Peak French stupidity, this isn’t about protecting kids - it’s about building surveillance infrastructure. Back in 2024, critics already called this the foundation for a “Great Firewall of France”. Once you have the legal framework to block websites and force ISPs to implement monitoring, mission creep is inevitable.
The technical approach is laughably naive. They’re essentially creating a centralized system that could easily become a database of citizen sexual preferences. Even with their “double anonymity,” you’re still creating digital fingerprints and metadata trails.
Most importantly, it won’t work. Kids will just use VPNs - the same way adults are already doing. You’re not protecting anyone; you’re just pushing everyone toward circumvention tools while normalizing government control over what adults can access online.
It’s perfectly French because it combines maximum bureaucratic complexity with zero practical benefit, all while creating new opportunities for state overreach. Classic.
I hate how VPN access is the scaffolding holding the building up making things look normal. You can visit all your normal web sites, you can bypass georestrictions, you can be a little less tracked than you might otherwise be. But what happens when they decide to do away with that scaffolding and we all find out they tore down the house behind it while we were enjoying “normalcy”. Too much of making the web functional depends on vpns and adblocking. We shouldn’t have to do this stuff and Chromes adblocking scandle should impact millions of users all around the world unilaterally removing adblocking from the web. I fear for the day we have a US only internet and a global internet, not just on paper, but in actual practice.
Don’t people realize there are hundreds of free porn video sites besides Pornhub? With bigger selection too because the lesser known sites usually don’t get half their content DMCAed.
Paying money for a VPN just to access ONE free porn site? Sigh. I really hate web 3.0
I guess this bodes well for Proton becoming increasingly a Google One products replacement with more users potentially paying
I’m pretty satisfied as a subscriber. Slowly using proton mail for more and more important accounts. Constant usage of the VPN. Trying to use the calendar more but still haven’t broken my Google Calendar habits. Proton Drive I use over google; I just need a Linux desktop application. Proton pass, still haven’t given that a go. Comfortable with KeepassXC and managing the backups myself. Proton Docs, it’s OK. Solid start. Hoping that notes partnership/acquisition eventually replaces Google Keep for me as a cloud notes application. I have pretty strong confidence now in the company regardless of the slow Linux developments
And now they want to keep doing the job of the parents and forbid “social network” to kids 15 and under.
hows proton?
You horny bastards
How about mullvad
Dr. Cox was right: “I’m fairly sure if they took porn off the internet, there’d only be one website left, and it’d be called ‘Bring Back the Porn.'”
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Tumblr the Depraved?
I hate how hard this made me laugh
I still miss og tumblr and my little porn account i had going there.
Does oglaf count as porn?
Asking for a friend.Well, it’s blocked by my porn blocker, so I’d say yes
Scared to click, someone pls provide context
These are comics, often with a nsfw gag, it’s safe to click on, it’s very mild.
Lol, there’s even a warning. The first one I saw was fucking hilarious, thanks for the recommendation!
I had totally forgotten oglaf existed, thanks for the reminder!
Oh, she’s trying!
Bro’s name is Dr. Cocks
Blocking porn has got to be the most “why even bother” thing
Political theater. “Won’t somebody think of the children?” is an easy win for politicians.
deleted by creator
Plus an excuse to collect more data.
Yeah the point is just to soften the populace to the idea. Our fucking PM covered for pedophile priests in a Catholic school 30 years ago, he doesn’t give any fuck about kids.
Except it’s fucking awful to wait for buffering over Tor or a VPN
If you are paying for a VPN and you have buffering problems, change to another VPN, that one is shit.
Could just be their local internet quality. Which, still, not a VPN problem.
Sometimes routing between two IPs is fucked. Had that, and proxying to another location then to the destination again fixed it. Internet 😵
Video over Tor is pretty awful, simply due to the way Tor works; Bandwidth is inherently limited, because it’s shared by everyone using the network. Same reason you should avoid torrenting over Tor.
