The Online Safety Act 2023[1][2][3] (c. 50) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate online content. Designed to protect children and adults online, it passed on 26 October 2023 and gives the relevant Secretary of State the power, subject to parliamentary approval, to designate and suppress or record a wide range of online content that is illegal or deemed "harmful" to children.[4][5]
The act creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be "harmful" to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher. It also empowers Ofcom to block access to particular websites.
So that's what they'll be aiming to do.
Some websites and apps stated they would introduce age verification for users in response to a 25 July 2025 deadline set by Ofcom.[47] These include pornographic websites,[48] but also the social networks Bluesky and Reddit.[49][50]
Probably should be mostly irritated with Parliament.
I expect that using a VPN that terminates in another country will avoid it, though I bet that then you can't do things like buy Reddit Gold, if that's still a thing.
I'd add that if you pick Ireland as the VPN exit country, it will have notable benefits:
Sites that pick language based on IP will probably do English.
It probably won't add much latency.
Ireland isn't too bonkers and hopefully won't have any large collection of online laws of their own that become an irritant.
Because Ireland has a considerably smaller population than the UK, if people in the UK do this at scale for pornography, it will make the Irish statistically look like absolutely indefatigable horndogs, which I think will be pretty funny on visualizations.
If you don’t mind my hijacking, I’ve seen the term “kagis” used a number of times on Lemmy, possibly only by you but I think also others. Based on the usage, I assumed it was a Latin word to indicate some sort of transition or side-bar, but it seems to just translate to “you are”, which doesn’t make sense in context. Can I ask what it means?
Kagi is a new-ish search engine that is popular among Lemmy users. Those users are trying to get it to catch on, and have started using kagi as a verb, the same way people say “let me google that really quick.”
It honestly feels a lot like when Microsoft was trying to get Bing and their phone OS to take off, and started slipping product placement into popular TV shows. There was a brief time period in American TV, where characters had the disgusting line of “Bing it!” Usually while showing the Bing home page on a Microsoft Phone. It was just blatant ham-fisted cringey product placement.
Yeah I've noticed this user basically inserts a "kagis" into like 2/3 of their comments, it always slightly irks me because it makes me feel like I'm getting advertised at. I've never felt the need to proclaim which search engine(s) I've used to research any particular comment on Lemmy, and I find it odd that the one person who does so regularly is doing it for a paid service.
Apart from that, their comments are usually pretty good, so I'm not accusing them of shilling or anything, but I find it super peculiar.
It makes me sad when I see the name because Kagi used to be a payments processor for shareware and essentially a predecessor to modern app stores…but before enshittification.
Not particularly, and while I admit this can seem hypocritical, the verb "to google" has just become a generic trademark.
When someone says band-aid, or kleenex, or jello, I think of bandages, tissues, or gelatin desserts, not of a specific brand of these products. Same goes with "googled", it just means "searched the web" now rather than specifically using Google.
Too bad VPN server addresses are on-sight to reddit's IP blocking strategy for years now. For whatever good internet choice you make, reddit reciprocates with an equally bad one
What's funny about that is the VPN I use I saw advertised on Reddit. I wonder if these companies know that they ban users for using their products? Well I guess they don't really don't care.
can't argue with that. setting my server to other places makes Google completely unusable because it will localize to whatever your ip address is no matter what you specify it to do in your settings. it's annoying enough that it got me to stop using Google so I don't blame anyone for just opting to let the NSA do their thing.
if you're not logged in and using a VPN server that's not in the US. If you want to post, it's not an issue but if you want to browse logged out they block you.
I wonder if they pay per verification. If so, I wonder how hard it would be to set up a script to just keep submitting new requests a few hundred or thousands of times a day with random photos...
Sure, it's not about wasting their time; this says they're using a 3rd party service to verify, so theoretically they're paying for that service. It's about wasting their money.
Good point. I just think that if reddit would see an uptick in POC and old people with these random AI photos, it would be a weird and hilarious thing to happen to them. Spez is in awe of a nazi (musk) and old people would send their advertising into a tailspin.
Was using a VPN to watch iPlayer last night and then hopped on reddit and was like "whereintheactualfuck is all the porn‽" Before realizing I had it set to the UK. Blew my mind for a minute
I deleted my Reddit account but still follow some writers on it and had the same issue. The worst part is it's anything marked as NSFW -- even posts that were tagged as a joke weren't accessible.
I changed my VPN to another country and Reddit was still asking me to log in and show ID until I cleared my cookies and cache.
"the alternative is primitive tribal life" is classic Capitalist propaganda.
You're absolutely right though, we have progressed incredibly far. It's almost as if we have all the knowledge and tools to build a truly inclusive society that provides a dignified standard of living for all people, yet there are stubborn and powerful groups interested in maintaining economic heirarchies and exploiting biases for political gain...
But to speak to the condescension: only a lazy, entitled, pathetically obtuse Westerner would have the gall to say everything is okay while your people's institutions kill the Earth. Hopefully enough of you will die without children and we can rebuild the world without the toxicity of Western Christians.
i don't think we can make a government that works, what we can do is create a broader system of governance that functions.
it's pretty fucking wild that we just let a tiny fraction of the population decide things on a national scale for years at a time, with little way of interacting with these people and with it just being accepted that most people don't know what they're voting for, if they vote at all..
From what i've learnt over the years the system that seems most likely to work well is something much much much much more based around local communities and constant actual human interaction, like instead of the most important elections being the national ones they should be the quarterly local elections where you decide who from you actual community represents you, based primarily on actually trusting them as a person you personally know.
Rising above our limitations as a species is the field of religion. The current mainstream western religious meta is super toxic, but the entire point of dedicating ones life to meta-narratives is to transcend the limitations of our human instincts.
Just like, treat your meta-narrative with a healthy dose of skepticism or you fall right back into human nature. From my experience i feel confident in saying all meta narratives are fictions
Hellsing Abridged from TFS, classic. If you're gonna watch it you should do it on twitch since they used a copyrighted song for an epic sync that happens in one of the later episodes that got muted on youtube. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/294882536?collection=Y4Lf2g4TSRXQGQ
They haven't really unless you count the post-dbza content with the shorts and the streaming. Hellsing ultimate abridged was made along side DBZA timeline wise about the time Twilight was still popular.
If any service requires me to send a photo of myself to use it, I ain't using it.
EDIT: lol wut, Facebook and YouTube want photo ID now?? I must be old enough to have missed out. My comment stands though, if I wasn't already a member on either of those I guess I wouldn't become one!
Italy made VPNs practically illegal. The UK might soon follow. And surfing the web with a VPN is a painful torrent of capchas. And email addresses you can get without revealing your phone number to identify yourself are becoming sparse too.
If you'd want to actually address the issue (insofar unsupervised teenagers watching porn is an issue) you'd need something like a U2F security key that can be used as anonymous age verification and be bought anonymously in a physical shop for cash, just by showing your ID to a clerk (without your details being stored). Keys being stolen or misused could then also be flagged in a public database.
My VPN for about 7-8 years is run by Italian hacktivists (airvpn, it's a nonprofit, they're good people), I haven't heard about this ban. Perhaps it only applies to Italian citizens using VPNs, not to Italians running VPNs. Wait, that doesn't make sense... I'll check out their newsfeed.
Yeah, afaik airvpn basically can't offer VPN to Italian citizens any more because they'd be forced to keep logs. But they can still get customers from outside Italy. And presumably Italians can still use VPN outside Italy. I think, let me know if I'm wrong.
Exactly. I get that there are still niches there that haven't found their place here yet (be the change you want to see), but the only way I use Reddit now is through a search for things that find old information, since it is still a huge database of data (admittedly both good and bad).
Reddit blocks VPN users. I'm unable to access it on my home network because of it.
Which is great! They trained me not to bother going to their site by blocking my attempts. Though I kind of want to punch Snoo now, from having to see his smug face winking at me on the block page every time. Little fucker, you used to be cool. Enjoy the inevitable bot-pocalypse nazi farm you're building.
Dude I was recently visiting Florida. I totally forgot the fascist bullshit laws about porn there, was gobsmacked I couldn't view pornhub. 5 minutes and a free vpn on my phone and I was happily watching my preferred smut.
It's so stupid how pointless the laws are, like it's dumb easy to circumvent them.
Just some real bullshit waste of time. Plus a waste of money for companies that try to comply with the Florida law. Pornhub just decided if you're in Florida you can't even use pornhub because they didn't want to spend the money and time to comply with the stupid ass backwards law.
My deepest apologies sire, I know I lack familiarity with the greatest comedies. I know it is my duty to know them, especially when I listen to them out of my mind on laughing gas.
Damn, the website seems to be "with persona dot com" and holy fucking corpo.
I say we all stay off the corporate internet and just come to places like this. Usenet is still a thing, but it's all us binary kids now. Maybe we could go back to how it was in the '90s and actually chat on the platform. There's IRC instead of Discord, message boards instead of Facebook.
Usenet is still a thing, but it's all us binary kids now. Maybe we could go back to how it was in the '90s and actually chat on the platform.
People stopped using Usenet for discussion in large part because of overwhelming spam problems and a lack of infrastructure to mitigate it.
You could maybe build some sort of system to mitigate that.
