the greatest Onion writer could never come up with a headline like this
Let this man watch porn without giving out any of his personal information. I too want to watch porn without giving out any of my personal information. You do too, if you watch porn.
The people making the rules know this. They just … in their Christian nationalist hearts believe porn shouldn’t exist. And since there’s too much precedent to simply make it illegal (they’ve tried before). So here they’re trying to make watching it as painful and degrading as humanly possible.
In other words, you’re not wrong - just preaching to the choir.
Christian nationalists say that porn shouldn’t exist while watching a lot of porn and they would get mad if someone took away their porn. They only want others to not watch porn.
They all have Sunday brain. Living one life Sunday morning that’s just disconnected from their choices they make the rest of the week.
But, that’s indoctrination for you. The most infuriating part is when otherwise good & great people decide that calling themselves Christian, setting themselves up as human shields for all the abusive controlling monsters among their number. They’ll say the monster is ‘a sinner’ and ‘doesn’t represent our values’ while rushing to the defense of Christianity. They’d rather white-wash the Christian label than fix the structural abuse done by by ‘their neighbors’ (but it’s never their church that’s the problem).
Christian nationalists say that other people shouldn’t watch porn but that they’ve figured out a curious caveat within the faith that exempts them, personally. Then they establish special repositories of pornographic material that serve as an incentive for membership and a form of blackmail against turncoats.
Porn becomes a more direct means of patriarchal control - both in how it restricts which senior members are allowed to buy it and (in turn) which women are allowed to sell it, and at what price. It is a form of societal monopsony intended to make sex work a privilege afforded to elites at below market rates.
Yeah. Except these “Christians” also love to rape children. It’s pure projection on their part.
They’re usually (usually) not the same individuals, but the evil ones deliberately use the “good” ones as a shield. They’re a happy to rally as Christians to any attack from outside the religion, but will write off abuses they see internally as “not my church”.
From here
It’s all part of the plan. Only this time they let the cousins across the pond do the first significant move.
The line about “educators and public libraries” gives away the real game; this isn’t about actual pornography at all.
The “pornography” they’re referring to here is any form of media that portrays LGBTQ+ people in a neutral or positive light.
The age old problem of “if you remove rights from criminals, you can just change the definition of crime to encompass the people you don’t like”
I don’t think they view it as a problem
Don’t forget people of any color but white having any kind of fun. That’s shameful, too!
🙄
If only there was a very easy, simple way to trick the system into thinking you are an adult.
You mean a bobble head because apparently those work incredibly well.
I heard you could do it with a photograph with someone’s face in profile. Also with the Death Stranding photo mode for taking screenshots.
Yep some funco pops and whatnot, just basically any sort of smooth plastic-y face.
valve faceposer
He knows that video games where you can pose the character can bypass it, right?
Iirc death stranding and a few others have been shown to work.
Alternatively VPNs work.
Or piracy.
I don’t think that’s really the point.
I’m confused, can’t literally anyone just generate an AI selfie to submit for the censorship?
A couple news cycles ago was just talking about how AI video and image generation has progressed so far that it is really difficult for any system to tell it is AI in some cases. This seems like the perfect usecase for that.
Or does it need to link to a real person ID or something?
Selfie doesn’t work, you need to turn your head left and right to follow instructions.
But yeah, there’s a bunch of avatars that will bypass it
GMod apparently works lol
The simplist answer is that this guy could buy some high-coverage foundation and a make-up sponge. He could change his appearance in other ways too if he likes - get a wig, fake nose, etc.
In the US you submit your ID, no face scan that im aware of (yet).
In states that have started this requirement (at least in Virginia), they do have ID as an option, but the default is a face scan. I don’t think an ID is better. In fact, it’s even more personal information being exposed.
I don’t know the technical terms, but my internet provider sometimes routes my internet through Virginia, and even though I live in Wisconsin, I’m forced to adhere to Virginia law online because of it. It’s very annoying. I
Dude needs to just upload a pic of Norman Reedus.
Norman Reedus
You spelled Benny Hill wrong
At some point I think he just said fill the rest in with Aquaman to the artist
hmm, something tells me that facepaint will come into style in the next 10 years…
I’m honestly already thinking about anti-AI recognition make-up.
I want to go full cyberpunk and get QR codes tattooed on my cheeks that will either crash the cameras or tell the recognition software that I’m a stegosaurus.
You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?
“Whaddaya mean I can’t watch porn???”
How about… People are paid as age verifiers. Win, win. More jobs, lower chance of data being stolen, maybe more awkwardness if you came across your partner on the other end of the teleconference call.
Or, how about this, bring back porn theatres. Industry gets paid from ticket sales, you have a ticket person who can ask for ID.
Also, is porn really that damaging to kids? I remember when there were videos circulating from beheadings and that was far more traumatising.
First thing I thought of was what if your family like aunt/uncle or cousin has this kind of job… that’d be way awkward.
