In the third world you see people selling VPN access in person at markets. At this point junior can probably just download it themselves, but at some point maybe that opens up as a career opportunity.
Laws like this are trojan horses for draconian data collection policies and a failure of every other metric. The “Think of the children” people do not understand technology or how to enforce their own laws. Anyone with the impetus to get around the changes these laws mandate will do so with a google search and ~30 min. worth of effort regardless of age or ability to wave a credit card at something.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world
on 09 Mar 14:59
nextcollapse
If the porn sites just block the country from connecting with a notice as to why, will that piss people off enough to force them to change the law?
After a brief Internet search, I have found that no country or state has entirely pulled out after going all in on age verification. Most of them back out before even starting. So things don’t look very good for Australia.
Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world
on 09 Mar 18:10
nextcollapse
Like they do for Texas and Utah and I’m sure a few other states.
Pornhub does this in several US states. When you try to connect you get a message about why it’s blocked in your state. So far I don’t know of any state that has changed the law back.
tyler@programming.dev
on 09 Mar 15:45
nextcollapse
“Instead of these crude, circumventable policies that create an infrastructure of private companies effectively doing law enforcement, they should just mandate that every operating system provider has to create genuinely functional parental controls apps that meet a set of minimum criteria,” Lazar said
Explain your objection.
It’s a parenting problem, not everyone else’s.
tyler@programming.dev
on 09 Mar 17:07
nextcollapse
Parents already have the tools to block this at the network layer, including in mobile OSes. There’s no need to add age verification at all to anything. The parents control their kids devices, so don’t give them a device they can access this stuff on.
These tools have existed for literal decades at this point. Anyone trying to add something now is just trying to make it easier for the government to spy on you.
A lot of parents sadly lack any kinds of skills to use those tools nor even know that they exist. I’m not inherently against the approach where user agent sends some rough age (allowed R-rating or something) to the website which can then block minors from accessing porn/violence/whatever. If it was just that, locally stored info if the user is minor or adult, it could be a pretty decent approach to even technically less inclined parents to give some limits on what their kids can do.
But as with nearly every ‘protect the kids’ thing, it’s a pretty damn slippery and steep slope. If adult verification requires something more than a local variable that’s the point when the whole system becomes a tool for surveillance instead of a helpful thing for parents/schools and all of these “solutions” worldwide seems to be going in that direction.
A lot of parents sadly lack any kinds of skills to use those tools nor even know that they exist.
As far as laws with potential to repress freedom of expression go, wouldn’t public government programs or campaigns to train & educate parents be a less compromising way to meet such needs without raising issues of liberty, privacy, coercion?
If they actually worked, sure. I’ve been a parent for nearly 20 years now and at least in here there’s always been some kind of programs, information campaingns, news articles, tools and pretty much everything you can imagine to help keeping your kids safe. You obviously don’t buy porn magazines for your teens and don’t show news from war zones to your young kids and keep eye on the movies/shows they watch, but somehow every precaution is lost when it comes to the internet. I don’t know if it’s lack of understanding in general (as in what you can find from the net) or if it’s just the easy way out since you don’t need to learn how to apply limits on devices, but somehow (at least in here, based on what I’ve seen/heard) it’s not taken as seriously as PG-ratings on physical media.
And in that a system-wide setting on devices which would include allowed PG-rating on HTTP-headers (or equivalent) might be a decent solution. Obviously parents still need to pay at least some attention on the devices their kids use, but that wouldn’t require setting up a pihole on your network which blocks tiktok. However, as I said, that’s helpful tool to the parents only as long as it’s just a field on a local user account for the device, not something you’d need online services to verify.
Technically that would be pretty easy to implement and even if it’s just an extension to HTTP headers that would cover nearly all of the use cases today. Sure, the kids interested in tech could bypass that pretty easily, but that applies to nearly all of the parental controls anyways. But all those benefits obviously vanish if the age setting needs verification from someone else than the parent and it’s not stored just locally in the device. Building systems for adults to verify their age in order to look some bare nipples is a colossally stupid idea, but I’d guess nearly all of us here on fediverse already understand that.
