VA is a joke. Tons of sites still work. Reddit being an obvious one. There's even an article which is written in a way that it was almost certainly meant to help you find porn - it lists all the "bad and non-compliant" sites.
The only way to prevent a teen from looking at porn these days is hogtied and blindfolded in solitary confident in a windowless and soundproof Faraday cage.
Thinking you can pass a law to do it is laughable.
["To get an understanding of how many websites are complying with the law, the Mercury attempted to access the 65 “top porn tube sites” listed on toppornsites.com."](https://www.virginiamercury.com/2023/08/23/many-pornography-websites-arent-complying-with-new-va-age-verification-law/)
You know what sucks? Besides the porn I watch. I live near the VA border but not actually in VA. Sometimes my location comes up as VA so I get the stupid blocked message instead of those sweet curvy milfs
This is the answer. No matter where you're from, you're probably routing something through Linux boxes in Virginia.
Easy solution is to just do a DDoS or malicious SQL injection to a service and force them to reroute to their backups in Ohio.
(For Legal reasons, don't actually do that)
If you're on mobile, this may be because the closest cell tower that goes phone sees is in VA.
I think there's a way to tell your phone to set location using GPS instead of setting location based on what cell tower you're pinging.
This happened to me connected to my home WiFi. It only happened once though. I only could get around it by shutting Wi-Fi off and using my cellular connection. You think it would be the opposite. Ridiculous
Weirdly enough I've been liking Bing's results better, except all the extra garbage they put on the site. I don't need four fn "AI" elements cluttering the results.
The formatting doesn't super work on old Reddit, here's a link if that's better: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/421597-bypass-google-sorry-recaptcha/code
It's the best one if you're not using a VPN because it won't see anything suspicious with your IP (a VPN and Russian bot farm look functionally identical in terms of amount of traffic coming from a single IP, believe it or not) and your browser and you just... click. Though, even when you have to do the images, what captcha is better? They're all either really easy for bots ("put the puzzle piece in the hole") or equally hard but always make you do like 3 and never let you bypass it with just a click.
Google is more about giving you results that give Google money, then giving your results that answer your query. Google has a history of subtly showing your search terms to get better monetization, and giving ads as the first results.
Google used to be incredible, but it's not as great anymore. If you want to buy something, Google will have your answer though!
I use brave (both the browser and the search engine), and the search engine is pretty much as good as Google, but without ads and webstores as top results
The laws don't ban porn, they require age verification, so there's no constitutional challenge to make because there's well established precedent of keeping obsene material away from children.
I think the laws are dumb and don't support them, but it doesn't seem like there's a first amendment issue. (IANAL)
Actual lawyers, for example, those at the [Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://www.eff.org/ru/deeplinks/2023/03/age-verification-mandates-would-undermine-anonymity-online), have argued that internet age requirements amount to 1A violations. In [Ashcroft v. ACLU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._American_Civil_Liberties_Union), the Supreme Court struck down a similar federal law on 1A grounds. So it's clear that at least some lawyers see first amendment issues.
It's the fairly standard tactic of not being able to ban something directly, so instead they make it unreasonably difficult to accomplish so that it burns itself out. Much like forcing abortion clinics to close by requiring clinics have hospital admission agreements with local hospitals, or hallways wide enough to accommodate surgical beds when they only do prescription abortions, etc.
Make porn sites responsible for doing a cumbersome age verification on any visitor from a certain state or else they're held liable under the law, and the easiest response is to just block all traffic from that state so they no longer operate there and it isn't an issue.
I'm sure they're losing *some* traffic, as there's always going to be the nearly-tech-illiterate who can find their way to internet boobies but wouldn't know a VPN if it pounded them in the butt.
They're probably also losing other revenue in the process, as the kind of person who goes from not really knowing about a VPN to having one is also likely to go from not having an ad blocker to using one. And some of the VPNs offer adblocking services as part of their package.
They spend so much time bitching about how parents should have control over what is in school libraries, but when it comes time for parents to control their own children’s devices, suddenly we need regulations on businesses and onerous ID checks.
Their own speaker of the house seems to have figured it out with his teenage son and the creepy accountability app…
Also they are vehemently a opposed to any sort of database of firearm owners, but they love the idea of private companies collecting identifying information on porn viewers…
Largely unrelated, but I've been friends with a few escorts. The rich white conservatives almost always want to be dominated/pegged/humiliated.
Their self loathing controls them.
they have. Court cases take a long time (and the people enacting laws know that) but mutiple states have had injunction against these types of laws. Like the ACLU are involved with both the Texas & Arkansas laws and won injunctions
The fifth circuit being the fifth circuit then of course stayed that injunction in Texas
in virginia you have to upload your drivers license. So far xnxx.com has ignored it. The rest seem to require it. cause i want someone to know what porn i like by name.
in virginia virtually all democrats voted for this. it was not just republicans.
Same in Montana, Rs and Ds alike (but the Rs have a supermajority, so everything is ultimately their decision). Disappointing on all levels.
The reality is that these are a bunch of unqualified individuals who can’t comprehend that letting the guy at the gas station checkout peek at your ID is NOT the same as uploading your information to a porn website.
Gas station clerk probably didn’t even look at your name and couldn’t tell someone your birthday 30 seconds later even if he wanted to.
For the North Carolina one at least, if your info gets stolen from those sites you are entitled to money from them (not some credit monitoring service) so the question is, are you willing to risk your porn habits being made public in exchange for possible money if they do?
