UK Official Calls for Age Verification on VPNs to Prevent Porn Loophole
https://gizmodo.com/uk-official-calls-for-age-verification-on-vpns-to-prevent-porn-loophole-2000644942Open linkView original on lemmy.zip567
Comments192https://gizmodo.com/uk-official-calls-for-age-verification-on-vpns-to-prevent-porn-loophole-2000644942Open linkView original on lemmy.zip
Why is the UK such a hell hole all the sudden? I've never had such a terrible opinion of the place until now with encryption and authoritarian fuckwitism against the last bastion of real democracy on the internet.
And almost all those cameras are privately owned and operated, and not integrated into any kind of centralised surveillance apparatus. More typically, they're in place to deter graffiti or to keep drunks from pissing on the walls outside pubs. Police can and do request footage when investigating crimes, but if a camera owner's retention policy means the footage has been deleted, that's the end of the discussion. And such footage is useful if some arsehole has just jammed a broken beer glass into someone else's face.
The worse forms of authoritarian overreach are the increasingly pervasive number-plate recognition cameras that track the movements of every vehicle, and the inane attempts to regulate the internet and to ban peivate use of encryption.
As for "quiet, polite fascism," I've lived for extended periods in the US and the UK, and so far, despite the seemingly draconian laws, I've always found there to be more personal freedom in the UK. The police don't kill people very often, people tend to ignore the laws and the government can't be bothered to enforce the most intrusive of them, and there's far less social pressure towards brainless conformity and mindless obedience than there is in the States.
When the Snowden Revelations came out, it turned out the UK did as much or maybe even more civil society surveillance as the US, and unlike the US it doesn't even have constitutional limitations on surveillance of people on their own soil (in fact the UK doesn't even have a written Constitution).
In the US they actually walked back on some of the surveillance (because of said constitutional protections), in the UK they just passed a law that retroactively made the whole thing legal, got the editor of the newspaper who brought out the Snowden Revelations kicked, fired a bunch of D-Notices around (the UK's Press Censorship mechanism) out and nobody ever talked about it again.
As soon as the technology was good enough for that the UK created a Digital Stasi and it's only gotten worse since.
Trump.......That’s always such an insane fact to me compared to how many China has. Their traffic cams are impressive
china has that too.
They over there looking at America being the absolute fuck up it is and are jealous.
To be fair, they were the OGs of a prosperous stable country spontaneously shooting themselves in the head because someone convinced them they could be doing SOOO much better aaaannd it's gone...
Haha, good point! Us ‘muricans are just posers. :p
Tony Blair thought that the Labour Party would win if it were more like the US Democratic Party. That began an electorally successful period of unprincipled triangulation and petty authoritarianism. Eventually that momentum fizzled out due to the gloomy paranoid leadership of Gordon Brown, corruption of people like Peter Mandelson, and the loathsome hypocrisy of Blair's lies in support of GW Bush's second Gulf War.
Then the Conservatives got in for 14 years and fucked everything up even worse. Now the Blairite authoritarian-centrist faction is again running Labour, and so far has shown none of the political cunning that kept Blair on top. And the media fawns over the smarmy mini-Trump Nigel Farage despite his party having no policies.
Because they have to protect the children!! Oh why won't anyone think of the children?!
Or the poor adults who can't be bothered to parent their own spawn.
You should watch some Adam Curtis documentaries to get perspective on the UK.
Don't forget transphobia. They seem to have suddenly decided that's a good idea in the last 3 years.
It's always been a bit like this, actually
Yep. Politicians creating tech policy on the fly without consulting people who actually know what they are talking about.
More referring to the technofascism
sometimes the french are right. the brits are indeed cunts.
so seriously, this i brilliantly evil. this is the way that will allow some police state level of oversight for both social media, chats, and even vpn data will be tied to your personal file. this is so dark in every possible way. any site can be labelled porn or harmful at this point. even wikipedia. how dare the young browse the open truth of the internet? and this is already the second phase, mind police.
