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The Internet United States

Pornhub Goes Dark In Arkansas After Age Verification Law Kicks In (theverge.com) 69

Posted by BeauHD from the pull-out-method dept.
Pornhub operator MindGeek has blocked all users in Arkansas from the site after the state's new age verification law went into effect on Tuesday. The Verge reports: The Arkansas law, SB 66, doesn't ban Pornhub from operating in the state, but it requires porn sites to verify that a user is 18 by confirming their age with identifying documents. On Wednesday, Pornhub blocked all traffic from IP addresses based in Arkansas in protest, arguing that the law, which was intended to protect children, actually harms users. "While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk," MindGeek wrote in a message replacing the site's front page for affected users. The block also applies to other popular MindGeek adult sites, like RedTube.
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Pornhub Goes Dark In Arkansas After Age Verification Law Kicks In More

Pornhub Goes Dark In Arkansas After Age Verification Law Kicks In

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  • How... exactly... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Petersko ( 564140 )

    ... are safety and compliance at the forefront of your mission?

    I have no beef with pornhub, and I'm no prude or puritanical... but please... at the very best these things are a tolerated annoyance. And only because they have to be for you to stay in business.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Askmum ( 1038780 )
      Your details may get leaked (and yes, that is on pornhub, but it happens) and next thing the great state of Arkansas issues a court order to identifiy everyone who has viewed video X because they think it is not appropriate.

      There is NO added value in this.

    • Re:Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ewibble ( 1655195 ) on Thursday August 03, 2023 @08:19PM (#63738648)

      Is it a surprise that their was underage videos on pornhub? Just like airlines will also carry drugs, slaves. Uber has rapists. Scammers use telephone companies and banks.

      Nothing is perfect and you can always find an example of something bad in a large enough community. But do those things make them fundamentally bad?

      But moral panic sells views.

      • MindGeek is a known shithole company that at one point refused to take down revenge porn.

        • Revenge porn wasn't illegal (and isn't in many places). Why take down your legal product unless forced to?

          In other news, the oil industry continues to exist despite global warming.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Pornhub used user uploads to rapidly grow, knowing full well that some of the material was illegal. Not just involving children, but also stolen and non-consensual videos.

        After becoming established they deleted all the user uploads and stuck to stuff they could verify was legit. Profiting off exploitation is not a good look, especially when you could have easily taken steps to limit it many years before you did.

        • knowing full well that some of the material was illegal.

          Which is why they had a complaint and moderation system in place long before Visa went full retard on them.

          After becoming established they deleted all the user uploads and stuck to stuff they could verify was legit.

          No they didn't. They deleted user uploads only to try and appease the conservative idiots who tried to shut them down. In fact user uploads were on Pornhub for well over a decade after they become the number one porn source on the internet.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            It's well documented that people trying to get abusive material removed from PornHub found it extremely difficult to do so.

            • If it was removed instantly there would probably be legal grounds for those same people to sue.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by Iamthecheese ( 1264298 )
              >abusive material

              You're weaseling. Actual CP or rape was removed immediately upon detection. They didn't even allow searches for "forced" even before this. This whole controversy is anti-sex feminists teaming up with anti-sex conservatives to attack a porn site by any means available. When you stop all the legal porn sites or even tame them down to "only the most feminist-friendly 50% of non-evil content" the rest of porn users will look elsewhere. If there is no legal elsewhere to look, well.

              The outc
            • There's a whole library of documented evidence relating to the unsavoury videos YouTube continues to host, irrespective of complaints, and that's not including a lot of the older unverified videos PornHub removed which YouTube continues to make available. At worst, people will find such videos age gated and deemed ineligible for making money, with the general public acting like that's some kind of victory. If a victim doesn't take legal action, Google won't do anything either, and unlike MindGeek, they have

            • Interesting choice of words. Suddenly you decided to change the word "illegal" to the word "abusive". Why is that? Did your original argument not stand up to scrutiny?

              Now here's a question for you: what legal basis was there for removing abusive content? Why would a company remove a product on that was legal on the market. And before you say revenge porn and non-consensual videos are illegal, not that you're talking about the past, and even in the present it's still not the case in all jurisdictions.

              Rather

  • In other news... (Score:3)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Thursday August 03, 2023 @08:07PM (#63738622) Homepage

    Popular VPN services have seen a surge in sales in Arkansas.

  • I'm not sure they get how this works. (Score:3)

    by Chiasmus_ ( 171285 ) on Thursday August 03, 2023 @08:11PM (#63738632) Journal

    PornHub, the largest and most public streaming site, is also the site that's incredibly diligent about verifying the age of its actors and banning the most extreme and controversial kinks.

    So PornHub will indeed say "Well, this makes it impossible to do legally business in Arkansas, so we'll go ahead and block all IP addresses from Arkansas."

    Do we really expect www.barelylegalslutsofczechia.me to follow suit?

    Do we really expect this to *protect* children?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's about winning votes. The voters often don't get how it works.

      Especially the voters voting for them...

    • Re: I'm not sure they get how this works. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Thursday August 03, 2023 @08:21PM (#63738662)
      Protecting children was never the goal. Conservative virtue signaling was the goal and mission accomplished. The legislature knows good and well this wont reduce porn wont protect children and will drive a bunch of natural human activity further underground making it more dangerous. But in Arkansas you gotta convince the trump-lickers that youre completely foaming at the mouth in order to win a primary, even thought you know its all theatre.

