Pornhub pulls out of Florida, VPN demand 'surges 1150%' Florida witnessed a massive rise in VPN demand on New Year's Day after Pornhub began prohibiting people from accessing its site from within the Sunshine State, it is claimed. Between the clock striking midnight and 4am on January 1, the day of the Pornhub pullout, the folks at VPN-pushing vpnMentor documented a rather …
I find it hard to believe that many Florida Men could manage a VPN. Maybe this is the college crowd? Or just people Edging for 'veepenis' because they heard about it on 'them interwebs' and stumbling across vpnMentor? Well, I guess in between all the MAGA asshats, methheads, criminal cops, feral homeless, gun crazy rednecks, dumbasses building on hurricane exposed beaches, insane Cubans, senile rich snowbirds, south american gangsters, etc. (yes I know there is a lot of overlap between those groups) there are just some poor people who happen to live there for work and I do not begrudge them their porn - they certainly need it. *I* was horrified and got out ASAP.
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Yeah. Honestly I can't judge too hard because I've *been there * and if I had spent five years in intensely soggy and hot hell surrounded by All The Insects - including flying cockroaches! - and all the insane people I might also have gone completely insane too. But I was lucid enough to realize that and get out before being there long enough to start going 'hur hur de hurrrr Ron DeSantis is really a genyus compared to me' (and it might have been true at that point).
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My son found a way to change his phone's MAC address when he was still in primary school, he wasn't tech savi, he isn't now, but he managed to find instructions online.
I suspect that people have found they can't access the pronWeb, googled it, found links saying - I fixed it using pervVPN - and promptly followed suit.
People don't need to understand what a VPN is or how it works, they just need to be told it fixes their problem.
At least on android devices enabling a vpn service might be as easy as toggling a switch in your browser eg Opera.
The standalone ProtonVPN is almost as easy to use.
Even the floridan deficients should be able to figure that out, otherwise I suspect they would be find the content exhibited on porntube et al. incomprehensible.
I am curious as to how the age verification jurisdictions intend to enforce their legislation with when a resident accesses foreign (say Hungarian) sites. Some foreign sites do have an 18+ button which is highlighted and is no more than a continue button.
Being a BOFH in an organisation that had a no video download/streaming policy, and using a squid proxy one got to know from the traffic logs all the "naughty" sites. Curiously the org didn't have a policy that covered legal but NSFW (explicit) material until many years later - to limit traffic costs ie more concerned about the bits and bytes than the tits and boobs.
One thought on age verification could be for the site to display an image of a vulva and require the client to click on the clitoris to continue. :) Could exclude far more mature males than young teens (who in any case could locate the comprehensive and explicit Wiki article.)
Age verification should just be questions about mortgages, personal finance, DIY, gardening and pensions.
OK the under-aged might still be able to answer them. But at least we're forcing them to get vital adult education covered before they get to watch the nekkid people online.
It is a security measure, but only in very specific circumstances involving not trusting your network provider. Logging internet access for national security happens even in the US, but it can be even worse (and also targeted on "dissidents" who merely disagree with the current regime) elsewhere.
No sane person sends a scan of their passport or face to an online verification service.
UK next, so that will be another giant hit on the VPN servers and mass migration to dubious central European imageboards, writhing with nubile malware.
Governments should stick to being rubbish at pot holes, and avoid being rubbish at important stuff, like online anatomical research.
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>Yeah, UK needs a recall facility - one triggered by those electing the MP, not the very limited crap there is at the mo.
Probably not. Only because you'd get the losers in an election opening a recall petition at any available opportunity and persuading enough of the electorate to hold a by-election on a regular basis.
Not saying the bar shouldn't probably be lower than it is, but it does need to be high enough to prevent every MP just being bogged down in multiple by-elections every year.
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A segment that bears little resemblance to the likes of people like me. Most politicians are financially set to be able to run for office. I mean, generally speaking, you can't have a real job and hold political office too. And that "vote them out" thing - yeah, no. Like Florida, Texas, where live, is full of fools and the politically uninformed.
I was slightly stunned, but entirely unsurprised to learn that Jimmy Carter was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win Texas' Electoral College votes. I didn't get to vote until 1980, so all my voting for President has been in vain.
