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Rhode Island Bill Would Impose Fee For Accessing Online Porn (providencejournal.com)
If a recently introduced bill passes the General Assembly this session, Rhode Island residents will have to pay a $20 fee to access sexually explicit content online. The bill, introduced by Sen. Frank Ciccone (D-Providence) and Sen. Hanna Gallo (D-Cranston), would require internet providers to digitally block "sexual content and patently offensive material." Consumers could then deactivate that block for a fee of $20. The Providence Journal reports: Each quarter the internet providers would give the money made from the deactivation fees to the state's general treasurer, who would forward the money to the attorney general to fund the operations of the Council on Human Trafficking, according to the bill's language. If online distributors of sexual content do not comply with the filter, the attorney general or a consumer could file a civil suit of up to $500 for each piece of content reported, but not blocked, according to the bill.
ludicrously and patently unconstitutional
The RI lawmakers are Idiots.
I wonder who's definition of explicit material they use as well. We had a group locally that defined pornography as anything at all that is internded to arouse a person sexually. Which by the way, included the Sears catalog ladies section. Regardless, that second thing is the real problem. I could care less about porn, but patently offensive material could be banning the letter N in a short time.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
How do they plan on imposing a filter across state lines? I get how they can essentially tax online porn but it doesn't work like going down to your local gas station or adult store and picking up a few skin mags or videos. Especially all the free stuff.
I'd like some details as to how they're asking the ISPs to implement this. I need a good laugh.
Fucking lawmakers, suddenly they think they run a fucking protection racket.
I'm sorry, but smut is legal, and I don't need your fucking permission or consent to look at it.
This is pretty much just a fucking shakedown racket by asshole lawmakers.
Fuck you, assholes.
Isn't this a violation of both net neutrality AND 1st amendment. What if someone wants to post a comment on that porno site, and it being blocked from exorcising their free speech?
Honestly, this is -yet- another money grab by your heroes in office. Congratulations
Life is not for the lazy.
And like the Australian blacklist, 'somehow' content that has nothing to do with that listed on the bill will end up blocked. Like rival businesses. Or political opponents.
Or is the list of banned content going to be made available for public ... scrutiny? Ahem.
I'll be fascinated to see how they expect this to be implemented.
Legal because I have no doubt they can create a tax or fee on anything they want to.
Hypocritical because Rhode Island claims to also be in favor of "Net Neutrality"
http://www.providencejournal.c...
Funding the government through gambling, drugs, and now porn. Anything else you need to know about the United States of America?
"Rhode Island just joined the list of the states with net neutrality legislation"
https://www.fastcompany.com/40...
Ah, so those are the same people who now want the government to "filter" and "restrict" the Internet unless you pay more for certain parts of it. Doesn't sound very neutral. Doesn't sound like freedom. Doesn't sound like keeping ISP's from interfering with accessing of information.
That is completely independent of the total impossibility of an ISP being able to figure out how and which sites serve "porn" and exactly what constitutes "porn" and what happens when things are misfiltered.
Rhode Island- you must really like just PARTS of the Bill of Rights. But which parts? We know you dislike the 2nd Amendment, but I guess the 1st Amendment is now not to your liking, either? Which of the remaining 10 is next? Maybe the 4th?
No doubt the bill will include exemptions for elected officials and law enforcement. And then there's the next step: a $30 fee to access websites critical of elected officials and law enforcement.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
might indeed have worthwhile goals, but they demean their name and their cause by being associated with a shakedown operation.
Before we find out the legislators have exempted themselves....?
The bill, introduced by Sen. Frank Ciccone (D-Providence) and Sen. Hanna Gallo (D-Cranston)
Sounds more like something that Republicans would be doing, but I'm assuming that that "D" indicates these are Democrats that are proposing this.
"sexual content and patently offensive material."
Definitely sounds more like a Republican thing, so very confusing.
But even more concerning, who decides what is "patently offensive material"?
