Germany: States Pass Porn Filters for Operating Systems
heise.de
heise.de
I'm sure when those kids grow up and work long hours for the rest of their lives (if they can find a job at all!) just to be able to afford rent they'll at least be grateful they weren't able to access porn in their teenage years.
+Should be clear is that exposing children to porn or normalizing porn in no way promotes "healthy economies" either.
No, they do, they do it the whole time. Those might not the problems you care about, and not all attempts might be successful, but each new or changed law/regulation is fixing something. And there are many new of them over the year.
Multiple studies have shown that porn, in and of itself, is not damaging. The phenomenon of "porn addiction" appears to come entirely from people who think they shouldn't be looking at porn for various (mostly religious) reasons still looking at it, and feeling shame.
The BBC did a documentary about the knowledge of porn among kids, and how 16-year-olds go to the doctor's office saying they don't have erections...
> People who believe they have a porn addiction typically think their sexual behaviors are abnormal.
> In reality, however, their sexual behaviors tend to be similar to others'.
> Porn addiction typically involves a moral incongruence between sexual attitudes and sexual behaviors.
> By medicalizing problematic porn use, people can avoid taking personal responsibility for sexual behaviors.
The effects of porn, SoMe, ultra processed foods, etc. Likely also affect the real economies in ways wondo not yet fully grasp.
True, so we should start by not having every single computing device/service crave for attention, and not surrender our society's social fabric to Meta. Enforcing the GDPR would fix it overnight by making it not profitable, but instead we're relaxing it and doubling down.
Tbf, it's an establish pattern in Germany at this point. I mean you can't even sell games with explicit content in Germany, categorically... Though it's only selectively enforced. So you can still buy games like Baldurs gate or GTA, but some need to censor things etc.
The trafficking is another category, though, and I think still very active.
I hear about digital freedoms (for porn restrictions, chat message monitoring, etc) being attacked on a weekly basis, often with "think of the children" as a justification.
I don't hear about the fact that Western economies being property-based Ponzi schemes on their last legs being discussed very often, if at all. Instead everyone is trying to extract even more out of it by screwing over the next generations, the very children they are supposed to be thinking of.
> On Friday, the Sejm (lower house) passed an amendment to the bill on the provision of electronic services, which allows for the blocking of illegal content on the internet. The new regulations anticipate that the president of UKE (Office of Electronic Communications) and KRRiT (National Broadcasting Council ) will be able to decide on the removal of content concerning 27 prohibited acts, mainly specified in the Penal Code. Prohibited acts include criminal threats, incitement to suicide, glorification of paedophilia, promotion of totalitarianism, incitement to hatred and content that infringes copyright.
> Under the bill, the author of the disputed content will receive a notification from the internet service provider about the initiation of the procedure and will have two days to present their position. The decision of the UKE and KRRiT to remove the content will not be subject to appeal, but the author will be able to lodge an objection with a common court.
> 237 MPs voted in favour of the bill, 200 were against, and five abstained. The bill will now be debated in the Senate.
This happens four days after Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Affairs Krzysztof Gawkowski said that "Poland strongly opposes the introduction of mandatory scanning of private messages in instant messaging services.".
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I don't want to wear a tinfoil hat but considering that chat control is unlikely to work at EU level, local "solutions" like above in Germany and Poland may give legal way to include scanning instant messengers in the future.
The UK already arrests 33 people PER DAY for social media posts and that was in 2023.
If we're going to throw people in jail for posting political memes anyway, at least parents will have some control over what their children consume.
https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1mut3gv/12k_arrests...
Actually I cannot believe that the voters, or at least most of them, are so stupid that they no longer remember what they were doing as children, so I can only assume that the real purpose of the laws is not the claimed purpose, but something much more sinister.
I am male, so I do not know about what young girls think, so perhaps they are innocent and they might be protected by censorship, but I am certain that the "innocence" of young boys cannot be protected by such laws, even if they were technically successful.
I have grown in a country occupied by communists, like Poland. There existed absolutely no pornography whatsoever. There were no erotic movies, no erotic books, no erotic magazines.
So one might have believed that the "innocence" of young children was "protected", but such a belief was terribly wrong.
Due to the lack of any other kind of entertainment, a favorite pass-time was telling jokes, many of which had a strong pornographic content. I have no idea which were the sources of the jokes, but there existed a huge number of them. Starting from the age of 10 years, it was very frequent among boys to tell such jokes or listen to them.