Wait a mo... Just knowing somebody's SSN is almost enough to apply for loans (and leave the debt on somebody else's head), but watching somebody whip their bits out and shake them requires scans of official ID and face recognition?
I know America is turning into a Christian Fundamentalist country, but FFS get those priorities in order.
Just an "Add me directly to the naughty list" as far as any agencies are concerned.
Anyone running a "Large Public VPN service" is sitting on a "goldmine" of data about people who wish to hide their internet activity, for whatever reason..
Of course, someone in a dark suit is going to come along and buy it. It is literally doing half their work for them.
Meanwhile the -real- crims will be using botnet VPNs bouncing off your IP cameras.
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If you want to hide your traffic, you should be very careful about which VPN provider you trust.
If you just want to get around geoblocking so you can watch the same porn you were watching before without a VPN, on the other hand, eh, it doesn't really matter. Just pick a VPN provider that supports open standards and doesn't require you to install their own software client on your machine. (Ideally, you'll still want to set it up so that only traffic to the sites you want to circumvent geoblocking for goes through the VPN, but eh, whether you trust a ISP or a VPN provider with your traffic meta-data doesn't _really_ make much of a difference in practice.)
It's always pretty much the same group of states. Health, education, income, GDP per capita, Covid vax rates, brain drain, dollars paid to the federal gov't vs funds received. It doesn't much matter the metric or how it's measured. The same group of states come out in the bottom 10 or 15. If you made a Venn Diagram there'd be tremendous overlap. There's no surprise on this list.
Totally coincidentally, these states are usually Red.
I know. It was a total surprise to me as well/s
Ah, Indiana.
The state that proposed a law to set the value of Pi at 3.
You just can't invent that level of stupid.
> proposed a law to set the value of Pi at 3.
That's not what the law said (as your citation clearly explains).
There WAS another pi law for the specific case of farmers selling timber to railroads and telegraph systems. Professional wood-traders have tools to measure round trunks. Calipers, tapes with pi built in. But a farmer in 1870 may barely have a tape-measure (or chain). Or a pencil. The company rounds-down and cheats him. But who votes? Hard to believe today, but farmers were once heavy in politics. The law simplified the round-math by saying the diameter WAS a third (/3.0) of the circumference (for commercial transactions where one party was not expert). Of course the company just adjusted their offer-price by 4.4% or more. But the farmers felt good at pulling a fast one on the slickers.
Pornhub is based in Canada, which is not part of the US. Oddly enough, being "based outside of the US" isn't enough to get around having to follow the laws here.
If you want to accept any US credit cards for example, it becomes much more important to follow US and state laws of the states you do business in.
Through extensive personal research since Texas enacted this law, I'd say you'd be surprised at just how many pR0n sites have knuckled under. Why?, you may ask. Because most U.S. states have reciprocity laws. Most of these sites are based somewhere in the U.S. and the arm of the law is long. But I am pleased to see there's a suit originating out of Texas to fight this censorship. I'll hold my breath while the Supreme Court takes 5 minutes to reach a verdict against.
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Nah. My dad kept his stash in a large wooden crate in the garage. Unlocked. And that, my friends, is how I learned about the "birds and the bees."
My sister once informed me that my mom had discovered my stash of purloined porno under my mattress - so I guess I was as security conscious as old pops. Upon looking back, it was pretty amusing. Sis ratting out mom to me for snooping through my shit and finding porn I'd swiped from my dad, which she probably no clue about him having.
Well, they have a product that people actually want, and will continue to want into the foreseeable future. So they have an actual reason to behave (in the cyber security arena, at least).
Unlike some online peddlers of trash [1] whose only real money-making strategy is data rape.
[1] some whose energy-to-usefulness ratio redefines the meaning of "obscene"
Porn website are statistically quite safe. You are more likely to get a computer virus checking your local church website than looking at porn.
Think about it... Porn websites need repeat customers. And if they are infecting their PCs, then that isn't very good for business.
Your local church website was probably cobbled together by an aspiring techie 10 years ago and has not been maintained since. Full of vulnerabilities and ripe for compromise by threat actors.
No, I'd say they understand that this is a tactic to ruin their businesses. Every site that I've seen that has posted a notification subtly blames the idiotic state law that forces them to enact age verification. They know it's a sham. I mean by this that the people who make these laws "may be dumb, but they ain't stupid." - Stalag 17.
