When the Fix is worse than the Problem 

I'm glad Louisiana is taking big measures to protect children like this. The current generation are going to learn how to browse the web privately with a VPN, and I think that's a great lesson to learn.

If they can't keep tobacco, alcohol, and drugs away from minors they certainly aren't going to keep digital content hidden away either

It’s all fun and games until one of these adult sites gets hacked and your full name is on a public list somewhere. Right after someone makes a search engine to find names in said list.

Being that I'm a US citizen and follow US politics: The most frightening part of all this (to me) is the notion that *the legislators from these states will have compromising data on their citizens.* I'm sad to say that there are *absolutely* politicians in the United States who would happily blackmail their electorate if it meant winning reelection.

3:15, it was the state of Missouri's department of education. They listed their teachers' social security numbers on the page in plain text in the HTML of the webpage. Governor Mike Parsons called anyone who did this a "hacker" and promised they'd be tried in court for leaking sensitive information.

Louisianan here. Literally the day that the age verification system rolled out, half of everyone I knew already started using a VPN or had some alternative. I’m not sure what our government exactly hopes to achieve by having this system, but whatever it is, it doesn’t work and is quite unpopular. You can have every country, region, state, etc on board with these laws but if even one doesn’t have them, this system will always have a massive flaw.

Government systems are probably among the least secure systems ever. I still remember when they tried to redact PDF files by adding a layer of black boxes that you could remove... EDIT: They = governments in general. Not any one specifically.

VPN sales are going up lol. But seriously it should be the parents job to monitor their kids. There's even software that allows them to do that! Don't punish the everyday user.

And then every private citizen in Louisana signed up for a VPN.

How much do you want to bet that the people writing and implementing these laws are the same type of people who think that if you delete something on the internet it's just gone forever.

When I worked at Dollar Tree they made our employee number the first 5 digits of our SIN, and our password the last 4 digits, and they stored everyones employee number and password in plain text on the managers computer. Every employee HAD TO KNOW that it was a list of everyones SINs because it included theirs. No one complained but me and I took it all the way to regional managers. I also got fired shortly after for "sitting on the job" so I know where their priorities lie

Imagine if those sites get data breached with ur government id on it sounds painful having ur SSN leaked

It's funny that the people defending these laws would be livid if they were required to give an ID to go to literally any other website.

The UK government tried to push through a similar law not that long ago. They eventually realised the only people they'd actually be restricting access to would be themselves, and would you believe the bill was quickly dropped 😂

"but is this a small government thing to do?" Bro the opportunity for small government has been thrown out the window by the politicians that keep constantly expanding it practically nonstop. The small government argument is idealism like ending racism and world hunger.

It’s always “let the parents decide” and let them control children’s phones until they want to pass something that they think is right

Unlike a startling amount of people, Linus actually faces the fact that he's going to be a parent and have "the talk" with his kids some day.

When will these lawmakers learn that making laws to prevent someone from accessing something, whether it be drugs, abortions, NSFW content etc., doesn't stop them from accessing those things. It just makes it far more unsafe for the people who do access them.

There’s already an option to do this on apple. In the privacy settings you can set it to limit adult websites which blocks them, doesn’t allow you to use incognito mode, and doesn’t allow you to delete your history. I feel like having parental controls on the devices that parents can use is a way better solution.

If there's one thing I've learned in my 18 years of life, its that horny teenage boys will always find a way.

Can Louisiana even fine a website that isn't hosted or run in their state?

Man... When I was growing up the common practice was to never share any personal information online....

This is the whole problem with politicians regulating anything they don't understand, which is nearly everything these days.

I'm pretty sure that lawmakers even factor in the possibility that personal data is being leaked. In their mind, it's your penalty for "immoral" behavior and should also deter from visiting these websites.

Cheers from Louisiana! The "service" that does the ID processing is located somewhere across from Beirut. Also, our Dept. of Motor Vehicles was snagged in the big MOVEit hack.

I see a LOT of lawsuits in Louisiana's future regarding compromising freedom of speech, putting citizens at undue risk by steering people to id fishing sites - cannot see a law like that lasting for very long.

i feel like people will do anything and everything before telling parents to do their job

employers firing you for being on the porn list, except i can probably guarantee that they'd be on that same list lmao if it existed

The contradiction of "small government" people pushing for big-government solutions makes a whole lot more sense when you realize they actually mean "small government for us specifically and exclusively". They want as close to zero restrictions on them as they can get away with, up to and including restrictions on their ability to restrict the rest of us.