The content of the jokes included pretty much everything that can be seen in a pornographic movie today and any young "innocent" boy was very familiar with such content, even if most did not understand the meaning of many parts of the content, for lack of explanatory images.
Of course, no boy would admit in the presence of adults of being aware of such things, but I would have expected that someone being now adult would remember his lack of "innocence" when young and would understand how futile is to expect that "innocence" can be "protected" by technical censorship, when the only means that could ensure "innocence" would be to be locked permanently in a prison cell, to avoid contact with any other humans.
The majority of USAians voted for Trump. It would be the height of hubris to think of our average voter as noticeably smarter than one from the USA.
Yes, they are. If you are an educated, intelligent person, most likely you live in a bubble of similar individuals. Step outside of the bubble and you'll quickly realize that most people are actually profoundly retarded.
We need to bring back institutionalization so people like that have somewhere their antisocial tendencies can be contained.
I think the issue with laws like these is that there is simply no way to actually enforce that everyone uses the "legal" OS for all activities. I think we probably infantalize children way to much these day and pretend 17 year olds need 0 interaction with sex because sex bad. But its not an honest look at life and is vulcanization of puritanism. I think being unable to talk about sex in mature way has left children totally unprepared to handle things like pornagraphy which exist.
And I do understand its parental togglable setting but I think its childish to think children are not going to find ways around such things. People are sexually interested when they hit puberty which is 10-12 in girls and 12-14 in boys (roughly). Acting like they are not is stupid and plans for failure much like your describing but in a 100% uncontrolled unknown way
That's because lawmakers think it has no impact on them. In Czech Republic a transparency law has been passed many years ago. This law effectively said that cities needs to disclose suppliers and agreements for services they are purchasing, like trash collection. Sounds pretty innocent.
It has turned out that politicians did not think that through because people found a lot of cities are buying services from companies which are owned by politicians who are also part of city council. Whoops, massive conflict of interests. So then politicians were clamping the law down until this got hidden under wraps again. All these Chat Controls, porn filters are going to have exactly same effect.
So now government is not allowed to track you and you can also make quite a lot of money out of this stupid law.
But honestly, if it were that simple wouldn't they think of it? Say, "only applies to politicians with a seat in parliament"?
And picking up only elected officials would piss of their own party again. Problem is that only fraction of party is elected, so they would be committing a friendly fire again.
It is easy to implement, easy to monitor, and will probably just work if the government do the effort to monitor and enforce it. If not, it will just be an other DNT header
Sorry, no.
As always with security, perfect is the enemy of good. A good set of hard to change - for children - client-side filters would do wonders in terms of real improvement. As much as I'm tired of the LLM hype, they might actually be a good fit for such tasks.
It's the parent's computer and they have a right to put a password on the BIOS and a child lock on the system that forces these types of headers, with no available bypass for the child account. Or, if they do please, have the router filter any website outside of a whitelist without a password.
We do worse for OpSec all the time?
The lives of others (Das Leben der Anderen) has 8.4 on IMDB.
If you can give children something that is basically whilelisted access then it reduces the need to try to filter the open web.
Frankly seems easier to solve to me than adblocking, and that’s already a solved problem.
Filtering on client-side is a good idea and lets parents parent without affecting anyone else, provided the filters work completely offline. And we should make sure governments and parents know this so they don't try to push any more Internet-wide censorship laws.
And instead of mandating it, it should work like movie ratings: OSes that implement parental control features get a "PG-capable" label, then make it illegal for minors to use a non-PG-capable OS. This should not affect adults, and parents can choose to not use it because it's a feature you have to manually turn on.
⇒ This will require OSes to have a filter, but it doesn’t require it to be switched on, not even for children using computers. Whether to switch it on will be a parent’s choice.
Risk, of course, is that this will be sloppy slope. Parents who don’t switch it on for their kids may get seen as not caring enough for their children, effectively forcing parents to switch the filter on.
Zero risk to Linux here.
Something like kiosk mode does not cover it. It will have to be locked down to the point of uselessness. From the article:
"Only apps that have an approved youth protection program or a comparable suitable tool themselves will be accessible regardless of the pre-set age group."
“Only apps from safe places can be installed.”
Yeah, d’oh. Otherwise, massive loophole.
Yes, it’s a Nintendo-ify button for a PC. It’s opt in. And very convenient for parents.
And if my kid wants to install something, it can come and ask me. Like I had to go and ask my dad before installing sth (before I got my own Linux machine with 14).
