Whenever someone says, "who cares, proton VPN is free," I get a bit sadder. If Proton ever drops the free tier, honestly? I'll understand. Because God knows, seeing people who can't be fucked to give a damn about open access to information using costly infrastructure to watch their shitty porn, I might've just cut it already.
The whole porn ban thing is probably my all-time favorite example of conservatives voting against themselves.
Meanwhile, in California, I can watch all the porn I want without registering myself in a database and walk down the street to the weed store. And the women in my life still have rights over their own bodies.
So I guess Democrats are actually the party of freedom.
California is bad for voting to keep prison slavery and refusing to solve the housing crisis with a council housing system much like the UK used to have.
My favorite small example of this is trying to watch a video on YouTube. If my VPN is set to United States then im told 'You can't watch this unless you log in.'
I switch to Germany and like magic the video plays. So clearly they didn't need to confirm I wasn't a bot. They just wanted to track my viewing habits.
Fortunately, this is easy to work around, just get a VPN hosted in a didn't different state or country.
We have something similar here in Utah, so I have a WiFi network that is always connected to a VPN in a neighboring state. If something isn't accessible, I just swap WiFi networks and I'm good.
Honestly, these laws are just gonna hurt old men in Republican states. Like, I grew up with piracy, torrents, and old school forums. These educated me on computers enough that I made a career out of it. And most of that computer knowledge was gained because I wanted to see big tittied women sit on each other's faces. These laws don't stop horny teens from accessing porn. It just makes them better at it.
And this is definitely not one of the cases of "oh it'll reduce numbers overall though". No the fuck it won't. It's porn. They're gonna access it. Literally every YouTuber they watch is sponsored by a VPN.
The only healthy thing to do is actually talking to your kids about porn. Educating them on its potential harms. But Republicans don't ever want to talk to their kids. Ironically, these "drain the swamp" people just want daddy government to "prevent" their kids from accessing it. Which these laws don't do.
Honestly, these laws are just gonna hurt old men in Republican states.
You know I think a lot more of their politics and general life outlook makes more sense when you understand that probably a lot of these super old guys are not computer literate enough to look up their niche fetishistic porn interests, and are probably still consuming porn the old fashioned way, which is becoming increasingly nonexistent even though it's still something that actually exists. Plus the propagation of morally puritanical values means that if they kept any of that material around at all, they'd be hypocrites, so they can't have that. Probably a lot of these dudes are walking around super pent up and sexually frustrated, I'd bet.
We need to introduce local community college and library courses to teach these elderly boomers how to goon
Idaho is starting a registry for at-risk men with erections, to prevent impure thoughts. You need to send a picture of your dick, where it will be validated by an evangelical priest.
What I hate most is that that would be an effective tactic for right wing extremist groups. Keeping men sexually frustrated and insecure in their masculinity is a powerful tool for them.
Actually come to think of it, I really wouldn't be surprised if there were a variety of political themed pro dommes these days. It seems like it would be lucrative
This is pretense to intrude on other things and more importantly remove the ability to browse pornography anonymously, which is dangerous. I would never use an account to browse a porn site because why would I ever want that data linked back to me? Look at the government right now. You watch a gay or trans porn video and in a few years that could be grounds for never being able to have certain types of jobs or worse, being deemed a “miscreant”
If this was truly about protecting children they would encourage open dialogue on sex in homes and increase inclusive sex education. This is evidence based. It would still be necessary even with this nonsense because obviously vpns exist, as well as amateur run sites, sites run from outside of the USA, torrents, etc that don’t give a shit about us laws requiring age verification and will show all kinds of obscenely hardcore videos
That's what you voted for. You want republican rule taking away your freedoms. Well now you Floridains have what you wanted and voted for. Don't be mad you made your bed and dont like the sheets.
Given how close most elections are and the low turnout, I would say at least 40% of voters and 50% of the population didn't vote for this without even having to look at the election results.
You know damn well not all Floridians voted for this shit. This is the same kind of out-group bullshit red hat shit bags do. You’re just being intentionally divisive.
