Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

This is interesting, but I’d like to go a step further. I watched the first quarter of the video on where they go over how it works. The site requests data from your ID and they get that data. The site chooses which data it needs and if it will store it or it or not. Sites these days have a tendency to ask for more than what they need, and to store it for profiling purposes. The user can deny the request, but then can’t use the site. They are then left with a dilemma. Give up this personal information or not have access at all? Companies are betting on users giving up privacy in exchange for access.

What I’d like to see is for the site’s request to contain their access rules. Must be over 18, must be in country X, etc. Then on-device it checks my ID against that rule set, and simply returns a pass/fail result from those checks. This way the site would know if I’m allowed to be there, but they don’t get any specific or identifiable information about me. Maybe I’m 18, maybe I’m 56… they don’t know, they both simply send a pass. For a simple age check, a user’s exact birthday, name, address, etc are irrelevant, but I bet companies will get greedy and try to pull it anyway.

I see the monkey paw of the ID spec as leading to more companies seeking to get all our data, when they really don’t need it, and have shown they can’t be trusted with it.

I already see this with Apple Pay. When buying a digital item, some companies are awesome and simply take the payment with no other data. Others pull name, address, email, etc to make a payment when none of that is required.

For what it’s worth these mDL providers are the people already contracted to provide the services for the government to manage the IDs and the IT system for the DMV. They were part of the ISO standardization body for mDL. Not sure California’s choice pressured Apple so much as it being an international standard that had support from the governing bodies in Europe, UK, North America and Japan (met all of them there).

Apple wasn’t there when I was and even broader Google joined about 6 months after I left Google in 2015 (I was just proactive about seeing the standard coming) but the big players hopped on board later in the process.

We were all also acutely aware of the privacy implications and making sure the bodies would sign records of >18, >21 to avoid having to share too much info (pre ZKproofs being more widely accepted recognized).

> Marcos Caceres (Apple Inc.) > Tim Cappalli (Okta) > Mohamed Amir Yosef (Google Inc.)

Don't forget: these are the upstanding members of society who brought the dystopia to you.

Personally i'd be much more excited about something like https://zkpassport.id/

While I completely understand the slippery slope concept, we ban all kinds of things for under 18s based on morals. Why couldn't these be any different? How else does a society decide as a whole what they are for or against. Obviously, there should be limits.

The hilarious part is this only regulates American speakers. If you want to sell Americans porn and ignore the age gate, publish from abroad.

The slope isn't slippery, it's paved with a Starbucks on the way. This process is outlined in detail in Project 2025 to get around 1A being used as a defense because the aim is to define anything as lgbt related as pornography.

The current administration has collected nearly all the pieces of Exodia to be able to legally criminalize homosexuality and transgenderism without ever writing a law that says those exact words and have it be held up as constitutional. I'd say it was clever if it wasn't awful.

Only for sites hosted in the US. They’ll still be able to access Russian content on the matter of course. The land of the free web.

For example, banning sites that criticize the religion of the mother.

Anti-fallacitical?

> some group of middle age mothers

With all due respect this comes across as mysoginic and ageist. It is also quite unnecessary to your point. Especially because middle aged women aren't the most powerful lobby in the US by any stretch.

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This is a slippery slope towards democracy I tell you! Before you know it they'll be asking for representation.

Seriously, isn't this sort of par for the course? We've always regulated what minors can access on the internet. Facebook didnt even formally allow children on their site (I don't know if that's still the case). I think it's a much larger issue that we haven't been enforcing those rules, since we apparently think they are a good idea.

The early web died when everything went behind the walled gardens.

I would call this a "legal overreach". Laws have nothing to do with morals or morality.

Ethos of the very early Internet. It was mid 90s when people started thinking the Internet was a great resource for kids, and various blacklists arrived for DNS and email and this cool Netscape web browser thing, and Internet providers were chosen on how much of the alt.* Usenet hierarchy they provided or which IRC servers were accessible. Way back when the Internet was academia, porn and piracy and the sysadmins could do little but roll their eyes when people talked about how great it would be when the schools would be able to give their students accounts and they could all hang out in #hottub and slap each other with trouts and other innocent things. ASR?

Its also to little, to late- the smut is in the LLMs now and they can generate whatever the user wants - locally. So good luck censoring that.

How did widespread adoption of the libertarian techno-utopianism of the early web work out for society as a whole?

I bet that in practice, at scale, these zero knowledge proofs end up being a lot more than zero.

Not to mention that you're almost certainly going to have to tie this stuff to specific accounts that will then forever and ever keep your habits collected. One day somebody enterprising is going to add all that data together too.

Do we expect Apple to implement a special, privacy-preserving age proof for porn viewers? Apple hates porn, when it's on websites like Tumblr.

Yet then again how hard is it to just grab your parents' ids while they're not looking and add it to your phone wallet?

It would be preferable if the prover party that holds the credentials in this scenario weren't Google. If anything I'd prefer a government issued digital ID with some form of local-only cryptographic exchange where neither the government knows someone has verified at a particular site/service and the verifier doesn't get info about one's identity. Just some cryptographic proof that verifies an age ('just' is doing some heavy lifting).