> would require internet providers to digitally block
> If online distributors of sexual content do not comply
Which is it? "Who" rather.
Onus on local ISPs is at least vaguely plausible, assuming a magic demon sits on ye Series Of Tubes and does what judges have failed to do (criteria of porn) for centuries. Perhaps the burden is on lewd content to identify itself (binarily, despite an obvious spectrum).
Whatever, putting a price tag on it will only further encourage the surface dwellers to support the VPN industry. By all means, please, feed that beast. You only make it harder to resist later, when lobbyists (eg MAFIAA) are stomping their feet for legislation to "do something about it".
Jewish writings and the Bible (if someone smuggling them) were categorized as pornographic in the Soviet Union, and in South Africa black liberation works were. Maybe the swimsujit issue of Sports Illustrated is pornographic in parts of the Bible Belt....
A VPN that is connecting through some other state, or some other country would easily defeat this.
Porn is almost half the Web. Putting a fee on it is almost like having a hamburger fee at Burger King.
Table-ized A.I.
https://lolzombie.com/3977/bac...
While this is an egregious example both of why the R's are 'on paper' against taxes, there have been similiarly stupid shit by D's in other places, the most hilarious being California, like that one Representative, Asian-American, in the Bay Area who was pro gun control... because he was helping with illegal gun trafficking in the region...
There are also Boxer, Pelosi, Feinstein and co with their pro-surveillance security theatre while also being pro-privacy for themselves (I don't remember the specifics but someone flew a drone over Feinstein's house with a video camera on it? Irony much?)
At this point in time people really need to purge the partisanship and then purge the partisan politicians. If America is to survive it needs its people focusing on the issues we CAN agree on and getting legislation on them enacted, then revisit the hot button issues once we have other parts of our house in order. And for fucks sake, both former sides need to stop dicking around on pressing issues and trying to use them to push those non-pressing issues through. Save those and debate on them for when you have nothing better to do with your time!
A VPN that is connecting through some other state, or some other country would easily defeat this.
Not necessarily. Analysis of packet sizes, timing, etc. can identify which sites are visited with surprising accuracy. Failing that, the state could simply charge the $20/quarter charge for anyone who uses a VPN service, or make the penalty for accessing pornography through a VPN in order to avoid the charge so ridiculously great that no one would take the chance. People who use VPNs for accessing child porn get busted all the time.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
There are crumbling infrastructures, climate change issues, serious challenges with globalisation and wealth inequality, health care systems in peril, an opioid crisis, unaffordable higher education, a fragile financial system, serious deficits, nations all over the world at the brink of bankruptcy or devastated by war and these morons have nothing better to propose as a bill which is not only unnecessary but also technically impossible to realize.
Each quarter the internet providers would give the money made from the deactivation fees to the state's general treasurer, who would forward the money to the attorney general to fund the operations of the Council on Human Trafficking, according to the bill's language
So this council would then be directly profiting from the sex-trade?
Is that really how they want to be funded.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I guess now lawmakers are planning to charge us to view anything they don't like. I have an idea, why don't they start charging to view guns or the NRA website. I am sure that looking at porn has caused fewer injuries and deaths than looking at guns. This is nothing more than censorship, and it is a terrible idea.
Opera Browser has built in VPN. Amazon has Silk. There are other browsers with other similar technologies. Are they literally just going to hit up ANYONE not using Chrome/Edge at this point?
This from the state that issued 12,000+ speeding tickets in 33 days from 5 cameras. Rhode Island obviously wants to lead the country in bringing on the police state. I think police access to all Home voice assistants is a logical next step. Liberty is way over-rated. Bring it!
This is a money grab, and it is not criminalizing anything, so your examples are too extreme for this scenario.
Width - 37 miles
Length - 48 miles
Population - 1,057,000
The city of Los Angeles is bigger.
Good luck proving in court that "because his packets were this size, he *must* have been viewing porn". If that's so accurate, VPNs would be worthless in repressive states like China and Iran (and apparently Rhode Island now, too, lol) because they could just *tell* that you're visiting a site they don't like, and shut you down.