Maybe automated text classification is good enough to do on a distributed level, on client machines, now. Problem is that automated text generation to try to defeat it has also probably improved, and I'd tend to bet on the spammers having the advantage.
Maybe an out-of-band mechanism to generate information about posts would work. Have Usenet clients support pulling a database of scores for current posts in a group. Like, have some server(s) that generates various types of scores (advertising, flameware, etc) text scores for posts. Can incorporate various human moderation in that scoring, maybe let an end user subscribe to one or more "moderators", which I understand BlueSky does something like.
Honestly, though, the Threadiverse mostly does what I want as a distributed discussion forum. I'm not sure what large benefits Usenet brings to the table relative to it.
There's infrastructure for posting large binaries, which the Threadiverse doesn't really have short of (relatively small) image posting, but servers propagating the (large) alt.binaries hierarchy plus Usenet's bandwidth-heavy "broadcast" style of post propagation is also what drove up the cost of running Usenet servers and forced them to generally go commercial. Eternal-september.org is one of the very few remaining free-as-in-gratis Usenet servers, and they don't propagate alt.binaries. And I'd expect that Parliament would crack down on commercial Usenet operators if the Act doesn't already do so and Usenet sees a major surge in popularity in the UK for the pornography that this is trying to block; payment processors are necessary for commercial service, and easy for countries to lean on as leverage. If you want the ability to post large binaries in a state-censorship-resistant way, I'd probably...hmm. If a state wants to leverage its control of the network infrastructure to block access, it can make access pretty difficult. Maybe use Hyphanet (previously known as Freenet) for the files, then use magnet-style links on a more latency-friendly forum for discussion.
It took me a second to realize what you meant. My first thought was, "Wait, like, binary genders? Cis-gendered people?" Then I remembered binary code exists and I laughed at myself.
haha, yeah. Like that other poster said spam was running wild but all the old heads were blaming us "binary kids" for "killing usenet" with our large files.
Message boards are closing or blocking the UK because of this. We even lost lemmy.zip in the UK. But the way lemmy works means you could access it from other instances. Probably illegal in the UK but as long as people are ok with spinning up instances and telling the UK to get fucked it will probably be fine.
Age verification is insane in it's entirety and no payment processor, corpo, government, or think-tank has any right to enforce their puritanical views on sex and Orwellian techno-fascist policies on everyone.
Try using old.reddit.com. Literally just replace www with old, or add old in front of reddit.com. This should take you to a version of reddit's interface which isn't complete trash and it usually also allows you to bypass the need to login for NSFW content.
I use rdx.overdevs.com for anything I need on reddit these days, it's a read only interface that isn't affiliated with the site and doesn't track you or advertise anything.
What I don't understand is that there are ways to prevent kids from looking at porn that don't rely on crazy shit like this, even if they do involve some government action. Having to send a picture of your face to a porn provider to view porn is the dumbest possible way to fix this. I suspect the real reason for all of this is people want to effectively ban porn altogether and dumb fucks are letting them.
Having to upload your ID anywhere is already sketchy as-is, let alone a porn site. What ever happened to the days of "never use your real name on the internet"? Computer class teachers would drill that into students' heads all the way through K-12.
When Facebook came along, I thought people were insane for posting things under their full name with their photo attached to it. I thought MySpace was asking for too much personal info as-is! Fast forward ~20 years, and not only are you expected to provide your real identity on several websites, some American states even require it now!
Honestly blows my mind how willingly we gave up our online anonymity without even the slightest bit of pushback. We all just accept it as normal now.
@markovs_gun@Abraxas Kids are being banned from all social media here in Australia soon. Including, it seems, YouTube lol.
Expensive and completely unworkable. Reminds me I must spin up that Mastodon instance for my kids and their mates :mastodondance:
It's absolutely not about making sure everyone signs up to DigitalID.
It's going to be interesting to see if, after Britons become accustomed to letting websites take pictures of their identity documents, whether there will be interesting fraud attempts made on the British public from other websites who claim that they are conforming to British law.
Here's an interesting point. I just went to an nsfw sub to see if I'd get that prompt, and it gives me two ways to verify - selfie or photo ID. The photo ID has to be "government issued", and maybe I don't have one of those. The selfie is a link for a phone, using a QR code and I don't have a phone that can scan QR codes.
This means that in order to access said sub, I'd need to buy a new phone or wait 30 days or whatever to buy some kind of ID. Even with all the other reasons this sucks, that seems discriminatory.
QR codes are a plain text encoding scheme. If you can screenshot it, you have access to FOSS software that can decode it, and you can paste that URL into your browser.
Who's in the middle of this Venn Diagram between "uses some kind of custom OS on their phone to where their camera app doesn't automatically read QR codes" and "doesn't know how to install or use software that can read QR codes"?
My phone is Android from 2016, and it doesn't have a QR scanner built-in. I know I can download something to do it, but someone like my mother for instance wouldn't know that. Why do I have such an old phone? It still lasts for days on a charge and does everything I need.
Yeah I hate this. Glad I’m not using it much anymore anyway but damnnnn. I’m convinced they’re rolling this out under the guise of child safety but with the profit motive of data harvesting for their donors
The world and the internet are so low on trust, I kind of wish there was some entity we trusted.
Some website where you could upload a photo, and people would actually know for sure that all the site is going to do is compare the photo to an ID, verify you're over a certain age, and send a simple boolean "Yes" to the website that wanted to know if you were over-age. Or, to somehow know that your account is human and not a duplicate.
We could do a lot with that, but as it stands, no person or entity can ever really be trusted with that kind of data; I think most wouldn't even trust the same governments that issue those IDs.
This module allows you to create "virtual video devices". Normal (v4l2) applications will read these devices as if they were ordinary video devices, but the video will not be read from e.g. a capture card but instead it is generated by another application.
Then you cannot access it, same as how you can't sign up to OF as a creator or any online govt services. Most of those don't even let you use a PC, only a phone, via an app that checks your phone for root, same as banking apps. Were you born yesterday?
I never have had to do one of these, and I promise I'm not deliberately trying to ask stupid questions. Would this system be fooled by holding up a mannequin head?
It depends on the quality, but not likely. If I made this I'd probably use something like a reverse clip embedding in a stable diffusion, and it definitely would not fool that.
I hadn't heard of this before, so I tried a few public instances listed on their GitHub repo. They're all throwing a json error. Do you have a link that works for you?
So I don't have a horse in the race, but I am curious if you follow the link to estimate age from selfie, and claimed some random picture of a politician is your selfie, would that work?
As those policies are enforced client side, an industrious person could probably see how it works and do whatever. I can't seem to trigger any age verification to see, but if it works in a web browser, you can pretty much rewrite everything about it and make it upload whatever you like.
Sy far the only ones I've seen are scenarios where I have to upload photo to match my appearance when I show up in person to something, so it's not useful in that context, but I'm suspecting this scenario is similar.
The counter argument could be that if a person has that ability, they are probably close enough to being an adult and/or have earned their technically illegal access to porn, and the site operator made a good earnest attempt that stands up to casual lying.
Yeah I already left Reddit because (one of the reasons) they wouldnt let you open NSFW content without downloading their app on mobile. Having to submit ID is just way too ridiculous.
They permabanned me claiming that I had posted the Alligator Auschwitz video and called it Bullying ( violating rule 1). Their evidence when I appealed? A screenshot of the video with "deleted" as the poster. Thing is, the only subs I ever posted to were niche hobby subs. I would comment in politics subs and news subs, but not post. I can't even lie, it hurts to lose access to some of those subs since Lemmy simply doesn't fill the void yet.
reddit has bots running the site mostly, i wouldnt be surprised its used in some form to report anti-faciscst sentiment. the only protected spaces are the subs, that the user has been on for a while.
I voiced anti-fascist sentiment all over the place, but I never posted the thing they banned me for. I had been behaving myself, so the ban was quite a surprise.
They will. People tolerate shitloads. They doubly tolerate it if you tell them to think of the children and point out the only reason they could possibly be offended by this is if they were some kind of pedophile.
If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear. Now submit to increasing orwellian surveillance.
Britain is the one to enforce this, so Britain should provide a way to do it imo, fair if the government has a partnership with a private actor to do it. But the government should absolutely have a stake and do oversight.
I worked for an early AI project for [large tech giant]. While there, Alexis Ohanian came into the office and talked to my boss about using reddit's content (your posts and probably private correspondence, too, we got it from every other social network) as corpora for the AI/bot, it wasn't quite "training data" yet, it was early still in the game, but most likely it has become such.
So yeah, add that to reasons to hate reddit. I have never understood the appeal of what is essentially a for-profit USENET/BBS system, except that you can decorate yourself with flare or whatever it's called. Why'd people start using it? Why do we give away our collectively-owned technology to these dipshits?
That doesn't mean the technology didn't/doesn't exist. Create a UI for it. Teams is just a copy of Slack, which is just a pretty face slapped onto IRC (not literally, but the point stands).
I mean you were asking why people use Reddit, I answered. Accessibility. It's easy to go to Reddit.com, some website you hear about in passing. Anytime large numbers of people flock to some platform is because they made it easy and attractive to use.
Like, couldn't I just ask, why didn't you create this Usenet based reddit killer yourself?
Anytime large numbers of people flock to some platform is because they made it easy and attractive to use.