The goal here isn't regulation or even keeping kids from seeing porn, this is first step in an eventual attempt to make porn illegal period.

We all know this will do NOTHING to stop the people who actually want to watch porn

I aint puttin in my id to bust. I got back from my college and completely forgot this was a law until I went on the hub and was hit with this BS. Common Louisiana L.

The right in America IS NOT small government and hasn’t been for a long time.

2:58 this was a good one, back during covid one US district had a hotline where you could rat out your neighbors and friends for ignoring the rules, and then the entire database leaked and all the snitches got exposed lol. Good work government.

What I've seen a few people do is basically ask me to send my ID but it is a heavily redacted and censored image. The only thing actually visible was my DOB. They also had me put it on a piece of paper with my username and date handwritten on it. Could it have been someone else's id? Sure and they wouldn't be able to tell but at least they could say "Yes we got an ID with a DOB that showed someone was 18+".

Just to let yall know as a Louisianan resident, while we are a "Red State" the big cities here like New Orleans and Baton Rouge are democrat heavy, which means we can have democrat like policy be implemented if they swing the committee right. Plus we are surprisingly (or not surprisingly ) religious, so I can imagine the bill was marketed as "For the kids" type of bill, when these old idiots didn't have the foresight to realize that blocking stuff like that can actually lead children into worse places.

Lets be real here, ive been clicking "yes im 18" since i was 13 lol so did every guy i knew

5:35 no they are radically religious states. The state of Utah is literally run by the Mormon church. We had a proposition pass during an election that would legalize medical marijuana, the Mormons didn’t like it so the brethren instructed the state to severely alter the proposition to the point it is almost unrecognizable.

Its not about "does it work" or "protecting the children", its about punishing/hurting ppl and making it harder to live

I think education about "that stuff" is really important here. Some people just watch it for the sake of curiosity and since some societies out there consider talking about it as taboo, it leads some astray. It's similar to what Linus said that it should be heavily taught that what they see on the internet are mostly show business and those who do those stuff there are just actors.

I remember a student at my high school found a filepath available to all students that contained all info like SSN for like 8-9 years of students and teachers

See the UK government tried this about 3 years ago and it went nowhere.

Bless your heart. It's just adorable that you say "small government" is on any politician's radar besides a campaign "promise"

I just wish parent's would do their job by actually using parent's controls and read ESRB for games and do research into things before blaming companies been a tale as old as the 80s since like pokemon and DND

9:55 no, Twitter doesn't need age verification, but it could certainly stand to have an IQ verification.

We really gotta stop thinking that kids should be completely cut off from certain content. You don't just magically become mindful enough to handle all the world's problems when you turn 18. Your parents help to teach you how to handle and interpret the world as you grow up. Trying so hard to put blinders on your kids is what makes them grow up into simple minded assholes. Teach them the dangers and possibilities of the internet. Help them to navigate it as they grow up instead of locking it off until some arbitrary age. EDIT: There are some.. Interesting.. Takes on this so I'm just gonna go ahead and clarify here. Noone in their right mind wants a totally unregulated internet. But the right kind of regulation is needed. Parents should be the ones responsible for regulating their own childrens intake of content but they also need to be given the power to do so. Linus even mentioned an isp based solution for locking a user from content on parental request. My point with the original post was that you can't keep kids from reality forever so you just shouldn't. As a parent you need to ease your kids into reality so that by the time they are moving out they can handle themselves. Tell them now how things work, they can handle it I promise. Don't say things like "when you're older you'll understand" because if you don't try and explain it now they literally won't understand it when they're older.

Let the government keep us safe... Is like the quote... "You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?"

3:50 The main theoretical advantage of direct government ID verification is that theoretically the government already knows your ID info from when they issued it in the first place. In practice, they are increasing the attack surface so it's still very bad, but assuming equivalent development effort it's *marginally* better

VPNs are the definition of the free market and it’s glorious

Another concern with device-based verification: What would Linux users or users of open-source operating systems do in that case? I can assure you that if this were to happen, Linux users would be excluded from everything because no Linux maintainer or developer in their right mind would ever agree to implement such an intrusive feature, especially considering Linux's commitment to privacy. Moreover, no one would be able to crawl web content that requires verification anymore, except for big tech companies like Google and Microsoft that have obtained approval to bypass proper verification. These are just my initial thoughts after pondering the idea for a minute, it would be absolute madness if the concept of device verification were to gain wider adoption.

