Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn
a year ago by Tony Bark to c/technology
As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.
Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
Archive: http://archive.today/uZB13
I mean, a VPN is way cheaper than whatever hoops Idaho wants you to jump through to watch some 10/10 goth hottie get their ass eaten.
Yea, but soon we’ll have no states to vpn to, and we will have to start using the Quebec servers, then all the websites will be in French and I’ll have to learn a new language.
Interesting…all of it? I’m in Ontario but my hub/ISP is in Quebec so all my random advertising is in French.
Somehow it knows to target advertising to you in English…maybe you need to work on your privacy?
soon we’ll have no states to vpn to
I've yet to see any state legislature take that proposal seriously. Unlike trying to make porn sites take your credit card info in advance (a policy they hated so much gosh darn it!) you're really fucking with the money when you try and regulate VPNs. Also, just... not really that practical. For the same reason Congress has been pretty toothless when it comes to regulating Torrents and digital encryption, going after VPNs at the regulatory level is something of a technological rabbit hole.
then all the websites will be in French
Nothing will ever make anyone on the internet learn a language other than English.
I’ve yet to see any state legislature take that proposal seriously
snekerpimp meant if every state requires ID, then VPN to another state will not get around the ID check.
... and then all that will be left will be .onion sites
This is the plan all along. It’s not about porn, it’s not even about control. It’s about teaching Americans a second language. You know who’s behind this? Duolingo and Big Language.
Is there a French version of /c/ich_iel?
Heh. I’m in Ontario, but I guess my DNS is outta Quebec…so most of my banner/insert advertising is in French. It’s fucking awesome because I have no idea what they’re saying or advertising to me most of the time. Highly recommend.
States are also considering banning VPNs now as well.
Well, some legislators have proposed taking wack-a-mole to the next level and demanding all VPNs be certified and regulated. But good luck getting that passed through the Silicon Valley Presidency or the Ancap Courts.
I would count on them being hypocritical. The rich will just use Starlink.
As a watcher from the outside:
It might not be fun to hear but vpn is neither the solution to government oppression nor a solution against tracking (recently there was a good article regarding that) so all you do is pay more.
Welp, now I’m off to XHamster. Thank a ton >B|
Ironically? If we were a less prudish society this genuinely wouldn't matter.
"Oh no! Sarah likes threesome porn. Uhm... okay?"
Yeah, people already browse porn with zero privacy precautions, so linking their fetishes to them would be trivial. The main concern is having yet another privacy vulnerability vector for identity theft.
And there are so many of those these days that a new one genuinely doesn't matter.
If you haven't been offered a free year of identity theft insurance recently? Some company/org is plugging their ears.
SSNs are a fundamentally broken system (look it up). Photo IDs? I will guarantee you that if you go to ANY city there is someone at the DMV who will look up whatever you want for fifty bucks. The ONLY reason credit card fraud is less massive than it is (and it is MASSIVE) is because the CC companies put in the effort to monitor that and lock it down.
EVERYONE should have their credit records locked unless they are actively applying for something.
No. the issue with these is that we live in an increasingly christofacist society where even looking at porn makes you Unclean. And if you look at the wrong porn? Off to the reeducation camps with you!
It's not really about the porn in the first place (for advertisers it is - they hate sex unless it's selling their product). The porn is merely an avenue to attack another minority group. In this case, LGBTQ people. Make everything about them sexual in some way, and then ban them from life for sexual deviancy.
That will protect the children, for sure.
If I lived in the US, I'd be far more concerned about sending my kids to school but whatever.
Also church. I wouldn't want them to get diddled by a pastor.
Sure, but that is more of a Christian church problem over a US one. There are plenty of cases where I'm from too, and also a few recent scandals with private Catholic school, so I'd tend to shit on the Vatican rather than the US on that particular one.
I just can't imagine thinking my children could get shot every time they go to school.
US Public Schools messed with me so much, partially contributed to my depression (amongst various other factors)
Damn, I'm sorry to hear. I have seen a couple of your posts around, and yeah, let's say I know this struggle.
It can get better, I hope it does for you.
The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent. This is an easy first step due to the longstanding controversy surrounding pornography.
It's all about control.
Social media has mostly divided and isolated us. Twitter and some other platforms have been useful communications channels during unrest. But there could be other forms of communication just for that, since it's all owned by billionaires now anyway, we need to stop imagining them as reliable tools.
The end game is id for everything including spending money.
Isn't this all part of project 2025?
The goal is get tokenized everything attached to an id so that everything you do is tracked to that id.
Thats why government is getting involved with crypto and they want land purchases and material purchases (gold, silver etc) to be tokenized like crypto so that all of a person's life is digitized and trackable.
That's the purpose of this whole admin. It's not just trump... I think this is all more likely to be a coup style maneuver by CIA to move America into a modern digitized lifestyle because it would be easier for the government. And they know if they put it bluntly and allowed the people authentic votes it wouldn't happen... So this way they have trump and friends to be the fall guys that take the blame when reality it IS "the American government" and not simply psycho trump and friends.
All this has been a long game that started long before trump. I think Whitney webb is right in that it's the world intelligence agencies attempting to move the 1st world into new age of modern surveillance. And it also makes sense when you look at the Epstein bullshit and Israel vs Gaza bullshit.... All the connections come together and it becomes more credible.
It's a sad sad culture we chose to fund for "protection" and "security". We are nothing but cattle to them.
We are nothing but cattle to them.
It's also why they get upset about the declining fertility rates and when people choose not to reproduce.
I hope to Darwin social media ends up requiring ID. I believe it would do wonders for democratic discourse. It was only last week, a number of large US right-wing accounts were revealed to be driven from outside the US. Is it healthy for democracies that so many people pay heed to foreign actors?
