Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/15/pornhub-and-other-sites-block-texas-over-age-verification-law.html
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Encroaching on the need for some business index (there are so many of those) which rates the degree of ruination of a state for establishing a business headquarters; the Republican State Ruination Index. “You can’t put the HQ there, Chauncy! You’ll never get any decent hires! You’re looking at a RSRI of 7.3, at least”
(states with a potential >7.0 already: Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Idaho, Tennessee…)
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I didn’t have “Porn Riots” on my bingo card for the mid-2020ies.
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Sen. Angela Paxton’s Tweet:
My bill created an age verification requirement for online pornography websites in Texas to protect minors from accessing their harmful content. After insistent fighting against it, the pornography industry is being forced to comply with the law.
For certain definitions of “comply”, I suppose. I’m sure the goal of the Xtianist wife of cartoonishly corrupt AG Ken Paxton was to chase the porn sites from the state, but apparently she doesn’t understand the concept of a VPN in the same way that a horny teenager or an “upstanding” member of her own fundie church does.
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Note that the way websites think they know where you are is only loosely related to where you actually are. It depends on what kind of internet connection you’re using. I’m not talking about VPNs, I’m talking about where things like where cell towers and Starlink ground stations and other infrastructure bits are.
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I haven’t read the details of the law, but I do have a lot of experience with (attempting) to determine the location of IPs. In short, there are a number of published databases varying from free to $millions per year, with variations in quality of data as well as frequency of update - a very accurate location for an IP is not any good if it was last sampled a year ago. For some IPs, it won’t be accurate if it was sampled yesterday or even hours ago
So I wonder - how hard are porn providers meant to work to determine location?
The free and cheap databases will often localize an IP to a country - usually by setting it’s geo coordinates to the geometric center of the country (sometimes a state, rarely a city) - this causes some “funny” things like millions of IPs being localized to a specific person’s house
And of course, yeah, starlink and mobile IPs are largely useless for location although for state-level they might be close enough.
Lots of gambling sites use geolocation which means that my friend in NY, where online betting is legal, can’t get into some sites because they claim he’s in connecticut
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Good points, and I assume they don’t work very hard at all? I would think that at least for the industry leaders it might be worthwhile to get more people annoyed at geofencing rather than spending more on aiming for precise compliance boundaries.
although for state-level they might be close enough.
Sadly, it doesn’t seem that way. It shows me where it thinks I am (based on ground station, AFAIK) every time I set up in a new spot. There are at least 5 states where it thinks I’m in Georgia, and at least 4 where it thinks I’m in Utah. Ironic, since determining my actual GPS coordinates is part of the startup process, unlike almost any other internet connection.
No more videos of a famous radio talk show star eating very specific body parts of leftists .
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Real “urges in my areas” stuff here.
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Hah! FWIW mine were genuinely unintentional.
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I just love a double entendre, intentional or not. Sure, sometimes it’s a bit of a stretch but, it’s all in good fun.
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I went to UNT for 2 years in Denton, TX, squarely in the bible belt. You could tell where the county line was, because there were 2 liquor stores and a porn store, and nothing else around for miles
(I think you can buy beer in Denton now but honestly I don’t remember)
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Between this and banning TikTok, the GOP is really working overtime to get out the vote…for Democrats.
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I just checked pornhub from here in TX and see it’s blocked with an age verification message. It took 10 seconds to find that the internet is still very much full of porn. While pornhub being blocked will not affect my life in any way, it is an astounding move from the party of small government. One that I think will hurt them with their base
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That’s what she said?
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Indeed, about twice a month my cell phone welcomes me to Canada (I live maybe 4 to 6 miles south of the Canada-Vermont border depending on the exact route).
I imagine many people close to a state border would have similar or worse issues since Canada-US is a billing difference, and TX to adjacent US states are not. So less effort will be spent by cell companies to get it right. (or maybe the effort here amounts to the “generous” 5M of data and (actually generous) unlimited voice/text I can use before I get a surcharge for “roaming” while actually sitting at home minding my own business)
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