This is the only true solution. Parents need to take responsibility for what their kids are doing online, what they’re viewing and who they’re talking to. This generation of parents should be prepared for that but apparently not.
As a parent, I do agree with taking responsibility on it. My older children is 8, so not much computer for her now. Just a bit of dactylography before she can play Gcompris, mostly chess lately, nothing online so far. They did have some initiation at school (for context this is public school in France).
That said, I do expect I won't be able to prevent them to reach inappropriate resources once they meet the point where they can browse online without me being there to inspect, so I'll rather invest time to explain them that can happen, make sure they are confident they can tell me if they faced something odd. Forbidding would be the best way to encourage, and any automatic system alone will have too shallow circumvention paths or too much burden of admin to follow for relevancy as a Parenthood tool.
I think this approach made a lot of sense in the 2000s and 2010s, when consumer electronics with internet access were expensive things well out of reach of a child unless given to them by a parent.
But we're in an era now where cell phones and tablets — especially used + low-spec ones — are something that even a young child can acquire en masse: from their friends at school, or from any mall kiosk or convenience store with their allowance, etc.
You can put all the parental controls you like on the nice phone you buy your child — but how do you put parental controls on the four other phones you have no idea they own?
(Before you say "search their room" — they could leave them in their desk at school, charging them with a battery bank they charged at home or got a friend to charge for them; and then use them with free public wi-fi rather than locked-down school wi-fi. This doesn't require any particular cleverness; it's the path of least resistance!)
If you ask me "well, what do we do, then?"... I have no idea, honestly.
I tried to block YouTube when my kids were remote learning during the pandemic, it took several attempts and they were in grade school. They even got around Apple's considerable content controls I had to set up a DNS proxy.
This never happens tho - parents dont sometimes even know how to use the tech. Its like giving a gun to a child and telling them its ok, just remember when you open the packaging to take the safety off.
...and oh yeh the safety software changes every few months so you will have to review it
I read it as the author being passive aggressive -- they're implying the problem is parents who, instead of learning how to manage what their children can do with electronic devices, just want the government to make bad things illegal.
But, you know, we've never been able to agree as a people on what "bad things" are. So it should be, as you said, for each parent to engage in setting boundaries and being responsible.
"Because I say so" is a weak ass argument, no argument at all.
"Because I bought it" is passive aggressive, because you do not intend to allow even if you did not buy it.
Its a Swiss one, so compared to some sites its probably in French out of box. Has a good reputation, located in country that doesn't take much bullshit from EU or given government (Albeit some of it is good, this is not).
Also cares more about privacy than most other countries globally (if folks grokked what "numbered account" meant then there wouldn't be so much baseless hate about how "Swiss took all jewish and nazi money and profit from it till today and that's core of their prosperity".
Couldn't be further from truth, I live here and watch these matters closely from both inside and outside perspectives.
It’s smart to be using a VPN for any sort of adult internet use these days anyway. Vixen Media Group is extorting people by threatening to leak their identity if they don’t pay up[0]. And not by a 3rd-party collections company either - it’s their own parent company making the demands.
Why does anybody care that their porn viewing habits become public? To me it sounds as ridiculous as somebody threatening to publish a log of the food we eat or the music we listen to.
Empirically, there's a sizeable market of people willing to pay thousands to keep their porn viewing from becoming public. Prenda Law[0,1] was an extortion racket that blackmailed people with their porn history, and demanded in the region of $4,000 per victim. Their total revenue was at least $15 million, that the courts could find.
Porn is considered a highly private activity for many reasons: societal disapproval, religious prohibitions...heck in some countries, watching gay porn is potentially a death sentence.
Sounds like the actual dumb move is torrenting without a VPN. Even if you're torrenting to watch prestige television, you'd still want to have a VPN to avoid getting sued. On the flip side, I don't think anyone got sued from watching pirated porn from a streaming site.
