Pornhub shuts down in Texas... and predictably, VPNs benefit

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨restingboredface@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://mashable.com/article/texas-pornhub-ban-vpns

From the article: “Unsurprisingly, this skyrocketed searches for the best VPNs. According to a SlashGear report sent to Mashable, searches for “Texas VPN” jumped by 1,750 percent in the past day. It also spotted a 1,600 percent increase for the phrase “How to access Pornhub.””

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Comments

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jeffw@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
What if it was just lobbying from the VPN industry this whole time?

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- BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Probably the politicians bought VPN stock just before this was ruled. Just like so many “randomly” happened to buy video conference stock just before the COVID lockdown?
  
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  - imPastaSyndrome@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I mean if you saw what was going on in Italy and had any clue about it, you’d have been smart and purchased it. There was a lockdown in Italy for like he saw it month before there was even talk of COVID coming to the states
    
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- hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  VPN use likely spiked in South Korea recently as well, since being blocked by Twitch.
  
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- Mango@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Image
  
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pop@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Lots of shady free VPNs out there from Chinese/Russian companies. Now instead of just letting people watch porn, they’ll send their data to a shady/foreign entity. The apps will ask all the permissions, and people who don’t know shit, will grant them.

Same thing will happen when they ban Tiktok.

Well done, You played yourself.

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- ferralcat@monyet.cc ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Definitely no shady VPNs run by white westerners though. Theyve all got impeccable morals through ans through. Glad you cleared that up.
  
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  - Evil_incarnate@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Let me make it clear folks, nobody has better morals than white people, believe me. They’re tremendous, the best. They follow the rules, they respect authority, they’re just fantastic. I mean, look at me, I’m the best example of great morals, and I’m white, folks. White people, they’re winners, they know how to do things right, they’re tremendous patriots. So let’s make America great again with the incredible morals of white people leading the way.
    
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  - oce@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Reread the comment considering it’s taking the view point of a Republican in Texas who voted this law, it will make more sense.
    
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  - McDropout@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The outlook on everything on Lemmy is driving me away from the platform. I’m not saying other platforms are any better. I might just stop using it.
    
    The same people who complain about government propaganda are the same people who type “Russia bad! China bad!” like it’s not decades of propaganda to make westerners hate these countries.
    
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- pathief@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Just use proton VPN, the free tier should be enough.
  
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  - DudeDudenson@lemmings.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    His argument is that the average person won’t know any better and will just take the first sponsored result for “free VPN” of Google
    
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- Kekzkrieger@feddit.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I dont think so, Texas finally solved the problem with porn, now nobody can watch it and everyones life (and children) are finally safe.
  
  /s
  
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- peg@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Shady American services are OK though.
  
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ininewcrow@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m sure the people who legislated all this into place were the first ones to access a VPN to get onto PornHub

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- essteeyou@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I suspect they invested in companies that sell VPNs.
  
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  - kautau@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Kape technologies comes to mind, which owns Private Internet Access, CyberGhost, and ExpresssVPN, and is in turn owned by an Israeli billionaire
    
    en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_Sagi
    
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- hempster@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Using a VPN that is beholden to shareholder’s mood swings is even more dangerous
  
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Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
At some point, Republicans will surely cross the line where their policies are so unpopular that people stop voting for them, right?

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- scoobford@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  They are heavily entrenched in Texas. They will have to badly piss off most people enough that they all go vote in the same cycle.
  
  Our state government has actually been getting much more radical over the past few years, because the only people who vote are conservative radicals, because everyone else is either apathetic or aware that their vote won’t matter unless millions of people suddenly wake up tomorrow and vote.
  
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  - JackiesFridge@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Millions of people not voting because it would take millions of people voting to elicit positive change and nobody is doing that is one of the most frustrating things.
    
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- HawlSera@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Not as long as the other guy is some dirty liberal who believes in socialist conspiracies like the holocaust having actually happened…
  
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  - echodot@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’ve never really understood why they claim it didn’t happen, it’s not like they were the ones doing it so i don’t understand why they feel the need to protect themselves by claiming its non-existence.
    