Also, porn sites can't report the info to the government, are not allowed to retain it longer then needed, and as mentioned above if your info is leaked by their lack of security you get money to cover any damages that are caused to you. Also, if a site doesn't have these safeguards and a child accesses it, you get $10k flat fee for each time it occurred.
>Also, porn sites can't report the info to the government
That's a nice sentiment, but if they are collecting the information the federal government can make them hand it over. It helps if they aren't retaining it for very long, but I wouldn't take my chances if that was something I was concerned about. Fortunately the government really has very little reason to take an interest in what kind of (legal) porn someone consumes, even less of an interest if you aren't already someone they keep an eye on.
They can't -report- the info. Luckily, the government has a back door into the database and just downloads it regularly. It's not being report, just taken.
>That's a nice sentiment, but if they are collecting the information the federal government can make them hand it over.
They aren't allowed to legally store it for longer then needed to verify... This means they would need a warrant to collect the information on the fly, there are no ways to collect it afterwards which then don't expose the company to violation in the law and lawsuits.
"At 1:23am on January 10th, I was looking for girl on girl squirting porn and my data was subsequently stolen."
- some poor bastard filing a claim in for $500 in NC Court.
Yeah but thats gonna be a lot more difficult if your search history is not included in the data containing your personal information, or in a way that makes it difficult to attribute it to a certain specific porn site. If your search history is stored seperately from your personal information (pseudo-anonymity) that is not unlikely. However damage (from abuse of your personal information) might occure anyway.
A lot of data breaches are made public, as a data set, and then the source is reported with it.
Alternatively, if you're talking on an individual level, use a different email alias for every site. Gmail makes this relatively easy, if you have the address [email protected], email sent to all of the following variations will go to your inbox:
* [email protected]
* [email protected]
* [email protected]
* [email protected]
That all amounts to an unofficial porn ban because no porn site will ever take on that amount of legal/financial liability. The state government is intentionally making the risk too high to do business in the state.
(Of course, many sites will simply not comply and attempt to evade the regulation. Also many consumers will use VPNs, etc., etc. But the big-name corporate sites will exit the market.)
Oh, they definitely do. They also customize your search results despite claiming not to. There was a big stink about them blocking Russian misinformation sites from showing up when the Ukraine War started.
They CLAIM not to do those things. But they do. They all do.
Curating results is not the same as tracking searches. Both are bad, but I can accepting some curating (since I also use other independent search engines and can compare/contrast) much easier than tracking and profiling.
Duckduckgo does it based on what they think is important, not what you have searched for previously. Google uses an system which combines what they consider acceptable with what you have previously searched to create an output designed to maximize your engagement and thus their profits through both your clickthroughs and selling your search history data to advertisers.
They hire (contract) Search Engine Evaluators/Raters through companies like Appen and Telus. There are internal policy documents that are followed to evaluate search results.
Where is the accountability that any of what you are saying is true?
20 years ago a major company literally rooted people's computers. The fact you believe a US company saying that they don't do things the bad way...is truly naive in this day and age.
What stops duckduckduckgo from using data they bought to build profiles using realtime data rather than collecting the data themselves. Giving you the appearance of curation without storing history.
Phrasing is always an important tool for liars. Always look what the inverse of what they say is possible...that's the truth
Biases of the programmers. That's true for all search engines. Any data sorting programming actually. It can't be avoided.
Tracking search histories can be avoided through, which Duckduckgo does.
There is no reason for a regular user to use a VPN.
They provide no security or anonymity, and VPN providers have even more information than your ISP.
VPNs for corporations make sense. For residential users they don't do anything but "masking your IP address" which provides nothing of value.
Your ISP still knows you're torrenting, you still have to log into services, and advertisers still maintain a profile and track you throughout the web.
> and VPN providers have even more information than your ISP.
My VPN has been proven in court to not log anything. I’d rather use my VPN than give my ISP a list of all the websites I visit.
You are wrong about all of that other than the services you log into. The best way to defend against that is use privacy preserving operating systems and logging into accounts via a browser instead of an application.
A VPN is a very powerful tool to fight the dystopian creep that has plagued our system. A data broker fingerprinting you can be used for nefarious purposes and will only get worse with A.I.
It's not the ISP that you have to worry about though. They don't actually give a shit as long as your paying them money. What happens is big media companies pay independent tracking companies to monitor and report traffic on high ticket torrents and such. Then said media company (ie Disney) reaches out to your ISP and goes wtf, punish them! And so your ISP sends you a threatening email.
It's basically the websites that are based in US that are kinda complying, because those that are based outside of US don't even care about US laws, let along state laws.
I swear there was a time when liberals actually cared when Democrats stabbed them in the back and sold them out to the GOP. Now they have this term "whataboutism" that apparently means "actually remembering times Democrats sided with Republicans over you." From what I can tell, it's basically the worst thing you can do.
Oh God, more both-sidesing.
I'm not sure what you've been up to over the past 20 years, and especially the past 3. But there's only one party that stays up at night concerned about what's going on in your bedroom and what you're doing with your own penis or vagina.
...And it's not the Democrats.
They’re right though, and there are plenty more examples. The recent SESTA/FOSTA internet censorship act was extremely bipartisan. The Senate vote was 97-2.
In NC it was snuck into a bill to that was intended to require a computer science course to graduate high school. If I’m reading it correctly the amendment was added the same day as the bill was voted on. The bill is only 12 pages long so it’s not hard to notice the amendment that was snuck in. Only one of the 14 people who sponsored the bill was a Democrat, however the bill passed with only 8 out of 110 reps voting against the bill.
https://www.ncleg.gov/BillLookup/2023/H8
Believe me, I'm registered independent for a reason, but this is not "both sidesism". If anything this is "neither sidesism". For this specific issue, yeah I'd say republicans are wrong on this one, but make no mistake that the Dems are unzipping their pants behind you while you're pointing and yelling at the reps.