I don't know if it's the root reason, but one gets scoffed at harshly by the average Tom, Dick, and Harry when suggesting that a Monarchy is an archaic and, frankly, insulting form of governance in spite of protestations that the role of the sovereign is purely ceremonial.
Simply put, they (mostly) seem to prefer political masochism, and are ruled by sadists. Sadly, in 2025, aren't we all?
I wouldn't underestimate the effect Brexit had on this. No there is no check for the national Government anymore.
knowingly leaking everyones medical information, fucking surveillance camerason every corner.. my opinion didn't meaningfully change by these, they are being a hell hole for a longer time
Turns out Liberals are Fascists.
Uhh no... Idiots are fascists. Some idiots may call themselves liberal but that doesn't make it so. Liberals by definition cannot be fascist. The idiots are those that let fascists parade as anything but.
One thing is the Political self-proclaimed Liberals mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world, a very different thing is the Political Ideology of Liberalism.
"Liberals are Fascists" definitely applies to the mainstream politicians in at least the UK, US and Canada who say they are "Liberals" and have "Liberal policies".
Strange how every Liberal does the things Fascists do. They must not understand Liberalism like you do.
Always have been, just with a better PR campaign.
UK is far from being liberal lol, they are closer to the US than not
There is no amount of blocking the Internet that will safeguard the children effectively. The real solution is this:
If this were actually done to children/teens surely their brains would not form any associations between being restrained and horny, right?
Right?
seems like a great way to train for hands free orgasms.
Wet dreams happen no matter what you can do at puberty.
They would definiyely want to employ that, if this bullshit actually had anything to do with protecting children.
Seeing this from the US scares me. I already have an elaborate system for tunneling my traffic out of the country without it appearing I’m doing so from my end devices.
But seeing this happening in the UK and knowing there’s a chance of it happening here, I really feel the need to get into China-style circumvention with shadowsocks and what have you, and I need to figure this out sooner rather than later.
21 states have laws for age verification on porn sites. 4 more states are in the process of passing laws for age verification. That's nearly half the states...
Quite insane honestly
Where will you peer to once these laws are active everywhere. That’s where this is actually headed
Only commercial VPNs? So HTTP proxying, Tor, SSH tunneling, SOCKS tunneling, running your own VPN node, etc are all allowed? There's plenty of VPS hosting companies that don't need ID or proof of age to sign up. Even if the UK requires this, you can just sign up for a server outside the UK.
There's also weird approaches that work but not many systems catch, like tunneling stateless data (like HTTP responses) over DNS TXT lookups.
When I was in high school in the 2000s, kids figured out how to bypass the internet filtering at school. Kids these days have way more resources available to them, making it even easier to do.
I used a server on my personal computer that would just echo back the raw HTML from a PHP call back in the day. Definitely not the safest or best way to do things but ebaum's world had the best games. All fun til the principal wanted to talk about my friends putting porn on all the computers in the library.
CGIProxy / PHProxy were definitely very popular when I was in school. Some of the more tech-savvy kids would get free hosting accounts and install a proxy in them and share the URL.
You can easily make it a ton harder by blocking VPS IPs when serving certain types of content
If you have issues with IP blocks, get the AWS equivalent of a VPS (Lightsail). It's expensive compared to other VPS services - $5/month for only 512MB RAM, 20GB disk and 1TB monthly transfer, whereas good deals usually have at least 8GB RAM for that price - but it's difficult for anyone to block Amazon/AWS IPs because so many services use them :)
I literally have lightsail (not the equivalent) as well because it doesn't have issues connecting to SK, but China throttles those addresses nevertheless
Why, does AWS use a different IP address pool than lightsail?
I fucking hate the UK, so much.
The MPs and Peers only fucking learnt about VPNs when this bullshit bill was being passed. They're so fucking clueless about the whole thing. They don't understand what a VPN exactly is and what it does and the fact their own government (hopefully) uses them, as do Banks (for security), Companies, and indeed, how it works.
This will lead to more bullshit.
Wrote a email to my MP for this exact reason.
The OSA needs repealing. All it's doing is either teaching people to follow poor digital hygiene practices, or forcing people to follow more risky methods of bypassing the OSA controls.