This issue uncovers a major point of contention between libertarians and the other factions on the American right. A significant number of conservatives will abandon all pretenses of "small government" the second that there is a chance that kids could get into something inappropriate.

Trying to regulate the internet like this is akin to building a fence around a bird

Didn't expect this to turn into an educational video at the end and tbh I wish as I kid I had someone like Linus or Luke to give me advice because back then I had to hide out of fear of my family and when I finally got to do the real thing there were issues due to unrealistic expectations on my side that took me a while to fix. Restricting won't help any kid, it will only make them hide where you cannot control them, cannot guide them, cannot develop a parent-child relation where there is trust.

It should be the parents job to monitor what their children are doing. We don't need the gov to spy on us like this or let our data leak. This is why it is important to register to vote, I'm 26. Also Linus, I believe there are many topics republicans share together (probably for their own control of people). I'm not left or right, I believe in making the best choices for everyone.

The UK tried to do this years ago, it would push kids in to more harm, if they wanted to actively look for it, they would find it on worse sites.

at the end of the day the solution to keep minors off of adult sites is for parents to actually raise their kids instead of thinking it's enough to just keep them fed and in school

The death of the internet is happening 1 step at a time. What a time to be alive while it was still mostly truly free. Truly no better time to be born.

The real "fix" would be to make actually good sexual education. Not just about the physical part, but going deep into the psychological part of relationships and sex.

I did an experiment and clicked through the top 10 trends on Twitter to see how many of them had NSFW content. For each trend I looked at the first 12 tweets and I was unable to find a single instance of NSFW. I don't understand why Linus' experience is so different.

From the second these pieces of legislation were announced I laughed and thought "That's stupid, this is only going to cause VPN usage to go up in those areas." And that's exactly what's happening.

it's one of those things where the parents just need to take responsibility, because all of this surrounds restricting access to underage individuals. No step in technology is going to prevent kids from finding ways around any such access restriction at the technological level.

"please think of the children" lmao

Finally at the end, you hit the nail on the head. It's the parents that need to guide their children, not the government. I can see and agree with the restrictions, when it's a place like an adult movie theater. Inline no, I ran a BBS for years. I never had adult material, not because I'm against it for those who want it, but because I knew how easy it was for kids to get a picture of dad's ID to send. It should be parents who raise their kids, not the government.

All age verification rules and nonsense and a waste of time and money. Even with alcohol. It all makes doing it more attractive because it's forbidden and does not actually stop anything. This kind of stuff needs to be dealt with by parents in their own houses and networks.

With the Australia social security leak it’s amazing that there was someone technical enough to import a table from a database to an html layout, and then not know a blur was only visual.

I think it's only right when talking about porn laws that Linus indeed let Luke finish...

The hilarity of this also that kids could very easily learn how to use a vpn.

Lol almost the same in Indonesia where they literally spends miliions usd of taxpayer money to block those webs, anw it could be bypassed by a simple dns change

Korea did similar things to other websites, and it was hackers' playground for a long time. Pretty much all personal info e.g., SSN, address, name, phone numbers, were leaked and became public information.

I just don’t get how we’ve come so far when you used to just have parents watch what their kids were doing to not do anything bad or have parental locks No that’s not good enough anymore

This is what happens when you keep electing people that are literally older than Television. Imagine Internet.

When people making laws have completely broken from reality...

pornhub was advocating for this Louisiana law in the first place as they saw it as a way to fine their competition out of service. They have no interest in data privacy here which is why their alternate option is bad as well because its the same solution as the first one they pushed through the legislature.

When Luke mentioned the blocklist, I think he thought of the linklists of old. Blocklists could easily be used that way.

and today its released that "Every Louisiana driver’s license holder exposed in colossal cyber-attack" article by the guardian

I just want everyone to remember that Utah started this ball rolling. It wasn't Louisiana or Mississippi or any other state in the Deep South where you'd expect something like this to spawn from, it's from that godforsaken patch of desert.

17:20 linus is just a gigachad of a dad

I'm still of the opinion that the teacher SSN issue was very likely an issue of the page being directly created from database content and the developer took the lazy route of CSS or commenting to hide the unwanted fields instead of removing it from the query.

This will never be enforceable.

