The explicit tube site Pornhub is now blocked in 23 U.S. states.

This is due to age-verification laws. These laws vary state by state, but typically require visitors of a site with over a third of explicit content to submit a government ID or other form of age authentication. Louisiana was the first state to enact such a bill a couple of years ago, and now others have followed suit. In June, the Supreme Court deemed Texas’s age-verification law constitutional, setting a precedent for such bills that come before and after.

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According to one preliminary study, age verification won’t work to keep minors off porn sites. This is because of software like VPNs that allow someone to appear to be in a different location, and because of non-compliant websites. (The Florida attorney general is suing foreign-based porn sites for not instituting age verification.) Yet, these laws keep getting passed — and are encroaching on non-explicit websites as well, experts told Mashable.

While Pornhub is not blocked in Louisiana, it is blocked in these states, a Pornhub representative confirmed to Mashable:

• Alabama

• Arizona

• Arkansas

• Florida

• Georgia

• Idaho

• Indiana

• Kansas

• Kentucky

• Mississippi

• Missouri

• Montana

• Nebraska

• North Carolina

• North Dakota

• Oklahoma

• South Carolina

• South Dakota

• Tennessee

• Texas

• Utah

• Virginia

• Wyoming

Pornhub isn’t blocked in Ohio despite the state’s age-verification law, due to a clause stating that establishing age verification methods doesn’t apply to a provider of an interactive computer service (Aylo considers itself one).

In Louisiana, where users must submit ID to view Pornhub, the site has seen traffic decline by around 80 percent, Aylo (Pornhub’s parent company) told Mashable.

“These people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content. In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and children,” Aylo stated when asked for comment by Mashable back in January.

In a statement to Mashable, Aylo continued:

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 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.

Industry experts say that, in addition to not working for their intended purpose, age verification laws also raise concerns about privacy protection and safety since websites now have to host (even more of) people’s personal information. It will be harder to be anonymous online, which experts warn is dangerous to free speech. Adult industry experts Mashable spoke to in an explainer on age-verification laws advocated for device-level filters, as did Aylo in its statement.

Some in the adult industry worry about what Trump’s second presidential term will bring due to the conservative policy outline Project 2025 and its measures to ban porn. One of Project 2025’s authors, Russell Vought, was caught on a secret recording stating that age-verification laws are the “back door” to a broader porn ban.

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 22 seconds ago

Science fiction is filled with incredible spaceship captains. Star Trek alone gave the world Picard, Kirk, and Janeway, Firefly has Malcolm Reynolds, Farscape’s John Crichton, and Battlestar Galactica’s Adama, all of them are fantastic characters. All are noble and inspiring figures who make their crews better.

On the other end of the spectrum is Stanley H. Tweedle, captain of the Lexx, the most powerful weapon ever created. He’s a coward, a traitor, self-centered, shallow, and the last man in existence who should have the keys to the most powerful weapon in both galaxies. 

Lexx’s Stanley H. Tweedle Is Sci-Fi’s Worst Captain

Stanley H. Tweedle, played by Brian Downey, kicks off the events of Lexx by skipping work to the point he’s deemed a fugitive from justice by the servitors inside His Divine Shadow’s headquarters and runs into another fugitive, Zev (Eva Habermann). Taking shelter on board the organic spacecraft Lexx, the command codes embedded in Stanley’s tooth are activated, and the ship recognizes him as the Captain. It’s not the most glorious origin story for the man who would eventually, sort of, save the galaxy. It gets worse. 

Technically, Stanley’s responsible for the deaths of 685 billion people. He didn’t give the order to fire, and he was being tortured, but he did give the codes to the Lexx over to a band of mercenaries, and then they sold it to His Divine Shadow, and 100 worlds ceased to exist. No other captain in sci-fi can say thay also have the title “Arch-Traitor.” 

During Season 2, “Stan’s Trial,” we learn that the root of Stanley’s cowardice is his fear of death. The threat of death causes Stanley to break under the smallest bit of pressure from any of the villains, which all comes to a head in Season 3 when he actually dies and has to face the judgment of Prince from the Fire Planet, Lexx’s version of the Devil. You’d think that anyone who’s that cowardly wouldn’t be respected by his crew, and you’d be right. 

No One Respects Stanley

Early on in Season 3, Stanley’s desire for women comes to a head when Prince offers to revive Maya, a gorgeous woman from the Water Planet, if he’ll use the Lexx to destroy the Water Planet. Stanley doesn’t only think about it, he spends most of the second episode actively devising ways to betray everyone. Not even Kirk, sci-fi’s most famous womanizer, would contemplate an offer like that for a single second. 

Stanley H. Tweedle is both sci-fi’s worst captain and one of the most interesting characters, because he is so detestable and openly not a good guy. At all. He helped save the galaxy from thousands of years of control under His Divine Shadow, but he’s still a coward and a lech. Worst of all, we never learn what the H stands for. 