Whole guise of child safety is laughable when they've made zero attempts to educate everyone (not just kids) on being safe online.
aaanddd did they respond?
Of course not. Implies they do their jobs properly.
They are not the first country to ban vpns, those bans usually target 95% of individuals who are bad at tech not encrypted communications as a whole. Though I can see Britain ignoring that experience and just shooting itself in the face.
As is tradition.
Shithole country doing shithole things. The UK is acting like a red state, and their standard of living is dropping accordingly.
Uk is closer to US in ideology than to europe post-brexit. also russel vought is behind all the porn bans of steam recently too, i would imagine he probably is too on this.
UK was also closer to US ideology pre Brexit.
Republicans with nationalized health care and a monarchy.
Even pre-brexit. The UK was never part of the EU, culturally speaking
I'd argue that causation may be the other way around.
It's recursive
You can just mail cash to mullvad and include a code that links it to your account.
This is how you get under-18s to use Tor browser
Until the go government starts blocking entry nodes, then there will be a whole new country relying on the snowflake protocol.
Also, this doesn't affect only people under 18, any sane adult should never send a copy of their id to anything but the government, bank, insurance or employer.
That would put them in the company of China, Russia, and Iran. Getting unrestricted Internet to people in those countries is why I am among those who run a snowflake node on a dedicated VPS (the link also has a simple browser addon -- it's easy to support the network, everyone should)
Yes, these moves suck for UK youth. But, anti-censorship tools do exist, and volunteers like me want people who could benefit from them, to know about & use them.
100% agree, take my upvote
Just out of curiosity how does one connect to the snowflake in the event that normal Tor does not work? (in minecraft)
In general real-time games are not great for Tor, because it introduces lots of network latency -- which makes you safer
For most applications, the easiest way to Torify is via using SOCKS from the Tor Browser Bundle, which would let you simply pick Snowflake when Tor Browser starts up. I asked Perplexity for directions on running Minecraft over Tor, here ya go
Does Snowflake still work in China? Thought I read they're now able to detect and block it.
Yeah, the newer thing to counter that is WebTunnel which came out last year. There's considerably more setup than just starting a snowflake proxy process, and I am ashamed to say I haven't set one up yet
If they block entry nodes, just build an entry node. They can't block stuff inside your own network.
Ofc they can, but they don't need to, they just seize the server and jail the operator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRRw1ERj2Gc
Like Idiocracy has been a manual for the US, V for Vendetta is a manual for the UK.
For fuck sake people, these are movies of worlds we DON'T want to live in.
Quick! Someone make a movie where the population suffers from affordable housing, free and universal healthcare, fair taxation, and a healthy planet!
You mean Star Trek? But where are the suffering people? It's no fun when there is no suffering. Why would fascists want a world like that. I don't understand why there are not more people willing to support the 1%ers. We might all be suffering, but their lives matter too you know! The world we live in right now, like in Don't Look Up, is much more appealing. I mean, fuck poor people, fuck sick people, fuck hungry people. It's their life choice. They just should have been born more fortunate. It's their choice to have no life, no future, no opportunity. Might as well lock them up in prison (concentration camps) and use them for forced labor.
How about I get us started? To get the groove going;
AHHH! Look at my Bank Account! I have money left after paying rent! OHHH THE HUMANITY! 😨
Drugs are cheaper than groceries, also delivered within 15 minutes while groceries take 1 to 2 days. Guess what I'll be consuming tonight instead of dinner!
1 grocery bag with food for 2 day: 75 euros.
Or:
5 grams of ketamine: 25 euros.
5 xtc pills: 10 euros.
3 grams amphetamine: 15 euros.
I just saved 25 euros expenses, with enough for 5 days! Yay!
Just get a Fent-a.
The only soft drink with the extra kick of terrible addiction!
I have nyl wishes getting addicted to that shit. I'm more of an upper guy. Gotta stay positive! The world is already full of downies, like diaper Donny the taco in chief.
