E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents | Hacker News Reader

E621, Pornhub, and others block North Carolina residents

foxcarolina.com

133 pointslilboiluvr69160 comments

What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater? What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message?

What if the government kept a record of any or all of those checks? What if they arranged for third parties to commercialize that data so they could 'legally' end-run any restriction on domestic spying with a small ad targeting data service fee?

This is the sort of dystopia that librarians and others focused on liberty have been fighting for what seems like forever.

If you extend this policy to "consuming a video/image/text message," that would be dystopian. But this is about porn. Maybe it'll be a slippery slope but I doubt it.

I wouldn't vote for this policy but I get it. Lots of people don't want kids watching porn. And it's not just social conservativism, people across the political spectrum think porn is addictive, psychologically damaging, and leads to sexual dysfunction.

> If you extend this policy to "consuming a video/image/text message," that would be dystopian. But this is about porn

Eho decides what is porn? There is portln on Twitter, will all of twitter be monitored?

Kids suicides inceased 10x because they arent alliwed to go outside any more and have no friends - if we actually cared about kuds we'd be solving that.

Western boomers grew up in a better world than kids today

“Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children & teens to play, roam, & engage in other activities independent of direct oversight & control by adults.”

license to walk home alone from school dropped from 86% in 1971 to 35% in 1990 and 25% in 2010, and license to use public buses alone dropped from 48% in 1971 to 15% in 1990 to 12% in 2010.11

Homework, which was once rare or nonexistent in elementary school, is now common even in kindergarten. One study revealed that the average amount of time that US children in school, ages 6-8 years, spent at school plus school homework increased by 11.4 hours per week between 1981 and 2003, equivalent to adding a day and half to an adult’s work week.

those who could play freely in neighborhoods spent, on average, twice as much time outdoors, were much more active while outdoors, had more than twice as many friends, and had better motor and social skills than those deprived of such play"

> Kids suicides inceased 10x because ...

What country, which ages, and when?

That didn't happen in either the USofA nor Australia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crude_US_suicide_rate_by_...

https://viz.aihw.gov.au/t/Public/views/CoD_Tableaus_2022/S6a...

as "10x" would imply suicides per 100,000 rose from ~10 per 100K to ~100 per 100K (depending on country | age bracket, etc).

I mean a town in Tennessee recently outlawed homosexuality in public. I can easily see this being applied to anything with LGBT material, sexual or not.

That said, yeah, I get the motivation. I put this in a similar category as the regulatory response to Airbnb/Ubers of the world: it seems like a better outcome may have been possible if the companies didn’t totally and flagrantly shirk their social obligations to begin with.

Now I want someone to start The Church of Jesus Christ, Drag Queen, and say that reading the gospel to children is the Lord's calling and a religious requirement.

I don't think a town in Tennessee recently outlawed homosexuality in public,

They just added: "No person shall knowingly while in a public space engage in indecent behavior, display, distribute, or broadcast indecent material, conduct indecent events, or facilitate any of the foregoing prohibited acts."

Problem was that the referenced indecent statue definition included homosexuality, which was then removed from the definition even before it blew up on social media

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/11/22/ten...

https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/nov/28/did-a-city-in...

What do you think the intent of the ordinance is? My aunt recently moved to Tennessee and as a trans woman, I am terrified of stepping foot in that state. It is clear we are not welcome there.

It was removed in response to a lawsuit. Strictly speaking, yes they did recently outlaw being gay, but it was (allegedly) due to forgetting to change a statute definition rather than expanding it.

I guess they get kudos for removing “homosexuality” from the definition of “indecent acts” in 2023!

In any case, the question is whether there’s reason to believe this will be a slippery slope. There’s obviously a pattern of increasing moral regulation throughout the country including book bans. That this particular instance of moral regulation was a bit complicated in its implementation and (allegedly) accidentally overzealous in its scope doesn’t negate the trend.

If I like BDSM, and that is cataloged, I can easily see that being leveraged against me.

We should focus on tools and systems that empower parents to guide their childrens' internet experience. Maybe a token of some sort sites can use to self identify as 18+ so parents can set up strong filters.

I mean, just talk to your kids about sex. You're not going to succeed in censoring their internet activity. Any more than you'll succeed in stopping them from sneaking out and going to parties or drinking with their friends - did your parents try to stop you from sneaking out? Did it work? Because I got really good at scaling fences and climbing out of windows.

