You talk like actors are actually choked. I’m pretty sure there are already regulations against that.

You talk about protecting actors; sure. That’s not what’s discussed though.

You think people that are actually willing to choke someone, sometimes even against their will, need a porn flick to think about it? Or that they would not do it without someone having filmed it somewhere? Some people are lower than beasts, and they’ll do what they want. Trying to chase after every possible outside justification will not change them, and will not protect anyone. If a couple is getting it on and the man won’t listen to a “no, don’t do that”, there’s no amount of censorship, regulation, and ban, that will make them abide. The only thing it will do is increase censorship, regulation, and bans.

The sane approach for that is, surprise surprise, education, and maybe properly labeling stuff. It’s not putting in place another framework to ban things on a whim, which will subsequently be abused for much more than the arguably “fair” initial point.

This discussion is repeated ad nauseam everytime there’s plan for banning something. The argument that choking is bad is true, there’s no point repeating it. The argument that “monkey do what monkey see”? Sure, go for that. Let’s ban every media then, because boy oh boy I have a bad news about the movie industry of the past 50 years.

and it should absolutely be called out

That is THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT of this article. CALLING IT OUT instead of going all “oh, they diddly daddlied the dudely prisoner into giddily happily compliance”.

It is not safe to choke your partner even if it is agreed upon

I agree on that point. My point is that this is what should be discussed, and not banning acting.

Porn is acting. Play. Or maybe you think everyone that gets shot in a movie is actually killed during recording?

There’s no point arguing that “choking is bad”. I’m pretty sure any sane person would agree.

what you gonna arrest me for making my partner cum?

It might be the endgame at this point, who knows. We’re currently at “actors doing plays and people watching plays might become illegal”.

Good thing women with flat chest (or non women for that matter) doesn’t exist, right?

Only if it’s for procreation, too.

porn normalized chocking

I’m not sold on the “porn normalized XYZ”, or non porn either. There’s plenty of content of all kinds showing all kind of things that would be deemed dangerous, wrong, lethal, immoral, cruel, etc. but somehow, it’s only porn and kinks we’re talking about. If the prevalence of something in easily accessible media was a thing, I’d have a thing or two to tell about cops choking/gasing/beating up people laying on the ground.

I’m more concerned by the amount of people that consider fictional content to be guidelines for how they actually live their life. It seems that there’s enough of them to warrant censoring weird shit, but as long as this side of the issue is not addressed, this will not stop.

When I was younger (yes… classic one) a lot of people were worried that younger generation could not distinguish fiction from reality. And we didn’t even have realistic fiction, too. Now that we do, it seems that too many people consider “normalisation” through any media the natural course of things. Kinda like video game making people violent… only when it is convenient.

It’s less prevalent, but this content definitely exists too.

Nothing, no matter how bad, evil, terrible, treasonous, or ihumane, will destroy youtube. Except if they fail to honor a C&D from Disney.

That work at such a scale, with “popular” content creator being able to actually share their content, for free? No, not really. There are small scale initiatives, but you likely won’t find much of the mainstream people on them. And, depending on what you use, you won’t find much at all, because searching for content is a mess unless you are directly pointed to it from somewhere else.

There is a big issue with making up an alternative to youtube, at anything approaching the scale of youtube: it represents a lot of content, streamed from servers under strict time constraints, to many dozen/hundreds/thousands of people. With a centralized infrastructure that requires a lot of servers, spread over many places and many different networks. And these cost money. Using peer to peer at such a scale isn’t that great either, although with more popularity it could improve.

Existing large providers such as youtube can handle this because they have such a vast CDN available, which allows sending one copy of a video into a region once, then spreading it across multiple diffusers, who then have a reasonable load on them.

Eh, is hell really the worst place to be this time of the century?

Why would the rich be part of this discussion? Not paying taxes, not giving loan to foreign countries.

I’ll remind you that using strong encryption was not exactly legal not so long ago. For the general public anyway. To this day, in some countries, exporting software with cryptographic capabilities requires some declaration to state services.

Laws and regulations don’t have to care about reality of feasibility, unfortunately.

Banning VPNs would be an unmitigated disaster and anyone who suggests that it’s a good idea has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about and should never be allowed to make tech policy again because they are a massive idiot.

You’re right. Sadly, this have no bearing on the people actually deciding federal laws in the US, if I am to trust the news cycle from the last 10 or so months.

The damage that would stem from such things is guaranteed to span far and large :(

This, even as a mere proposal with zero chance to pass, should be strongly repelled. Moving somewhere else ends up not being an option when everywhere decides to play the same game over time. And mandatory state surveillance and breach of privacy are really trending.

From that excerpt, it sounds like they understand what it is… for the general public. Take anyone on the street, if they know what a VPN is, they’re likely to just know some brand name that sells “VPN” to end users. The same way to some people, github is git.

The idea that such ban/restriction would affect basically every business and a lot of individual out there doesn’t matter if you just open with “VPN are used for illegal things” and just, stop there.

Legally? Easy. Pass the law, boom. Done. They see encrypted traffic from your house/phone? That’s a paddling.

Technically? Well, sort of. A lot of VPN uses TLS for the encryption between their servers and the clients, so from the outside it could very well look like regular encrypted HTTPS traffic. So, depending on how such hypothetical (I hope) law is worded, it could just make all encryption illegal. It would not prevent anyone from using it, because that’s just math. You can’t prevent people from doing math with a computer. But you can certainly prosecute them if the law says so.

Of course, a more complete answer is that it is possible to masquerade as something else, depending on your available bandwidth and your will to side step the (hypothetical) law. If your traffic looks legitimate (and seems to be in plaintext), but you embedded some hidden meaning that the recipient can decipher, then you’re playing cat and mouse, and you can get away with thing. Wrapping DNS queries inside TLS made it easy to avoid DNS spoofing at ISP level, for example. But the point remain; such law are not made to make something technically impossible. They’re made to make something prosecutable. After all, there are laws against murder, but they don’t prevent murder, they merely incentivize people to not do it.

edit: I ignored the whole lot of other issue with banning encrypted communication as a whole, because it would break every business that have an online presence, including banking and trading. But, exemptions are a thing. Law for thee, not for me, this kinda move.

When they start talking, yeah.

This meeting could have been skipped entirely. And doing so would have been less embarrassing for everyone.