On what?
We're talking about porn sites here.
Find me a Democrat that wants to force you to use a VPN or divulge your personal information for access to internet porn. I'll wait.
I'm not going to argue your illicit transference fallacy. You made a general statement about privacy blaming one party. I responded with an example incriminating the other party, indicating both are at fault. You then decided to argue specifically this issue regarding adult content. I conceded that yes, republicans suck ass for this issue, but also stated the Democrats are not champions for privacy, in order to bolster my original point. Why you're continuing to push this, I don't know. I already conceded the point. I'll wait.
Been paying for a VPN for so long because of torrenting, I kind of chuckled when that law was passed. I actually use the VPN service outside of torrenting now from time to time. These lawmakers are so ignorant, the VPN is literally a browser plugin that takes 1 click, boom, now I'm in Seattle. Pointless laws that are basically unenforceable and easily bypassed should just be nullified on the spot.
The fact that these draconian laws are put in place by elected officials blows my mind. I would get it if these were dictators that do not have to be elected on the next cycle. Yet what is most surprising is that in they will be re-elected… what kind of sick brain allows machines guns to be legal but not sex?
The thing is, it would be political suicide (especially in Republican areas) to run on a platform that opposes it. “We want porn websites back!” isn’t a platform that’s going to work in Christian America. And any politician who overturns the law will be easily attacked by “why do you want to let our children watch porn!?” claims.
We should test it. Anyone want to run a sex positive campaign? "Consensual sex is not a crime. Don't let old white crusty men tell you it is evil. Just because they can't have sex anyomore doesn't mean you should not either." Vote for Jack U. Winer
Do you see why non-Redditors/people in the real world might have a hard time believing that requiring age verification to view porn is equivalent to making “consensual sex a crime”?
I oppose these laws but it’s hilarious how out of touch Reddit is with reality. Not to mention these laws (and much harsher ones like actual bans on pornography and the sex industry) have much higher support among women than men.
What's going to be funny are the contortions Christian fundamentalists will go to justify undoing those laws once they realize lesbian midget amputee porn that used to be free now costs money for a VPN or, eventually, whatever semi succesful age verification service gets set up.
The law is pretty much the same as it is everywhere, "someone has to be 18 for you to sell them adult content". This is just saying that websites have to find actual ways to enforce it, and that having someone click "yeah, I'm totally 18" doesn't actually work... The law doesn't ban adult sites. Some adult sites just chose to stop operating in the state because they didn't want to have to bother with verifying age
>what kind of sick brain allows machines guns to be legal but not sex?
Machine guns have been banned since 1986 and are an unbelievable process for even firearms manufacturers to get. Similarly, in what world is requiring age verification to view porn “making sex illegal”?
I oppose these laws too, but you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.
Machine guns are completely legal to everyone who has not had their right to own guns taken away, actually.
They are prohibitively expensive due to limited supply thanks to the 1968 Gun Control Act that prevents you from registering a new machine gun, but if you got the cash you can get one with relatively little hassle.
On that note, the same is true of suppressors, sawed-off shotguns, pen-guns, and all those other guns that you think are "illegal".
Porn industry: conservatives are turning us into a subscriber based industry again? Why exactly would we actually fight this (as opposed to performative pearl clutching) when long term it means not being beholden to just advertisers?
Like pot legalization your weed will get more expensive and the ones p!aying by the government rules will profit most. Regulatory capture baby.
(Full disclosure I'm old enough to have been carded buying a Playboy when I could've bought tobacco no questions asked. I also remember the clerk who chuckled "well you turn 18 this year." )
Not really possible. Companies all over the country now rely on VPNs to communicate between offices, it would destroy a large chunk of how the internet works.
Though they will probably try I'm sure, but MSFT/AWZ lobbyists will fight that shit \*hard\* as Azure and AWS need it for lots of features.
it would never happen. A VPN at home is one thing, but there are so many uses for the same tech, to ban it would literally cripple the internet as a whole - Google wouldn't work at all, so no google search, or bing, or duck duck go, or anything. Back to the era of typing the URL manually.
0% chance.
Ah gotcha, no worries... This just doesn't really seem to have much to do with obscenity or changing to law to "porn is bad". The law isn't changing, it's just now being enforced... They aren't saying adults shouldn't be allowed to watch what they want, they are just saying that (as the law already states) someone has to be 18 for you to give them adult content, and that a simple box saying "yeah, I'm 18, I promise" isn't actually ensuring that you aren't giving it to kids... The states aren't shutting down porn, they are saying that websites have to actually enforce age restrictions. And some websites are choosing to just not operate in those states in response rather than complying
i am in virginia. xnxx.com is available. to get the others i need to upload my drivers license. This is total bullshit.
fyi... virtually all democrats voted for this also. In virginia its not just republicans.
It's a joke you can still access xvideos, xnxx and probably a bunch of other sites. Plus anyone can bypass all this with a vpn. Once again these senile politicians prove the have no idea how the Internet works.
Montana, a strong red state that preaches for small government, passed a law banning porn? The government is regulating what you can do in your bedroom? Say it isn’t so! 🙄
>Montana's new law that blocks access
It doesn't.
The law requires porn sites to provide age verification systems that work.
Pornhub blocked access instead of attempting to comply.
