This would be a reason for processing such transactions to be more expensive.

Those are valid facts, but this is missing an underlying point: HN’s community is not concerned about this form of discrimination, so each time it crosses the front page, we see lots of threads about deregulation but few about the spectre of ethics raised by these acts. Ethics aren’t typically in-scope for HN unless the party harmed is either a for-profit corporation or a tech worker; since HN doesn’t as a community tend to openly self-identify with the fields of sex work, the ethical issues here are effectively out of scope here. One can imagine a different HN that gave the ethical threats to Others as much airtime as it gives to ethical threats to Self. I remain hopeful.

If U.S. credit-card issuers were worried about fraud, they would have implemented the other half of "chip-&-PIN," which the rest of the world has been using for decades.

U.S. customers pretty much JUST got chips in our cards... but issuers "forgot" to implement the PIN part.

Zero sympathy for this scumbag monopoly.

> This is not free speech. Adult content is not a protected class.

Why does adult content not count as speech?

Collective Shout is a Christian anti-rights organization wrapped in feminist cloth.

The founder of Collective Shout previously successfully lobbied against mifepristone and opposed changes to legislation requiring pro-life pregnancy-counseling services to disclose their affiliations in their advertising.

In 2004, she founded the anti-abortion lobby Women's Forum Australia.

> There is no "religious oligarchy" dictating anything.

You might inform Peter Thiel.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-...

Adult industry is digital content that can be "purchased" and then scraped before the chargeback goes through. Now the user has all the content that the site/model/whoever offers and didn't pay anything for it; they can then share it around, resell it, whatever.

It helps that a lot of people have no respect for the people producing the content; they'll happily consume it, but they refuse to acknowledge any work that goes into it or that people should be compensated for what they've created.

Wife goes "was this you?" "no, I must have been hacked".

The stats I've seen actually did put the charge back rate is high compared to other industries.

What does seem like a scam though is, especially in the digital space, a refund is basically free. The merchant could agree in the case of any charge back the credit card company can just take it back, they won't argue, just take it. They'd even agree to pay the transaction fee.

But you can't, so you get the 20% fee, and you still get the money clawed back from you.

There’s going to be a lot of the spouse saving face chargebacks, people using stolen card numbers to download porn to avoid exposing their use to anyone else, active use of porn sites as a means of laundering funds from stolen card numbers—if you’re in an organization that does prostitution and card theft, you can use a third-party porn site to turn stolen card numbers into cash, etc.

People always retroactively justify anything they see as convenient and uncontroversial, stick to “everyone's opinion” (which does not exist, and is the product of their own projections).

One needs education to explain that, for example, hentai manga has little to do with realism, that character drawing styles have a long history that is only partially intertwined with lolicon wave started in the early 1980s (and that they even cross-pollinated with female-oriented manga along the way), or that the strict indecency ban (again, thanks to US) had created it in the first place (so little girls were actually used to portray proverbial 900 year old vampiresses because you could not draw those vampiresses that way).

Then we can see that any kind of image, even highly realistic, even photographs, is a deliberate set of choices made by the author, not a 1:1 copy of of “reality”. Then we can switch to the viewer side, and study how the contents of people's head define what they see, and how they react.

Here's a party trick. Japanese entertainment industry still produces a significant amount of media with young women in bikini. Weekly Young Magazine (one of the biggest manga periodicals) keeps placing idols on the front cover to this day. Ask someone about it, and listen to the expected comments about “questionable”, “seedy”, and “exploitative” nature of those (which are obviously true to a large extent). Then compare that to Western media products, global pop stars and such, and enjoy the excuses about it being completely different, “suitable for the whole family”, and “playing by the rules”.

I'm partially with you on that one ("computer generated") but the laws converge to the position that if the computer-generated pixels are arranged in such a way that it's a young human, it's CSAM.

Also we're not arguing the language here or its adherence to the specific reality, but the blunt tool the laws are.

Putting other countries laws aside, I believe that digitally manipulating the image of the real child in that way results in the production of the actual CSAM and as such is a federal crime.

And back to my previous comment - actual children are involved, so the abuse actually happens. If you doubt it, feel free to read up about women who experienced their own AI-manipulated pictures to make them appear naked - I don't think you deny the actual harm here.

In terms of generation (harming pixels), I think the idea of the lawmakers is to criminalise similar ones as well ("indistinguishable from a real child") to offer some protections to real children.