21 || (age > 18 && country_of_residence != "us"))`, and providers promise not to return successful responses for users who don't fulfill the expression criteria.
Just one example: https://okcfox.com/news/local/cyber-security-experts-be-wary...
Does anyone know if Mastercard gets any data relating to whats actually being purchased? Or does the store get a globally unique ID to associate with every purchase made with a specific card?
... But it's real hard to fake the actual server requests and human sourced usage patterns to the service provider at scale.
There's also the matter that, from what I've observed, women often prefer erotic literature. That seems very difficult to parse out from traffic.
For what it's worth, I did come across one article where researchers were using data from an analytics company to probe porn use[1], but it wasn't measuring what I was looking for, so I didn't look too closely.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2023.2...
As a seperate note, I saw another HNer blog post specifically complain about AI generated furry art as a destroyer of talented furry artists... I get the point, but still have mixed feelings.
If some AI is so incredible at an artistic niche (not just furry), isn't that amazing? If artists are not economically free to pursue new styles and representations the AI doesn't "know," I feel thats a larger problem with society and art platforms, not AI specifically.
I think the most likely outcome is that people stop drawing manually and either switch to making physical products like clothing and fursuits. Or they make use of the generative tools to create much more elaborate art. Perhaps one person pumping out a full comic in the time that would have taken 10 people.
It's still a very scary and uncertain time when peoples incomes are on the line and decades of hard earned skill is at risk of becoming worthless.
I'm just frustrated society isn't ready for this. Someone who made useful stuff for others, for years, shouldn't have to worry about having a roof over their head when automation is so rampant.
That I do think is pretty messed up, and potentially something to pass legislation about. Some people want to opt out of pornography altogether, and their choice should be respected. As should the choice of people who do consume pornography, but aren't choosing to do so at this moment.
I saw a bunch of super explicit stuff, unbidden, on my Twitter/X feed the other week and it made me not want to use it any more.
I love porn, but it absolutely should not be shown to me without my consent.
Source: Was a kid.
1. There is no direct communication between R and D related to your proof of age. You will receive a message from R, send a message to D, receive a message from D, and send a message to R.
2. R gets no information other than (1) your age information, (2) what site D checked your documents, (3) the timestamps of when you exchanged messages with them.
3. The site D just gets (1) the documents you provide to prove your age, (2) a binary blob that you generate that is for all practical purposes random to anyone other than you [1], and (3) the timestamps of when you exchanged messages with them.
If someone compromises D all they get is copies of your documents (assuming D kept them) and those for all practical purposes random blobs (if they kept them), and timestamps. They don't get the identity of R, the site you were verifying your age to.
If someone compromises both R and D, they might try to match up timestamps to try to figure out who people really are. If D is busy enough and you add some delays in your message sending it should be possible to make this risk negligible.
[1] The blob is some data you receive from R, transformed by a random permutation chosen by you. To anyone who does not know the random permutation it is indistinguishable from random.