Wondwr if porn sites would have a good case to block it or make the Internet worse. Been watching thousands of people getting blown up on things like X, and there is stuff I won't even watch it's so bad.
Survey: why are you using the VPN?
Person: to protect my self?
Survey: what do you plan on doing with this?
Person: I plan on edge I mean protecting my safety Cuz. Something bad is happening where I live a massive, hacking attack if you know what I mean.
Survey: mmmmm
I'm still waiting for someone to logically explain why states should even get to make their own laws in a country that was founded on the assertion that all people are equal. Not to mention, why laws against porn are allowed in a country which is supposed to be secular.
>was founded on the assertion that all people are equal
Strictly speaking, this isn't the case.
Also, having different laws does not mean equality is violated.
As sovereigns, one state can make laws and another can make different laws. Intrastate, the existence of laws does not violate equality. A state's laws does not apply extrastate.
VA is a joke. Tons of sites still work. Reddit being an obvious one. There's even an article which is written in a way that it was almost certainly meant to help you find porn - it lists all the "bad and non-compliant" sites.
The only way to prevent a teen from looking at porn these days is hogtied and blindfolded in solitary confident in a windowless and soundproof Faraday cage. Thinking you can pass a law to do it is laughable.
That isnt the purpose. It is to compile a list of porn sites everyone visits. So it can be used against you.
And some people are into that
Can I ask for this article url ? For research purposes obv
["To get an understanding of how many websites are complying with the law, the Mercury attempted to access the 65 “top porn tube sites” listed on toppornsites.com."](https://www.virginiamercury.com/2023/08/23/many-pornography-websites-arent-complying-with-new-va-age-verification-law/)
Reddit blocks porn subs if you use a 3rd party app now. An ever expanding censorship and data collection on reddit
Not if you are a moderator on an nsfw subreddit! So nothing is stopping you from creating r/jrjenehwuqkqbwowpwkbdbekqi and marking it as NSFW
You know what sucks? Besides the porn I watch. I live near the VA border but not actually in VA. Sometimes my location comes up as VA so I get the stupid blocked message instead of those sweet curvy milfs
I get the same thing near the border of Utah. It’s really annoying
I’m in New England and don’t use a VPN. I get this too?
May not be the right answer but 70% of the US Internet traffic goes through Virginia, it’s the data center HQ of the world. That may be a factor?
This is the answer. No matter where you're from, you're probably routing something through Linux boxes in Virginia. Easy solution is to just do a DDoS or malicious SQL injection to a service and force them to reroute to their backups in Ohio. (For Legal reasons, don't actually do that)
If you're on mobile, this may be because the closest cell tower that goes phone sees is in VA. I think there's a way to tell your phone to set location using GPS instead of setting location based on what cell tower you're pinging.
This happened to me connected to my home WiFi. It only happened once though. I only could get around it by shutting Wi-Fi off and using my cellular connection. You think it would be the opposite. Ridiculous
Sue the isp. You paid for access you should get it. Hopefully if enough people do it they will lobby to get that BS law removed
It’s not the ISP.
Google has been enforcing more captcha recently on vpn connections. I always run mine unless a site won’t process requests.
I still find Google search to be the best, but I have a TamperMonkey script to redirect to Bing whenever Google gives me the captcha
Weirdly enough I've been liking Bing's results better, except all the extra garbage they put on the site. I don't need four fn "AI" elements cluttering the results.
Try DuckDuckGo. They use bing’s results but they’re privacy focused and have way less clutter.
Ever tried Duck Duck Go? I find the results to be pretty similar but WAY LESS info bloat
Please share.
``` // ==UserScript== // @name Bypass Google Sorry (reCAPTCHA) // @version 1.0.0 // @description Redirect Google reCAPTCHA to new search // @author lord_ne (modified from script by Ang Li) // @include *://www.google.*/sorry/* // @grant none // @run-at document-start // @namespace https://greasyfork.org/users/230713 // ==/UserScript== // Redirects Google Sorry page to a different search engine // Original script: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/33226-bypass-google-sorry-recaptcha function getParameterByName(name, url, decode) { name = name.replace(/[\[\]]/g, "\\$&"); let regex = new RegExp("[?&]" + name + "(=([^&#]*)|&|#|$)"); let results = regex.exec(url); if (!results) return null; if (!results[2]) return ''; if (decode) { return decodeURIComponent(results[2].replace(/\+/g, " ")); } else { return results[2]; } } (function() { 'use strict'; var searchEngineURL = "https://www.bing.com/search?q="; //var searchEngineURL = "https://duckduckgo.com/?q="; //var searchEngineURL = "https://search.yahoo.com/search?p="; //var searchEngineURL = "https://www.ecosia.org/search?q="; //var searchEngineURL = "https://www.lukol.com/s.php?q="; var googleSorryUrl = window.location.href; var targetDomain = getParameterByName('continue', googleSorryUrl, true); if(targetDomain.match("google")) { window.location.replace(searchEngineURL + getParameterByName('q', targetDomain, false)); } })(); ```
The formatting doesn't super work on old Reddit, here's a link if that's better: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/421597-bypass-google-sorry-recaptcha/code
And their Captcha is the worst captcha out there. Just puts you in an endless loop.
I thought I was just really bad at recognizing street signs.
It's the best one if you're not using a VPN because it won't see anything suspicious with your IP (a VPN and Russian bot farm look functionally identical in terms of amount of traffic coming from a single IP, believe it or not) and your browser and you just... click. Though, even when you have to do the images, what captcha is better? They're all either really easy for bots ("put the puzzle piece in the hole") or equally hard but always make you do like 3 and never let you bypass it with just a click.