But if your video is buffering over a VPN, you need to find a new VPN provider. Mine maxes out my gigabit connection.
Are there going to be bandwidth problems with vpns when more countries block porn though?
Like lots of France just joined them, and the rest of us lost a bunch of French exit nodes (at least for porn). The increase in subscribers should help expand bandwidth at big servers, but there’sa limit when we’re talking whole nations.
My VPN’s perfectly fine. To be fair, it’s not a free plan of a VPN that’s heavily throttled, but I can even play multiplayer FPS games with only a few milliseconds of additional delay, and my overall max upload and download speed is almost exactly identical to when I have my VPN off.
Could be worse. Could be you’re in the early 90s with only a 56k modem.
You’d have good games and no bullshit on your PC.
And great LAN parties.
Why use Tor? It’s been compromised for years now. Just use I2P. You can torrent with that too.
Can you elaborate on how tor is screwed?
An example: https://youtu.be/XDsLDhKG8Cs
It’s an easy proxy.
It doesn’t do the one thing it’s meant to do.
I mean, neither does the Web by now.
allow region blocked people to circumvent restrictions? AFAIK it still does that.
That’s not the sole purpose of it. The way it does it was what was important. And that method is flawed.
It’s not about blocking porn.
It’s always about control. Conservatives want to control how you consume sexual content.
It’s not about that either. It’s about connecting photo ID to browsing profiles and deanonymising the internet.
¿Por que los dos?
VPN companies and data brokers have a financial incentive to lobby for intrusive age-verification and restrictions, and prudish politicians are conveniently present in every political system. The porn lobby is powerful, but it seems they’ve been losing this battle recently. Or maybe they’re cutting deals with the data brokers, who knows.
Politically speaking, it’s easy money. You pander to the conservatives with blocking propositions, get votes.
*Who is going to champion the flip side?!"
Me. Porn is fine. Teach your children how to handle it. Teach them that it’s not realistic and some of it is straight-up dangerous. Put a filter on your internet if you’re too scared to talk to your kids about uncomfortable topics.
Man it’s porn, not guns. Children should not be near it!
Oh wait this is France
Anyway, I agree with you. We’re talking about regular ol garden variety porn. Everyone will probably see it at some point. Parents can limit what their kids see until the kids become smart enough to bypass filters. At which point they can probably handle seeing pennis n vagene.
Like Reddit or YouTube with proper keywords didn’t exist
Been there, done that
Reminds me of when my buddies discovered our friend’s YouTube account… He only had one public playlist, and it was 100% full of softcore porn. Nothing else. It was all softcore porn. We gave him a pretty good ribbing for that one, and still make a point of reminding him that better porn sites exist every time it comes up.
Always hide your playlists and subscriptions haha
But softcore has the benefit to help you retain normal libido and to not be dependent of more hardcore stuff
We gave him a pretty good ribbing for that one,
I guess you could say he got ribbed for his pleasure.
Meanwhile in Australia, they just passed a bill requiring social media to verify the age of their users to make sure they’re over 16
Ouch
What a great way to prevent minors from living their lives
I feel like reddit and YouTube are completely different leagues when it comes to porn… Porn is the only reason I haven’t deleted my last reddit account. YT doesn’t even really have real porn…
YT doesn’t even really have real porn
Indeed, but there’s still things to find if you’re a young scared kiddo, and I’d say it’s pretty soft so it’s okay
I have to admit, of all the nations on earth, I never expected this sort of puritanical theatrical authoritarianism out of the french.
They’ve been trying to block it for many years now.
France has been going downhill for quite some time. Many proposals for chat control and tracking… even recently, we got a law proposal that aimed at banning E2EE 😵
Damn, the whole world really is going authoritarian.
When it’s not about protecting kids, it’s about fighting drugs
They always have a “good” reason to remove our freedom, because apparently security seems much more important, and it seems like it’s the only way to do it. Lol.