It's impossible to ban all VPNs. And even if they somehow do it, you can get a VPS(virtual private server) from one of the cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure etc.) and host your own vpn service (OpenVPN, Algo, Vultr). You don't need to know a lot about it, there are step-by-step guides for it.
They'll ultimately just have to cut off the US Internet from the rest of the world, right? As long as we can access other countries with more freedom, we can enjoy that level of freedom on the Internet. Or am I not understanding how the Internet works (entirely possible)?
In my teens I lived in Brockville Ontario near Ogdensburg New York and watched a lot of US channels. The Star Spangled Banner came on at the beginning of the broadcast day for some channels.
For many years, I thought the first line was "Jose can you see"
When I was a kid I thought the "for which it stands" in the national anthem was in reference to a country called "witchistan", which was presumably full of witches.
ChatGPT will be drawing conclusions from the data like "Subject is likely a tipthumbing twister (86.436% confidence) with content dependent high frequency intervals (94.738% confidence)"
It'll analyze things like minor mouse movements, microphone audio, and use that wifi radar trick.
Can you imagine, training rec algos for porn sites on intensity of movement and facial expressions...
Edit: if this ever happens (and I'm 85% convinced it will in some way), I'll just start crankin' to financial spreadsheets and medication specs, keep'em guessing.
That sounds like a chicken and egg problem. How is the cum getting on the ID before accessing the porn? If you use another means, surely you will no longer be in the mood for accessing a porn site...
Hey the cum can be anywhere. It doesn't say "only" a picture of your face.
For example, why not put a mirror on a table. Put your ID next to the mirror. Look down into the mirror and ready your camera. Then, slap your dick right on the table next to the ID. Finally, banana for size.
The third party has a very secure agreement to very securely sell data to 572 advertising partners and that is very securely being bought by the FBI.
Not that outlandish, since the FBI and the US police already buys advertising data streams to get access to data they are prohibited to collect directly.
It's so bad there are already middlemen who buy data and compile it into products for law enforcement.
It must be real inconvenient to have to turn on a VPN, it's like a whole button that they have to click, Libs totally owned. Meanwhile the actual weird idiots that voted for this can barely operate a mouse and so they actually do have to suffer the consequences of their own decisions.
No because there are a million different websites that just don't follow these rules. All this does is dissuade people who are both clueless about where to find porn and not particularly determined.
It also won't make a difference when basically every major social media website is a softcore porn website. I feel like conservatives opened their crusade by targeting thotfluencers they would have had a lot of momentum.
I feel like conservatives opened their crusade by targeting thotfluencers they would have had a lot of momentum.
They did. Under the hashtag ThotAudit, after one thotfluencer said something that could be interpreted as her not paying taxes on the money she was making showing her bits online.
Conservatives jerk off to porn all the time. This isn't even strictly conservative per-say, its just generic American prudishness. 30 years ago, you'd have Tipper Gore and Newt Gingrich coming together to restrict the sale of rap music CDs and wrestling themed video games to anyone under the age of 13, on similar grounds.
Demanding everyone have an ID present any time they want to do anything is a throw-back to the 90s liberal fixation on "accountability" that was a proxy for mass surveillance.
Nowadays, there's not much to learn. For user-friendly OSes, just install the VPN app, sign in like any other service, and, at a minimum, hit "go". Most people will want to scroll through a list of locations of where they want to appear to be, choose a location, then hit "go".
Yup, my red state pulled this nonsense, so I made a WiFi network that connects to a VPN for you in a less stupid state. If I get blocked somewhere, I just change WiFi networks.
Depends on how much other media you consume. If you're forced to get a VPN anyway I bet you're more likely to start looking into pirating everything else, too
I wonder if that'll end up being true. I'd guess these constituents represent voters that watch porn at least as much on average as anyone else. I'm going to go ahead and guess above average. They might get tired of this and push for change. But I'm also admittedly less educated on how our political system works than I should be and might be overestimating how much influence Florida Man has because he's disgruntled at having to jump through hurdles to fap.