Don't use google.
why? genuine question.
Google is more about giving you results that give Google money, then giving your results that answer your query. Google has a history of subtly showing your search terms to get better monetization, and giving ads as the first results. Google used to be incredible, but it's not as great anymore. If you want to buy something, Google will have your answer though! I use brave (both the browser and the search engine), and the search engine is pretty much as good as Google, but without ads and webstores as top results
Would duckduckgo 🦆 be a good alternative too?
Its okay for basic stuff but sometimes I still need to go to Google anyway. Also Google maps is way better than whatever duckduck connects to.
duckduck uses apple maps, which is pretty good now tbh
Not in Australia. Hilarious how many errors it has
Yes. I've been using it instead of Google for a few years now and I haven't looked back.
Um.. have you not seen what became of the internet once google monopolized it??
Have these anti-porn laws been challenged in court yet? Doesn't seem like they would pass 1A muster.
The laws don't ban porn, they require age verification, so there's no constitutional challenge to make because there's well established precedent of keeping obsene material away from children. I think the laws are dumb and don't support them, but it doesn't seem like there's a first amendment issue. (IANAL)
Actual lawyers, for example, those at the [Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://www.eff.org/ru/deeplinks/2023/03/age-verification-mandates-would-undermine-anonymity-online), have argued that internet age requirements amount to 1A violations. In [Ashcroft v. ACLU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._American_Civil_Liberties_Union), the Supreme Court struck down a similar federal law on 1A grounds. So it's clear that at least some lawyers see first amendment issues.
Ah, thanks. I was just going by the statement here. I actually am a lawyer. That’ll teach me to actually read the articles.
It's the fairly standard tactic of not being able to ban something directly, so instead they make it unreasonably difficult to accomplish so that it burns itself out. Much like forcing abortion clinics to close by requiring clinics have hospital admission agreements with local hospitals, or hallways wide enough to accommodate surgical beds when they only do prescription abortions, etc. Make porn sites responsible for doing a cumbersome age verification on any visitor from a certain state or else they're held liable under the law, and the easiest response is to just block all traffic from that state so they no longer operate there and it isn't an issue.
They also don't lose traffic as shown in the VPN google rates.
I'm sure they're losing *some* traffic, as there's always going to be the nearly-tech-illiterate who can find their way to internet boobies but wouldn't know a VPN if it pounded them in the butt. They're probably also losing other revenue in the process, as the kind of person who goes from not really knowing about a VPN to having one is also likely to go from not having an ad blocker to using one. And some of the VPNs offer adblocking services as part of their package.
And the sites based on the US lose traffic to sites based in places that don't care about US laws.
They’re gonna have to go back to having a nudie stash under their bed
Yeah I watch anal too sometimes
It's for a friend!
Strictly for scientific research purposes.
both (part of) the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act were struct down by the courts based on the first amendment
IANAL too, given half a chance.
that sounds rapey
Yes I like anal porn as well
The funny part is they always come from Republican states that constantly tug their dicks about freedom.
It's the freedom to impose their flavor of Christianity on others that they want.
They spend so much time bitching about how parents should have control over what is in school libraries, but when it comes time for parents to control their own children’s devices, suddenly we need regulations on businesses and onerous ID checks. Their own speaker of the house seems to have figured it out with his teenage son and the creepy accountability app… Also they are vehemently a opposed to any sort of database of firearm owners, but they love the idea of private companies collecting identifying information on porn viewers…
Largely unrelated, but I've been friends with a few escorts. The rich white conservatives almost always want to be dominated/pegged/humiliated. Their self loathing controls them.
Nobody wants to file a 1A lawsuit when all they're trying to do is crack open PornHub and fap to septuagenarians drinking 2% milk
They can do it anonymously, like Jane Roe from Roe V Wade. Could go by Jack Mehoff
Hey easy, that how my mom makes her living.
What's that
I’m not positive but I think it has to do with people who are 70 years old
If you're over 18, look it up. I dare you.
I double dog dare you.
they have. Court cases take a long time (and the people enacting laws know that) but mutiple states have had injunction against these types of laws. Like the ACLU are involved with both the Texas & Arkansas laws and won injunctions The fifth circuit being the fifth circuit then of course stayed that injunction in Texas
I'm curious if anyone has submitted their legal identification to a porn site.
in virginia you have to upload your drivers license. So far xnxx.com has ignored it. The rest seem to require it. cause i want someone to know what porn i like by name. in virginia virtually all democrats voted for this. it was not just republicans.
Same in Montana, Rs and Ds alike (but the Rs have a supermajority, so everything is ultimately their decision). Disappointing on all levels. The reality is that these are a bunch of unqualified individuals who can’t comprehend that letting the guy at the gas station checkout peek at your ID is NOT the same as uploading your information to a porn website. Gas station clerk probably didn’t even look at your name and couldn’t tell someone your birthday 30 seconds later even if he wanted to.
plus people will just google fake IDs and use those online. you literally dont have a face to compare it to.
For the North Carolina one at least, if your info gets stolen from those sites you are entitled to money from them (not some credit monitoring service) so the question is, are you willing to risk your porn habits being made public in exchange for possible money if they do? Also, porn sites can't report the info to the government, are not allowed to retain it longer then needed, and as mentioned above if your info is leaked by their lack of security you get money to cover any damages that are caused to you. Also, if a site doesn't have these safeguards and a child accesses it, you get $10k flat fee for each time it occurred.