If you write an op-ed for a newspaper, the newspaper need to identify you as there is an editor who is responsible for what gets written in the paper. This ensures there’s someone who can stand to account for any libellous statements.
With social media we immediately reneged on this and allowed them to wash their hands; “we are just a channel” is a pretty bleak statement to make when the discourse on social media destroys the lives of minorities, encourages suicide, undermines our democracy with AI and troll farm bots.
And we can do this is a privacy preserving way - of course the social media companies feeds the opposite narrative because they don’t want to implicated in the piles of shit they shovel on top of our democracy.
If social media was required to ensure they could tie an account to a real person, which they needn’t reveal unless forced to by a court order, we would know that we were engaging with a real opinion, not something coughed up by a Putin-run AI bot or a Chinese troll farm.
The system required isn’t that complex.
A social media
- a social media company is opening a new account.
- it sends the person opening the account to any of the multitude of ways we can already verify identity online.
- the person is identified and issued an identity token, which gets sent to the social media company.
- the social media company says “great, this person is real and we can, if required by a court order, work with the identity company to reveal who this person is is”. Right now, all the social media company has is a token.
- the account is opened.
In a system likes this, the identity company doesn’t know who the person is; that sits with the social media company.
Nor does the identity service know which account is actually posting for this real person, all they know is they verified someone as part of an account opening process.
Social media should be treated like the press - make them accountable for what gets posted and allow them to place this accountability on a real person by labelling posts “op-eds” if, and only if, they know who is doing the posting.
We are letting large, anonymous money-men ruin our democracy behind the veil of “free discourse”. It’s not free to the many people who gets harmed by it.
It's all fun and games until the government decides that it really doesn't like dissenting opinions. We've already seen serious erosion of 1A rights in the U.S.
It would be one thing to have this in a world with benevolent leadership. But that isn't the world we are living in.
It would be one thing to have this in a world with benevolent leadership. But that isn’t the world we are living in.
So, Fantasyland, then. The closest anyone gets to benevolent leadership is their own parents, and that's only maybe 50-50.
Bogeymen are imaginary. Political troll farms are real.
They certainly are real, but their machinations are misunderstood. They often consist of people in poor countries looking to make a buck. Follow the money. You'll find that even if you were to build a great firewall for your country of residence, troll farms will still reach you, and that domestic astroturf ain't any greener than foreign astroturf.
That's the point.
You, as a common citizen, should not have to. But the moment you feel like to share your thought or opinion, you should be identifiable and made responsible for it.
The current social media outlets shield behind the argument they act solely as channels while at the same time fostering and allowing for "anonymous" groups or individuals to spout whatever views they want, often views that deter from advancing social and civilizational progress. Hence the current state of the world, with authoritarianism on a rise and hight like there wasn't in nearly 70 years.
When the internet was made of individual websites, the person behind it was automatically made responsible for whatever they put on it. That was fair and reasonable.
Pushes like this, is assigning suspition/guilt before any wrong doing.
I will grant the overall facilitated acess to pornography is damaging the kids. There are already enough studies showing how the early access to porn is related to bad interpersonal relations on social, emotional and sexual level.
But this does not imply you should be identifying yourself to access adult content or anything on the web. Just impose curation. If it's available to the public, you're responsible for it.
Old school "dirty" books and magazines stores had controlled access and the really hardcore stuff was well out of reach of who should not get to it. Free porn is nice but there are things available that should be behind pay walls or at least registry, with identity verification.
If your point is to stifle dissent, then sure. Whoever controls the narrative will make contradiction look unacceptable. If your name is tied to an opinion that may be construed as contrary to the dominant narrative, you will hesitate to post it, and if you do post it, then you will be taken down with very real consequences because of that tie to your real identity. Employers already look at social media to determine if your behavior is considered acceptable to them, even if you keep your professional life completely separate. Your proposal only destroys free speech further by making it worth less and less the cost of expressing.
Make no mistake, the excuse of protecting children from pornography is just that, an excuse, to restrict freedom of speech by putting into place the mechanisms to identify people and strike at them for daring to express their opinions. Pornography being in the form of books, magazines, tapes, DVDs, whatever physical media did not necessarily control access. There are many with stories of how they managed to gain access as children, either through a parent's collection or otherwise. Similarly, this internet ID bullshit can be defeated, but it'll be backed by stricter and stricter legislation to make defeating it illegal and they won't be prosecuting children or the companies providing the ID verification service, they'll be prosecuting adults using tools to defeat these mechanisms to express their opinions.
I am not doxxing myself because the paranoia will likely continue in such a scenario.
And what's next? Suspecting US citizens of being foreign agents and then sicking the FBI on them?
Unlike you, I'm not going to be cheerleading the return of McCarthyism.
Keep this shit up and I'll have to go back to having sex with my wife.
In Soviet Russia, wife fucks you!
......wait, what?
That was in fact one of the original propositions of communism.
Sharing is caring.
Hey, if you can get her to do it, more power to ya.
I'm already fucking your wife. But if this goes through, she wont have income and will have to fuck you. I liked being her big black bull.
Dude, I thought we were just out here making jokes and you come through with whatever that was.
Hey, give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he's never interacted with humans before.
It was a joke. A bad one..but a joke.
Hey, part of growing and learning is understanding that failure is only a step in the process. Keep at it, brother. When making jokes, I always try to remember this: "If you're going to be offensive, make sure you are more funny than you are offensive. Just being offensive isn't funny."
Now get back in there and make some god damn jokes.
