VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website.
VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website.
239 comments
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Blocking porn has got to be the most "why even bother" thing
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Politically speaking, it's easy money. You pander to the conservatives with blocking propositions, get votes.
*Who is going to champion the flip side?!"
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Me. Porn is fine. Teach your children how to handle it. Teach them that it's not realistic and some of it is straight-up dangerous. Put a filter on your internet if you're too scared to talk to your kids about uncomfortable topics.
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Like Reddit or YouTube with proper keywords didn't exist
Been there, done that
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Reminds me of when my buddies discovered our friend’s YouTube account… He only had one public playlist, and it was 100% full of softcore porn. Nothing else. It was all softcore porn. We gave him a pretty good ribbing for that one, and still make a point of reminding him that better porn sites exist every time it comes up.
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Meanwhile in Australia, they just passed a bill requiring social media to verify the age of their users to make sure they're over 16
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I'm shocked that this many people feel the need to disobey a rule that is only there to help the children. Next step must be to ban VPNs altogether, and enforcing all Internet users to be identified with their real identity (/s obviously).
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The VPNs will be harder to ban. Not just from a technical standpoint, but politically as well. Big businesses will be absolutely opposed to VPN bans.
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There will be a lot of businesses who feel the (justified) need to hide the entrypoint to their infrastructure behind a VPN.
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Teacher, leave the kids alone!
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Fun fact: they already tried. In the same law where they tried to ban E2EE a few months ago. It went about as well as you'd expect.
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I have to admit, of all the nations on earth, I never expected this sort of puritanical theatrical authoritarianism out of the french.
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To clarify, the french didn't ban pornhub, it's the company behind pornhub who decided to deny it's access in France to protest a law proposal that is currently getting examined in parliament
Ps : The law in question would require all porn sites to verify the age of its users
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The law in question would require all porn sites to verify the age of its users
Wait aren't they proposing the same thing in the US as well? It's a fairly standard thing of right-wing governments to just demand the impossible with no understanding about it could possibly be achieved.
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Ps : The law in question would require all porn sites to verify the age of its users
This is how young boys learn to computer. It won't do shit to stop anything. It's a waste of time.
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The law in question would require all porn sites to verify the age of its users
Isn't that already the case on a lot of the internet?
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They've been trying to block it for many years now.
France has been going downhill for quite some time. Many proposals for chat control and tracking... even recently, we got a law proposal that aimed at banning E2EE 😵
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They should actually take to the streets (again). Not joking. What is this nanny-state BS?
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Democracy and general Egalitarianism is so 2008. Authoritarianism is what's hot now.
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Democracy and general Egalitarianism is so 2008
Bold of you to assume it ever was!
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I can't wait for a severe overcorrection
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I know right? Aren't there nude beaches in the south of France where people will fuck in broad daylight with others watching?
French citizens please confirm (for uh, science, and not vacation planning)!
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I hate how VPN access is the scaffolding holding the building up making things look normal. You can visit all your normal web sites, you can bypass georestrictions, you can be a little less tracked than you might otherwise be. But what happens when they decide to do away with that scaffolding and we all find out they tore down the house behind it while we were enjoying "normalcy". Too much of making the web functional depends on vpns and adblocking. We shouldn't have to do this stuff and Chromes adblocking scandle should impact millions of users all around the world unilaterally removing adblocking from the web. I fear for the day we have a US only internet and a global internet, not just on paper, but in actual practice.
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once again porn leads technology
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Peak French stupidity, this isn't about protecting kids - it's about building surveillance infrastructure. Back in 2024, critics already called this the foundation for a "Great Firewall of France". Once you have the legal framework to block websites and force ISPs to implement monitoring, mission creep is inevitable.
The technical approach is laughably naive. They're essentially creating a centralized system that could easily become a database of citizen sexual preferences. Even with their "double anonymity," you're still creating digital fingerprints and metadata trails.
Most importantly, it won't work. Kids will just use VPNs - the same way adults are already doing. You're not protecting anyone; you're just pushing everyone toward circumvention tools while normalizing government control over what adults can access online.
It's perfectly French because it combines maximum bureaucratic complexity with zero practical benefit, all while creating new opportunities for state overreach. Classic.
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Amen
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Fair point on the current system being theater, but here's the thing - any centralized age verification system creates exactly the surveillance database you're worried about.