They have an agenda. And the smartest of them know, they have to keep chipping away, bit by bit, to get what they want.
Its odd that Pornhub are refusing to implement age checks in some US states as I remember when the parent company Aylo was called Mindgeek there were going to be running the UK's ill thought out age verification scheme back in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aylo
They also used to have their own free and paid VPN service called VPNhub, Although looking on the VPNhub.com website it appears to be closed down now so unsure how long that lasted.
There's multiple issues with age verification.
Biggest of which is that we all know that data breaches are happening essentially all the time, the type of ID these sites would require e.g. passport including photo, is very juicy data for ID fraud merchants so privacy conscious people may not want to risk giving that data to a third party*
As the article states, ID is also fairly useless for porn, as there will always be sites in different countries that people can use so local laws irrelevant, torrents of erotic content etc. It is not a vital service that people need access to so all ID demand will do is stop people using providers that want ID.
* In my dealings with banks, I have made the (often irritatingly long) trip to a branch with my ID, which got photocopied to be checked, but not stored electronically, rather than submit it online - but I'm a bit extreme on security issues (having had attempted ID fraud performed after address change house when bank were tardy in updating my address details & sent out a statement to old address & new tenant or a mate of theirs then used that to take out a loan in my name & it was a real PITA to sort it all out, even though things like signature used by fraudsters was totally unlike my signature, bank refused to tell me what other ID was used, if any!, (as any ID beyond the statement would have needed to be forged) - only figured out the statement must have been used when I contacted bank to ask why I had not received statement at my new address )
"there will always be sites in different countries that people can use "
Although it inevitably becomes a game of whack-a-mole, ISPs will be instructed to block any sites which are non-compliant, assuming they remembered to put that response into the the law so any porn sites "available" in the relevant States will have to comply if they want to continue doing business in said States. It'll probably work about as well as "blocking" The Pirate Bay and their ilk at the ISP level in the UK.
> "substantial portion of material harmful to minors,"
In other news, Florida is requiring any indoor walls of parents' bedrooms be soundproofed -- doors too -- lest the poor minor(s) have to listen to their parents having sex, an undeniably damaging experience.
Oh, wait. They meant only on the internet. Right.
"For what it's worth, Robin Tombs, boss of Yoti, which provides age checks for blue-movie sites in the US, argued earlier this week that its age confirmation system, using facial analysis, and identity document verification is secure and safe, as you might imagine."
But my desktop doesn't have a camera you insensitive clods! Well, Iowa hasn't gotten there yet.. the nuts in power here are too busy trying to get books banned and take away LBGTQ rights to worry about porn.
What's most maddening about these right-wingers is their constant lying about wanting to reduce government intrusion and restrictions, while in fact wanting to turn the state (and the country) into an "Iran of the west", passing all sorts of religious-hangup-based laws and regulations. As someone who is libertarian at heart and really wants light regulation, it's pretty galling to have these people falsely claim that's what they want when they want the exact opposite.. and that their followers truly have the doublethink to simultaneously support restrictions to people's rights while simultaneously believing these politicians are easing up on restrictions.
They seem to genuinely act like they want less government -- with respect to business.
OTOH, they also seem to take the stance that the Holly Babble is Gosh's law, and needs to be enacted as such in written law -- and *both* sides of the political office have carried that out until an alternative was presented in the early to mid 1900's. Everything is still shifting.
Yes, they do want to lock every person into their own idealism. OTOH, the other party isn't any better -- I went to California in recent years, and the bathrooms were labeled "Women" and "others". No exaggeration.You don't matter unless you're female, you're a *problem* if you're white or male (and quadruply a problem if both), and the bitch who shrieks loudest gets the greatest payout.
Good luck. (Now the down-votes because the last line. Oh well.)
Or, just possibly, it was actually quite a conservative stance on the transgender debate about bathrooms, and one bathroom was only for women, and transgender women had to use the same one as the men? Or it was a joke? You're jumping to quite a lot of conclusions there, based on a bathroom sign.
apparently, it's a booming erotica genre...
No mention of VPNs
Age restrictions are happening globally so eventually the VPN solution will not work.
Recent events have shown that whenever societal policies are adopted universally, and in synchronicity there's an agenda behind them. Will the masses be wise enough to see through it this time? I frankly doubt it.
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