https://github.com/HelloZeroNet
https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet
perhaps it was too good?
Check the 2023 keynote for Microsoft's Ignite AI conference. Microsoft plans to move ALL compute into the Azure cloud, meaning that they are planning for a future where even your OS in a cloud server.
The GOV's of the world will be on the heels behind the curtain making sure this all passes.
The future is sneaker net.
The only time politicians ever see children is when they can use them as a soapbox to push an agenda.
The ironic thing is many people who decry forcing these companies to verify age, would be fine with such age verification restrictions on Insta or TikTok.
From your own source:
> A government spokesperson said VPNs are legal tools for adults and there are no plans to ban them.
As someone with kids I care deeply about the harmful stuff my children will get exposure to. And I'm worried about this as a negative influence, especially to boys, much more than I'm worried about smoking, vaping, drugs, guns, and most other things. This can absolutely wreck your relationships, and it's just not practical to control on a family level. Over 25% of teenagers have ED and it's going up. That can't be good. And for girls it can lead to risky or overall degenerate behavior due to changing expectations and influence.
So many people here pretend like there's no problem.
Or maybe they think that the proposed solutions are worse than the problem.
Because children are the only ones who use VPNs?
We will never get our privacy once this is widespread. Laws are too easy.
I feel like this narrative is counterproductive. Sure, it is true that some people advocating for this are doing it out of ulterior motives, but it certainly isn't true for all of them. Telling the people with legitimate concerns that they don't actually care about children is going to push them into the camp of the people who want to take advantage of their concern. In order to actually prevent the kind of damage that these censorship systems can inflict, there probably needs to be an actual discussion about the problem these systems are ostensibly designed to address.
People have to remember this is a political issue and politics is about coalition building. Insulting large swaths of the general population as being nefarious liars isn't a great way to build coalitions.
On the contrary! Look at Qanon. They've essentially taken over the Republican party. They not only insulted the bulk of the population, Qanons want them dead. It worked fine.
And large swaths of the general population are nefarious liars who don't actually care about children. If building coalitions requires ignoring that fact, then we're not going to build coalitions. The real world isn't HN, where you're expected to assume good faith at all times, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
Today the internet in Russia is utterly broken. A VPN or a DPI bypass tool isn't something nice to have — it's an absolute necessity, especially if you communicate with people in other countries.
That’s not true. Sometimes they see kids for sex. I mean, isn’t this what Epstein is all about?
Focusing on how it makes pornographers almost as poor as average workers is almost an advertisement for internet censorship; I may have to call my rape a "grape," but at least a pornographer will have a bad day.
Being against porn is an issue for the base, politicians don't actually care. When you swallow their arguments whole, you've already lost.
I think graphic adult content is bad for a lot of people. It degrades women, is highly addictive, promotes ED, among other things. For instance, as many as 17–30% of young men aged 18–24 report some symptoms of ED, compared to early 2000s, around 1–7%. Is this mostly due to adult content? I think so. That and having a portable computer with you 24/7. I don't know how I would have responded as an adolescent with that kind of access.
I know people personally affected by this. And as a society, I've seen people casually consuming adult content in the library or the bus, watching it like you'd watch a Seinfeld re-run. I think its especially harmful for children.
Its also important to note how prevalent it is.
> A majority of teens aged 13 - 17 have seen online adult content, with 73% exposed by their teens and the average age of first exposure being 12.
> Another survey found the average age of exposure was 12, and 15% of children first saw online adult content by age 10 or younger.
> A UK study reported that 8% of children aged 8–14 viewed pornography monthly, indicating regular exposure even at younger ages.
As a parent, you can restrict things but its getting harder and they have access through their phones or other computers from friends. Ideally I wish these sites would voluntarily try to put some age-gating, but considering that a huge percentage of their traffic is underage, they have no incentive to do so.
> I wish these sites would voluntarily try to put some age-gating, but considering that a huge percentage of their traffic is underage, they have no incentive to do so.
That mandating a self-identification system (of the site, not the user) would solve 90% of the underage user problem exposes these governments' user-identification campaigns as pretext.
Kids could always get jazz mags from friends, find VHS tapes, be told stories, see topless women etc.
The difference here is that it's easier, but that's partly caused by indifference and technical illiteracy.
If it was a serious enough problem to warrant government intervention the larger public would be championing this cause.
They aren't.
That's not even withstanding that soft porn is often just people showing their bodies, which should never be a problem.
> They aren't.
Nearly 70% of Americans support tougher laws restricting children’s access to adult content online—up from 65% in 2013.
Six in ten young men (ages 18–29) support stricter online restrictions for adult content, a shift from an even split in 2013
You gotta get out of your bubble
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/jul/10/young-men-b...
"In the 2000s, AEI was the most prominent think tank associated with American neoconservatism.[5] Irving Kristol, widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism, was a senior fellow at AEI and the AEI issues an 'Irving Kristol Award' in his honour.[58][59] Paul Ryan has described the AEI as "one of the beachheads of the modern conservative movement"
If there's independent studies great, especially world wide (the US can be a bit insular), but as someone in the UK I dont see anything but disdain for ID checking age-gating.
Even other political parties are saying they'll roll it back if they get in power, which if they're betting the farm on that policy, must have considerable public influence.
Where is the evidence that it is bad for people?
Where is the evidence that it is bad for children?
Where is the evidence that it is addictive?
Where is the evidence that it causes ED?
These things are commonly believed by "traditionally-minded" people, but I have yet to see a reputable study that shows any of this. Indeed, recent studies have shown that "porn addiction" is effectively a myth: it's basically just people who think that using porn is bad, still using porn (because they have normal, healthy, human urges), and feeling guilty about it.