Is this really the case? There are many reasons why people flock to things, but those things being the "best" or "easiest" are not necessarily chief among them. People left friendster because it couldn't handle the traffic and it was annoying. People left myspace for various reasons, some political (it was acquired by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Sky/FOX), and many simply because college kids were using this newer thing called Facebook.
Why were they using it? It wasn't because it was the easiest, or best, it was because their parents weren't using it and they could be themselves without being snooped (a similar force has driven Twitter and Tiktok success). Youth culture tends to attract more users, another reason that doesn't involve making something the easiest or best; add this good fortune and Zuck's shameless profiteering by selling user data in order to cover the growing pains of their servers, and Facebook became a thing.
Like, couldn’t I just ask, why didn’t you create this Usenet based reddit killer yourself?
The short answer is that I'm not a developer. Another short answer is that even if I were a developer, convincing habitual users to do other things is a different planet of annoying. I hope that not developing reddit-killing software does not prohibit me from having criticisms of reddit and other corporate social plats?
I still kinda feel like every one of those examples was success based on accessibility and ease of use. Connectivity issues? Inaccessible. Facebook was cleaner and more user friendly. I never had a MySpace because it just seemed more daunting to me for whatever reason. Facebook seemed cleaner and standardized in ways, so to me, it felt more accessible.
Steam and Newell comes to mind, about how piracy is an accessibility and distribution problem.
And no, I didn't mean to invalidate your stance because you didn't develop something, more that I too am not a developer so I couldn't speak to your point about how easy it would be to have Reddit be Usenet based and still have the same level of proliferation. My apologies for being unclear.
How about instead of reddit being the example, we use craigslist? A mostly innocuous non-profit with wide usage, founded by a person who could have easily "gone reddit." It isn't so hard to imagine the same ethos and technology being applied to fundamental "social protocols" like reddit, facebook and others. My objection is that there seems to be an assumption (in American culture at least) that the way things are are the only way they could have turned out or the end result of making the best thing.
A widely cited example: Microsoft did not make the best operating system. There's many reasons why they too over the world.
A lot depends on what one considers the best, too. Your points about the examples I gave are valid, we just had very different experiences of those platforms.
I got perma banned from reddit after pissing off a few of their nazi mods. Pro tip, if you wanna keep your account then don't call out blatant far left nazis.
I'm as progressive as the next but reddit has a serious issue with "extreme left ideology "
The downvotes allude to the far left nonsense already being on lemmy. It was fun while it lasted
It seems like a great way to deprive young people of education and exposure to foreign culture. Not to mention asking everyone to validate there age seems like a great way to ruin the entire internet.
You taking it a little far I think there. Education into foreign culture can be provided by books.
Anyway, there are things that children should not be allowed to have access to. And that access has always been partially governed by parents and partially governed by Society.
Now when I was a kid my dad could take me to an R-rated movie and that's fine. But no parent, no admission.
When you're there in person someone can look at you and make a judgment of your age or they can ID you.
That's not possible using the internet without people saying it's too invasive.
So we need some kind of solution which provides enough anonymity while also being able to absolutely confirm you are above certain age.
I think the reality is that kids will get exposed to adult content at some point on the internet. As a parent it is very important to have sex related conversations early so that your kid doesn't get taken advantage of. At the end of the day kids grow up to be adults and sometimes that happens much faster than we would like it to. Even if you shelter your kid they will still get exposed from other kids. You can't control teens and young adults.
Of course they will get exposed to things over time and kids will always work to circumvent their parents restrictions. But we got to make them work for it. It shouldn't be easy. Lol
There already is a solution. Parents need to be involved in restricting what their kids are viewing. Thats the solution, but parents dont want to do that, they want the sites to do the job for them.
Nope. Its already been tried. The internet is too ubiquitous.
And that's like saying, all liquor stores should not require ID, and it's the parents fault if an underage kid acquires some booze.
Silly.
Im following along perfectly fine. You're the one not comprehending the fallacies in your argument, but nice try. Im done responding to you after this though anyway cause its obvious you aren't interested in actually listening and learning.
Why stop at porn? Any objectionable words (like darn or poop), or any form of non-consensual contact (including Three Stooges pies in the face) must require photo ID to access. The internet is for everyone, after all.
Government should provide a way to anonymously verify that you have reached a certain age (not your exact age). If your id is a smart card, the proof could even be generated offline.
Unpopular opinion: this is a good thing - there should be more barriers to porn. I know some teens will find a way around it, but it has been proven to affect the developing brain negatively and normalizes some really harmful behaviour.
Respect for sharing your opinions and backing it up.
That said, it's not a question about whether porn is bad; it's a question of whether we should normalize providing your ID online. I don't think the risks involved with deanonymization and ID fraud are worth it.
This is the most convincing argument for me, as I know many governments have not been putting their citizen’s interests first.
Despite the risks, I know these sorts of anonymous confirmation systems already exist, and can be implemented effectively with transparency.
Most VPN services tout “zero logs”, and many back it up with audits. We can demand the same from our government.
I’m sure drivers licenses and social security numbers made people uncomfortable too when they were rolled out, but they certainly improved our lives.
A slippery slope is a logical fallacy - we can impose just enough oversight to be helpful AND curtail overreach. We can build and verify a good system.
There is no meaningful barrier to porn without changing what makes the internet the internet. There are only old tech illiterate law makers virtue signaling about their children while those children run circles around arbitrary shit like this
What is worse is that the politicians have totally forgotten the typical behavior of youth. The are going to end up making porn seem really cool and rebellious which will increase porn addiction.
We can change anything, and if it makes society a better place then we actually have a moral obligation to try.
I’m also not asking for perfectly monitored total surveillance. Just some barriers for surface level use.
A kid can camp outside a liquor store, offering strangers money to buy them alcohol. But this is difficult, and has a chance of having them turned in.
In the same way an ID pop-up can be circumvented with savvy use of VPNs etc., but it will easily block many of the youngest and most vulnerable. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be effective.
Realistically, a kid that wants to see some funky stuff is going to find a way. Not every website cares about these stupid laws.
Instead of policing everyone, risking security leaks, and deanonymizing users, the parents who want to stop their children from viewing naked humans should just put up block lists on their network. It would filter a lot more than just adding age verification to reddit.
Also, most students have phones. The first time I saw someone I knew naked was some other kid showing me the photos she sent him. He and I weren't even friends, we just, sat next to each other in class.
Instead of policing everyone, risking security leaks, and deanonymizing users, the parents who want to stop their children from viewing naked humans should just put up block lists on their network. It would filter a lot more than just adding age verification to reddit.
Or even better, parents could have conversations about sex instead of letting the kids get sex ed from porn.
Sure, we all have anecdotes of finding porn on the internet before it was reasonable. And everyone can eventually find ways around barriers. I also remember someone young googling terms and not realizing there was a setting blocking content. They had given up.
Barriers can meaningfully delay, giving young people more time to mature before they are exposed to this content. If every social media platform implemented this, it would have a significant impact. That’s why the porn industry lobbies so hard against these sorts of laws.
I think many underestimate how damaging porn use actually is, how toxic the industry is, and how much of the traffic is generated by the underaged.
I found porn in the woods my dude - friend's houses, parent's stashes. It's always been available, although not so readily.
While I tried to prevent access for my own kids also, I accepted that after a certain age they're going to be interested and be able to find it. Their mother and I had some tangential talks about it with them and let them know it's not realistic at all. As far as I know, everyone turned out okay. Normal lives and relationships and all.
I'm not convinced that whatever they found as they were growing up was as harmful as you're making it sound. You're making a lot of bold, unsourced claims. Although now that I think about it, I don't know how you can ethically do a lot of research on the topic.
I believe a bigger topic, and one that plays into what you're concerned about, is early use (especially unmonitored) of any networked computing devices. Maybe make smart phones or PCs adult only like alcohol, tobacco, or guns. If the family chooses to have one in the home it's up to the parents to make it safe.
You could theoretically come up with a system that is both decentralized and able verify age using dedicated protocols/API to respective governments. Just like how most Lemmy sites scan for and report CSAM.
We can change anything, and if it makes society a better place then we actually have a moral obligation to try
The problem is that "better" in the context of society is usually subjective. We're talking about a form of censorship, for which change in a positive direction is very complicated at best.
Lawmakers in the US want people to think that ISPs taking responsibility for pirates on their network is a change for a "better" society, for example. Or that net neutrality is unfair to businesses and would result in a "better" society if abolished.
The truth is that it's a ploy to gather unprecedented amounts of data on citizens hiding behind a "won't they think of the children" moral take.
Advertisers have already been mining porn habits on Reddit to sell to third parties. Browser fingerprinting and the Reddit app identify you. If you were concerned about privacy you would not be using Reddit.
But a lot of children and teens do use Reddit, and we should do our best to limit their access to pornography, especially when this data is indiscriminately collected about them too.
Then the parent(s) need to be parent(s) by monitoring their childrens online activity if they feel theyll have access to content they shouldnt. They should also explain what porn is, why they shouldnt view it, and what about it is harmful to prepare them for when they will, not might, but will encounter it so they have the tools and understanding necessary to handle and process what they are seeing. Porn exist. Its not going anywhere anytime soon. Making it harder to access for everyone isnt going to make it go away, stop witty teens from finding it, or stop content that slips through the moderation cracks in spaces that dont allow pornagraphic content.
