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Pornhub goes dark in Arkansas after age verification law kicks in::Pornhub operator MindGeek has blocked all users in Arkansas from the site after the state’s new age verification law went into effect.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Pornhub operator MindGeek has blocked all users in Arkansas from the site after the state’s new age verification law went into effect on Tuesday.
The Arkansas law, SB 66, doesn’t ban Pornhub from operating in the state, but it requires porn sites to verify that a user is 18 by confirming their age with identifying documents.
On Wednesday, Pornhub blocked all traffic from IP addresses based in Arkansas in protest, arguing that the law, which was intended to protect children, actually harms users.
“While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk,” MindGeek wrote in a message replacing the site’s front page for affected users.
Responding to this wave of bans, MindGeek has decided to block access to its sites from states where the laws have gone into effect.
So, instead of rolling out age verification systems, it says it decided to block access entirely, calling on users to contact their state representatives to oppose these laws.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot! I didn’t know I missed having a summary until now
Having one in link posts really should be mandatory in the rules for most communities
I appear to be in the small minority, but I do not think we should be relying on an AI to summarize stories for us because the AI doesn’t actually know what are important details.
On the other hand, having some people who read a summary that skips some important parts when they otherwise wouldn’t have read the article at all, might be worth the trade off it brings of people who would have read the article now reading an incomplete summary. The net amount of people who go into the comments more informed about the topic past whatever is in the headline would be decently higher, and personally I see that as one of the best ways to increase the quality of discussion overall.
Author of the bot here, so obviously biased, but the bot so far is doing really great at picking the important parts. And sure, it doesn’t know, but it’s really good at guessing and I dare say better than many actual people would be at picking 6 sentences to summarize the article.
Good bot
What is the expectation for compliance here? Are users supposed to scan their physical ID and upload that to PH, then PH checks age against that?
The bill says that commercial entities serving pornography are required to do age verification through either verifying a driver’s license, verifying another piece of government-issued identification, or through the use of any commercially viable age verification mechanism.
So, yeah, I’d imagine compliance to look like either uploading a photograph or scan of an identity card or document for the site operators to check, or uploading it to an affiliated service which does age verification on their behalf.
Which is obviously horrendous from a privacy and information security standpoint for the consumer, and exposes the site operator to costs and legal risk associated with verifying and storing sensitive personal information.
Good bot
Arkansas: your kids should be working in a mine, not wanking online
Arkansas: where the people rule! (Until we, the ones decidedly ruling over the people, decide we don’t like what you’re doing and think it’s icky.)
Everyone in Arkansas is still watching their porn, from the pimply teenagers on up to the crotchety old politicians who came up with this shit.
It’s all a political stunt so that the (significant) bloc of evangelical/social conservative voters in the state can feel like they got a win, and in turn they’ll reelect the old white guys that signed it into law next fall.
Politicians get a win, evangelicals get a “win”, and everybody keeps on watching exactly the same amount of Internet porn as they were before this law went into effect.
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no one gives a shit about karma here, son
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Man it’s been a while since I cared about minimum karma requirements for posting. You’ve gotta be either obtuse (to your own detriment) or very stupid to not rack up karma.
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small gov party btw
Small government taxation of the rich party
I know a lot of Republicans that hate how both parties have become. We need some independents to vote for. There’s a lot of us that are caught in the middle. I agree with the small govt part of traditional Republicans, and agree with a lot of what the left has. For whatever reason. All we get is some bullshit extreme from either side.
What about normal ass people that just want people to leave them the fuck alone, pay taxes, keep their roads working, and stop wasting (literally stealing) our fucking money
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/0C3gc_8XZro
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
To be fair, porn is a little lower on the “first they came for the -----” list than he was probably expecting. He likely thought he had a few more marginalized groups to take the fall before the leopards started eating HIS face. But yeah, reap what you sow.
So your boss found out at about this at work? 🤔
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I dunno, I would feel weird watching porn with my kids.
I don’t like child porn myself, but… Different folks, I guess…
Not every porn is child porn. Please stop acting like we are the bad guys and that you don’t think of anything sexual at all at any point in your life…
“We must blame them and cause a fuss, before somebody thinks of blaming us!”
Oh no. I’m in Arkansas.
Guess I’ll turn on the VPN.
I’m in Arkansas
I’m sorry.
I grew up there. The northern part of the state is honestly one of the prettiest parts of our country. It is also filled with some of the most vile people. Vile people from everywhere else go there to retire and add to the smegma pot.
You just described basically the whole south.
Hey! I’m from Texas and… Fuck there’s Mansfield.