Not sure that part’s absolutely necessary: if it’s publicly promoted to the extent that parents don’t have an excuse (eg, time, cost, access) other than low willpower/interest they are reasonably accountable for, then the public has fulfilled its duty to empower parents to direct the rearing of their children while protecting everyone’s fundamental rights.
However, I also think interested parents would popularly adopt voluntary solutions with enough public resources committed to promote & provide them in a major way.
While the public expense may seem extra, I think the government’s duty to protect fundamental rights justifies the expense.
Another comment mentions legislatively commissioned studies that suggest solutions similar to yours, but broader & less intrusive.
Recommendations included
A broad, national, private sector conversation should be encouraged on the development of next-generation systems for labeling, rating, and identifying content reflecting the convergence of old and new media.
Government and the private sector should undertake a major education campaign to promote public awareness of technologies and methods available to protect children online.
They also stressed the importance of adult involvement to provide child supervision & teach children internet safety, information literacy, & skills to evaluate inappropriate messages.
If the government had pursued these recommendations (it didn’t), I think it would have succeeded.
It’s also worth noting those & newer studies found client-side filters more effective than age verification for a number of reasons.
false positives & negatives are low & can be corrected
filters all internet protocols (not only HTTP or successors) regardless of geographic origin (including those beyond legal jurisdiction) or dynamism (eg, live chats also filtered)
highly granular (eg, can filter sections inside web pages)
You obviously don’t buy porn magazines for your teens and don’t show news from war zones to your young kids and keep eye on the movies/shows they watch
Though Australia isn’t the US, the US federal courts had an interesting opinion there: parents may always allow their children to access protected speech.
Even with sex-related materials, the Supreme Court has stated
the prohibition against sales to minors does not bar parents who so desire from purchasing the magazines for their children.
They regarded as constitutionally defective laws that impose a single standard of public morality.
Instead, they’d allow laws that “support the right of parents to deal with the morals of their children as they see fit”.
Laws that take away parental control are also impermissible.
“It is cardinal with us that the custody, care and nurture of the child reside first in the parents, whose primary function and freedom include preparation for obligations the state can neither supply nor hinder.” Prince v. Massachusetts, supra, at 166.
In another decision, they regard & defend parental responsibility & discretion in leaving access open to children.
The Fabulous Associates […]. Id. at 788. The court noted that “[i]n this respect, the decision a parent must make is comparable to whether to keep sexually explicit books on the shelf or subscribe to adult magazines. No constitutional principle is implicated. The responsibility for making such choices is where our society has traditionally placed it — on the shoulders of the parent.”
So, according to them, presenting such content to children ought to be left up to their parents, and laws shouldn’t infringe on their right to do that.
There are all kinds of laws regarding on how parents should treat their children and one might argue that keeping non-age appropriate material away from them is a reasonable line to draw into. For example in here with movies it’s pretty common practice (depending on a theater) to allow kids to ‘higher age bracket’ PG-rating with a guardian.
But the whole problem, at least from my point of view, can’t be solved only by either technological or legal barriers or solutions. Parenting is a tough job and from what I can see there’s really not enough support for them to do the job. “It takes a village to raise a child” used to be pretty commonly understood approach where all individuals from school bus drivers and cashiers played their small part on educating kids on how to behave and how the world works. Today it’s just rules and regulations which adults can use to hide behind and avoid taking any kind of responsibility and also, at least on some cases, the same rules say that you’re not even allowed to intervene if kids are being kids and do something stupid.
Obviously a lot of things are better now too than even in the 80s and 90s when I was a stupid kid, but I’d say something is also lost on the way.
If we had to choose, though, I’d consider the professor’s suggestion preferable to age verification.
While I disagree with mandating it, it’d pretty much do nothing, because it’s already reality: most mainstream OSs include parental controls.
The “criteria” would establish standards for parental controls, which isn’t altogether a bad idea.
A better idea would be to promote a standard & replace mandates with public services to provide parental control technologies free & to educate parents.
In the late 90s, when US Congress attempted to regulate access of adult content to minors, those laws commissioned studies that drew similar conclusions even then.