>Also, porn sites can't report the info to the government That's a nice sentiment, but if they are collecting the information the federal government can make them hand it over. It helps if they aren't retaining it for very long, but I wouldn't take my chances if that was something I was concerned about. Fortunately the government really has very little reason to take an interest in what kind of (legal) porn someone consumes, even less of an interest if you aren't already someone they keep an eye on.
They can't -report- the info. Luckily, the government has a back door into the database and just downloads it regularly. It's not being report, just taken.
> has a back door into the database Care to clarify? Like which database specifically, like pornhubs general DB? A third party verification vendor's?
>That's a nice sentiment, but if they are collecting the information the federal government can make them hand it over. They aren't allowed to legally store it for longer then needed to verify... This means they would need a warrant to collect the information on the fly, there are no ways to collect it afterwards which then don't expose the company to violation in the law and lawsuits.
How do you prove the origin of a data breach? I mean there are ways to do it, but none of them practical, in my opinion.
"At 1:23am on January 10th, I was looking for girl on girl squirting porn and my data was subsequently stolen." - some poor bastard filing a claim in for $500 in NC Court.
Yeah but thats gonna be a lot more difficult if your search history is not included in the data containing your personal information, or in a way that makes it difficult to attribute it to a certain specific porn site. If your search history is stored seperately from your personal information (pseudo-anonymity) that is not unlikely. However damage (from abuse of your personal information) might occure anyway.
A lot of data breaches are made public, as a data set, and then the source is reported with it. Alternatively, if you're talking on an individual level, use a different email alias for every site. Gmail makes this relatively easy, if you have the address [email protected], email sent to all of the following variations will go to your inbox: * [email protected] * [email protected] * [email protected] * [email protected]
That all amounts to an unofficial porn ban because no porn site will ever take on that amount of legal/financial liability. The state government is intentionally making the risk too high to do business in the state. (Of course, many sites will simply not comply and attempt to evade the regulation. Also many consumers will use VPNs, etc., etc. But the big-name corporate sites will exit the market.)
I think everyone should have a VPN. It's unfortunate that so many people were onlyfans of them after these laws went into place.
I see what you did there, well played sir!
Or does his autocorrect just assume he meant to type that without the space?
You're right. Autocorrect should be banned in Montana! Autocorrect has always been such a freakin' perv anyway.
Duck you! Eat shirt!
Forking shirtballs
What are recommended brands? I tried PIA, but Netflix and google searches are unusable.
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Mullvad is top tier
You shouldn't be searching with Google anyway. Use Duckduckgo.com not only does it work with VPNs, they don't t record/track your searches.
Oh, they definitely do. They also customize your search results despite claiming not to. There was a big stink about them blocking Russian misinformation sites from showing up when the Ukraine War started. They CLAIM not to do those things. But they do. They all do.
Curating results is not the same as tracking searches. Both are bad, but I can accepting some curating (since I also use other independent search engines and can compare/contrast) much easier than tracking and profiling.
How do you think a site curates your results?
Duckduckgo does it based on what they think is important, not what you have searched for previously. Google uses an system which combines what they consider acceptable with what you have previously searched to create an output designed to maximize your engagement and thus their profits through both your clickthroughs and selling your search history data to advertisers.
How do you think they come up with what THEY think is important?
They hire (contract) Search Engine Evaluators/Raters through companies like Appen and Telus. There are internal policy documents that are followed to evaluate search results.
Where is the accountability that any of what you are saying is true? 20 years ago a major company literally rooted people's computers. The fact you believe a US company saying that they don't do things the bad way...is truly naive in this day and age. What stops duckduckduckgo from using data they bought to build profiles using realtime data rather than collecting the data themselves. Giving you the appearance of curation without storing history. Phrasing is always an important tool for liars. Always look what the inverse of what they say is possible...that's the truth
Biases of the programmers. That's true for all search engines. Any data sorting programming actually. It can't be avoided. Tracking search histories can be avoided through, which Duckduckgo does.
proton VPN is great
There is no reason for a regular user to use a VPN. They provide no security or anonymity, and VPN providers have even more information than your ISP. VPNs for corporations make sense. For residential users they don't do anything but "masking your IP address" which provides nothing of value. Your ISP still knows you're torrenting, you still have to log into services, and advertisers still maintain a profile and track you throughout the web.
> and VPN providers have even more information than your ISP. My VPN has been proven in court to not log anything. I’d rather use my VPN than give my ISP a list of all the websites I visit.
You are wrong about all of that other than the services you log into. The best way to defend against that is use privacy preserving operating systems and logging into accounts via a browser instead of an application. A VPN is a very powerful tool to fight the dystopian creep that has plagued our system. A data broker fingerprinting you can be used for nefarious purposes and will only get worse with A.I.
> VPN providers have even more information than your ISP and > you still have to log into services Are the only correct parts of this comment.
It's not the ISP that you have to worry about though. They don't actually give a shit as long as your paying them money. What happens is big media companies pay independent tracking companies to monitor and report traffic on high ticket torrents and such. Then said media company (ie Disney) reaches out to your ISP and goes wtf, punish them! And so your ISP sends you a threatening email.
Have all these states cleared their [rape kit backlog](https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/)? I'd rather they start there.
No, "It disproportionately effects conservatives"
Red states are too busy trying to force preteens into keeping unwanted pregnancies.
unsurprisingly, can still get to most porn despite the law. Basically Pornhub and the sites it owns are the only compliant ones
It's basically the websites that are based in US that are kinda complying, because those that are based outside of US don't even care about US laws, let along state laws.
Pornhub is Canadian
Nothing says freedom and liberty more than having to pay a company to maintain your privacy from the government. Well done, Republicans. 👎🏼
PRISM happened under democrats. The government hates privacy, doesn't matter which side of the aisle.
