Last September, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law SB-1271, which redefines and adds to several electric bicycle regulations in the state. Chief among them is a clarification of the three-class e-bike system, which is likely to now rule that many of the throttle-enabled electric bikes currently available and on the road in California will no longer be street legal.
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Almost two years ago, Louisiana passed a law that started a wave that’s since spread across the entire U.S. south, and has changed the way people there can access adult content. As of today, Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina join the list of 17 states that can’t access some of the most popular porn sites on the internet, because of regressive laws that claim to protect children but restrict adults’ use of the internet, instead.
That law, passed as Act 440, was introduced by “sex addiction” counselor and state representative Laurie Schegel and quickly copied across the country. The exact phrasing varies, but in most states, the details of the law are the same: Any “commercial entity” that publishes “material harmful to minors” online can be held liable—meaning, tens of thousands of dollars in fines and/or private lawsuits—if it doesn’t “perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material.”
To remain compliant with the law while protecting users’ privacy, Aylo—the company that owns Pornhub and a network of sites including Brazzers, RedTube, YouPorn, Reality Kings, and several others—is making the choice, state by state, to block users altogether.
Pornhub is currently blocked in:
Georgia’s age verification bill has passed and is set to go into effect in July.
On a map, it looks like this:
Georgia’s age verification bill will go into effect in July.
In Louisiana, sites in the Aylo network direct visitors to use the state’s LA Wallet, a digital driver’s license for Louisianans, before they can enter the site. That system has been in place since January 1, 2023. But the law is not working as the lawmakers would have us believe they intended it. Instead of protecting children from “harmful material,” it’s sending visitors elsewhere across the internet. An Aylo spokesperson told me that the number of visitors in Louisiana “instantly decreased by 80 percent” when the platform introduced age verification in the state. Instead, visitors go to sites with worse moderation practices and no requirements on identity verification for uploaders—just a few of the security and safety practices Pornhub started putting into place in late 2020 amid allegations of abusive imagery on the site and a campaign by religious conservative groups to have the whole platform shut down.
Even if someone wanted to visit Pornhub from Florida today, they could easily get around any age verification barriers with a VPN, which we consistently see searches for spike when these laws go into effect.
Emanuel Maiberg
Aylo sent 404 Media a statement about the age verification laws’ progress across the country:
"First, to be clear, Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults.
Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide, including Florida, have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws."
In place of the homepage, in several blocked states, Aylo-network sites show a message read by adult performer and activist Cherie Deville: "The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the best and most effective solution for protecting children and adults alike is to identify users by their device and allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that identification," DeVille says. "Until a real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in your state."
2025 will be a year of intensifying legal battles against the creep of age verification laws. As such, there is some hope: Not every state where bills were introduced rolled over and allowed their constituents to face more censorship with less safety. In Arizona, governor Katie Hobbs vetoed the copycat bill there. “Children's online safety is a pressing issue for parents and the state,” Hobbs wrote in a letter announcing her decision. “While we look for a solution, it should be bipartisan and work within the bounds of the First Amendment, which this bill does not.”
The Free Speech Coalition filed a challenge to the law in Florida earlier this month, along with several co-plaintiffs, including the sex education platform O.school, sexual wellness retailer Adam & Eve, adult fan platform JustFor.Fans, and Florida attorney Barry Chase. “These laws create a substantial burden on adults who want to access legal sites without fear of surveillance,” Alison Boden, Executive Director of the Free Speech Coalition, said in a press release published in December. “Despite the claims of the proponents, HB3 is not the same as showing an ID at a liquor store. It is invasive and carries significant risk to privacy. This law and others like it have effectively become state censorship, creating a massive chilling effect for those who speak about, or engage with, issues of sex or sexuality.”
And in Texas, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton continues and will be heard this month.
Age verification bills like the ones flooding the south and beyond are regressive at best, and actively harmful at worst. They’re not just ineffective, they’re worse: they push people to sites where piracy is rampant and moderation—meaning, protection from actual harmful material—is almost nonexistent. We’ll be following these laws and their challengers into 2025 as we have been for years; if you have anything to share from inside of lawmakers’ offices about how they’re approaching these laws, please get in touch via Signal: sam.404.