The studies & federal courts concluded that to meet the government’s compelling interest in “protecting minors from harmful content”, there were more narrowly tailored alternatives to criminalization & age verification that are less restrictive to fundamental rights & are at least as effective:
client-side filters to block content from the receiving end
government programs to train parents & provide them resources to “protect” their children from "harmful content"
public education campaigns.
They pointed out while client-side filters may have false positives & negatives
they can be monitored & corrected
they’re a more complete solution that can restrict all internet protocols (not just web) from any geographic source (not only in legal jurisdiction) with content of any type (including dynamic such as live chat)
they allow restriction of other kinds of content (eg, violence, hate speech)
they can vary restrictions per child (eg, age-appropriateness)
they let parents disable them
they don’t obstruct access by adults.
Criminalizing access to adult content at the source obstructs everyone’s access & burdens them with loss of privacy & with security risk.
Despite their age, those studies’ findings remain relevant.
In October 1998 Congress enacted the Child Online Protection Act and established the Commission on Online Child Protection to study methods to help reduce access by minors to certain sexually explicit material, defined in the statute as harmful to minors. Congress directed the Commission to evaluate the accessibility, cost, and effectiveness of protective technologies and methods, as well as their possible effects on privacy, First Amendment values and law enforcement. This report responds to the Congressional request.
In November 1998, the U.S. Congress mandated a study by the National Research Council (NRC) to address pornography on the Internet (Box P.1).
COPA Commission summary
The COPA Commission found Age Verification ID to have the highest adverse impact on cost, privacy, fundamental rights, and law enforcement and to score poorly on effectiveness and accessibility.
They found other technologies & methods to be more effective & accessible with much lower adverse impact including
- client-side filtering
- family education programs
- acceptable use policies
- top-level domains for materials “not harmful” to minors
- “greenspaces” containing only child-appropriate materials.
Some recommendations to highlight
> Public Education:
> - Government and the private sector should undertake a major education campaign to promote public awareness of technologies and methods available to protect children online.
> - Government and industry should effectively promote acceptable use policies.
>
> Consumer Empowerment Efforts:
> - Resources should be allocated for the independent evaluation of child protection technologies and to provide reports to the public about the capabilities of these technologies.
> - Industry should take steps to improve child protection mechanisms, and make them more accessible online.
> - A broad, national, private sector conversation should be encouraged on the development of next-generation systems for labeling, rating, and identifying content reflecting the convergence of old and new media.
> - Government should encourage the use of technology in efforts to make children’s experience of the Internet safe and useful.
> Industry Action:
> - The ISP industry should voluntarily undertake “best practices” to protect minors.
> - The online commercial adult industry should voluntarily take steps to restrict minors’ ready access to adult content.
NRC
nymnympseudonym@piefed.social
on 09 Mar 20:26
collapse
My objection is that its my operating system running on my computer
Not yours. MINE.
I can make its logic gates do anything I want, as long as it’s not sending CP or malware over the Internet.
While I agree, I don’t think the language “every operating system provider has to create” means it’s installed if you don’t want it.
Parental control software exists for Linux, it’s available from the package manager, and we can opt out of installing it.
I doubt “every operating system” is meant literally.
Embedded OSs for specialized hardware (eg, routers, satellites, rockets, missiles, drones, calculators, industrial lasers) aren’t typically meant for children to browse the web.
If TempleOS supported networking, it might be in trouble.
Viable legislation would probably be restricted to OSs designed to allow children to access content over the internet.
The main thrust of the suggestion is to prefer parental controls over age verification.
Better ways to ensure availability of parental controls (like government services to provide the software free) fit that broad idea.
I can make its logic gates do anything I want, as long as it’s not sending CP or malware over the Internet.
That stipulation doesn’t need to be stated.
It can be programmed to do anything, and that’s fine.
Laws already exist for illegal activity.
Anyone who’d fuss the absence of that stipulation lacks credibility.
I am not against porn on any moral or ethical level as long as the content is produced with everyone’s consent and some level of protection for everyone involved, or if it’s material being shared by adults for fun. Fantastic, more of it. Everyone should enjoy the good things in life and that includes sexuality.