I would like to dispute the primary supposition here that pornography is harmful. The use of pornography is nearly universal, and most of the harms that it supposedly causes are symptoms of other issues, or are invented to impose control of sexuality. The ability to reach out with the power of the law to impose religious edicts or project sexual hangups is one of the most esoteric, yet effective, forms of political control available other than violence. If you can control the way that people express their sexuality, you can probably also control their views through the monetization and restriction of sex.
Sexuality and privacy are human rights, and the creation of and access to pornography is protected by the first and fourth amendments under which so-called “age verification” is an unnecessary and excessive burden. If the idea is to prevent access to children, ask yourself why now all adults must now have their access prevented or interrupted.
Furthermore, it is not the state’s role to control childhood sexual development, and the idea that porn is harmful to minors is debatable at best and dubious at worst. Access to objectionable material is solely at the discretion of parents. The fact that they cannot effectively manage this is a symptom of another problem.
When Meta shows teenage girls makeup ads after they delete their selfies, or streaming apps are flooded with violent movies that are easily accessible to minors, this is acceptable. But when I want to watch porn it’s now my job to “protect minors” by compromising my privacy and security?
The real “danger” here is the availability of ideas that do not align with state power.
Feels like half the country wants to outlaw gay marriage and reimplement sodomy laws, so we're not exactly coming at this issue from a great place right now.
No offence to anyone, but this post strikes me as coming straight from a spokeperson for Aylo (formerly MindGeek). A mix of baseless claims and straight up misinformation, that happen to align with the company's business model.
You speak as if porn sites are analogous to social media and it's perfectly normal to record your experiences and post them online. Which it absolutely isn't, anywhere in the world. 'Expressing your sexuality' and porn are entirely separate and have very little to do with each other.
It is widely known and confirmed that pornographic content comes with a broad spectrum of negative effects, especially for children and adolescents. The latter really should be common sense in 2025. Watching porn isn't always bad and can be beneficial in some ways (as some sources below even highlight), but those cases represent a small minority.
Below are some quotes and just a few out of countless sources providing much more reliable information on the topic of pornography's effects. I strongly recommend reading at least some, because this comment is like ignoring decades of scientific literature and traveling in time back to the 1700s.
Prolonged exposure to pornography is known to lead to habituation, resulting in blunted processing of pleasurable stimuli and greater sensitivity to negative stimuli (21). Continuous use of pornography impairs emotional processing capacity and flattens affect, reducing emotional connection to real-life sexual experiences.
Source: Impact of pornography consumption on children and adolescents
Research shows that frequent porn use hijacks the brain’s reward system and changes the brain’s structure, much like addictive substances.
This means that prolonged pornography use can weaken natural pleasure responses and reinforce compulsive behavior.
A 2014 study found that heavy porn users showed significantly reduced activity in critical areas of the brain responsible for motivation and impulse control, suggesting long-term neurological rewiring.
Source: The Hidden Cost of Pornography: How It Shapes Your Brain and Behavior
Age of first exposure was significantly associated with reported need for longer stimulation and more sexual stimuli to reach orgasm when using pornography, decrease in sexual satisfaction, and quality of romantic relationship, neglect of basic needs and duties due to pornography use, and self-perceived addiction in both females and males. (...) In the opinion of most of the surveyed students, pornography may have adverse effects on human health, although access restrictions should not be implemented.
Additional sources:
Assuming what you're saying about the harms of consuming pornography, is it the state's responsibility? Is it a top priority? Do we trust conservatives to implement a solution in good faith?
The answer to all of those I think is no.
There's no analogous ID check for violent media, so far as I know.
There could be a raging wildfire and I would hesitate if a Republican said "let me deal with it". They are fundamentally untrustworthy.
That's on top of the deep irony of the same party that goes on about "small government" and "parents rights" is typically the same one pushing draconian anti-porn laws. It's a joke. "A government small enough to fit in your bedroom". Their motivations are so corrupt I am extremely skeptical of anything they propose.
Assuming what you're saying about the harms of consuming pornography, is it the state's responsibility?
In general, yeah. It's quite literally what the government is supposed to be for. When there's a widespread problem affecting a lot of people, it's precisely the government's job to step in, regulate and solve it.
Is it a top priority? Do we trust conservatives to implement a solution in good faith?
These two I can agree with the answer being 'no'. The problem isn't that it's not an issue or that the government shouldn't interfere. The two main problems I can identify here are:
- The current American government (and most of the previous ones) cannot be trusted to handle this in good faith,
- There are several more pressing matters that should be addressed first.
And a bonus issue. There's currently no sufficient and reliable infrastructure to even implement restrictions on pornography, as we can plainly see from the results of recent attempts. But this ties in to the first problem. If they really wanted to solve the issue in any capacity, obviously they'd start by building the necessary digital infrastructure.
All in all, I think you brought up important points and I pretty much fully agree with you on them. However, to me it seems like they're not exactly relevant to the discussion. Or at least that's not what I was trying to address.
My main goal was to refute the previous guy's theses that pornography has no confirmed negative effects on people, especially the part about children, since it literally takes seconds to find dozens of studies on this topic. I didn't mean to speak about whether or not the government should do anything, let alone defend the current US efforts to regulate porn, if we can even call them that. In fact, one of the studies I quoted stated that the participants did not feel a government intervention is needed, which I felt was a crucial detail to highlight.
Prolonged exposure to pornography is known to lead to habituation, resulting in blunted processing of pleasurable stimuli and greater sensitivity to negative stimuli (21). Continuous use of pornography impairs emotional processing capacity and flattens affect, reducing emotional connection to real-life sexual experiences.
Source: Impact of pornography consumption on children and adolescents
This is disingenuous. This issue is caused by prolonged use, as in unhealthy addictive behavior. Framing it as a result of porn access in general is flagrantly dishonest.
