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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26274 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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Why can’t the ID situation be solved by

  1. Must create account to view porn site
  2. Must complete crypto-style Know Your Customer challenge to activate account. Basically hold your ID up to webcam, then take picture of yourself on webcam in several poses to match ID

This is exactly what crypto exchanges are required to do.

A lot of people don't have IDs, or don't want to give their IDs and that level of personal information to a random porn site. For more marginal or custom sites, the overhead in that sort of analysis is huge, particularly since you have to run it not just for paying customers, but pretty much anyone trying to figure out even the slightest bit of what you're doing. I dunno that I'd trust AI-style analysis anyway, but because there's not a standardized US ID layout (even for driver's licenses!), nevermind world-wide, it's a frustratingly large problem.

((There are other issues of varying stupidity. For some godawful reasons, some states allow or even default to having your SSN on them.))

Crypto can (kinda) get away with this for accounts because users are already giving away a lot of their privacy and the median account is in many ways a whale.

I'm actually not entirely unhappy with the solution being to install a VPN. It requires a credit card (the free ones don't have the bandwidth for HD porn, I've tried). Also someone in the house needs to be tech savvy enough to work it, which increases the odds that person would also block porn sites on their kids devices.

I saw a lot of coomers on /r/Nova were pretty upset about the law in VA. I never noticed, having been behind a VPN the entire time.

While I sympathize with the argument that it's tyrannical to require crypto exchanges to adhere to KYC, I would imagine that the immediate and obvious objection from Pornhub's side would be that this would substantially cut into their bottom line, from the principle that providing stuff for free paradoxically increases the revenue of it (look at how piracy of video games boosts their sales). If they can't provide free videos, then they'll get less money.

???

Pornhub didn't say they can't make the ID requirement work, they said it's stupid and awful and they want nothing to do with it.

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