Im not advocating for more porn or easier access to porn, but rather recognition that the parent(s) are responsible for their childrens wellbeing, education, and preparedness for adulthood where they will absolutely encounter adult content, online and off, regardless of if they voluntarily sought it out. Hiding it, pretending it doesnt exist, or avoiding the topic with them doesn't prepare them for reality in adulthood where they are expected to be able to handle uncensored life.
Not to mention, as it was pointed out several times in the comments, an ID mandate for a website is extremely easy to circumvent with a vpn, something that is incredible easy to obtain and set up. The only way, in my opinion at least, to effectively stop children from accessing porn is for the parent(s) to monitor their online activity and educate them on what and why this content is not okay for them to view as a child.
The problem is that porn and self pleasure are taboo topics. Parents seem to want to make their kids stay kids when in reality they need guidance on how to be an adult.
Parents should monitor their children’s behaviour AND society should also impose barriers. The “everything is on parents” is the same personal responsibility myth that conservatives use to justify removing government assistance and cutting things such as healthcare and schooling.
On their way home from school children cannot enter a bar and be served alcohol - or at least this is exceedingly difficult. This has undoubtedly saved people from substance abuse. The same can be said here.
Of course parents should discuss porn and its problems, just as they would with alcohol and other vices.
Also, I have taught young people technology. VPNs are not as intuitive for the mobile generation. Many will not bother, or when they figure it out they will be much closer to a reasonable age.
The barriers do not have to be perfect, but they will help.
Society does impose those barriers in the form of dedicated spaces for adult, dedicated spaces for children, and content moderation in spaces where both audiences are welcomed. I also didnt and am not claiming "everything is on the parents" because i think thats a ridiculous and unrealistic stance. I fully support government assistance programs. What Im claiming is theres a level of responsibility on the parent(s) to monitor their children, regulate the content they consume, and educate them about the things they may encounter outside of their ability to process as children and im making this claim specifically about online porn/adult content, the topic of the main post and conversation.
Alcohol is a different topic despite the overlap in it being considered for adults. Correct, children cant just walk into a bar and order a drink, but they can walk in with their parent and that parent can order it on their behalf and give it to them. The law obviously varries from place to place, but in general in the U.S., its that a bar cant serve children, not that they cant let them enter. Ultimately, its up to the parent to decide if its something they feel their child is allowed to consume and the bar owner if they want to allow that child to enter.
I think at this point it’s clear to everyone that content moderation done by humans is not viable at scale. In this sense the web is unique, and would require a more dragnet solution, like ID verification. This is done in China already to much success to limit game time for youths.
A child would be turned away at a strip club, so perhaps this is a better analogy than a bar.
Still, if a parent wanted their children to browse an unfiltered Reddit they could provide their ID, and in this way we have a similar analogy.
A strip club isnt really a better analogy since there are no laws in the U.S. barring children from entering, but again, this cam varry depending on location. A parent can still take their child there if the establishment owner allows it.
Except we're not talking about the physical world, we're talking about the digital where a simple ID verification is a piss poor effort of a barrier. Which then leaves us with, what, exactly? The mass surveilance, a.i. facial recognition, and deep privacy invasion used in china? Because, im never going to agree with you on this, period. If a parent has a problem with their kid visiting spaces clearly labeled and marked as for adults, then that parent needs to be a parent and kick their kid off the internet.
You can just use a different porn site, there are millions of them and someone who wants to find them (horny teenagers) will find them. I will let you figure out yourself if the content on those sites is less harmful.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
Yes, you probably could make access to those mutually exclusive, but why would they want to when the point IS blocking access to both? They might not say it outright, but there's a reason they call it TERF Island and it ain't because they love the LGBT community. This regressive view also goes hand in hand with villifying sex ed in general and it's easy for them to correlate it without saying the quiet part out loud.
All this to say I and many, many people don't trust the government to not abuse this and limit legitimate, lifesaving resources from being found by those that need them most.
Your intentions are good faith. The reality is that the government rarely does us the same favor nowadays.
That is, I believe, a British law that they're following for users that appear to be in the UK. Not like they're going to just disregard the law.
kagis
Yeah, the Online Safety Act 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
So that's what they'll be aiming to do.
Probably should be mostly irritated with Parliament.
I expect that using a VPN that terminates in another country will avoid it, though I bet that then you can't do things like buy Reddit Gold, if that's still a thing.
I'd add that if you pick Ireland as the VPN exit country, it will have notable benefits:
Sites that pick language based on IP will probably do English.
It probably won't add much latency.
Ireland isn't too bonkers and hopefully won't have any large collection of online laws of their own that become an irritant.
Because Ireland has a considerably smaller population than the UK, if people in the UK do this at scale for pornography, it will make the Irish statistically look like absolutely indefatigable horndogs, which I think will be pretty funny on visualizations.
Indefatigable horndogs best band name calling dibs now
Please make the music ska. A band with that name, playing literal horns, creating a fast, upbeat tempo? It would be beautiful.
What did you think that "wild rover" they keep singing about was? 😉
Pornhub stats: Irish +28572%
If you don’t mind my hijacking, I’ve seen the term “kagis” used a number of times on Lemmy, possibly only by you but I think also others. Based on the usage, I assumed it was a Latin word to indicate some sort of transition or side-bar, but it seems to just translate to “you are”, which doesn’t make sense in context. Can I ask what it means?
Kagi is a new-ish search engine that is popular among Lemmy users. Those users are trying to get it to catch on, and have started using kagi as a verb, the same way people say “let me google that really quick.”
It honestly feels a lot like when Microsoft was trying to get Bing and their phone OS to take off, and started slipping product placement into popular TV shows. There was a brief time period in American TV, where characters had the disgusting line of “Bing it!” Usually while showing the Bing home page on a Microsoft Phone. It was just blatant ham-fisted cringey product placement.
Yeah I've noticed this user basically inserts a "kagis" into like 2/3 of their comments, it always slightly irks me because it makes me feel like I'm getting advertised at. I've never felt the need to proclaim which search engine(s) I've used to research any particular comment on Lemmy, and I find it odd that the one person who does so regularly is doing it for a paid service.
Apart from that, their comments are usually pretty good, so I'm not accusing them of shilling or anything, but I find it super peculiar.
It makes me sad when I see the name because Kagi used to be a payments processor for shareware and essentially a predecessor to modern app stores…but before enshittification.
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/08/01/kagi-shuts-down/
Does “googled” make you feel advertised at?
Not particularly, and while I admit this can seem hypocritical, the verb "to google" has just become a generic trademark.
When someone says band-aid, or kleenex, or jello, I think of bandages, tissues, or gelatin desserts, not of a specific brand of these products. Same goes with "googled", it just means "searched the web" now rather than specifically using Google.
What about ye olde "googles on ddg"?
There's a search engine named Kagi. It's basically the equivalent of "googles" but for a different search engine.
Thanks. The usage now makes sense, albeit superfluous.
https://kagi.com/
Example.com
https://kagi.com/
Upvote for the verbification of Kagi :)
In this one instance I'll give Reddit a pass. This is 100% a fuck the UK government moment
Lol yeah I'm not doing that. VPN all the way.
Today I'm french.
Tomorrow, who knows?
The possibilities are endless.
Too bad VPN server addresses are on-sight to reddit's IP blocking strategy for years now. For whatever good internet choice you make, reddit reciprocates with an equally bad one
What's funny about that is the VPN I use I saw advertised on Reddit. I wonder if these companies know that they ban users for using their products? Well I guess they don't really don't care.
Other companies: Thank you for buying from our sponsors! Here's a code for 15% off!
Reddit: You bought from our sponsors? Lol, you're banned.
Remember when you didn't even need an email address to sign up for reddit?
If I need to look at that site, my LibRedirect extension sends me to a privacy focused mirror
Mullvad has couple of USA exits that don’t get blocked by Reddit. Texas and D.C., I think.
so does nord but to me the point of using a VPN is to get my traffic exit point out of the US and the other eyes countries
I usually use US because I like the localization of websites more that way.
can't argue with that. setting my server to other places makes Google completely unusable because it will localize to whatever your ip address is no matter what you specify it to do in your settings. it's annoying enough that it got me to stop using Google so I don't blame anyone for just opting to let the NSA do their thing.
Blocking VPNs from posting or vviewing content too?
if you're not logged in and using a VPN server that's not in the US. If you want to post, it's not an issue but if you want to browse logged out they block you.
I wonder if they pay per verification. If so, I wonder how hard it would be to set up a script to just keep submitting new requests a few hundred or thousands of times a day with random photos...
Random AI photos. That would be funny in theory, but they're just using AI to check the ages anyway.
Sure, it's not about wasting their time; this says they're using a 3rd party service to verify, so theoretically they're paying for that service. It's about wasting their money.
Good point. I just think that if reddit would see an uptick in POC and old people with these random AI photos, it would be a weird and hilarious thing to happen to them. Spez is in awe of a nazi (musk) and old people would send their advertising into a tailspin.
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
Was using a VPN to watch iPlayer last night and then hopped on reddit and was like "whereintheactualfuck is all the porn‽" Before realizing I had it set to the UK. Blew my mind for a minute
I went "whereisallmyporn?" When reddit banned it from r/all. I think that was the start of its downfall for me.