> "and having offshore porn sites or any other third parties collect IDs from adults and becoming a repository of potential blackmail material comes with its own risks [...] A more technically sound approach would be content controls directly implemented on the devices parents chose to give their children" said the company's (Proton's) spokesperson
While I agree with their second point, the first argument sounds a bit overly dramatic, considering how the implementation seems to work. They couldn't blackmail, as the information they receive is limited.
As far as I understand how at least one of the methods for verification must be, is “double-anonymity” or "double-blind" protocol: the site never sees the user’s identity, the verifier never learns which site is being visited, and only a yes/no “18+” token is exchanged. Then other methods could be offered too.
Although if we assume the average security competence with these types of companies, handling ID documents and stuff, they'll surely get hacked sooner or later. So maybe the link between porn site and identity isn't there, but your personal data that been submitted to them will yet again float out there.
Their proposed alternative is even worse IMO. Even if you can figure out some privacy-safe way of doing on-device age verification, the end result will be a web that only works if you are browsing from an "approved" client - i.e. a platform controlled by Apple, Google or Microsoft.
Not necessarily. You need some source of truth (i.e. government ID) to sign digital tokens representing attributes like "18+". Those tokens are uploaded to those websites.
The risk becomes "kids loading their parents' ID into their phones" but with decent digital ID that shouldn't be a problem.
Yivi already solves this problem. It's being used as a basis for an implementation of a European digital ID of sorts, though I'm still sceptical of the European side of things.
The app works on any device because the device doesn't do anything special. All it does is POST some signed token if the user clicks "approve".
I suppose this can be a problem in the US where people hate the idea of digital government ID for some reason, but that's a political problem, not a technical one. France already has a digital ID equivalent for use with government services, as do all other EU member states in their own way, so the source of these tokens is practically ready to go.
There could easily be a web standard to allow/disallow NSFW content and the web browsers could broadcast this flag based on settings at OS level similarly to the light/dark theme setting at OS level that can be used by websites and it works on all OS/web browsers implementing this trivial feature.
> “double-anonymity” or "double-blind" protocol: the site never sees the user’s identity, the verifier never learns which site is being visited, and only a yes/no “18+” token is exchanged.
Isn't this an actually reasonable solution? I assumed age verification was supposed to be done by the site itself, and therefore it was considered a very bad idea. But this... what's the problem with this method?
> But this... what's the problem with this method?
You're just hoping that there's never a leak of any UUID(s) that could be used to correlate things. The ad-tech industry has pioneered de-anonymization tech and they're very, very good at it.
Tangential question: if the principal is divorced from the "is not a minor" signal, what prevents a thrifty youth from just buying/stealing somebody's token?
If the only thing that verifier does is verification for accessing digital pornography, it remains blackmail-able. Not in the sense of identifying the specific content accessed but in the sense of "this user has gone through the steps to gain access" which is, frankly, good enough.
After verifying the ID, there is no reason the verifier needs to know to whom a token belongs, which would help this. It doesn't need to be repudiatable in practice because the security risk of a leak is near 0 and nobody ages backwards.
The solution to that is to make sure the age verification is used for a variety of different purposes.
For example, why not use the same age verification system to block access to sites that advertise or sell alcohol or tobacco products? Or sex toys. Or dating apps. Or loans applications. Or for any number of adult-only apps that aren't necessarily blackmailable? Normalize age verification for adult-only services.
That provides people with plausible deniability. “Oh, I wasn't looking at porn! I was just trying to find the perfect brandy to buy as a business gift.” or “Oh, I was just trying to get a quote to refurnish my apartment on credit.”
Threatening someone to tell people “There's a high likelyhood that X watches porn” is a blackmail-worthy threat IMHO.
Unless you have access to someone's specific kinks or routine (how often does he/she watches porn, for how long), you're no going to scare many people.
Facebook has these information by the way, thanks to the “like buttton” scattered everywhere (at least for people who don't browse porn in private mode, but having done IT support in college, I can tell you there are many people who don't).