Doesn’t need to be?
“Oh, hi Andrew why are you here?” “Got a bottle of wine with my Asda order and need to go through this circus again…” “Well enjoy your wine, age approved, see you!”
call disconnects, browser goes back to not-Asda
Idk, even that feels like a bit of a ideal/optimistic take. I just can’t see this going well no matter how they try to implement it. Can’t help but feel the ick anyway.
Probably the more desirable dystopian future, to be honest.
People are paid as age verifiers. Win, win. More jobs
Broken window fallacy
I like the rest of your points, but moving verification off to a different private companies is not solving anything. Why would a second company not sell your data or make it easy to steal?
Edit: Ah, my bad, my brain erroneously conflated paying people with private companies.
Why privatise though? Or if you do privatise, pass legislation to make data trading illegal unless you pay the person whose data is bring traded or make it outright illegal. Or figure out a way to make the data completely useless. Perhaps banning advertising and marketing or limiting what they can do. So many possibilities for a better future than this.
Ah, my bad, my brain erroneously conflated paying people with private companies. Thanks for catching me on that. I am fine with it being done in the public center as long as there isn’t a more anonymous way of age verification. There may be a public private key cryptography thing we could use instead. I don’t know if this has been explored yet.
🏴☠️ I live to ride the ocean
The mighty world around
To take a little plunder
And to hear the cannon sound 🦜Unexpected Knopfler
It’s not a discrimination thing, I’m sure this is just facial recognition failing over his extensive facial tattoos, same as it can fail on people with very dark skin. No racism or discrimination needed to explain it, it’s just the software or sometimes even physics that causes it.
Having said that, fuck the UK government for implementing this shit.
Get your porn whilst you can because other countries will follow suit and soon even a VPN won’t save you anymore
The system is still discriminating against this guy’s face tattoos even if it’s unintentional. Hopefully they will fix the issue.
This is one of the many ethical issues that can come up when you build software. It might be just a bug for the engineers who built it but this probably ruined this guy’s whole life. I hope he can move on from this hahaha.
Agreed with all your points though. What a stupid law. It’s crazy they are popping up all over now. We are losing anonymity online. What little we had left.
I want there to be a difference between actual discrimination and just software not working the way it should be, or sometimes even physics.
Again as the example: facial recognition on people with extremely dark skin. The camera gets less light, less detail, it’s literally physics causing the issue, NOT discrimination.
If cour the that needs to be fixed but that might mean that the camera needs a small light to help, for example. Again, this is not discrimination, it’s just a consequence of having darker skin, doesn’t make anyone less or more, it is what it is.
I really get uncomfortable when people start throwing around “discrimination!!!” on things like this, because it means that in my job as a software developer now suddenly I can be called a nazi because a software method wasn’t done quite right
Don’t assume evil where plain stupidity suffices
The discrimination part comes in when the decision to use it is made. In your example that’s a huge technical flaw that makes the technology useless for a large part of the population yet someone still chose to implement it in a way that would affect people’s lives.
The technology is cool on its own but why does it need to be used if it doesn’t work correctly? If you were the person making the call and you knew the technology didn’t serve all of the people it’s supposed to in a fair way and you still choose to use it that is discrimination.
Maybe it was initially a bug but once it is identified and there is no real attempt to fix it or make a work around, that would also be discrimination. It’s not the bug that is discriminating it’s the people who allow it to persist intentionally.
same as it can fail on people with very dark skin. No racism or discrimination needed to explain it
That’s a classic case of implicit racism. The technology is tailored to perform optimally against lighter toned skin, because the people building and evaluating the software are all lighter skinned, themselves. Similarly, I’m sure, the developers of the technology didn’t bother to evaluate how it would work on people with facial skin conditions, markings, or tattoos.
In classic “Move Fast and Break Things” style, they rushed an application to market that only half worked on some people, and then told anyone who would fail the check by default that this was an individual’s problem to resolve.
“Who cares if this system works for <Subset of People X>?” shows up in all sorts of lowest-bidder crap work, from medical studies to mechanical engineering. Whether its left-handed car drivers get fucked by a right-hand favorable design or clinical trials that just didn’t bother including women as subjects or dark-skinned people failing facial recognition, the implicit bigotry of poor engineering is rampant in our modern world.
The technical aspect could be a systemic SDLC problem if the software wasn’t tested on a broad enough range of users. As for what’s broad enough, that’s another issue to debate.
He should get a VPN, for example: https://mullvad.net/en
Not saying that he should have to do this – but I bet he could apply foundation+concealer to cover them up.
Why bother, just generate a face with some other AI and call it a day.
This entire thing is some out of touch shit.
Dead Internet is coming faster than I thought.
Well, that would be putting on a mask.
On one hand this guy has a hell of a hobby that seems like it steps on everything else in his life. On the other its amazing dude exists to fuck with normative behavior and policies that exist to keep people down.