That said, porn addiction is damaging not necessarily just because it alters your perception of relationships, but because anything you do that creates pleasure spikes/associations can have negative effects on your ability to derive pleasure from other things. And if you start getting hooked on porn early in life, these changes to your brain become extremely hard to break and you can set yourself up for chronic issues like depression, anhedonia and anxiety. And yes, also fucked up ideas about sex and relationships.
I don’t think a ban is appropriate and I don’t trust the agencies that want to manage our age-verification, but I do think something needs to be done that doesn’t just hand wave it off as “let the parents do their job” because we don’t live in that world. Parents are just children with more bills. Nobody knows how to parent, much less parent properly though difficult topics.
I am admittedly unsure what the right answer here is. A lot of the internet, not even just porn, is very damaging to our minds. Our attention spans are shot, we all just read the worst thoughts from the slimmest margin of people and focus on those edge cases about any idea or topic and it ruins our ability to socialize or engage with others happily. And a lot of young people around the whole world are just deeply stuck in ruts of doom-scrolling, porn, social-media and influencers giving fake advice and selling scams to anyone with access to a credit card.
I feel like with all problems it comes back to capitalism fucking everything up for everyone, but I also know we’re nowhere near a point where people are going to start like, creating effective governments so that services and systems can be nationalized safely. I wouldn’t trust a nationalized trash-can in the USA, not sure how bad it is in Australia but it’s just a matter of time before capital ruins every developed country with a few cents to rub together.
edit: if your impulse is to push back on this, it’s kinda telling bro.
There are thousands and thousands of people who have suffered addiction to behavior that gives them dopamine, from scrolling to video games to porn, if it’s not real to you… GREAT, shut up and go away. I’m sure you’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.
In other words, you don’t understand what addiction is or how it works, kiddo. The simple fact is that psychology has dismissed the notion of “porn addiction” as unscientific. If you don’t like that, tough.
Reiterate9120@lemmy.org
on 09 Mar 19:40
nextcollapse
Everything is an addiction to those with no self control.
Don’t project your issues onto the rest of us.
I am literally saying that anything that gives you pleasurable feelings can be addictive, but I’m saying it’s not a morality issue. If you think people who get hooked on bad habits “have no self control” then you’re part of the problem.
vantablack@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 09 Mar 20:07
nextcollapse
That is a terrible article on an argued topic, dealing with the feelings of morality surrounding porn addiction and not touching on the psychological pleasure/reward cycle that compulsive behavior creates. You misunderstand the actual debate or you’re looking for the articles to support your feelings. It’s a debated topic but most professionals believe that porn is addictive even if it’s not a defined condition.
There is debate about if porn addiction is a real, separate issue than just compulsive behavior, but the vast consensus is that porn is addicting, just that by itself it doesn’t count as a separate addiction when people show the same addictive behavior towards things like video games and other things that don’t chemically interact with the brain, so the argument is if we should make a blanket category for compulsive behavior for certain media and habits.
It’s about the categorization and definitions, not a pass that porn and similar compulsive behavior isn’t a danger.
the world’s leading guide on psychological disorders, asserts that pornography, as well as sex addictions, are not psychological disorders.
But does that mean porn isn’t addictive, and that people can’t become addicted to it? Absolutely not. Because the APA or DSM-5 has not “recognized” something does not mean that it isn’t real.
Lots of people are harmed by addictive behavior, about a lot of different things that aren’t always written up in a book. I’ve talked to too many guys who have had problems with this for me to dismiss it just because some wannabe celebrity doctors found they can make bank supporting our bad habits that don’t leave physical marks.
porn addiction is not real, if someone’s porn consumption is such that it is disruptive of their daily lives then they likely have some sort of underlying psychological issue, but the same can be said of anything, including exercise for example
but I do think something needs to be done that doesn’t just hand wave it off as “let the parents do their job” because we don’t live in that world.
We absolutely could live in that world, but we’re never gonna get there if people like you continue to pass the buck to others who should not at all be tasked with being responsible for other people’s children—particularly not corporations run by billionaires who have been raping or facilitating the rape of children for decades.