After the US, the three largest Western countries are Germany (which already banned Pornhub), the UK and France, but the UK and France are virtually tied in terms of population, so it was always going to be a tossup between the two.
Always wondered why latin america is not considered the "western" world (it surely is not on the east side of... whatever mark you put in the world. Actually if one uses the greenwich meridian, that would leave countries like Germany on the "east" side of the world).
France usually has its own domestic alternatives for a lot of stuff. Even online. It's becoming less and less true (for example, instagram or tiktok are just as common there than anywhere else) though. So it could make sense to think that France would be a smaller market for PH than Germany or the UK.
I know Germany is similar to France in that regard, but I'm more familiar with France. And it also has a bigger population!
I wouldn't worry about the VPN's, the 8 year olds aren't going to get one.
On mass, it'll be successful, but I'd be more worried about social media than the usual porn sites for early exposure.
I always wonder what it takes to start a VPN? It's super saturated yet there's clear winners. Also I wonder how the operator is able to side step liability for obvious illegal use cases.
The internet has become a very hostile place and its not just surveillance but peer to peer political persecution where someone doesn't follow the script or believe the same thing they do and they lash out and try to censor them by mass reporting or DDOS
I miss the old internet where we used to escape to avoid reality, now we go offline to avoid the internet.
Seems to be one of those commodities where some winners are only by virtue of advertising, if all the NordVPN sponsorship jokes are true. There's also sketchy providers that double-dip aren't there? Residential customers pay once for a VPN and commercial customers pay again for residential IPs used for scraping and proxying.
> Can't you just educate them to avoid drinking to excess? No, you can't, they don't have that level of self-control yet
This is not only untrue, it's actually the only worthwhile course.
I know that bans, rules, and technical solutions are not substitutes for parenting. This is why all the kids of the parents I know who have tried that are doing all the supposedly disallowed things secretly (and circumventing the technical restrictions with ease).
>Yes, they will, but it matters that they get it less often and less frequently.
but they won't. Alcohol restrictions are at least somewhat enforceable (although as a sidenote I also find them silly) but you can open a new tab, literally type "porn" into any search engine, and you'll get fifty thousand results.
And all of those sites are hosted in the middle of nowhere and do zero content moderation compared to Pornhub, so chances are on those sites adolescents will run into some genuinely abhorrent content. You've made it no less difficult, but much less safe.
It's so utterly meaningless even compared to other internet bans, it makes more sense to assume they just banned something so that people would stop talking about it. It's as if someone was on a crusade against video games, banned literally one video game
They basically add 'verification headers' to the original website through a proxy solution, allowing visitors to browse sites with some level of age verification regardless of their location. They are more focused on the 'privacy aspect'.
I support banning porn. You've got coordinated "teams" of men, most of them diagnosable sociopaths, who work as a group to manipulate and destroy teenagers. For every one woman you see on a porn website, there's a network of 10 men who are working as a coordinated team to manipulate her. Most of the young women are from broken homes, many of them are low IQ, and many of them were sexually abused as children by male authority figures. The male pornographer teams work together to push the teenage women into harder and harder stuff, basically stuff that causes more permanent physical and psychological damage. Once the woman has reached her capacity for pain and humiliation, she's cast out of the scene, likely with a drug addiction, likely ending up in prostitution. Saying that porn is "sexual education" or "empowering" or whatever is like saying that factory farming is the same as James Herriot-type farms. They're different in kind: in brutality, scale, and automation.
If you visit a website like Pornhub then you're complicit in this.
You should provide sources. And after that, you could be presented other sources that present much cleaner environments. It will depend.
...So, what you have said is "Shoes are made in sweatshops: ban shoes".
--
Replying to the dead post below: yes, you have as if declared that "all shoe production is substantially like torturing geese for foie gras", but we note that "producing shoes does not necessarily involve torture", hence "you cannot ban shoemaking because of local abuses".