Actually it seems like all of your points regard excessive and unhealthy usage. You're portraying these as results of any level of exposure and that is blatantly dishonest.
Sure but one of those has been dead for over a decade and the other hasn't been been active in the industry for even longer. There are more useful people to blame.
Yeah, I will never show my ID to a fucking porn site, get real
I'm just over here in "hellscape" California enjoying the freedom to not have to do this, and I can walk down the street to the weed shop, and my girlfriend still has basic human rights over her own body.
Do any other states, like Texas, need some of our freedom? We've got some to spare.
The most important issue facing the world: Someone might be jerking off in the privacy of their own home.
Porn is just the foot in the door to force ID for connecting to the Internet. This is techno-fascist dystopian police-state shit, and the "don't tread on me" crowd is just bending over and saying "Please, sir, may I have another? No lube this time!"
*half of the us requires you to "visit" iceland to watch porn
Right right, block the VPNs and destroy corporate infrastructure and WfH, and then everyone will just use more torrent clients or stream from international servers. It's all good, my friend.
They could just make VPN only illegal for peasants.
Then I start renting private vpses out as vpns to coomers.
The death of freedoms by the day.
They can applaud because they have both hands free
what's sound of one hand fapping?
errr... I mean clapping
those aren't claps you're hearing. might just be the half that can still watch porn...
I wouldn't care if 1% of the population watched it. The truth is that enough of the population watches it that it is a useful tool to track and dox the population. People in power don't care who you fuck or don't fuck, they care how they can use who you fuck against you.
plus republicans are probably one of the largest audience for porn
All this actually does is push people to porn sites outside of Missouri's jurisdiction and/or sites that don't give a fuck about being "legitimate businesses" or whatever. It's effectively prohibition and the outcome will be the same.
This shit never actually makes anyone safer, it just draws more normal users to seedier parts of the internet.
Luckily enough I have a rich imagination and I can wank without any porn.
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Can't stop my imagination GoVeRnMeNt! I'll masturbate to all those geriatric fucks.
I'm not against proper age verifications as such, it would be like carding people in a store or a bar. But I just haven't seen an implementation of it that isn't prone to being a privacy nightmare and surveillance state shit.
I know there's some systems that generate a token that verify that you are 18 and you give that to the site, so neither side directly meet so to say. The site knows only that you have a valid token for being 18 and the app or service you use to generate the token knows just that you wanted to token for something. I think Spain was figuring out a system like that.
When you are carded at a club the staff doesn't scan your card and keep it on file. They simply look at it and return it.
As someone who worked similar jobs and would have had to look at tons of IDs every day I can assure, I dont have the time or interest in remembering all of them.
The UK experienced a major data breach with all their government info from their ID checks not long after the law kicked in. How many fucking data breaches do we need before people catch on?
Exactly. Just have a system that has basically no other info than "they had a valid token showing they're 18". Nobody does anything with that info if there's a data breach.
Why does everyone in the US card everyone over something ostensibly about age?
It's never been about age.
I've seen a seventy year old man with a foot long white beard get carded and refused, while he was stone cold sober.
Do you think he can't handle his liquor? He's seventy. He knows what it does.
There's a lot of bars/restaurants that do.
I have literally been refused service because the only ID I had is a passport, and those barcodes wouldn't scan into their system.
It's Papers, please, and it's fucking bullshit
They denied your passport? That is like literally the highest level of ID you can present! Holy fuck!
Tell me about it. I've also had security goons dive deep into my grandpa's ID, that was issued in 1922, and give me a pass, so you know. anything is possible
welcome to america, the most fascist state in the world
the easiest thing would be making the internet as a whole 18+.
under 18 would be restricted to a firewalled version and age info would be part of the cellphone or internet plan. on a family plan..? under 18s get a firewalled plan. home internet? have a family and home internet? owner of the service gets a pin to disable the firewall. when everyone in the house hold is over 18, the service is unlocked.
the truth is that none of this is actually about porn or kids, its about the new world lifestyle of surveillance state getting a foot in the door. thats why all this bullshit aligns with other aspect of modern political and business tech agendas
Also the fact no companies are ever held liable for losing all your personal info, I sure as hell don't trust this, it can backfire at all.
Same.
Clearly, no-one involved in making these laws has ever heard of OAuth. Not every single site needs to manage your identity / credentials. The government already has this info, they can be the identity provider and use OAuth to grant access to age-gated resources without giving any personal data to the platform. Someone mentioned id.me, and I'm pretty sure that's how that platform works, though they're a private entity if I understand their site correctly.
I know most politicians are comically tech-illiterate, but it's so frustrating to see them constantly implement terrible solutions to already solved problems without asking a single expert who knows how this shit works.
That being said, California passed a bill with a not perfect, but better approach. User age is configured on the OS level when a user account is set up, and then it will tell platforms what age category the user belongs to, and nothing more:
(a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user:
(A) Under 13 years of age.
(B) At least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age.
(C) At least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age.
(D) At least 18 years of age.
(3) Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title and shall not share the digital signal information with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.
I think iOS already does this, actually.
The CA bill is also dystopian nightmare fuel... The US isn't going to build an enormous firewall like other countries have, we are just going to pass a bunch of stupid laws and threaten companies to block our citizens from access instead. Put the burden of building the wall on someone else, the modern American Way™!
An entire generation of fuck-wad parents that just gave their kid a tablet and zero supervision instead of actually raising them are now using their failings as an excuse to control the population; control their devices, control their habits, control their knowledge, and control their thoughts.
The bill I mentioned actually relies on parents configuring their kid's devices. The system it describes just gives online (and even offline) platforms a standardized way of asking the OS what age category a user is as defined at account setup--hardly "dystopian nightmare fuel"...