I actually paid 1,30 per gram but only when I bought a larger quantity. But with my home dealer it's 15 per gram, 5 for friends. Tested 86% pure needles. Perks of living in The Netherlands, cheap top quality dope with fast home delivery. Can be tested in every city. Yet there are only few homeless people and no dope crisis. The hard junky drugs like crack, crystal meth, opioids like oxycontin, fentanyl and heroin aren't popular here. Mostly regular party dope and weird Chinese designer drugs for younger people like 3MMA and 4FMP.
I think we are living in the Star Trek universe, but we're just getting to the Bell Riots shown in DS9. No word on if we get much past it.
On the planets in the Cardassian/Federation neutral zone....
We were talking about earth. In Star Trek earth is nice.
Add some 1984 to the mix.
Well both books were written to describe what british authoritarianism would look like.
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler How long before we have a leak of the PM masturbating to state violence? Ugh V for Vandetta was so sexual in such an intentionally uncomfortable way :::
I don't remember a scene like that was it only in the comic?
I didn't watch the movie, but I can't imagine an American movie getting away with what the comic did. Yeah, one of the major themes of the comic is the fucked up sexuality displayed by the fascists and the leader gets off on the concentration camps.
Really good comic, but it's definitely a lot. Moore did a really good job of depicting the fascists as pathetic but dangerous. Though fair warning, if Moore could think of a slur a brit might possibly use it's in that comic.
Honestly, the us is going full vendetta too. Our president is really reminiscent of Adam Susan
The US would be better off with president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
Porn loophole? You can literally Google image search porn.
Yeah, I noticed Google had evaded the ban.
Would have thought they'd be all over the opportunity to gobble up even more data.
I wonder how they figure that's going to work out.
I couldn't imagine being this pants-shittingly stupid about how the internet works.
To the people of the UK:
What the hell is this authoritarian, pearl clutching shit? You're fucking shit up for everyone. Can you get your people to please fuck off?
Thanks, from some guy on the Internet.
Yes I know I'll write to my local MP and see what they sa- oh they didn't respond. Ah, I'll sign that petition that got over 400,000 signatur- oh they said no. You can be damn sure the "people of the UK" have nothing to do with this, we didn't vote on it. Should just take a leaf out of the French book and just start burning shit.
The French get shit done. I can certainly say that. They're a population that really won't stand for being shit on. It's why they made such good use of the guillotine, historically.
Taking a page from their book may not be a bad idea.... Or you could reference the alleged works of Saint Luigi from America. He also made a profound impact. At least for a while.
Don't tell them you can buy a vps and run your own vpn in another country.
They probably know and don't care because more than 99.99% won't do it.
Shh, dont tell him lobotomies became mandatory on birth since Gen Z, and there are only few who still know how this magical phone they are using every day works, let alone know what an IP address is
Accessing the internet now requires age verification. Gg
In the UK we already have a law where isps block porn by default (blacklisting) the adult who took out the plan can contact the isp and ask them to opt out of these blocks. That's been a thing for about 10 years. You can own a Pay-as-you-go sim as a minor but you have to send government id to prove you are over 18 to get the adult content filtering turned off.
That's one of the things that made it clear to me that the new law is an authoritarian data mining operation and blatant power grab. Like... We already have these tools in place. If you don't want your kid accessing porn, don't opt out of the filters provided by your isp.
You could argue that putting the onus on the platform is more effective at "protecting kids" than having the isps maintain blacklists but there will always be small sites that don't comply and enterprising kids who find a way around any block. Just like the law requires you to be 18 to buy alcohol or tobacco here but there are always dodgy shops who sell tobacco to underage kids. There are older siblings and relatives willing to buy cigarettes and alcohol for underage teens.
This was never about protecting the children. That was the Trojan horse used to justify these laws to the technically uninformed.
I demand total access to UK official's private life then.
I see the louis rossmann in that answer
VPN company: "Don't care, not in the UK, fuck off."
Mullvad vpn is probably gonna be safe from this demand from the uk because their account system relies on random string of numbers PLUS their website is also available on the tor browser
as long as they can accept GBP in the mail you're good
They take crypto, wash a few satoshis through lightning and you're as good as anonymous.
sure, xmr would be better, but 🤷🏻♂️
edit: well shuck my corn!