I deleted my Reddit account but still follow some writers on it and had the same issue. The worst part is it's anything marked as NSFW -- even posts that were tagged as a joke weren't accessible.
I changed my VPN to another country and Reddit was still asking me to log in and show ID until I cleared my cookies and cache.
Anyone try a McLovin ID?
Fuck most governments
genuinely cannot think of a government that doesn't suck ass
It's not all around great but I think New Zealand has a pretty decent government
"the alternative is primitive tribal life" is classic Capitalist propaganda.
You're absolutely right though, we have progressed incredibly far. It's almost as if we have all the knowledge and tools to build a truly inclusive society that provides a dignified standard of living for all people, yet there are stubborn and powerful groups interested in maintaining economic heirarchies and exploiting biases for political gain...
I don't think you realize that I am agreeing with you.
But to speak to the condescension: only a lazy, entitled, pathetically obtuse Westerner would have the gall to say everything is okay while your people's institutions kill the Earth. Hopefully enough of you will die without children and we can rebuild the world without the toxicity of Western Christians.
i don't think we can make a government that works, what we can do is create a broader system of governance that functions.
it's pretty fucking wild that we just let a tiny fraction of the population decide things on a national scale for years at a time, with little way of interacting with these people and with it just being accepted that most people don't know what they're voting for, if they vote at all..
From what i've learnt over the years the system that seems most likely to work well is something much much much much more based around local communities and constant actual human interaction, like instead of the most important elections being the national ones they should be the quarterly local elections where you decide who from you actual community represents you, based primarily on actually trusting them as a person you personally know.
Rising above our limitations as a species is the field of religion. The current mainstream western religious meta is super toxic, but the entire point of dedicating ones life to meta-narratives is to transcend the limitations of our human instincts.
Just like, treat your meta-narrative with a healthy dose of skepticism or you fall right back into human nature. From my experience i feel confident in saying all meta narratives are fictions
we gotta take back our parks from the night y'all
In this case I blame the UK government
I'm not sure what you all are doing
Lol what is this from
Team four stars' Hellsing abridged. I highly recommend.
Hellsing Abridged from TFS, classic. If you're gonna watch it you should do it on twitch since they used a copyrighted song for an epic sync that happens in one of the later episodes that got muted on youtube. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/294882536?collection=Y4Lf2g4TSRXQGQ
Oh man I love TFS, I didn't know they had done anything since DBZ abridged.
They haven't really unless you count the post-dbza content with the shorts and the streaming. Hellsing ultimate abridged was made along side DBZA timeline wise about the time Twilight was still popular.
If any service requires me to send a photo of myself to use it, I ain't using it.
EDIT: lol wut, Facebook and YouTube want photo ID now?? I must be old enough to have missed out. My comment stands though, if I wasn't already a member on either of those I guess I wouldn't become one!
It's a UK law, you either comply or get banned. Obviously everybody now has a VPN subscription.
Italy made VPNs practically illegal. The UK might soon follow. And surfing the web with a VPN is a painful torrent of capchas. And email addresses you can get without revealing your phone number to identify yourself are becoming sparse too.
If you'd want to actually address the issue (insofar unsupervised teenagers watching porn is an issue) you'd need something like a U2F security key that can be used as anonymous age verification and be bought anonymously in a physical shop for cash, just by showing your ID to a clerk (without your details being stored). Keys being stolen or misused could then also be flagged in a public database.
I think it's better to reject these sites rather than work around it. Especially for major platforms. Make it hurt financially.
Many have done that for decades, but the tend remains that the internet is getting less and less free.
My VPN for about 7-8 years is run by Italian hacktivists (airvpn, it's a nonprofit, they're good people), I haven't heard about this ban. Perhaps it only applies to Italian citizens using VPNs, not to Italians running VPNs. Wait, that doesn't make sense... I'll check out their newsfeed.
Yeah, afaik airvpn basically can't offer VPN to Italian citizens any more because they'd be forced to keep logs. But they can still get customers from outside Italy. And presumably Italians can still use VPN outside Italy. I think, let me know if I'm wrong.
That's terribly disheartening. I'm sorry, Italy.
Facebook does that,
Youtube does that
Does a vpn bypass it?
Edit: btw yes I totally agree with you, I'm just wondering if that would be a workaround
You can use a VPN to negate this check. For now...
But Spez will still edit your comments. I don't know how reddit has still some users left after that and the API train wreck.
Exactly. I get that there are still niches there that haven't found their place here yet (be the change you want to see), but the only way I use Reddit now is through a search for things that find old information, since it is still a huge database of data (admittedly both good and bad).
Reddit blocks VPN users. I'm unable to access it on my home network because of it.
Which is great! They trained me not to bother going to their site by blocking my attempts. Though I kind of want to punch Snoo now, from having to see his smug face winking at me on the block page every time. Little fucker, you used to be cool. Enjoy the inevitable bot-pocalypse nazi farm you're building.
At one point Reddit had an Onion site
I heard about this but I didn't really believe it, until now.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
Dude I was recently visiting Florida. I totally forgot the fascist bullshit laws about porn there, was gobsmacked I couldn't view pornhub. 5 minutes and a free vpn on my phone and I was happily watching my preferred smut.
It's so stupid how pointless the laws are, like it's dumb easy to circumvent them.
Just some real bullshit waste of time. Plus a waste of money for companies that try to comply with the Florida law. Pornhub just decided if you're in Florida you can't even use pornhub because they didn't want to spend the money and time to comply with the stupid ass backwards law.
Its funny and pointless until they pressure Visa and the site you are using dies.
Sometimes my VPN kicks me to one of those backwards ass states and I also get surprised by them. Swap states and I'm in.
"Estimate age from selfie"
fake beard sales dramatically increase
Works in real life too. Grew a beard when i was 17, and never got carded for booze again after that.
As someone with long hair and a long beard I haven't been carded in basically 10+ years.
Last weekend I got carded buying a beer with my parents-in-laws. Of course one of the very few times I didn't have my ID.
Two 65+ people order a beer and then like, oh we'll get your beer on our tab to make things easier. Bartender "I'll need to see his ID"
We all couldn't believe it. I wasn't upset or anything, it was just kind of absurd feeling. I've been drinking for almost 20 years.
It's one of those situations where common sense should be allowed to be used.
Yeah how tf is that supposed work??
Are there any women here today?
The stuffed bra has deferred many an ID check.
Don't be sexist. Gray is gray.
It was a Life of Brian reference.
My deepest apologies sire, I know I lack familiarity with the greatest comedies. I know it is my duty to know them, especially when I listen to them out of my mind on laughing gas.
When you're chewing on life's gristle don't grumble, give a whistle. And this'll help things turn out for the best.
Every Sperm is Sacred - Monty Python's The Meaning of Life?
Oh shit, hopefully god can't see through my tin roof.
Damn, the website seems to be "with persona dot com" and holy fucking corpo.
I say we all stay off the corporate internet and just come to places like this. Usenet is still a thing, but it's all us binary kids now. Maybe we could go back to how it was in the '90s and actually chat on the platform. There's IRC instead of Discord, message boards instead of Facebook.
People stopped using Usenet for discussion in large part because of overwhelming spam problems and a lack of infrastructure to mitigate it.
You could maybe build some sort of system to mitigate that.
Maybe automated text classification is good enough to do on a distributed level, on client machines, now. Problem is that automated text generation to try to defeat it has also probably improved, and I'd tend to bet on the spammers having the advantage.
Maybe an out-of-band mechanism to generate information about posts would work. Have Usenet clients support pulling a database of scores for current posts in a group. Like, have some server(s) that generates various types of scores (advertising, flameware, etc) text scores for posts. Can incorporate various human moderation in that scoring, maybe let an end user subscribe to one or more "moderators", which I understand BlueSky does something like.
Honestly, though, the Threadiverse mostly does what I want as a distributed discussion forum. I'm not sure what large benefits Usenet brings to the table relative to it.
There's infrastructure for posting large binaries, which the Threadiverse doesn't really have short of (relatively small) image posting, but servers propagating the (large)
alt.binarieshierarchy plus Usenet's bandwidth-heavy "broadcast" style of post propagation is also what drove up the cost of running Usenet servers and forced them to generally go commercial. Eternal-september.org is one of the very few remaining free-as-in-gratis Usenet servers, and they don't propagatealt.binaries. And I'd expect that Parliament would crack down on commercial Usenet operators if the Act doesn't already do so and Usenet sees a major surge in popularity in the UK for the pornography that this is trying to block; payment processors are necessary for commercial service, and easy for countries to lean on as leverage. If you want the ability to post large binaries in a state-censorship-resistant way, I'd probably...hmm. If a state wants to leverage its control of the network infrastructure to block access, it can make access pretty difficult. Maybe use Hyphanet (previously known as Freenet) for the files, then use magnet-style links on a more latency-friendly forum for discussion.It took me a second to realize what you meant. My first thought was, "Wait, like, binary genders? Cis-gendered people?" Then I remembered binary code exists and I laughed at myself.
haha, yeah. Like that other poster said spam was running wild but all the old heads were blaming us "binary kids" for "killing usenet" with our large files.
I'm pretty sure Gen Z and Gen Alpha are not going to be using Facebook, Message boards or anything else from a previous era.
Chances are they will find simple and effective ways to bypass censorship.
