That will ask for a government ID scan or selfie face capture. It solves the company-side problem only.
A maybe as clear as possible example of this is the Patriot Act, even though it’s now 24 years old. It was so easy to manipulate people being emotional and thinking they were doing good and stopping bad, when in reality they were doing the opposite.
I won’t even bother listing several other examples because people are still very deeply invested in those manipulations, because no one wants to believe a) they were so easily fooled and b) what they were raised to believe was just manipulative lies and actually bad, while being told it was good and supporting it made them good. It’s far easier thinking of oneself as good…which is the easily manipulated part.
It’s all very standard psychological manipulation stuff, it just takes on whole other self-fulfilling characteristics when it ascends to a complete majority scale, because things can’t be bad if everyone believes… was trained on it all their lives… right?
How would that work? do you want to provide government id to watch porn?
And how is this helping since it's not going to work overall (other sites, torrents, etc)
Can't wait for the headlines when the entire watch history of some famous person is released after someone recognises them in their "age verification scan".
It's about the only good thing which could come out of digital ID. Being able to proved proof of age in a double blind way.
Come up with a better solution, provide a proof of concept and yes regulatory agencies / governments will take notice. People like us work in these agencies. Let's propose better ways of achieving the same goal of reducing porn exposure to minors - not keep bashing the initiative taken.
fair enough, but legislate this? why cant you just stop your own kid going on the internet? Id argue youre overblowing it but you cant ever remove the emotional/hysterical aspect when dealing with a parent
May I ask if you are a parent? Because every parent knows that kids will try to cross any boundary set (which is how they learn, not a problem). If there is additional friction at each step before they access something which is harmful for them, chances are they would have matured well enough to prepare them before they are exposed to harmful content.
In his teen years, we started hearing some stuff you'd typically associate with the toxic manosphere. A number of discussions later it turned out he was picking this off the internet.
Parents who talk about the difficulty of dealing with all this are labelled as hysterical, emotional, helicopter parents...the list goes on. My only response to that is what I tell most people - don't judge parents too harshly until you've had the opportunity to be one.
Parents are responsible for their children.
Most parents do a reasonably good job of regulating the physical environment their child exists in. At the same time, a lot of parents are out of their depth keeping up with all the threats that exist on the Internet.
Like with security of systems, there has to be defense in depth against these threats to children. Regulation is one of them. Parental efforts are another.
This isn't a situation where a parent is so overloaded that they need a village to help raise a child. This is just parents who have decided not to do anything.
But if we're going to go the village route, how about we send someone from say, a child welfare organization to visit every house with a child to walk parents/guardians through setting up the software on their devices - maybe with regular follow-ups to ensure the child's well-being in neglectful households that did not already have such software set up.
1. It doesn't stop kids from accessing porn because kids know about or can learn about free VPNs.
2. I think it exposes lots of adults to identity theft on non-porn websites by normalising compulsory ID checks. e.g. on Spotify, Bluesky, Reddit, etc. I think it's a matter of time before phishing sites start making use of this.
I think the implementors of this law either knew about these issues or are hopelessly naive.
Given that and the push for digital IDs at the same time I think they are bad actors and I question their motivation.
Or they decided that, on balance, there is still a net benefit to this starting point.
Doing nothing is not an option - the unregulated Internet is a cesspool. We've allowed children unregulated access to this for a couple of decades now. The argument that we cannot regulate this to protect kids, so we should just accept the damage it is doing is not acceptable any more.
Yes, effective regulation takes time to formulate. But you have to start somewhere and improve the situation.
The vague potential harm of sex doesn't justify the concrete harm of abolishing digital privacy. Further, it's just sex. Equating imagery of legal, natural activity with physical danger is an error.
It is blatantly dangerous to justify stripping citizens of their anonymity. The lawmakers who proposed this are oppressors. They are the danger to our children.
I think we would have a lot less of a pushback against such policing efforts if governments had done a better job at reigning in tracking on the internet from the start. "Porn websites should check your age" is not that radical, but in a world where it doesn't feel unrealistic that much of the information about you is correlated and processed in ways that are not in your personal best interest, then it becomes another loop in the proverbial noose that can be used to hang us all.
The real motivation behind this effort is not protecting children (the signal for that is all over the place), it’s about interrupting and conditioning society for a total surveillance state that controls or suppresses speech and thought. As always, the “think of the children” is just a typically cynical, narcissistic manipulation of people’s natural instincts to protect children.
Of course the underlying motivation is totalitarian. What, do you think they’re just going to come out and say “ok, peasants, we are not going to implement totalitarianism now”? No, they always sneak it in little by little, just as they always have, to the point that people still don’t understand what is going on in spite of things being as bad as they already are.
This is basically grooming, and no, the van does not have candy in it, kid.
If they actually cared about kids, they would have not banned and controlled adults from engaging in legal things freely, or they would have banned pornography as a clear societal ill. They could have also barred children from the open internet in general by allowing children only on a white/allow list; which is exponentially easier to implement, there is government justification, they are not full legal persons, and it can be enforced and penalized with existing child endangerment laws… you give access to a child, you are punished, just like if you, e.g., give children access to alcohol or any number of things.
What they choose to implement instead was that adults have to reveal their identity, essentially digital “show me your papers!”
The ruling class even constantly, openly talk about how they want everyone to have to provide their real identity on the internet to speak. They’re narcissists; all you have to do is listen to what they do and say to the audience they seek admiration from to see through the manipulation and lies directed towards you.
