Politics/nationalism is always a great cover to erode rights of the population. If you object, you are on the "other team" and will be shunned.
No one in Texas wants porn bans, abortion bans, IVF bans, restrictive marijuana laws and everything else going on down there, but they will still enthusiastically vote for it to show party allegiance.
> No one in Texas wants porn bans, abortion bans, IVF bans, restrictive marijuana laws and everything else going on down there
You sound ripe for some travel! It's not a bad place to visit!
You may want to believe what you wrote because it helps those of us with contrary preferences to pretend that we're just better aligned to some rational truth or something, but no: there are many people in Texas and elsewhere who sincerely believe that each of those things is good and something that they want for their community.
The number or loudness of those people change when stirred up by politicians, and sometimes ideas that weren't widely considered previously are wholly seeded as part of a political strategy, but that doesn't really change that most people are fully sincere in their beliefs and that their beliefs can sometimes be radically different than your own.
"No one" was a figure of speech. Yes there are always some people who want all of these things, but there have been countless polls done in all these states on topics like abortion and there is always a clear majority that is in favor of more sensible laws. One example is for exceptions for rape, incest and mother's health etc., which upwards of 85%+ of Republicans support. Yet the laws they enact don't reflect this, because these same people will not vote for moderates.
I've lived in the deep south for a number of years. Problem is you're both right. Problem is there's a diverse set of opinions and it depends who you're going to come into contact with.
I'll say that I know quite a number of people who claim to be stout libertarians (a very common stance in the south and especially in Texas) and even be much more supportive of legalizing all drugs because "government bad, personal choice good" and "government shouldn't be a babysitter." YET I've seen those same people vote for those politicians. I've seen those politicians run on those platforms and then push such agendas and then people not really care about it. Not too different from the old "I didn't speak out because I wasn't x, but then there was no one left to speak for me" quote.
Truth is humans are full of hypocrisy, for better or worse. Some of this is so we can handle nuance in an approximate way without having to invest in the computation/effort to resolve those. It is a real thing though and we need to be nuanced to deal with it, including how we discuss it.
BUT there's also a clear and measurable phenomena where politicians are not acting as good representatives. You can find many polls on things like Marijuana laws, government provided health coverage, government pension plans (cough social security cough), paid family leave, corporations not paying their fair share of taxes, wealthy not paying their fair share, complexity of taxes, return free filing, and many other things. You can find Pew and Gallup polls on this stuff running back for years, showing majority approvals. The issue, is we quibble over nuance AND oversimplify the nuance. We often pretend that the optimization functions are the same or identically conditioned. Often the difference is coming down to a focus on positive rights vs negative rights in the conditioning of the linear program. Abortion might be a good example. Liberals try to minimize the harm while conditioning on the liberty of the mother while conservatives tend to have the inverse approach. Essentially liberals will give up liberty of the unborn in favor of the currently living while conservatives are willing to give up liberty of the currently living for the unborn. You cannot maximize both liberties of the living and the unborn at the same time, there has to be a trade-off. Both want surprisingly similar things, but we frame them as extreme opposites because we are not discussing the nuance and we're arguing while we work from a different set of base assumptions assuming that the other persons are operating under the same assumptions. Which makes it quite difficult to actually understand the other person's goals and intentions.
Thing is, people are happy to prey upon this complexity and difficulties in communicating. Knowingly or unknowingly. We are often unwitting players in this as it is so easy to get trapped into the mindset that others operate under the same premise that we do. Until we understand this, we are going to have extreme difficulties in communicating. Even if we want the same things and even if we want extremely similar outcomes. I'm sure many people here have had a "stupid argument" where you realize that you and the person you're passionately arguing with are on the exact same side, just expressing your views in different ways. It's often embarrassing and we laugh about it because we __are__ fucking idiots. Yes, this includes (especially) me. Don't listen to me, I'm a fucking idiot.
>No one in Texas wants porn bans, abortion bans, IVF bans, restrictive marijuana laws
I grew up extremely religious in Texas... I can assure you that there are plenty of people who want these things.
The good news is things are changing. Some members of my family who effectively spent their entire lives trying to overturn Roe, are now totally overwhelmed and distraught by the after effects, and what an awful person Donald Trump is. Truly a dog-that-caught-the-car situation.
The abortion ban in particular has me confused: A huge amount of people believe abortion means killing a baby and absolutely are for banning it entirely.
13 states (Texas included) had trigger laws already on the books to ban abortion if Roe v. Wade was ever overturned, and are now in effect. This was a big thing all over the place when it happened.
1st a. will be the least of our concerns when Ruth Bader Biden loses to orangeman who will change the flag, make a new loyalty test salute, and require documentation checkpoints every few miles.