Message boards are closing or blocking the UK because of this. We even lost lemmy.zip in the UK. But the way lemmy works means you could access it from other instances. Probably illegal in the UK but as long as people are ok with spinning up instances and telling the UK to get fucked it will probably be fine.
Age verification is insane in it's entirety and no payment processor, corpo, government, or think-tank has any right to enforce their puritanical views on sex and Orwellian techno-fascist policies on everyone.
Reads like more material for the Palantir machine.
Try using old.reddit.com. Literally just replace
wwwwithold, or addoldin front ofreddit.com. This should take you to a version of reddit's interface which isn't complete trash and it usually also allows you to bypass the need to login for NSFW content.I use rdx.overdevs.com for anything I need on reddit these days, it's a read only interface that isn't affiliated with the site and doesn't track you or advertise anything.
Or use Stealth if you're on Android.
rdx is already an android app
True, but it's only available through the Play Store if I'm not mistaken.
Once they figure that out they will no doubt get rid of old.reddit.com.
And once they do that, this place will get some new users. Guaranteed.
I mean Lemmy has been growing. Think of it as anarchist reddit- no CEO, no ads, no data collected.
I'm only back on reddit because I like to be evangelical from time to time, and I used to mod r/mapporncirclejerk so I like to pop by and say hi.
Edit: I forgot I was on Lemmy lol
I use it for local subreddits. There's not enough people here for local communities.
It's over the threshold for a few. Some examples:
![email protected] for the San Francisco Bay Area.
![email protected]
![email protected]
![email protected]
Those are large populations, though. Gonna be hard to get enough people for Podunk, Iowa.
Subscribers is one thing, but the. Bay area community has 2 posts in the last week. That's not a lot of activity
And then you'll need to use a VPN if you're in the UK, which is recommended anyway.
What I don't understand is that there are ways to prevent kids from looking at porn that don't rely on crazy shit like this, even if they do involve some government action. Having to send a picture of your face to a porn provider to view porn is the dumbest possible way to fix this. I suspect the real reason for all of this is people want to effectively ban porn altogether and dumb fucks are letting them.
Having to upload your ID anywhere is already sketchy as-is, let alone a porn site. What ever happened to the days of "never use your real name on the internet"? Computer class teachers would drill that into students' heads all the way through K-12.
When Facebook came along, I thought people were insane for posting things under their full name with their photo attached to it. I thought MySpace was asking for too much personal info as-is! Fast forward ~20 years, and not only are you expected to provide your real identity on several websites, some American states even require it now!
Honestly blows my mind how willingly we gave up our online anonymity without even the slightest bit of pushback. We all just accept it as normal now.
FB has a very aggressive data mining verification for making an account, they don't even let you use some obscure emails to registet
@markovs_gun @Abraxas Kids are being banned from all social media here in Australia soon. Including, it seems, YouTube lol.
Expensive and completely unworkable. Reminds me I must spin up that Mastodon instance for my kids and their mates :mastodondance:
It's absolutely not about making sure everyone signs up to DigitalID.
It's going to be interesting to see if, after Britons become accustomed to letting websites take pictures of their identity documents, whether there will be interesting fraud attempts made on the British public from other websites who claim that they are conforming to British law.
Here's an interesting point. I just went to an nsfw sub to see if I'd get that prompt, and it gives me two ways to verify - selfie or photo ID. The photo ID has to be "government issued", and maybe I don't have one of those. The selfie is a link for a phone, using a QR code and I don't have a phone that can scan QR codes.
This means that in order to access said sub, I'd need to buy a new phone or wait 30 days or whatever to buy some kind of ID. Even with all the other reasons this sucks, that seems discriminatory.
QR codes are a plain text encoding scheme. If you can screenshot it, you have access to FOSS software that can decode it, and you can paste that URL into your browser.
Sure, but the point is, they also could've posted a simple link, instead of expecting users like the above, to go thru hoops.
I know this, but it's a barrier for anyone who doesn't.
Who's in the middle of this Venn Diagram between "uses some kind of custom OS on their phone to where their camera app doesn't automatically read QR codes" and "doesn't know how to install or use software that can read QR codes"?
My phone is Android from 2016, and it doesn't have a QR scanner built-in. I know I can download something to do it, but someone like my mother for instance wouldn't know that. Why do I have such an old phone? It still lasts for days on a charge and does everything I need.
Damn. Did you find something else to jerk to my friend ? ( Shit no I don't want you to jerk to my friend )
Can't even get porn models from civitai in a few hours it's about to be blocked in the UK too.
Really? Lmao. Stock up.
Brit here, I say fuck the UK government
Fucking Red Tories
It's weird how they voted against it as opposition, but as soon as they took power just let it in.
Almost as if that's what they wanted all along.
UK politicians are among the worst. The US certainly has some trash but holy shit are there some real creatures in Parliament.
We have the benefit of a private education system whose primary output is financiers and politicians - give the septics time to figure it out.
Yeah I hate this. Glad I’m not using it much anymore anyway but damnnnn. I’m convinced they’re rolling this out under the guise of child safety but with the profit motive of data harvesting for their donors
Basically what FB does, and you already know they use it to sell your data and train their AI
Yeah abandoned that platform long before
The world and the internet are so low on trust, I kind of wish there was some entity we trusted.
Some website where you could upload a photo, and people would actually know for sure that all the site is going to do is compare the photo to an ID, verify you're over a certain age, and send a simple boolean "Yes" to the website that wanted to know if you were over-age. Or, to somehow know that your account is human and not a duplicate.
We could do a lot with that, but as it stands, no person or entity can ever really be trusted with that kind of data; I think most wouldn't even trust the same governments that issue those IDs.
It's simple, librarians or even gas station clerks look at your license and they give you a code that you can use idk 10 times for account signups.
No scanning or tracking of who is requesting. Just make it an ID check like buying cigarettes
This is why we can't have nice things.
The government already knows who you are! No need for a third party
Just give you a fucking oauth login and have websites use that for age checks.
We can trust each other, just takes a little chemical and/or psychological manipulation.
It'd still be a joke to fool anyways
What happens if everyone just uploads the same 1 photo/ID?
What’s preventing you from uploading a random photo for that estimate age from selfie button?
You can't upload, only use the camera
Nobody has created some sort of fake virtual camera thing? Like it appears in device manager as a real webcam, but the output is altered?
I'd assume that this is something that can be most-easily bypassed at the browser level if a site can request access to a camera.
I don't think that any trusted-to-the-camera hardware stack exists today.
But at an OS level...
I dunno about Windows, but Linux can do virtual video-4-linux devices, which is probably how the OS exposes a camera to a browser on Linux.
https://github.com/v4l2loopback/v4l2loopback
Yes of course they have like sparkocam or manycam and of course the mentioned below v4l devices on linux
What if your PC has no camera?
Then you cannot access it, same as how you can't sign up to OF as a creator or any online govt services. Most of those don't even let you use a PC, only a phone, via an app that checks your phone for root, same as banking apps. Were you born yesterday?
Hold up a photo of any random schmoe?
Have you never done one of these for an ID check? Doesn't work like that, it will likely ask you to turn your head so it can take a "3D" scan.
I never have had to do one of these, and I promise I'm not deliberately trying to ask stupid questions. Would this system be fooled by holding up a mannequin head?
It depends on the quality, but not likely. If I made this I'd probably use something like a reverse clip embedding in a stable diffusion, and it definitely would not fool that.
Does this get enforces with old.reddit.com?
Probably, if not the UK could sue them for tens of dollars.
It is fucking mental that an industry plagued by data harvesting is being asked to harvest more data.
Anyway, I'm now in Belgium according to my VPN.
just use one of the libreddits like safereddit.com or something, never go to actual reddit.
Rdx is my jam
FUCK THAT NOISE WTFFFFF give me 2015 back
Lucky we're on Lemmy, where it's basically 2015 😁
I’m going to do the Harlem shake at a David Bowie concert!
try redlib
I hadn't heard of this before, so I tried a few public instances listed on their GitHub repo. They're all throwing a json error. Do you have a link that works for you?
https://redlib.perennialte.ch/ this seems to be working.
I'd say reddit changed something and broke it.
That one works. Thanks!
privacyredirect.com works well too
Hosting is so easy I even run it on Termux 24/7
Stealth also works
So I don't have a horse in the race, but I am curious if you follow the link to estimate age from selfie, and claimed some random picture of a politician is your selfie, would that work?
From what I have heard it's absolute bare minimum level of checks so it will probably work
Idk but it probably forces use of ur camera and uses faceid features. can’t just upload a random photo
As those policies are enforced client side, an industrious person could probably see how it works and do whatever. I can't seem to trigger any age verification to see, but if it works in a web browser, you can pretty much rewrite everything about it and make it upload whatever you like.
Sy far the only ones I've seen are scenarios where I have to upload photo to match my appearance when I show up in person to something, so it's not useful in that context, but I'm suspecting this scenario is similar.
The counter argument could be that if a person has that ability, they are probably close enough to being an adult and/or have earned their technically illegal access to porn, and the site operator made a good earnest attempt that stands up to casual lying.
You can also buy digital copies of UK passports for 10bucks a pop
Yeah I already left Reddit because (one of the reasons) they wouldnt let you open NSFW content without downloading their app on mobile. Having to submit ID is just way too ridiculous.