In past HN comments this apparently exists IRL in Germany and/or Canada, where age can be proven via a smartphone without leaking one's identity to the verifier and without any communication back to the government.

Eh. So now I'm forced to have all my IDs stored at an advertising behemoth. Not really a great situation either.

You're practically forced to have a Google/Apple account and a google/apple smartphone to even exist in today's world.

Either so few people appreciate the freedom that privacy confers or the perceived conveniences for trading it away are too compelling because of just how little society has done to protect privacy.

I only imagine it changing after a significant cultural change in which the economic value is not held as higher than the value of privacy, but would be delighted to be wrong in this regard.

That's literally what EU privacy laws are about and guess what...

Anti government folk from the USA hated them and decided they were government overreach.

Privacy is required for the mental health of many people, perhaps everyone except the extroverted and naive. Anxiety and fear over people watched, caught, punished, especially innocently. Anxiety and fear over their lack of privacy being abused and harming them, such as currently popularized with identity theft and other crimes, or simple ridicule or bullying. And the resultant chilling effects, where people who wish to speak feel they cannot because they might suffer, especially in cases where this is an actual risk rather than normal existential dread. Without privacy, you can't be inclusive.

I don't feel as strongly about privacy because "community" is what holds civilisation together.

Its nice to have a little space, and to have your own thoughts and opinions, but not at the expense of civilisation.

People should not be able to use privacy to evade responsibility or debts.

We always need to balance freedoms with responsibility.

Final thought is that this is precisely why government and politics is not a joke and needs to be taken seriously. We need small transparent governments we can trust and that are a held accountable.

If you don't trust your government, you've got bigger problems than your privacy.

I appreciate your emotions, but can you explain how it impacts you in practice?

Your ID is effectively stored by the issuer indefinitely. What’s the difference between one and two entities? What’s the difference between two and a hundred?

PICS and ICRA were not adopted by many due to complexity. RTA [1][2] is a more generic header that can be used on any adult site or site that allows user contributed content and is easier to implement. There needs to be a law that requires clients to look for this header if parental controls are enabled. Not perfect, nothing is. Teens will easily get around it but most small children will not which should be the spirit of the ID verification movement. It's better than what we have today. The centralized ID verification sites will push many small sites to Tor and bigger sites to island nations and tax evasion in my opinion. More browsers are natively supporting .onion domains.

Congress critters should be opposed to the centralized ID verification systems as their browsing habbits will be exposed to the world when those sites ooopsie dooopsie "leak" the data or just openly sell it or an employee turns that data into a summarized online spreadsheet of who is into what. The kickbacks and lobbying they may be potentially receiving will not be worth it.

[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single

[2] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-R... [dont follow the links, NSFW]

Don't forget about sex education and literature in general

You’re getting downvoted, likely because the people downvoting you dont realize that Project 2025 explicitly calls for the complete outlawing of pornography and the imprisonment of anyone who produces it. They also frame transgender ideology and LGBTQ+ educational materials as falling under “pornography”, essentially calling for these to be banned.

7 years is crazy. I can't think of a single plausible justification for that that isn't dramaticallly expanding the purported scope of the law

No entity willingly gives up control, and that is what this issue is about.

This is going to impact every book out there, creating an environment where the authors simply can't tell their stories anymore because of someone's moral shock.

Bad things happen in stories to characters, and authors need that flexibility. Its the journey in overcoming these things that makes the story good. The moment you or an author can't express reality without it being a felony, is the moment you no longer have real writers.

Some people don't write for money, and these things impose untenable cost on everyone.

Are you ok with all devices considering the user hostile and coming with heavy encryption and locked bootloaders?

> There should be a clear exemption threshold for low volume indie products, build your own PC, and open source self-install like Linux - since the purpose is to protect ignorant/apathetic consumers.

Then everyone will just follow a YouTube tutorial to reinstall their operating system and bypass restrictions. There were TikTok videos teaching kids how to steal cars, would there not be easy to follow instructions to bypass whatever client side filtering is implemented?

I get where you're coming from, but mandated client side filtering has been tried and has been ridiculed as a complete failure every time. Attempts have been made to market and provide filtering products to parents with little effect, with them either being easy to bypass or difficult to use.

It's actually kind of interesting to see the people who were fighting against client side filtering are now advocating for it, because server side restrictions are the next logical step.

Those drivers check my ID at the door.

>Sure. A government issued certificate that is required to get an IP and be able to navigate the internet. How does that f-+-ing sound?

sounds like the solution to me. disallow under 18s from internet access. any parent who allows an underage to browse the internet unsupervised should be penalized to the same degree that they would if they directly provided hardcore pornography to the child, because thats exactly what it is.

I personally would choose this route, handing kids fully internet enabled pornography consumption devices is beyond ridiculous, and the size factor of smartphones (take them everywhere, camera connected directly to encrypted chats with strangers) well the fact that the government even allows this is simply a matter of confusion to my small mind.

What am I missing here? Why do we allow children internet access?

This would apply to Facebook just as any other site, and that’s obvious to the HN crowd.

It’s the ambulance chaser section of the article that explains the problem.

American Christians can and should rely on content blockers rather than lawsuits.