"We accept cash, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, bank wire, credit card, PayPal, Swish, Eps transfer, Bancontact, iDEAL, and Przelewy24."
That's a niiiice tip.
Deleting my account and re-joining under TOR when my lapse comes around. Might as well hide my use entirely.
Next step would be requiring UK ISPs to block traffic to the VPNs. They've already made it so you can't go to some sites based on DNS lookups, so there's precedent. Making it by IP address from a continuously-updated list would make it exceedingly difficult for regular users to access a public VPN, and while making one yourself from a VPS is straightforward, it can get expensive very quickly if you want to watch videos or download lots of stuff through it.
Real talk though, Tor for porn would be an awful experience and would slow down the entire Tor network. Tor is slow to begin with, and downloading large files (like videos) only slows things down even more for everyone. It should be a last resort, not the first thing people flock to. It’s the same reason people avoid torrenting over Tor; It’s slow and inefficient, so your downloads take fucking forever.
You use Tor to pop out in any other more enlightened country where you use bitcoin or some other crypto to purchase access to a good vpn and download the installer.
Then download TBs of porn through your shiny new vpn subscription rather than bogging down the onion network
A VPS is one of the best tools on the internet. Make your own relay, with or without blackjack and/or hookers.
I use up3foe torrenting, but Tor for porn. It's fine.
It was slow when I first tried it, decades ago, but I actually can't tell any difference in speed these days. I use it for everything now.
UK has a massive budget problem and they still keep increasing expenditure on surveillance. That social value is negative at this point as its taking money away from critical services. Well done to the Government continuing the worsen debt, health, and wellbeing of the population. A terrorist will kill 5-10 people, failure to protect the health & well being of population (who needs a roof over their head) it just pales in comparison.
The UK isn't a Federal Country. It's a Unitary state with Devolution. I know it is basically a Federal state in Practice (Holyrood, Cardiff Bay and Stormont all have varying amounts of autonomy) but the distinction is significant.
This is the fucked up bit though: The OSA doesn't put the burden of Age gates on the State. They put it on The Service Provider (Websites and services). This is why so many non-porn forums, lemmy instances, and mastodon instances have either had to shut down or geoblock the UK, all the responsibility is on them to institute this lest they get sued out the arse. They can't afford to get YOTI or whatever, or don't have the manpower or money to institute their own system, so they shut down.
It's also why overblocking is a thing: because the OSA's official defination of what should be blocked is so vague so the two people who decide what get's blocked are the Service Provider and the Government effectively in that order. This is why Reddit is blocking things that should not be agegated (like support groups), because the law is so fucking vague, and why sites like Twitter are blocking tweets that don't need to be blocked under the "news" exception (yes, there is an exception for the news).
All of this, by the way, is because an investment trust and thinktank (yes, a lovely little conflict of interest) called Carnegie United Kingdom Trust pretty much wrote the OSA for the government. As an investment trust, they invest money in things, but being private, they don't need to tell Joe Public what they invest in, nor to the Investees need to tell us. So basically, they invested in YOTI or some others like it, and are making money from it because so many sites are forced to have it to work in the UK.
And all the other major tech players (Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft) are developing "Digital ID" systems as a "solution" which will not only make it easier to track people for them and the government, but also for advertisers, so they aren't complaining either.
TL;DR, The UK basically put all the pressure on the Websites so their friends can make loads of money.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this shit starts pushing Scotland to want to be its own country again.
Oh my sweet summer child:
Thanks for the info. Now I know.
Can you link more information about this conflict of interest? I can't find anything about it.
Just a fun fact about “think tanks”, “institutes”, “foundations” and most of those little groups is that when they appear in the news there’s a solid chance that they’re being propped up by corpo money. Every time they appear you need to go double check their bias and you’ll often find that it will be they themselves saying they’re “a conservative think tank” and, if not that, there will likely be a Wikipedia article and a bunch of other sources confirming it. I’m sure there are good ones, but it’s largely just oil companies and banks and big tech funding some corrupt as hell “academics” in order to buy some credibility.