I was forced out of reddit, as are many through their schemes of removing accounts that doesn't adhere to propaganda standards
They permabanned me claiming that I had posted the Alligator Auschwitz video and called it Bullying ( violating rule 1). Their evidence when I appealed? A screenshot of the video with "deleted" as the poster. Thing is, the only subs I ever posted to were niche hobby subs. I would comment in politics subs and news subs, but not post. I can't even lie, it hurts to lose access to some of those subs since Lemmy simply doesn't fill the void yet.
reddit has bots running the site mostly, i wouldnt be surprised its used in some form to report anti-faciscst sentiment. the only protected spaces are the subs, that the user has been on for a while.
I voiced anti-fascist sentiment all over the place, but I never posted the thing they banned me for. I had been behaving myself, so the ban was quite a surprise.
people will not let this become the norm (aka persona hq bombings, im predicting that)
They will. People tolerate shitloads. They doubly tolerate it if you tell them to think of the children and point out the only reason they could possibly be offended by this is if they were some kind of pedophile.
If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear. Now submit to increasing orwellian surveillance.
Discord is the same now. Wish more communities used something else
VPN, friend
They're compromised.
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
Gross
How old is your account? I wonder if this happens for 10+ years redditors too
That's an odd way of spelling incest. /s
Why dont they just offer some government id api service that Reddit can use? Giving away ur id and shit for everything is insane
Every country has their own, and they usually have pretty strict guidelines with who can access it.
its much easier to outsource this process to llms (or, much more likely, people manually checking it somewhere in Philippines)
Britain is the one to enforce this, so Britain should provide a way to do it imo, fair if the government has a partnership with a private actor to do it. But the government should absolutely have a stake and do oversight.
I worked for an early AI project for [large tech giant]. While there, Alexis Ohanian came into the office and talked to my boss about using reddit's content (your posts and probably private correspondence, too, we got it from every other social network) as corpora for the AI/bot, it wasn't quite "training data" yet, it was early still in the game, but most likely it has become such.
So yeah, add that to reasons to hate reddit. I have never understood the appeal of what is essentially a for-profit USENET/BBS system, except that you can decorate yourself with flare or whatever it's called. Why'd people start using it? Why do we give away our collectively-owned technology to these dipshits?
People don't know how to use Usenet.
That doesn't mean the technology didn't/doesn't exist. Create a UI for it. Teams is just a copy of Slack, which is just a pretty face slapped onto IRC (not literally, but the point stands).
I mean you were asking why people use Reddit, I answered. Accessibility. It's easy to go to Reddit.com, some website you hear about in passing. Anytime large numbers of people flock to some platform is because they made it easy and attractive to use.
Like, couldn't I just ask, why didn't you create this Usenet based reddit killer yourself?
Is this really the case? There are many reasons why people flock to things, but those things being the "best" or "easiest" are not necessarily chief among them. People left friendster because it couldn't handle the traffic and it was annoying. People left myspace for various reasons, some political (it was acquired by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Sky/FOX), and many simply because college kids were using this newer thing called Facebook.
Why were they using it? It wasn't because it was the easiest, or best, it was because their parents weren't using it and they could be themselves without being snooped (a similar force has driven Twitter and Tiktok success). Youth culture tends to attract more users, another reason that doesn't involve making something the easiest or best; add this good fortune and Zuck's shameless profiteering by selling user data in order to cover the growing pains of their servers, and Facebook became a thing.
The short answer is that I'm not a developer. Another short answer is that even if I were a developer, convincing habitual users to do other things is a different planet of annoying. I hope that not developing reddit-killing software does not prohibit me from having criticisms of reddit and other corporate social plats?
I still kinda feel like every one of those examples was success based on accessibility and ease of use. Connectivity issues? Inaccessible. Facebook was cleaner and more user friendly. I never had a MySpace because it just seemed more daunting to me for whatever reason. Facebook seemed cleaner and standardized in ways, so to me, it felt more accessible.
Steam and Newell comes to mind, about how piracy is an accessibility and distribution problem.
And no, I didn't mean to invalidate your stance because you didn't develop something, more that I too am not a developer so I couldn't speak to your point about how easy it would be to have Reddit be Usenet based and still have the same level of proliferation. My apologies for being unclear.
How about instead of reddit being the example, we use craigslist? A mostly innocuous non-profit with wide usage, founded by a person who could have easily "gone reddit." It isn't so hard to imagine the same ethos and technology being applied to fundamental "social protocols" like reddit, facebook and others. My objection is that there seems to be an assumption (in American culture at least) that the way things are are the only way they could have turned out or the end result of making the best thing.
A widely cited example: Microsoft did not make the best operating system. There's many reasons why they too over the world.
A lot depends on what one considers the best, too. Your points about the examples I gave are valid, we just had very different experiences of those platforms.
I'm scared
Does old.reddit.com still work? It used to not even require a login for NSFW.
I don't know about local requirements in the UK but testing now in the US, yes old.reddit.com allows access to NSFW subs without a login
The UK recently passed a law requiring submitting a photo ID to access adult content. It's also super unclear on very important specifics
Nsfwbrowser.com
Works for all subreddit with pics, I use it to watch whatcouldgowrong, instant_regret, etc. boobies.
I'm sure there are a dozen others also.
Or use old.reddit.com and the redirect plugin for Firefox.
I'm sorry to say, but as stupid as it is, just blinking and moving away is not gonna stop the proliferation of this everywhere, lemmy included.
I got perma banned from reddit after pissing off a few of their nazi mods. Pro tip, if you wanna keep your account then don't call out blatant far left nazis.
I'm as progressive as the next but reddit has a serious issue with "extreme left ideology "
The downvotes allude to the far left nonsense already being on lemmy. It was fun while it lasted
They ID at the liquor store too.
Go ahead and give a better solution. I'm up for it.
Except you're not at the risk of the liquor store owners storing a copy of your ID when they quickly review it
Nor at risk of a server misconfiguration leaking all the copies to random assholes
Wait until the guy at the liquor store has facebook glasses or whatever they're called
That's why we need a novel solution.
What the heck is a "novel solution"
It seems like a great way to deprive young people of education and exposure to foreign culture. Not to mention asking everyone to validate there age seems like a great way to ruin the entire internet.
You taking it a little far I think there. Education into foreign culture can be provided by books.
Anyway, there are things that children should not be allowed to have access to. And that access has always been partially governed by parents and partially governed by Society.
Now when I was a kid my dad could take me to an R-rated movie and that's fine. But no parent, no admission.
When you're there in person someone can look at you and make a judgment of your age or they can ID you.
That's not possible using the internet without people saying it's too invasive.
So we need some kind of solution which provides enough anonymity while also being able to absolutely confirm you are above certain age.
I think the reality is that kids will get exposed to adult content at some point on the internet. As a parent it is very important to have sex related conversations early so that your kid doesn't get taken advantage of. At the end of the day kids grow up to be adults and sometimes that happens much faster than we would like it to. Even if you shelter your kid they will still get exposed from other kids. You can't control teens and young adults.
Of course they will get exposed to things over time and kids will always work to circumvent their parents restrictions. But we got to make them work for it. It shouldn't be easy. Lol
Don't be dumb, this isnt even close to the same thing.
The "thing" is how to age gate materials on the internet. I said I'm up for a solution. What's yours?
There already is a solution. Parents need to be involved in restricting what their kids are viewing. Thats the solution, but parents dont want to do that, they want the sites to do the job for them.
Nope. Its already been tried. The internet is too ubiquitous.
And that's like saying, all liquor stores should not require ID, and it's the parents fault if an underage kid acquires some booze.
Silly.
Again, liquor store and this aren't even remotely the same. So your example is irrelevant. Silly.
This is about age restriction which is entirely the same. You can stop commenting now because I don't think you're following along.
Im following along perfectly fine. You're the one not comprehending the fallacies in your argument, but nice try. Im done responding to you after this though anyway cause its obvious you aren't interested in actually listening and learning.
Why stop at porn? Any objectionable words (like darn or poop), or any form of non-consensual contact (including Three Stooges pies in the face) must require photo ID to access. The internet is for everyone, after all.
No that's not how the world works. All things are not for everybody. Ask any parent. Your kids do not get to run free and do whatever they want.
Exactly. So why should we require ID for porn and not for a bad word?
If you don't know the answer to that then you're not a parent are you?
To quote Steve Hofstadder, I'm not a helicopter pilot either but if I see one in a tree I know someone fucked up.
Government should provide a way to anonymously verify that you have reached a certain age (not your exact age). If your id is a smart card, the proof could even be generated offline.
Yeah I agree to more anonymous it could be, the better.
Not sure how possible that is though.
-EDIT.
... at least without losing anonymity.
A solution presumes there is a problem in the first place.
You don't say?
Unpopular opinion: this is a good thing - there should be more barriers to porn. I know some teens will find a way around it, but it has been proven to affect the developing brain negatively and normalizes some really harmful behaviour.
Respect for sharing your opinions and backing it up.
That said, it's not a question about whether porn is bad; it's a question of whether we should normalize providing your ID online. I don't think the risks involved with deanonymization and ID fraud are worth it.
This is the most convincing argument for me, as I know many governments have not been putting their citizen’s interests first.
Despite the risks, I know these sorts of anonymous confirmation systems already exist, and can be implemented effectively with transparency.
Most VPN services tout “zero logs”, and many back it up with audits. We can demand the same from our government.