Downloading Linux ISOs just became illegal for real this time.
Also, your lack of concern for any people or projects who may happen to actually be German is... disturbing.
I'm 40 and what are you talking about? I've... seen stuff on the internet, but I think nothing my 15 year old self couldn't handle.
We all know what a big issue Climate Change (and specially warming in Europe) is. So most European politicians go on and on about environment and all that.
Well, yesterday, I went to play football at night and finished at around 10PM. I was planning on taking the metro, as any normal European citizen.
Much was my surprise when I compared the time and cost to a Car Sharing app (Free2move).
The metro in my city is €3,80 and Google Maps estimated a metro travel time of 30 minutes.
I ended up paying €3,64 for the Car and made it home in 19 minutes. Worst part, the car was not even electric.
It makes absolutely no freaking sense.
So yeah, European politicians are just scammers. They're doing their own businesses while claiming to protect the population.
That said, public city transport should likely just be free. (not so much regional or national transport as the extreme congestion from the Deutschland ticket has shown)
Truly all European politicians are just scammers, and Europe is in a "slow collapse"
How sad.
The cost of a comparable single trip for me would be on the order of 5x more expensive, in favor of public transport.
If we take into account monthly tickets, it'd be on the order of 10x.
This isn't a fluke either, there is simply no way a single occupancy taxi service could ever cost less than mass public transport. You just got lucky.
Even discounting single trip price, the more trips you make, the better and better mass transit scales. For example, take London - even if you do the brainless act of just tapping your card on every card reader as you go, you can only get charged so much: [1].
But monthly/yearly tickets are really where the cost effectiveness comes in. I was being very generous in my calculations above, I assumed you'd only travel 2x a day, to commute to work. But as soon as you've bought the ticket, all trips during its duration become effectively free, so there's no reason not to use the system as much as practicable.
For example, I've probably made around 40 trips in the last 3 days. That plus all my commuting trips this month puts my cost per trip on the order of pennies per trip. You just can't beat that for cost.
Hmmm, I doubt they really care about pornography and more about censoring certain stuff that politicians do not like. But what do I know, I'm probably just a conspiracy theorist.
https://www.standingforfreedom.com/2025/04/11/german-court-p...
I am also worried about another detail:
> The states also want to prevent the circumvention of blocking orders by erotic portals ... using so-called mirror domains – i.e., the distribution of identical content under a minimally changed web address. For a page to be treated as a mirror page and quickly blocked without a new procedure, it must essentially have the same content as the already blocked original.
Note the part "quickly blocked without a new procedure" so there is a way to block sites with even less process and oversight. That just invites overblocking without accountability.
Who decides what hate speech is? Incitment? what the actual fuck. Linux is the way until they come for that as well.
I don’t understand the outrage here. Many parents who are technically illiterate would like to be able to leave their 10yo alone with a computer without having to worry.
Rn the only option for that is nintendo/playstation/xbox. Smartphones aren’t.
I really don’t want the British version with a central internet authority instead.
(1) It's the parent's fault.
(2) Freedom! No government censorship!
(3) This is technically impossible to control (the fix is worse than the problem.)
While each point can be argued, I think the debate needs to be framed a different way. We are facing a dosage and availability problem, just as in comparing, in order of harmfulness: coffee, alcohol, and heroin.
We know what happens when a harmful substance suddenly becomes widely available. Do people say "hey I drank some beer when I was a kid so all drugs are fine, including opioids, in unlimited amounts"? And, "if your kids gets addicted to opioids, it's the parent's fault for not keeping it away from them" (when your trusted doctor prescribed them first?) Or, "people are free to do what they want, and it is technically impossible to control the supply of opioids anyway, so why bother"?
The unfiltered internet is FLOODED with violent, disturbing pornographic images that literally NO ONE should ever see. It's not some sort of law of nature that this content exists - humans made it and put it there, and the wide availability and potency of this content is the problem. It isn't seeing someone's naked behind in a context-appropriate scene in a movie (that's closer to coffee in the above example.)
As it turns out, I think this law is a good step, but far from complete or perfect (or even good.). Requiring each individual to personally set up 100% effective filters is an impossible burden. For sure, when I had young kids a decade ago, I tried, and I also talked to my kids about it. But how about also that drug dealer isn't allowed to sneakily approach my kids with free samples? And I can reasonably expect that my kids aren't forced to walk through the floor of a casino, with all the flashing lights and prostitutes, on their way to school? Since most school work requires the internet these days, that's what it feels like as a parent.