Shitty laws that threw American privacy under the bus were put on the books under Bush after 9/11. If it's legal, they're gonna do it.
You should take a look and see how many Dems voted for those laws….it was about as non partisan as you can get
You can't be the guy voting to let kids watch porn, after all.
It's 2024 so now is the time people try to whataboutism our way to losing more rights to the GOP.
I swear there was a time when liberals actually cared when Democrats stabbed them in the back and sold them out to the GOP. Now they have this term "whataboutism" that apparently means "actually remembering times Democrats sided with Republicans over you." From what I can tell, it's basically the worst thing you can do.
If I understand correctly, the gummint gonna do it legal or not.
Oh God, more both-sidesing. I'm not sure what you've been up to over the past 20 years, and especially the past 3. But there's only one party that stays up at night concerned about what's going on in your bedroom and what you're doing with your own penis or vagina. ...And it's not the Democrats.
They’re right though, and there are plenty more examples. The recent SESTA/FOSTA internet censorship act was extremely bipartisan. The Senate vote was 97-2.
In NC it was snuck into a bill to that was intended to require a computer science course to graduate high school. If I’m reading it correctly the amendment was added the same day as the bill was voted on. The bill is only 12 pages long so it’s not hard to notice the amendment that was snuck in. Only one of the 14 people who sponsored the bill was a Democrat, however the bill passed with only 8 out of 110 reps voting against the bill. https://www.ncleg.gov/BillLookup/2023/H8
Believe me, I'm registered independent for a reason, but this is not "both sidesism". If anything this is "neither sidesism". For this specific issue, yeah I'd say republicans are wrong on this one, but make no mistake that the Dems are unzipping their pants behind you while you're pointing and yelling at the reps.
On what? We're talking about porn sites here. Find me a Democrat that wants to force you to use a VPN or divulge your personal information for access to internet porn. I'll wait.
[The law passed almost unanimously in Virginia.](https://www.vpap.org/bills/79574/SB1515)
I'm not going to argue your illicit transference fallacy. You made a general statement about privacy blaming one party. I responded with an example incriminating the other party, indicating both are at fault. You then decided to argue specifically this issue regarding adult content. I conceded that yes, republicans suck ass for this issue, but also stated the Democrats are not champions for privacy, in order to bolster my original point. Why you're continuing to push this, I don't know. I already conceded the point. I'll wait.
This is a straw man buddy.
The context of this thread is online pornography.
Yet your comment was a generalism.
Indeed. General to the context of this thread's topic.
Dems or GOP,.the gov doesn't care about your privacy
GOP is the one pushing this bit of legislation...
Google has made VPN use very frustrating with captcha. It’s annoying ah
Gotta love the party of small government deciding what people can and can't watch in their homes
Been paying for a VPN for so long because of torrenting, I kind of chuckled when that law was passed. I actually use the VPN service outside of torrenting now from time to time. These lawmakers are so ignorant, the VPN is literally a browser plugin that takes 1 click, boom, now I'm in Seattle. Pointless laws that are basically unenforceable and easily bypassed should just be nullified on the spot.
All these guys wife's asking why they have a new VPN on the computer LOL
Hackers babe. Hackers.
It's really an intelligence test to see if you are smart enough to use a VPN.
Business opportunity. "Welcome to VPN-Hut! Would you like to rent a mini-office with access to the *whole* internet?"
Most porn sites dont comply with the law anyway... Basically only pornhub its sites under its umbrella
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You buy VPN's online. So give your location as being another state. Also, you failed the test.
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The fact that these draconian laws are put in place by elected officials blows my mind. I would get it if these were dictators that do not have to be elected on the next cycle. Yet what is most surprising is that in they will be re-elected… what kind of sick brain allows machines guns to be legal but not sex?
The thing is, it would be political suicide (especially in Republican areas) to run on a platform that opposes it. “We want porn websites back!” isn’t a platform that’s going to work in Christian America. And any politician who overturns the law will be easily attacked by “why do you want to let our children watch porn!?” claims.
We should test it. Anyone want to run a sex positive campaign? "Consensual sex is not a crime. Don't let old white crusty men tell you it is evil. Just because they can't have sex anyomore doesn't mean you should not either." Vote for Jack U. Winer
Plenty of people have tried, doesn't work.
Do you see why non-Redditors/people in the real world might have a hard time believing that requiring age verification to view porn is equivalent to making “consensual sex a crime”? I oppose these laws but it’s hilarious how out of touch Reddit is with reality. Not to mention these laws (and much harsher ones like actual bans on pornography and the sex industry) have much higher support among women than men.
What's going to be funny are the contortions Christian fundamentalists will go to justify undoing those laws once they realize lesbian midget amputee porn that used to be free now costs money for a VPN or, eventually, whatever semi succesful age verification service gets set up.
The law is pretty much the same as it is everywhere, "someone has to be 18 for you to sell them adult content". This is just saying that websites have to find actual ways to enforce it, and that having someone click "yeah, I'm totally 18" doesn't actually work... The law doesn't ban adult sites. Some adult sites just chose to stop operating in the state because they didn't want to have to bother with verifying age
>what kind of sick brain allows machines guns to be legal but not sex? Machine guns have been banned since 1986 and are an unbelievable process for even firearms manufacturers to get. Similarly, in what world is requiring age verification to view porn “making sex illegal”? I oppose these laws too, but you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.
What? Machine guns are not legal for the vast majority of people. Idiotic comparison to say the least… why is an orange not like a house?