France has very stupid and strict laws, that apply accross borders! For example paternity test gets you two years, even when physically done in another country!
It’s illegal for porn sites in France to operate without imposing age verification. That doesn’t mean that it’s illegal for French residents to use porn sites without age verification.
Correct. I believe it has to be court-ordered and even then it's rare. DNA testing is also generally illegal unless for medical reasons. They claim this is to "uphold family peace" because "fatherhood is social, not biological". It seems incredibly wrong to me in that they are removing the father's right to choose whether to enter that social role when it is not biologically mandated.
Maybe it just seems like a lot but it’s interesting how much shit Texas got for its age verification law when other western countries either were doing similar or pushing for similar laws. UK, Canada, France, Australia, I think I saw someone in the comments say Germany has something similar.
Pornography isn’t all that healthy but so is parents not stepping up and educating their kids on sex, even if it is awkward to talk about.
A better way would be to only allow soft content for unverified users, so youngsters wouldn't be brainwashed and hooked by the excessive ram up a train in someone's arse kinda mindless, cromagnon like content. Politicians must be replaced with something more human centric. All they do is bring forth rules to deny something, instead of trying to cure the epidemic porn brings into the life of everyday people.
> instead of trying to cure the epidemic porn brings into the life of everyday people
Eh?!
This makes no sense. Is it something like "smartphones bring addiction", i.e. the inability to deal with a tool normally as duly, because some people were left immature, is taken as an excuse to fall into bad logic?
If everyday people faint in front of begonias, it's not the begonia. Treat the roots.
> A more technically sound approach would be content controls directly implemented on the devices parents chose to give their children
Passive aggression level 10, and I approve.
This is the only true solution. Parents need to take responsibility for what their kids are doing online, what they’re viewing and who they’re talking to. This generation of parents should be prepared for that but apparently not.
As a parent, I do agree with taking responsibility on it. My older children is 8, so not much computer for her now. Just a bit of dactylography before she can play Gcompris, mostly chess lately, nothing online so far. They did have some initiation at school (for context this is public school in France).
That said, I do expect I won't be able to prevent them to reach inappropriate resources once they meet the point where they can browse online without me being there to inspect, so I'll rather invest time to explain them that can happen, make sure they are confident they can tell me if they faced something odd. Forbidding would be the best way to encourage, and any automatic system alone will have too shallow circumvention paths or too much burden of admin to follow for relevancy as a Parenthood tool.
I think this approach made a lot of sense in the 2000s and 2010s, when consumer electronics with internet access were expensive things well out of reach of a child unless given to them by a parent.
But we're in an era now where cell phones and tablets — especially used + low-spec ones — are something that even a young child can acquire en masse: from their friends at school, or from any mall kiosk or convenience store with their allowance, etc.
You can put all the parental controls you like on the nice phone you buy your child — but how do you put parental controls on the four other phones you have no idea they own?
(Before you say "search their room" — they could leave them in their desk at school, charging them with a battery bank they charged at home or got a friend to charge for them; and then use them with free public wi-fi rather than locked-down school wi-fi. This doesn't require any particular cleverness; it's the path of least resistance!)
If you ask me "well, what do we do, then?"... I have no idea, honestly.
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I tried to block YouTube when my kids were remote learning during the pandemic, it took several attempts and they were in grade school. They even got around Apple's considerable content controls I had to set up a DNS proxy.
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How? Keyloggers and spying?
What if the parents hate gays but their kid is in the closet seeking help?
Having uncontrolled access to information about sex and sexuality is a blessing not a curse. It saves lives.
And I bet its much better having kids at home jacking off to porn than them having sex with girls early. Urges are normal, porn is good.
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[dead]
This never happens tho - parents dont sometimes even know how to use the tech. Its like giving a gun to a child and telling them its ok, just remember when you open the packaging to take the safety off.
...and oh yeh the safety software changes every few months so you will have to review it
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Okay, should bars and off licenses be able to sell alcohol to 10 year olds? Cigarettes? Should that be the responsibility of parents to control, too?