I have two adult kids, one doing well (despite visiting some questionable sites as a youth, I found out later), and one struggling, in part from the crap that is found on the internet. I know many of my peers with young adult children are telling the same story - at least one of their kids is way off the rails with a serious real-life problem, usually fueled by the internet casino in some way (and before you tell me we were all bad parents, these are now adults in their 20's and 30's, who mostly seemed normal and well-prepared after high school.)
Now, I am not completely blaming the internet, an excellent tool that has improved many things in my lifetime, for these outcomes. But let's not kid ourselves - there is a huge distinction between, say, Google Maps, and animal torture videos.
This is a hard problem, with lots of nuance and gray areas. It's the entire reason that laws and courts exist - sometimes you really do just need to sit down with a group of people and come to some sort of solution, however imperfect, and iterate to make it better.
Because clearly something has to happen - the opioids coming through the municipal internet pipes aren't going to be completely remediated with a personal water filter. This law provides for free water filters, but ones that won't work everywhere without prohibition-like enforcement (e.g. open source, DIY distributions of Linux.) It's part of the solution, far from perfect, and far from complete. But we are done doing nothing.
Why is any restriction on adult content so fiercely defended? I can post that Mark Zuckerberg should be arrested and tried at the Hague and receive a somewhat warm reception on this platform. But there are these giant faceless corporations pushing unrestricted, often depraved content to minors and people stand up for them. And this content often includes anonymous uploaded content with underage girls. It's like the meme "leave those billionaires alone!"
I'm sure this will get downvoted, but help me understand what the visceral reaction is. I've heard people argue that this kind of adult content isn't harmful, but it seems obvious that it is, especially to children. At least more than short form content like TikTok. What would you rather your 12 year old spend hours watching? The adult industry has always been a few steps ahead of popular media in terms of virality, addiction and kitsch. They're shaping the online generation, and not in a good way.
Porn doesn't do this. It may have other issues, but it doesn't aim at maximing engagement with infinite scrolls and similar tactics. Let alone the content, who would watch porn for 12hrs/day? We already have the possibility to do that, and if somebody doesn't have mental issues, I'm of the opinion (s)he's not going to do that
You also have to assume that people are not taking the purpose of these new measures at face value, but assume that there are other underlying motives and that the measures are broader than just simple pornography. And I don't think that assumption is unjustified.
The ID-based measures like in the UK are a gigantic privacy nightmare as well.
These measures are also not specific to kids, in the end they essentially always affect the access to this kind of content by adults as well. And some people think that is none of the government's business.
An additional factor is that these measures are technically infeasibly without drastic measures. So they're either easy to circumvent, or would give the government enormous power and access over all kinds of communication.
This is a regulation that, at least in theory, would give parents more control over what their children consume. If you think about it on a family unit, this is pro consumer. You don't have to use it.
But in general I just don't think we need freedom max absolutely everything. I think its destructive to society (as is social media but this is much worse). Naive purely economic measures like GDP and consumption miss out on the things that actually matter, like kids being the first generation in history to have unlimited unrestricted access to extreme content in their pocket.
I have very low trust in government (mine or other). We had these restrictions before. My country has been there, done that, for 41 years, not keen on repeat.
And unlike corporations (for all their problems and there are many), you can't avoid that.
Parents can put filters on their kids' internet accessible devices and everyone should be happy.
I'm honestly not against blocking social media for children. It's just sad that we got to this point. In an ideal world, parents would be the gatekeepers and the reason for not allowing their kids to use TikTok would be that it's simply not good for them. But I'm not happy with the solution, which means that you need a way to prove your age and/or identity to all these sites. Mkey. I guess. For social media that's one thing, but you already see that they're very keen on applying that same thing for porn now? Why? That gives my government highly fucking sensitive information about me. I seriously detest that thought, so I'd rather just not give any government the tools to interfere and/or closely watch what I do.
FWIW I am opposed to all such restrictions, although the restrictions on media companies (versus OS restrictions, chat control, etc) are slightly less bad because they don’t broadly constrain individual freedom in the same way.
If you mean “why do people protest age verification” then the answer is that the only effective way to do age verification is by mandating login with government verified ID, which destroys anonymity. People aren’t upset about kids not seeing pron, they’re upset about the entire rest of the internet being subject to surveillance.
