Alabama House bill would require Internet porn filters | Hacker News Reader

Alabama House bill would require Internet porn filters

abc3340.com

56 pointscoreyp_141 comments

I am so glad they put a lot of resources into this. It will solve all of Alabama's problems from Education, to Homelessness, to cleaning up their beautiful coast.

I was totally thinking of visiting because their state has so much to offer.

Very forward thinking like their immigration laws some years back.

They need to attack this at the root source. Make it illegal to sell a camera without a pornography filter.

+1 They should design a custom chip to perform pornography detection realtime. Even smartphone manufacturers could add something like this to every phone. Now the question is how will they apply different thresholds which define what porn is in markets around the world? /s

Or just make silicone illegal...

I bet all my money that Representative Jack Williams of Alabama has the nastiest porn collection of anyone you've ever met.

Maybe he's trying to eliminate the competition.

An internet access device would require a "filter to block out obscene material, child pornography, images used for sexual cyber harassment, or sites used for human trafficking."

These criteria are not decidable by humans.

I highly doubt this will pass or stand up to judicial scrutiny. Seems like a pretty clear first amendment violation

Either pay $20 to get the filter removed... or just ask a teenager to do it for you :)

And who's going to be paying for this exactly? Yeah ...

What is it with people in the US and pornography in general? I've never been able to wrap my head around it and I was born and raised here in the US.

Hey, at least you can watch a girl sit on a guy's face in the US.

To be fair, it's not just us Americans. I believe the UK has a universal opt-out pornography filter. Somewhat less savory comparisons are to some of the autocratic middle eastern nations.

they also have explicitly banned certain sexual acts like spanking [0].

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/a-long-list-of-sex-act...

Wait, you can't produce porn with spanking in the UK, or you can't even view it? I'm at work, so I'd rather not click that link.

Pornography produced in the UK cannot include any of the following:

Spanking

Caning

Aggressive whipping

Penetration by any object "associated with violence"

Physical or verbal abuse (regardless of if consensual)

Urolagnia (known as "water sports")

Role-playing as non-adults

Physical restraint

Humiliation

Female ejaculation

Strangulation

Facesitting

Fisting

I never thought of the UK as being particularly puritanical or me as being particularly kinky, but I've participated in a surprising number of the acts on that banned list, and most of them seem pretty tame.

I die a little bit inside when I see stuff like this, I mean, what sort of cowards are afraid of free speech? Geez.

As long as everyone is consenting, it's all fair. In fact, my guess is this crap does more harm than good by pathologizing sex. There's enough people out there shamed by their sexuality. We don't need more.

And how did they come up with such a weird list? Caning, female ejaculation, and facesitting in the same list? ???

> they also have explicitly banned certain sexual acts like spanking [0].

Not just that, but they've banned the sale of a whole variety of porn that would be considered pretty tame in the US.

For example, it's pretty much illegal to sell porn filmed outdoors in the UK. You can do it, technically, but you have to prove that there is literally no chance that any minor could possibly have been within eyeshot of the scene at the time it was filmed, and the burden of proof for this is so high that it's impossible to satisfy. (Which was the intended goal of the act).

This ban applies both to physical media as well as online streaming sites, as noted in the article.

I had never heard of a filter (at the government or ISP level) until now. Regardless of how Americans tend to treat the subject, they have in the past valued freedom of information on the matter.

It's been tried at the congressional level (COPA, and probably a few others that didn't make it very far). COPA was found to be unconstitutional.

Thanks, I did not know about that one. I suppose it says something about US precedent that it was ruled unconstitutional, and also says something (quite different) about our representatives in Congress.

I don't know. We're not alone though, the UK is further down this road than we are.

"Still Puritan After All These Years" - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/are-america...

nothing good is ever associated with alabama.

the space program

To expand on that, Huntsville, Alabama is the home of Marshall Space Flight Center, which was the design center for the Apollo space program among other things. Also, for those who grew up in the 80s, it's the home of Space Camp.

This is good. Porn is one of the most powerful weapons in the psychological warfare armory. It interrupts the risk-reward cycle of the human brain, thus disrupting the functioning of society generally. For example, Israel broadcast porn on major television networks when occupying Palestine in 2002 [1].

[1] http://www.news24.com/xArchive/Archive/Porn-the-new-weapon-o...

I mean, cool anecdote that you've shared about its potency on the human mind.

But please don't impose your Puritan world view

Do Puritans have views on modern psychological warfare tactics that I am unaware of?

Far worse than what you may have heard of about the Amish, I am afraid to say.

Maybe the traditional "functioning of society" itself is flawed? When you're talking about human society, arguing for the status quo isn't necessarily a strong persuader.

For one thing, I would much rather live in a modern liberal society (where porn is legal) than any of the many repressive countries where porn is expressly forbidden.

Liberalism is based on the incorrect assumption that man has agency.

Regardless of whether or not man has agency, I'd still rather live in a liberal society!

We may have our problems, but it's better than goose-stepping in uniform, getting caned for sexual deviancy, being burned at the stake for heresy, etc.

(Also: life has got to be about more than lamenting the fate of some imagined "golden culture" that frankly never existed. Live a little!)

Thats great, but certain populations are being demonstrably soft-genocided in that their birth rates are below replacement level, and internet porn is a leading cause.

> Thats great, but certain populations are being demonstrably soft-genocided in that their birth rates are below replacement level, and internet porn is a leading cause.

So, by deciding not to have children, people are guilty of "soft genocide"?

I've seen some crazy beliefs and weird moral systems on HN but this one takes the cake.

>This is good.

Yes, a bill requiring adults to pay $20 and send in a written request just to be able to use their "internet access device" normally is brilliant. I'm not sure why this wasn't implemented sooner.

It just seems so obviously good, especially when you consider that historically, adult content filters have a false positive rate of 0%.

>Porn is one of the most powerful weapons in the psychological warfare armory.

Maybe PornHub is secretly a DARPA project!

You wish it's DARPA

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