Or do we continue with the long held legislative reality that you are responsible for the goods and services that you unlawfully provide to children?
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How is this passive aggression? “You’re not using porn, because I say so, and you’re not using a computer without a porn filter, because I bought it”
That’s not passive aggression, that’s responsible parenting and clear boundaries.
I read it as the author being passive aggressive -- they're implying the problem is parents who, instead of learning how to manage what their children can do with electronic devices, just want the government to make bad things illegal.
But, you know, we've never been able to agree as a people on what "bad things" are. So it should be, as you said, for each parent to engage in setting boundaries and being responsible.
"Because I say so" is a weak ass argument, no argument at all. "Because I bought it" is passive aggressive, because you do not intend to allow even if you did not buy it.
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(The VPN service is Proton VPN, for those coming directly to the comments.)
why this VPN in particular?
Its a Swiss one, so compared to some sites its probably in French out of box. Has a good reputation, located in country that doesn't take much bullshit from EU or given government (Albeit some of it is good, this is not).
Also cares more about privacy than most other countries globally (if folks grokked what "numbered account" meant then there wouldn't be so much baseless hate about how "Swiss took all jewish and nazi money and profit from it till today and that's core of their prosperity".
Couldn't be further from truth, I live here and watch these matters closely from both inside and outside perspectives.
Because this VPN provider tweeted about it.
I’d guess many did, and this is just the one being reported on
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
Likely because it's one of the few VPNs with a ~reliable free tier
It’s smart to be using a VPN for any sort of adult internet use these days anyway. Vixen Media Group is extorting people by threatening to leak their identity if they don’t pay up[0]. And not by a 3rd-party collections company either - it’s their own parent company making the demands.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vixen_Media_Group#Legal_action
https://www.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/1d3wfiz/my_exp...
Why does anybody care that their porn viewing habits become public? To me it sounds as ridiculous as somebody threatening to publish a log of the food we eat or the music we listen to.
Empirically, there's a sizeable market of people willing to pay thousands to keep their porn viewing from becoming public. Prenda Law[0,1] was an extortion racket that blackmailed people with their porn history, and demanded in the region of $4,000 per victim. Their total revenue was at least $15 million, that the courts could find.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=prenda
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Porn is considered a highly private activity for many reasons: societal disapproval, religious prohibitions...heck in some countries, watching gay porn is potentially a death sentence.
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Why have privacy if you have nothing to hide?
On another note, a lot of places, including those in the west will ostracize you for listening to the wrong music or eating the wrong foods.
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people have things they don't want everyone to know. how is wanting a small amount of privacy ridiculous?
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> as ridiculous as somebody threatening to publish a log
And in fact, privacy laws saw slow codification because the violations they are relevant to are largely preposterous.
> Vixen Media Group is extorting people by threatening to leak their identity if they don’t pay up[0].
This is specifically people who pirate their IP over public bittorrent; not paying customers.
Sounds like the actual dumb move is torrenting without a VPN. Even if you're torrenting to watch prestige television, you'd still want to have a VPN to avoid getting sued. On the flip side, I don't think anyone got sued from watching pirated porn from a streaming site.
> "and having offshore porn sites or any other third parties collect IDs from adults and becoming a repository of potential blackmail material comes with its own risks [...] A more technically sound approach would be content controls directly implemented on the devices parents chose to give their children" said the company's (Proton's) spokesperson
While I agree with their second point, the first argument sounds a bit overly dramatic, considering how the implementation seems to work. They couldn't blackmail, as the information they receive is limited.
As far as I understand how at least one of the methods for verification must be, is “double-anonymity” or "double-blind" protocol: the site never sees the user’s identity, the verifier never learns which site is being visited, and only a yes/no “18+” token is exchanged. Then other methods could be offered too.
