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> A more technically sound approach would be content controls directly implemented on the devices parents chose to give their children

Passive aggression level 10, and I approve.

This is the only true solution. Parents need to take responsibility for what their kids are doing online, what they’re viewing and who they’re talking to. This generation of parents should be prepared for that but apparently not.
How is this passive aggression? “You’re not using porn, because I say so, and you’re not using a computer without a porn filter, because I bought it”

That’s not passive aggression, that’s responsible parenting and clear boundaries.

(The VPN service is Proton VPN, for those coming directly to the comments.)
why this VPN in particular?
Its a Swiss one, so compared to some sites its probably in French out of box. Has a good reputation, located in country that doesn't take much bullshit from EU or given government (Albeit some of it is good, this is not).

Also cares more about privacy than most other countries globally (if folks grokked what "numbered account" meant then there wouldn't be so much baseless hate about how "Swiss took all jewish and nazi money and profit from it till today and that's core of their prosperity".

Couldn't be further from truth, I live here and watch these matters closely from both inside and outside perspectives.

It’s smart to be using a VPN for any sort of adult internet use these days anyway. Vixen Media Group is extorting people by threatening to leak their identity if they don’t pay up[0]. And not by a 3rd-party collections company either - it’s their own parent company making the demands.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vixen_Media_Group#Legal_action

https://www.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/1d3wfiz/my_exp...

Why does anybody care that their porn viewing habits become public? To me it sounds as ridiculous as somebody threatening to publish a log of the food we eat or the music we listen to.
> Vixen Media Group is extorting people by threatening to leak their identity if they don’t pay up[0].

This is specifically people who pirate their IP over public bittorrent; not paying customers.

Sounds like the actual dumb move is torrenting without a VPN. Even if you're torrenting to watch prestige television, you'd still want to have a VPN to avoid getting sued. On the flip side, I don't think anyone got sued from watching pirated porn from a streaming site.
> "and having offshore porn sites or any other third parties collect IDs from adults and becoming a repository of potential blackmail material comes with its own risks [...] A more technically sound approach would be content controls directly implemented on the devices parents chose to give their children" said the company's (Proton's) spokesperson

While I agree with their second point, the first argument sounds a bit overly dramatic, considering how the implementation seems to work. They couldn't blackmail, as the information they receive is limited.

As far as I understand how at least one of the methods for verification must be, is “double-anonymity” or "double-blind" protocol: the site never sees the user’s identity, the verifier never learns which site is being visited, and only a yes/no “18+” token is exchanged. Then other methods could be offered too.

Although if we assume the average security competence with these types of companies, handling ID documents and stuff, they'll surely get hacked sooner or later. So maybe the link between porn site and identity isn't there, but your personal data that been submitted to them will yet again float out there.

Their proposed alternative is even worse IMO. Even if you can figure out some privacy-safe way of doing on-device age verification, the end result will be a web that only works if you are browsing from an "approved" client - i.e. a platform controlled by Apple, Google or Microsoft.
> “double-anonymity” or "double-blind" protocol: the site never sees the user’s identity, the verifier never learns which site is being visited, and only a yes/no “18+” token is exchanged.

Isn't this an actually reasonable solution? I assumed age verification was supposed to be done by the site itself, and therefore it was considered a very bad idea. But this... what's the problem with this method?

If the only thing that verifier does is verification for accessing digital pornography, it remains blackmail-able. Not in the sense of identifying the specific content accessed but in the sense of "this user has gone through the steps to gain access" which is, frankly, good enough.

After verifying the ID, there is no reason the verifier needs to know to whom a token belongs, which would help this. It doesn't need to be repudiatable in practice because the security risk of a leak is near 0 and nobody ages backwards.

Fascinating that France is PH's second-biggest market, presumably after the US.
How is that surprising?

After the US, the three largest Western countries are Germany (which already banned Pornhub), the UK and France, but the UK and France are virtually tied in terms of population, so it was always going to be a tossup between the two.

Savoir-vivre.
I wouldn't worry about the VPN's, the 8 year olds aren't going to get one. On mass, it'll be successful, but I'd be more worried about social media than the usual porn sites for early exposure.
I always wonder what it takes to start a VPN? It's super saturated yet there's clear winners. Also I wonder how the operator is able to side step liability for obvious illegal use cases.

The internet has become a very hostile place and its not just surveillance but peer to peer political persecution where someone doesn't follow the script or believe the same thing they do and they lash out and try to censor them by mass reporting or DDOS

I miss the old internet where we used to escape to avoid reality, now we go offline to avoid the internet.