Authoritarians have embraced internet culture somehow.
I’m curious how they got Gen Z so curtailed.
Politicians are always trying to ban encryption in every country. I remember it happening constantly in the 90s. And it happens because politicians don’t understand that you can’t ban math
Wait 'til they do it. You’re underestimating them.
They should actually take to the streets (again). Not joking. What is this nanny-state BS?
To clarify, the french didn’t ban pornhub, it’s the company behind pornhub who decided to deny it’s access in France to protest a law proposal that is currently getting examined in parliament
Ps : The law in question would require all porn sites to verify the age of its users
Ps : The law in question would require all porn sites to verify the age of its users
This is how young boys learn to computer. It won’t do shit to stop anything. It’s a waste of time.
Well – this might be more succesful in boostering the IT skills of France’s next generation than any curriculum reform.
How do you know it’s just boys? Seems an odd assumption, considering the nature of omission of information with this.
Because the majority of porn watchers are male at about a 4:1 ratio. They aren’t saying it was exclusively boys either, likely just what made sense from their perspective at the time.
The law in question would require all porn sites to verify the age of its users
Wait aren’t they proposing the same thing in the US as well? It’s a fairly standard thing of right-wing governments to just demand the impossible with no understanding about it could possibly be achieved.
They understand just how hard it would be to comply. And that’s the point. Make it hard enough to meet the requirements to not make worth a business’ while to comply. And the politicians can say “We didn’t ban PornHub. They blocked you from access.”
It’s a common tool both the left and right use to control behaviors. Governments around the world do this all the time.
For now it’s not nation wide, it’s just up to states if they want to implement an age verification law like that. They want to make it so that in order to prove your identity/age you need to do something like upload a copy of your ID/Drivers License that will be linked with your “research” accounts.
They say it’s to “save the children” and shit like that but the end goal really is to basically shame people who enjoy researching things because Jesus says it’s bad.
Right, because we’ve never checked ID for things like tobacco and alcohol before?
These porn companies should work on efficient cost effective ways to verify adults instead of using politics and social media to increase profits. I’m sure you are aware profit is higher if children are allowed on their websites.
Yes because I’m not buying whisky online am I’m going to a physical store where I can give them my physical ID and they can look at my physical face. Unless I’m wearing a very convincing prosthetic there isn’t very much I can do to hide my identity.
Online is harder, just because I have uploaded an ID doesn’t mean it’s mine. What are they going to do, demand a video as well, because it’s not as if video generation hasn’t already gotten to the point where it’s perfectly capable of faking that kind of thing.
I can see you haven’t thought about this at all. You should run for office.
It’s very different handing my ID to a store clerk, who barely looks at it because my birth year starts with 19, from uploading a photo of that ID to a sketchy service who now has a permanent documentation of precisely who I am and what sort of freaky shit I’m into.
Sure, the tracking services already know this, but they don’t also have a photo of my ID that I willingly gave to them to prove it’s me.
Are you embarrassed you look at porn? There’s plenty of ways to manage without an internet connection. Go grab a compilation torrent.
Even if all these sites went verification tonight, you’d still be able to privately jerk off to whatever it is you want to hide so bad.
Torrents are even worse without a VPN. Ever heard of https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/ ?
Given that I torrent without a VPN and it had nothing on there, and it also got my location wrong by over 500km, I dont think I’m too worried.
I’m not opposed to vpns. I simply don’t want porn accessible to children easily. Simple barriers to entry like an ID or credit card have worked before and surely will again once porn streaming sites give up fighting this regulation and start working to follow it.
How about we put some responsibility on parents to keep their kids away from potentially harmful Internet content, instead of relying on the state to do it for us in large swathes, affecting literally anyone who goes to those sites, legally or not? Surely you’re more on board with responsible parenting than everyone having to hand over their legal identification to a fucking porn site.
Its on both sides of the relationship, parent and porn provider. Same as with alcohol and tobacco, if you don’t have parents doing their part, those kids end up with that stuff anyways.