I refuse to believe lawmakers around the world are genuinely convinced you can prevent children from accessing porn
Sure not all children will be that tech savvy to circumvent the limits, but then they could access it like I was shown porn for the first time before breadband: a random kid during a school trip had a porn video saved on his phone. Only a few phones had video capabilities at the time, now it’s commonplace.
So yeah I will never believe the good will of such bills
threaded - newest
If it’s illegal anyway, you might as well pirate it.
I like godnroc’s suggestion of having bottle-o’s sell cards with proof of age numbers/hashes.
No problem giving those codes to minors. I bet such codes would be sold on the net withing 1 minute of the release of such a system.
Remembering that a valid age verification is supposed to be a parent approving their child’s use
“Muuuuu-uuum! I wanna have a wank to incest porn! Can you come and verify me?!”
“Not now son, I’m stuck in the washing machine!”
Insane, I came up with the exact same idea when reading the article then scroll down and you’ve linked to someone else saying it too.
Last time I checked, the darknet marketplaces have whole sections just for stolen pr0n site username/passwords
<img alt="xNt16gKrlASZvVF.png" src="https://media.piefed.social/posts/xN/t1/xNt16gKrlASZvVF.png">
EDIT: example screenshot
This might seem drastic but think of the great benefits to society! Such as…. uhm… uuuh. Hey! Look what I can do! 🤹
Privacy violations galore?
and users tapping out, completely. Build your libraries
Hold a photo of the PM up to the camera?
So dumb lol
This will only hurt people working in adult entertainment as it will train Australians to steal it all.
Western governments don’t care about solving issues, only looking like they do.
In the third world you see people selling VPN access in person at markets. At this point junior can probably just download it themselves, but at some point maybe that opens up as a career opportunity.
My jedi powers sense and increase in VPN subscription sales.
but doesn’t this just feel like the path to making those age gated or otherwise inaccessible?
LoL no…
Laws like this are trojan horses for draconian data collection policies and a failure of every other metric. The “Think of the children” people do not understand technology or how to enforce their own laws. Anyone with the impetus to get around the changes these laws mandate will do so with a google search and ~30 min. worth of effort regardless of age or ability to wave a credit card at something.
If the porn sites just block the country from connecting with a notice as to why, will that piss people off enough to force them to change the law?
After a brief Internet search, I have found that no country or state has entirely pulled out after going all in on age verification. Most of them back out before even starting. So things don’t look very good for Australia.
Like they do for Texas and Utah and I’m sure a few other states.
Pornhub does this in several US states. When you try to connect you get a message about why it’s blocked in your state. So far I don’t know of any state that has changed the law back.
Uhhhh no.
Explain your objection. It’s a parenting problem, not everyone else’s.
Parents already have the tools to block this at the network layer, including in mobile OSes. There’s no need to add age verification at all to anything. The parents control their kids devices, so don’t give them a device they can access this stuff on.
These tools have existed for literal decades at this point. Anyone trying to add something now is just trying to make it easier for the government to spy on you.
A lot of parents sadly lack any kinds of skills to use those tools nor even know that they exist. I’m not inherently against the approach where user agent sends some rough age (allowed R-rating or something) to the website which can then block minors from accessing porn/violence/whatever. If it was just that, locally stored info if the user is minor or adult, it could be a pretty decent approach to even technically less inclined parents to give some limits on what their kids can do.
But as with nearly every ‘protect the kids’ thing, it’s a pretty damn slippery and steep slope. If adult verification requires something more than a local variable that’s the point when the whole system becomes a tool for surveillance instead of a helpful thing for parents/schools and all of these “solutions” worldwide seems to be going in that direction.
As far as laws with potential to repress freedom of expression go, wouldn’t public government programs or campaigns to train & educate parents be a less compromising way to meet such needs without raising issues of liberty, privacy, coercion?
If they actually worked, sure. I’ve been a parent for nearly 20 years now and at least in here there’s always been some kind of programs, information campaingns, news articles, tools and pretty much everything you can imagine to help keeping your kids safe. You obviously don’t buy porn magazines for your teens and don’t show news from war zones to your young kids and keep eye on the movies/shows they watch, but somehow every precaution is lost when it comes to the internet. I don’t know if it’s lack of understanding in general (as in what you can find from the net) or if it’s just the easy way out since you don’t need to learn how to apply limits on devices, but somehow (at least in here, based on what I’ve seen/heard) it’s not taken as seriously as PG-ratings on physical media.