Are guns a country-wide problem? I was offered a job in San Francisco but am scared of moving to the US because of stats like there being like 1.5 mass shootings per day.
The headline seems misleading. "Pornhub blocked in Texas" suggests Texas did the blocking, a better headline would be "Pornhub blocks users with Texas IPs"
The Texas legislation is effectively a block - there's no way for PH to verify the age of users entering the site in the way the legislation demands, but they face fines and legal action for not doing so. Catch-22, the only solution is to turn off access.
This is interesting. What about the Texas law makes it impossible for PH to comply if they were to otherwise decide that that they wanted to (which of course isn't likely)?
Maybe one hack would be to have a binary "restricted" flag communicated through the ISP's reverse IP lookup (probably very slow). It wouldn't put any personal information at risk, but it would probably open Pandora's box, except that Pandora's box had hope inside of it.
1) IP address from "Restricted Region" connects to website.
2) Server attempts a reverse IP lookup and waits for reply from ISP's DNS.
3) If DNS reply contains "restricted" (on behalf of the subscriber), server has to restrict access, etc.
> there's no way for PH to verify the age of users entering the site in the way the legislation demands
What exactly are those requirements, and how is there "no way" for Pornhub to satisfy what "the legislation demands"?
I ask because I'm tired of seeing (in general, not just PornHub) deceptive rephrasing of "we don't want to" as "it's impossible for us to." Companies too often take the attitude that they're entitled to their business model or being able to push externalities onto others, but that's obnoxious BS propaganda.
Edit: So according to the OP, the law "requires [PornHub] to verify the age of all visitors using a government-issued ID or 'public or private transactional data.'" I'm pretty sure they've already implemented that to verify the identify of performers (https://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/articles/19159382668435-Tr...), after much kicking and screaming, in the wake of that Nicholas Kristof article a few years ago. So a pretty straightforward implementation would be to require user accounts to view (at least for Texas), push users through PornHub's existing age verification flow, then give them access.
Leaving aside free speech and spurious moral panic concerns for a moment — isn’t digital ID verification a solved problem? Getaround has to verify my ID before I can drive, and I’ve had to do digital ID verification for a number of other apps. This doesn’t really seem like a question of whether ID verification is possible or practical. AFAICT it definitely is.
I will verify my identity for unemployment benefits, but not for this. It's only a matter of time before a breach happens, especially since I am not verifying with a local government but rather a private entity, who do not have strict mandated security measures (or at least are likely to violate them).
Then check the ID and then throw the PII away. All I’m saying is that there are absolutely ways to do this, and I keep hearing that these companies “can’t” accomplish this, but it just isn’t true.
If you want to buy a copy of Playboy from a newsstand, in general, you’re going to get asked for ID at the counter. It’s been like that for a very long time and nobody seems to have a real problem with it. It’s unclear why people think this kind of requirement just goes away if it’s on the Internet.
Looking at the article, the statement they display to blocked users could do with either a change in tone to be more legally formal or a change in tone to be more approachable to less-literate users - bullet points, multiple headings etc. Right now that message is the worst of both worlds and will get a very low conversion rate.
I've been away from this line of work for over a year, though. Does anybody here who has current experience in effective messaging, legal communication or marketing want to read the message Mindgeek put up and give their two cents on it for our entertainment?
As a technologist the most interesting part to me is they bring up "Device based age verification" and I am very curious what the current state of that is. Some initial research shows that it is only at the exploratory stage (according to my 10 whole seconds of searching) but it definitely seems interesting.
In NL we have IDIN. A website can use it to verify age or address information. I don't think that any porn-websites are using it, but technically this should do the job.
IDIN is set up by all the Dutch banks. You check in via your own bank using an IDIN link. IDIN will do an age-check to verify that you're 18 or older. IDIN can verify age, name, address and contact info. You need a bank account, and the bank has checked your identity and age, so this is guaranteed to work.
Maybe you don't want that the bank knows that you visit a porn website, but that's another question.
From a logistics one, devices can be shared and it is very easy to share to a minor (which is what theses laws supposedly target). Or have multiple accounts on one device.it seems like a lot of work for less results..
Here is the full text on pornhub.com if accessed from within Texas:
"Dear user,
As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.
While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk.
Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving thousands of platforms open and accessible. As we've seen in other states, such bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the thousands of websites, with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply. Very few sites are able to compare to the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place. To protect minors and user privacy, any legislation must be enforced against all platforms offering adult content.
Unfortunately, the Texas law for age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Not only will it not actually protect children, but it will also inevitably reduce content creators’ ability to post and distribute legal adult content and directly impact their ability to share the artistic messages they want to convey with it.