The dots are right next to each other and are labeled A and B. I am always a bit confused why so many people cannot, maybe don’t want to connect obvious dots; maybe because of what it means, not wanting to face reality because it causes discomfort in what they believe about things and themselves?
“I supported them and voted for them/this system. How could they be totalitarian? I would never vote for totalitarian control over myself, because I am smart and good. Therefore their intentions and motivations must be pure”. It’s a common abuse trap. It is also the underlying psychological manipulation mechanics of other cults and con artists, not just contemporary politicians.
While we can all see potential abuse (yelling FIRE in a crowded theater), surely the IRL abuse by governments is equally clear, with possibly a higher potential for damage.
Eh, maybe? Maybe not? What if years later someone from that company flies through the UK? And if you think you can avoid connecting flights there, what if a flight from NY to CDG has to do an emergency landing and chooses somewhere in the UK?
The bigger problem is if the UK has an extradition treaty with the country you live in.
Try running an online poker site abroad and serve US players and find out how that'll work out for you.
Didn't work out well for Lithuanian/Canadian/Israeli Isai Scheinberg founder of Poker Stars, nor Calvin Ayre, the founder of the Bodog, who ended up on the FBI's top 10 list. United States reportedly sought* to seize around $3 billion worth of assets from 3 major online poker companies at the time.
https://poker.stackexchange.com/questions/457/is-online-poke...
* Stop laughing. It's a hypothetical, wherein the US government only does internally lawful acts.
You need to prove your statement is generally true, not that one unicorn company had profits.
Trying to restrict access to content on the Internet by requiring "robust" age verification was never going to achieve the goals they stated, and has a number of predictable (and already seen) negative side-effects.
Unfortunately governments all over the place seem intent on continuing this type of regulation, I presume so they can be seen to be doing something. Good time to be in the VPN game, I'd guess.
Then you're into "what about all TLS connections" which can be used to send traffic, so you have to do TLS interception at scale, which is a very non-trivial problem to try and solve.
Then you're into non-TLS encrypted protocols, so your only option there is to block anything you can't intercept.....
At that point you've pretty much broken Internet access in your country, might as well just chop the cables :P
For the UK I'm kind of doubting they'll put enough money into it to make it good, so we'll get the ineffective version and politicians will get stories like this one written about their efforts.
While we still have alternate operating systems, that won't be a universal control of course. You'd have to stop people owning general purpose computing devices for that to be fully effective.
That's been the corporate and probably governmental wet dream since the iPhone released. I think the only thing keeping the x86_64 scene from doing the same thing is legacy software support, and open alternatives existing. If Microsoft could've viably banned getting software from anywhere outside their store, they would have.
I would argue with all the computers they sold in "S mode" a few years ago, they earnestly tried it in the home market.
This also has the benefit (to the government) of criminalising individuals, making prosecution much easier and allowing it to be more selective according to the government's whims. It reminds me of the way the US dealt with piracy, you could go after a bunch of college kids to make a point etc.
In a fully authoritarian state of course you likely don't have to worry too much about proof, but I'd suggest the UK has a ways to go for that.
On the piracy front, well we've seen how successful they were in stopping piracy.... not at all.
This should not give you /any/ comfort that they won't attempt to ban VPNs. It's as easy as making it illegal to purchase/use a VPN/proxy service as a non-business entity with some loosely drafted legislation that would scare people.
It's child's play to draft legislation that would not affect businesses, plus some appropriate PR/propaganda campaigns
If they're going down that route I'd expect the first service to be banned will be Tor, I'm actually mildly surprised they haven't tried that already.
It really is easy. You can not outsmart lawmakers here, if they are determined enough.
It doesn't have to be 100% perfect, just 80% plus some messaging (edit: and harsh penalties). Do you not accept this?
As to wording of the law, eg:
"A Commercial VPN is defined as a service offered to the public for remuneration that routes internet traffic through servers to obscure the subscriber's IP address or apparent geographic location, where the primary purpose is to provide anonymity or circumvent geo-restrictions."
"A Business VPN is defined as a virtual private network operated by or on behalf of an organisation to enable employees, contractors, or authorised agents to securely access the organisation's internal network resources; connect geographically separate premises of the same organisation; or comply with data protection or security obligations."
They're still going to try anyway though. Wisconsin is already putting up a hilariously bad anti-VPN bill[2], and I'm curious if they don't just end up trying to ban every server provider out there in the process of enforcing it.
OFCOM failed to do anything, they could have forced them to sell the number range, taken over control of the umber range, or proactively thought out such situations due to the way they port numbers being that the new provider gets control of that number and not at the mercy of the previous provider, which in this case went bust.
Many other stories on this here: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/talk/threads/vectone-is-dead.406...
But like many, I myself contacted OFCOM and found a chocolate teapot far more comforting and with better results.
What with the UK pushing digital ID, funny anecdote there - I did jury service recently and they do not accept a digital ID as proof of ID, nor do they accept a selfie either as proof of age or ID ( we all had a good laugh as was done in the best possible taste ).
Weirdly, it might makes 'local' porn site like Dorcel who used to ask for credit cards for age verification (because of prior regulation not followed by mindgeek) more popular in the long run.
Lio•2mo ago
DoctorOW•2mo ago
sva_•2mo ago
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/i...
entuno•2mo ago