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

171–180 of 229 posts

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#171

Post by reverendsteveii »

vel0city wrote: post #164
reverendsteveii wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in this description you deferred to your own personal interpretation when you said "I don't think much of the content of Wikipedia is describing sexual content in a patently offensive way". Someone might, or might find it politically expedient to pretend that they do. After all, what's "offensive" is arbitrary.

You're misunderstanding my description. You don't just need "someone". You'll find "someone" say anything, including that the Earth is flat, its 40,000 years old, and we're controlled by lizard people. The standard isn't "someone". You'll find someone who claims a table of ICD codes or a stop sign appeals to their prurient interest and is sexual in nature. You'd need "the average person, applying contemporary communi…

You're just kicking the can down the road. "Who decides what's obscene?" "The average person." "Who decides who the average person is?" In your own argument you keep pointing to how arbitrary and abusable this average person standard is as though that makes it somehow a better choice, but at the end of the day the idea of the "average person" is just someone dressing their own personal feelings in a pretty hat. There is no determining who the average person is or what they believe empirically, so the opinion of the person actually making the decision just gets labelled the opinion of the "average person". It does nothing but distance the people making these decisions from responsibility for them because they get to pretend they're just doing what everyone would want. It's 100% arbitrary.

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#172

Post by reverendsteveii »

dragonwriter wrote: post #167
vel0city wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misunderstanding my description. You don't just need "someone". You'll find "someone" say anything, including that the Earth is flat, its 40,000 years old, and we're controlled by lizard people. The standard isn't "someone". You'll find someone who claims a table of ICD codes or a stop sign appeals to their prurient interest and is sexual in nature. You'd need "the average person, applying contemporary communi…

> You'd need "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" to say that under the Miller test and have the court/a jury to agree. No, you just need the court to agree, you don't need to actually get the (non-existent, fictional abstraction) of “the average person” to say anything, you just need a judge to believe that.

in a nation of 400 million people you only need 5 to agree with you (if it's the right 5) and then the 6 of y'all are "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" and the 399,999,994 of us are out of touch deviants.

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#173

Post by morgango »

daft_pink wrote: post #111

I’m curious if Apple Wallet will provide a framework for future privacy protecting age verification nationwide after securing the ability to load US Passports into Apple Wallet, since Driver’s licenses in Apple Wallet is such a patchwork and they seem to be a trusted method of doing verification without submitting your information to some sketchy porn website.

Apple has never been friendly towards adult sites. They could have made a mint off of adult applications in the App Store, but it isn't their style.

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#174

Post by ndriscoll »

NekkoDroid wrote: post #140
ineptech wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can put all of the state into the browser:

1. Site generates an AES key for the verification request. Gives it to the browser along with (short) expiration time in an encrypted cookie (so the browser can't see or forge the key). Encrypts a request to .gov (using .gov public key) saying "use to encrypt a token for ". Gives that request to the user to present to .gov.

2. Browser asks user if they'd like to request age verification. Proceed.

3. Gov does ID verification. Checks requesting IP matches. Creates tokens for "over16", "over18", "over21", and any other magic ages that laws exist for, each individually encrypted with site AES key and IP-bound. Gives all tokens back to the browser so .gov doesn't know which will be used. e.g.

    {
      "over13": "",
      "over16": "",
      "over18": "",
      "over21": ""
    }
4. Browser asks user which token they want to give to the site (that could actually be part of step 2, and the site could indicate which one it would like).

5. Site gets single relevant token back, decrypts the cookie, and uses the key to decrypt the token. Checks requesting IP in response token matches. Checks token signature against .gov public key.

.gov only learns that some age-restricted service was requested, but not even which age. Server only learns user is over the required age. Browser can't see or modify any of the messages between .gov and site because they're all encrypted.

With such a protocol, adding more age-restricted use-cases (e.g. buying cigarettes/alcohol, gambling, social media/advertising/anything where you need COPPA's "I am over 13" assertion) would increase overall privacy.

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#175

Post by elcritch »

isodev wrote: post #98
Workaccount2 wrote: post #38

I'm more interested in the downsides of not having ID verification. We have an entire generation of humans raised with effectively no verification going back 30 years now. So what is the data? Why is a high barrier so important that every adult has to annoyingly climb over it with all sorts of friction?