      • What do you mean by "natural human activity"? If you say masturbation, sure, it's hard to argue with that. But if you mean internet porn, isn't that the definition of modernity? And what, exactly ,is made more dangerous?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by sudonim2 ( 2073156 )

      This is laughably untrue. They only recently instituted stronger age verification after it came out that the site was a hotbed for underage sex workers. Fundamentally, PornHub and other MindGeek sites are pirate sites. Because they were pirating vice, no one stopped them as vociferously as they would have if they had been pirating movies or music. As such, they leveraged the ad revenues generated by serving user uploaded pirate videos to outright purchase many major porn producers, as well as small competin

  • Kansas is weird.

  • Incandescent ban (Score:4, Funny)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Thursday August 03, 2023 @08:45PM (#63738724)

    So Arkansas goes dark the day Biden bans incandescent light bulbs. That can't be a coincidence.

  • Their people are dying from treatable infections and hard drugs, and this is what they're focusing on.

    • Because solving real problems is hard, expensive, take a long time, and thankless. Not the kind of things that win elections with a bunch of people with the attention span of a goldfish!

  • all those frustrated teenage boys will find a way around it

  • ... Arkansas students ever learn their math [pornhub.com]? [NSFW]

  • VPN business is booming in Arkansas
  • I noticed they did the same thing in Virginia within the last few months. I grumbled about having to turn on a VPN whenever I wanted to hit up a few sites, but I'd rather do that instead of giving a government ID to them.

  • Free VPN cosigned by Voice of America (Score:5, Informative)

    by kyoko21 ( 198413 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @01:09AM (#63739150)

    For those that wish to surf the internet beyond the Great Firewall of China or Porn Hub, check out the free VPN service promoted by Voice of America: nthlink.

    "nthLink is an application that allows you to browse the internet freely without website or content blocking restrictions. The application is simple to set up, and uses a mix of encryption and obfuscation technology to grant you safe access to the internet. nthLink undergoes regular security audits by an independent auditor, and operates under a no-logs policy, meaning they do not know who you are or which websites you visit while you’re using the application. What’s more, nthLink is committed to transparency in technology, and as such makes their codebase open source and available for the benefit of the internet freedom community's use."

    Clients for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS.

    https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws... [amazonaws.com]

    https://www.nthlink.com/ [nthlink.com]

    If it's good enough for Voice of America, it's good enough for PornHub.

  • A few weeks ago PornHub was also disabled for the state of Virginia.

  • Isn't it funny, the conservatives who want justices that uphold the constitution and claim China violates its citizen's rights are denying constitutionally protected rights and being just like China in the process? I always heard about the nanny state by conservatives, They ARE the nanny state. It's like the two parties have shifted dramatically. I remember when dems were anti-war and anti-governemnt, but cov** and TDS changed that. Both of these parties are so bad, its like picking Kang or Kodos (Simpson's

  • Modern day real conspiracy (Score:3)

    by RegistrationIsDumb83 ( 6517138 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @03:26AM (#63739280)
    The law, like all these age verification laws, was authored by religious antiporn lobbyist groups Exodus Cry and morality in media (now renamed NCOSE). Its entire purpose is to deter adult consumption of legal adult content by raising a barrier no one in their right mind would agree to (uploading a government id to a website, much less a porn website) and simultaneously starve the adult industry of customers. It is dismaying how a couple small, well funded groups can make so much progress shutting down free speech in a free country. They're stepping on our rights state by state, and no one does anything. People should be out there protesting this shit.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      People should be out there protesting this shit.

      They do. They're just shut down by the proponents as "woke" and "progressives" and "own the libs".

      Basically, the people who objected to being cancelled have instituted cancel culture of their own.

  • Requesting your id papers is idiotic. It opens you up to all kinds of dangers.

    Suggestion: Apple and Google add a service to their phones so you have to go to a store once with your ID, and an employee is then able to store your age on your phone in a cryptographically safe way. Then when a site wants to know that you are 18, your phone replies yes or no. No other information. As an exercise for the reader, how to make that unforgeable.

    And a fifteen your old capable of using mums or dads phone can also

    • Requesting your id papers is idiotic. It opens you up to all kinds of dangers.

      Suggestion: Apple and Google add a service to their phones so you have to go to a store once with your ID, and an employee is then able to store your age on your phone in a cryptographically safe way. Then when a site wants to know that you are 18, your phone replies yes or no. No other information. As an exercise for the reader, how to make that unforgeable.

      And a fifteen your old capable of using mums or dads phone can also lay their hands on their ID.

      You are on a technology site, don't you know there are existing technical solutions to this problem?

      • So why don't you tell us about them?

        • So why don't you tell us about them?

          Just search "third party age verification services". It's not an unusual need for an online service provider, so it's not surprising there are commercial services to provide it. It's what you are suggesting anyway, except in your model the third party is Apple or Google

  • Speaking of Talibansas... I see they just banned music. That's a shame. Oh well. Back to the engaging sounds of two goats fucking. Just don't watch.

    PMRC must be dripping after all these years of barren desolation.

    • Reminds me of a fictional? story of drones photographing afghan shepherds screwing the livestock. Every conservative or religious person accused or caught in the act should have their name/video on a wall of shame somewhere. Perverts in Charge would be a good name.
  • Incest porn comsumption down by 30%
  • ... er, took their ball and went home?

  • This isn't about children (Score:3)

    by DarkRookie2 ( 5551422 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @10:20AM (#63740148)
    It is about republicans installing regulation they agree with.
  • SO now the Spam email in AK will be how to get a VPN.
  • I live in Massachusetts and decided to see the site for myself. It blocked me!!! So much for their algorithm. What a way to kill off a business.

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