The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users’ age on their device and to either deny or allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification.
We call on all adult sites to comply with the law. Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.
We encourage you to:
Learn more about device-based age verification* solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy.
Contact your representatives and demand device-based verification solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy.
*Device-Based Age Verification refers to any approach to age verification where the personal information that is used to verify the user’s age is either shared in-person at an authorized retailer, inputted locally into the user’s device, or stored on a network controlled by the device manufacturer or the supplier of the device’s operating system. Whether through pre-installed content blocking and filtering software, the disabling of web-browsing permissions, or other means, the user will then be prevented from accessing age-restricted content over the internet unless they are age-verified. To come to fruition, such an approach requires the cooperation of manufacturers and operating-system providers."
"Device-Based Age Verification" raises my software freedom hackles. I could imagine public perception for things like Google's Web Environment Integrity being bolstered by this kind of call to action.
The power of "think of the children" arguments for "normies" is already strong when it comes to encryption and privacy. I can't imagine standing up for software freedom if it runs counter to "think of the children" will fare well.
Well, if implemented properly I think it's OK. Back in the Internet Explorer days, Microsoft used to block adult sites on device based on the RTA header adult sites added themselves. I think if adult sites were required to use the RTA header and device manufacturers/OS/browser makers forced to obey it; it's an OK compromise.
All the well known adult sites are already using it, it's just up to the browser makers to support it again... and besides, with on-device AI they don't even need to only rely on the RTA header if they want to make their implementation more advanced.
Readit News
No one in Texas wants porn bans, abortion bans, IVF bans, restrictive marijuana laws and everything else going on down there, but they will still enthusiastically vote for it to show party allegiance.
You sound ripe for some travel! It's not a bad place to visit!
You may want to believe what you wrote because it helps those of us with contrary preferences to pretend that we're just better aligned to some rational truth or something, but no: there are many people in Texas and elsewhere who sincerely believe that each of those things is good and something that they want for their community.
The number or loudness of those people change when stirred up by politicians, and sometimes ideas that weren't widely considered previously are wholly seeded as part of a political strategy, but that doesn't really change that most people are fully sincere in their beliefs and that their beliefs can sometimes be radically different than your own.
Like one rural vote is worth 10x what one urban vote is worth? Or is that just for federal elections?
I'll say that I know quite a number of people who claim to be stout libertarians (a very common stance in the south and especially in Texas) and even be much more supportive of legalizing all drugs because "government bad, personal choice good" and "government shouldn't be a babysitter." YET I've seen those same people vote for those politicians. I've seen those politicians run on those platforms and then push such agendas and then people not really care about it. Not too different from the old "I didn't speak out because I wasn't x, but then there was no one left to speak for me" quote.
Truth is humans are full of hypocrisy, for better or worse. Some of this is so we can handle nuance in an approximate way without having to invest in the computation/effort to resolve those. It is a real thing though and we need to be nuanced to deal with it, including how we discuss it.
BUT there's also a clear and measurable phenomena where politicians are not acting as good representatives. You can find many polls on things like Marijuana laws, government provided health coverage, government pension plans (cough social security cough), paid family leave, corporations not paying their fair share of taxes, wealthy not paying their fair share, complexity of taxes, return free filing, and many other things. You can find Pew and Gallup polls on this stuff running back for years, showing majority approvals. The issue, is we quibble over nuance AND oversimplify the nuance. We often pretend that the optimization functions are the same or identically conditioned. Often the difference is coming down to a focus on positive rights vs negative rights in the conditioning of the linear program. Abortion might be a good example. Liberals try to minimize the harm while conditioning on the liberty of the mother while conservatives tend to have the inverse approach. Essentially liberals will give up liberty of the unborn in favor of the currently living while conservatives are willing to give up liberty of the currently living for the unborn. You cannot maximize both liberties of the living and the unborn at the same time, there has to be a trade-off. Both want surprisingly similar things, but we frame them as extreme opposites because we are not discussing the nuance and we're arguing while we work from a different set of base assumptions assuming that the other persons are operating under the same assumptions. Which makes it quite difficult to actually understand the other person's goals and intentions.
Thing is, people are happy to prey upon this complexity and difficulties in communicating. Knowingly or unknowingly. We are often unwitting players in this as it is so easy to get trapped into the mindset that others operate under the same premise that we do. Until we understand this, we are going to have extreme difficulties in communicating. Even if we want the same things and even if we want extremely similar outcomes. I'm sure many people here have had a "stupid argument" where you realize that you and the person you're passionately arguing with are on the exact same side, just expressing your views in different ways. It's often embarrassing and we laugh about it because we __are__ fucking idiots. Yes, this includes (especially) me. Don't listen to me, I'm a fucking idiot.