The "harder than clicking yes" solutions all have the same fundamental flaw: they require collecting and storing sensitive data that becomes a honeypot for both state actors and bad actors. Upload your ID? Now there's a database linking your identity to your viewing habits. Credit card verification? Same problem, plus you're creating financial trails.
The technical reality is that determined kids will circumvent anything you put in place. We already saw this play out - VPN registrations exploded 1,000% in France within 30 minutes. You're not actually protecting kids; you're just normalizing data collection on adults while teaching every teenager in the country how to use Tor.
Better approach would be device-level parental controls that parents can configure without creating centralized databases. Let Apple, Google, Microsoft handle age verification through their existing account systems where the data stays local. That way you get actual protection without building the infrastructure for a surveillance state.
The French solution gives you the worst of both worlds - ineffective protection AND mass surveillance. Classic government efficiency.
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At first I suspected this was the French government demanding that 40% of the videos be made in europe using the French language.
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wtf, france?
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Don't people realize there are hundreds of free porn video sites besides Pornhub? With bigger selection too because the lesser known sites usually don't get half their content DMCAed.
Paying money for a VPN just to access ONE free porn site? Sigh. I really hate web 3.0
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List them or it didn't happen
please
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Out of the loop here, why did Pornhub leave France?
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France passed a law requiring porn sites to verify age of all site visitors. Pornhub is blocking France instead of forcing its visitors to provide ID.
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As one headline put it "PornHub pulls out of France".
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Why do the French even need Pornhub when their basic movies are very porn adjacent?
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Reminds me of the running joke I had with a French bloke in a place were I worked in about how Jacquie-Et-Michelle (NSFW) was an unmissable part of French Culture, which none of our other colleagues seem to - or at least admitted to - get.
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this only means that americans dont know about proton vpn
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it could also mean that americans already use a vpn service.
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Which they should
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im in california, browsing the internet using proton as i type this.
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Why do people even go to pornhub... there are so many other options
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Because it's simple and it works. When most people want to watch porn they don't spend an hour researching their best option, they just go somewhere they know and watch something there.
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I don’t really give it much thought, I load pornhub, click a recommended video, do my business and then close the private tab (yes I know this doesn’t hide your activity but it does stop pornhub showing as a search suggestion.). I’m not a connoisseur it’s a means to an end.
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What would you recommend? :)
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I'm pretty satisfied as a subscriber. Slowly using proton mail for more and more important accounts. Constant usage of the VPN. Trying to use the calendar more but still haven't broken my Google Calendar habits. Proton Drive I use over google; I just need a Linux desktop application. Proton pass, still haven't given that a go. Comfortable with KeepassXC and managing the backups myself. Proton Docs, it's OK. Solid start. Hoping that notes partnership/acquisition eventually replaces Google Keep for me as a cloud notes application. I have pretty strong confidence now in the company regardless of the slow Linux developments
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Not sure where I got it form, but I have a Proton VPN client on Linux. It is pretty barebone, but it works.
Personally I just pay the 12,10$ for Bitwarden and use SimpleLogin aliasses together with that.
I just miss Microsoft Office on Linux, but that has nothing to do with Proton.
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Also, when in France, who needs porn when you have Eva Green?
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How about you just parent your children? But it's not about the children, that's just always the convenient excuse
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Anyone with more than two brain cells to click together could have told them this would happen. Some of them did. Not that they would/did listen.
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Ah yes, chat control, the crackdown on encryption, backdoors, etc., all forgotten? So now thousands of French people are deliberately using VPNs for something that is now illegal. Well, the politicians won't take advantage of this to take action against VPNs and encryption... To protect the children, of course...
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hows proton?
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pornhub is so sanitized now, im guessing its mostly because of the OF videos. most of them are on sites that arnt affiliated with PH.
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After the big purge of some years ago, PornHub has became useless. The good real videos are elsewhere.
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I think that you are just a bit too kinky
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They removed a lot of videos that were perfectly legal and fine :-/
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And now they want to keep doing the job of the parents and forbid "social network" to kids 15 and under.
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I guess this bodes well for Proton becoming increasingly a Google One products replacement with more users potentially paying
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I mean for context with the TikTok comparison using a VPN didn't get you around the TikTok ban unless you also made an entirely new account.
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How about mullvad
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Why not zoidberg?