But VPNs are still very effective in many countries if your endpoint isn't a "known" VPN operator. The other option is for the ISP operator to maintain a strict whitelist of which IPs/websites are reachable from their network; a few countries have begun to think that this is the only true way forward, because if you default to routing any traffic, it's still trivially easy to bypass just about any filtering or deep scanning attempts using standard crypto like TLS.
Sure, you can probably inspect the timing and bandwidth utilization of an encrypted connection to distinguish between streaming video, working in an online office suite, uploading a video to a streaming service, or viewing a restaurant's menu, with high accuracy of being able to at least rule out one or more of those categories. But being able to tell which actual *website* is being visited, or what content is being consumed? That seems very unrealistic to me. The degree of confidence you'd have in your assertions would be, at best, around 50% or so, and almost always much lower than that. This sort of "suspicion-based reasoning" wouldn't fly in most courts in countries that uphold basic human rights.
Oh, and any timing based traffic analysis deductions can be easily defeated client-side by inserting random, non-deterministic jitter into all outbound packets. Since the server endpoint's send rate is also dependent on your client's responses (TCP ACKs), you can effectively control the delay in your server endpoint's responses by introducing small amounts of random latency into your own client's ACKs. Then you can further muddy the waters by having the endpoint pollute the encrypted tunnel with nonsense data. The most accurate conclusion that could be claimed with a high degree of certainty thereafter would be "They seem to be using a lot of throughput for some reason".
Indeed, any justice system that would allow such leaps in logic based on packet size and timing analysis (while having no idea of what the actual contents of the datastream contained) is not a justice system I'd want to be subjected to. That's getting dangerously close to guilty until proven innocent.
The bill doesn't limit itself to ISPs, it applies to pretty much anything that makes accessing the Internet possible.
"A person who manufacturers, sells, offers for sale, leases, or distributes a product that makes content accessible on the Internet shall: "
A VPN client easily falls under this statute. As does a 14.4k baud modem.
And besides, it's not like politicians have ever cared if a law is feasible or enforceable.
Someone said circumventing bad policy with technology isn't the way to do it, but...
Ohhhhh, patently offensive material! That could be like bleeding heart politicians and bullshit bills.
Oh, I don't know I think it might be quite amusing at the moment given that your current president is someone who a good fraction of your country finds patently offensive and attempting to ban every mention of him on the internet will be a fun exercise to watch from a safe distance, especially when he finds out what they are trying to do. With a bit of luck it may distract him from his usual business of stirring up a nuclear/trade/cold/... (depending on the flavour of the week) war.
If the VPN is not based in the USA, then it doesn't matter that an overreaching state fee exists.
Extend this nationwide and... there you have it: a solution to US budget problems ;)
we tax guns to pay for the health care of people injured by them!
Pretty sure Rhode Island still has that law that it's ok for a stripper to be as young as 16...as long as she's home before curfew.
Yep, there it is : http://abcnews.go.com/Business...
Ah, America.
-Styopa
I subscribe to the sort of puritanical, prudish beliefs that many here frown upon, but even I don't understand or support this misguided attempt at a bill.
If companies with vested interests in keeping sexually explicit content off their platforms can't do so (e.g. Nintendo's Miiverse app was aimed at children and was apparently rife with users sending drawings of exactly the sort you'd expect in the days immediately prior to its recent shutdown), how are ISPs supposed to make that happen across every single platform that's Internet-accessible?
Moreover, as it's written in the summary, these rules apply so broadly as to be meaningless, given that they'd require ISPs to...
...monitor all chat rooms and chat messages (after all, the bill is for "sexual content" not "sexual imagery", so sexting is just as against the rules as porn)
...intrude on the privacy of marriages (after all, the bill isn't just for web or publicly-accessible content, and we wouldn't want husbands to be having innuendo-laden video chats with their wives, let alone something steamier!)