And in that a system-wide setting on devices which would include allowed PG-rating on HTTP-headers (or equivalent) might be a decent solution. Obviously parents still need to pay at least some attention on the devices their kids use, but that wouldn’t require setting up a pihole on your network which blocks tiktok. However, as I said, that’s helpful tool to the parents only as long as it’s just a field on a local user account for the device, not something you’d need online services to verify.
Technically that would be pretty easy to implement and even if it’s just an extension to HTTP headers that would cover nearly all of the use cases today. Sure, the kids interested in tech could bypass that pretty easily, but that applies to nearly all of the parental controls anyways. But all those benefits obviously vanish if the age setting needs verification from someone else than the parent and it’s not stored just locally in the device. Building systems for adults to verify their age in order to look some bare nipples is a colossally stupid idea, but I’d guess nearly all of us here on fediverse already understand that.
Not sure that part’s absolutely necessary: if it’s publicly promoted to the extent that parents don’t have an excuse (eg, time, cost, access) other than low willpower/interest they are reasonably accountable for, then the public has fulfilled its duty to empower parents to direct the rearing of their children while protecting everyone’s fundamental rights. However, I also think interested parents would popularly adopt voluntary solutions with enough public resources committed to promote & provide them in a major way. While the public expense may seem extra, I think the government’s duty to protect fundamental rights justifies the expense.
Another comment mentions legislatively commissioned studies that suggest solutions similar to yours, but broader & less intrusive. Recommendations included
They also stressed the importance of adult involvement to provide child supervision & teach children internet safety, information literacy, & skills to evaluate inappropriate messages. If the government had pursued these recommendations (it didn’t), I think it would have succeeded.
It’s also worth noting those & newer studies found client-side filters more effective than age verification for a number of reasons.
Though Australia isn’t the US, the US federal courts had an interesting opinion there: parents may always allow their children to access protected speech. Even with sex-related materials, the Supreme Court has stated
They regarded as constitutionally defective laws that impose a single standard of public morality. Instead, they’d allow laws that “support the right of parents to deal with the morals of their children as they see fit”. Laws that take away parental control are also impermissible.
In another decision, they regard & defend parental responsibility & discretion in leaving access open to children.
So, according to them, presenting such content to children ought to be left up to their parents, and laws shouldn’t infringe on their right to do that.
There are all kinds of laws regarding on how parents should treat their children and one might argue that keeping non-age appropriate material away from them is a reasonable line to draw into. For example in here with movies it’s pretty common practice (depending on a theater) to allow kids to ‘higher age bracket’ PG-rating with a guardian.
But the whole problem, at least from my point of view, can’t be solved only by either technological or legal barriers or solutions. Parenting is a tough job and from what I can see there’s really not enough support for them to do the job. “It takes a village to raise a child” used to be pretty commonly understood approach where all individuals from school bus drivers and cashiers played their small part on educating kids on how to behave and how the world works. Today it’s just rules and regulations which adults can use to hide behind and avoid taking any kind of responsibility and also, at least on some cases, the same rules say that you’re not even allowed to intervene if kids are being kids and do something stupid.
Obviously a lot of things are better now too than even in the 80s and 90s when I was a stupid kid, but I’d say something is also lost on the way.
Cool: agreed. Your objection was ambiguous.
If we had to choose, though, I’d consider the professor’s suggestion preferable to age verification. While I disagree with mandating it, it’d pretty much do nothing, because it’s already reality: most mainstream OSs include parental controls. The “criteria” would establish standards for parental controls, which isn’t altogether a bad idea. A better idea would be to promote a standard & replace mandates with public services to provide parental control technologies free & to educate parents.