But in the effort you will send the message that there is no trust between you and your child, and they won't feel safe talking to you should they need to. If you take the attitude that sex is something illicit, they will take the message that it's something to keep secret from you.

There is already one - it’s called RTA (‘Restricted to Adults’) and is a meta tag that should filter out sites if you have parental controls enabled. I expect it’s one of the things Google etc. look at for SafeSearch to remove those results too (among other checks).

Of course, the irony is that only those that would label their sites as RTA already (so are already easily filtered) would comply with any ID requirement, so these kinds of laws achieve very little!

> [P]eople across the political spectrum think porn is addictive, psychologically damaging, and leads to sexual dysfunction.

I think everyone acknowledges it can be, but it's a pretty distinct cohort that holds it necessarily is. Definitely not that it inevitably leads to sexual dysfunction, that's just patently untrue.

Most adults consume pornography, and for the vast majority of them it isn't a problem. Every adult who's sex life I know anything about, watches porn. They're fine.

> Most adults consume pornography, and for the vast majority of them it isn't a problem.

Got a source for this? Because everything I look at suggests that much like alcohol, a relatively small number of habitual users account for the vast majority of consumption.

Not to hand. That's my belief from my observation. I looked for statistics for about 10 minutes, but didn't really find good information. I suspect this area is under researched. Happy to look at any sources you want to link.

Both of these can be true, however. I imagine most adults sometimes drink alcohol too. Personally I might go weeks or months without watching porn, it's not something I generally do everyday. People who do would blow my usage out of the water (which, to be clear, is fine, you do you).

As a thought experiment - we all agree that lots of people watch porn, right? So if it leads to addiction or sexual dysfunction at even a rate of 1% or 2%, that would be an epidemic. If there are tens of millions of porn consumers in the US (which I think is very conservative), we'd expect hundreds of thousands of people to develop issues.

So - where are they? Do we have a source for that?

You know, the organizations most likely to have that information are the ones with the big data on access and source IP address, who could make an educated guess on the scale and variety of consumers of pornography.

... In other words, PornHub.

Do you think anonymous surveys wouldn't work here? (Genuinely asking and not being snarky, I expected to find lots of people doing surveys in this area but didn't readily find it, so I'm open to there being something I'm not understanding.)

I have no idea. Broadly speaking, I don't trust self-reporting on anything taboo even when it's anonymous; people both lie to themselves and have justified paranoia about precisely how anonymous any collected data is.

... But it's real hard to fake the actual server requests and human sourced usage patterns to the service provider at scale.

Yeah, ideally I suppose we'd have both and perhaps other sorts of measurements, the server logs can still have error because of eg bots scraping porn sites, the uncertainty of attribution, and people who consume porn offline (by downloading it, by ordering DVDs or magazines, etc).

There's also the matter that, from what I've observed, women often prefer erotic literature. That seems very difficult to parse out from traffic.

For what it's worth, I did come across one article where researchers were using data from an analytics company to probe porn use[1], but it wasn't measuring what I was looking for, so I didn't look too closely.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2023.2...

"porn" is poorly defined and has definitely been used to censor things before that aren't necessarily pornography.

whether or not you agree with the blocking of that sort of content, supporting these sort of restrictions on pornography means supporting a policy that lets the government gate content they deem objectionable behind an id check. i guarantee you there's at least some content out there that you're not going to agree with the government's definition of pornography. or even if you agree with the current government on all their content moderation choices, you might not agree with the next one.

> What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message?

I mean you mostly are already

While I strongly disagree with this NC law, and others, your analogy is a bad one.

As a society I think we've accepted that some things (cigarettes, alcohol, sex, etc.) should be restricted from children. That's a far cry from requiring ID every time I go to the grocery store. But, as long as I've been alive, you have had to show ID to purchase alcohol, and the sky hasn't fallen.

Again, I think these types of laws are particularly poorly thought out, but I don't buy the "slippery slope into dystopia" arguments, and I think there are better arguments against it.

You had to show ID to buy porn magazines, go in a strip club or even the adult video rental room.

It's pretty insane that we have no check for an unlimited amount of free porn with all kinds of extremes.

It fucks up a lot of kids (and adults).

Showing porn to a random kid on the street would have you catch a charge if not something worse, but somehow on the Internet it's just fine?

They are leaving it out where anyone can get it (if their parents aren't watching), not showing it to unsuspecting pedestrians. Maybe teenagers have too much autonomy online but it's the place of their parents to take it away from them - not the state of North Carolina.