The problem is that it's political suicide to be the "pro sex, pro smut" politician. Consistently the counters to anti sexual freedom laws have come from the courts. By saying "age verification on porn has gone too far," a politician more or less accepts that their entire campaign is going to be about this. And when that happens the right has the advantage because they have the ability to be short and quippy as they misrepresent you and play to emotions.
I think it's uncontroversial to say that porn is bad for children, and I would say that social media is bad for children as well. I think as one matures and becomes an adult both become less bad, less fraught, but the difference between the two of Is that one with one of them you sometimes want to be anonymous, and the other one you almost always want to be anonymous.
I mean I'm against requiring affirmative identity verification online anyway, even as a solution to keeping children away from things that are unhealthy for them. You can't sacrifice the freedom of adults on the altar of protecting children.
Fucking Jesus. They did say they wanted to ban porn and this is only the first step. This will systematically destroy porn and livelihoods. Who in their right minds would upload a picture of their horny selves next to their licence to some likely unreliable site? Lower the traffic and you kill the shit out of sex work. Evil motherfuckers, man.
The privacy and security issues of this are pretty obvious.
However I do think that the easy accessibility and ubiquity of porn and highly sexualized content for children and tweens is a serious problem that people who make fun of porn restriction efforts fail to address or even acknowledge.
Certainly a lot of the responsibility falls on guardians, but it's hard to moderate when you're up against the giant machines of social media. They need help to limit exposure. And this isn't some prudish "oh no protect the children from the titty and the peen" attitude. I don't think most people feel comfortable with the idea of 10-year olds sharing videos of aggressive gang banging or throat fucking like it's a normal thing. And obviously this isn't exclusive to porn. Plenty of explicit and gruesomely violent content out there to be worried about. But the internet footprint of porn dwarfs everything else put together.
Why is it everyone's problem that parents can't figure out that their kids shouldn't have unlimited unrestricted access to the internet? They know not to let their children loose on the Las Vegas strip, why can't they apply the same logic to the internet? I don't agree with 10 year olds looking at porn even slightly but also it's not my problem. I'm tired of the world making everything child friendly. I don't have kids for a reason and if I want to watch Human Centipede 1-4 while blasting hardcore dwarf deepthroat gangbang porn then that's my prerogative.
Because we live in a society and things that impact society impact you, as a member of society. It's the same reason why we have age restrictions for alcohol, porn stores, and cigarettes. It's also why we have laws about seatbelts, labour, and certain non-toxic but excessively unhealthy ingredients. Even if you take giving a shit about others out of the equation, the self-interested view knows that what happens to others' kids now can and do become your individual problem down the road.
Enforcing age restriction is not a ban. I think as an adult it's entirely your perogative to watch your dwarf porn. However your framing of "making everything kid friendly" is a bit misleading and disingenuous. It's quite the same as complaining everyone is always trying to make things kid friendly because they check your ID at the liquor store. Would it be more convenient if you could just grab and go? Sure. But the social harm without it clearly outweighs the inconvenience.
The fickle problem with the internet porn is still privacy and data security, but that's a separate issue.
Certainly a lot of the responsibility falls on guardians, but it’s hard to moderate when you’re up against the giant machines of social media.
It's really not. Establish an open and trusting relationship with your kids.
Porn will be accessible without ID regardless, because plenty of sites operate outside the neutron jurisdiction of the US. All this does is punish responsible sites and push kids onto sketchier websites.
The only real solution here is responsible parenting. If you're not going to be a responsible parent, don't have kids.
Not every kid has the privilege of being born to parents who give a shit or are even in their lives for one reason or another.
Still my original point was not about what the actual good pragmatic solutions are to reducing accessibility (a spectrum from can't avoid it to mildly inconvenient to highly inaccessible to banned). It was about recognizing the problem at all.
Because, apparently gay porn (with men) or just men in porn at all doesn't exist. I understand that some porn producers can be exploitative, especially to women, but that doesn't mean the whole industry is bad and needs to be blocked.