I loved when I got into with one person over climate change and all they could do was send me articles that use oil-backed think tanks and which quoted a climate scientist who’s such a huge liar that whole webpages exist to organize and debunk all his paid-for bullshit.
The video that lead me down this rabbit hole.
I got around to watching this video... without having seen this guy before (and therefore having no reason to take what he says at face value), and with the "source" in his description being almost unrelated to the video content, all that's left is that "Yoti is funded by trusts, Carnegie is a trust mentioned on Yoti's website."
That is conspiracy-theory level. The author doesn't even go so far as to draw actual conclusions; he's saying "we need to follow the money" which is reasonable, but you are saying "Carnegie invested in an age verifier and that's why they wrote the law." That's going well beyond the facts. You wouldn't stand for it when some moron tries to cast doubt on climate science and you shouldn't stand for it now just because it tickles your biases.
Quite possibly. But almost certainly a lot of Carnegie's money is going to companies who provide online services who now have much higher costs from doing age verification, content blocking and users fleeing, simply because there are a lot of companies in that position.
How these taxes are applied either reimbursed, taxed directly, or passed on: its still is a tax burden increasing the cost of living. This and previous Government's have only further worsened the problem. The police state reduces life expectancy.
The Online Safety Act doesn't apply any new taxes on anyone. It forces service providers (IE: Private Companies) to institute age checks through either AI Face checks or ID either through an in house solution or buying services from a third party (YOTI or similar). It imposes a cost on a business where they have to either spend money setting up an age verification solution or acquire one from a private company. The government doesn't impose any new taxes on people on businesses with this bill, but instead makes companies who run services give money to other companies to comply with the law.
In short, the censorship isn't being done directly by the state, it's being done by private companies under pain of massive fines by the state. Other than suing websites or dealing with court challenges (which is done in house), all the actual legwork is being done by private companies, some of whom, like YOTI, are making handsome amounts of cash.
Read my post, you really didn't read it.
I'll spell it out.
State created the law. That creates a cost to be recovered. How that cost is recovered is irrelevant, it's s state mandated cost aka tax.
Just because it's a state mandated cost doesn't mean it's a tax. Tax implies the money goes to the government to pay for goods and services. It's actually worse than that: it's a levy.
A levy doesn't go to the government. A levy goes to whatever person provides the good or service. For example: if I tax alcohol based on alcohol content, the amount of money added to the tax goes to the government. If I place a levy based on alcohol content, the amount of money that is added goes to the person/company selling the booze. An example of a levy is the plastic bag levy, which was put in place to reduce plastic pollution. That money you spend on a bag doesn't go to the government, it goes to the people you got the bag from, and they can do whatever they want with it, keep it, give it to charity, use it to buy Heroin on the deep web, you name it!
What this law has effectively done has made service providers (not just companies, but whoever runs the site) a choice: They can either develop their own age verification system or pay a company (like YOTI) to do it for them. Most service providers do the latter because they do not have the resources to do the latter.
Does the money go to the government? No (except maybe under the table nudge nudge wink wink), it goes straight to the company. What the government has done is force entities to give a private company money.
It's a tax in the way, let's say, a hypothetical Right-Libertarian government might tax you, or even an American Homeowners Association might "tax" you: making you give a private company money.
Levy, lol.
Call it what it is: a tax.
A burden on the population. No amount of dirty politics changes the fact. Taxes do not all get directly paid to gavernment. Like sales taxes, service tips ect.
Edit wrote another post, more depth.
The population being the people who run self hosted forums with a certain amount of British users. If you are one of those people, yeah, I'm sorry, I hate it too, but the vast majority of the UK don't run forums with a large amount of British users. Fun fact, the End users (the people giving away their IDs) aren't actually paying shit to anyone bar their IDs.
VAT (what you call "sales tax") does go to the Treasury. Like when you buy something, that 20% extra you paid goes off to the government via the Taxes the shop pays. That's how VAT works.
Services tips aren't really a thing in the UK, especially not mandatory ones because food service workers in the UK aren't exempt from the minimum wage.
