Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
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.
I assume this is the "small government" party doing this?
(I'm not an American)
Republicans, which yeah. They like to talk about “small government” when it comes to billionaires and taxes, it really, that’s about it.
And guns. Can't forget the guns.
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?
Small so it can sneak into all their citizen's lives.
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 law is a step toward the latter.
You: (bring facts and logic)
TX Republicans: "A witch! They're a witch! Burn them!"
Honestly, this feels like a canary in a coalmine. A coalmine that we've known to be on fire, but a canary nonetheless.
12 states total. That's like a quarter of the country.
2025 is gonna be a wild ride..
Ironically their leader pays porn stars to have sex with him which obviously is not a problem for their voters.
Just imagine how angry everyone is going to be when they can't masturbate the pain of Present Day away
Enjoy that freedom!
Never lost that backwards, repressed, puritanical, "we come to the new world to be more dogmatic" prude streak.
"Land of the free" lmao
Land of the VPN?
Banning porn nationwide is part of Project 2025's plan. defeatproject2025.org
Republicans plotting in the open to install an authoritarian theocracy? Sounds serious!
So when will democrats drop gun control considering this imminent threat?
Armed queers bash back.
SocialistRA.org
Conservatism / Religiosity is a plague that's been retarding our species since the dawn of man.
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.
Pornhub is just good about making news about them, raises their profile and perception as the main porn site.
It's not just pornhub. There are already a handful of others closing off service as well.
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.
Also, porn sites can just white label their UX/content kinda like how there's a million pirate Bay proxies
Creeping theocracy
More of a stampede than a creep these days.
Yes, I worry we're entering the exponential curve, with the new effort to put ten commandments in schools
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.
Time to invest in VPN companies..
vpn stonks go up
XVideos will get more popular.
I just tested with my VPN and indeed xvideos doesn't give a shit if you're in Texas.
The A record for xvideos resolves to the Netherlands so that's probably why they don't give a shit.
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.
Anyone got any tips on that front?
Tinyproxy
https://github.com/tinyproxy/tinyproxy/releases
Free Open source Upstream Http/s, socks4/5, direct redirection per site/URL/domain with regex. Can set default upstream proxy for everything else.
Invisible proxy Reverse proxy
Command line / simple text config
It's in your distros repo
It's available in termux.
It works.
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.