I had to travel to Austin for work a few weeks ago. Got off the plane, checked into the hotel, took a shower, decided to use mother nature’s melatonin to help with the jet lag… then, boom. Upload your driver’s license.
So I had visited some sites that were hosted outside US and didn’t give a fuck about Texas’ stupid laws.
These laws are not only authoritarian, they’re fucking useless.
Yes. They want "small government" when the law affects them, but "law and order" when it punishes someone else who annoys them.
It's childishness we've come to be accustomed to, thanks to lead-brained 70-year-olds who are falling into legit cognitive decline... but still have the numbers to be a formidable opponent at the polls on election day.
Also, their dicks don't work anymore without a blue pill, so they may as well take away the consensual naked fun of Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z (18+) people right?
What's worse: Reputable sites that comply with U.S. laws (such as participants being 18+ and filming of their own free will) are effectively forced out, while questionable site carry on.
The likelyhood of seeing abuse victims or underage in Texas goes up, not down.
If they truly cared about protecting minors, they'd see the flaw in their law and rectify it. Of course, we all know (not through cynicism but cold repeated behavior) that political conservatives do not care about minors and care far more about punishing consenting adults.
This is part one of the religious rights plan to go after porn sites and their patrons. Don’t give them your ID. If they get power, it will come back on you.
Funny thing is....do people think Pornhub is the only porn site on the internet or something? That if they make Pornhub shut down that all the porn will magically disappear? Fucking LOL. Sure, there's a good idea guys. It's not like there aren't a billion other porn sites on the internet that couldn't give a shit less about US age verification laws.
All this will do is drive people away from the most popular porn sites that at least have something in place even if it isn't very good and drive them to any number of other sites where they'll pick up all sorts of malware on their devices and probably finding even more of the porn-of-questionable-legality that these bills were meant to stifle in the first place.
Fire hot, water wet, teenagers are gonna find porn. It's embedded in their DNA. Don't believe me? Ask any teenager in the 80s about going into the woods to find a stash of porn magazines. We weren't told this shit. It's just like we...knew. Basic instinct. We somehow just knew there was porn in the woods and on scrambled cable TV channels at like 4 in the morning. Porn is eternal. And as long as it's out there, teenagers are going to find it.
And for each one of those, two that don't give a shit about age verification will pop up to take it's place. Pornhub could close today and it would be replaced with hubofporn and pornohubs dot com by lunchtime, hosted in some country like the Isle of Man or something.
A blog post from Pornhub said that its latest locations for shutdowns are Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky and Nebraska. The site said it would end operations in those states in July 2024. The website closed in Texas last week, and has also blocked access to its site in Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia in response to similar state legislation.
So, I have a pretty alright VPN provider, but I've been looking for a self-hosted solution to allow me to say "Hey, if you're trying to hit www.domain.com, go through this VPN tunnel instead" but still run everything else straight through. Lots of options exist, I have one that would be perfect that we utilize at my company, but I haven't found a good solution that doesn't utilize enterprise level pricing.
You can use foxyproxy (browser extension) with SOCKS5 proxies to ssh tunnels to various hosts based on the URL pattern. Maybe too kludgey for your use case.
Yeah, I've seen that one, but I'm looking for something at the router level or something I can run on linux and just have everything run through. I have CLI-based options that are super janky... I'm probably just being too picky.
Get a cheap vps. Set up wire guard. Set up routes that pass through wire guard. In this case porn hubs IP's go through the vps. Be aware that some vps providers IP blocks are often blocked by cloudflare and other similar services. So it pays to check out the IP rep of the vps provider before you choose.
I know this is a joke, but that would require them to put actual effort into their shit ass slow ui that's had the same stupid bugs for the past 15 years and still doesn't have a search function that gives you what you fucking searched for.