On Sept. 11, Michigan representatives proposed an internet content ban bill unlike any of the others we’ve seen: This particularly far-reaching legislation would ban not only many types of online content, but also the ability to legally use any VPN.
The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people. It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.
Main issue I have with this article, and a lot of articles on this topic, is it doesn’t address the issue of youth access to porn. I think any semi-intelligent person knows this is a parenting issue, but unfortunately that cat’s out of the bag, thanks to the right. “Proliferation of porn” is the '90s crime scare (that never really died) all over again. If a politician or industry expert is speaking against bills like this, their talking points have to include:
- Privacy-respecting alternatives that promise parents that their precious babies won’t be able to access that horrible dangerous porn! (I don’t argue that porn can’t be dangerous, but this is yet another disingenuous right-wing culture (holy) war)
- Addressing that vagueness in the bill sets up the government as morality police (it’s right there in the title of the bill, FFS), and NOBODY in a “free” country should ever want that.
- Stop saying it can be bypassed with technology. The VPN ban in this bill is a reaction to talking points like that.
- Recognize and call out that this has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with a religious minority imposing its will on the rest of the country (plenty of recent examples to pull from here).
Unfortunately this is becoming enough of “A Thing” that the left is going to have to, once again, be seen doing “something” about it. So they have to thread a needle of “protecting kids,” while respecting the privacy of their parents who want their kids protected and want to look at porn, and protecting businesses that require secure communications.
I just masturbated to these representatives. Legally that makes them pornography, and they are also required to be banned under this bill’s provisions.
Taking one for the team.
It was a challenging fap.
“Corruption of public morals” is such a shameless name to put on a bill that simply tries to enforce your own morals.
“Banning VPNs” has some real " I declare bankruptcy!" vibes.
Why not also ban cash? That can be used to evade detection as well and is notoriously used by criminals.
they kinda did in australia. If you want to withdraw more than $10K you need proof of what you’re going to pay with it.
In Canada it is the same. And in Quebec carrying more than $3K Canadian is considered proof that you are up to no good and will get you arrested.
surely Michigan has no one who works over the internet
Corporate media’s job is to manufacture consent. Please do not accept their spin uncritically.
This has nothing to do with kids or porn, those are always easy bells for censors to ring. It’s about control and tracking. They want to be able to tie anonymous online activity to your real identity.
This from guns for breakfast with dash of kids, really I guess freenet scum runs the country.
Don’t forget to ban renting servers, vps and cloud services by individuals.
Don’t forget to ban renting servers, vps and cloud services by individuals.
I think Microsoft and Adobe might lobby against the latter… But if they could expand the ban to AI, I’d be in favor of banning all the other stuff as well. I mean, what good is banning and blocking smut, when you can just ask an LLM to generate whatever your perverted 13yo heart desires?
NO VPN!
And the corporate world comes to a screeching halt.
These fuckwads don’t even understand anything about what they’re trying to legislate.
When shit starts being monitored, I want to see the legislators’ traffic public first.
And the corporate world comes to a screeching halt.
In theory, businesses would be required to register their VPNs and… idk, this would limit access to them somehow?
Much like with the Assault Weapons Ban and the assorted online porn bans and strip club bans and dry counties and SEC rules on insider trading, etc, etc, etc a lot of this boils down to “how hard do you want to work in order to enforce this?”
And the short answer is “we only want an excuse to arrest people arbitrarily”. So a VPN can quickly because a “everyone with an Internet connection is a criminal suspect”. And then you just harass the people you want to harass under cover of “we thought you had kiddie porn” as an excuse
I once worked for a banking transaction company (or something like that, I did their network and telecom support, none of the actual business) and they had offices in Russia. I was told that since VPNs are more restricted there, but required for the business, they had to have a special application with the government to be allowed to have the site to site VPN work.
I imagine they’d try to do the same, as well as grant them another way to be in the pocket of or have some control over businesses. If the government has to approve your necessary security software, you’ll want to stay on their good side.
When shit starts being monitored, I want to see the legislators’ traffic public first.
Oh my sweet summer child. Of course these laws won’t apply to them.
And if they do, they will make up shit to use the dirt you dug up against them against you.
Kind of like how when a cop shoots a black guy they look for whatever parking ticket they got 10 years prior as proof he is a cracking smoking cap busting gangsta who was itching for a bullet. Never being slightly concerned for the cop’s violent history or misconduct in various police forces.
