No more Pornhub? That will depend on what happens with a Senate bill

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 83 points –
cbc.ca

No more Pornhub? That will depend on what happens with a Senate bill::A Senate bill might cause the owners of Pornhub to block access to the site in Canada, its owners say.

44

As some wise man once said:

I'm fairly sure if they took porn off the internet, there'd only be one website left, and it'd be called "Bring back the porn!"

options include the establishment of a digital ID system or services that can estimate an individual's age based on a visual scan of their face.

Oh yeah... I'm sure that won't cause any unintended issues at all...

In a world where there's VPN ads literally everywhere and even bitcoin ATMs, I'm sure that will be of tremendous effectiveness

Just like the pop up notice when you visit pornhub for the first time and asks you to click whether you are 18 or not.

Which makes me wonder what happens when you click that you're not.

I clicked it out of curiosity, once. It just took me to Google.

I'd like to try that too, but unfortunately I'm over 18.

You could get a child to click that button for you

So it would just be fair if all users on Google with wrong age would be linked to PH in return. (jk)

I gotta wonder if these people know that these kinds of laws will do nothing, and they are just pandering, or if they actually think this time they got it

I think they all just fundamentally don't understand how the Internet works and how it doesn't care about borders.

They approach it like companies are providing services to users directly like you just walked into a store and they're in full control of everything. Like companies are explicitly entering all the markets worldwide by being available on the Internet and providing their services to users. Obviously if you provide services to Canadian users you must be a company with a presence on Canadian soils.

Except you can't exactly put customs on the Internet like you can block sketchy imports from China when they arrive at the border. It literally crosses the border at the speed of light.

I'm reasonably certain that once enough governments jump on the "we need to control the internets" bandwagon, there will be a region specific convention adopted similar to country codes for phone numbers so that they can, in fact, apply customs to it...

I suspect it won't be in the name of righteousness though, more likely it'll be taxes, copyright, etc, on internet sales that trigger it.

Don’t IP addresses already provide you with region info?

America's IP addresses are governed by ARIN, how long until you see that name in headlines for controversy...

But somewhere down the line someone knows, either the lawmakers, or the advisors, or maybe they all know and it's just grandstanding to those of the public that don't know.

Really all this does is train the people with the drive or ability to learn things like DevOps to be even better at circumventing it, well this is not that hard, but generally, laws like this.

23 more...

Let's start blocking websites in our country because it might be inappropriate for the children. Yes I understand that it is very easy to get around but ask yourself how many pornographic websites are out there...Who is going to decide which sites or content is ok? AI? LOL

This is what parental controls are for. Why is the government trying to be every kids parent? This is definition of big brother. Say it's for the kids to get people on board then use that info for other means.

I don't care about porn sites personally but to what end will this take us?

I will snap in this motherfucker if I can't look at femboys with big tiddies

I enjoy these threads. I have noticed people really hate two themes here: (1) internet censorship, and (2) people screwing with their porn :)

(I'm not a pornhub user, nor advocating for the internet censorship nonsense, just a devils advocate question for fun)

Pretend for a second it was reasonably feasible to enforce this, so I'm asking you to forget how the internet/VPNs/tons of options work :)

  • If a site like pornhub 'PROMISED' to not log any user data under threat of death, but all they did was run a query against some government database that verifies age >= 18, would you do it?

  • Also, the government database 'PROMISES' to not log the source of the age only verification queries, would you do it?

So, if you say no, is it because you believe there's no way each of those organizations would keep their word or something else?

I don't trust them first off, but even trusting them to not voluntarily disclose it doesn't mean they won't have a security breach and disclose it involuntarily. Also, the database has to be created and queried somehow; some employees and govt workers will be able to see what queries are made. Even trusting the business and the govt and the security of both, I don't trust those random people having access to that info.

What evidence do you have to give the website that you are person X that they're running the database query against? If that's an ID there's going to be some available online, or a kid can just sneak it from the parent. Everything I've heard proposed for the identification strategy is either grossly invasive or quite easy to step over.

I don't believe that Canada will actually enforce this across all websites. If they do it on only the large/main ones, it makes it harder for kids to access the relatively safe and legal porn hosted on sites making effort to follow the law, and pushes them towards sites that aren't making such an effort and therefore probably have more objectionable content.

To put a positive spin on that...

If they enforced it on the big sites it would push many users (not just the kids) to other sites.

This could work toward breaking up the monopoly held by just a few big porn companies, and could be a good thing for the consumers.

Not all smaller sites are inherently nefarious. Maybe we'll see some competition start to rise. And maybe that competition won't be entirely full of "I fucked my sister/brother and/or my mom/dad" type porn like all the big companies keep cranking out.

Yeah, I agree with not liking people having that info, but ISPs do, unless you use VPN, and then the VPN does.

We just usually don't hear of that getting leaked from VPN providers since their reputation is on the line.

Data breach would also be a bummer. If a criminal group takes the time to breach a government database, I think it would be wasted effort to try black mailing people over porn access. Unless you're a priest. Then uh oh.

The way you get positive ID that can't be skirted is with government issues ID card with PKI. All US federal employees have ID cards issued by their department. It has certs that let you sign into computers, sign documents, etc. It's 2FA, card and a PIN.

Every driver in the US is supposed to have a driver's license. They just need to add PKI to them. Then you sign into a website with your DL and PIN. You'd never need a million accounts anymore. Caveats apply.

Torrenting porn is still alive and well, so who cares?