> But there are these giant faceless corporations pushing unrestricted, often depraved content to minors and people stand up for them. And this content often includes anonymous uploaded content with underage girls.
...right. You got a little too into the hyperbole here. All the remotely popular websites you may think of are restricted and are compliant with the law as far as monitoring for and removing CSAM content is concerned.
And this does not really need to be said, but nobody is standing up for anything related to such content.
Also quite obviously, people who upload such content are not going to be deterred by whatever regulation you can possibly think up.
> I'm sure this will get downvoted, but help me understand what the visceral reaction is.
"Here's a dead kid, now give up your rights."
> I've heard people argue that this kind of adult content isn't harmful, but it seems obvious that it is, especially to children.
Yeah, and I'm all for parental controls. So far as they do not infringe on my rights to say, privacy.
Why exactly can't we force phone manufacturers to engineer phones with the option to turn on "child mode" that gives parents full control and insight over everything the child does? Only whitelisted apps are allowed and there's a special web browser that only allows whitelisted websites. The parent gets to see a full audit of what the child has seen, including URLs visited. Done. No need to burden every single already existing OS and internet-facing software with this nonsense.
Oh, and take some responsibility for raising your own kids. I'm tired of increasingly being forced to do it for you.
I struggle with porn addiction. When I really fall back into it I act out 5-10 times a day. I can’t stop even if I want to. It distracts from work and from my real life relationships and girlfriend.
Everyone on HN loves to rag on social media because it’s so toxic. What about porn? If social media makes it easy to compare my “boring” life with “beautiful” influencer lives, why wouldn’t porn make my normal girlfriend and normal sex seem boring. Part of that is how young I found porn when my brain was still developing and forming how it processed sex and relationships. Porn makes me feel so depressed.
I am sure other people handle porn and social media better than me. And that’s ok, I respect that. *But even if you think porn is ok as an adult, can’t you see why adults should be able to have more control over what their kids see.* Yes if they are motivated kids will find it - I learned a lot of the engineering skills I have now getting around my parents blocker. *Not every kid is that good and this might help many.* If it’s not required to be on in the OS, what’s the harm?
P.S. if you struggle with something similar to me, look up SA, SAA, or SLAA.
(I expected it to be harder to find with that generic name)
edit: I like Leechblock for Firefox
Kids can’t really join addiction recovery groups, at least not in the same way adults can because it takes a full understanding of the impacts of porn addiction on life and a desire to stop. I can only speak for myself but even with parents who tried to communicate this, I didn’t have that level of maturity then.
Blockers at least can stop them from accidentally finding it, or generic curiosity. At least until the parents decide they are mature enough to handle the unfiltered internet
There are better ways of doing this. For example require ISP provided routers to have built in parental controls or that people have the option of filtered connections, and ensure parents are offered child safe filtered SIMs at the same price as normal ones. It would not even require changing the devices.
It’s an opt-in measure for parents with a one-click solution. Think ad blocker but for adult content.
Parents have to actively enable it. It’s on the device itself, not in the internet backbone. No censorship happening; government doesn’t even know whether parents use it.
It’s a good solution.
And it's correct in principle: each parent should be able to decide what their child sees, but not what anyone else's child sees. Parenting a child is the responsibility of that child's parents, but it is not the responsibility of governments or other people.
Though I do have some gripes with it being a mandate rather than a recommendation, it is a much better proposal than age verification or censoring the entire Internet.
I don’t understand the pushback from tech companies either; all OSes already have a kiosk mode (incl the major Linux DEs). Should be very low effort to implement.
Movie ratings don't outlaw movies and actually provides a good framework: instead of mandating that OSes implement this, publish a client-side filter spec that OS devs can choose to implement. And if they implement it, their OS gets a label like "PG-capable". Then make it illegal for minors to possess a non-PG-capable device.
Authoritarian states like China and the UK do require classification/certification of films before release. Imagine requiring a painter to have their paintings reviewed by the state before exhibition!
Step 2. Make the use of the technology optional, and fairly non-intrusive to ease acceptance and normalization.
Step 3. Make the technology mandatory for certain groups/areas like all schools or certain businesses. Or for people who work for them. Also incremental changes are applied which makes the system a bit more restrictive, and bit more surveillant.
Step 4. Make the technology mandatory for everyone (except politicians and certain private persons like CEOs of big corps)
Step 5. Continue incremental changes until the system completely transfers all real power and control of the system from the individual to the corporation/state.