Are you even from the UK? Are you even in the UK? Because if you were from here, or even if you spent any amount of time here, you would've known the following things:
Considering these things, I think you're American. In that case, please, do us a favour, don't act like you're a fucking expert on this. I live in the UK, Scotland to be precise. Shit's bad, The OSA can get tae fuck, but having Yanks who watched videos made by other yanks who don't know shit about fuck on the ground lecture me about my own fucking country as if it's just "America with funny accents" not only doesn't help, it's just spreading bullshit.
It's not a tax burden because it's not any kind of tax. It's a cost of doing business, like the cost of keeping and filing accounts. Imposing an additional cost on services which are by-and-large ad-funded/freemium does not have nearly the same effects as funding something out of the treasury.
It very much is.
Doesn't matter who or how its recovered. Its still a state mandated cost, aka indirect tax.
Every single piece of legislation costs the population. They all add a million cuts to the costs of living. In times of economic crisis these costs need to come down not up.
Edit: addressing the ad revenue stream. Again irrelevant. The ad revenue stream is reduced, some platforms are talking about charging UK users the outcome is the same. Maybe some pull out of the UK or force more ads into the freemium services costing time.
The requirement to file accounts is not a tax. Call things what they are, not whatever you've decided they're similar to in your mind. To do is either confusing or dishonest, depending on whether people ultimately see through what you're doing or not.
Opposition to this on the basis of finances requires you to actually have some idea of the fiscal outcome. If the number of British children who end up bypassing the rules and viewing genuinely harmful material is small then it will result in lower costs from children traumatised, mentally ill or killing themselves.
I oppose the act because of incalculable costs to privacy, not because it might mean Facebook has to display 10 more ads to someone to maintain their profit margins.
You should practice it.
Levy is a Tax.
Absolute bollocks. Doesn't require anything. It only requires personal opinion. Parliament runs on it.
Of course the privacy impact is huge. privacy just does not matter to the average working voting person trying to put groceries on the table.
MPs wont change the stance here because people want to be protected by anonymity. Frankly they won't change stance at all. Its a certainty at this point.
But it will increase the cost of business which will be passed on and definitely exploited.
"Wont somebody think of the children"
Plenty of children starving in the UK because Government services cant raise revenue to maintain existing levels of public services.
I look to the UK and see the future of western economies. Boned badly, society highly controlled with a large overall tax burden, years of immigration to keep the budget balaced on paper increasing the impact all to delay the fallout. And yes while this will most likely not register a blip to the CPI, its still yet another cut in the wrong direction.
If your opposition is just based on vibes than it can be ignored based on nothing more than that.
Oh, you are talking about an actual fee in the legislation, not the cost of contracting with a company that verifies ages.
The cost though is £70 million. Since you raise the prospect of child poverty, the one policy the government needs to reverse to improve child poverty is the two-child benefit cap, which would cost £2.1bn, so this policy costs 3% of a substantive policy on child poverty.
A high estimate for how many deaths could be prevented by lifting the cap is about 300 per year, that I have seen (it's not really about the cap itself but is about modelling what would happen if Labour were able to reduce child poverty at the same rate it was in 1997-2010, which would presumably include eliminating the cap). 3% of 300 is 9 deaths. While I don't support the OSA, I think it is completely plausible that a policy which reduces the amount children are looking at extreme violence and advocation of eating disorders and suicide would prevent in the region of 9 deaths per year. About 150 children die each year by suicide (according to statistics, which will undercount the problem because parents as a rule don't want their child's death to be recorded as suicide). And saving 9 lives is to bring this policy in line, cost-wise, with an estimate that relates to a whole programme of government, which will in reality cost far more than £2.1bn.
Cost is not the right lens through which to examine the OSA, no matter what your personal opinion tells you.
Economy and climate change is getting worse and they need to protect their rich, so more control of us low lives are needed. They laying the groundwork.
Their mass surveillance program doesn’t even work. Like not enough people are watching those video feeds of all the cameras in London to prevent crime or even solve crime. Not to mention UK also has a cop problem. People who are in most need of their protection do not trust the police.