The issue is that currently, adding restrictions to what minors can do is expensive, both economically, and politically. It requires the cooperation of a lot of non-government appointed people, and many of them could (locally) sabotage the restrictions.

This limits the restrictions to those with incredibly broad support. Keeping a lot of agency with families on how to raise their children.

Digital age verification, if implemented well, is easy to enact, and hard to sabotage without being noticed. That enables restrictions that 49% of people disagree with. Heck, it enables restrictions that 49% of Congress disagrees with. That could be 60% of people disagreeing.

And educating the kids should be, and always has been a collective effort. Even in pre-industrial societies it was true. In the modern world it should be doubly true. I think most people would agree that we need public schools, even though some of them disagree with how sex ed and evolution were taught there.

It’s not the material cigarettes or alcohol that are the problem, it’s lying to get them. Same is true for sins like gambling and explicit romance novels.

The enforcement here is quite twisted: it attracts greedy litigants. Lying is bad, but greed is a mortal sin.

Oh, don't you worry, they'll come after VPNs next. After all, this makes them accomplices to felony acts.

At this point I think accusing conservatives of hypocrisy is blase and yesterday's news.

Of course conservatives are hypocrites. All they care about are their end goals, and they will say and do whatever they need to say and do in order to achieve them.

One of those goals involves enshrining Christian values into law. Christian values themselves are often hypocritical and contradictory. And inconsistent: ask 10 Christians to weigh in on a thorny moral issue and you'll get 15 different answers.

And on top of that, the conservatives in power have a fetish for using those power structures to enrich themselves and their cronies, under the guise of "small government" and "free markets".

I don't think exposing conservative hypocrisy is a winning or useful strategy anymore. Conservatives are masters at cognitive dissonance, and at hand-waving away inconsistencies in their views, or the very real, very negative consequences of their policy plans. I'm not sure what the right strategy is, though. And perhaps this is why liberals fail to win hearts and minds when it matters.

I expect a liquor store to check ID, why not a porn store?

Because 'online' is the entire planet, including sellers in foreign countries. Would you like to have "digital borders" between countries, where data has to show some sort of passport to cross the border?

The Federal harmful-to-minors laws don’t mandate you check IDs. Only some state laws do. You’re better off asking, “why would buying a magazine here in Michigan have anything to do with Rhode Island statutes?”

I don't even disagree with the spirit of what is being attempted here but it is ultimately pointless.

You aren't going to stop teenagers from watching porn if you have the internet.

All this would do is change the websites that teenagers are using.

It strikes me as just political grandstanding since the people putting forth this idea must know it is completely pointless.

Not to mention, a website is vastly different than a physical store.

These are ideological litigious fanatics among a much bigger herd of worried parents. They’ll attack any bypass tool and risk degrading the features of normal stuff like browsers and url parser libraries; totally ineffective at solving the problem but doing something in the eyes of unsophisticated constituents.

1) it doesn’t go as far back as you think. Only within my lifetime did the drinking age settle on 21. The Feds couldn’t do it directly, so they hacked highway funds. So that’s a bad example when porno has changed so much. What we’re risking here is parents who haven’t tried any solutions being convinced that litigation is the only way.

2+3. A simple cookie with a birth year ought to work. Why should every site worry about South Dakota’s definitions when checking a cookie seems reasonable effort. Circumvention of that is already fraud.

> parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device

Tough luck, I say. If you’re going to bring humans into this world, you better do a great job at it and not externalize responsibility or create a nuisance for others.

With all due respect to parents that overscheduled themselves: Tough. Raise your kids. Don't try to raise mine.

> Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.

I'm going to have to upload 3D models of my face and pictures of my ID just to use the internet because... some people don't like the idea of other people's kids using the internet?

This is a good point of course but that's always the issue, no? You may try to hide violence from your children, but if they see gang violence around them it doesn't matter. You can try to hide sexual content from your kids but if they have friends who share the content, hear people talking about it, or live in an area where prostitution occurs, you can't stop them from being exposed to it.

These were problems from before the age of devices. If anything car oriented development has made it easier to control your children's experience diet by controlling their physical proximity.

Fundamentally I think you just need to trust your kids beyond a certain point. Do your best to build constructive consumption habits with them (including restricting access to devices as needed), help build good moral frameworks, but always remember that the world is messy and it's your child's job to synthesize their upbringing with their experiences. We all did the same while growing up

It takes less than 5 minutes to set up NextDNS with the same functionality and it costs $2 a month for unlimited DNS calls. If you download the app it absolutely can police cellular.

If these legislators cared about keeping kids safe, they’d be focused on getting them off social media, not stopping adults from exercising free speech.

> but that’s way beyond the technical capability of probably 95% of people.

It really isn’t, and even if it were an ISP could offer it. Indeed I believe most ISPs do (I chose one which is unfiltered, I do my own filtering at a router and dns level, the biggest threat is DoH)

That still seems better than the proposed cure. Connected devices are overrated.

> parents that are too busy

If you are too busy to parent, then you shouldn't be one in the first place.

>Devils advocate: parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device.

May be such inept people who don't care that much about their kids as to setup parent control shouldn't have kids in the first place? Why we all should take a hit to our rights/business/etc. just because of such careless and irresponsible parents?

