It wasn't until after I got home I realized it was because of adult content.
Yes it is, well, the shady ones that make you part of a botnet are. Those are the ones people are going to predominantly use.
My experiences in the country using VPN stuff was pretty interesting though... it _really_ felt like depending on where you were physically in the country that you were going through completely different censorship pipes. And things like Apple push notifications would just get through no problem so you could at least receive stuff via push from banned apps.
I wonder what kind of detailed explanations of the mechanics there are, because I don't have a mental model of it that works beyond "censors just tell each regional office of national operaors to do stuff and they all do it slightly differently"
https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/columnists/onli...
Seriously? You can't make this up: she represents the town that did nothing about a massive (and completely offline) child grooming and molestation network for years and she has the gall to say, "think of the children on the Internet"?
Remember, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas already have similar laws in place in the US, so even a nation with better speech and gun laws is still not immune from the slow descent into technocracy.
I’m not sure what gun laws have to do with anything but guns are not unreasonably difficult to legally purchase in the UK or EU if you have a specific need for one. It’s a tool and treated as such
Interesting that decades of government leaves half the country to rot, and their solution is to try to stop that half from rioting about it, rather than - perhaps - making society fairer?
The words that come to mind are malicious and incompetent. The only 'achievement' is to increase contempt towards the government. And the times aren't exactly stable to begin with.
> complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government
I disagree with this sentiment, however it does show how bad "democracy" can be when voting for a complete government change results in absolutely no change whatsoever.
What I see instead is the other side of Hanlon’s razor —incompetence— coupled with a political class riven with pockets of self-interest, and very few seemingly with an intellectual hypothesis to explain the UK’s current predicament, or to chart a path out of it.
None of this is porn of course, but supposedly a lot of the lone wolf's are radicalised online so it creates a lot of "someone needs to do something!!!!" type attitudes (and no public gun ownership would not work like everyone says it would because the USA had that yet no one lifted a finger when they needed to recently, and now look what's happened), and sadly the older and more little-c conservative population carriers more clout in terms of policies because historically they tend to vote in greater numbers than younger groups. N.b. that 16 and 17 year olds have very recently been given the right to vote so things may change.
That was 20 years ago. Not really recently.
On the NHS, I tried for years to push for improvements to switch to digital cancer screening invitations after they missed my mother (offering to build the software for free), which is now happening, but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here. My sister who works in NHS DEI hasn't spoken to me since publishing a book on it.
Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it. Anecdotally, many of my friends have already left, some of the older generation want to leave but feel tied in. My flight out is in 6 weeks. Good riddance, no doubt.
This is the issue.
The UK was also one of the first nations to ban indoor smoking and in cars with kids. I think this is very much in that vein (politically).
Most of the time these dystopian descriptions of the UK turn out to be completely overblown nonsense when you look into them properly.
Tons of people are arrested and charged every day for thought crimes in Britain.
https://freespeechunion.org/protest-footage-blocked-as-onlin...
I’m not involved with X or with its chatbot. Is its chatbot ordinarily an authoritative source for facts about assumptions like this one, that the law “was used to take down” politically sensitive video?
It’s a bad look either way, but I feel like there are important differences between the law leading to overly conservative automated filtering, vs political actors using it deliberately in specific cases. Bad symptom either way, but different medicines, right?
You've misquoted the chatbot, which is a new one.
The video wasn't "taken down" and Grok never said that. It was blocked for some users in the UK due to the new authoritarian age verification laws which everyone should be concerned about if access to newsworthy content requires "papers please".
If not for kids, then why they introduce data-gathering solutions? I wonder why...
Funnily enough. They just need to claim it's "protecting the children" and people fall for it.
The funniest part is that high profile criminal cases go unpunished very visibly. Even if they have minors in their context, because the elite figures in question must be protected from the enforcement of rules.
This morning it was all about "think of the children" in the context of banning AI tools that could potentially be used to make AI generated CSAM. Even adult nudity is in the firing line. Ban the lot was the advice from the expert. Not just banning access, but making it a crime to even possess the tools.
What next? Ban paint brushes because someone might use them to paint offensive images?
It's just that Australia and UK tend to lead the way when it comes to authoritarianism and then it becomes "this has always been like this, you conspiracy theorist".
One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.
The more troubling thing about these laws is enforcement. The threat of fines only works against websites that map to a business entity. For anything else there will surely see a ramp up in the size of The Great British Firewall Ruleset, edited by the courts, and distributed to the Big N (5?) ISPs.
What will become of the smaller ISPs that refuse to block illegal sites?
I don't think many people object to blacklisting known sources of child pornography etc.
The fact is you now have to verify your identity (name and photo id) in the UK to access an adult subreddit.
mmarian•5h ago