From the article: “Unsurprisingly, this skyrocketed searches for the best VPNs. According to a SlashGear report sent to Mashable, searches for “Texas VPN” jumped by 1,750 percent in the past day. It also spotted a 1,600 percent increase for the phrase “How to access Pornhub.””
What if it was just lobbying from the VPN industry this whole time?
Probably the politicians bought VPN stock just before this was ruled. Just like so many “randomly” happened to buy video conference stock just before the COVID lockdown?
I mean if you saw what was going on in Italy and had any clue about it, you’d have been smart and purchased it. There was a lockdown in Italy for like he saw it month before there was even talk of COVID coming to the states
VPN use likely spiked in South Korea recently as well, since being blocked by Twitch.
Lots of shady free VPNs out there from Chinese/Russian companies. Now instead of just letting people watch porn, they’ll send their data to a shady/foreign entity. The apps will ask all the permissions, and people who don’t know shit, will grant them.
Same thing will happen when they ban Tiktok.
Well done, You played yourself.
Definitely no shady VPNs run by white westerners though. Theyve all got impeccable morals through ans through. Glad you cleared that up.
Let me make it clear folks, nobody has better morals than white people, believe me. They’re tremendous, the best. They follow the rules, they respect authority, they’re just fantastic. I mean, look at me, I’m the best example of great morals, and I’m white, folks. White people, they’re winners, they know how to do things right, they’re tremendous patriots. So let’s make America great again with the incredible morals of white people leading the way.
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This is pure evil! You’re, like, evil incarnate!
The outlook on everything on Lemmy is driving me away from the platform. I’m not saying other platforms are any better. I might just stop using it.
The same people who complain about government propaganda are the same people who type “Russia bad! China bad!” like it’s not decades of propaganda to make westerners hate these countries.
So the Ukraine invasion and the Uyghur genocide are both just propaganda?
When I see the same energy directed towards what shady activities UK/Israel/USA are doing in the Congo (child labor and genocide) or what USA/Israel is doing in Palestine (genocide) or whatever France is meddling with in Africa then I’ll see Lemmy as unbiased but it is a very biased social media website. When I see the same energy directed at the USA for killing millions of Iraqis by spreading lies and never finding weapons of masa destruction in Iraq then I’ll believe the narrative.
And please don’t mention the Uyghur and pretend to care about the muslims only when China does it but when Israel does it, it’s up for debate.
USA good. France good. UK good. China bad. Russia bad. Middle East bad.
Hilarious. Wake up people.
Uhh… most people I’ve seen on Lemmy are condemning the genocide in Palestine. Same for the war in Iraq. Where are you getting all those “USA Good” comments? I constantly see people complaining about it.
Just use proton VPN, the free tier should be enough.
His argument is that the average person won’t know any better and will just take the first sponsored result for “free VPN” of Google
Shady American services are OK though.
I’m sure the people who legislated all this into place were the first ones to access a VPN to get onto PornHub
I suspect they invested in companies that sell VPNs.
Kape technologies comes to mind, which owns Private Internet Access, CyberGhost, and ExpressVPN, and is in turn owned by an Israeli billionaire
Is there a wesbite that hosts all these connections? I’m sure if we could see the web of relations there’d be a little but of reasoning on top of this dung pile.
Using a VPN that is beholden to shareholder’s mood swings let alone a publicly tradable company is dangerous
At some point, Republicans will surely cross the line where their policies are so unpopular that people stop voting for them, right?
They are heavily entrenched in Texas. They will have to badly piss off most people enough that they all go vote in the same cycle.
Our state government has actually been getting much more radical over the past few years, because the only people who vote are conservative radicals, because everyone else is either apathetic or aware that their vote won’t matter unless millions of people suddenly wake up tomorrow and vote.
Millions of people not voting because it would take millions of people voting to elicit positive change and nobody is doing that is one of the most frustrating things.
I refuse to be part of that group. I’m a democrat living in KS and I vote in every single election I can. My candidate may not win, but damnit they will count my vote and know that I dissent.
I look at it as earning my right to bitch about our elected officials
My candidate may not win, but damnit they will count my vote and know that I dissent.
Which is the same exact reason I vote third party despite them mostly not winning.
edit: keep downvoting me. I’m sure that will help convince me to vote for your team, just like the last 50 times it happened.