...illegally circumvent DRM protections (after all, the bill doesn't carve out an exception for encrypted traffic, so ISPs will have to break any DRM used by streaming video providers to ensure that the content isn't sexual, lest a customer watch something racy on Netflix like the PG-rated Airplane—which just happens to have a naked woman randomly run across the screen in one scene—without paying their $20 fee to end the abuse of women like that one).
Just as bad, there's no mention of a grace period to block the content after it's been identified, so how are they supposed to identify sexual content across literally every single realtime stream of content available online at any given moment? Even live TV crews can't manage to perfectly do so for justone video stream at a time, and they have teams of full-time staff dedicated to the problem.
And that's before we even broach the discussion of where we draw the line for "sexual content". Rumor has it that the authors of the bill are working to hash out a new definition, with there being some internal disagreement about whether it's okay to draw the line at the knees, or if they instead should insist that skirts cover the ankle as well.
Anyway, the only guaranteed way an ISP can ensure they don't run afoul of this bill is for them to leave Rhode Island.
This bill is going nowhere. It's absurd. Those clowns that introduced it are two of the more worthless members of the GA, and that's quite a feat in itself.
C'mon, it's in the name.
If the VPN is not based in RI, it doesn't matter, actually. It can still be in any of the other 49 states.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I wonder when The Pirate Bay will begin enforcing Rhode Island's porn fee. That is definitely a thing that will happen if this passes.
will have to change HBO, MAX, and more
No because people don't magically change between 17.999 and 18. When you hide things from people for as long as possible and then suddenly toss them in the deep end, they end up with all kinds of crazy beliefs.
For me, porn gave me a sexual education. My parents were unwilling to do it. School was every STD will leave you disfigured for life and any contact will give you STDs. Sexual education sites were blocked because they used proper terms so the internet filters easily banned them. The only thing left was obscure porn or having underage sex. I wanted to see what female parts looked like rather than a four line drawing. And I now know more about sex and those body parts than most of the sexperts I hear about on blog articles and podcasts.
Had I not had online porn, the teen pregnancy rate in my town would have increased. If anything, online access to the sexual education sites need to be lessened. It's easier to access CBT, sexual water torture, bestiality, snuf fantasies, and the like than it is for a kid to find quality sexual education materials. When you go around the filters, like any normal kid will do especially when told there's secret info they're not allowed to know, that is the material you'll find first. Without the filters, you learn about sex before you care about it and thus you're already prepared by the time you do start caring and can then make intelligent choices.
None of the hardcore stuff follows local laws. By trying to restrict it you end up restricting only the materials you don't want to be restricting. It's better to drown it in the normal content most people are trying to find.
I browse the web with safe filters turned off. I've never been forced to look at hardcore porn. You can easily avoid it if you want to.
They're lamer than that: they only care about money.
How in the hell is this modded up to insightful? This is hardly insight of any kind. Inciteful? Sure.
Porn is as hard to access by kids as it need a to be. People need to stop asking the government and other authorities to do the fucking parents job. Little Jimmy can't see titties on the Internet if mom and dad actually give a fuck and do the things they need to to keep it from happening. Monitor computer access, use programs to restrict access, you know, actually be a parent. Fucking hell...
HBO has consistently raised the stakes for simulated sex on TV. Even Netflix and Amazon have gotten into the business of making shows with near-realistic sex scenes. There's a lot of big industry that has large pools of money to dump into lobbying the shit out of repealing stuff like this if it was ever pointed at them.
What the security services could afford in the past is now ready for cyber police in Rhode Island?
"Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security" (Fri 6 Sep 2013)
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
"... By 2015, GCHQ hoped to have cracked the codes used by 15 major internet companies, and 300 VPNs.... "
Rhode Island can ask the NSA for the keys to many of the big VPN brands?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Alcohol has costs and benefits.
Cars have costs and benefits.
Guns have costs and benefits.
Porn has costs and benefits.
Prostitution has costs and benefits.