Mansfield sounds a bit gay ngl
Not true. There are many shitty looking places in the south that don’t attract remote retirees but are equally vile.
add to the smegma pot
Good lord.
the smegma pot.
That phrase evokes quite the image.
It is a beautiful state, especially the part in the ozark mountains. But there is no way I could live there because of the people. It also lacks a single great city (Little Rock is a dump).
Why a dump? I thought it was a pretty decent place for living in, if it wasn’t for the state.
Me too :( I hate it here (For reasons other than Pornhub)
I’m European so I don’t know that much about stuff like this, but isn’t it kinda easy to move from state to state in US?
It is. If you have money. Trust me, if I had the funds, I’d be somewhere different in a heartbeat.
It is, but with a few caveats that can make it outright impossible, largely down to financial issues.
From a legal standpoint, it’s only slightly more annoying than moving from one town to another. You don’t have to go through any sort of immigration process or anything, you just inform the state you’re leaving and the state you’re moving to of the change in address, and then get tax/identification stuff done like registering your car in the new state and getting an in-state driver’s license.
Financially, the housing market is a mess in the US right now for a number of reasons, from the number of new houses being built not keeping up with population growth for like 60 years and many empty houses being in unlivable condition due to lack of maintenance, to many homes being owned by investment companies (and wealthy Chinese apparently) as basically a high yield savings account or bought up by companies and people turning them into rental property. And that’s before you get into the logistics of moving your life to a new home.
Heh, sounds suspiciously similar to what’s happening in my country. Except here it’s wealthy Russians instead of wealthy Chinese. Seems the whole western world is the same kind of fucked when it comes to housing.
Oh no. I’m in Arkansas.
That’s putting it mildly
I recommend using Tor browser as an alternate option. For anybody who can’t use a VPN or doesn’t want to.
I’m not sure if streaming 1080p video over Tor would be very appreciated by the rest of the network. Or that it would be a very pleasant experience.
Do you always stream porn in 1080p? I guess I never thought about the quality, but I honestly don’t expect anything more than 720
Does the resolution really matter? I may be wrong, but I think nobody runs a Tor node, giving away their bandwidth for free and risking jail time, just so that some random dude in Arkansas can watch some porn.
Definitely not the right scenario for tor. If you dont care about your privacy and just want to see some titty boombom Fanny maracas then even the cheapest VPN would be a better experience.
Really though a decent VPN should something everyone has access to though anyway.
I think a vpn is simpler than tor personally. Also then videos gonna be buffering for a minute on tor lol
It’s not “simpler” at all because it includes the step of paying. But, indeed, better for this application.
Not necessarily. Granted installing the Tor browser will set up the services/daemons and access to the appropriate ports in the background, but generally the Tor protocol has a lot more going on than a VPN.
Additionally a VPN can be had for free from certain services like ProtonVPN. It’s not as fast as a paid VPN service, but during lower traffic times it’ll suffice. Plus if you know how to torrent over a VPN, then you just download the vids that way and you don’t need internet access every time you want to watch it.
This plus using CLI tools like yt-dlp on sites like pornhub, xhamster, etc, and you really start to realize how ineffective bullshit laws like these are for increasingly more technically savvy youths.
the step of paying? lol. i’m not sure that constitutes difficulty.
Nobody is going to prefer tor to a vpn.
I just use OperaGX’s shitty free VPN if I need it. It works enough to get any vpn needed jobs done.
Very Pretty Neice/Nephew?
We sleep with our cousins here. Not our nieces or nephews. That’s Alabama.
That’s grim
So is the dating scene in Arkansas.
The party of small government.
For a party that prides itself on being all about “small government” and “no nanny state,” this is some surprisingly big government nanny state shenanigans
The small government libertarian types were lowered in priority in the party after two decades of people pandering to them because there’s basically nobody out there that’s a fiscal conservative and a social liberal.
Trump and his grip on the GOP are evidence again of that same thing. There are more “conservatives” that are actually fiscal liberals and social conservatives than there are right libertarians.
The rich would (for the most part) love to get the tax breaks and allow people to do whatever they want socially, but that (and virtue signaling) are not enough to rile up the fascist voters and evangelicals anymore.
They’ve crossed the Rubicon with Trump and now it’s full on censorship and other Nazi tactics to take us back to the good old (non-existent) days.
I’m just going to sit over here in my fiscally conservative and socially liberal corner.
(Although, I’m good with some level of safety nets still)
In fairness, this is a state law. States rights being part of the Republican platform during my childhood. Just another reason not to go to/live in Arkansas
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Is it?
I think “you can’t show porn to kids” seems like something well within the authority of a state to make a law about, even if the implementation is hamfisted and ineffective.
