Technology

The issue here, I'm sorry to say, is that your parents dropped the ball. They were the ones responsible for your health and the safety of your environment.

There is no "middle ground". The solution is to talk about sex. Early and when it's prompted aka when children start asking questions.

Stop treating sex as if it's something holy, special, taboo, and assigning a bunch of value to it. Trying to shield children from it is precisely the wrong thing to do. It's exactly the same with this fairy tale bullshit about relationships, marriage, and kids. Media makes it seem like the epitome of existence, that there's nothing greater than finding that one special person, and that there's only one special person forever and ever, and that it has to be of the opposite sex in order to procreate.

The more you hype something up, and that includes trying to hide it, the more it tantalizes people.

Again, answer questions honestly and truthfully that pertain to sex, attraction, relationships, and so on. Teach how to tell the real from the fake. Normalize knowledge and understanding of intimacy. It'll make for much healthier children and even healthier adults.

Education is the silver bullet.

Anti Commercial-AI license

You’ll never be able to properly block it

You can just go to Reddit instead. Same thing.

There isn't even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone's age.

It depends what you mean by this. If you mean in terms of a way to trust that the third party is doing its job correctly, that's as simple as using the government itself to do the verification after seeing some proof of age.

If you mean in terms of privacy, you can't protect the privacy of the fact that someone got verified, but you can protect the privacy of their browsing after the fact. It's a neat cryptographic trick called blind signatures. The end result is a token that the user holds which they can hand over to websites that tells the website "a trusted third party has verified I'm over 18" but would not have to reveal any more information about them than that. But even if the government was that trusted third party, and they asked the websites to hand over all their logs, the government would still not be able to trace your views back to you, because the token you hold is one they never saw.

This is, in my opinion, still a bad idea. I am in no way advocating for this policy. There's still the mere fact that you have to go up to someone and basically register yourself as a porn viewer, which is fucked up. Maybe if these tokens were used in other ways, like instead of showing your licence at bars, it could be less bad (though there are other practical reasons I don't think that would work) because the tokens could be less directly associated with porn. But it's still an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Not to mention the cost that adding all this would put on the government—or, if they charge for these tokens, the people using it—for what actual gain, exactly?

I'm merely pointing out that from a purely technical perspective, this is quite different from when governments request back doors into chat encryption. This actually can be done. It just shouldn't, for non-technical reasons.

the only way to protect kinds (like little me) is to block the porn.

This is false.

Parents have a number of options available to them that do no need to involve the state.

How about less "control everyone else" and more "control your own damn kids".

My daughter didn't get unsupervised access until she proved responsible enough to trust. I want to say around 13.

Just because "I grew up with it unsupervised and it ruined me" doesn't immediately equal "everyone will have this experience". Sorry your parents didn't understand what you were doing. Sorry you saw stuff that bothered you. Don't punish everyone else for it.

I'm far from a helicopter parent... Instead, my kid has come to me for help in resolving uncomfortable or problematic interactions. We've always been clear and honest about why we've asked her to avoid certain things. Even when it made us uncomfortable. Especially then.

She's 20 now. Most cheerful kid I've ever met. No idea how that happened directly, but I know I can trust her.

Parental controls exists, and it’s on the parent to use them. Easier now than ever before.