There is currently a law going through UK Parliament that introduces the exact same restrictions here in the UK, as well as trying to force encryption providers to include backdoors. It's called the Online Safety Bill and it's proving to be something of a nightmare. Years ago similar laws were proposed, and the government at the time even managed to choose a private company to handle UK age verification at the time, that company was Mindgeek who own Pornhub (yes really). Those laws were dropped at the time but surprise, surprise the same vested interests who pushed for those laws the last time are the ones behind these new laws. Unfortunately it now looks like the law will be passed later this year.

For the biometric one, it can be set in Parental Controls. If certain sites are accessed, the phone has to check who’s using it. It’s not like the phone isn’t already getting a lot of this data anyway.

Haha I am all for protecting children, yet this whole scenario just reminds me of lazy teachers in school. It's always so much easier to punish the entire class when that 1 student is a problem, but it's a blanket solution for something that deserves specific, special attention. I can only see average users being righteously pissed off and adolescents will still find loopholes to access lewd internet.

Really nice conversation with a perfect punchline. Education instead of bans or total surveillance. Kids will always find ways around bans, and they would just be taught to lie in case they get caught in case of surveillance. Education on the other hand helps them grow up and figure out stuff on their own.

Kids are into tech and are getting better with each generation. Politicians are usually 80yrs old and unable to due their daily job.

Once again a bunch of stay at home moms who never graduated high school are blaming the behavior of the children they refuse to stop neglecting on a Company who provides a service to adults.

Linus' comments on tech regulation are based AF.

I had fun Thank you for sharing ✌

i came home from school one day. my dad handed me a sheet of paper and said "read this out loud." it was the list of xxx sites my curious teenage mind went to the might before. he caught me red handed. then scared the living daylights out of me saying "i know everything you do on the computer. dont do this again." and i never did it again. until i learned about deleting internet files lol.

Device based verification would mean a walled garden of proprietary operating systems.

Yeah, it'd be the AshleyMadison user list all over again, but even worse because it involves people who weren't specifically using a dating website for adultery

I think the possibility of a database leak is kind of the point; if the age verification system for accessing adult content is easy, anonymous and secure then there's very little incentive to not view it and that's exactly what the people coming up with these policies want to to stop.

I’m in Europe and here google wants us to confirm our age with an id or credit card. I don’t want to give this information to google

This has a lot of parallels to the intrinsic high cost of defense compared to offense. Spend time and money to develop and implement a system to try to verify identities based on geography, harden that against attackers (which it obviously wont be), fine companies to get them to comply... then get defeated by a free VPN.

I think honestly what we need to do is just make a law saying ISPs are required to ask DO YOU HAVE CHILDREN? during the sign up, if you click yes it deplys a kids network for them, or if a cell phone is for a kid it automatically blocks said sites. The tools have been here from all major US carrers and ISPs for a bit, so it's just a matter of ensuring parents know about them and use them

Did these politicians not read the dystopian books in school? Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Brave New World, etc? How can anyone hear about this and not see it as a step towards Thought Police?

Off topic 16:10 merch message: You can actually buy infrared readers that you can strap to your meter. It has a tag on it explaining what it is to the utility company, and an IR transciever that communicates with the meter. This transmits the information to a small receiver in the house, about the size of an outdoor weather station, that tells you your current and accumulated power usage. Source: Uncle in law gave me one for Christmas. Although the Florida sun destroyed the outside unit within a year or two.

The term your looking for, Linus, isn't red herring - it's the TSA, i.e. security theater.

The thing that really makes me question this is the timing. Why haven't they started this 20+ years ago? Why *now*? If this were because they 'thought of the children', they would have taken on the issue decades ago. And it's not like they developed some kind of tech to allow proving your age annoymously (or at least, annoymous to the p0rn sites - the government already knows your name and how old you are) that would have been unfeasible in the past. They just make you send your ID. This isn't done to protect the youth. It's done because some way to old men are scared of p0rn and think that it'll destroy society (which anyone with a connection to reality knows just isn't the case, but I digress).

On the subject of sites outside of the US refusing to comply, there's a site that hosts a version of the content of all the official Dungeons And Dragons books. It is based in Estonia, a country that, despite being an EU member state, Will not comply with demands from foreign companies (within the EU and its orbit, maybe, but outside of it, nope) If some adult site were to reincorporate in Estonia, they sure as hell would assume no obligation to follow these demands from Utah or Louisianna.

In the UK all ISPs automatically set the safety feature to max, and give instructions on how a user can change them. For mobile all over 18 content including places like ann summers is blocked and you need to go into a store to show your id for them to the unlock your account. Nobody is able to keep anything.