Isn’t Texas getting more and more purple? I think Biden only Lots by 5 percentage points. Lots of tech people, California emigrants, and “east coast” educated types moved to the cities there (like Austin).
Granted Texas is huge so the cities play less of a role in the overall state picture.
It might not be a swing state yet, by I don’t know that it’s as entrenched red as it used to be.
I honestly think that a lot of the bullshit about abortion is an attempt to force those blue voters out of their state because they are scared they are losing their grip.
Yes, but actually no. In the federal election, it is trending that way.
Our state government has gotten both more corrupt and HARD right, mostly because the only people who care enough to vote in those elections are the crazies.
Not as long as the other guy is some dirty liberal who believes in socialist conspiracies like the holocaust having actually happened…
(Yes this is sarcasm, not actually saying the holocaust didn’t happen)
I’ve never really understood why they claim it didn’t happen, it’s not like they were the ones doing it so I don’t understand why they feel the need to protect themselves by claiming its non-existence.
Meanwhile the actual people who did do it fully acknowledge that it happened, was bad, and have taken steps to ensure it never can be allowed to happen again.
It’s a recruitment tactic mostly, they all know that it happened, but they hope they can reach those who pride themselves on being open minded by saying “What if it didn’t?” or “Hey, they seem to get REALLY made at people who are just harmlessly asking questions?”
So that they can be “Heard out”, and hope to indoctrinate you.
This tactic sadly works, and it’s why you can’t just “Debate them and challenge their idiocy in the free market of ideas.”
They simply won’t play the game fairly and in good faith. An honest debate is between two parties hoping to better make their positions understood, but if you’re not honest about what you believe in or why, the whole process has the rug pulled out from under it.
Unfortunately that isn’t how identity politics works.
Not as long as there are minorities to blame for everything.
Something something… Leopards … Face eating …
I doubt it.
the old guys with piles of old greasy porn mags grinning with their remaining teeth.
They are trying their damndest with this and going after IVF, but so far it hasn’t moved the needle too much.
To be fair current age verification is useless. We all know clicking a button does not verify anything.
Also we know that submitting personal data to a website to verify your age is terrible. Big no no.
I’m curious of what will happen in my country. Here in Spain government said that they will implement a new age verification system using Anonymous digital certificates. The government will issue those and you have to give your ID but the certificate itself it’s anonymous and the website won’t be able to know who is the person behind the certificate. While there’s no implementation yet, I hope they use the kind of anonymous certificates that, once expedited, the government also does not know who is using the certificate when serving as a certificate authority to validate its authenticity.
Let’s see how it goes. I’m afraid even while being privacy friendly with this system Pornhub will block access here to as a threat to other places. At the end is a private company and blocking minors from accessing their content cost them big money, and, of course, money is the only thing that matters to them.
To be fair, who gives a shit about age verification?
I do not care what your child does on the Internet.
Right. Why do I have to submit a retinal scan and 3 forms of ID to watch porn because parents can’t be bothered to learn basic computer skills and monitor their own children?
The right way to implement this is where they don’t even have any persistent identifier that could be used for tracking. They should only ever see a derived single-use signature that after verification gives them a yes/no answer and nothing more.
It IS possible from a technical standpoint to be able to do anonymous age verification. I can think of several methods that would work but the issue is I’d have to trust a company or the government with this information and trust them to not do something stupid with it like using it for nefarious purposes, selling it, or just not protecting it well enough. And with all the data brokerages and security breaches in the news there is no way I’d ever do that. Just not gonna happen. This data is just too valuable to trust any single company with it.
To me this is absolutely a 1st and 4th amendment issue. We are quickly devolving in an American religious state ruled by morality police.
In the Netherlands we have this app that could be used for it https://www.yivi.app/en it’s open-source, developed by an ngo in collaboration with a Dutch university. It’s not very widely used yet, but the idea behind it is really good.
Outside the issue of yet another competing standard to do the same thing, there’s an inherent issue with verification in these kinds of apps. That is, how the identity is actually verified for the account. Is it the government itself, a for-profit company partnered in some way with governments, something else? The issue begs the question, is this something we should have in the first place?
