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E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents

foxcarolina.com

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Re: E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents

#91

Post by jzb »

hattmall wrote: post #44
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I strongly disagree with this NC law, and others, your analogy is a bad one. As a society I think we've accepted that some things (cigarettes, alcohol, sex, etc.) should be restricted from children. That's a far cry from requiring ID every time I go to the grocery store. But, as long as I've been alive, you have had to show ID to purchase alcohol, and the sky hasn't fallen. Again, I think these types of laws ar…

You had to show ID to buy porn magazines, go in a strip club or even the adult video rental room. It's pretty insane that we have no check for an unlimited amount of free porn with all kinds of extremes. It fucks up a lot of kids (and adults). Showing porn to a random kid on the street would have you catch a charge if not something worse, but somehow on the Internet it's just fine?

"It's pretty insane that we have no check for an unlimited amount of free porn with all kinds of extremes."

And... we still don't. Porn is available through a lot of channels to anybody who knows how to look, all the NC law (and others) is doing is applying pressure to a handful of businesses and encouraging bad practices in the form of having to handle IDs.

I'm the first to acknowledge it's sometimes worth doing something imperfect if it'll improve things, even if it's not 100% effective. But this isn't likely to be 10% effective, much less 90% or 100% effective. Anybody who wants to can dredge up tons of porn on any number of other sites, torrents, etc.

As others have said, it's one thing to have to flash an ID at a convenience store or to enter a business where there's nudity, etc., but here you're requiring people to pass their info online. That's bad policy, and I doubt it's even in good faith that the legislators really think it'll do anything to curb access by those under 18.

It's designed to target sites like PornHub and to give government a cudgel against all kinds of content that most wouldn't consider "porn" to begin with. And they want to go after LGBTQ+ content on the basis that it's LGBTQ+ -- not that it's necessarily adult in nature. [1]

There's little chance that you're going to come anywhere close to preventing motivated people from seeing porn on the Internet laws and policy like this. If you have kids that you don't want accessing porn, then you need to take steps to monitor their access and have the hard conversations with them.

(I am less alarmist about the "dangers" of kids accessing porn, but I will agree that unfettered access at a young age especially if parents aren't teaching their kids adequately about sexuality and that porn isn't a good representation is not great.)

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/17/masculine-policy-the-gop...

Re: E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents

#92

Post by cf1241290841 »

harry8 wrote: post #87
mjevans wrote: post #14

What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater? What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message? What if the government kept a record of any or all of those checks? What if they arranged for third parties to commercialize that data so they could 'legally' end-run any restriction on domestic spying wit…

>What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater? What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message? 1) entered a grocery store - No, at least not since peak-pandemic. Face recognition? 2) a library - Yes, to borrow books or on demand from security. Needed govt. id to get a library card. 3) movie theatre…

>A Turnkey totalitarian state exists, who is going to turn that key?

A totalitarian that will be recognized as such.

The plausible deniability of the status quo is worth quite a bit.

Re: E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents

#93

Post by Gigachad »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #85
Gigachad wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not usually impressed by generated images. But the furry models are astounding. Right now my best signal for something being AI is that it's incredibly detailed by doesn't have a signature.

Yeah. As a seperate note, I saw another HNer blog post specifically complain about AI generated furry art as a destroyer of talented furry artists... I get the point, but still have mixed feelings. If some AI is so incredible at an artistic niche (not just furry), isn't that amazing? If artists are not economically free to pursue new styles and representations the AI doesn't "know," I feel thats a larger problem with…

I don't think it's as simple as just exploring new styles. AI has gone from generating unrecognizable crap to stunning digital art within a year. And it's not clear how much further it will go. If you are a digital artist who makes their entire income on what was once a very secure job of drawing furry art. You'd be terrified right now. The artists are still quite a way ahead of the AI stuff, but for how long?

I think the most likely outcome is that people stop drawing manually and either switch to making physical products like clothing and fursuits. Or they make use of the generative tools to create much more elaborate art. Perhaps one person pumping out a full comic in the time that would have taken 10 people.

It's still a very scary and uncertain time when peoples incomes are on the line and decades of hard earned skill is at risk of becoming worthless.