Brick and mortar shops aren’t comparable to websites, and I don’t know why you keep trying to compare them. The places that sell alcohol and tobacco aren’t asking me to upload a digital version of my legal identification to some cloud-backed database. They’re just manually checking a date and a picture. Most places I buy from don’t even make me physically hand over my ID, I can just show it to them without it ever leaving my possession.
You’ve never had your I’d scanned at a store before? How do you think all that works?
The law in question would require all porn sites to verify the age of its users
Isn’t that already the case on a lot of the internet?
I think this law requires you to upload a photo of your ID and says that it’s the website’s fault if underage people use it and they face a hefty fine. It’s a lot more than the standard “click to pinky promise that you’re definitely 18” because PornHub already has that.
I know right? Aren’t there nude beaches in the south of France where people will fuck in broad daylight with others watching?
French citizens please confirm (for uh, science, and not vacation planning)!
Yes, there are. But you misunderstood the news: France didn’t block pornhub, pornhub blocked France as a protest against a new law.
Age verification in a porn database is odd to me, from a privacy point of view AND a massive undertaking for the porn company. And then there’s the puritan culture of wanting to block teenagers from watching porn? Seems a very anti-French thing to me, but I’m also pretty ignorant of actual French culture. I assumed French culture would be like, once you have the urges, you’ll go seeking, and if you need to look at the internet in the safety of your own bedroom, is better than unexpected pregnancies to satisfy urges.
What’s the deal with all of this, anyway? What are the arguments here?
I’m not aware of the exact motivations of all the actors. What follows are my guesses.
My guess would be that
- Some député want to protect children from the most dangerous types of porn (which I can hear on some level, porn can be addictive for some people and can lead to negative behaviour, children are always more sensitive).
- Some probably think that all porn is bad and want to prevent anyone from consuming it, this would only be a first step for those.
- Some definitely want to be able to spy on everyone and use this as an excuse to further reduce privacy and freedom
You might not be aware depending where you are from, but France is on a slippery slope towards Fascism, the far right is gaining more power every day, a lot of people think it is very plausible that a far right president is elected on the next election (2027), along with a parliament’s majority.
What are the arguments
“Protect delicate children’s eyes from seeing nudity”
I think that’s about it
Germany had this since forever, it’s just how offline laws translate to the internet: There’s a difference between a) ordinary nudity, b) eroticism and c) straight-up porn. The latter was always 18+, in video rental stores etc. they would have a separate section and if you didn’t look of age you’d get ID’d.
You can’t order alcohol online in Germany without a proper age check, and the same applies to porn. For paid offerings that’s no issue, payment providers offer age checks (your bank knows how old you are and them vouching suffices), for free sites it’s a no-go, noone is going to go through the hassle. Especially as you can escape off the German-language internet onto the international one and merely click through an “are you 18” banner.
Notably, pornhub isn’t blocked in Germany – neither from the German side, nor from pornhub’s. Very occasionally DNS bans are ordered when a site without age checks tries to specifically target the German market. Mostly though it’s down to German google not serving up those international porn sites which in the end is good enough for the youth protection authorities because the point is not to make access impossible, it’s to make sure that youth not ready for content doesn’t stumble across it. And once you’re actively seeking, you’re ready, the hoops you have to jump through are proof of the “active” part. YMMV on “not ready for porn with 18”, back in the days there was still softcore. On free TV. Probably won’t hurt kids to not start out with gonzo.
Passings laws we don’t like?
NO PORN FOR YOU!!!
Isn’t protest coooooo you guys?
Democracy and general Egalitarianism is so 2008. Authoritarianism is what’s hot now.
Democracy and general Egalitarianism is so 2008
Bold of you to assume it ever was!