I think having to codify "obscenity" so deep into the law to even make it become an exception to free speech is an indicator of a bigger problem. I know the US is generally a lot more conservative about this, but it really feels like more extreme forms of religion/politics are relying on the popular vote to shortcut solutions. No child was ever damaged from getting a glimpse of a very normal adult human interaction.…

Pornography isn’t sex. It doesn’t promote healthy sex from the statistics I’ve seen. Many teenagers now think that doing sex acts they see online before even ever kissing is normal.

I also suspect it’s at least partly linked to declining reproductive rates. It’s the same as freely available sugar. Human ape brains weren’t evolved to handle this sort of easy access high dopamine stuff.

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#176

Post by commandlinefan »

TriangleEdge wrote: post #14
aa_is_op wrote: post #2

This will just drive people to non-compliant foreign sites. They just killed their own adult industry, who is gonna take their business and taxes elsewhere

I think your assumption that Texas cares about its porn industries is incorrect. Pornhub is a Canadian company. Afaik it's the #1 porn site, I could be wrong. I assume if they don't comply, their DNS host will be blocked in Texas. Registries of porn sites are readily available. (I use them in my hosts file blocking). So, my guess is that the likely step will be block all of them until they prove they have ID enforcem…

> if they don't comply, their DNS host will be blocked

Actually they've already pre-emptively blocked themselves. If you try to access their site from anywhere in Texas, you get a wall of text urging you to call your congressman and oppose this law (or so I heard from a guy).

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#177

Post by [deleted] »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #93
TriangleEdge wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your assumption that Texas cares about its porn industries is incorrect. Pornhub is a Canadian company. Afaik it's the #1 porn site, I could be wrong. I assume if they don't comply, their DNS host will be blocked in Texas. Registries of porn sites are readily available. (I use them in my hosts file blocking). So, my guess is that the likely step will be block all of them until they prove they have ID enforcem…

> I assume if they don't comply, their DNS host will be blocked in Texas. I'm guessing you mean blocking their entire NS host. It would be a massive overreach and would block every site they're authoritative for. It's one more thing on the rapidly growing Unconstitutional=Okay stack. Cherry-picked courts are routinely fine with that. But it wouldn't stop lawsuits from registrars, site owners and other parties harmed…

[deleted]

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#178

Post by nomel »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #112
init2null wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time they'll go on Twitter or the noncompliant websites instead. That being said, published numbers have shown VPN subscriptions skyrocket. Public tech skills aren't what they were in the 2000s, but people who can't/won't verify ID are motivated. It is a powerful force after all.

Just make sure it is not a Facebook owned VPN which is actually used to spy on its users. https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/facebooks...

I think it's silly to think that any VPN isn't spying on you, for profit or for government compliance.

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#179

Post by quickthrowman »

tacticalturtle wrote: post #35
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The movie theater doesn't keep a database of who's been watching their movies. [edit] and that doesn't just mean “okay jimbob is a dirty dirty boy.” It’s also a handy way to create a registry of whatever the handlers think is the target perversion du jour. [edit][edit] … and it's not even the government who's keeping that database, it's pornographers. Regardless of your political leanings or trust in the gov't, can y…

By the letter of the Texas law, neither do the commercial entities that have to verify identity: https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/pdf/HB01181F.... Edit: Key bit there, the commercial entity or third party verification “may not retain any identifying information of the individual”.

As we all know, everybody always follows the rules.

Re: US Supreme Court Upholds Texas Porn ID Law

#180

Post by pyuser583 »

techjamie wrote: post #160
Canada wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pretty much have to whitelist. I think we're heading towards a future where we give kids only devices that restrict internet access to known good content. There's more than enough known good content out there already to keep kids occupied until they come of age. There will be managed whitelists that your kids can access, which sites must apply for and demonstrate compliance with the policy of, and you will be abl…

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 tons of inappropriate content, and there is no way for the school to know?

When the schools are literally requiring software that allows inappropriate, what can you do?

Post reply on HN