Although if we assume the average security competence with these types of companies, handling ID documents and stuff, they'll surely get hacked sooner or later. So maybe the link between porn site and identity isn't there, but your personal data that been submitted to them will yet again float out there.
Their proposed alternative is even worse IMO. Even if you can figure out some privacy-safe way of doing on-device age verification, the end result will be a web that only works if you are browsing from an "approved" client - i.e. a platform controlled by Apple, Google or Microsoft.
Not necessarily. You need some source of truth (i.e. government ID) to sign digital tokens representing attributes like "18+". Those tokens are uploaded to those websites.
The risk becomes "kids loading their parents' ID into their phones" but with decent digital ID that shouldn't be a problem.
Yivi already solves this problem. It's being used as a basis for an implementation of a European digital ID of sorts, though I'm still sceptical of the European side of things.
The app works on any device because the device doesn't do anything special. All it does is POST some signed token if the user clicks "approve".
I suppose this can be a problem in the US where people hate the idea of digital government ID for some reason, but that's a political problem, not a technical one. France already has a digital ID equivalent for use with government services, as do all other EU member states in their own way, so the source of these tokens is practically ready to go.
There could easily be a web standard to allow/disallow NSFW content and the web browsers could broadcast this flag based on settings at OS level similarly to the light/dark theme setting at OS level that can be used by websites and it works on all OS/web browsers implementing this trivial feature.
> “double-anonymity” or "double-blind" protocol: the site never sees the user’s identity, the verifier never learns which site is being visited, and only a yes/no “18+” token is exchanged.
Isn't this an actually reasonable solution? I assumed age verification was supposed to be done by the site itself, and therefore it was considered a very bad idea. But this... what's the problem with this method?
> But this... what's the problem with this method?
You're just hoping that there's never a leak of any UUID(s) that could be used to correlate things. The ad-tech industry has pioneered de-anonymization tech and they're very, very good at it.
Tangential question: if the principal is divorced from the "is not a minor" signal, what prevents a thrifty youth from just buying/stealing somebody's token?
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It depends how solid the implementation is, and what the competency reputation of the government implementing it is.
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If the only thing that verifier does is verification for accessing digital pornography, it remains blackmail-able. Not in the sense of identifying the specific content accessed but in the sense of "this user has gone through the steps to gain access" which is, frankly, good enough.
After verifying the ID, there is no reason the verifier needs to know to whom a token belongs, which would help this. It doesn't need to be repudiatable in practice because the security risk of a leak is near 0 and nobody ages backwards.
The solution to that is to make sure the age verification is used for a variety of different purposes.
For example, why not use the same age verification system to block access to sites that advertise or sell alcohol or tobacco products? Or sex toys. Or dating apps. Or loans applications. Or for any number of adult-only apps that aren't necessarily blackmailable? Normalize age verification for adult-only services.
That provides people with plausible deniability. “Oh, I wasn't looking at porn! I was just trying to find the perfect brandy to buy as a business gift.” or “Oh, I was just trying to get a quote to refurnish my apartment on credit.”
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Threatening someone to tell people “There's a high likelyhood that X watches porn” is a blackmail-worthy threat IMHO.
Unless you have access to someone's specific kinks or routine (how often does he/she watches porn, for how long), you're no going to scare many people.
Facebook has these information by the way, thanks to the “like buttton” scattered everywhere (at least for people who don't browse porn in private mode, but having done IT support in college, I can tell you there are many people who don't).
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Fascinating that France is PH's second-biggest market, presumably after the US.
How is that surprising?
After the US, the three largest Western countries are Germany (which already banned Pornhub), the UK and France, but the UK and France are virtually tied in terms of population, so it was always going to be a tossup between the two.
Always wondered why latin america is not considered the "western" world (it surely is not on the east side of... whatever mark you put in the world. Actually if one uses the greenwich meridian, that would leave countries like Germany on the "east" side of the world).
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France usually has its own domestic alternatives for a lot of stuff. Even online. It's becoming less and less true (for example, instagram or tiktok are just as common there than anywhere else) though. So it could make sense to think that France would be a smaller market for PH than Germany or the UK.