I don’t think so. And it seems to me that those who do likely don’t realize how much of a slippery slope it is to complete privacy erosion. Others are simply trying to live their life and this is very far down on their list of worries. Yet here we are, where services are built around the assumption that every user has a phone (and phone number).
Some relevant media to the topic: xkcd 927 Electric Dreams S1E9
The certificate may be anonymous to website hosts, but it won’t be to the Spanish government. Otherwise you copy Grandpa’s cert and pass it around school.
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the porn must flow
POON. Muad’Deepthroat. Feyd-Rawdog. The story just lends itself to porn parody.
In the later books it’s not even a parody
Go on, Texas, try to ban VPNs.
… Then they banned VPNs. Thanks to the Republicans we have scorched sky’s… We don’t know who stroke first, but without Internet we are now a real communicative country with people who… Billy! Put your rocks down man! I’m trying to tell you s story about how important Republicans are to us and yet you choose to distract the entire class with your rock tossing game!
The only thing that matters is texas loses
that can be understood more that one way.
I wonder how many people here never saw porn before they were 18.
When I was a teenager, we got our porn the old fashioned way, by shoplifting it from the magazine rack at the convenience store.
No, sir I’ve never heard of it.
I still haven’t
Saw what now?
They “right porn” to keep it entirely out of the public eye so they can follow their illegal and inhumane sexual shit in private. You’re searching for the real perverted bastards? The one’s who’s shouting against sexual freedom the loudest. Search their computers.
I just connected my VPN through texas and tried to access.
Yep! Good thing I don’t live there.
Proton VPN and Mullvad are both great choices.
If you’re stupid and still pay for regular streaming services, mullvad gets blocked by things like netflix and disney plus. But Mullvad is great for privacy and great for games, especially P2P online games.
Don’t let salty losers dox you, use a VPN when you do PVP online
In a perfect world GeoIP should be illegal.
Let’s see if Elon’s satellites will bring uncensored internet to every inch of the planet.For people with amateur radio licenses, amateur sattelite is already a thing that exists. I haven’t looked into it, or even thought about it at all until now, but I’m sure it’s least theoretically possible for a completely decentralized, amatuer internet to be built using only radio/sattelite infrastructure, which would actually be really interesting. I think we could really use another internet, totally separate from this; an internet that requires a license to access legally, which itself requires passing a test demonstrating a solid understanding of how the system works on a technical level; that exists on the air and only on the air, overseen by whatever regulatory body already oversees the airwaves in a given country anyway, and by them only and by no one else; a totally disparate internet wholly unrelated to this, which, by definition and by law, exists exclusively for every individual reason imaginable that is already legal and which is not commercial; an internet wherein a literal felony is commited by advertising in any way. We could really use a self policing internet owned and operated by the people, for the people; completely free as in going to prison for trying to sell something; completely free as in freedom of speech without limitation otherwise. The internet, meaning this internet as it exists at present, cannot effectively police itself because it’s already used for commercial purposes legally. Don’t get me wrong: we need an internet like that to exist, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. If for no other reason than exactly that, it would benefit everyone involved for an amateur internet to exist by itself, I think.
These Terms of Service, your use of this Website, and the relationship between you and us shall be governed by the laws of the Republic of Cyprus, without regard to conflict of law rules. Nothing contained in these Terms of Service shall constitute an agreement to the application of the laws of any other nation to this Website. You agree that this Website shall be deemed a passive Website that does not give rise to personal jurisdiction over us, either specific or general, in jurisdictions other than the Republic of Cyprus. The sole and exclusive jurisdiction and venue for any action or proceeding arising out of or related to these Terms of Service shall be in an appropriate court located in Limassol, Cyprus. You hereby submit to the jurisdiction and venue of said Courts.
—Terms Of Service, PornHub
They will never allow themselves to become subject to any kind of accountability, or oversight, or call it whatever you will—in so far as it would concern any interest of anyone outside of their existing tax haven—be it age verification according to the State of Texas, or be it anything else. They would totally nullify their own terms and conditions as of the most recent change if they did, which is why they’re not, and they’re never going to make any legal change in order to accommodate anyone who is not Cyprus, simply because they would stand to lose revenue currently pocketed to taxes if they did.
But I was so excited to watch Debbie Does Dallas #4,537. Ugh!
The only Dallas Debbie is gonna be doing is Dallas, Oregon