Your kids is your personal responsibility. It the same story again and again - why can't these conservative people own their personal responsibilities without hoisting its costs onto the others?

Then they shouldn't let their kids have connected devices. It's that simple.

doesnt realize theyre the problem

Sorry you're experiencing a bunch of downvotes over a counterpoint from your own experience.

Even though I could predict what side HN would stand on any sort of internet freedom post, reading through all the reasonable yet greyed-out comments in this thread feels like HN's last dying breath as a place for genuine debate.

Right, so you're admitting what we already know to be true: it's censorship.

Now, I can get behind some censorship if it's for very good reasons. As soon as it's for moralistic reasons, you've lost me. This is a morality law. Morality laws are bad, period. We need real, concrete reasons for blocking content and enforcing censorship - not morality.

Why not? Because morals change from person to person and throughout history. What an evangelical thinks is moral is different from what I think is moral.

If the internet existed during times of slavery, would they have censored websites addressing freedom because it is "immoral"? In my mind, yes. That's a problem with the entire thought process. So, we should throw the thought process out.

I don't know what the future holds in 10 years, 20 years, 30. I don't want to be bound to laws that rely solely on morality. That's just asking for trouble.

I mean, even just the word "pornography" is a moral footgun. Who defines that? Because a large portion of the US believes anything containing homosexuals is automatically pornographic, regardless of the material.

You should read the article.

The difference between the comments there (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44528204) and here is quite funny.

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Sure, but that is a step from banning because it's harmful to the producer to banning because it's harmful to the consumer

I had very passionate talks online about all 3 categories before I turned 18, and I got a lot of feedback, from older folk I didn't previously know, that I shaped opinions and formed new perspectives - and a lot of the talks sure as shit did the same for me. I cannot say I would have nearly the same current passion that I do for technology, aspects of politics, and philosophy (including that of religion) without such exposures during my adolescent years, and I'm sure you'd be hard-pressed to find others young enough that wouldn't say the same - provided they have an adequate baseline of introspection.

On that note, out of all the examples you could have given for discussion categories that are unbecoming to have with minors, you chose 3 relatively benign ones, lol.

> safe in the knowledge that I am not inadvertently communicating with a minor.

Why is that so bad? As a kid I really appreciated participating in mixed-age discussions on many topics. I view that as part of what it means to grow into a "young adult."

Too often I think we (North American society) assume that school, with all it's rigorous age separation, gives kids the space and instruction they need to do well in the world but inevitably we get 18 year olds with no awareness of how the world functions beyond themselves... because they've only ever dealt with people of the same age.

The world is a diverse place; ideologically, racially, and in age. We, adults, need to be comfortable communicating with both children and legal minors because they'll be future citizens of the world [added in edit:] and they need to learn those skills too.

Overall, we keep trying to model a world that filters it's own interactions towards children, which is flawed to begin with, but at some point people stop being children, and where does that leave them w.r.t. their expectations of others? If you've never had to consider that an adult might act in bad faith because your world has been so sanitized, are you prepared for a world with bad actors in it?

I don't care if they are 16 or 68, I discuss about topics, not necesarily with the person themself. the former can be insightful and the latter still be extremely close minded.

I also don't understand why the government should control who I can talk to in a digital space. Maybe start investigating the president's flight records if you suddenly care about children interacting with adults.

Parent said identity verification, not age verification.

You won't though. Malicious actors will find a way around this - either purchasing or stealing whatever form of ID is used for this. The only people who will suffer are law-abiding citizens simply trying to browse the Internet.

You already have that with Cloudflare checking almost every single website on earth, as you can see, that doesn't work.

That's why "AI" founders do stuff like Altman's Worldcoin. First they reap $$$ while creating a problem then more $$$ when "solving" it.

No idea why you’re getting downvoted when there’s a slow but unstoppable migration of everything into discord or other walled, somewhat LLM-proof gardens.

GAN style training is only going to get cheaper and easier. Detection will collapse to noise. Any ID runes will be mishandled and the abuse will fly under the radar. Only the space of problems where AI fundamentally can't be used, such as being at a live event, will be meaningfully resistant to AI.

Another way for it all to unfold is maybe 98% of online discourse is useless in a few years. Maybe it's useless today, but we just didn't have the tools to make it obvious by both generating and detecting it. Instead of AI filtering to weed out AI, a more likely outcome is AI filtering to weed out bad humans and our own worst contributions. Filter out incessant retorting from keyboard warriors. Analyze for obviously inconsistent deduction. Treat logical and factual mistakes like typos. Maybe AI takes us to a world where humans give up on the 97% and only 1% that is useless today gets through. The internet's top 2% is a different internet. It is the only internet that will be valuable for training data to identify and replace the 1% and converge onto the spaces that AI can't touch.

People will have to search for interactions that can't be imitated and have enough value to make it through filters. We will have to literally touch grass. All the time. Interactions that don't affect the grass we touch will vanish from the space of social media and web 2.0 services that have any reason to operate whatsoever. Heat death of the internet has a blast radius, and much of what humans occupy themselves with will turn out to be within that blast radius.

