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.

  • Luftruessel@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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!”

  • aelwero@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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…

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
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    9 months ago

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

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      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.

    • Weslee@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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

      • iopq@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        How do you ban a VPN? If I connect to a server that’s a big cloud provider, how do you know the connection is to a VPN or a website?

        • TherouxSonfeir@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          They just make it a law and use it against people at will. They make it the ISPs responsibility for blocking and tracking access. They ban vpn software and all the corporate OS makers obey.

          You’re right in a way, how do they really have a 100% block? It’s not possible. But they can scare 90% of users away.

          • frezik@midwest.social
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            9 months ago

            That’s not feasible. A lot of companies have VPNs to protect their own networks. This increased with work from home during the pandemic. There are too many domino effects.

            With SSH and an AWS instance, I can create my own VPN. It’s not that hard with a bit of Linux experience. Canada would be about as successful at this as the US was at keeping PGP away from foreign exports.

          • iopq@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Again, how do you track a connection to a data center? VPN software is freely available on GitHub. Are you blocking GitHub too?

            Even China can’t do it fully

            • TherouxSonfeir@lemm.ee
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              9 months ago

              Again, if vpns are banned, and vpn software is banned, all US companies will have to abide or die. GitHub is American. Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. Windows, macOS, Android, could all be forced to report. The year of the Linux desktop!!

              Your ISP knows where you go. They just pull the plug on IPs they know are VPNs.

              • iopq@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                No, nobody cares about Canadian law

                How do you know an IP is a VPN? I can change the address of my VPS at any time

        • anyhow2503@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          It’s not feasible to prevent it completely, but you can certainly make it harder for the average person and discourage usage by simply outlawing it. That’s what China is doing at least.

          • iopq@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            China is not successful in it, since you can still use a VPN in China. You can even self host

            • anyhow2503@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              Somehow I knew when I wrote that comment that someone would interpret “it’s possible to discourage VPN usage and make it harder for the layman” as “it’s possible to prevent VPN usage completely and China is 100% successful at doing that”. China hasn’t gone all in on blocking VPN traffic either way, since corporations can still use them and tourists don’t like having their internet connection dropped without warning (which they actually did at one point), but someday they might and it will probably be enough to prevent the majority from using VPNs to circumvent government censorship.

              • iopq@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                It’s technically impossible without blocking cloudflare and breaking most of the internet. You can route your VPN through cloudflare, so there’s that

        • nihilvain@lemmy.ml
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          9 months ago

          With deep packet inspection they can detect a VPN protocol connection attempt and drop it. There are already countries utilizing this method.

            • nihilvain@lemmy.ml
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              9 months ago

              Yes, my point is that banning protocols will kill all the commercial VPN offerings. Restricting a big size of the population. Obscure protocols like X-Ray can work but not everyone can set it up.

              And I think you can also raise some suspicion if you use too much bandwidth on that connection. GBs of data consumption from MyTotallyLegitWebsite.me can raise eyebrows. And that would be the only thing needed for a court notice or a visit by the police, depending upon the country. And in anti-democratic countries you’re guilty until proven innocent anyway.

              • iopq@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                There are commercial xray servers where you just share them with people for a subscription price and it automatically updates with the freshest info

                GBs of data from a connection is not that uncommon. There’s a thing called cloudflare and you might already be hitting those IPs for gigabytes per month. You can route the VPN through cloudflare so it just looks like you’re visiting a lot of websites hosted by cloudflare

  • RedFox@infosec.pub
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    9 months ago

    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?

    • Atlas_@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • w2tpmf@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        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.

  • boatsnhos931@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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

    • N3M@lemmy.electrospek.com
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      9 months ago

      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?