My understanding is that porn would be considered obscenity, and obscenity is generally not protected by the first amendment, and can generally be regulated much more strictly.
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This isn’t “you can’t show porn to kids,” this is “you have to provide an official ID to see porn.” Aside from just basic surveillance state issues, what happens when there’s the inevitable data breach?
Small government is allegedly still at part of the Republican platform at the state level. For a small government party, they sure do like to dictate what’s going on in people’s bedrooms.
This is interestingly why Democrats once performed better at the local level. There was a sizeable block that would split their ticket on state lines.
Republicans only cry States Rights when the federal government is attempting to make someone’s life better or when they want to take something away
They cry states rights as a tactic because they can control some states. If they had a supermajority on the national level they’d be passing abortion bans, contraceptive bans, trans bans, and any number of other abhorrent piles of garbage through at the federal level.
Note how they give not a single shit about states rights to regulate firearms or allow abortions.
“just move”
You know, there is a reasonable reading of the comment that doesn’t involve the assumption that they are telling people to move FROM Arkansas. Intentionally avoiding visiting the state, and intentionally avoiding relocating there, are quite different than the standard “LEAVE THE STATE” comment.
They used to claim they wanted a small government meaning not telling people what to Jack off to. It wasn’t solely about the federal government. Of course if you ask them you quickly find out it’s freedom for them to do anything they want while subjecting all of us to disgusting fascist fascinations
Who in their right mind would expect a free porn site to go to this level of hassle?
Or is this a puritanical measure in disguise?
It’s the second one. I saw article where they talked how Florida was the first to pass it, pornhub put time and money into developing what they needed to comply and saw a 90% decrease in traffic because nobody wants to hand over their ID for free porn.
Wouldn’t even want to hand over my ID for a paid service.
After MindGeek started complying with the Louisiana law earlier this year, the company said traffic dropped by 80 percent.
It’s literally in the linked article lol
Pornhub would make more money simply starting a vpn service rather than try to gather IDs
They already do
Ohhhh fuck is it viewer’s age verification… I assumed it was the people in the porn… As if this is gonna stop horny kids from seeing porn
It’s to stop people from watching porn, they don’t care about kids.
yeah, the smart teenager is going to be charging the adults in his life $50 to get their porn working again.
Pretty sure PH already requires ID for people in porn. That’s why they wiped half the uploads some years ago pending accounts verifying themselves.
When this happened in Utah a few months ago, Google searches for VPN increased in like over 1000%.
The best Free VPN IMO is ProtonVPN,
For a general user that just wants a comprehensive google replacement, proton unlimited at $12/mo is a pretty good deal. Comes with the VPN premium and a password manager (now).
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And way more private by accepting Monero and requiring no registration, but they don’t have solutions for my Calandar, Cloud Drive, email with custom domain, etc. hence “drop in google replacement”.
I do not understand the need to have your passwords stored somewhere in the cloud. I’d better sync them by a wire if I had several devices, not like passwords change every day. And there are cheaper VPNs out there with better reputation.
It’s not like they are plaintext, and increased availability/ redundancy would be one potential reason for deciding to have a cloud synced password manager database.
There are other solutions that you can self host or create yourself, and if that works better for you and your use case, I encourage it.
VPN industry lobbyists disguised as morality crusaders if you like tin foil hats as much as I do. Most likely not though, just people who feel the need to control how others spend their time and precious bodily fluids.
I don’t think it’s especially disguised…
Especially since PornHub has an excellent point. Even though they theoretically could do an ID check, the sketchier porn sites simply wouldn’t. All these laws would do is push minors to use more dangerous porn sites. They’re not going to not watch porn just because the big, law abiding site checks IDs.
Didn’t read the bill cause pdf and cause it’s a bill, but found another article describing it, and it says at the end:
The bill also would apply to material that as a whole lacks serious “literary, artistic, political, and scientific value for minors.”
Isn’t that like 99% of the internet?
Why are you against Pdf files?
Edit: Though reading my question out loud I get it…
(Are we anti postscript document format now? Did I miss a haters meeting??)
“Now?”
PDF files have been widely hated for as long as they have existed. They’re good for printing and not much else. Definitely not a user-friendly substitute for a text file or web page.
The are a requirement for distributing a document that has to look the same on every device. I don’t love them and Adobe can go take a flying fuck but if I NEED to make sure that my boss doesn’t alter a document it has to be a PDF.
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PDF is an Open Standard, the problem is that every site tells you that you can only open it with a program from Adobe.
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Just don’t like opening on phone, my browser doesn’t open, so it asks to download, then i end up with a bunch of random useless files there. Don’t u skip search results that lead to pdfs?
