The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to block a Texas law requiring pornographic websites to verify the age of their users.
The justices rejected an emergency appeal filed by the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the adult entertainment industry. The provision of House Bill 1181, signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott, remains in effect even as the association’s full appeal is weighed by the Supreme Court.
There were no noted dissents from the court’s one-sentence order.
Similar age verification laws have passed in other states, including Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, Utah and Virginia.
The Texas law carries fines of up to $10,000 per violation that could be raised to up to $250,000 per violation by a minor.
‘Court allows Texas to ban porn websites’ is closer to the truth. None of them have the ability (or desire) to implement a system to accurately verify anyone’s identity.
In uh… unrelated news VPN usage in Texas up almost 300%.
I might’ve recovered my long-standing NordVPN account…
Pornographic DVD and print media sales up a similar amount!
It will become more compelling for them as more states enact similar legislation. The article states that Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, Utah and Virginia already have.
Enabling identification systems for porn websites will lead to a massive privacy concern. It’s only a matter of time until one has its user database hacked.
Not exactly porn, but the Ashley Madison data breach was in the same zip code. It caused a lot of embarrassment for a lot of people. But, self righteous prudes will be self righteous prudes, not matter what they are trying to limit/ban.
I remember that. It ended a lot of marriages. Y’know, you’d think the repressed and closeted Christians would care more about the privacy of the porn they watch.
What they think/fear privately doesn’t matter, Evangelical Christianity is a performative religion. The entire goal is to appear to be the most pious prig on the block. What you get up to, behind closed doors, doesn’t matter, unless you get caught. And no one believes that they will get caught. So, the religion devolves into a game of “one-ups-man-ship”. With each one trying to prove how “holy” they are by claiming ever higher standards of “holy”, while basically none of them live up to the ideal they are putting forth. When a member’s discretions get exposed, they then have to engage in a ritual “purification”, claiming how bad they were, that they have learned the error of their ways and now they have found God again (he got lost behind the dryer with the socks). And all will be forgiven, so long as you do not question the
delusionreligion.The states will only need to implement a properly verifiable online ID system first.
Suggestions for one on a whole house scale. Ideally I’d love to be able to do some method of split tunneling where I route banned IP ranges over the VPN vs normal traffic over standard routes. I guess I could set up a vpn tunnel on my synology and then add static routes to it on my gateway…
Yeah if you’re willing to do some sysadmining, it’s pretty easy to set up any vpn supporting openvpn or wireguard. Set the default route to be over the ISP interface, and then direct a list of known IP ranges over the vpn interface.