This isn't going to stop unsupervised children, which is it's own problem that technology doesn't (and probably can't) solve.
It requires every Operating System and "App Store" to know the user's age. It requires every piece of software installed to receive the age-range token. It could be catastrophically bad for the open source community - the bill does nothing to define how these tokens are communicated and received. The largest players in the industry can use their market share to exert control over how it happens and bully anyone that doesn't get on board. For example, Google could tie it to the Play Integrity/Services and effectively kill 3rd party roms and possibly even open source app stores like fdroid, or all side-loading entirely if it was tied into the Play Store enough.
The bill isn't specifically a privacy dystopian nightmare, but it is still a dystopian nightmare. We need the government and mega-corps to have less influence and control over our devices, this gives them more.
Agreed, but you'd think they would prefer that. The way it is now, they have no way of knowing which platforms have your government IDs.
Though, let's be real, all they need to do is pay a data broker for the tracking data that's already being collected everywhere.
By creating a plaintext dotfile in $HOME, I'd reckon. Minimum effort, gets the job done. Users can lie when setting up the account so protecting the file against tampering is pointless.
But more likely, not a single distro will implement anything by default because it doesn't make sense to change your internationally-distributed OS because one state in one country passed a stupid law.
The US government already uses a clearing house service, id.me, for it's own verification systems. Why is this not used for this purpose as well instead of forcing the site owners to collect and protect that data? It's stupid and unnecessary. There is literally already a system in place that they aren't even considering using.
I'm 1000% against this age verification bullshit, not only because of the privacy and data reasons, but also because getting carded in a bar or at a store is also bullshit.
It Is Papers, please.
It's Never a question of if you're old enough, it's a question of "Do I think you're human enough?"
And more often than is reasonable, the answer is no, they don't think you're a person, who should be able to spend their money as they like.
Is there any organized fight against this? I feel like open access to porn is something people can get behind (pun intended).
People could literally put porn in everything until it's reversed and put their red state into porn overload. They could slip porn between the pages of the newspaper,or drop a copy of bad babysitters 5 in every DVD player in best buy at the same time. They could mass mail stills from 2 girls 1 cup, goetse, and blue waffle to their Congress people. They can wear the raunchiest t-shirts they can find and pack a town hall. These assholes already created a climate where woman are (understandably) even more afraid to have sex, now they want to lock down porn too. I'm not a degenerate because I watch porn; I'm a degenerate because I in ironically enjoyed Spongknob Squarenuts. But degenerate or not, I believe freedom of inquiry is important and I want to know exactly what she If you are gonna strip people of their economic output, abuse workers, stifle culture and art, etc, you at least have to give people a blowoff valve somehow. Reading the Bible after a double shift at work isn't gonna get anyone hard except maybe JD Vance and it probably still comes second to furniture warehouse ads.
Fuck these assholes.
drop a copy of bad babysitters 5 in every DVD player in best buy
Soooooo, 0 dvd players? Best Buy stopped carrying physical media years ago.
What? They still sell DVD players: https://www.bestbuy.com/...
Online doesn't count since you can't drop a dvd into one...
Best buy stopped carrying physical media in stores ages ago and outside of very out of date stores don't have display models like that anymore.
They stopped selling Bad Babysitters years ago also.
As someone who hasn't been in a Best Buy in over 15 years... What the fuck do they sell then?
Consumer electronics / appliances?
The one near me got torn down this year...so not a whole lot I guess.
Computer hardware & accessories, networking equipment, and appliances. Physical media and hatdware specifically for playing it has been on a decline because of the prevalence of streaming.
Fight against what? I'm on coomer and nothing is blocked. Looks good to me.
“Under his eye.”
Any site that makes me do this immediately loses my traffic and I go to tor or a service that doesnt give a shit about us law.
I'm waiting for huge spike of trojan-infected computers from people trying to bypass the law by torrenting their porn from unknown sources.
Those folks aren’t looking up “two adults having sex,” we’ve seen the contents of computers and it’s ALWAYS an R screaming about porn with 7 year olds in a folder on the desktop.
I mean......by that logic their ramblings make sense. Porn to them is child porn. So if all porn is child porn (in their minds) then blocking access to porn isn't a bad idea.
The whole thing falls apart however if they were to realize that most people DO look at porn, but most people DON'T look at child porn.
I watch porn most days. I've never in my life had any desire to restrict others ability to watch porn.
But then again, porn for me is a woman fucking a dude in the ass, or 4 women standing around another woman who's tied up and they're tickling her until she screams bloody murder.
You know. Normal shit. Harmless shit. Fill in the blank of your own kinks, but at no point do kids come into play in my mind.
If I equated "porn" to "child porn" then yeah, I'd be trying to pass those laws too. But that says more about the way they think than anything.
Especially when you consider that schools are one of the most common places for public shootings, but you don't see them racing out to pass common sense gun reform laws.
It's such a hard problem to tackle, when you're self defeating in your attempts. No other country has this issue.
Black hats will accidentally pop around the other side by attacking Windows 11 security in ways that hinder the reporting back to Microsoft. So their trojans and such have a better chance of survival.
It is 49% of the population. I did the math: https://lemmy.ca/post/56198025/20385158
Texas has a lot of people
Hear me out!
What if parents did their fucking job as they should instead of demanding the state to do it for them, only for it to get hijacked by both
- christofascists wanting to make it illegal to not live a "christian life",
- and corporations wanting to ensure competition will need to pay a shitton of money on age verification AI?
It's only a matter of time before a data leak happens.
That'll be a fun day.