Your entire argument rests on that "I think so".
We are getting hit from all sides. You will be tracked and it will be used against you.
It's just that right now, though everyone is tracked, only a few people get watched. So even today, the algorithm is already picking out the people who should be watched. It's just that currently the government doesn't always do it on the up and up.
This should be adopted by many other countries
I'm sure you don't. Feel free to disconnect from the internet though, I don't mind. Also, I wouldn't compare the freedom to have porn with the freedom to have slaves, but it's a cultural difference, right?
Break the narrative abroad and after the frogs are acclimated turn up the heat at home.
No matter how many $x's you conquer, there's always another $x around the corner.
- anthropogenic climate change
- institutional racism
- healthcare availability and affordability
- gun violence
Put simply: You've all been asleep at the switch while the US-side Internet has been systematically under attack by pornscolds trying to implement Chinese-style censorship, this article's author included.
It only hurts real users.
It's clear that the HN crowd is a bit of an echo chamber. Somehow, these messages of warning are not getting to people who need to hear them in order to stop voting against their own interests.
Well, now I think about it, people vote against their own interests on all kinds of issues. So I suppose this one doesn't have to be any different?
Tell me, what’s even worth saving?
This advocates a:
( ) technical
(*) legislative
( ) market-based
( ) vigilante
...solution to control explicit or controversial content online. It won’t work. Here’s why:
Why it fails:
(*) Can be bypassed with basic tools (VPNs, mirrors, alt accounts)
(*) Users and creators won’t tolerate the restrictions
(*) Requires unrealistic global cooperation
(*) Censors legitimate content (art, education, etc.)
(*) Lawmakers don’t understand the tech they’re regulating
(*) Platforms may quietly ignore or undermine it
(*) Trolls and bots will weaponize it
What you didn’t consider:
(*) Jurisdiction conflicts across countries
(*) Encrypted and decentralized content sharing
(*) Abuse of takedown/reporting systems
(*) Privacy and free expression concerns
(*) Content filters are always one step behind
And finally:
(*) Sorry, it just doesn’t work.
( ) This idea causes more harm than good.
( ) You're solving a symptom, not the problemOr maybe it’s not that odd and this is a common conflict.
I stand on the side of those indifferent to the material consequences of this censorship on pure moral grounds.
And the funny thing is that there are people who seek to mean well and who find the material trade-off intolerable for their own reasons.
Society as a whole is kept in quite the quagmire by the string of these aforementioned hands, ain’t they?
Take a look at the Australian age verification law. Mainstream websites aren't even collateral damage, they are explicitly the target.
aogaili•2h ago
The flood of AI content, social media, and confused articles is destroying the internet.
puppycodes•1h ago
Porn has always been around.
It will easily outlast the idiots writing these laws.
> The Wheel: 6000 years old
> Porn: 42,000 years old (Hohle Fels “Venus”)
jabedude•1h ago
puppycodes•1h ago
Not to be rude but, this is a lazy analysis that is filled with assumptions, moralizing, over identification, and magical thinking.
you are falling into a causation coorelation trap
a4isms•1h ago
I am under the impression that "unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex" have been with us for a very, very long time. If we observe that porn addicts have such unhealthy ideas, are we confusing correlation with causation?
fpgaminer•1h ago
So if we're looking at correlation, doesn't the data imply that _more_ porn is associated with _more_ rights for women?
(Conversely, the vast majority of people calling for and enacting policies for more restrictions on pornography are also rolling back rights for women.)
diggan•1h ago
danaris•1h ago
thinkingtoilet•1h ago
rescripting•1h ago
Sohcahtoa82•1h ago
thinkingtoilet•50m ago
rescripting•17m ago
Finding a Playboy magazine in the bushes wont radicalize a 13 year old, but watching BDSM or CNC at an age where you're beginning to form your sexual ideologies can't be healthy.
mpalmer•1h ago
TehCorwiz•1h ago
The world population also exploded in almost every corner from hundreds of millions a to billions.
Relationships, procreation, gender views, and such also depend heavily on economic outlooks and have tracked that rather than porn in every comparison I can find.
I disagree with your assessment that porn causes those things anymore than violent video games cause violence.
cardanome•1h ago
Yeah, we should go back in time to when good men used to regularly beat up and rape their wife just like god wanted. Where anything not cis and hetero was not tolerated. Where relationships where based on dominance and very seldom on love.
Nope. As sad as that may be, in terms of having healthy ideas about sex, we are probably at the peak since the neolithic revolutions. Times have never been better, especially in progressive Western nations.
For porn to have ruined anything where would need to be something to ruin in the first place. Young men had unhealthy ideas about sex long before porn existed. They probably have a little bit more of a clue now.
Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely willing to entertain the idea that porn and especially over consumption of porn is problematic in many aspects. However it is not a major societal issues. And I absolutely abhor the idea of the state censoring porn to enforce personal and specifically sexual morality. There is good reason civilized countries don't do this.
bigyabai•1h ago
krapp•40m ago
This only seems like porn because we live in a culture founded on Judeo-Christian taboos against sex and the female form. I wouldn't assume it was in any way pornographic in its own time and context.
normalaccess•1h ago
https://youtu.be/-gGLvg0n-uY?si=KDEVLayU5ToEEmpL
sunshine-o•21m ago
Porn is just the new TV or video games, the scapegoat hidding the real taboo of our society: Parents are happy to believe the society, the government has to take care of their children.
In the 80s they were leaving their children in front of the TV all day long and were blaming the TV programming. Then they bought them video game consoles and games and complained the games were too violent. Now they buy them full HD porn streaming devices with unlimited data and access to the internet to get rid of them and blame porn or tik tok.