I think a reasonable analogy would be putting TV's playing porn outside of a school and covered them with a cloth and sign that said adults only. What would my liability be then? And I also sell advertising on the side of the tvs?

Based on the growth of some "romance boutiques," who seem to be able to open chain stores anywhere, the liability is nil.

They allow kids to go in?

To be honest, I don't know - but the billboards are everywhere and not subtle at all.

No, they check IDs.

Source: Was a kid.

    I think a reasonable analogy would be putting 
    TV's playing porn outside of a school and covered 
    them with a cloth and sign that said adults only.

Well, no. Anybody entering or leaving the school would have no choice but to see the covered TVs. Whereas porn is generally not showing up online unless you are looking for it.

Strongly suggest dropping the analogies entirely.

Like many digital concepts this just will never map cleanly to a real-world analogue.

This is like the millions of bad analogies related to music downloads back in the Napster days. Please, stop. This is an issue worth discussing, but every analogy is bad and every analogy pollutes and enshittifies the discussion.

Though porn advertisements can pop up when you're just minding your own business. The other day a friend of mine was doing perfectly mundane research, and they were shown ads with full nudity. (Yes, I know, they should install an ad blocker, that's not the point.)

That I do think is pretty messed up, and potentially something to pass legislation about. Some people want to opt out of pornography altogether, and their choice should be respected. As should the choice of people who do consume pornography, but aren't choosing to do so at this moment.

I don't know the answer but yeah, I'm definitely on your side about it being a problem.

I saw a bunch of super explicit stuff, unbidden, on my Twitter/X feed the other week and it made me not want to use it any more.

I love porn, but it absolutely should not be shown to me without my consent.

> It fucks up a lot of kids (and adults).

That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

"It's pretty insane that we have no check for an unlimited amount of free porn with all kinds of extremes."

And... we still don't. Porn is available through a lot of channels to anybody who knows how to look, all the NC law (and others) is doing is applying pressure to a handful of businesses and encouraging bad practices in the form of having to handle IDs.

I'm the first to acknowledge it's sometimes worth doing something imperfect if it'll improve things, even if it's not 100% effective. But this isn't likely to be 10% effective, much less 90% or 100% effective. Anybody who wants to can dredge up tons of porn on any number of other sites, torrents, etc.

As others have said, it's one thing to have to flash an ID at a convenience store or to enter a business where there's nudity, etc., but here you're requiring people to pass their info online. That's bad policy, and I doubt it's even in good faith that the legislators really think it'll do anything to curb access by those under 18.

It's designed to target sites like PornHub and to give government a cudgel against all kinds of content that most wouldn't consider "porn" to begin with. And they want to go after LGBTQ+ content on the basis that it's LGBTQ+ -- not that it's necessarily adult in nature. [1]

There's little chance that you're going to come anywhere close to preventing motivated people from seeing porn on the Internet laws and policy like this. If you have kids that you don't want accessing porn, then you need to take steps to monitor their access and have the hard conversations with them.

(I am less alarmist about the "dangers" of kids accessing porn, but I will agree that unfettered access at a young age especially if parents aren't teaching their kids adequately about sexuality and that porn isn't a good representation is not great.)

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/17/masculine-policy-the-gop...

"NC legislature accidentally endorses Mullvad VPN" could be a parallel article to this one. It would be interesting if someone analyzed the growth in VPN use following the enactment of this law.

Indeed. I'm pretty sure VPN subscriptions had a nice little spike at the end of December in NC.

If you give your kids unrestricted access to a gun they can shoot themselves.

Why should minors be allowed on the internet unsupervised at all?

> You had to show ID to buy porn magazines

Not to someone wearing a Google Glass device, taking a snapshot of it.

It is one thing to show ID. It is an other thing to show ID and have the details stored in a database in perpetuity by companies who don’t have huge budgets for data privacy and security.

Zero-knowledge methods for verifying age are possible but there is almost no political will or interest in them. Sites would get a “yes” or “no” as to whether someone is of age, and no other information.

They could verify ID, associate you with an "ID verified" token, and immediately trash all the information they collected other than that token.

Does this require users trust several parties? Any one of which could sell out, get a court order, be tapped en mass by the NSA?

It is possible to design a system where there are three parties, you, the site R that is requesting you prove your age, and a site D that you are willing to show documentation that will prove your age, with these properties:

1. There is no direct communication between R and D related to your proof of age. You will receive a message from R, send a message to D, receive a message from D, and send a message to R.