I grew up extremely religious in Texas... I can assure you that there are plenty of people who want these things.
The good news is things are changing. Some members of my family who effectively spent their entire lives trying to overturn Roe, are now totally overwhelmed and distraught by the after effects, and what an awful person Donald Trump is. Truly a dog-that-caught-the-car situation.
13 states (Texas included) had trigger laws already on the books to ban abortion if Roe v. Wade was ever overturned, and are now in effect. This was a big thing all over the place when it happened.
1) IP address from "Restricted Region" connects to website.
2) Server attempts a reverse IP lookup and waits for reply from ISP's DNS.
3) If DNS reply contains "restricted" (on behalf of the subscriber), server has to restrict access, etc.
What exactly are those requirements, and how is there "no way" for Pornhub to satisfy what "the legislation demands"?
I ask because I'm tired of seeing (in general, not just PornHub) deceptive rephrasing of "we don't want to" as "it's impossible for us to." Companies too often take the attitude that they're entitled to their business model or being able to push externalities onto others, but that's obnoxious BS propaganda.
Edit: So according to the OP, the law "requires [PornHub] to verify the age of all visitors using a government-issued ID or 'public or private transactional data.'" I'm pretty sure they've already implemented that to verify the identify of performers (https://help.pornhub.com/hc/en-us/articles/19159382668435-Tr...), after much kicking and screaming, in the wake of that Nicholas Kristof article a few years ago. So a pretty straightforward implementation would be to require user accounts to view (at least for Texas), push users through PornHub's existing age verification flow, then give them access.
That's not true.
It's onerous, inconvenient, whatever.
DPI? DNS? etc
Deleted Comment
Especially in this era of data breaches.
Deleted Comment
If you want to buy a copy of Playboy from a newsstand, in general, you’re going to get asked for ID at the counter. It’s been like that for a very long time and nobody seems to have a real problem with it. It’s unclear why people think this kind of requirement just goes away if it’s on the Internet.
I've been away from this line of work for over a year, though. Does anybody here who has current experience in effective messaging, legal communication or marketing want to read the message Mindgeek put up and give their two cents on it for our entertainment?
IDIN is set up by all the Dutch banks. You check in via your own bank using an IDIN link. IDIN will do an age-check to verify that you're 18 or older. IDIN can verify age, name, address and contact info. You need a bank account, and the bank has checked your identity and age, so this is guaranteed to work.
Maybe you don't want that the bank knows that you visit a porn website, but that's another question.
From a logistics one, devices can be shared and it is very easy to share to a minor (which is what theses laws supposedly target). Or have multiple accounts on one device.it seems like a lot of work for less results..
"Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_for_the_Thought_That_W...
"Dear user,
As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.
While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk.
Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving thousands of platforms open and accessible. As we've seen in other states, such bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the thousands of websites, with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply. Very few sites are able to compare to the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place. To protect minors and user privacy, any legislation must be enforced against all platforms offering adult content.
Unfortunately, the Texas law for age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Not only will it not actually protect children, but it will also inevitably reduce content creators’ ability to post and distribute legal adult content and directly impact their ability to share the artistic messages they want to convey with it.
The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users’ age on their device and to either deny or allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification.
We call on all adult sites to comply with the law. Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.
We encourage you to:
Learn more about device-based age verification* solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy. Contact your representatives and demand device-based verification solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy. *Device-Based Age Verification refers to any approach to age verification where the personal information that is used to verify the user’s age is either shared in-person at an authorized retailer, inputted locally into the user’s device, or stored on a network controlled by the device manufacturer or the supplier of the device’s operating system. Whether through pre-installed content blocking and filtering software, the disabling of web-browsing permissions, or other means, the user will then be prevented from accessing age-restricted content over the internet unless they are age-verified. To come to fruition, such an approach requires the cooperation of manufacturers and operating-system providers."
The power of "think of the children" arguments for "normies" is already strong when it comes to encryption and privacy. I can't imagine standing up for software freedom if it runs counter to "think of the children" will fare well.
All the well known adult sites are already using it, it's just up to the browser makers to support it again... and besides, with on-device AI they don't even need to only rely on the RTA header if they want to make their implementation more advanced.
More info: https://davidwalsh.name/rta-label
Dead Comment
Pornhub is low-quality crap, haven't visited it in years.
FYI: delta-9 THC is legal in Texas when derived from hemp, so actual weed is sold alongside the legal stuff in many cities.