Criminal mafias have costs and benefits.
As long as the benefits outweigh the costs, they should probably leave it alone. I'm sure the legislator has only focused on the costs of porn. Someone should enumerate the benefits.
$10/month? You're getting ripped off.
More like, "fuck this! How about funding the Council Against Human Trafficking".
Yep, typical USA story, starts taking about sex and is changed to discussion about guns. No surprise really, same with USA movies. If a movies is not made in the USA then when a pretty girl gets topless the next scene is usually her making love but if the film is made in the USA the odds are pretty high that she is murdered violently in the next scene.
...are in bed with the Taliban, and that's something no healthy human being wants to see.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Given existing case law, his is probably constitutional. Keep in mind they are not barring speech, merely taxing it.
OTOH, how would they enforce it? Certainly they could watch sites like https://bigbazzoms.com, but people could simply start some google group, or subreddit where they post URLS to places like rapidshare.
The framer could not have foreseen that a single person could mow people down, literally, with a semi automatic rifle with easy reloading, or even in some case double circular reloading add on. Reading what they wrote I view them as highly rational people having gone through a revolution, and thus from the parameter of THAT TIME, wrote what they could. Seeing how rational they were and well written the constitution was, i am betting they would be horrified. Furthermore the second amendment does not disallow restriction on training, or even type of weapon allowed. I would say the average person should only be allowed single shot weapon which have to be manually reloaded.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I think it's a lot of fuss about nothing. If pornography was one-tenth as dangerous as campaigners against it claim, civilization would have collapsed by now. Even if children happen across the really weird fetish stuff, it's not going to traumatise them on sight.
That Rhode Island residents are a bunch of wankers
So, sex is bad, but defending the murder of children is a constitutional right?
That is a sick, sick culture over there.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
A bargain! People selling you what you already own are an interesting phenomenon.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
True with the exception of a few very key subsets of the population. Most notably the Jewish Citizens of Germany. The NAZI's did relax gun controls as they sought to prepare their population for mass militarization. But they did not extend those relaxed rules to the Jews, the Roma and a few other undesirables.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
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Over-reaching, constitution-violating pricks. Time for Rhode Island to be removed from the US
Clearly unconstitutional as it violates the first amendment.
Hell, if you can prohibit access to porn, why not other things that are considered unsavory? Like racist websites? Or your favorite website that shows you how to make a bomb? Or any other number of sites that are more dangerous in some other way. Or is this what the repeal of net neutrality allows? Either way, pretty stupid.
It's Rhode Island. I imagine most of the state can pirate wifi from Connecticut or Massachusetts.
10 U.S. Code § 246 - Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
And there is NO WAY anybody will figure out how to use an anonymous proxy service to get around this fee!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Neither do the Courts
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
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Let's not forget that the cost to implement and run will eat most of that $20, so net proceeds would be limited.
Plus, you know, legal consensual pr0n != trafficking.
If the liberal argument holds that only militia members can own guns and the definition of militia by US code excludes females not in the National Guard, then that would exclude a lot of women.
Need to check the exception in section 313 of title 32 to see what happens when a male turns 45 to see if old guys can own guns. Progressives might want to rethink this whole 2nd amendment only applies to militias.
Ha! You got short changed.
Table-ized A.I.
Three cheers for petty, futile neo-puritanism! Hup hup h[CENSORED]h!
Everybody who paid the fee gets put on the Sex Offender's Registry and can't get a Goddamned Job or live within a mile of a school.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've got $20 that says this bill never makes it out of committee. And if I lose that, I'd be willing to double down that the authors and supporters of this bill suddenly discover that, unbeknownst to them, they've apparently requested access to pr0nhub.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
A VPN that is connecting through some other state, or some other country would easily defeat this.
...snipsnip... Failing that, the state could simply charge the $20/quarter charge for anyone who uses a VPN service ...
There goes the work-from-home business model. I know a few govt agencies and defense contractors who might have words for "the state".
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.