So much for small government…
This is going to expand. The next wave is going to be keeping kids off of social media. That means they will have to be age-verified, which they can't do, because they're kids, and don't have ID. Instead, everyone else will have to be age-verified in order to use the Internet.
Here in Florida, I've already heard one state lawmaker scoffing at any objections, saying it's the same way we keep kids from buying alcohol - by checking EVERYONE'S ID. Now they're going to do it for the Internet. Every movement and post you make on the Internet will be directly tied to your verified identity. That should be perfectly fine, as long as you aren't doing or saying anything wrong, right?
Don't forget to bring your copy of Chairman Trump's little thin-blue-line book when you leave the house, patriot! Otherwise the little 'murica-guards will get you!
This may be the real reason r's are losing all of the elections, lol. They are entirely red states.
I just remembered that I'm the guy everyone in my family goes to when they need someone to scan their ID or passport for whatever stupid bullshit.
Guess it's time to sign all my conservative family members up to gay porn websites!
But gun control is too hard. smh
Land of the free, eh guys?
I suppose dvd order porn will become a thing once again.
Or alternatively we can start sharing bootleg USBs with our friends.
The Internet had begun its enshitification stage, as governments look to control and lock down access to the internet people will find new and creative ways to bypass these barriers. For one, things like Tor or going back to DVDs and physical media might get more main stream.
I don't think we're ready for the drives unless it's some weird hippie business that uses a reuse redemption program.
Thumd drives are twice the cost or more and only have a 5-20 year life expectancy vs DVD of 30 to 100+ years.
So thumb drives only makes sense as some sort of transfer service
Does DNS and having a privacy focused browser work?
Usually it helps but not as much as most people think. Very few people actually use a privacy focused browser, so that in and of itself is surprisingly identifying.
Fingerprinting still does a lot. If you want to do hard, use a VPN inside a VM. Even harder? Use multiple different VMs and a VPS with a VPN.
What is a VM?
Virtual Machine. You run a computer... on your computer.
It can. Some built in ad blockers like on brave will even skip YouTube ads.
Adblock Plus does that for me in Chrome. Although sometimes YouTube is able to disabled the extension, which is bad.
I still use ublock and Firefox, adblock lets paid ads through. Ublock is GOAT and works on Firefox mobile.
That's not the issue though, as long as my IP can teleport to a normal country, I can view whatever I want.
For anyone curious, the privacy video is in their latest(?) blog post on their site. It should be viewable anywhere as it's outside the NSFW area and before the 18+ notice.
(Just bear in mind that while it should be SFW, it is still under a porn-site's domain.)
There is no sarcasm here. You are right. They'd love that.
I think pancakes COULD kill you. You just need enough of them. Like imagine 2 tons of pancakes fell from the sky, and right onto you.
There’s no way. Two tons of flapjacks would need an aircraft flying at an altitude where the pancakes would disperse wide enough that I’d receive a significant pelting, but would not die. You’ve absolutely lost your mind! 😬
Fortunately lawmakers think all internet porn is on PornHub and that you find it by going to w-w-w dot yahoo dot com and typing "sex video" or "naked ladies" in the search thing.
The only porn they have experience with are polaroid photos that they got from a friend who knows a guy who makes tasteful art for clients with "particular tastes."
Don't kid yourself. Anti-porn lawmakers know that there are like 4 big porn sites and if you can shut down access to those ones, it is a huge step towards their goals.
Conservative lawmakers don't know anything about porn, because if they ever recorded themselves fucking and the recording got out, they'd go to jail for statutory rape.
They're generally very comfortable around Grindr though.
I'm going back to physical media. Guess that will include my porn soon too.
Hmm, might actually still have some old playboy somewhere 🤔
I remember back around 2000 or so, getting some porn mags at a liquor store that came with DVDs. In retrospect I figure it was their way to compete with the internet which was quickly overtaking them. Maybe we will return to those days again. Ah, going backwards.
As Randy Marsh said, "You can't just go back to Playboy after that!"
Physical media: spinning disks
Exactly. It's going to be the Great Revival for porn stores. I still have a bunch of dvds somewhere. If the ISPs start blocking IPs of VPNs, yo ho ho (pun intended) it's off to the high seas for porn torrents.
Sorry, MAGA. If you want to stroke it to trans porn, you need to show ID.
When I went on vaca a few months ago I was caught off guard with this. Kind of crazy that this is going to be everywhere probably... I will never give them this info, there are always alternatives. I just used VPN that week which worked fine.
It's not just for porn anymore though. My new phone required it to use certain applications. Facebook requires it to sell on marketplace. As for conversations about it, all of this went to supreme court at least 6 months ago, spoilers, they lost in terms of protecting our privacy. There are days THEY win inside my head & I assume they're recording & adverty within my dreams. you don't even need to be a tin-hat wear crazy to believe things like that anymore.
🤔 I'm not sure that lawmakers really understand what they're up against. If most VPN locations all eventually require government ID for porn, then some people will likely seek porn from places/networks that are... Less legitimate.
you mean more obscure, there are non-PH affiliate sites, most of them have the pre- sanatized PH content as well.
You can still hold up a picture of Norman Reedus to bypass age checks right?
Not downplaying that this is real dumb, but "half the US" is meant to be misleadingly attention-grabbing. The states that are doing this are not the most populous states. No law like this exists in NY or CA, for example.
I don't know the amount of the population living under these laws, but it is not nearly half, even if half the states have passed such laws.
I did the math and it's 49.37% of the population, based on the 2024 census data, or 49.94% if you exclude Puerto Rico and D.C. I suppose mostly due to Texas and Florida being in the list, but also Ohio, Georgia and North Carolina with over 10M people each.
