Pornhub says that Texas laws don’t keep children safe, so if you’re in the Lone Star State, you’ll have to go elsewhere to get some relief by looking at feet or hot moms/dads or whatever floats your boat. Texas says they’re just thinking of the children. I suspect this was the entire purpose of the apparently badly written age verification law.
Aside from political issues(censorship, etc)-'x
How does this work physically? What ar the technical issues?
I thought the internet is called the WWWeb specifically to prevent it from being shut down easily.
Is it really so easy for a website to restrict specific geographical locations? And if so, how precisely? (The whole state of Texas, a single city, a single street, an individual house?)
According to the article: Pornhub “is blocking anyone who accesses it from a Texas IP address.” I’m not an expert, but apparently, IP addresses have geographical markers on them. I knew this on a basic level, but interesting (and concerning) that it can be used this way. I’d guess that a VPN would dodge this problem but again, I’m no expert.
It’s the same principle that keeps us Texans from using FanDuel and Draft Kings. The companies themselves block traffic from certain areas. Presumably the alternative would be something like China’s Great Firewall. In order to avoid it coming to that, companies that are banned from providing their service have agreed to cut off access from their end.
Exactly correct and the sites would potentially face legal action if they operated there in violation of the law. In a different thread about the sports gambling sites, they are precise enough to block people on smart phones on either side of a state border.
PH has done the same thing in Virginia. Instead of “sexy stepmom” videos you get a short message read by an attractive woman about why they won’t operate. It’s based on IP address, but it’s not precise. Some people in neighboring states have been blocked too.
The US is sliding back to porn hidden behind the counter. It was like that when I grew up. Even Playboy wasn’t out in the open. The cashier would get one when asked.
What a bizarre take on this. Ridiculous hyperbole. That isn’t close to happening and things aren’t trending in that direction in any sense. There are at least dozens of alternative ways to view porn on the web in Texas and most of the rest of the US isn’t even considering laws like Texas just made. It’s one web site doing a protest.
I suspect it’s probably just a way for our hopelessly crooked AG to flex a bit and show his fealty to the religious kook billionaires (Farris Wilks & Tim Dunn) who pull a lot of the strings of the Texas GOP.
There isn’t really a good technical way to enforce this- they’d have to do one of two things- somehow erect a “Great Firewall” for Texas and block access themselves, or start suing all sorts of small-time and foreign sites with content they don’t like.
Neither of which is likely to happen; they’re just going after the big fish and making a show of it, from what I’ve read.
snicker
I’m sorry, that was childish of me. You make a good point.
FWIW this was something that wasn’t even on my radar. No mention of it by anybody that I follow on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok (I deleted my Twitter in protest of Elon). No mention in the local paper, and if it was in the Dallas paper it was only for one day that I missed.
In other words this wasn’t something where the usual suspects got a bunch of suburban moms riled up about porn. It’s more like something done in the dead of night by the legislature.
There are now seven states where PH is banned (according to my quick Google). The law wasn’t to ban PH. The law is to make a requirement that PH chooses not to follow. It was PH who is making a big deal out of this to get the headlines. One and only one website is doing this, granted it’s the biggest or one of the biggest ones, and that’s it.
Yeah, this is an ongoing thing.
https://cybernews.com/news/pornhub-montana-north-carolina-age-verification/
Heh-heh…point…Heh-heh
I’m not a tech genius, but couldn’t anyone in Texas get by this trivially easily?
The existence of the Great Firewall of China should have put a nail years ago into the idea that “the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it.”
You forget how deeply stupid (or willfully ignorant) a large percentage of humans are.
Don’t forget lazy.
Yeah, that’s basically what it is. They don’t have markers, but there are ways of generally figuring out where an IP range is operating. Pretty much everyone buys the MaxMind DB and uses it. In the past, I integrated it into a customer’s system so their porn site couldn’t be viewed in the country they were making the porn in. I assumed this was to keep the actor’s friends/family from seeing them and causing an uncomfortable situation.
Absolutely. Firstly by getting the identical content on many, many other sites. Secondly by a VPN.