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 28 seconds ago

Starfleet Academy was canceled shortly after the end of its first season. Nonetheless, a second season had already been greenlit and filmed, so fans can look forward to more misadventures with their favorite band of space cadets. Even as those fans look forward to what Season 2 brings, though, at least one of the show’s biggest actors regrets that there won’t be a third season to tell his character’s most ambitious story yet.

Robert Picardo reprised his role as the Doctor for Starfleet Academy, and the first season provided a surprise follow-up to “Real Life,” one of his best Voyager episodes. In a recent interview, the actor revealed that he had pitched a Season 3 SFA follow-up to “Living Witness,” where he would encounter a backup version of himself that was left behind on an alien planet. Picardo saw the episode as a chance to grow the Doctor like never before. Unfortunately, his description of the plot makes it clear that the episode he pitched would have ruined his character altogether.

Is There A Doctor In The House?

“Living Witness” was a Star Trek: Voyager episode where a backup version of the ship’s holographic Doctor is activated on an alien planet seven hundred years after Voyager left. He is activated by a museum curator hoping to get to the bottom of a centuries-old conflict between two alien races. Eventually, the Doctor is able to make peace between the two groups and stays behind as their surgical chancellor before getting into a shuttle and very belatedly plotting a course back to Earth.

To many fans’ surprise, the first season of Starfleet Academy never followed up on “Living Witness.” However, Robert Picardo recently appeared on the D-Con Chamber Podcast (hosted by Enterprise alumni Dominic Keating and Connor Trineer) and revealed that he pitched a Season 3 story that would follow up on this iconic Voyager episode. “I wanted to do an episode—now we can talk freely about it, because the show’s canceled…I wanted to meet my Voyager backup, my old self, and be as I looked at 41 and play off my self.”

Doctor, Heal Thyself

At first, this would have the “Living Witness” Doctor chastising the Starfleet Academy version for programming aging into his subroutine. Eventually, they bond over the relationship they share with Lewis Zimmerman, the man who invented the Emergency Medical Hologram. “The Doctor and his backup program are two children of the same parent. One has resolved the issues, the other hasn’t, and after 800 years, those daddy issues, those parental conflicts, they don’t go away if you don’t deal with them,” Picardo said.

On paper, I love the idea of following up on “Living Witness,” and I previously wrote about how interesting it would be if the backup version was actually the Doctor in Starfleet Academy. Furthermore, Robert Picardo’s storytelling instincts are good in the sense that it would be fun to see multiple versions of this cranky hologram bouncing off each other. Unfortunately, the Starfleet Academy episode that he pitched was emblematic of the show’s biggest problem: that the adults on the show are no more mature than the young cadets.

Nearly Ruining A Beloved Character

Critics of Starfleet Academy have frequently dunked on the cadet characters for various reasons, including their vulgar language, constant insults, and frequent infighting. Fans of the show have traditionally responded to this criticism by pointing out that, as young characters growing up in a post-Burn galaxy, the cadets should be immature. 

However, one of the show’s biggest problems is that the adult characters were equally immature. The Doctor and Captain Ake have a combined 1200 years between them, but they spend their screentime making poop jokes and laughing at a farting fish. Plus, their dialogue is equally vulgar, with the Doctor infamously declaring that “debate is not for the chickensh*t” and Captain Ake telling her enemy to “blow it out your *ss!”

What does this have to do with the Season 3 SFA episode that Robert Picardo pitched? Simple: the last thing the show needs is another older character acting just as immature as the younger characters. For example, having daddy issues is part of Genesis’s character, which makes sense because she is supposed to be so young. But both versions of the Doctor are now over 800 years old, making them some of the wisest and most ancient living beings in the galaxy. Why in the name of Neelix’s stinky cheese would either of them have the same kind of daddy issues as a teenager in her freshman year of space college?

Meet The Trauma Teacher

It was already weird enough in Season 1 that Starfleet Academy turned the Doctor into a tragic figure haunted by the death of his holographic son from “Real Life;”; before this, he never even mentioned the kid after the episode. Now, Picardo’s pitch would further tweak his character to explain that, after the better part of a millennium, the backup Doctor is suffering from daddy issues that, like him mourning his son, were never really mentioned before in Voyager. I can’t help but think this would ultimately ruin his character, turning the whimsical comic relief character from a beloved Star Trek show into just another NuTrek character defined primarily by trauma.

Because of this, I’m glad that Starfleet Academy got canceled. I actually warmed up to Season 1 over time, but it had an insanely rocky first half that made it really hard to love these characters. If Season 3 was going to ruin the Doctor (one of my favorite characters from the Golden Age of the franchise) with Picardo’s pitch, it’s best that the show died. Fans will have to make peace with the fact that the best days of the Doctor are just like the best days of Star Trek: stuck a few decades in the past.