I know Germany is similar to France in that regard, but I'm more familiar with France. And it also has a bigger population!
what makes you think it's banned in Germany?
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it was always going to be a tossup between the two.
UK slang and this context give this a very relevant double meaning. Well played if this was intentional!
it was always going to be a tossup between the two.
UK slang and this context give this a very relevant double meaning. Well played if this was intentional!
Savoir-vivre.
I wouldn't worry about the VPN's, the 8 year olds aren't going to get one. On mass, it'll be successful, but I'd be more worried about social media than the usual porn sites for early exposure.
I always wonder what it takes to start a VPN? It's super saturated yet there's clear winners. Also I wonder how the operator is able to side step liability for obvious illegal use cases.
The internet has become a very hostile place and its not just surveillance but peer to peer political persecution where someone doesn't follow the script or believe the same thing they do and they lash out and try to censor them by mass reporting or DDOS
I miss the old internet where we used to escape to avoid reality, now we go offline to avoid the internet.
Seems to be one of those commodities where some winners are only by virtue of advertising, if all the NordVPN sponsorship jokes are true. There's also sketchy providers that double-dip aren't there? Residential customers pay once for a VPN and commercial customers pay again for residential IPs used for scraping and proxying.
Because apparently french parents can't handle the education of their children.
Clearly they cannot. They had already banned selling alcohol to kids.
Drugs too. Doesn't seem to stop ones that want to do it though by looking at some neighbourhoods.
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Mindgeek is a very gross corporation that’s involved in human trafficking, anything that discriminates against them is good.
There's a big cultural gap here. To people who are concerned about porn, it's like asking why we have to stop children from buying handles of vodka.
Can't you just educate them to avoid drinking to excess? No, you can't, they don't have that level of self-control yet.
Isn't it unfair to the responsible bakers who just want a really tender pie crust? Yes, it is, but they're going to have to deal with it.
Won't a determined kid still be able to get their hands on alcohol? Yes, they will, but it matters that they get it less often and less frequently.
> Can't you just educate them to avoid drinking to excess? No, you can't, they don't have that level of self-control yet
This is not only untrue, it's actually the only worthwhile course.
I know that bans, rules, and technical solutions are not substitutes for parenting. This is why all the kids of the parents I know who have tried that are doing all the supposedly disallowed things secretly (and circumventing the technical restrictions with ease).
6 replies →
Alchool is poison. If you handle it maturely, it remains an intoxicant.
Chocolate should be eaten with restraint. If you handle it maturely, it remains something not that comparable to alchool.
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> it's like asking why we have to stop children from buying handles of vodka
I would argue that part of the answer is because with vodka they can easily harm themselves. However this doesn't hold for porn.
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>Yes, they will, but it matters that they get it less often and less frequently.
but they won't. Alcohol restrictions are at least somewhat enforceable (although as a sidenote I also find them silly) but you can open a new tab, literally type "porn" into any search engine, and you'll get fifty thousand results.
And all of those sites are hosted in the middle of nowhere and do zero content moderation compared to Pornhub, so chances are on those sites adolescents will run into some genuinely abhorrent content. You've made it no less difficult, but much less safe.
It's so utterly meaningless even compared to other internet bans, it makes more sense to assume they just banned something so that people would stop talking about it. It's as if someone was on a crusade against video games, banned literally one video game
Pornography isn’t an education tool. If anything, it hinders education by setting unrealistic expectations.
[flagged]
Another service which tries to fill this gap with a unique offering is https://getadultpass.com/
They basically add 'verification headers' to the original website through a proxy solution, allowing visitors to browse sites with some level of age verification regardless of their location. They are more focused on the 'privacy aspect'.
I am surprised Pornhub hasn't acquired a VPN company yet...