A lot of people will by definition be disappointed that the middle standard deviation of thought on any topic no longer adds anything. At least at first. There used to be a time when the only person you heard on the radio had to be somewhat better than average to be heard. We will return to that kind of media because the value of not having any expertise or first-hand experience will drop to such an immeasurable low that those voices no longer participate or appear to those using filters. Entire swaths of completely replaceable, completely redundant online "community" will just wither to dust, giving us time to touch the grass, hone the 2%, and make sense of other's 2%.

Callers on radio shows used to be interesting because people could have a tiny window into how wildly incorrect and unintelligent some people are. Pre-internet media was dominated by people who were likely slightly above average. Radio callers were something like misery porn or regular-people porn. You could sometimes hear someone with such an awful take that it made you realize that you are not in the bottom 10%. The internet has given us radio callers, all the time, all of them. They flooded Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. They trend and upvote themselves. They make YouTube channels where they talk into a camera with higher quality than commercial rigs from 2005. There is a GDP for stupidity that never existed except as the novelty object of a more legitimate channel. When we "democratized" media, it wasn't exclusively allowing in thoughts and opinions that were higher quality than "mainstream".

The frightening conclusion is possibly that we are living in a kind of heat death now. It's not the AIs that are scary. Its the humans we have platformed. The bait posts on Instagram will be out-competed. Low quality hot takes will be out-competed. Repetitive and useless comments on text forums will be out-competed. Advertising revenue, which is dependent on the idea that you are engaging with someone who will actually care about your product, will be completely disrupted. The entire machine that creates, monetizes, and foments utterly useless information flows in order to harness some of the energy will be wrecked, redundant, shut down.

Right now, people are correct that today's AI is on an adoption curve that would see more AI spam if tomorrow's AI isn't poised to filter out not just spam but a great mass of low-value human-created content. However, when we move to suppress "low quality slop" we will increasingly be filtering out low-quality humans. When making the slop higher quality so that it flies under the radar, we will be increasingly replacing and out-competing the low-quality content of the low-quality human. What remains will be of a very high deductive consistency. Anything that can be polished to a point will be. Only new information outside the reach of the AI and images of distant stars will be beyond the grasp of this convergence.

All of this is to say that the version of the internet where AI is the primary nexus of interaction via inbound and outbound filtering and generation might be the good internet we think we can have if we enact some totalitarian ID scheme to fight against slop that is currently replacing what the bottom 10% of the internet readily consumes anyway.

be careful what you ask for.

Nothing is going to be "regulated properly" for at least the next 3.5 years, and we'll all be dealing with backwards decline for decades after. That's best case, but i'm guessing It'll be even worse than the "radicals" are shouting about.

What issues do you have with Cloudflare becoming the defacto standard that wouldn't also apply to whatever would come of regulating it 'properly'?

Pretty sure you can guess a few.

This doesn't really track with widespread and normalized use of pornographic materials, including written descriptions, by most adults in this country. There's a pretty wide gulf between "I don't think kids should be able to access this stuff" and "I think we need to supercharge the surveillance state and destroy the first amendment"

Did you miss the recent years of some states trying to ban gay/trans books from libraries? Or even just books written by gay/trans authors? It's been part of their playbook for years to try and assosiate transgenderism with pornographic.

You are right, the average voter is not worried about any single enforcement outside of CSAM. The people who will exploit this are not just "your average voter".

> You open a big can of worms if entities are required to proactively comply with regulations in states they have zero presence in.

It’s true, it would cause a great deal of chaos if suddenly every person and business had to comply with fifty-plus different and sometimes contradictory state laws.

But it seems like that’s where we’re headed?

IANAL, but it seems like things are already moving in this direction. For example, FL has a similar state law regarding pornography, and the response from many porn sites has been to comply or block FL IPs rather than fight it up to the supreme court. I guess someone will do it eventually, but I suspect there is an assumption that they'd be wasting their time and money to do so.

Isn't this covered by the "full faith and credit" clause? [0]

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S1-1/AL...

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First they will find targets, then decide on the crime, then shop the venue.

Unfortunately, this is the law we're talking about. Privacy tools don't do much to mitigate the hardships of life as a fugitive.

This is already happening to queer people who dress in drag.

True, but it's a given that prosecutors will do it since that's their job.

Is there a breakdown of this anywhere?

ie, something that shows what was proposed in p2025 and what policies/procedures/orders have pushed a particular part of the plan forward?

Who is responsible for preventing a child from running into a busy road and being hit by a car? And why, on the internet, does that responsibility seem to fall on everyone else?

With random lawsuits as a sort of offhand censorship of <thing you dont personally like>..??

Its the parents job to curate access to the inernet. I say that as a father of three.

Yes, I believe that ten year olds should only have parent-supervised interactions with the internet.

that is the responsibility of parents. and why is gay erotica any worse than straight? Kids have sought sex information out once they got curious about sex and since there have been things written down and humans learned to read.

Why is it everyone else's responsibility to keep it out of the hands of 10 year olds by being 24/7 surveilled by the government, instead of the parents' responsibility to regulate internet access for their 10-year old?

Not that gay erotica seems that harmful, even for a 10 year old. They probably don't seek it out as much as you thing they do. If they do, it is probably a beneficial step in their development given what they learn about themselves in a safer environment than the probable alternative.

That's a decision for the parents of that kid to make, not the government.

