TBH I kinda agree with the states here… I started watching porn waaayyyy too early and it’s fucking me up… without a doubt… I shouldn’t have seen all the things I looked for and now I gotta put up with it.
But I also agree with PornHubs decision. There is no way to verify age without exposing your identity. There isn’t even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone’s age.
There really isn’t a middle ground, the only way to protect kinds (like little me) is to block the porn. But websites go on and offline every few minutes, VPNs and Tor are free and hard to blacklist.
How do we censor internet porn?? ¯\(°_o)/¯
Yeah, something like Adguard family DNS protection or any other family protection DNS service exist which works at the device level or even the network level and is simple to setup on smartphones and latops/computers or even the router.
YouTube won’t even load comments saying restricted mode if I browse through Adguard family protection DNS server.
Healthy parenting would go a long way. See some of the other comments in this thread.
You can also have settings on your local network. If you’re afraid of your kid casually finding something inappropriate, you can set that up stuff locally without involving the government. A determined kid will still find a way to get stuff, so this is more a safeguard against accidental discovery.
Investing in quality education would also benefit everyone.
How about less “control everyone else” and more “control your own damn kids”.
My daughter didn’t get unsupervised access until she proved responsible enough to trust. I want to say around 13.
Just because “I grew up with it unsupervised and it ruined me” doesn’t immediately equal “everyone will have this experience”. Sorry your parents didn’t understand what you were doing. Sorry you saw stuff that bothered you. Don’t punish everyone else for it.
I’m far from a helicopter parent… Instead, my kid has come to me for help in resolving uncomfortable or problematic interactions. We’ve always been clear and honest about why we’ve asked her to avoid certain things. Even when it made us uncomfortable. Especially then.
She’s 20 now. Most cheerful kid I’ve ever met. No idea how that happened directly, but I know I can trust her.
I think the part these points miss is that a lot of kids don’t have good or involved parents, and they shouldn’t have to suffer disproportionately because of it
You are still removing others rights over a hypothetical. It doesn’t miss this, it directly focuses on the point of blame. Punish the parents for exposing their kids. Irresponsibility is not excuse for harm… If a parent leaves hardcore porn laying around for a child to find and harm occurs, don’t punish the uninvolved adult up the street.
Another form of media doesn’t magically absolve parents from parental responsibility. Stop trying to play the “poor adults have no control over their kids!” Card.
The “but think of the children!!!” trope is tired and over abused to remove rights and privacy. Move along.
There isn’t even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone’s age.
It depends what you mean by this. If you mean in terms of a way to trust that the third party is doing its job correctly, that’s as simple as using the government itself to do the verification after seeing some proof of age.
If you mean in terms of privacy, you can’t protect the privacy of the fact that someone got verified, but you can protect the privacy of their browsing after the fact. It’s a neat cryptographic trick called blind signatures. The end result is a token that the user holds which they can hand over to websites that tells the website “a trusted third party has verified I’m over 18” but would not have to reveal any more information about them than that. But even if the government was that trusted third party, and they asked the websites to hand over all their logs, the government would still not be able to trace your views back to you, because the token you hold is one they never saw.
This is, in my opinion, still a bad idea. I am in no way advocating for this policy. There’s still the mere fact that you have to go up to someone and basically register yourself as a porn viewer, which is fucked up. Maybe if these tokens were used in other ways, like instead of showing your licence at bars, it could be less bad (though there are other practical reasons I don’t think that would work) because the tokens could be less directly associated with porn. But it’s still an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Not to mention the cost that adding all this would put on the government—or, if they charge for these tokens, the people using it—for what actual gain, exactly?
I’m merely pointing out that from a purely technical perspective, this is quite different from when governments request back doors into chat encryption. This actually can be done. It just shouldn’t, for non-technical reasons.
The issue here, I’m sorry to say, is that your parents dropped the ball. They were the ones responsible for your health and the safety of your environment.
There is no “middle ground”. The solution is to talk about sex. Early and when it’s prompted aka when children start asking questions.
Stop treating sex as if it’s something holy, special, taboo, and assigning a bunch of value to it. Trying to shield children from it is precisely the wrong thing to do. It’s exactly the same with this fairy tale bullshit about relationships, marriage, and kids. Media makes it seem like the epitome of existence, that there’s nothing greater than finding that one special person, and that there’s only one special person forever and ever, and that it has to be of the opposite sex in order to procreate.
The more you hype something up, and that includes trying to hide it, the more it tantalizes people.
Again, answer questions honestly and truthfully that pertain to sex, attraction, relationships, and so on. Teach how to tell the real from the fake. Normalize knowledge and understanding of intimacy. It’ll make for much healthier children and even healthier adults.
TBH I kinda agree with the states here… I started watching porn waaayyyy too early and it’s fucking me up… without a doubt… I shouldn’t have seen all the things I looked for and now I gotta put up with it.
But I also agree with PornHubs decision. There is no way to verify age without exposing your identity. There isn’t even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone’s age.
