The overton window has shifted. We’ve just assumed age verification will be a thing and now everybody is looking for the solution that doesn’t burden them. Don’t comply. There are already tools parents can use to monitor their children.
This would require “verified” operating systems: No alternative Android-based OSes. No Linux phone. Hell, no Linux desktop, or at least we would be stuck with a big-tech-built proprietary web browser.
This is a terrible idea.
Pretty sure this is the direction big tech and government want to take things. Mandatory ID to use your operating system, perfect tracking and as targeting, no anonymity, censorship, consolidated monopolies, etc. Pornhub won’t be the only website requiring verified OS and ID. They want to build a locked down, surveiled internet, and moral panics are the way they’re doing it.
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i am glad, however, that we’re not reshaping society in order to be more convenient customers for pornhub…
Well it requires a verified source for the data. I don’t see why it excludes open source at all.
Because of who decides how such verification gets built. Just look at what is happening with Android apps to know how big tech companies will handle it. https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
What constitutes a “verified” operating system?
Whatever Apple, Microsoft, and Google decide it does.
I kinda agree, but it doesn’t need to be verification. Just a standardised child account set for the OS that devices come with. Make it really fucking obvious when setting up a device too, parents can be morons so don’t give them that excuse.
Make it clear that the parents are responsible.
parents can be morons so don’t give them that excuse.
I promise you that they will still find a way to fuck it up. Badly.
Sure will. But it’s about setting expectations. Make sure society views the parents as responsible too because they clearly gave the kid unfiltered internet access.
This is what California just passed into law, I think they’re thinking the same thing and trying to force the hand a bit before I’d verification becomes the only option.
Its the best option I can think of that doesn’t infringe on privacy in any way while also working. The parents are responsible and technical changes that help make that more obvious to society along with making it easier for parents that can’t be bothered to look after their children seems like the best compromise to reduce the chance of the otherwise inevitable loss of privacy that we are going to face. Or in some cases, already have.
Exactly, it makes sense up and down the stack. Parent says junior is under 18 to the os. Os passes it into the browser, browser passes it along to sites, or prevents displaying them. There would of course be ways around it, but it solves 95% of the cases immediately, and lets us adults continue being adults.
Any sort of hardware attestation that non-trivially identifies a person to verify their age is going to be used to track and exploit people.
Anything less than that isn’t going to be effective for the supposed purpose.
The moment we need photo ID or government issued keys to access computer systems, things will get a lot more ugly real fast.
That is not at all what we were talking about. California passed a law that only requires an admin on a PC to be able to create a child account which will be marked as under 18. Standard OS behavior there with permission systems that already exist. That then is passed up the stack. It’s quite literally a boolean, one that was created by a parent. It’s the most sensible way for a compromise.
What makes you think it will stop there? Once the groundwork has been laid for this framework, all they need to do is roll out v2 which requires a little more from the user, etc.
Most servers won’t check this bit at first because they don’t need to or care, but once the technology is in place, it won’t be long before legislation mandating the checking of that bit begins to roll out affecting industries and providers that deal in topics and goods deemed to be bad for the children (it won’t stop at porn).
Once that happens, minors will learn ways around the check (or parents will be lazy and give their kids access to adult logins, etc), and the “need” to enact stronger checks will be pushed for and…
Put all of it together and you’re heading towards an Internet without anonymity in a couple of decades.
That’s all 100% a slippery slope argument. Fact is is that they’re already trying to do that. Saying no is only going to be ignored, as it already is. It’s better to provide a solution that works that also respects our privacy and allows us to maintain control over our devices, otherwise they’ll mandate the exact thing you’re worried about.
Have devices do the blocking for kids by having sites required to identify themselves as adult oriented in a standard way. The bad sites aren’t going to enact the requirements for people to identify themselves any more than they would enact the requirements for sites to identify themselves to devices but it eliminates the tracking of adults and blocking of legitimate content to children with parental permission like sexual education sites by allowing exception lists for parents.
None of this shit is ever going to stop kids from finding porn (or anything else they’re determined to find). I owe my career in IT to figuring out how to circumvent all the parental control things my parents put on the family pc and cover my tracks. All you can do is supervise them as best you can and teach them about being responsible and what’s real vs imaginary.
Exactly, so give parents the tools to filter and make it their responsibility to police their children. Don’t make everyone give up their privacy and sometimes, security, and safety to shitty corporations who will eventually leak all of their data. Which is exactly what both I and pornhub are saying.
They already do flag themselves and have done for at least 20 years. But apparently most parents are dipshits who dont install content blockers.
Is this right? Out of curiosity, how do these sites flag themselves as content for adults?
Obviously, this is the solution. Sites that do this correctly, and software that detects the metadata. Parents are the ones that need to choose the correct software and enable the correct settings.
Sites that do not set the correct metadata are legible to be banned by authorities.
It’s called RTA and it’s a tag that goes in the header of each html page to be restricted. All “mainstream” US adult operators back the scheme as a sort of self-regulation.
Pornhub became boring as fuck. It looks like (not sure how it really is) they now host videos only from a dozen studios and the lack of diversity shows. Additional limits will kill it.
Here’s what happened speaking as someone who worked for 3 adult companies that were all bought by manwin/pornhub.
They bought out too many companies that hosted user generated porn/“reality” porn and couldn’t/didn’t do anything with it.