Pdfs are like the best for reading. Consistent format on every device.
They just suck to create or edit.
They suck to edit but you can create them in most Free/Open/Libre software. It’s my favorite way to distribute drawings so that they print the same on every machine.
I actively search for them, moonreader catalogs everything. Having about half a TB on the phone file system also helps, but to be fair, since 2016 I never have filled any phone file system in a meaningful way
Sounds like all online games too
Things you aren’t legally allowed to do in Arkansas: watch porn, have an abortion, read, write, or wipe your ass.
I get the impression not a lot of people were reading, writing, or wiping there even when it was legal.
Dang, if kids just had some kind of guardians that would be responsible for their media consumption while every media device out there had basic functionality to support such supervision.
It is completely unrealistic to control kids media consumption after a certain age without also infringing on their rights to privacy. Basically, you can’t do it right as a parent. You are either helicopter parenting or you aren’t controlling enough. It’s funny how we shift blame entirely to parents on this while ignoring that it’s an impossible task. And I am not even a parent.
It’s not hard to talk to your kids about porn or the existence of sex. Masturbation is ok and natural.
I think unhealthy sexual behavior comes from denying that masturbation and sex are perfectly normal and healthy activities. It’s important as a parent to let your kids know about the potential risks (STDs, pregnancy, porn addiction) and to educate on consent. Give your kids a roadmap and advice, but don’t blanket ban or shame and they should be healthy about sex.
It needs to be done at school. Sex is a part of lives (we don’t have more humans without it.) By teaching kids about sex (in an age approprate way) they can learn how to have sex responsibilty, how to see the signs that someone has ill intentions (no one touches you there without permission etc…), as well as the importance of consent. Teens are going to have sex so we might as well prepare them for it.
You will all go blind.
/s
Well, except the traditional parents don’t think that way or just won’t do it, so saying that doesn’t matter in the cultural context. I don’t think there’s a solution to that except moving to a place more aligned with our values.
Was that supposed to be a reaction to my comment? I was talking about expecting parents to supervise all and every media consumption of their children.
Healthy, open discussion contributes to a reduced need for parental controls and monitoring, but paired together parents have more than enough to help their kids develop into fully functioning humans.
You make it sound like without strict monitoring 24/7 kids will turn into porn addicts and lose all sense of all other facets of life.
The problem is that far right Catholic types won’t touch the subject on a personal level, and will try to abuse government to save themselves from what shouldn’t be but is an uncomfortable conversation.
?? Where do I make it sound like that?
Every phone and computer has parental control options that allow for as much control as you feel necessary. And obviously as you kids gets older you have to trust in your upbringing - but that’s also completely on you, to teach your kids to deal with modern media.
I’ve been using the parental controls to lock out FOX and other crap.
Sucks to suck.
No, not every phone and computer has parental control options. What about the PCs at libraries and schools? What about older siblings? Other students? Friends of the kid? It’s completely unrealistic to claim parents should just supervise every media usage.
People also aren’t robots where you put “upbringing” in and get predictable results. You can teach them all you want, unless you completely ignore all privacy rights of your children, you won’t be able to control their media consumption.
No, not every phone and computer has parental control options.
Which one don’t have one? And even if there are few - it’s not hard to get one with for your kids.
What about the PCs at libraries and schools?
Even in my day and age we had restricted access to things on our school pc - learning to get around it was the only useful thing I learned in those classes. But here the same, there are software solutions to control access on local machines.
What about older siblings? Other students? Friends of the kid?
What about them? They all also have parents or people responsible for them.
It’s completely unrealistic to claim parents should just supervise every media usage.
Because they should not. They should teach children to use media and gradually trust them more and more to make their own decisions. Like with everything else.
You can teach them all you want, unless you completely ignore all privacy rights of your children, you won’t be able to control their media consumption.
And as I said, you should not -you should teach them and then learn to trust them - that’s hard part of being a parent, you don’t have control over your childs life.
No real side in this debate because I don’t have kids and am basically an anti-natalist but I don’t think it’s terribly important to control kids media access above a certain age anyway.
It’s probably important to prevent them from accidentally seeing irrelevant filth, and may make sense to prevent them from accessing certain stuff before they’re ten or eleven. But I had near unfettered access to the wild world of the Internet from a young age and I don’t think it made a big negative difference.
I personally think it was important to my development to be able to explore things on my own terms in the relatively safe way of accessing pages on the Internet.
I do think, however, that social media is likely riskier than media consumption for children in certain age groups, but most parents seem to be a-ok with their kids mainlining that and worried instead that they may accidentally see a nipple.
Which one don’t have one?