I can’t wait for a severe overcorrection
The percentages of respondents in surveys on infidelity answering “not a moral issue” from France are a bit of a cultural difference (from Australian perspective, anyway)
I’m shocked that this many people feel the need to disobey a rule that is only there to help the children. Next step must be to ban VPNs altogether, and enforcing all Internet users to be identified with their real identity (/s obviously).
Jokes on them I just have an incredibly high volume of DNS traffic
That’ll be really slow.
Can confirm, used DNS proxying to bypass cruise ship WiFi paywall once. It worked, but god damn did it send me into dialup flashback lmao
I’d like to hear more about how that works…
It’s called DNS tunneling it’s typically used for data exfiltration tactics, but it’s also great if you’re desperate to punch through even the toughest paid WiFi paywalls to Google something really
quickslow because you fucked something up on your phone lmaohttps://dmachard.github.io/posts/0047-dns-tunneling-overview/
It really isn’t that slow, last time I tried to homebrew a working DNS tunnel it maxed my 100mbps card. I never needed the extra speed so I didn’t try to see how fast it could be on a 1gbps card
Wait, this can’t just be another useless DNS blocking, or is it?
Edit: Didn’t get the joke first lol
It’s not. I use next and it’s blocked.
I was making a joke about running wireguard over UDP/53
Edit: Didn’t get the joke first lol
The VPNs will be harder to ban. Not just from a technical standpoint, but politically as well. Big businesses will be absolutely opposed to VPN bans.
There will be a lot of businesses who feel the (justified) need to hide the entrypoint to their infrastructure behind a VPN.
I feel they could easily ban VPN companies (maybe?), which is what 99.9% of people that want to browse from a different location use.
This won’t affect companies at all as they would be using their own VPN.
VPN becomes VPS and life goes on.
The only way the sovereign nation of France can ban VPN companies not based in France is to block the IP address of every single entry point of every single VPN company and keep doing so as they add new entry points (I bet the response on the VPN company side would be to start having some kind of dynamic VPN server thing).
And then, as somebody else already pointed out, any technically inclined person can just rent a VPS anywhere in the World and fire up their own VPN server on it.
Teacher, leave the kids alone!
All and all its just a-nother dick in the porn.
if the VPN ban doesn’t work then the only reasonable course of action would be to ban the internet entirely. it’s the only way the children can be truly safe.
Back to the Minitel !
Honestly and truly, I don’t think humanity is ready for the internet.
Don’t give them ideas. If they block no-log VPNs I’m going to become a real threat 👀
Fun fact: they already tried. In the same law where they tried to ban E2EE a few months ago. It went about as well as you’d expect.
Does the rule in question even apply to end users? All I had heard of it was that it put some kind of requirement on the website itself to identify people, which a person seeking out a noncompliant or foreign website presumably wouldn’t be the one violating?
How about you just parent your children? But it’s not about the children, that’s just always the convenient excuse
Out of the loop here, why did Pornhub leave France?
France passed a law requiring porn sites to verify age of all site visitors. Pornhub is blocking France instead of forcing its visitors to provide ID.
Age verification requirements.
wow, didn’t expect that from france. I thought they, of all countries, would be less prudish than Texas about porn. 😬
We have our own homegrown bigots, thank you
Everywhere has religious people that think they deserve to control others.
Texas isn’t the first. I think it was started by Germany? I know the UK banned women’s orgasms and Australia banned hentai. Heck, India apparently banned porn altogether, ineffectively.
Germany didn’t do anything like that. Britain tried to ban porn like this but realized it’s a terrible idea and stepped back from it.
Ironically, it was PornHub’s parent company that was set to run the UK age verification scheme.
Australia banned hentai
Did we? My scientific search the other night proves that false, and I’m not on VPN.
They banned the physical books, but they can’t really stop the internet
I know the UK banned women’s orgasms
Why? To prevent British women from having expectations?
Because female cum is urine according to the powers that be, and that’s too much for them.
It was literally the next post in my feed 😅
Thank you!
As one headline put it “PornHub pulls out of France”.
🤤