If that were truly the goal we would either need a great firewall style internet filter or blocks on devices available to minors, since nothing about this approach works for websites outside of the US jurisdiction.

If you read the article there is a direct quote from Vought, one of the chief project 2025 architects, about how this is really a path to banning pornography. Which the project 2025 folks believe includes any discussion of lgbtq+ lifestyles.

Far more damage happens by letting 10 year olds have access to firearms

But that is US law, as of literally just this week!

> "In fact, under the laws that the Supreme Court just upheld, prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site."

I think that's the point of the article. The Supreme Court has Ruled:

   "prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines
   and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-
   explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states,
   facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on 
   my dinky little free WordPress site."

> The other is to accept that your kids will sometimes see things that you don't want them to see. That's how the world has always worked, and will continue to always work. Be there for them to provide context and support when they run across these things by accident and are confused or upset, and punish when they seek it out against the rules and boundaries you've set for them. You know... be a parent, and parent them.

Would you say the same about drugs?

It's not about blocking it all. It's about blocking some, removing the monetary incentives to entice children from major players. It's about stopping some of the addiction and damaging effects. Just like we limit alcohol but kids still drink, or vape etc. They still do it, but it requires more effort and that barrier can be a very real barrier to addiction formation.

Are they actually just as hard to block though? e.g. I don't see much reason to allow traffic to any Russian or Chinese IPs for any reason from my network. To be honest a default blacklist to any non-American IP seems like it'd not cause much trouble for my family, and then if there were some educational or FOSS or whatever sites in Europe, those could be whitelisted on a case by case basis.

Similarly the only expected VPN traffic in my network would be inbound to my wire guard server/router. Everything else can be banned by default.

That's not even universally true, though. I've been to bars where they scan the barcode on my drivers' license. I assume that's more convenient than reading the data off it, so maybe they're just doing it for convenience and aren't storing the data anywhere, but who knows, maybe they are. Maybe there's a database somewhere with a list of name, date, time, location tuples for some of my bar visits from years ago. Creepy.

Pot shops in legal states are compiling databases with their compliance CRM systems.

Pot industry needs to anonymize their customer records or stop using SaaS packaged solutions.

Now if China hacks Meadows or something, they have customer and purchase lists which may include security cleared personnel who can now be blackmailed.

If you run a pot shop, or an SaaS solution for them like Meadows, you really have to figure out how to divorce customer PII from purchases.

I am back to the black market in Oregon for this reason!

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I didn't say public libraries, I was going to say bookstore but picked "library" because I wanted to drive home the point that even a kid whose parents didn't give them any money would be allowed to access the materials. My point: if someone opened a facility to knowingly give kids books about sex acts (and not the "sex ed" kind), we would all agree they are a creep.

They wont allow minors to take out porn. Simply, they wont and it would be illegal for them.

Yeah this is the thing everyone here seems to ignore. The moment someone does age verification and downloads a file the whole thing falls apart.

You would have to lock down any electronics device that can be used to bypass the restrictions. In reality the best way to do this is to build a screen based nudity filter into the device, which is not only more effective, it exposes this whole nonsense as an attempt to grow the police state.

By providing technical means to implement such censorship in "more acceptable" ways, you lower the political bar for its passing.

Not only that, but once you do so, you effectively concede that such censorship is valid to begin with, which can and will be used against you to pass further laws along those lines in the future. And if those laws cannot be implemented without ditching all that privacy you worked so carefully to respect in your compromise, well, too bad about that.

Are you assuming the "tech community" doesn't have the right to argue this on morality and thus refuse to provide technical means ?

But we don't need any government intervention for this kind of thing. You can already maintain such a whitelist yourself, and interest groups can collaborate with businesses interested in maintaining their public image to have a centralized registry of voluntary certification for websites (similar to those ratings for e.g. movies that we already have).

Separately from that, if switching DNS servers is an easy workaround to keep access to porn, kids interested in it will quickly learn how to do so, trading recipes and even downloaded content directly. Ditto with Tor etc.

The fundamental problem here is that it is an attempt to censor something for which there is huge demand among the very group that's being excluded. The only way you can do so that would actually work is full-fledged panopticon, where all communication channels are pervasively monitored.

I actually agree with this. One would just need Apple, Google, and Microsoft to buy into this and listing a legitimate site on the registry would be adopted as fast as universal HTTPS was. Keeping pubescent kids from mainly learning about sexuality through the lens of often-disturbing porn is a worthwhile goal.

Still need a solution to age-verify without tracking though, or else people would think of it as something to be turned off immediately since Reddit and X would obviously not be on the registry since they host tremendous amounts of porn.

I don't think that's an intractable problem at all, and I think as technologists we should be putting our efforts into building the most trustworthy system for that instead of just campaigning for nothing to change because it's "the parents' problem." Easy for us to say: We're all either not parents, or we're the type who are equipped to properly filter access to the Internet for our young kids. In reality, the single mom of 3 working 12 hours a day is not equipped to "just" set up a proxy server or figure out how to install internet filtering software on the Amazon Fire tablet she got her 8-year-old to watch Spider-Man.

When did you grow up?

I'd imagine that male nipples are exempted due to the line that mentions "applying contemporary community standards".