The ones I mentioned directly after… Please, do not quote out of context.
I feel like people miss the context of the original content and put words in my mouth. I was referring to the claim that parents can “simply” supervise, and should supervise, all media consumption of their children. Which I argue is impossible without infringing on the children’s rights of privacy.
It’s like people misinterpret my point with intent. Or there is a huge language barrier I can not comprehend.
You can not supervise every media consumption of your children. That is all I wanted to say. I didn’t even comment upon whether or not and how good it works (or not) to teach your children about responsible media consumption. That’s a whole different topic.
The ones I mentioned directly after… Please, do not quote out of context.
So none. All devices have the capability to control access.
Which I argue is impossible without infringing on the children’s rights of privacy.
But that whole conversation is in context of governmental control vs. parental control. In my opinion governmental control infringes much more on everyones rights in this case. So obviously your statement is interpreted in this context, not in vacuum.
Parents do not have access to parental control on devices of other children, other adults, school, libraries, etc.
Do you think the same way about physical media? Like, do you think we should be letting kids buy porn magazines? Or that it should be legal for someone to wait outside a school and hand kids porn as they walk home?
Pretty sure it’s already illegal to distribute porn online to kids.
In other, unrelated news, VPN’s are experiencing an unexpected spike in traffic. More at 5.
I don’t understand why they use pornhub, it’s so much easier for them to get actual sex with their favorite dating app: 23andme.
23.5andme
Do Arkansans have a reputation for inbreeding ?
Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Both the carolinas, and missouri are all commonly made for of for their perceived incest issues
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Vpn searches bout to go upFTFY
I wanna see over the next year how rape and sexual harassment rates change.
Oh man, if only we had statistics from countries where porn is banned, or some sort of scientific study from multiple countries where porn was banned and then unbanned to see what the change was…
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.htm
Spoiler: They’ll probably go up slightly.
Not sure what the spirit is behind this comment, but for all the cases that could be made in advocacy for porn, I don’t think this should be one. If porn is the only thing keeping rape cases from drastically increasing, there is something much more broken in our society, and access to porn won’t fix that.
Edit: Holy shit, guys. I thought poor reading comprehension and inflammatory dog-piling was something that wouldn’t be so commonplace, after moving here from Reddit. Where did I say I support anything about what these pieces of legislation are enforcing? Every single response I’ve gotten so far has been arguing different points of discussion, of which my comment has nothing to do with. All I said was “GIVE THE RAPISTS THEIR PORN SO WE CAN BE SAFE!!!” isn’t exactly a strong angle to approach the issue from. One user is even sharing a study that includes data showing that giving pedophiles access to child pornography reduces rates of sexual assault with children. Like, no shit, but is the lack of child pornography really the core issue at that point? Don’t bother replying to me if you just want to put words in my mouth, and assume my stances on topics which I so far haven’t shared.
The spirit is quite clearly that rape and abuse numbers will likely go up slightly anywhere porn is banned.
Nobody said “drastically.”
Holy shit I never thought I’d get to use line before.
“Anyway, walk to your cars in pairs tonight. Rape’s up 8 percent”
Do you lock your door at night or when you leave? You shouldn’t have to, but you currently need to. So it would be stupid not to.
You’d rather rape rates be higher because the knob we know we can turn is slightly distasteful?
Edit: GP is a coward and edited their comment rather than try to defend their pro-rape stance.
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“human nature” is such a loaded phrase that generally is only used justify bullshit. and linking some article from some site that reports on some study somewhere isn’t going to change that
I am utterly unsurprised that there is evidence of a correlation between access to pornography and rates of sex-related crimes. However, I stand by what I said.
“We shouldn’t use evidence that banning porn has a potentially deleterious effect to make a decision on banning porn. We should use The Jesus!”
It’s not OUR society that you’re responding to. It’s NUMEROUS societies.
The rest of the world does exist, ya know.
You are just shoveling words into my mouth, but go off dude. Hope you feel better.
No spirit at all. Genuinely want to see if / how these change.
I have a feeling they wont.
Well, that basically is an age check. People of Arkansas are obviously not old enough to deal with porn when they support a government that produces such stupid laws.
Won’t someone think of the horny Arkansans?
Seriously the Republicans are beyond the pale.
Reps are using The Handmaid’s Tale as an instruction manual.
Arkansans
Arkansawns? While pronounceable, I don’t think that is the correct way to personify that word.
I’m leaning towards Arkansinians
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We usually say Arkansan.
Source: Am Arkansan
Well that was my best guess haha.
Freedum loving repubeicans inbound to other states?
They already go to the more liberal states for their abortions and their weed. Might as well download some porn while on the dispensary wifi.