In the late 90s, when US Congress attempted to regulate access of adult content to minors, those laws commissioned studies that drew similar conclusions even then. The studies & federal courts concluded that to meet the government’s compelling interest in “protecting minors from harmful content”, there were more narrowly tailored alternatives to criminalization & age verification that are less restrictive to fundamental rights & are at least as effective:
They pointed out while client-side filters may have false positives & negatives
Criminalizing access to adult content at the source obstructs everyone’s access & burdens them with loss of privacy & with security risk.
Despite their age, those studies’ findings remain relevant.
COPA Commission summary
The COPA Commission found Age Verification ID to have the highest adverse impact on cost, privacy, fundamental rights, and law enforcement and to score poorly on effectiveness and accessibility. They found other technologies & methods to be more effective & accessible with much lower adverse impact including - client-side filtering - family education programs - acceptable use policies - top-level domains for materials “not harmful” to minors - “greenspaces” containing only child-appropriate materials. Some recommendations to highlight > Public Education: > - Government and the private sector should undertake a major education campaign to promote public awareness of technologies and methods available to protect children online. > - Government and industry should effectively promote acceptable use policies. > > Consumer Empowerment Efforts: > - Resources should be allocated for the independent evaluation of child protection technologies and to provide reports to the public about the capabilities of these technologies. > - Industry should take steps to improve child protection mechanisms, and make them more accessible online. > - A broad, national, private sector conversation should be encouraged on the development of next-generation systems for labeling, rating, and identifying content reflecting the convergence of old and new media. > - Government should encourage the use of technology in efforts to make children’s experience of the Internet safe and useful. > Industry Action: > - The ISP industry should voluntarily undertake “best practices” to protect minors. > - The online commercial adult industry should voluntarily take steps to restrict minors’ ready access to adult content.
NRC
My objection is that its my operating system running on my computer
Not yours. MINE.
I can make its logic gates do anything I want, as long as it’s not sending CP or malware over the Internet.
While I agree, I don’t think the language “every operating system provider has to create” means it’s installed if you don’t want it. Parental control software exists for Linux, it’s available from the package manager, and we can opt out of installing it.
I doubt “every operating system” is meant literally. Embedded OSs for specialized hardware (eg, routers, satellites, rockets, missiles, drones, calculators, industrial lasers) aren’t typically meant for children to browse the web. If TempleOS supported networking, it might be in trouble. Viable legislation would probably be restricted to OSs designed to allow children to access content over the internet.
The main thrust of the suggestion is to prefer parental controls over age verification. Better ways to ensure availability of parental controls (like government services to provide the software free) fit that broad idea.
That stipulation doesn’t need to be stated. It can be programmed to do anything, and that’s fine. Laws already exist for illegal activity. Anyone who’d fuss the absence of that stipulation lacks credibility.
I am not against porn on any moral or ethical level as long as the content is produced with everyone’s consent and some level of protection for everyone involved, or if it’s material being shared by adults for fun. Fantastic, more of it. Everyone should enjoy the good things in life and that includes sexuality.
That said, porn addiction is damaging not necessarily just because it alters your perception of relationships, but because anything you do that creates pleasure spikes/associations can have negative effects on your ability to derive pleasure from other things. And if you start getting hooked on porn early in life, these changes to your brain become extremely hard to break and you can set yourself up for chronic issues like depression, anhedonia and anxiety. And yes, also fucked up ideas about sex and relationships.
I don’t think a ban is appropriate and I don’t trust the agencies that want to manage our age-verification, but I do think something needs to be done that doesn’t just hand wave it off as “let the parents do their job” because we don’t live in that world. Parents are just children with more bills. Nobody knows how to parent, much less parent properly though difficult topics.
I am admittedly unsure what the right answer here is. A lot of the internet, not even just porn, is very damaging to our minds. Our attention spans are shot, we all just read the worst thoughts from the slimmest margin of people and focus on those edge cases about any idea or topic and it ruins our ability to socialize or engage with others happily. And a lot of young people around the whole world are just deeply stuck in ruts of doom-scrolling, porn, social-media and influencers giving fake advice and selling scams to anyone with access to a credit card.