Seems to be one of those commodities where some winners are only by virtue of advertising, if all the NordVPN sponsorship jokes are true. There's also sketchy providers that double-dip aren't there? Residential customers pay once for a VPN and commercial customers pay again for residential IPs used for scraping and proxying.
Because apparently french parents can't handle the education of their children.
Clearly they cannot. They had already banned selling alcohol to kids.
Mindgeek is a very gross corporation that’s involved in human trafficking, anything that discriminates against them is good.
There's a big cultural gap here. To people who are concerned about porn, it's like asking why we have to stop children from buying handles of vodka.

Can't you just educate them to avoid drinking to excess? No, you can't, they don't have that level of self-control yet.

Isn't it unfair to the responsible bakers who just want a really tender pie crust? Yes, it is, but they're going to have to deal with it.

Won't a determined kid still be able to get their hands on alcohol? Yes, they will, but it matters that they get it less often and less frequently.

Pornography isn’t an education tool. If anything, it hinders education by setting unrealistic expectations.
Another service which tries to fill this gap with a unique offering is https://getadultpass.com/

They basically add 'verification headers' to the original website through a proxy solution, allowing visitors to browse sites with some level of age verification regardless of their location. They are more focused on the 'privacy aspect'.

I am surprised Pornhub hasn't acquired a VPN company yet...
Then you can prove collusion to circumvent whatever legislation is there.
and im surprised pornhub is still the de facto normie smut site but here we are
I don't even understand why people bother, given that there a millions of porn sites out there, why would you stick to pornhub in particular?
CMV: cocomelon and TikTok are much worse for children than porn
I support banning porn. You've got coordinated "teams" of men, most of them diagnosable sociopaths, who work as a group to manipulate and destroy teenagers. For every one woman you see on a porn website, there's a network of 10 men who are working as a coordinated team to manipulate her. Most of the young women are from broken homes, many of them are low IQ, and many of them were sexually abused as children by male authority figures. The male pornographer teams work together to push the teenage women into harder and harder stuff, basically stuff that causes more permanent physical and psychological damage. Once the woman has reached her capacity for pain and humiliation, she's cast out of the scene, likely with a drug addiction, likely ending up in prostitution. Saying that porn is "sexual education" or "empowering" or whatever is like saying that factory farming is the same as James Herriot-type farms. They're different in kind: in brutality, scale, and automation.

If you visit a website like Pornhub then you're complicit in this.

Sounds like you've heard of a few cases of abuse and are extrapolating that to every single person that works in porn. It doesn't work like that.

For the most part, the actors just get paid per scene, know what they're getting into, and have clear boundary and consent terms.

Then there's all the amateur stuff too.

You should provide sources. And after that, you could be presented other sources that present much cleaner environments. It will depend.

...So, what you have said is "Shoes are made in sweatshops: ban shoes".

--

Replying to the dead post below: yes, you have as if declared that "all shoe production is substantially like torturing geese for foie gras", but we note that "producing shoes does not necessarily involve torture", hence "you cannot ban shoemaking because of local abuses".

Im sorry but you sound completely delusional to me. Whats next, rock and roll turns kids satanic?
Lovely, people would go to prison, just to see some porn!

> engaging in illegal activities while using a VPN remains prohibited under French law.

https://medium.com/@green21/is-vpn-legal-in-france-exploring...

France has very stupid and strict laws, that apply accross borders! For example paternity test gets you two years, even when physically done in another country!

It’s illegal for porn sites in France to operate without imposing age verification. That doesn’t mean that it’s illegal for French residents to use porn sites without age verification.
Wait what? You can't do a Paternity test in France?
Maybe it just seems like a lot but it’s interesting how much shit Texas got for its age verification law when other western countries either were doing similar or pushing for similar laws. UK, Canada, France, Australia, I think I saw someone in the comments say Germany has something similar.

Pornography isn’t all that healthy but so is parents not stepping up and educating their kids on sex, even if it is awkward to talk about.

> UK, Canada, France, Australia

Many Western countries are past the limit of a damaged authority. People just listen to the legislative novelties and nod.

Pornography and sex education are two different things and I’d argue that pornography hurts education.
A better way would be to only allow soft content for unverified users, so youngsters wouldn't be brainwashed and hooked by the excessive ram up a train in someone's arse kinda mindless, cromagnon like content. Politicians must be replaced with something more human centric. All they do is bring forth rules to deny something, instead of trying to cure the epidemic porn brings into the life of everyday people.
> instead of trying to cure the epidemic porn brings into the life of everyday people

Eh?!

This makes no sense. Is it something like "smartphones bring addiction", i.e. the inability to deal with a tool normally as duly, because some people were left immature, is taken as an excuse to fall into bad logic?

If everyday people faint in front of begonias, it's not the begonia. Treat the roots.