so, how did porn ID laws go?

it's been over a year since i last wrote about porn ID laws on this blog. have things changed since then?

well, i was just about right about everything, and things have gone terribly in just about exactly the ways i predicted they would. specifically, that third-party age verification services would get hacked, repeatedly. and how have legislators responded? well, by passing even more of the laws!

so that's not great. but are these laws working?

absolutely not, obviously! every single teenager already knows of a dozen ways to get around these things, from using a VPN to simply borrowing mom's ID. for some reason, some age verification services simply require you to verify your face; and those are easily bypassed by booting up any video game where you can play as an old person.

now, for those who still don't quite understand my disdain for these laws, how about a metaphor?

say you're a distiller who makes whiskey. one day, you get an angry complaint from someone who says that their child drank your whiskey. you ask how the child got it, and they say that they — an adult — bought it from a liquor store, and their kid got into it while they weren't looking. obviously, that's not the distiller's fault that the kid drank it, is it? the parent should have kept the liquor on a high shelf or something, or just watched their kid better.

so why is it suddenly the fault of a website owner when a parent goes out to a store, buys a device, gives it to their child, doesn't monitor what their child is doing on that device whatsoever, and then that kid seems something the parent doesn't like? why should adults making things for other adults be expected to babysit a random child who wandered in, when we already told kids to stay away?

maybe parents should try actually taking care of their children, instead of expecting someone else — or the government — to do it for them. and if you don't want to have to take care of kids? well, then just don't have any.