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 with a small ad targeting data service fee?
This is the sort of dystopia that librarians and others focused on liberty have been fighting for what seems like forever.
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 are particularly poorly thought out, but I don't buy the "slippery slope into dystopia" arguments, and I think there are better arguments against it.
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?
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 - Yes, mine no longer takes cash.
4) tracked each time you consumed a video - Yes. Every single streaming service.
5) a still image - Everything on the web. Every book w/ photos I buy. Can hypothetically still look at books we own, was given, found, lent, pirated or stole in privacy.
6) Audio - spotify, youtube etc.
7) a text message - Your phone IS a device you pay for and maintain which is designed and regulated to spy on you. Signal is the only possibility for any privacy at all here.
How is that fight going, do you think?
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.
Most people use a SIM card that is tied to same. Their web activity is similarly tied to ID.
Most USians voluntarily provide that payment card (with full name in the magstripe) whenever they shop at a grocery store or movie theater.
I’m not sure why people think this sort of surveillance isn’t occurring. We’ve known since before Snowden that the feds have been receiving this data in bulk in realtime for decades.
What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a bar, a strip club, or a (R-rated) movie theatre?
You already are.
I mean you mostly are already
I wouldn't vote for this policy but I get it. Lots of people don't want kids watching porn. And it's not just social conservativism, people across the political spectrum think porn is addictive, psychologically damaging, and leads to sexual dysfunction.
I think everyone acknowledges it can be, but it's a pretty distinct cohort that holds it necessarily is. Definitely not that it inevitably leads to sexual dysfunction, that's just patently untrue.
Most adults consume pornography, and for the vast majority of them it isn't a problem. Every adult who's sex life I know anything about, watches porn. They're fine.
whether or not you agree with the blocking of that sort of content, supporting these sort of restrictions on pornography means supporting a policy that lets the government gate content they deem objectionable behind an id check. i guarantee you there's at least some content out there that you're not going to agree with the government's definition of pornography. or even if you agree with the current government on all their content moderation choices, you might not agree with the next one.
We should focus on tools and systems that empower parents to guide their childrens' internet experience. Maybe a token of some sort sites can use to self identify as 18+ so parents can set up strong filters.
That said, yeah, I get the motivation. I put this in a similar category as the regulatory response to Airbnb/Ubers of the world: it seems like a better outcome may have been possible if the companies didn’t totally and flagrantly shirk their social obligations to begin with.
Eho decides what is porn? There is portln on Twitter, will all of twitter be monitored?
Kids suicides inceased 10x because they arent alliwed to go outside any more and have no friends - if we actually cared about kuds we'd be solving that.
Western boomers grew up in a better world than kids today
“Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children & teens to play, roam, & engage in other activities independent of direct oversight & control by adults.”
license to walk home alone from school dropped from 86% in 1971 to 35% in 1990 and 25% in 2010, and license to use public buses alone dropped from 48% in 1971 to 15% in 1990 to 12% in 2010.11
Homework, which was once rare or nonexistent in elementary school, is now common even in kindergarten. One study revealed that the average amount of time that US children in school, ages 6-8 years, spent at school plus school homework increased by 11.4 hours per week between 1981 and 2003, equivalent to adding a day and half to an adult’s work week.
those who could play freely in neighborhoods spent, on average, twice as much time outdoors, were much more active while outdoors, had more than twice as many friends, and had better motor and social skills than those deprived of such play"
/r/spaced*cks, ViolentaCruz, others I cant recall, and the infamous /r/cannibals controversy with a reddit founder and CEO.
Yeah, weird times - not its many bots - and interestingly, in the last year, a boatload of .in India subreddits for various aspects of their culture (like IdianMotorcycles, Weird train behavior, their version of /r/idiotsincars, lot of bollywood and movie and celeb gossip subs.
Maybe need a comment filter that hides anything that a non-sequitur or perhaps comments that have < (N) syllables, words or sentences?
I haven't come across the Indian version of this, but the default page (I don't have an account) now has a lot of posts from celebrity gossip subs, and the viciousness and hatred there is worse than what I saw in radical politics subs, or even 4chan.
At least the porn and NSFW stuff was hidden. This actually what made me block Reddit from my devices.
Armie Hammer?
i'm surprised that the app stores let them on though since it isn't that hard to view it
Looks like it's unconfirmed but likely it was specifically named for monosodium glutamate. "This is where we keep the tasty content."
https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/E621
https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/e621/
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/e621
(Edit: Apparently there's a sister site called E926 to share SFW content. E926 is yet another food additive (Chlorine Dioxide) which is used to bleach food for a cleaner appearance.)
> Any commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall...
That's a ridiculously vague standard. Google and Bing both distribute material harmful to minors in "substantial" quantities...
I hope it gets thrown out on judicial overview.
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.
Perhaps one could even argue that it is beneficial, by helping dispel sexual repression or discomfort around sexual matters.
ಠ_ಠ
this was clearly meant to be a political stunt leading into the 2024 election year to make the democratic governor Roy Cooper appear as though he didnt care about children. No respectable republican voter would ever dream of submitting to a government database for something like this.
Cooper called the bluff, as did most of the minority Democratic legislature in the house and senate. i doubt this law will survive past the second quarter of 2024.
edit: e621 is certainly doing this; this is from their front page right now:
Dec 31st: Due to the current legal situation in North Carolina and the uncertainty surrounding it, we will be blocking access to e621.net from North Carolina until we can consult with our legal counsel on this matter. We did not come to this decision lightly and we will do what we can, as we can, to rectify and remedy this situation so that we can restore access to those users that are affected by this matter. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and will have an update as soon as possible.
Do they seek different entertainment?
Does it lead to more or less socially desirable/adjusted behavior?
I'd take you up on it, but there's absolutely no way to accurately measure this.
> As you may know, your elected officials in Virginia are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our...
Is this a reasonable point?
What?
> 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.
There would be close to no accurate test for the difference between an 17 year old and an 18 year old.
People are upset about the privacy and free speech aspects of this law, as well as the annoyance of having to hand over your personal information for something as basic to human nature as your sexuality. I think there's a 100% chance that there will be a data breach at some point and a bunch of people will have their porn habits leaked to the web. Not to mention the chilling effects when it comes to something like looking up more taboo kinks and not wanting your ID associated with that.
It's not just porn. I'm a member of the furry fandom. I regularly publish fiction in that community, I have life long friends in that community, it's a community that has helped me through a lot of dark places in my life, a community where I can explore taboo subjects in a safe setting. For most people it may just be 'porn', material they use to jerk off, but the fandom is a major part of my life. E621 and other sites aren't even necessarily 'pornographic', I rarely look at 'furry porn' to masturbate as a matter of fact. I'm being 100% honest when I say I follow the artists I follow for the art. It's just that in the furry fandom things like depicting sexuality aren't necessarily taboo.
Preventing other people from participating in this community, whether it's fear that their identity is going to be leaked correlated to their fursona, concern over increased tracking of possibly undesired sexual minorities, or just the pain in the ass required to take that first plunge and sign up for E6, feels like an attack on a major part of my life.
And personally, I don't feel like I should have to take responsibility for some parent who freaks out every time their kid sees breasts, but isn't willing to install parental controls on their fucking computer.