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US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law
191–200 of 229 posts
Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law
#192Earlier 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 don't go through the hoops to buy and install a VPN just to access porn.
If someone made a list of all the things kids are willing to do just to access porn, it would blow your mind.
Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
What counts as obscene has been defined for a while. And I don't think Wikipedia would count as obscene by the Miller test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test . Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, . Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory fun…
What counts as obscene has notably not been defined. "Contemporary community standards" and "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" are so vague as to be useless. Whose community? Which standards? How many people have to be offended by something? How many people have to find value in it for it to be serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity > In 1957, two associates of acclaimed poet…
IRT The Simpsons, the Simpsons of 1989 and the Simpsons of today are essentially two radically different shows, they just happen to both be animated and feature four fingered yellow cartoon people. That very early 90s Simpsons show featured far more family violence and other things along that nature than the show today, among a lot of other things that make the show very different.
Even then, it wasn't like the average person was arguing for it to be banned by obscenity rules. The spat between H.W. Bush and the Simpsons was a comment he made, saying "We are going to keep on trying to strengthen the American family, to make American families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons." It's not like Bush was actively pushing for The Simpsons to be taken off the air or anything along those lines.
Honestly, I think it makes more sense to have some kind of standard like a reasonable person/common person/contemporary community standard when trying to define something like "obscenity". Not making an argument of what kind of law to pass with that, just stating I don't think having some etched in stone standard would ultimately be good in the end for any kind of law related to such content. Ultimately its the same to me in terms of laws that would otherwise try and regulate certain kinds of commerce or whatever, with extremely rigid definitions that can't keep up with changes to the marketplace. That we might find something like The Simpsons potentially detestable in the 90s but otherwise fine today is an example for such a standard with flexibility, not against it IMO. We wouldn't want the law to be bound to whatever people specifically thought was "obscenity" in 1850 to still hold legal weight today.
Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law
#194As they should. What's unconstitutional about the law?
Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not unless that newspaper is "more than one-third sexual material".
The archive link shared by heythere22 (which seems to be a different story) discusses this. The published plan from the heritage foundation includes a few more steps: (1) redefine obscenity to include pornography, effectively banning it via interstate commerce laws (2) extend this to anything that could “be harmful to minors”, which will certainly include information about groups they don’t like, starting with LGBTQ+…
Does obscenity not already include pornography? Porn most definitely doesn't pass the Miller test, so the only reason it's not currently illegal is because the federal government doesn't enforce that law.
Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most difficult part is getting parental enforcement. Because a lot of parents: A. Aren't tech savvy enough to set up rigorous controls. B. Don't feel like dealing with setting up the controls to keep their kid quiet. C. Allow things that contain the content anyway. (Twitter, Discord, Reddit, etc.) And D. Assuming their kids don't learn to bypass it anyway. I'm sure with the locked down nature of devices today, go…
I'm a very, very "tech savy" parent, raising a non tech savy child. Parental control software simply does not work. It just does not. And even worse, it is advertized as working! The only solution is to deprive them of devices that access the Internet. But even that does not work, because schools often require Chromebooks to use with Google Classroom. Did I mention Google Classroom has workarounds that let through to…
Go to a school board meeting early, before it starts. Bring up the issue, and say “if any of you doubt that this can be done, I will happily demonstrate just how easy it is - privately, and with content that is legally available to adults.”
If they aren’t responsive, call a local TV reporter.
Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
The archive link shared by heythere22 (which seems to be a different story) discusses this. The published plan from the heritage foundation includes a few more steps: (1) redefine obscenity to include pornography, effectively banning it via interstate commerce laws (2) extend this to anything that could “be harmful to minors”, which will certainly include information about groups they don’t like, starting with LGBTQ+…
This is already laid out in Project 2025. > Transgender people will see their existence denied and their rights stripped away under Project 2025. The authors equate ‘transgender ideology’ to pornography, calling for it to be outlawed. While the far-right policy agenda cannot directly ban transgenderism, it aims to do so indirectly by labeling it as pornography, and then outlawing pornography itself – effectively eras…
This shit is genuinely terrifying and it seems like no one is doing anything to stop it.
Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a very, very "tech savy" parent, raising a non tech savy child. Parental control software simply does not work. It just does not. And even worse, it is advertized as working! The only solution is to deprive them of devices that access the Internet. But even that does not work, because schools often require Chromebooks to use with Google Classroom. Did I mention Google Classroom has workarounds that let through to…
Go to a school board meeting early, before it starts. Bring up the issue, and say “if any of you doubt that this can be done, I will happily demonstrate just how easy it is - privately, and with content that is legally available to adults.” If they aren’t responsive, call a local TV reporter.
I have strongly explored such options, and decided against this approach.
Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law
#199Hey— 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…
> Yeah VPNs exist, but HN users faaaaar over-estimate the technical knowledge & ability of the average American used to having the net served to them on a silver platter. We can evaluate this by considering the results of DNS blocking ThePirateBay. ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=How+effective+was+dns+blocking+the...
That's not a reference, it's just a list of search results.
Do you have a direct source for how many Americans accessed TPB after it was DNS blocked in all of the US?
Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law
#200What's worse is that combined with the ruling in Mahmoud v Taylor, age verification can now be justified against anything considered "adult" or "pornographic" in nature - including LGBTQ+ storybooks, information on abortion or sexual health, discussion about HIV, or even just political dissidence if a state wants to reach particularly far. "Adult content" is nebulous and vague on purpose , and one party is taking adv…
Whats probably most important to a tech related forum: The dirty secret that drives new technology: it's porn
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2002/mar/03/internetn...