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- jhulten@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Unfortunately that isn’t how identity politics works.
  
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- MostlyGibberish@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Not as long as there are minorities to blame for everything.
  
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- billwashere@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Something something… Leopards … Face eating …
  
  I doubt it.
  
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  - Fedizen@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    the old guys with piles of old greasy porn mags grinning with their remaining teeth.
    
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- Theharpyeagle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  They are trying their damndest with this and going after IVF, but so far it hasn’t moved the needle too much.
  
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daniskarma@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
To be fair current age verification is useless. We all know clicking a button does not verify anything.

Also we know that submitting personal data to a website to verify your age is terrible. Big no no.

I’m curious of what will happen in my country. Here in Spain government said that they will implement a new age verification system using Anonymous digital certificates. The government will issue those and you have to give your ID but the certificate itself it’s anonymous and the website won’t be able to know who is the person behind the certificate. While there’s no implementation yet, I hope they use the kind of anonymous certificates that, once expedited, the government also does not know who is using the certificate when serving as a certificate authority to validate it’s authenticity.

Let’s see how it goes. I’m afraid even while being privacy friendly with this system Pornhub will block access here to as a threat to other places. At the end is a private company and blocking minors from accessing their content cost them big money, and, of course, money is the only thing that matters to them.

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- Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  To be fair, who gives a shit about age verification?
  
  I do not care what your child do on the Internet.
  
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  - MostlyGibberish@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Right. Why do I have to submit a retinal scan and 3 forms of ID to watch porn because parents can’t be bothered to learn basic computer skills and monitor their own children?
    
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- realharo@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The right way to implement this is where they don’t even have any persistent identifier that could be used for tracking. They should only ever see a derived single-use signature that gives them a yes/no answer and nothing more.
  
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- billwashere@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It IS possible from a technical standpoint to be able to do anonymous age verification. I can think of several methods that would work but the issue is I’d have to trust a company or the government with this information and trust them to not do something stupid with it like using it for nefarious purposes, selling it, or just not protecting it well enough. And with all the data brokerages and security breaches in the news there is no way I’d ever do that. Just not gonna happen. This data is just too valuable to trust any single company with it.
  
  To me this is absolutely a 1st and 4th amendment issue. We are quickly devolving in an American religious state ruled by morality police.
  
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- trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  In the Netherlands we have this app that could be used for it www.yivi.app/en it’s open-source, developed by an ngo in collaboration with a Dutch university. It’s not very widely used yet, but the idea behind it is really good.
  
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  - unbroken2030@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Outside the issue of yet another competing standard to do the same thing, there’s an inherent issue with verification in these kinds of apps. That is, how the identity is actually verified for the account. Is it the government itself, a for-profit company partnered in some way with governments, something else? The issue begs the question, is this something we should have in the first place?
    
    I don’t think so. And it seems to me that those who do likely don’t realize how much of a slippery slope it is to complete privacy erosion. Others are simply trying to live their life and this is very far down on their list of worries. Yet here we are, where services are built around the assumption that every user has a phone (and phone number).
    
    Some relevant media to the topic: xkcd 927 Electric Dreams S1E9
    
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- jhulten@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The certificate may be anonymous to website hosts, but it won’t be to the Spanish government. Otherwise you copy Grandpa’s cert and pass it around school.
  
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tal@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There’s a certain argument that it might be preferable from a privacy standpoint if people used VPNs in general, though it sure isn’t ideal from a performance standpoint.

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- laxe@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It also costs money. For many people, every monthly fee makes a difference.
  
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  - SundryTornAsunder@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I am not affiliated with Mullvad VPN in any capacity and I have nothing to disclose, lol.
    