Take Pink Visual/Twistys for example. a good 10 years or so ago they bought them (I was working there) Now the only thing Twistys had going for it was A. the actual Twisty brand which was like a B or C tier Playboy and B. it’s user generated sites (GayTube, SexTube, TrannyTube, etc) and arguably Gaytube was in the later stages of the companies life making the money. It was all user and affiliated submitted content that had to be manually moderated (that was me) in order to go up on the site. Yes I saw/reported a lot of underage content but overall the majority was consenting adults and there was A LOT of it. Side note you know the video of the guy that sticks the jar up his ass and it doesn’t go well? we got that first and I denied it buttttttttt I did send it along to some “other” sites. you’re welcome.
Every “user” site was moderated by at least 2 people. each one. When manwin bought us they didn’t bother with that and got their asses nailed for it. SO instead of using moderators to view all the content submitted they decided to just not allow any of it unless it was from a studio. the problem with that? they pretty much bought all the studios and promptly either relocated them or shut them down. This is what happened to another company I worked for, Digital Pink. They did “reality porn” like Wife Swap, College Orgy Party or whatever it was called, and a shit ton more I can’t remember. We also ran a massive and very successful affiliate program called Topbucks. Manwin buys the company and again doesn’t do anything with it. all that content goes bye bye. And because there’s no content the affiliates aren’t making money so all those smaller niche sites also go bye bye.
The lack of content as you’ve clearly seen is their own doing. A handful of content studios remain and all those creators that were submitting their own stuff to us have gone else where be it onlyfans or simply putting up their own crap somewhere. the ONE company that has been around longer than any of it and STILL hasn’t sold to Manwin/Pornhub and is all amateur created content is Southern-Charms but…yeah you’ll be hard pressed to find a “looker” on that site.
Manwin became a sort of monopoly for porn. They just didn’t do anything with the shit they bought and now after all these years they’re starting to hurt. They won’t be around much longer.
Thanks for the explanation. I know nothing about the industry, and from the outside it really looked like they just wanted to save a few bucks on the moderators and stopped receiving videos from any sources except for a few they know well. I had no idea that they buy studios en masse.
Monopolies (especially monopolies of something that isn’t totally unavoidable and necessary) never end well. And it is good.
They were caught out hosting non-consential and underage material, and so made a blanket ban of any material other than verified creators.
Its because PH sanatized the site because of all the alleged pedophilia/ SA videos. i think some other sites have captured the old PH in various videos on thier categories. ironically, PH stored the tumbler after thier porn purge, and now PH purged thier own “unprofessional porn” largely is scattered in other obscure sites includes pirated some OF VIDEOS… Xvideo was the closest thing to orignal PH, and then theres others with some of the old PH videos.
Honestly, would you mind DMing some of the better sites you’ve found?
Do a search for tblop, you’ll get sites with lots of links.
Thank you!
Why is pornhub doing this all of a sudden? I thought they were against the digital ID bs. How is device-based age verification different?
How is device-based age verification different?
You put your device in child safety mode, and it tells sites “I’m a kid, treat me like a kid” – otherwise the site can assume you’re an adult with full rights. Done. No intrusive ID requirements. No face scanning. No third-party payment shakedowns. Parents, in theory, can still stop their five year olds from accidentally accessing PornHub or other content that would disturb them by just clicking a button when they set up an account on the device.
It’s, frankly, the sane way to do this if we’re going to have age restrictions.
Honestly, I don’t picture this happening. The main problem is parents parking their kids in front of screens or devices with internet access and then just bailing. Most devices have the means to do this and have so for a long time, it’s called “parental control”. It’s been a thing since the late 90s in my experience and probably earlier. The problem is it requires some time/effort to set up. I’m not advocating for the digital ID solution to this problem necessarily, just to be clear. However, even anti virus suites have this ability, routers have this ability, hell even browsers do if I recall but people and parents have been hands off about it.
Now they are complaining and expecting the entire internet to change or blaming online porn companies. The alternative is realising that letting kids have unfettered and unmonitored access to the internet, the place where you can easily view graphic footage of people dying, is actually a bad idea; bordering on neglect. Though this ignores places like Tik Tok, YouTube and a lot of social media marketing their platforms as “kid friendly” when they’re anything but, probably a different discussion however.
It’s already happening. California passed a law to require OS vendors and online services to support this functionality last month.
One state in the US but, fair enough. Though a lot of the wording for this seems account based, instead of an OS baked “kid mode”, which again just seems like a variation of parental control which already exists. The point is this problem already has a solution not being utilised by the majority of the world’s internet user base. This won’t fix parents just buying a device to palm off to their kids, because if setting up parental controls is beyond them, setting up an account for them properly likely will be too.
This won’t fix parents just buying a device to palm off to their kids, because if setting up parental controls is beyond them, setting up an account for them properly likely will be too.
Sure, but this limits companies liability if they make a good faith effort to comply; idiot parents being idiots and not setting up a kid’s account are no longer their problem, legally speaking, if they follow this law and respect age signals.
Mainstream adult sites carry a flag which trips content blockers. Have done for decades. Its all nonsense.
Because they know the “party of anti-regulation/anti-nannie state” will never trust people to take care of themselves and someone will be forced to do it. They acknowledge either they will have to do a bunch of work and be liable when it fails, or some middle man will. So they choose the middle man.
They know that verification is happening as we shift rightwards, but instead of being the ones beholden to implement an age-verification system that puts them at risk, they want to have device manus do it, which would absolve PH from any responsibility. It’s a business move, on their part.
Because if they don’t do something like this they’re going to lose a massive amount of their user base. If something like this doesn’t happen then it’s id verification, and it’s pretty clear republicans want that nationwide, and UK proves that other countries also want it. This would provide a format to say “I’m over 18 let me in” without needing to provide an id, and so most of their users could still enjoy privately. Decent compromise imo
PH’s parent was one of the front running bids to operate the UK age verification scheme before it was abandoned.