2. R gets no information other than (1) your age information, (2) what site D checked your documents, (3) the timestamps of when you exchanged messages with them.

3. The site D just gets (1) the documents you provide to prove your age, (2) a binary blob that you generate that is for all practical purposes random to anyone other than you [1], and (3) the timestamps of when you exchanged messages with them.

If someone compromises D all they get is copies of your documents (assuming D kept them) and those for all practical purposes random blobs (if they kept them), and timestamps. They don't get the identity of R, the site you were verifying your age to.

If someone compromises both R and D, they might try to match up timestamps to try to figure out who people really are. If D is busy enough and you add some delays in your message sending it should be possible to make this risk negligible.

[1] The blob is some data you receive from R, transformed by a random permutation chosen by you. To anyone who does not know the random permutation it is indistinguishable from random.

Yes. It is possible to implement zero-knowledge age verification securely. There are just exponentially more ways to do it insecurely, and we can assume that by default this is what will happen.

they could, but a law enforcement agent looking for a suspect will send a lot of subpoenas to every porn site. When a porn site says "we wipe that data instead of storing it," the law enforcement agent will say "what do you mean you wipe KYC and identity verification trails once you get them? Are you letting sanctioned people use your site and covering your tracks?"

Similar thing happened to Valve; people were trading gun skins, and regulators fined them for not having AML/KYC controls because the state argued "the business didn't do enough to stop money laundering."

This trickles out to porn companies (and the vendors that use them for identity verification), and implies that they need to store this data to prove that they didn't delete it to help terrorists.

I am curious how this would work. Could you put me in the right direction in how this is done?

THe simplest way is as follows:

1. There's a provider that already has your data (it could be the government, a bank, a phone carrier etc). If more than one provider is supported, there's a list of trusted providers somewhere.

2. Whenever a website needs an age check, it asks you to authenticate with one of the trusted providers. The provider gets a challenge (a random string).

3. If you authenticate successfully, the provider uses their public key to provide a cryptographic signature of the challenge. This signed challenge is then transmitted back to the website.

In a more advanced version of this system, the website also provides a boolean expression, like `country_of_residence not in forbidden_countries && (age > 21 || (age > 18 && country_of_residence != "us"))`, and providers promise not to return successful responses for users who don't fulfill the expression criteria.

California is trying out something like this with their digital drivers license.

Basically, if you only want to verify age, you open the app in age verification mode. It will display your picture and a qr code but not your address and other sensitive info typically present on a drivers license. The participating* alcohol vendor then scans the qr code which only contains data like "over 21" and some sort of verification that the qr code isn't forged. I'm a bit hazy on how this last bit works but it really all pivots on how this bit is implemented. Could be good for privacy or a total nightmare.

*there are only 3 locations participating in this test phase, afaik

It would be helpful to be able to digitally verify different types of identity. Where I live, how old I am, my real name, my nationality, etc. Give the user control over what information is being verified.

Completely agree, and that's one reason I'm against these laws. But that's a very different argument from the one I was responding to.

These days when you buy alcohol there's a good chance that data is being stored. A lot of restaurants and stores that sell alcohol scan or swipe cards as part of the purchase now.

Just one example: https://okcfox.com/news/local/cyber-security-experts-be-wary...

I wonder if merely paying with your credit card leaves a monetizable paper trail.

Does anyone know if Mastercard gets any data relating to whats actually being purchased? Or does the store get a globally unique ID to associate with every purchase made with a specific card?

At least here in the US, we don't legally restrict minors from having sex (with others of the same age). The other two are physical goods with well-studied and proven health effects. Porn is not like these things.

You don't have to show ID if you look about 40 years old, generally.

As far as I know most of the laws don't provide an exception if you look old enough.

The core of OPs argument is that tracking is bad, not that ID/age verification is bad.

You have to show government-ID-linked payment card information to shop at most shops in airports, or to buy plane tickets.

Most people use a SIM card that is tied to same. Their web activity is similarly tied to ID.

Most USians voluntarily provide that payment card (with full name in the magstripe) whenever they shop at a grocery store or movie theater.

I’m not sure why people think this sort of surveillance isn’t occurring. We’ve known since before Snowden that the feds have been receiving this data in bulk in realtime for decades.

Thank god for those librarians fighting for our liberty. Read a book everyone!

don't tread on books

> What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater?