This corridor of conflict stretches across approximately 4,000 miles and encompasses about 10% of the total land mass of sub-Saharan Africa, an area that has doubled in just three years and today is about 10 times the size of the U.K., according to an analysis by political risk consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft…
Africa is now experiencing more conflicts than at any point since at least 1946, according to data collected by Uppsala University in Sweden and analyzed by Norway’s Peace Research Institute Oslo. This year alone, experts at the two institutes have identified 28 state-based conflicts across 16 of the continent’s 54 countries, more than in any other region in the world and double the count just a decade and a half ago. That tally doesn’t include conflicts that don’t involve government forces, for instance between different communities, and whose number has also doubled since 2010…
The continent is now home to nearly half of the world’s internally displaced people, some 32.5 million at the end of 2023. That figure has tripled in just 15 years.
Here is more from Gabriele Steinhauser, Andrew Barnett, and Emma Brown at the WSJ. In my view, people are not taking these developments seriously enough.
The post Africa facts of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
It will be a happy new year for Joseph Shepard, the outgoing president of Western New Mexico University (WNMU), who is scheduled to receive a $1.9 million lump-sum payment on January 15 as part of a severance package after resigning amid allegations of "wasteful" and "improper" spending. Under the agreement, which the public university's five-member Board of Regents unanimously approved on December 20, Shepard, who had been receiving about $415,000 annually in salary and bonuses as WNMU's president, will step down into a tenured position paying him $200,000 a year to teach a couple of business classes each semester. The salary is guaranteed for at least five years, adding another $1 million to the cost for taxpayers.
That sweetheart deal for Shepard came a month after a scathing report from New Mexico State Auditor Joseph M. Maestas highlighted $214,000 in travel spending that violated WNMU's own policies, along with another $150,000 or so in improper charges on university credit cards. One example of the former: The university spent $25,500 in taxpayer money for six staff members to undergo training at a Ritz-Carlton resort in Palm Springs, California. Searchlight New Mexico, which has been digging into WNMU's spending practices for more than a year, notes that the same course was available online.
The state auditor's report, which covers July 1, 2018, through June 30, 2023, describes "$214,261.91 worth of spending covering 402 instances of domestic and international travel and lodging for university staff and leadership" that were "found to be noncompliant with university policies and rules." It also cites "$149,264.08 worth of spending" on university credit cards by Shepard "covering 91 instances of procurement," including noncompliant purchases of "high-end custom furnishings" for Shepard's house on the WNMU campus in Silver City.
Maestas notes trips by Shepard that were covered by the university even though they "appear[ed] to be unrelated to official university business." They included "trips related to other noneducational organizations [with] which the President is affiliated, such as the Finca Vigia Foundation, dedicated to saving author Ernest Hemingway's Cuban legacy, and for conferences and events where his spouse [former CIA officer Valerie Plame] was a guest speaker such as the Simmons Leadership Conference."
The investigation "found that the travel requests and travel reimbursements provided by WNMU for the University President and members of the Board of Regents during the period" were "consistently noncompliant with university policies." The report cites many cost-control deficiencies, including international travel "lacking any documentation articulating the business need, purpose, justification, or authority for the travel." The audit also found meal expenditures and upgrades in seating, amenities, and lodging that likewise were "lacking any documentation articulating the business need or purpose justification or authority."
While traveling, Maestas notes, Shepard improperly used his university credit card to buy "alcohol, food or room service." Although the university "was subsequently reimbursed for the disallowed purchases with private funds by the university's Foundation," the report says, WNMU "appears to have affirmatively disregarded its policy and allowed the initial use of public university funds rather than private foundation funds" for those purchases.
The report notes Shepard's "use of a university credit card to purchase high-end custom furniture" at a total cost of about $25,000. Although Plame was not a WNMU employee, she was issued a university credit card, which she used to buy an "oriental sofa" from Etsy for $1,488.27 and to pay $4,073 for a purchase from the fireplace company Woodland Direct. Maestas notes that "the University's purchasing card holder agreement applies to university employees, requires approval of their supervisor, and any violation of the agreement references sanctions which can only be enforced on university employees."
In a November 18 letter to Board of Regents President Mary E. Hotvedt, Maestas said WNMU had "engaged in the waste of public funds" through "excessive or extravagant domestic and international travel," "improper use of procurement and university credit cards," and "expense accounts and purchasing cards" for "a non-University employee." He described "an appearance of management overreach and a lack of a strong 'tone at the top'" at WNMU.
"Without the proper example being set by the University's management and Board, which is fundamental to an effective internal control system, any disincentives for university employees to engage in inappropriate or extravagant travel spending are limited or removed," Maestas wrote. "Further, University management and Board failed to uphold their fiduciary responsibilities by neglecting to adhere to the corresponding elements as established in the University's policies, procedures, and rules regarding travel, per diem, and procurement."