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BTW, who even had the brilliant idea to block pr0n for French of all people?
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You can say porn here on lemmy
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There are other, much better sites, lol.
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go on...
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Pervertube. Thisvid. Motherless.
I just realized indicating these websites might have revealed a little too much about the kinds of porn I like to watch. ☹️
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As a «produced porn» enjoyer…
Usenet Stashdb Local stash instance
Treat porn like you do tv shows :p
I don’t really care for home video stuff
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spankbang, xvideos, eporner…
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More than TikTok's US ban doesn't mean much given TikTok blocked user accounts who originate from the US regardless of VPN location
Edited for clarity: given
theyTikTok blocked, usersaccounts-
No one reads the damned article. France didn't ban porn nor Porn Hub, they put in a place an age verification law and now PH is banning French IP addresses.
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Right, and TikTok banned users it previously identified as being from the US rather than doing the IP-origin ban PornHub uses given they don't require an account nor app.
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I don't understand, why not just open another porn website?
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You misunderstand, France didn't block pornhub, pornhub blocked France.
It is to protest against a new law requiring porn site to verify the users age. Which they argue will have dire consequences for security and privacy (I fully agree about the danger)
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Intrigued by the quarter a day oscillation in that graph... 🤔
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I think the oscillation described people's activity time. Over the course of a day, people who would register for a VPN are much more likely to do so during the evening, because during the day they are busy with work. So you observer on a daily basis a peak like this.
Such charts are very common with services used daily. For example, social media usage in a given region often has a peak during the morning, a big peak during lunch time, and in general goes up after work time.
Of course not everyone works at the same time, but a majority of people have more or less the same work times, so we observe the peaks.
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You are right, thanks! I misread the graph and thought it was a 4 cycles per day, which was puzzling me, but is indeed just a daily oscillation
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If you at all think that people can be addicted to social media, you could draw a correlation from this to porn addiction.
I know a lot of you either don’t think porn can be addictive and/or don’t think it can have negative effects on society.
Ask yourselves why the logic works for social media but not porn.
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If everything you can get addicted to were made illegal, there'd be nothing legal left.
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To be fair, potentially addictive or not, I wouldn't support a ban on social media either. The practical requirements needed to effectively restrict access to information in the modern age (both porn and social media being examples of information) are such that I generally view the cure as worse than the disease, so to speak, and view the least bad option as being to just give up on legal restrictions and just deal with the consequences instead. Addiction is harmful, but most consumers of such information aren't harmed by it, and restriction inherently requires monitoring and removing internet anonymity to a degree that I find unacceptable.
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Didn’t say anything about banning porn or social media. Just saying that they’re both addictive and have negative consequences on society. Yall can keep your porn. Relax.
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Ehh... Application of a addiction model is somewhat controversial for pornography (the ground seems divided on whether it's a compulsion or an addiction). Social media, however, is no less controversial (it's just the media likes to hype this more).
I will say - the point of a porn site is to sell user data and deliver ads, whereas the point of social media is to keep the user scrolling by any means possible. By its design, the latter cultivates addiction as a clear goal (the goal to scroll is artificially imposed), whereas the case for the former is less clear (the goal to masturbate isn't something porn created). In essence, one creates a drive and then sates it, whereas another sates an existing drive.
Honestly, I think, at the moment, we're on the "violent video games cause violence" stage of the research. In other words, not enough data to decide so the media has decided for us.
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maybe we should ban all the vices you don't partake of but leave the rest intact
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Exactly. The world is addicted to porn.
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Ask yourselves why the logic works for social media but not porn.
Because they're two completely different things.
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So alcohol and tobacco should be entirely banned as well? We should start with these, they're way worse
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You absolutly right, but here in the Mecca of internet freedom, we don't likey.
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But we love our mods. What about freedom of speech online? People just too addicted to porn and can’t even muster an ounce of criticism or critical thinking.
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239 comments
Dr. Cox was right: “I’m fairly sure if they took porn off the internet, there’d only be one website left, and it’d be called ‘Bring Back the Porn.'”
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Tumblr the Depraved?
I hate how hard this made me laugh
I still miss og tumblr and my little porn account i had going there.
Does oglaf count as porn?
Asking for a friend.
Scared to click, someone pls provide context
I had totally forgotten oglaf existed, thanks for the reminder!
Oh, she's trying!
Bro's name is Dr. Cocks