Of course, that wording is deliberately vague for a reason. Judges, especially conservative ones, have often let states use wording like that to get away with female-toplessness bans, blue laws, religious imagery in government buildings, etc, since that kind of wording lets them avoid including discriminatory language in the law itself, therefore supposedly not violating the constitution.

I also noticed that! Certainly speaks of the intelligence of the people who write these laws :)

Tenets.

A tenant is somebody who has a lease, for example to an apartment or one of those big metal sheds for a supermarket, and by analogy, customers of something like Microsoft's "Entra ID" (what was "Azure Active Directory" at least the new name is less confusing)

A tenet is a belief or principle that you believe in absolutely, I think we'd say that this "protects but does not bind / binds but does not protect" idea isn't a tenet of Fascism but instead an observable trait.

Thank you for that, I've been looking for a decent pre-AI/Non-wikipedia summary like that. Unsurprisingly but depressingly, at least 13 out of 14 points are a perfect match.

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This is not the gotcha people think it is. Bible thumpers only pay attention to a few sections of the new testament anyways.

It happened a few times https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65794363

The Great Bible Battle

https://archive.md/60QZV

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They never banned abortions for themselves, just made it more difficult to get if you’re not getting an “acceptable” one (i.e. have the money to go where it’s legal or have a private family doctor who can make Bastard Fetus go bye-bye).

The irony of course are stats like these.

From "Data Finds Republicans are Obsessed with Searching for Transgender Porn"[1]:

> So far in 2022, more than 300 anti-LGBT bills have been proposed across 36 states – at least one third of which are directed at trans youth. This surge, especially in anti-trans legislation from Republicans, stands in stark contrast to a startling fact.

> Republicans love transgender porn, a lot.

> With more than 4.7 Million transgender porn related Google searches each month (per Ahrefs.com), do Republicans represent those searching most? The answer seems to be a clear yes.

[1] https://lawsuit.org/general-law/republicans-have-an-obsessio...

You have it backwards, Pornhub preemptively blocked access based on geolocation before the bills even passed.

Breaking news: VPN stocks skyrocket.

Note that pornography is not banned here in Texas at least. You just have to provide age verification, and PH elected not to participate in that process. It doesn’t seem like that wild a thing at face value.

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I can guess which, and I implore you to do some reading from actual medical professionals and groups on this.

And if you’re still opposed to it, the solution is regulation - not criminalization.

I think your comment would be well served by adding some reasons why.

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No, some of them are. More evangelicals than my crowd.

Morality bears directly on what we consider to be a just society, so I don’t care if you don’t care. You’re broadening the scope beyond this particular issue, where I’m guessing I agree with you.

It’s not virtuous to act right because the state makes you, but the question of what we require and preclude is defined by our moral frameworks at some level.

I’m not sure with whom you’re arguing about the homosexuals point. I view a lot of things of degenerate I wouldn’t ban. Most adults I see are fat, thus gluttons, thus are committing a sin. It’s just not particularly my business to meddle in what’s between them and God and Satan. I didn’t suggest we “retvrn to Comstock” or something.

I don’t see how you can ignore the massively negative effects pornography has on mostly young men, particularly if you think about the marijuana analogy and how it’s increased in strength and availability. Novel hyperstimuli are a big issue. Just like supernormal stimuli tend to increase obesity and cause metabolic dysfunction.

A ton of lawmaking is moralistic. Eg the way I grew up I think it’s fine for two guys to settle something with a fight provided it’s clean and nobody’s kicking someone when he’s down. A bunch of people with different morals (“all violence is wrong”) told the cops to start arresting people for that sort of thing. I think stealing is wrong and vote to tell the cops to arrest people for that, while others (because of their morality) say that “it’s systemic factors” and turn people loose for sub-$1k or so, or sometimes don’t believe in property rights the same way I do. I don’t believe that income tax is just, nor federally-administered welfare, but a ton of people voted to tell the feds to take money and do just that.

I’m not sure how you can suddenly flip to “moralistic legislation is wrong actually” in such a selective sense just because it’s movitated by Christianity or right-wing ideology for once.

Many of them are. I just don’t see any reason to say “I disagree with the conservative Christians pushing this” rather than “I disagree with the people who support this.” There are secular folks who also support such legislation. It hints at a generalized animus towards religion and likely in particular towards Christianity, kind of like Fox News boomers complaining Obama wouldn’t say “radical Islamic terrorism”.

You're the one identifying me with them. That's my point. The group you dislike is "people who support this policy" or "Christians who want to enshrine their social policy via legislation." That's not what you said though.

Did something I wrote read like I disagreed with this? What children do in their private time is their parents’ business. What children do can sometimes be the business of the state; there’s tons of precedent for it acting in loco parentis. I just don’t find this to be the best solution.

Something being normal doesn’t make it right. Obesity is normal. Shoplifting has become normal in many places. People getting drunk is normal. Normalcy doesn’t equal moral rectitude.

Why do the opinions of my ancestors bear on that, and which ones are you talking about? Most of the ones I can think of, unless you run back to the days of tribal europe, would see the culture today as hideously liberalized. Regardless a lot of my ancestors probably did a lot of things I don’t think are right. Heck, I’ve done plenty of things I don’t think are right. None of that effects what actually is and isn’t morally good.