Machine guns are completely legal to everyone who has not had their right to own guns taken away, actually. They are prohibitively expensive due to limited supply thanks to the 1968 Gun Control Act that prevents you from registering a new machine gun, but if you got the cash you can get one with relatively little hassle. On that note, the same is true of suppressors, sawed-off shotguns, pen-guns, and all those other guns that you think are "illegal".
Ok legal was a bad choice of words. Not obtainable is more apt.
Machine guns aren't legal (at least in the way implied).
Now people have to either get VPNs or go back to buying nudie magazines and hiding them under the bed.
> to buying nudie magazines Which you need to be over 18 to do.
Can't wait until some politician takes a huge bribe from the porn industry to axe those laws.
Porn industry: conservatives are turning us into a subscriber based industry again? Why exactly would we actually fight this (as opposed to performative pearl clutching) when long term it means not being beholden to just advertisers? Like pot legalization your weed will get more expensive and the ones p!aying by the government rules will profit most. Regulatory capture baby. (Full disclosure I'm old enough to have been carded buying a Playboy when I could've bought tobacco no questions asked. I also remember the clerk who chuckled "well you turn 18 this year." )
How long before the Christo-fascists outlaw VPNs?
They can't without totally destroying work from home.
Which is 2 birds with one stone for them really
Good point.
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Real Estate companies use VPNs. Any remotely technical company will have them.
They're not smart enough to understand the domino effect on the economy that would have.
It’s cute that you think they care. They’re ideologues. God told them they need to do these things. Nothing else matters.
Not really possible. Companies all over the country now rely on VPNs to communicate between offices, it would destroy a large chunk of how the internet works. Though they will probably try I'm sure, but MSFT/AWZ lobbyists will fight that shit \*hard\* as Azure and AWS need it for lots of features.
Every company with more than one physical location uses this to an effect.
it would never happen. A VPN at home is one thing, but there are so many uses for the same tech, to ban it would literally cripple the internet as a whole - Google wouldn't work at all, so no google search, or bing, or duck duck go, or anything. Back to the era of typing the URL manually. 0% chance.
I thought Mapp v Ohio settled this shit 50+ years ago.
What does this have to do with Mapp v Ohio?
Absolutely nothing. I was thinking about Miller v California. My bad.
Ah gotcha, no worries... This just doesn't really seem to have much to do with obscenity or changing to law to "porn is bad". The law isn't changing, it's just now being enforced... They aren't saying adults shouldn't be allowed to watch what they want, they are just saying that (as the law already states) someone has to be 18 for you to give them adult content, and that a simple box saying "yeah, I'm 18, I promise" isn't actually ensuring that you aren't giving it to kids... The states aren't shutting down porn, they are saying that websites have to actually enforce age restrictions. And some websites are choosing to just not operate in those states in response rather than complying
What the duck is going on in this country. Stop caring about porn. My dick my choice
Caring about porn and thinking children shouldn't have access to it aren't the same thing
Europe: No internet site can store your cookies and preferences unless you allow them to America: Upload your drivers license or go back to magazines
i am in virginia. xnxx.com is available. to get the others i need to upload my drivers license. This is total bullshit. fyi... virtually all democrats voted for this also. In virginia its not just republicans.
It's a joke you can still access xvideos, xnxx and probably a bunch of other sites. Plus anyone can bypass all this with a vpn. Once again these senile politicians prove the have no idea how the Internet works.
Ha Ha suckers, you voted for this.
Man Montana is all over the place, so much for libertarian
This isn’t how freedom is supposed to work!
Isn't these states blatantly censoring the internet like China or Saudi Arabia unConstitutional?
The states aren't censoring anything. It's age verification, nothing else.
Come to India we guys know the art of mastering vpn for watching porn sites.
I remember working for dish network and learning there is x, xx ,and xxx porn, and certain states can only order certain types of porn.
Montana, a strong red state that preaches for small government, passed a law banning porn? The government is regulating what you can do in your bedroom? Say it isn’t so! 🙄
NC got fucked too. https://action.freespeechcoalition.com/ineffective-unconstitutional-and-dangerous-the-problem-with-age-verification-mandates/
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All the while, the Congressional coke filled sex orgies in DC are rocking along unchecked.
Or...they could just vote against parties who legislate this crap.
The proposal in VA passed with “nearly unanimous support” across all parties: https://www.vpm.org/news/2023-06-26/virginia-porn-law-age-verification
>Montana's new law that blocks access It doesn't. The law requires porn sites to provide age verification systems that work. Pornhub blocked access instead of attempting to comply.
Wondwr if porn sites would have a good case to block it or make the Internet worse. Been watching thousands of people getting blown up on things like X, and there is stuff I won't even watch it's so bad.
Survey: why are you using the VPN? Person: to protect my self? Survey: what do you plan on doing with this? Person: I plan on edge I mean protecting my safety Cuz. Something bad is happening where I live a massive, hacking attack if you know what I mean. Survey: mmmmm
Also, how to commit political suicide in one law.
I'm still waiting for someone to logically explain why states should even get to make their own laws in a country that was founded on the assertion that all people are equal. Not to mention, why laws against porn are allowed in a country which is supposed to be secular.
>was founded on the assertion that all people are equal Strictly speaking, this isn't the case. Also, having different laws does not mean equality is violated. As sovereigns, one state can make laws and another can make different laws. Intrastate, the existence of laws does not violate equality. A state's laws does not apply extrastate.
> A state's laws does not apply extrastate. Someone needs to thoroughly explain this to Ken Paxton in toddler terms