Here's the raw data
Based on the table from Wikipedia, and the list of states in the article.
| State | Population (2024) | Requires Age Verification | Population Requiring Age Verification |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | 39,431,263 | 0 | |
| Texas | 31,290,831 | x | 31,290,831 |
| Florida | 23,372,215 | x | 23,372,215 |
| New York | 19,867,248 | 0 | |
| Pennsylvania | 13,078,751 | 0 | |
| Illinois | 12,710,158 | 0 | |
| Ohio | 11,883,304 | x | 11,883,304 |
| Georgia | 11,180,878 | x | 11,180,878 |
| North Carolina | 11,046,024 | x | 11,046,024 |
| Michigan | 10,140,459 | 0 | |
| New Jersey | 9,500,851 | 0 | |
| Virginia | 8,868,896 | x | 8,868,896 |
| Washington | 7,958,180 | 0 | |
| Arizona | 7,582,384 | x | 7,582,384 |
| Tennessee | 7,227,750 | x | 7,227,750 |
| Massachusetts | 7,136,171 | 0 | |
| Indiana | 6,924,275 | x | 6,924,275 |
| Maryland | 6,263,220 | 0 | |
| Missouri | 6,245,466 | x | 6,245,466 |
| Wisconsin | 5,960,975 | 0 | |
| Colorado | 5,957,493 | 0 | |
| Minnesota | 5,793,151 | 0 | |
| South Carolina | 5,478,831 | x | 5,478,831 |
| Alabama | 5,157,699 | x | 5,157,699 |
| Louisiana | 4,597,740 | x | 4,597,740 |
| Kentucky | 4,588,372 | x | 4,588,372 |
| Oregon | 4,272,371 | 0 | |
| Oklahoma | 4,095,393 | x | 4,095,393 |
| Connecticut | 3,675,069 | 0 | |
| Utah | 3,503,613 | x | 3,503,613 |
| Nevada | 3,267,467 | 0 | |
| Iowa | 3,241,488 | 0 | |
| Puerto Rico | 3,203,295 | 0 | |
| Arkansas | 3,088,354 | x | 3,088,354 |
| Kansas | 2,970,606 | x | 2,970,606 |
| Mississippi | 2,943,045 | x | 2,943,045 |
| New Mexico | 2,130,256 | 0 | |
| Nebraska | 2,005,465 | x | 2,005,465 |
| Idaho | 2,001,619 | x | 2,001,619 |
| West Virginia | 1,712,278 | 0 | |
| Hawaii | 1,446,146 | 0 | |
| New Hampshire | 1,409,032 | 0 | |
| Maine | 1,405,012 | 0 | |
| Montana | 1,137,233 | x | 1,137,233 |
| Rhode Island | 1,112,308 | 0 | |
| Delaware | 1,051,917 | 0 | |
| South Dakota | 924,669 | x | 924,669 |
| North Dakota | 796,568 | x | 796,568 |
| Alaska | 740,133 | 0 | |
| District of Columbia | 702,250 | 0 | |
| Vermont | 648,493 | 0 | |
| Wyoming | 587,618 | x | 587,618 |
| 343,314,283 | 169,498,848 | ||
| 49.37% |
Ok, that is much closer to half (or, let's just say effectively half) than I thought. I'll go eat some crow.
It was a reasonable assumption, but the distribution didn't pan out that way.
I apologize in advance for how pedantic this comment will be but "half the US now requires" obviously refers to half the administrative units (states in this case, could be counties or municipalites etc) while "half the US is required" would refer to the population, so technically the post title is not wrong because of the population distribution.
I'm going to wash my hands now so that my fingers forget they typed this.
That's actually useful pedantism.
Thank you!
That is so technically accurate, I love it.
It's probably the FREE STATES OF FREEDOM STATES!
Here come more spikes in VPN usage.
Why not also the company that does the IDs?
And hell, also the porn site?
Its all a big money making scheme. Security theater bullshit.
Someday, we will be using AI to generate fake IDs and faces, simply because our governments refuse to respect our privacy. They will have uncanny resemblance to political critters who enacted the surveillance.
As with everything born of enshittification, I do not know if this is to be a lame joke or reality. 😒
Someday?
People were literally doing that day 1 of the first of these new ID laws. Also using video games that use real likenesses of people like uploading pics of Norman Reedus from Death Stranding 2. lol
Done already lol this-person-does-not-exist.com saved me from showing youtube my face
In other news VPN use in the US is soaring to new heights.
Can I use my O face for verfication?
The problem is that these kinds of laws are becoming widespread. When they become the norm, simply VPN’ing to a different country won’t save you, because there won’t be any “safe” countries.
Shit like this is why I unironically considered spinning up a NSFW Jellyfin instance. At least if I save the degen content like a data hoarder, they can’t legislate away my access.
@mic_check_one_two @fodor move all the internet over tor
Yes I would agree. But one big issue on tor. Do not try and lookup nsfw. In minutes you find shit you absolutely dont want...
If you VPN into the UK or Australia, you'll run into the same restrictions.
As more countries pass this kind of legislation, VPNs become less and less of a solution, and they were only ever a solution for people who can afford them.
they are going after vpn next, there are several states talking about that. Considering that microsoft is working on their super ai windows, we can bet they are gonna be reporting everything you do to big brother.
Some states have already begun to require sites to detect connections from VPNs and block them.
When I read about this I'm always brought back to the conversation of "internet as a public utility". I hope it's cool if we can take a tangent.
See unlike any of our other utilities like natural gas electricity water and sewage, the only thing that could potentially give any meaningful information about us is our sewage,, and the government already tests sewage for diseases. If we allow the government to "sell" us our internet they would basically be able to know everyone we are "talking too". Also how could we ever have enough regulatory oversight to protect everyone on the internet. Symmetrically if the government wants to have so much regulatory control over our internet it should maybe pay for it.