    Mullvad VPN does not even offer a renewing subscription, that I know of, and I’m almost entirely certain that they used to. Their VPN service costs less than $5/month (USD) if you get their card off Amazon that’s good for a year, and that is literally a physical card sent through the mail—the kind you have to scratch off on the back to get to the number underneath, in other words—and so at least AFAIK, there’s no possible way for whichever unique card you happen to end up getting sent in the mail, to be traced directly to that specific transaction on Amazon, even if you paid for it using your credit/debit card, and directly associated that purchase with your bank account in so doing. It’s even better than that if you pay them by means far less traceable to begin with, of course, and they have those options as well. In fact, they prefer doing it that way as opposed to credit card purchases, even of physical cards through Amazon, IIRC. At least AFAIK, they don’t even accept any form of payment directly traceable to a bank account on their own website, for every obvious reason.
    
    One thing I really like about (using) it, and I have no idea what other VPNs would also do something like this, if any: it sets up a SOCKS5 proxy for you internally, and you can use that anywhere you need a killswitch properly, meaning to make said application physically unable to resolve hostnames in the event of your connection to the VPN being interrupted for some reason. I’m also pretty sure you can use their DNS-over-HTTPS no matter what, even if you don’t alruady use their VPN service. Anyway, especially if you already do, though, I always figure it’s never a bad to use just use the same provider everywhere you can: using their encrypted DNS wherever possible, in addition to using their proxy wherever possible, in addition to using their VPN anyway. I do that, and I also use multi-hop, which hides my enjoyment of innocuous websites everyone else also uses even further. It’s simply a technical matter that doing all of that will make damned near everything—excluding, of course, abject OPSEC failure, browser fingerprinting, etc.—way more difficult to trace than it otherwise would be. It has to be. I didn’t say “impossible” because I never would, and again, it’s never gonna protect anyone from themselves because it can’t. It’s still just so many consecutive layers of obfuscation contrary to the best interest of the boogeyman, especially for the price, that if I didn’t have immediate access to $60 in order to buy another year’s worth of Mullvad VPN, or immediate access to Mullvad VPN, I would literally beg and borrow, figuratively steal, and otherwise aquire.
    
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  - FlavoredButtHair@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    [deleted]
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- lemmylem@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Wireguard is super fast
  
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  - Dempf@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah wireguard is really nice, but it drains my battery pretty quick on Android.
    
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- 14th_cylon@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  oh yes, routing all traffic into limited number of bottlenecks is excellent for privacy 🤣
  
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  - tal@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You’ve got a lot more options by way of selecting a VPN provider than an ISP. Your ISP options are those who have physical infrastructure at your location.
    
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  - CucumberFetish@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I mean, it is?
    
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- Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A lot of my traffic goes to CDNs, and all of it is encrypted over https. Why should I pay for a vpn?
  
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  - tal@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    encrypted over https
    
    The TLS handshake will generally – through there are some ways to avoid this, and people are banging on it – expose hostnames in the clear.
    
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
    
    Even if your browser is using DNS-over-HTTP, most software doesn’t, so outside of your browser, DNS is generally visible.
    
    Some protocols still are not encrypted; I was looking at MUDs the other day, and few of them support encrypted connections. The networks that I’m most worried about are random WiFi access points.
    
    The network provider can still see which addresses and ports someone is connecting to and to where the traffic goes, and how much traffic is sent.
    
    Some network providers blacklist material – as is the case here. For example, one of my first experiences on the Threadiverse was kbin sending me to a random discussion on policy that Ada (the lemmy.blahaj.zone admin) was having with some gay user who lived somewhere in the Middle East. Lemmy.blahaj.zone had been blocked in that country – the country presumably didn’t like something related to the server having LGBT content. The Threadiverse is semi-resillient to that – they could still connect to a federated server and see comments. But it meant that images on lemmy.blahaj.zone were blocked in that country.
    
    For another contemporary example, Russia has cracked down on politics online. Can’t block access to content without killing off VPNs, and they went after those too.
    
    For people who maintain a long-running IP address, it’s possible to cross-correlate logs from various services. So, okay, let’s say that a given IP address has been logged downloading BitTorrent content. That same IP address is linked to, at various times, use of an app where a particular unique phone ID has shown up, or maybe that a user has logged into some account service on, which is linked to personal information. Even a party who is not someone’s ISP can cross-correlate logs using the IP. A VPN doesn’t absolutely avoid that, but it makes it harder.
    