What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a bar, a strip club, or a (R-rated) movie theatre?

>What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater? What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message?

  1) entered a grocery store - No, at least not since peak-pandemic. Face recognition?
  2) a library - Yes, to borrow books or on demand from security. Needed govt. id to get a library card.
  3) movie theatre - Yes, mine no longer takes cash.
  4)  tracked each time you consumed a video - Yes. Every single streaming service.
  5)  a still image - Everything on the web. Every book w/ photos I buy. Can hypothetically still look at books we own, was given, found, lent, pirated or stole in privacy.
  6) Audio - spotify, youtube etc.
  7) a text message - Your phone IS a device you pay for and maintain which is designed and regulated to spy on you. Signal is the only possibility for any privacy at all here.

>This is the sort of dystopia that librarians and others focused on liberty have been fighting for what seems like forever.

How is that fight going, do you think?

A Turnkey totalitarian state exists, who is going to turn that key?

>A Turnkey totalitarian state exists, who is going to turn that key?

A totalitarian that will be recognized as such.

The plausible deniability of the status quo is worth quite a bit.

Oh I think a certain presidential candidate is running under the “let’s stop pretending” thing. So in half a year we’ll know.

I dont see the "Look there a three headed monkey" type of tribalism distraction to be a future proof plan.

The attention economy overdid it. And corruption bloomed as a result. Which is typical for a totalitarian rise. Kleptocracies without checks and balances dont work and its quite visible to the outside.

Its just not a sensible path to go down on. Even looking past ethical and human perspective, totalitarianism is at its core dysfunctional.

The motivation of a late 70s old person is probably not being future proof

> What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message?

You already are.

And I would say if you carry a cellphone, they also know where you go physically.

How do sites that have porn but not their main purpose respond, or do they have to? Reddit and Twitter come to mind, I've stumbled across a lot of weird stuff on both.

i think they don't want to respond as to avoid being the crosshairs.

i'm surprised that the app stores let them on though since it isn't that hard to view it

Reddit had a lot of dark subs and users for a very long time, and they kinda just swept it all under the rug.

/r/spaced*cks, ViolentaCruz, others I cant recall, and the infamous /r/cannibals controversy with a reddit founder and CEO.

Yeah, weird times - not its many bots - and interestingly, in the last year, a boatload of .in India subreddits for various aspects of their culture (like IdianMotorcycles, Weird train behavior, their version of /r/idiotsincars, lot of bollywood and movie and celeb gossip subs.

Maybe need a comment filter that hides anything that a non-sequitur or perhaps comments that have < (N) syllables, words or sentences?

Fuck Spez. He's a cannibal???

> "movie and celeb gossip subs"

I haven't come across the Indian version of this, but the default page (I don't have an account) now has a lot of posts from celebrity gossip subs, and the viciousness and hatred there is worse than what I saw in radical politics subs, or even 4chan.

At least the porn and NSFW stuff was hidden. This actually what made me block Reddit from my devices.

I only browse /r/all any longer - with no account after admin fraud killing mods for policy gain... and I have a good filter-out list in RES, but yeah, .in domain submissions have spiked in the last year+

Would be cool for a toggle in prefs/RES to only include certain domain tLDs/blacklist certain TLDs -- like maybe one doesnt want to see .cn, .in, .ir, .[STRING] ?

Regardless, granularity over feed is still tedious in /r/ and RES is still a slow solution.

You can edit RES files, but avg reddit viewer (Anyone who does Not use old.reddit) just get the same crappy 'modern' UX.

I wonder about engagement times on old.reddit vs www.reddit get - I cant even look at https://www.reddit - but thats due to me customizing me data density to my view.

https://i.imgur.com/XKMfMJO.png

https://i.imgur.com/MLnUEPc.png

---

Reddit should be ground/target|zero for sentiment/mind-mining (will never forget in an interview with Twitter when they were still on (howard) (near the AT&T spy room) -- Question:

"What do you think Twitter is?"

ME: "You are a global sentiment engine"

They did not like that comment... and asked me what physical publications I read to keep up on networking/DC Design/etc...

(Which I thought was ironic, except for seeing what publications they could exploit - but the truth was they wanted to usurp sentiment+discourse...

(Succeeded)

(similar with google interview (2006) "what would you say we do around here?" -- >>"Everyone thinks you're a search engine - but you're just an advertising company"

> /r/cannibals controversy with a reddit founder and CEO.

