Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 229 posts

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#131

Post by JohnMakin »

nickff wrote: post #101
GameOfKnowing wrote: post #99

Hey— performer & small site owner here. Most of the hypothetical cases in the media (and these comments) relate to Pornhub, OF, etc— companies that definitely can afford to implement age verification even if it hurts their bottom line. This totally misses the vast majority of porn sites that are very small, operate on licensed technology that may not even be maintained, and would have their ~low-5-digit annual income…

The regulatory burdens on most companies have been gradually increasing, to the point that it is very difficult to run companies with <100 (some might say <1000) employees in most non-software industries. I am sorry to hear that it will negatively impact you, but you don't have the most sympathetic story, and nobody seems to care about this issue anyway, so there's little hope of reprieve, and you'll likely just have…

Why is the story not sympathetic?

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#132

Post by pyuser583 »

theschmed wrote: post #128
pyuser583 wrote: post #124

I have kids and try very hard to keep them from inappropriate material online. The real dangers aren’t dedicated porn sites, but poorly managed social media sites. You can’t just block the domain. In many cases, the bad material comes from peers. Kids have always talked about “bad” things, but the internet super charges it. I generally support these efforts, but I’m also very cynical they help. Politicians focus on t…

I tend to think that this challenge posed by "mixed" domains, partly unobjectionable but partly inappropriate, will only become more prevalent. A couple of thoughts: 1. Filtering at the DNS level will never be enough. You'll always need to have the capability for the browser or user agent to do filtering, since the user agent has the context to know the full URI as well as other things needed for filtering. The OS ad…

The absolute worst domain for mixed content is google.com. Google has it's own internal internet. Searching for inappropriate images on Google images (using "safe" terms), and downloading the cached image is a powerful workaround.

Ok, there are a few worse ones. But it's pretty bad.

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#133

Post by rwyinuse »

Banning kids from using social media would probably have a much more significant positive impact on their mental development. Obviously kids browsing Pornhub is not a good thing, but sites like TikTok expose them to much more traumatizing violent material, and of course turns them into quick dopamine-seeking zombies that are glued to their smartphones.

Frankly speaking, even for underage teenagers the most harmful thing about porn is the potential for addiction, not the content itself.

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#134

Post by toast0 »

jimbob45 wrote: post #22

You already have to show ID to see rated-R movies in the US. I don't see how this is any different.

ID to see rated-R movies in theaters (but not on streaming services, some of which don't even require payment or even an account), is a voluntary measure done by the industry.

I don't know that I've ever actually been carded at a theater.

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#136

Post by gotimo »

yupyupyups wrote: post #59
cchance wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its bullshit a kid can buy a vpn without an ID for 3$ and skip any restriction, and even without that 90% of international porn sites, so the law fixes nothing but opens a slippery slope, whats next a law saying US needs a "Great Firewall" to protect the children from international deviancy. And it also just opens the possibility for centralized ID verification services being breached and tieing identities to their m…

Kids don't go through the hoops to buy and install a VPN just to access porn. If they were not exposed to it in the first place, which is very easy without a VPN, then they wont have the interest to get one.

kids will absolutely do that.

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#137

Post by AudiomaticApp »

dilippkumar wrote: post #33
giarc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not unless that newspaper is "more than one-third sexual material".

So pornhub needs to see how many terabytes of content they host and use AI to generate 2x more terabytes of cat pictures and add them to a compliance tab on their home page now? Seems annoying but not impossible to do. Edit: I am happy to build a cat pic to porn ratio audit company if anyone is interested. I want to participate in the funniest regulatory process this will create

Contact vx underground, they'd be happy to help

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#138

Post by jarjar2_ »

stvltvs wrote: post #123
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think plenty of legal adults have zero interest in having a link tied to their porn consumption. The never ending stream of data leakage announcements should make it clear that if the data is collected, you have to assume it will become public. VPN at least puts a layer of indirection on that.

Agreed. As an adult, I would use a VPN to bypass ID requirements to preserve my privacy.

Which they're fully aware of. They will eventually at some point pass a law requiring you to identify yourself to the VPN and/or government.

This decision is ultimately about the end of the last vestiges of anonymity on the internet, unfortunately.

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#139

Post by standardUser »

TZubiri wrote: post #117
cchance wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its bullshit a kid can buy a vpn without an ID for 3$ and skip any restriction, and even without that 90% of international porn sites, so the law fixes nothing but opens a slippery slope, whats next a law saying US needs a "Great Firewall" to protect the children from international deviancy. And it also just opens the possibility for centralized ID verification services being breached and tieing identities to their m…

Taking a step back from this case. In general any legal argument of the form: People will break the law, so there is no point in the law, is bullshit. Imagine any law and you will see how ridiculous it is. "Making stealing with guns is illegal, people will use facemasks and file gun identifiers" "Adding security features to money is pointless, counterfeiters can always " "Adding locks to doors is pointless, if an thi…

Not a good analogy because people don't inherently crave firearms as an inescapable aspect of the human condition. They do crave sex, food and, by most anthropological accounts, drugs. When we try to artificially restrict these innate desires we consistently see people reject those restrictions in large numbers, oftentimes leading them to fulfil those needs in worse ways than the ways that were limited. And only the most repressive regimes/social orders are able to (mostly) quell that perpetual rebellion, but those are not systems anyone I know would want to live under.

EDIT: And by comparison, most societies get along fine with very limited access to firearms. Only the most repressive manage to enforce bans on unpermitted forms of drugs or sex.

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#140

Post by NekkoDroid »

ineptech wrote: post #119
ahtihn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need something like Verifiable Credentials to do this properly imo. You don't want something like OAuth because the login service knows which websites you're requesting the login from.

I'm not suggesting that people actually authenticate to Pornhub using Login.gov's oauth, they would continue to auth (or not) as they do now. Login.gov can issue a token saying, in essence, "A user authenticated to me, and that user over 21, but I'm not going to identify them, I'll just give you a random GUID so this token will be unique". edit to add more details, since I'm thinking it through: the token would need…

What I've been thinking of is (although very similar):

1. Government has private/public key or similar for "Is above 18/21/legal age" 2. Site generates random data 3. Sends data to user 4. User somehow sends the data to government for signing (be it via some login or whatever) 5. User gets signed data back and sends it to the site 6. Site verifies the data against the public key

I guess the signing part could be done with all sorts of different methods, but the site would still need to be able to somehow figure out how it was signed and get the appropriate public key for it.

The main problem I see is that this isn't exactly stateless, so you do need some form of (semi-)persistent identifier on the server side.

Post reply on HN