Like I wouldn't mind even paying another 50 bucks a month extra for "private internet" just so the government can have their free and regulated "public internet". Or would I (・–・)ゞ?
Like I wouldn't mind even paying another 50 bucks a month extra for "private internet" just so the government can have their free and regulated "public internet".
That’s basically how cable TV started. Over-the-air TV stations were ad-supported and public broadcast was largely supported by public funds. Cable TV got off the ground by marketing itself as a commercial-free way to watch.
And then once everyone had switched to cable, they went “hey, why don’t we introduce commercials anyways? I bet people will keep paying for our service if we just gatekeep the media that people have gotten hooked on…” And that’s exactly what happened. They pivoted away from the “commercial free TV” sales pitch, and moved towards “gatekeep media and force people to pay for it” model instead.
That's because more than half of the country is some combination of evil and/or retarded.
And on the flip side, occasional SEO fuckups cause random terms to show porn image results
For example, I was searching for millimetre wave cell towers on duckduckgo a while back, I typed "MM wave cell tower" and saw a whole bunch of massive tiddies on the standard filtering setting. They fixed this a week after me discovering it however, so if you were hoping to see tits from searching telco infrastructure, I suppose you're outa luck.
Not to mention that half of all subreddits is porn. So easy to access.
Whole lot of unmoderated ones too, so there's lots of unfiltered porn
Try reading it instead. Go old school. And while you're at it, write yourself and share it. Bring back the times of hand to hand banned knowledge sharing.
But now seriously: that is completely stupid.
As anyone considered the amount of money that "industry" generates. Considering the US is so economy driven and concerned with jobs, maybe that argument can raise concerns.
All the public restrooms and back streets are going to packed with trafficked people.
in the 70s and early 80s there was a lot of public sex. when the internet came out people just did whatever in their homes.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Amusingly, as part of similar laws in the UK the regulator decided to make a public shame list of non-compliant websites.
Essentially if you don’t want to follow the government’s writ that you must send your ID to a shady offshore ID firm, they’ve kindly provided a list of websites that won’t ask for it!
With this on top of trying to claim extraterritorial powers against 4chan in the US (fucking lol), I’m starting to think a key check on tyranny in the UK is the incompetence of its public institutions.
Amusingly, as part of similar laws in the UK the regulator decided to make a public shame list of non-compliant websites.
The regulator truly believes they are on the side of good, and that everyone agrees with them, except the nasty pornmongers.
FOLLOW THE 💰:
EXON
RINAT AKHMETSHIN
ALEX VAN DER ZWAAN
KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK
CHUCK SCHUMER
JAMES COMEY
ROTHSCHILD
TRUMP
JARED KUSHNER
GARY COHN
STEVE MNUCHIN
SAM NUNBERG
NELSON BUNKER HUNT
LAMAR HUNT
MICHAEL FLYNN
DAN SCAVINO
ERIK PRINCE
WILBUR ROSS
STEFAN HALPER
GEORGE SOROS
JOHN DURHAM
DANIEL MURPHY
PETER STRZOK
LISA PAGE
BRUCE OHR
NELLIE OHR
CHRISTOPHER STEELE
CHRISTOPHER WRAY
JEFF SESSIONS
JOHN PODESTA
MUELLER
CHRIS WRAY
HUNTER BIDEN
SETH RICH
BILL BARR
KAMALA HARRIS
ADAM SCHIFF
TULSI GABBARD
https://www.palantir.com/offerings/defense/army/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inslaw#Development_of_PROMIS
Are we just naming people now or what?
Bet
GANDALF THE GREY
GANDALF THE WHITE
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAILS BLACK KNIGHT
BENITO MUSSOLINI
& THE BLUE MEANNIE
COWBOY CURTIS
JAMBI THE GENIE
ROBOCOP
TERMINATOR
CAPTIAN KIRK
DARTH VADER
LO PANTS
SUPERMAN
EVERY SINGLE POWER RANGER
BILL S. PRESTON
THEODORE LOGAN
SPOCK
THE ROCK
DOC OCK
HULK HOGAN.
all came out of nowhere lightning fast and kicked Chuck Norris in his cowboy ass?
Now I have to listen to it again and have it stuck in my brain
Oh I see, a bunch of stupid-ass unsubstantiated bullshit.
I'm sure it's secretly the Clintons and Obamas behind this, that makes sense. You are massively fucking stupid person.
AOC
CLINTON
OBAMA
ZIONISM
MICROSOFT
CLOUDFLARE
GREAT RIFT VALLEY
NETANYAHU
KISSINGER
Sure enough the vast majority are Republican shithole states, although Virginia and Arizona are a surprise.
It's not that it's immortal to want IDs for porn (although GOP generally is immortal), it's just so... technologically stupid. The red states are stupid states.
No it doesn't. Mullvad costs less than 6 dollars per month: https://mullvad.net/en/pricing
Time to either quit porn or start downloading. It's over.
Good thing I know how to use VPNs
Or VPN
why not both?
I will have a taco!
This is the future you all dreamed of.
since PH is canadian, set your vpn/proxy to another country?
Applied for a permit to carry conflicting ideals. Denied for 'causing ideological clutter. 😗
Just posting on social media using your face to speak against the state in México gives you the privilege of being doxxed on national TV by the president, I can't imagine what they would do with something like this
Keep the downvotes coming, I live here and you don't have any idea if you really believe Morena is left leaning in any way or form
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Everyone who ever submits for age verification will have their information stolen. It is a matter of when, not if.
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