Armie Hammer?

This is true but I do wonder if this is where the interesting part of the question around platforms lies. Dark stuff aside, reddit has a lot of porn period. If challenged, I wonder if they would be able to compromise by introducing an age-verification requirement for specific subreddits. Since otherwise it seems like they'd either have to just outright block traffic from places with similar laws or go the imgur route and attempt some kind of content purge if they wanted to avoid id-ing people.

Reddit being full of porn is an open secret. I bet its not something they advertise to banks and investors.

I think they would purge rather than confirm the presence of it in any way.

The law says it applies if more than 30% of the content is adult content. So won't apply to reddit or Twitter at least but I could see this still leaving plenty of gray area for other sites.

Reddit is easily at least 30% porn if not 90%

[citation needed]

When I sampled pushshift dumps (before the API kerfuffle), it appeared to be about 40% of new posts.

Literally r/all before admins intentionally removed porn

I wonder if these adult sites could host a ton of non-adult content in order to get below the 30% mark. There used to be a similar law in (I think it was) NYC stores. To combat this, adult bookstores would stock tons of non-porn titles which weren't even really for sale.

Does it have an exception for search sites? What percentage of the content Google indexes is porn? Probably pretty high.

E621 isn’t even mentioned in the article, but of course it comes before pornhub in the title on HN X3

I'm perplexed that someone would name a pornographic site with the same name as a very popular food additive.

E621 - Monosodium glutamate (MSG), Flavour enhancer.

Great, now I am too. Thanks. Forgive me ad-sense recommendations, but I'm going in.

Looks like it's unconfirmed but likely it was specifically named for monosodium glutamate. "This is where we keep the tasty content."

https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/E621

https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/e621/

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/e621

(Edit: Apparently there's a sister site called E926 to share SFW content. E926 is yet another food additive (Chlorine Dioxide) which is used to bleach food for a cleaner appearance.)

As someone who considers himself a relatively informed netizen, I hadn't even heard of e621.net until now, and I don't know whether I should be proud or ashamed of that.

E621 is probably the best porn site on the internet tbh. I’ve never seen a site so well organised and searchable.

It's an incredible source of tagged training data - meticulously detailed and hand maintained

There's in fact a Stable Diffusion model trained on most of e621. Uh not sure what HN's linking rules are, but look up Furtastic.

Though I understand and respect furrydom, I'm not a furry... But in its niche of generating anthropomorphic people, I still find the model to be incredible. Its got to be one of the most extensively trained, tagged and coherent SD 1.5 finetunes out there, which doesn't even surprise me TBH.

I'm not usually impressed by generated images. But the furry models are astounding. Right now my best signal for something being AI is that it's incredibly detailed by doesn't have a signature.

Yeah.

As a seperate note, I saw another HNer blog post specifically complain about AI generated furry art as a destroyer of talented furry artists... I get the point, but still have mixed feelings.

If some AI is so incredible at an artistic niche (not just furry), isn't that amazing? If artists are not economically free to pursue new styles and representations the AI doesn't "know," I feel thats a larger problem with society and art platforms, not AI specifically.

I don't think it's as simple as just exploring new styles. AI has gone from generating unrecognizable crap to stunning digital art within a year. And it's not clear how much further it will go. If you are a digital artist who makes their entire income on what was once a very secure job of drawing furry art. You'd be terrified right now. The artists are still quite a way ahead of the AI stuff, but for how long?

I think the most likely outcome is that people stop drawing manually and either switch to making physical products like clothing and fursuits. Or they make use of the generative tools to create much more elaborate art. Perhaps one person pumping out a full comic in the time that would have taken 10 people.

It's still a very scary and uncertain time when peoples incomes are on the line and decades of hard earned skill is at risk of becoming worthless.

Yeah. And forget images or comics, what happens when AI can make a furry TV show, even if it has to be steered by an individual? Its not that far away, all the pieces are there. How do oldschool artists possibly compete with that, even if the AI quality is questionable?

I'm just frustrated society isn't ready for this. Someone who made useful stuff for others, for years, shouldn't have to worry about having a roof over their head when automation is so rampant.

I think you meant "anthropomorphic animals".

True.

Maybe the adjective is mismatched, but "people" is not necessarily a synonym for "human," right?

There's nothing quite like a well tagged booru. There are more out there.

I mean only if you care about furries, for anime Danbooru is probably an equivalent, funny enough I have never found a website like E621 and Danbooru with real photos, the tagging is always terrible.