    Without an VPN, anyone can get at least a rough geographical location of a user by geolocating their IP address.
    
    Probably more, but that’s some off-the-cuff.
    
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bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I should register bringbacktheporn.tx.

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bloopernova@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Go on, Texas, try to ban VPNs.

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sbv@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
the porn must flow

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- Iamsqueegee@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  POON. Muad’Deepthroat. Feyd-Rawdog. The story just lends itself to porn parody.
  
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  - KingJalopy@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    In the later books it’s not even a parody
    
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werefreeatlast@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
… Then they banned VPNs. Thanks to the Republicans we have scorched sky’s… We don’t know who stroke first, but without Internet we are now a real communicative country with people who… Billy! Put your rocks down man! I’m trying to tell you s story about how important Republicans are to us and yet you choose to distract the entire class with your rock tossing game!

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RedditWanderer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The only thing that matters is texas loses

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- HelloHotel@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  that can be understood a couple diffrent ways
  
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sagrotan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They “right porn” to keep it entirely out of the public eye so they can follow their illegal and inhumane sexual shit in private. You’re searching for the real perverted bastards? The one’s who’s shouting against sexual freedom the loudest. Search their computers.

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blazera@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I wonder how many people here never saw porn before they were 18.

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- GratefullyGodless@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  When I was a teenager, we got our porn the old fashioned way, by shoplifting it from the magazine rack at the convenience store.
  
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- silica@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  No, sir I’ve never heard of it.
  
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- boatsnhos931@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I still haven’t
  
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- Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Saw what now?
  
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fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Just gonna leave this predictable comment right here: lemmy.world/comment/8449238

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dumpsterlid@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Texas is going to get a violent crime wave from all the pathetic loser incel rightwing men who are too dumb to figure out a VPN and too hateful to get another living breathing human being interested in getting naked with them.

The news stories will break that the violence is done by brown skinned immigrants who fought through poverty, uncertainty, cartels and any number of hardships to just get their fucking foot over the doorstep into a place they dreamt to call home come but it will come out over and over again that it was done by some nauseatingly bigoted white dude lowlife who turned straight to violence after he couldn’t break up hatespeech orgies on gab with other disgusting idiots with bouts of watching stolen porn on pornhub, pounding his member while yelling sexist slurs at the very people creating content to give him the tiniest, tiniest moment of pleasure.

I think Texas is one of the dumbest places on earth. Not the people, not the human brains within the geographical borders of Texas but rather the very concept of Texas as an identity, as a white story with white facts and white narratives.

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BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
But I was so excited to watch Debbie Does Dallas #4,537. Ugh!

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EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I just connected my VPN through texas and tried to access.

Yep! Good thing I don’t live there.

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joe_cool@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
In a perfect word GeoIP should be illegal.
Let’s see if Elon’s satellites will bring uncensored internet to every inch of the planet.

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SundryTornAsunder@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

These Terms of Service, your use of this Website, and the relationship between you and us shall be governed by the laws of the Republic of Cyprus, without regard to conflict of law rules. Nothing contained in these Terms of Service shall constitute an agreement to the application of the laws of any other nation to this Website. You agree that this Website shall be deemed a passive Website that does not give rise to personal jurisdiction over us, either specific or general, in jurisdictions other than the Republic of Cyprus. The sole and exclusive jurisdiction and venue for any action or proceeding arising out of or related to these Terms of Service shall be in an appropriate court located in Limassol, Cyprus. You hereby submit to the jurisdiction and venue of said Courts.

—Terms Of Service, PornHub

They will never allow themselves to become subject to any accountability or oversight outside their existing tax haven, be that the State of Texas, or be it anyone else.

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ThatoneNB23@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think at this point pornhub knows lots of its users are children. Because when the Louisiana state government required them to also do this there was no push back from PH I live in LA and when ever you want to access the site it has you verify with ID. Them disableding their site completely in Texas is a way of trying to make sure other states don’t follow in the same direction. There are lots of privacy problems with storing peoples IDs but then also watch porn isn’t a necessity.

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