I hope that legislators are actually technically illiterate. If they were, they'd know what kind of stuff gets posted on any underground porn torrent tracker and probably geo-fence the whole internet.
I wish they would put some effort into these bills instead of taking the archaic approach of making everything a pain in the ass for legitimate users while doing almost nothing towards solving the actual problems it intends to solve.
What's to stop the content from appearing on another site or outside of the US? The PirateBay is still going strong since 2003 despite all the raids and efforts to remove it.
They should be allocating more resources towards collaborating with PornHub to stop these abuses, not by introducing legislation against it.
Even more disappointing that this was introduced by Jeff Merkley - the senator I just voted for - typically known for doing actual research and not lazily introducing legislation.
Who knows, this might be 3d chess by lobbyist. They might be carving out a porn lobby, where porn sites have to shell out money to the crooked system to stop these laws.
Sadly this is a feature not a bug for the lawmakers who wrote the laws. They want databases of PII to be breached in order for porn consumers to be publicly named and shamed without the political blowback or getting their hands dirty.
Pornhub should purchase and publish the search history and browsing habits of Texas government officials in lieu of the usual content. Name and shame the hypocritical bastards.
Pornhub should redirect traffic from Louisiana to a page that includes names and contact information of the politicians that sponsored the legislation.
Especially since it's such a poor excuse - these sorts of people do not use standard http to communicate or distribute this sort of content (the dumb ones do but they would just as easy to catch without filters or logs like this).
Good example, hop on TOR and try to access almost any image site such as 4chan as a test. 99% of endpoints are banned for uploading child-pornography or other material while these sorts of users simply look for another exit point.
The government is either ignorant about how these sorts of people actually operate, and how the internet facilitates them, or it really is a Big Brother style solution to put a full blanket audit-at-will on the general population.
Or what if they don't want to have to track adults who use their site? What if they think it's the parents responsibility to ensure their kids don't visit the site and they view what they produce as constitutionally protected speech.
No need for the government to be given a nice formatted list of all the porn each TX adult is consuming.
That information is also guaranteed to be a hacking target or be selectively leaked to prove a point by someone with a moral axe to grind
Anybody dumb enough to go source a bunch of kiddie porn to plant on computers to collect bounties probably doesn't have the smarts to actually pull it off correctly.
The political driver: Tories don't like (other) people looking at porn. The real driver: age verification will entail logging of who looked at which page, information which is rather useful to the government.
wow I am just utterly surprised how the politicians in US are trying to pass the bill via CSAM just like the politicians in korea. Korea already has a DNS surveilance on porn related websites because it may contain sexually abusive material that may harm teenagers' mental health (it is called children and teenangers act). They even passed a bill to monitor the videos shared in online chatroom because people may share sexually abusive material via messengers. They have a very strong ethical reason in that they are trying to protect children and teenagers, and it is difficult to overcome that by making a case for privacy protection.
What a time when a platform for pornography does make more sense and is the responsible party compared to elected officials.
Of course a mechanism to ID user does make everyone more unsafe. Aside maybe from a violation of their modesty if they indeed do elect to view content that might upset them.
Based on how bad firewall filters work I wouldn't trust a bit any statistics like this one.
Also, I feel like there are reasonable motives for visiting porn or porn-related sites in this case. It may sound like a joke but if work at legislative body responsible for creating new laws you should be able to do research.
1. You draw up a blocklist of offending domain names and IP addresses for child porn websites and get ISPs to block them
2. Force google not to return results for people searching for child porn.
Because politicians and their advisers really do seem to think it's that easy and that if it's not listed on google it's not on the internet. It's stunningly ignorant.
reply