I feel like with all problems it comes back to capitalism fucking everything up for everyone, but I also know we’re nowhere near a point where people are going to start like, creating effective governments so that services and systems can be nationalized safely. I wouldn’t trust a nationalized trash-can in the USA, not sure how bad it is in Australia but it’s just a matter of time before capital ruins every developed country with a few cents to rub together.
edit: if your impulse is to push back on this, it’s kinda telling bro.
Porn addiction isn’t a real thing, sparky.
There are thousands and thousands of people who have suffered addiction to behavior that gives them dopamine, from scrolling to video games to porn, if it’s not real to you… GREAT, shut up and go away. I’m sure you’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.
In other words, you don’t understand what addiction is or how it works, kiddo. The simple fact is that psychology has dismissed the notion of “porn addiction” as unscientific. If you don’t like that, tough.
Everything is an addiction to those with no self control. Don’t project your issues onto the rest of us.
I am literally saying that anything that gives you pleasurable feelings can be addictive, but I’m saying it’s not a morality issue. If you think people who get hooked on bad habits “have no self control” then you’re part of the problem.
porn addiction isn’t real
psychologytoday.com/…/science-stopped-believing-i…
That is a terrible article on an argued topic, dealing with the feelings of morality surrounding porn addiction and not touching on the psychological pleasure/reward cycle that compulsive behavior creates. You misunderstand the actual debate or you’re looking for the articles to support your feelings. It’s a debated topic but most professionals believe that porn is addictive even if it’s not a defined condition.
There is debate about if porn addiction is a real, separate issue than just compulsive behavior, but the vast consensus is that porn is addicting, just that by itself it doesn’t count as a separate addiction when people show the same addictive behavior towards things like video games and other things that don’t chemically interact with the brain, so the argument is if we should make a blanket category for compulsive behavior for certain media and habits.
It’s about the categorization and definitions, not a pass that porn and similar compulsive behavior isn’t a danger.
addictioncenter.com/…/is-porn-addiction-real/
Lots of people are harmed by addictive behavior, about a lot of different things that aren’t always written up in a book. I’ve talked to too many guys who have had problems with this for me to dismiss it just because some wannabe celebrity doctors found they can make bank supporting our bad habits that don’t leave physical marks.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_addiction
No, sweetie, it’s actually a great article that’s devastating to your claims.
porn addiction is not real, if someone’s porn consumption is such that it is disruptive of their daily lives then they likely have some sort of underlying psychological issue, but the same can be said of anything, including exercise for example
We absolutely could live in that world, but we’re never gonna get there if people like you continue to pass the buck to others who should not at all be tasked with being responsible for other people’s children—particularly not corporations run by billionaires who have been raping or facilitating the rape of children for decades.
What exactly did I say should happen.
Prove my age?
No thanks
I think I’ll just wait until this thing… blows over
[ funk guitar plays ]
Ooh, baby!
Do you like it when I slip into my VPN?
I wanna bet the rich will have some shell companies and lobby so they can anonymously access porn trough those.
now all curious and unsurveilled teens can only watch porn on the darkweb
Where the good stuff is
I wonder how fediverse instances are supposed to handle this.
Let’s all rub one out for our fallen brothers…
Good grief. Who cares about porn?
Why not address government lobbying, for starters? Or how about the housing crisis/tax incentives that encourage wealth hoarding?
“We can’t tackle government lobbying, the lobbyists bribed us not to.”
So what about Reddit and Lemmy’s nsfw parts? Will they so need age verification for the apps now too, even if you don’t access any of them?
I refuse to believe lawmakers around the world are genuinely convinced you can prevent children from accessing porn
Sure not all children will be that tech savvy to circumvent the limits, but then they could access it like I was shown porn for the first time before breadband: a random kid during a school trip had a porn video saved on his phone. Only a few phones had video capabilities at the time, now it’s commonplace.
So yeah I will never believe the good will of such bills
They all suddenly cared at the same time too, at around the same time every country started a massive push for fascism.
VPN subscriptions are going to skyrocket
Guys, guys! Relax!
Australia’s brilliant leaders aren’t stupid* !
Of course, when they finally get told that these magical things called VPNs can bypass the requirements, they’ll just ban VPNs!
^*majority^ ^not^ ^included^