If I’m not running around telling off couples who leave the bar together, what do you care?

Most of the BS from modern christians is a byproduct of the church trying to control every aspect of a person's mind and body rather than being an expansion of their spiritualism. Traditional religion does not like free thinking amongst its worshippers. Puritans were amongst the worst and they have a huge influence on early Americans and their religions.

Yes, I would. Just like with proposed bans on alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, I understand the motives (particularly when I look at the rash of wife-beating that encouraged the temperance movement, for instance) but oppose the proposed solution (banning those things).

I'm not sure if that's the intent of everyone backing this; I think part of it amounts to parents who are legitimately worried. I may not agree with their means but I can understand that. I haven't personally met anyone who talked about baptizing the internet but that doesn't mean it isn't happening, and I'd oppose that.

I strongly agree with you on escapism and consumerism. I see pornography as a nasty end-stage manifestation of this, but not as the root issue. I've also seen peers spend way too much time rotting in front of netflix or tiktok or videogames, or addicted to shopping, or spending their money traveling to highly-instagrammable destinations and posting it. I have a huge beef with what you're describing, very true, and consumerist hellscape is a great characterization. Sticking with the drug analogy, I think it's like cocaine vs. fentanyl. It seems like many fewer people can consume is "recreationally" without some level of harm if they do it repeatedly over time. I also tend to key on it more because it so explicitly pertains to what I see as some of the most beautiful and sacred elements of creation (love, sex, marriage). But it's absolutely one manifestation of a greater issue.

I tend to agree with you that "purity culture" is bad and that America has a weirdly-victorian air about it that almost seems to tempt people more. I see alcohol as another example of this; I'd prefer my kids didn't drink until they were older and in the right place/at the right time, but our current set-up just makes most kids get blackout the first half-dozen times they drink.

To be honest, it's still not something I'd be comfortable sitting and discussing personally, but I think there's a difference between "not polite dinner-table conversation" and "God forbid anyone mentions it ever."

I agree with you that lawmakers don't care one whit about children, families, or people. I wish some of my fellow Christians weren't so quick to assume that "their guy" is actually going to fix anything, and see it as a way to disclaim responsibility for working on their own families and communities in particular. I think I've noticed more of this amongst my peer group, a basic distrust of particularly the federal and state governments across the political and ideological spectra. I hope this drives us to focus on fixing what we can. Work on our families rather than calling state assemblymen, work more to feed our homeless rather than expecting the feds to implement a perfect nationwide solution. And I hope rather than politicization, Christianity in America focuses more on the Second Great Commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself."

People need to touch grass instead of blaming everyone else for their failure to do so haha.

The Supreme Court considered internment camps and segregation constitutional, until it didn’t.

There are also people who disagree with the Supreme Court’s interpretations. Including members of the Supreme Court! Both current (dissents) and not (overturning past rulings.)

> The Constitution of the United States was a layman's document, not a lawyer's contract. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-constituti...

The Supreme Court is not the ultimate decider of what the layman's document means. It was wrong when it decided, for instance, Plessy v. Ferguson. The law that the Court upheld patently violated the Fourteenth Amendment and was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court was simply wrong.

We've drifted pretty far from the Constitution and what the Founders envisioned.

The reinterpretation of the Commerce Clause was the start of a downward spiral.

I'm hoping the Convention of States will succeed and fix this, even if it means rebuilding many institutions at the State level.

Let's not pretend that the current federal government isn't completely compromised.

Not really. The Supreme Court believes some rulings to be wrong the day they were decided:

> “The dissent’s reference to Korematsu, however, affords this Court the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: *Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided*, has been overruled in the court of history, and to be clear ‘has no place in law under the Constitution,’” Roberts said, quoting Justice Jackson’s 1944 dissent.

If Mommy says I can't eat carrots because they are bad for me, I have to listen to her. But I don't have to listen to her because she's right, it's because she's mommy.

Quiet frankly I don't give a shit what a judge says is constitutional when they are acting in direct opposition to the stated goals of the constitution and I don't think anybody else should either. I believe the Founding Fathers both expected and wanted people to stand up in defiance against legal rulings and laws that many find unjust, even to the point of violence after some time. The Constitution starts with "We the People", which means if the people don't agree then the judges are wrong and should be opposed in every aspect.

The US legal system has gone out of control and it is getting to the point where people need to defy the law as a matter of principle and fight for their rights. The preamble of the constitution is pretty clear in its general goals, and working against the people's will, restricting the peoples rights, committing what the people believe are injustices, and causing social turmoil among them, are all blatantly opposed.

Tor doesn't protect against traffic correlation last I checked.

Mixnets/Nym are better for actual privacy.

(I've not audited Nym, not an endorsement)

Two-hundred and fifty years of piwertripping lawyers with their heads up their own asses, ignoring the plain text of the constitution.

What on earth are you talking about? Surely you're not displaying prejudice against 340+ million people?

We don't get to selectively decide when a Constitutionally recognized inalienable human right is applied or not.

If you don't protect the right for Americans to share obscene material, you open the door for the first amendment to be trampled over time by the authoritarian ratchet.