There really isn’t a middle ground, the only way to protect kinds (like little me) is to block the porn. But websites go on and offline every few minutes, VPNs and Tor are free and hard to blacklist.
How do we censor internet porn?? ¯\(°_o)/¯
Parental controls exists, and it’s on the parent to use them. Easier now than ever before.
Yeah, something like Adguard family DNS protection or any other family protection DNS service exist which works at the device level or even the network level and is simple to setup on smartphones and latops/computers or even the router.
YouTube won’t even load comments saying restricted mode if I browse through Adguard family protection DNS server.
I didn’t catch the name of that great parental control service, could you say it again?
Sure: https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-parental-control.html
This is false.
Parents have a number of options available to them that do no need to involve the state.
Imagine parents actually parenting instead of blaming everyone else but themselves?
What are those options?
Domain and IP block lists?
Healthy parenting would go a long way. See some of the other comments in this thread.
You can also have settings on your local network. If you’re afraid of your kid casually finding something inappropriate, you can set that up stuff locally without involving the government. A determined kid will still find a way to get stuff, so this is more a safeguard against accidental discovery.
Investing in quality education would also benefit everyone.
Parental controls and an /etc/hosts file for good measure
How about less “control everyone else” and more “control your own damn kids”.
My daughter didn’t get unsupervised access until she proved responsible enough to trust. I want to say around 13.
Just because “I grew up with it unsupervised and it ruined me” doesn’t immediately equal “everyone will have this experience”. Sorry your parents didn’t understand what you were doing. Sorry you saw stuff that bothered you. Don’t punish everyone else for it.
I’m far from a helicopter parent… Instead, my kid has come to me for help in resolving uncomfortable or problematic interactions. We’ve always been clear and honest about why we’ve asked her to avoid certain things. Even when it made us uncomfortable. Especially then.
She’s 20 now. Most cheerful kid I’ve ever met. No idea how that happened directly, but I know I can trust her.
I think the part these points miss is that a lot of kids don’t have good or involved parents, and they shouldn’t have to suffer disproportionately because of it
You are still removing others rights over a hypothetical. It doesn’t miss this, it directly focuses on the point of blame. Punish the parents for exposing their kids. Irresponsibility is not excuse for harm… If a parent leaves hardcore porn laying around for a child to find and harm occurs, don’t punish the uninvolved adult up the street.
Another form of media doesn’t magically absolve parents from parental responsibility. Stop trying to play the “poor adults have no control over their kids!” Card.
The “but think of the children!!!” trope is tired and over abused to remove rights and privacy. Move along.
You’ll never be able to properly block it
You can just go to Reddit instead. Same thing.
It depends what you mean by this. If you mean in terms of a way to trust that the third party is doing its job correctly, that’s as simple as using the government itself to do the verification after seeing some proof of age.
If you mean in terms of privacy, you can’t protect the privacy of the fact that someone got verified, but you can protect the privacy of their browsing after the fact. It’s a neat cryptographic trick called blind signatures. The end result is a token that the user holds which they can hand over to websites that tells the website “a trusted third party has verified I’m over 18” but would not have to reveal any more information about them than that. But even if the government was that trusted third party, and they asked the websites to hand over all their logs, the government would still not be able to trace your views back to you, because the token you hold is one they never saw.
This is, in my opinion, still a bad idea. I am in no way advocating for this policy. There’s still the mere fact that you have to go up to someone and basically register yourself as a porn viewer, which is fucked up. Maybe if these tokens were used in other ways, like instead of showing your licence at bars, it could be less bad (though there are other practical reasons I don’t think that would work) because the tokens could be less directly associated with porn. But it’s still an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Not to mention the cost that adding all this would put on the government—or, if they charge for these tokens, the people using it—for what actual gain, exactly?
I’m merely pointing out that from a purely technical perspective, this is quite different from when governments request back doors into chat encryption. This actually can be done. It just shouldn’t, for non-technical reasons.
The issue here, I’m sorry to say, is that your parents dropped the ball. They were the ones responsible for your health and the safety of your environment.
There is no “middle ground”. The solution is to talk about sex. Early and when it’s prompted aka when children start asking questions.
Stop treating sex as if it’s something holy, special, taboo, and assigning a bunch of value to it. Trying to shield children from it is precisely the wrong thing to do. It’s exactly the same with this fairy tale bullshit about relationships, marriage, and kids. Media makes it seem like the epitome of existence, that there’s nothing greater than finding that one special person, and that there’s only one special person forever and ever, and that it has to be of the opposite sex in order to procreate.
The more you hype something up, and that includes trying to hide it, the more it tantalizes people.
Again, answer questions honestly and truthfully that pertain to sex, attraction, relationships, and so on. Teach how to tell the real from the fake. Normalize knowledge and understanding of intimacy. It’ll make for much healthier children and even healthier adults.
Education is the silver bullet.
Anti Commercial-AI license