Maestas noted that WNMU, in response to reports of improper spending, had "taken proactive steps to strengthen the University's internal control structure" and "engage in an external forensic special audit to further review these and related issues." But he warned that "complacency or indifference to oversight…exposes the University's governing body and leadership to the threat of further waste" and "opens the door for potential fraudulent acts to occur, each of which negatively impacts the university and its finances."
Responding to the report, Hotvedt thanked Maestas for his "time and insights," which she conceded raised "serious concerns." But she said those concerns "have been addressed" by a "comprehensive review of cost disparities," policy updates that "align with applicable state guidelines and regulations," "revised travel and procurement procedures," "staff training to ensure compliance," and "an independent cost-benefit analysis of international initiatives."
Shepard, for his part, has defended his lavish spending as necessary to support fundraising and recruitment of foreign students. During the period covered by the state audit, Searchlight New Mexico notes, "international students made up less than 2 percent of the university's entire student body," although that share "has grown by a small amount" since then.
On the day that the Board of Regents approved his severance package, Shepard complained that he had not received "due process" from the state auditor's office. "I leave my post not in defeat, but with a deep understanding that it is the right thing to do, to advance that which I dearly love," he said.
Stephanie Rodriguez, New Mexico's secretary of higher education, called Shepard's resignation "long overdue," adding: "I have been and remain deeply troubled about the reports of gross negligence and mismanagement of taxpayer funds at Western New Mexico University. The health and stability of WNMU moving forward will require further examination and accountability."
Given that the regents were implicated in wasteful spending along with Shepard, it is not surprising that they were keen to quash the scandal, even at the cost of another $3 million in squandered taxpayer money. The Santa Fe New Mexican notes that the regents sealed the deal "without ever mentioning the amount of public money Shepard will receive." But news of the severance package provoked outrage among members of WNMU's faculty.
Keen to act before Shepard gets his payout, the WNMU Faculty Senate scheduled a meeting for this Thursday to consider a vote of no confidence in the Board of Regents and a demand for the resignation of all its members. "We call upon our state elected officials to work to remove any who will not resign, in accordance with the Constitution of the State of New Mexico," a draft of the statement says, "and to use any legal authority at their disposal to halt the recent severance agreement" with Shepard.
Phillip W. Schoenberg, president of the Faculty Senate, noted a "unanimous request" for the meeting from "the voting faculty [at] the School of Business," who "feel particularly outraged by the severance agreement." They complained that the regents had offered Shepard the consolation position in their school without consulting anyone there.
"The decision to approve such a substantial payout to a president who has been the subject of past accusations of financial misconduct" is "troubling," said Jorge Romero-Habeych, an assistant professor at the business school. "Furthermore, the package appears to be a clear conflict with the everyday struggles faced by average New Mexicans, many of whom are living paycheck to paycheck and rely on the institution to serve the public good. The optics alone are damaging, and the ethical implications cannot be ignored."
The post A University President Accused of Squandering Public Money Resigns in Exchange for a $2 Million Payout appeared first on Reason.com.
LG has responded to Samsung in the battle to slap displays on every home appliance you own, culminating in the LG Signature microwave which puts a superfluous 27-inch LCD touchscreen and speakers into an appliance you probably don’t even need.
LG says the microwave’s display provides “an immersive entertainment experience” that’ll surely prevent the onset of buyer’s remorse at having overpaid for a potential advertising machine centrally located in your kitchen. And when paired with LG’s oven, it “conveniently shows the cooking progress of dishes in the range, eliminating the need to bend down and check the oven manually.”
In 2023, LG announced plans to transform its hardware-based business into a platform-based service model that continuously generates profits. In September, the company started displaying full-screen ads on its idle televisions.
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Image: LG
The company’s second-generation Signature lineup of Wi-Fi appliances continues the tradition of putting a giant transparent OLED “Instaview” touchscreen on its fridge, alongside smaller LCDs on its washer and dryer. LG’s Signature displays can be used to operate the local appliance, access entertainment, and control devices in the LG smart home.
The announcement follows Samsung recently announcing a wider variety of display choices on its home appliances, ranging from 4.3 inches all the way up to 32 inches. It’s all part of the company’s strategy to put “screens everywhere,” instead of easy-to-use buttons and dials that rarely fail and are cheap to replace.
LG hasn’t announced any prices, countries of availability, or shipping dates for its new Signature lineup of appliances. But we’ll surely learn more when everything is demonstrated at the giant CES show which kicks off on January 7th in Las Vegas.
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