Re: E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents

#94

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

LammyL wrote: post #60
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I strongly disagree with this NC law, and others, your analogy is a bad one. As a society I think we've accepted that some things (cigarettes, alcohol, sex, etc.) should be restricted from children. That's a far cry from requiring ID every time I go to the grocery store. But, as long as I've been alive, you have had to show ID to purchase alcohol, and the sky hasn't fallen. Again, I think these types of laws ar…

It is one thing to show ID. It is an other thing to show ID and have the details stored in a database in perpetuity by companies who don’t have huge budgets for data privacy and security.

Completely agree, and that's one reason I'm against these laws. But that's a very different argument from the one I was responding to.

Re: E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents

#95

Post by dgacmu »

jzb wrote: post #91
hattmall wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had to show ID to buy porn magazines, go in a strip club or even the adult video rental room. It's pretty insane that we have no check for an unlimited amount of free porn with all kinds of extremes. It fucks up a lot of kids (and adults). Showing porn to a random kid on the street would have you catch a charge if not something worse, but somehow on the Internet it's just fine?

"It's pretty insane that we have no check for an unlimited amount of free porn with all kinds of extremes." And... we still don't. Porn is available through a lot of channels to anybody who knows how to look, all the NC law (and others) is doing is applying pressure to a handful of businesses and encouraging bad practices in the form of having to handle IDs. I'm the first to acknowledge it's sometimes worth doing som…

"NC legislature accidentally endorses Mullvad VPN" could be a parallel article to this one. It would be interesting if someone analyzed the growth in VPN use following the enactment of this law.

Re: E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents

#97

Post by userbinator »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #36
dymk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an incredible source of tagged training data - meticulously detailed and hand maintained

There's in fact a Stable Diffusion model trained on most of e621. Uh not sure what HN's linking rules are, but look up Furtastic. Though I understand and respect furrydom, I'm not a furry... But in its niche of generating anthropomorphic people, I still find the model to be incredible. Its got to be one of the most extensively trained, tagged and coherent SD 1.5 finetunes out there, which doesn't even surprise me TBH…

I think you meant "anthropomorphic animals".

Re: E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents

#98

Post by itishappy »

hattmall wrote: post #67
whatshisface wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the growth of some "romance boutiques," who seem to be able to open chain stores anywhere, the liability is nil.

They allow kids to go in?

No, they check IDs.

Source: Was a kid.

Re: E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents

#99

Post by JumpCrisscross »

schneems wrote: post #90
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps its an example of horseshoe theory? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory US State legislators tend to be more politically extreme these days, AFAIK. Or just good old "save the children," I guess? Where either party is afraid to make themselves look bad.

[flagged]

> yes “I want to be governed by a fascist dictator” and “maybe we shouldn’t destroy the environment completely” are pretty close

Eh, the American far left and right are both obsessed with policing language in surprisingly-similar ways. The left’s inability to cohere is largely what protects us from it meaningfully mobilising.

Re: E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents

#100

Post by tzs »

Note that they do not object to age verification. They object to the specific way North Carolina is requiring it to be done:

> Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults.

> Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws

Using modern cryptographic techniques (such as blind signatures or zero-knowledge proofs) it is possible to design a system whereby you can prove your age to porn site P without P receiving any information they did not already have other than that you are older than their age threshold. In particular this would even work for anonymous users.

There would be another site V involved in the verification. You would have to give V your real identity and show them your proof of age documents, but V would not get any information about what site you trying to get verified for.

If V were a site that already has your real identity then using V for age verification would not be giving them anything that they didn't already have.

It might be possible for someone who obtains records of both P and V to get an idea of the real identities of porn site account owners by trying to match up the timing. This risk can be greatly reduced by having just one or two V sites, so that they are high traffic, and by having some random delays in the verification protocol.

That way someone trying to figure out if I was using say Pornhub might find out from V that I was doing the V side of a verification at say 2024-06-01 01:44:21, and they might be able to find out from Pornhub if they had any verifications using V that started within a few minutes before that and completed within a few minutes after that.

But with only one or two V sites, there will be way more verifications that happened at V at times compatible with those Pornhub verifications. They would not be able to tell if mine at 2024-06-01 01:44:21 is one of those Pornhub ones or one of the many more going on around that time for other sites.

It is a little counterintuitive, but the more sites that require age verification the better the privacy protection, and the fewer the number of V sites, the better the privacy protection.

That suggests that if we are going to require some sites to do age verification, to do it in the most privacy preserving way (1) it should be done nationally rather than as a patchwork of state verification laws, and (2) V should be a government site.

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