I’m sure drivers licenses and social security numbers made people uncomfortable too when they were rolled out, but they certainly improved our lives.
A slippery slope is a logical fallacy - we can impose just enough oversight to be helpful AND curtail overreach. We can build and verify a good system.
Also, thank you for being kind.
There is no meaningful barrier to porn without changing what makes the internet the internet. There are only old tech illiterate law makers virtue signaling about their children while those children run circles around arbitrary shit like this
What is worse is that the politicians have totally forgotten the typical behavior of youth. The are going to end up making porn seem really cool and rebellious which will increase porn addiction.
We can change anything, and if it makes society a better place then we actually have a moral obligation to try.
I’m also not asking for perfectly monitored total surveillance. Just some barriers for surface level use.
A kid can camp outside a liquor store, offering strangers money to buy them alcohol. But this is difficult, and has a chance of having them turned in.
In the same way an ID pop-up can be circumvented with savvy use of VPNs etc., but it will easily block many of the youngest and most vulnerable. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be effective.
Realistically, a kid that wants to see some funky stuff is going to find a way. Not every website cares about these stupid laws.
Instead of policing everyone, risking security leaks, and deanonymizing users, the parents who want to stop their children from viewing naked humans should just put up block lists on their network. It would filter a lot more than just adding age verification to reddit.
Also, most students have phones. The first time I saw someone I knew naked was some other kid showing me the photos she sent him. He and I weren't even friends, we just, sat next to each other in class.
Or even better, parents could have conversations about sex instead of letting the kids get sex ed from porn.
Americans are scared of sex education. The schools could just continue teaching it, but a lot of people don't like that.
Sure, we all have anecdotes of finding porn on the internet before it was reasonable. And everyone can eventually find ways around barriers. I also remember someone young googling terms and not realizing there was a setting blocking content. They had given up.
Barriers can meaningfully delay, giving young people more time to mature before they are exposed to this content. If every social media platform implemented this, it would have a significant impact. That’s why the porn industry lobbies so hard against these sorts of laws.
I think many underestimate how damaging porn use actually is, how toxic the industry is, and how much of the traffic is generated by the underaged.
I found porn in the woods my dude - friend's houses, parent's stashes. It's always been available, although not so readily.
While I tried to prevent access for my own kids also, I accepted that after a certain age they're going to be interested and be able to find it. Their mother and I had some tangential talks about it with them and let them know it's not realistic at all. As far as I know, everyone turned out okay. Normal lives and relationships and all.
I'm not convinced that whatever they found as they were growing up was as harmful as you're making it sound. You're making a lot of bold, unsourced claims. Although now that I think about it, I don't know how you can ethically do a lot of research on the topic.
I believe a bigger topic, and one that plays into what you're concerned about, is early use (especially unmonitored) of any networked computing devices. Maybe make smart phones or PCs adult only like alcohol, tobacco, or guns. If the family chooses to have one in the home it's up to the parents to make it safe.
Making the internet a walled garden will NOT make society a better place.
This is just a lack of imagination on your part.
You could theoretically come up with a system that is both decentralized and able verify age using dedicated protocols/API to respective governments. Just like how most Lemmy sites scan for and report CSAM.
The problem is that "better" in the context of society is usually subjective. We're talking about a form of censorship, for which change in a positive direction is very complicated at best.
Lawmakers in the US want people to think that ISPs taking responsibility for pirates on their network is a change for a "better" society, for example. Or that net neutrality is unfair to businesses and would result in a "better" society if abolished.
The truth is that it's a ploy to gather unprecedented amounts of data on citizens hiding behind a "won't they think of the children" moral take.
Have you met some of these youth? They are never really stopped by restrictions. One person finds a way to bypass it and word spreads like wildfire.
The law doesn’t exist to raise your kids to do the right thing. This is a massive privacy violation.
Advertisers have already been mining porn habits on Reddit to sell to third parties. Browser fingerprinting and the Reddit app identify you. If you were concerned about privacy you would not be using Reddit.
But a lot of children and teens do use Reddit, and we should do our best to limit their access to pornography, especially when this data is indiscriminately collected about them too.
Does the law exclude sites that don't violate your privacy? Is it limited to big sites like reddit or Facebook?
Then the parent(s) need to be parent(s) by monitoring their childrens online activity if they feel theyll have access to content they shouldnt. They should also explain what porn is, why they shouldnt view it, and what about it is harmful to prepare them for when they will, not might, but will encounter it so they have the tools and understanding necessary to handle and process what they are seeing. Porn exist. Its not going anywhere anytime soon. Making it harder to access for everyone isnt going to make it go away, stop witty teens from finding it, or stop content that slips through the moderation cracks in spaces that dont allow pornagraphic content.
Im not advocating for more porn or easier access to porn, but rather recognition that the parent(s) are responsible for their childrens wellbeing, education, and preparedness for adulthood where they will absolutely encounter adult content, online and off, regardless of if they voluntarily sought it out. Hiding it, pretending it doesnt exist, or avoiding the topic with them doesn't prepare them for reality in adulthood where they are expected to be able to handle uncensored life.
Not to mention, as it was pointed out several times in the comments, an ID mandate for a website is extremely easy to circumvent with a vpn, something that is incredible easy to obtain and set up. The only way, in my opinion at least, to effectively stop children from accessing porn is for the parent(s) to monitor their online activity and educate them on what and why this content is not okay for them to view as a child.
The problem is that porn and self pleasure are taboo topics. Parents seem to want to make their kids stay kids when in reality they need guidance on how to be an adult.
Parents should monitor their children’s behaviour AND society should also impose barriers. The “everything is on parents” is the same personal responsibility myth that conservatives use to justify removing government assistance and cutting things such as healthcare and schooling.
On their way home from school children cannot enter a bar and be served alcohol - or at least this is exceedingly difficult. This has undoubtedly saved people from substance abuse. The same can be said here.
Of course parents should discuss porn and its problems, just as they would with alcohol and other vices.
Also, I have taught young people technology. VPNs are not as intuitive for the mobile generation. Many will not bother, or when they figure it out they will be much closer to a reasonable age.
The barriers do not have to be perfect, but they will help.
Society does impose those barriers in the form of dedicated spaces for adult, dedicated spaces for children, and content moderation in spaces where both audiences are welcomed. I also didnt and am not claiming "everything is on the parents" because i think thats a ridiculous and unrealistic stance. I fully support government assistance programs. What Im claiming is theres a level of responsibility on the parent(s) to monitor their children, regulate the content they consume, and educate them about the things they may encounter outside of their ability to process as children and im making this claim specifically about online porn/adult content, the topic of the main post and conversation.
Alcohol is a different topic despite the overlap in it being considered for adults. Correct, children cant just walk into a bar and order a drink, but they can walk in with their parent and that parent can order it on their behalf and give it to them. The law obviously varries from place to place, but in general in the U.S., its that a bar cant serve children, not that they cant let them enter. Ultimately, its up to the parent to decide if its something they feel their child is allowed to consume and the bar owner if they want to allow that child to enter.
I think at this point it’s clear to everyone that content moderation done by humans is not viable at scale. In this sense the web is unique, and would require a more dragnet solution, like ID verification. This is done in China already to much success to limit game time for youths.
A child would be turned away at a strip club, so perhaps this is a better analogy than a bar.
Still, if a parent wanted their children to browse an unfiltered Reddit they could provide their ID, and in this way we have a similar analogy.
A strip club isnt really a better analogy since there are no laws in the U.S. barring children from entering, but again, this cam varry depending on location. A parent can still take their child there if the establishment owner allows it.
Except we're not talking about the physical world, we're talking about the digital where a simple ID verification is a piss poor effort of a barrier. Which then leaves us with, what, exactly? The mass surveilance, a.i. facial recognition, and deep privacy invasion used in china? Because, im never going to agree with you on this, period. If a parent has a problem with their kid visiting spaces clearly labeled and marked as for adults, then that parent needs to be a parent and kick their kid off the internet.
Man kids should not be able to enter strip clubs, that’s insane to me.
Mhm
the law isn't about access to porn it's about stopping access to lgbtq spaces (and anything else the government doesn't like)
If this is true, then this censorship is a terrible tragedy. I still would like government imposed ID age verification for porn though.
Edit: Judging by the spike in downvotes on this comment I can see assumptions are being made about my intentions.
You can limit pornography and not limit access to sex education services, or LGBT communities as they are not pornographic.
But if there was an LGBT forum posting LGBT pornography, then yes, it too should have age verification.
You can just use a different porn site, there are millions of them and someone who wants to find them (horny teenagers) will find them. I will let you figure out yourself if the content on those sites is less harmful. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
Yes, you probably could make access to those mutually exclusive, but why would they want to when the point IS blocking access to both? They might not say it outright, but there's a reason they call it TERF Island and it ain't because they love the LGBT community. This regressive view also goes hand in hand with villifying sex ed in general and it's easy for them to correlate it without saying the quiet part out loud.
All this to say I and many, many people don't trust the government to not abuse this and limit legitimate, lifesaving resources from being found by those that need them most.
Your intentions are good faith. The reality is that the government rarely does us the same favor nowadays.
Fuck off. Like, all the way off.
I seriously doubt this will do anything
The youth tend to be pretty good at pushing though boundaries and restrictions