And here I was hoping some poor intern at Fox had visited such a site and had to explain what it was to their superiors

It's because I'm a furry and it's the only 'porn site' (not all the art is even explicit) I care about. And Inkbunny too I guess.

Wow, this moronic bill passed nearly unanimously. It's nice to see bipartisanship on display in North Carolina when it comes to the stupidest ideas.

> Any commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall...

That's a ridiculously vague standard. Google and Bing both distribute material harmful to minors in "substantial" quantities...

I hope it gets thrown out on judicial overview.

Perhaps its an example of horseshoe theory?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

US State legislators tend to be more politically extreme these days, AFAIK.

Or just good old "save the children," I guess? Where either party is afraid to make themselves look bad.

I guess a lawsuit could be filed arguing that showing a minor a video recording of loving consensual sex between two adults is not harmful.

Perhaps one could even argue that it is beneficial, by helping dispel sexual repression or discomfort around sexual matters.

> Officials explained that companies will be able to use commercially available databases to verify that users are old enough to access their content. The new law will take effect starting January 1st.

ಠ_ಠ

What would the legal consequences be for PornHub if they ignored the law and didn't (and perhaps don't) have any physical or commercial presence in North Carolina, beyond the website being available?

Not much. But it would be problematic for them if they ever have business dealings there.

They sell an online subscription. Some states consider there to be a nexus if you’re selling to residents in the state. NC doesn’t tax digital software, so that would complicate things, but it wouldn’t be as cut and dry as “we don’t have a physical presence there.” Fighting the government, even if you’re right, is very expensive.

From a political standpoint its sort of wild the bills principal sponsor --Amy Galey-- mentions absolutely nothing of it in her 2024 campaign site. You'd imagine championing child safety would be at the top of your list of achievements. nope. parenting and nutrition.

https://amygaley.com/#issues

this was clearly meant to be a political stunt leading into the 2024 election year to make the democratic governor Roy Cooper appear as though he didnt care about children. No respectable republican voter would ever dream of submitting to a government database for something like this.

Cooper called the bluff, as did most of the minority Democratic legislature in the house and senate. i doubt this law will survive past the second quarter of 2024.

This news article on a Fox affiliate site only mentions Pornhub. Did this originally link elsewhere?

edit: e621 is certainly doing this; this is from their front page right now:

Dec 31st: Due to the current legal situation in North Carolina and the uncertainty surrounding it, we will be blocking access to e621.net from North Carolina until we can consult with our legal counsel on this matter. We did not come to this decision lightly and we will do what we can, as we can, to rectify and remedy this situation so that we can restore access to those users that are affected by this matter. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and will have an update as soon as possible.

No, I just don't care about PornHub personally.

Ignoring other (obvious) issues, it’ll be interesting to see how people respond.

Do they seek different entertainment?

Does it lead to more or less socially desirable/adjusted behavior?

They will quickly learn what VPNs are.

Or just discovery slightly sketchier websites that don't operate in the US...

The internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.

Generally you get more of what you subsidize, so my bet is that this will lead to less porn consumption, an absolutely massive win.

> my bet is that this will lead to less porn consumption, an absolutely massive win.

I'd take you up on it, but there's absolutely no way to accurately measure this.

Given that access to porn is strongly negatively correlated with violent rape across most cultures I've seen studied, I'm not sure you should be cheering this.

How do you know this is true?

It is not, it is the exact opposite.

"Lastly, pornography use has been associated with an increased likelihood of committing both verbal and physical acts of sexual aggression.

With the correlation being significantly stronger for verbal rather than physical aggression, but both were evident."

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/606dc23be90e0...

The other observed behavior is that it has done a couple of things: sets ridiculous/false expectations, second desensitizes or commodifies sex (so in order to become aroused, despite having the partner right there, they need pornography to get them in the mood.) Not sure how much distortion has happened but it has to some degree.

Here's one of the studies I'm basing it on (this one is most in depth, but also only covers the Czech Republic): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-010-9696-y

I can drum up a couple more if you're looking for more data (the references in that study also contain a few).

My understanding is that, in addition to the Czech Republic, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sweden and the USA have also been studied and have similar results.

Yeah...pornhub is a good actor though. Maybe people end up on shadier websites with much less savory and/or outright illegal content instead.

I take it that you're gravely misinformed.

> an absolutely massive win

For who?