Then you can prove collusion to circumvent whatever legislation is there.
and im surprised pornhub is still the de facto normie smut site but here we are
I don't even understand why people bother, given that there a millions of porn sites out there, why would you stick to pornhub in particular?
CMV: cocomelon and TikTok are much worse for children than porn
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Oh no, a Jewish person? Reminds me of that horrible horrible Jew they called Jesus Christ.
I support banning porn. You've got coordinated "teams" of men, most of them diagnosable sociopaths, who work as a group to manipulate and destroy teenagers. For every one woman you see on a porn website, there's a network of 10 men who are working as a coordinated team to manipulate her. Most of the young women are from broken homes, many of them are low IQ, and many of them were sexually abused as children by male authority figures. The male pornographer teams work together to push the teenage women into harder and harder stuff, basically stuff that causes more permanent physical and psychological damage. Once the woman has reached her capacity for pain and humiliation, she's cast out of the scene, likely with a drug addiction, likely ending up in prostitution. Saying that porn is "sexual education" or "empowering" or whatever is like saying that factory farming is the same as James Herriot-type farms. They're different in kind: in brutality, scale, and automation.
If you visit a website like Pornhub then you're complicit in this.
Sounds like you've heard of a few cases of abuse and are extrapolating that to every single person that works in porn. It doesn't work like that.
For the most part, the actors just get paid per scene, know what they're getting into, and have clear boundary and consent terms.
Then there's all the amateur stuff too.
You should provide sources. And after that, you could be presented other sources that present much cleaner environments. It will depend.
...So, what you have said is "Shoes are made in sweatshops: ban shoes".
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Replying to the dead post below: yes, you have as if declared that "all shoe production is substantially like torturing geese for foie gras", but we note that "producing shoes does not necessarily involve torture", hence "you cannot ban shoemaking because of local abuses".
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Im sorry but you sound completely delusional to me. Whats next, rock and roll turns kids satanic?
Lovely, people would go to prison, just to see some porn!
> engaging in illegal activities while using a VPN remains prohibited under French law.
https://medium.com/@green21/is-vpn-legal-in-france-exploring...
France has very stupid and strict laws, that apply accross borders! For example paternity test gets you two years, even when physically done in another country!
It’s illegal for porn sites in France to operate without imposing age verification. That doesn’t mean that it’s illegal for French residents to use porn sites without age verification.
Wait what? You can't do a Paternity test in France?
Correct. I believe it has to be court-ordered and even then it's rare. DNA testing is also generally illegal unless for medical reasons. They claim this is to "uphold family peace" because "fatherhood is social, not biological". It seems incredibly wrong to me in that they are removing the father's right to choose whether to enter that social role when it is not biologically mandated.
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https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F14042?...
Also in Germany and probably some other countries.
Wild. What is the rationale?
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Maybe it just seems like a lot but it’s interesting how much shit Texas got for its age verification law when other western countries either were doing similar or pushing for similar laws. UK, Canada, France, Australia, I think I saw someone in the comments say Germany has something similar.
Pornography isn’t all that healthy but so is parents not stepping up and educating their kids on sex, even if it is awkward to talk about.
> UK, Canada, France, Australia
Many Western countries are past the limit of a damaged authority. People just listen to the legislative novelties and nod.
Pornography and sex education are two different things and I’d argue that pornography hurts education.
A better way would be to only allow soft content for unverified users, so youngsters wouldn't be brainwashed and hooked by the excessive ram up a train in someone's arse kinda mindless, cromagnon like content. Politicians must be replaced with something more human centric. All they do is bring forth rules to deny something, instead of trying to cure the epidemic porn brings into the life of everyday people.
> instead of trying to cure the epidemic porn brings into the life of everyday people
Eh?!
This makes no sense. Is it something like "smartphones bring addiction", i.e. the inability to deal with a tool normally as duly, because some people were left immature, is taken as an excuse to fall into bad logic?
If everyday people faint in front of begonias, it's not the begonia. Treat the roots.
Of course since you have zero exposure.
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