“Welcome to Michigan - The NoFap State”
The news on this has been underplaying how bad this bill is. It requires ISPs to inspect traffic to ensure its no porn, meaning they would have to be able to decrypt the traffic. This makes a single point were hackers can access credit card data, personal information, and anything else you don’t want to share with the world. This assumes the ISPs are willing to front the compute cost of decrypting then re-encrypting and not just banning encrypted traffic because its the easy and cheap way.
It seems quite obvious to me that this will, in fact, not work. I’d even argue that nobody wants it to work. Only to introduce a law that a lot of people will break at some point, to have an excuse to target them later in the future if the need arises.
No project like this will produce any significant results in any western country. It’s simply impossible to implement without full supervision and control over the entire Internet. China was able to block all online porn due to having such infrastructure. And that was possible due to a vastly different culture. We don’t.
In general, the issue of widespread pornography is very analogous to climate change. We’ve been warned about this for decades, and yet, have done nothing to prevent it. All we can, and in my opinion should be doing, is limiting its presence in our societies, especially in the context of children. This would no doubt involve online ID verification at some stage, though that can be done with respect towards privacy.
The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people.
Also, what’s up with targetting ASMR? It has no inherent relation to adult content. The transgender people part isn’t surprising and we know where that’s coming from.
Also, what’s up with targetting ASMR?
Something with “morals”, I guess…
It makes them uncomfortable, and they can’t tolerate anything that makes them uncomfortable. The entire world exists to make them happy.
This would no doubt involve online ID verification at some stage, though that can be done with respect towards privacy.
No it can’t. Data can be de-anonymized.
Of course. Any and all data, stored anywhere, either physically or digitally, can and will be accessed by third parties and bad actors. This is the harsh reality.
However, it doesn’t stop us from collecting various information about our nations, including personal data. It also doesn’t stop us from creating more and more digital national services. Are they perfectly secure? No, not even close. But the need for them and their benefits [usually] greatly outweigh the risks. Perhaps an online ID verification system is one such case.
It is possible to make it so that only the government has access to the ID itself, which it already does, obviously. If no other parties can access it, there seems to be minimal risk.
But the need for them and their benefits [usually] greatly outweigh the risks.
Losing the ability to anonymously criticize the government, the rich, and those in power is a non starter.
Worse, even if it somehow came to fruition it won’t solve the problem of kids getting access to porn. This is a parenting failure.
This would no doubt involve online ID verification at some stage, though that can be done with respect towards privacy.
This is exactly what the UK has attempted. It doesn’t work, either.
Porn is here to stay. “Children” covers a wide range of ages, and exposure to sex of some kind is not the debilitating thing it’s made out to be. The approach should be to contextualize it and educate about it.
Humans reach sexual maturity as young as like 8 years of age in rare circumstances. Trying to act like humans arnt just fucking animals is bafflingly stupid.
You can’t fucking hide humanity from humans. You want to prevent stupid kids from making more kids before they are ready? Or prevent them from easily being taken advantage of sexually?
TEACH THEM WHAT SEX IS, AND BE AS BLANTENT AS POSSIBLE.
The only thing that prevents people from doing something stupid is education and support . The only thing that stops people from letting others take advantage of them is education and support.
If you don’t educate your fucked up on bother counts. If you don’t support them you fucked up on both counts.
Pussy footing around, using complicated metaphors and flowery language does nothing but confuse children most of the time.
Kids are smart, give them the basic ass facts and they will understand.
Hell even teaching abstinence wouldn’t be so God damn fucking problematic if it wasn’t so wrapped up in religious bullshit to go along with it.
Just telling your kid what sex is, what porn is, that it’s risky and shouldn’t be done till they are older. But should it happen use a condom and talk to their parents about it. Would solve so many god damn fucking problems.
FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING PLEASE JUST TALK TO YOUR KIDS AND BE UPFRONT.
“If you removed all the porn from the internet you would be left with one website, titled “Bring Back the Porn””
Scrubs was way ahead of its time.
We need a steganographic VPN protocol, ideally with bonded heterogeneous multipath streams.
Hostile networks need to be exclusively treated as dumb pipes.
basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it’s produced by the modial interaction of magneto reluctance and capacitive directance
Like… tor? 🙂
It’s the GOP/Christians. It won’t work at first but they’ll come back and make it work once they get the Supreme Court to agree.
It’s happened like this multiple times. This don’t be different.
The rule of headlines is that if it asks a question in the title, the answer is assumed to be no.
No, it won’t.
Because if the answer was “yes” then the headline would be writen as a statement of fact. If its a question then the news agency cant be held to account if it is either yes or no because “we are only asking the question.”