Puritans/Evangelicals

You don't get less of what you prohibit, though. Lots of prohibited things just get swept under the rug, and in turn, become more extreme.

I'm in Virginia and these sites are also being blocked. On Pornhub:

> As you may know, your elected officials in Virginia are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our...

It would only affect local businesses advertising on G-rated websites in porn-banned states if porn viewers in their state found it easier to just leave the VPN running all the time.

Is this a reasonable point?

>Officials explained that companies will be able to use commercially available databases to verify that users are old enough to access their content.

What?

Note that they do not object to age verification. They object to the specific way North Carolina is requiring it to be done:

> Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults.

> Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws

Using modern cryptographic techniques (such as blind signatures or zero-knowledge proofs) it is possible to design a system whereby you can prove your age to porn site P without P receiving any information they did not already have other than that you are older than their age threshold. In particular this would even work for anonymous users.

There would be another site V involved in the verification. You would have to give V your real identity and show them your proof of age documents, but V would not get any information about what site you trying to get verified for.

If V were a site that already has your real identity then using V for age verification would not be giving them anything that they didn't already have.

It might be possible for someone who obtains records of both P and V to get an idea of the real identities of porn site account owners by trying to match up the timing. This risk can be greatly reduced by having just one or two V sites, so that they are high traffic, and by having some random delays in the verification protocol.

That way someone trying to figure out if I was using say Pornhub might find out from V that I was doing the V side of a verification at say 2024-06-01 01:44:21, and they might be able to find out from Pornhub if they had any verifications using V that started within a few minutes before that and completed within a few minutes after that.

But with only one or two V sites, there will be way more verifications that happened at V at times compatible with those Pornhub verifications. They would not be able to tell if mine at 2024-06-01 01:44:21 is one of those Pornhub ones or one of the many more going on around that time for other sites.

It is a little counterintuitive, but the more sites that require age verification the better the privacy protection, and the fewer the number of V sites, the better the privacy protection.

That suggests that if we are going to require some sites to do age verification, to do it in the most privacy preserving way (1) it should be done nationally rather than as a patchwork of state verification laws, and (2) V should be a government site.

Too complex. If I had the time and resources I'd love to work on a good internet "captcha" system for age verification. Basically training ML with responses from different age groups to certain patterns, text or imagery - not sure what exactly. It would not be perfect, one cannot classify "18 year old" accurately across the globe, but I'm quite sure a good AI, somehow, could get a ballpark maturity answer that would block age-sensitive content in the majority of cases, which would be much better than what we have now.

I don't think it's possible with any acceptable accuracy. If it's based on culture and media, you would be excluding anyone who didn't grow up in the local area. If its some kind of IQ/competency test, there would be too much overlap between the most mature kids and mentally impaired adults.

There would be close to no accurate test for the difference between an 17 year old and an 18 year old.

To those opposing this, do you think porn is harmful to children? Porn is a digital drug, how else do you propose solving this problem? I'm a bit confused as to why someone would want children to have access to porn...

I think it depends on the porn in question. Would I be upset if I discovered my teenage son had some playboys stashed in his room? Probably not, no.

People are upset about the privacy and free speech aspects of this law, as well as the annoyance of having to hand over your personal information for something as basic to human nature as your sexuality. I think there's a 100% chance that there will be a data breach at some point and a bunch of people will have their porn habits leaked to the web. Not to mention the chilling effects when it comes to something like looking up more taboo kinks and not wanting your ID associated with that.

It's not just porn. I'm a member of the furry fandom. I regularly publish fiction in that community, I have life long friends in that community, it's a community that has helped me through a lot of dark places in my life, a community where I can explore taboo subjects in a safe setting. For most people it may just be 'porn', material they use to jerk off, but the fandom is a major part of my life. E621 and other sites aren't even necessarily 'pornographic', I rarely look at 'furry porn' to masturbate as a matter of fact. I'm being 100% honest when I say I follow the artists I follow for the art. It's just that in the furry fandom things like depicting sexuality aren't necessarily taboo.

Preventing other people from participating in this community, whether it's fear that their identity is going to be leaked correlated to their fursona, concern over increased tracking of possibly undesired sexual minorities, or just the pain in the ass required to take that first plunge and sign up for E6, feels like an attack on a major part of my life.

And personally, I don't feel like I should have to take responsibility for some parent who freaks out every time their kid sees breasts, but isn't willing to install parental controls on their fucking computer.

What is that, 48 more states to go?

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