Let's extend our unpopular law to more places! Soon, you'll have to verify your age to see boobs in real life. Which will be pretty unfortunate for teens trying to get busy in the backseats of cars.
Microsoft Banned Commercial
Backseats of cars? This is the UK not Florida.
That's fine. We'll just use Tor instead
They'll just block that too. Can't have a full blown dictatorship without taking away any freedom people have. Better not have a negative opinion about it either.
Holy Fuck 1984 was a warning, not a fucking manual on how to do things.
Against them evil communists!... oh the irony...
It was a warning against authoritarians. 1984 was inspired by his time conscripted into the propaganda service during world war 2 and his negative experiences with the soviets fighting alongside them in Spain. It was a warning against both fascists and authoritarian communists
Im guessing they'll make it illegal for users to try to bypass the restriction.
Hello China my old friend ....
I don't think it's illegal in China, they also don't blanket ban vpns.
Good luck preventing someone from getting a vps in the another country and doing their own tunnel. It can be done in such a way is undetectable at the protocol level. Coming up next age verification for ssh.
What they can likely do is the same as with porn sites: require law-abiding, trusted and well-known VPN providers to do age verification, thus pushing people to more obscure and risky providers who don't care about the law instead.
In that case they have to geoblock UK to be out of UK jurisdiction. Which a lot of these providers are already doing.
And if they aren't doing it themselves, the UK will likely do it for them by forcing UK network providers to block them.
That's how my OpenVPN server works, Digital Ocean droplet overseas.
Damn, what is going on there? This is scary even for 18+ users.
It's scarier. They will track everything you are doing not and not have to guess what device you are using behind a shared IP address.
they want to know POCs, immigrants, women, which political parties you support, of course criticism against trump.
Use tor to tunnel to a more enlightened country
buy vpn anonymously
use vpn
Continue to buy VPNs while using other VPNs. Or use mullvad who apparently even accept cash in the post.
PIA takes bitcoin, i've used it myself before. easier, cheaper and less risky than sending cash in the post
You can use cash to buy gift cards, then fuel your account with 3rd party gift cards. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/gift-card-payment (Not the most economical, but a good way to bootstrap into a VPN if more traditional payments are not available)
Also traceable unless you bought the bitcoin anonymously or mined it. Mullvad accepts Monero, which is not traceable (and also bitcoin if you really want to).
at the moment no one is going into that level of granularity. I do own some monero, if i feel the need in the future i may switch over to that completely or at least start purchasing bitcoin anonymously which is something else a VPN can help with.
Add to that the fact that if a place accepts crypto there's a good chance that they only accept one and that is BTC
Yeah, Monero is a pain which is why a lot of people prefer mailing the money. That was my point.
Just create your own VPN. Just rent a vps server in Ireland or Netherlands and install VPN software on it like OpenVPN and route your traffic through that server. You can even share your VPN with friends.
at some point i may do
Doubling down on the batshit. Everyone knew VPNs were going to be the low effort workaround to this authoritarian batshittery.
I get what the (well meaning, I think) people lobbying for this are trying to achieve, but everything from the lobbying to legislation to enforcement seems to be happening in the worst way imaginable. Almost like it's an intentional "You want to see how badly can we do this? Hold my drink! YOLO!!"
For me, the tell was UK PLC leaving it up to the sites themselves to decide who/how the verification would be done. Classic bad management "I don't understand the slightest thing about any of this, but HOW HARD COULD IT BE?!" response. It's like the "series of tubes" stupidity all over again.
I assure you these people are not well meaning.
I assure you these people are not well meaning.
Gee I totally didn't see this coming and made a comment about it earlier. Oh wait I totally did.
The peoples republic of United Kingdom.
A true People's Republic would have less surveillance noncence than this.
The UK is a literal 1984 in the works.
Republic of UK, when did that happen
I'm certain a lot of politicians and veterans are bitter over the lack of universal adoration they get in their own countries. Politicians certainly annoyed with how easy it is for victims of war and veterans against war speaking out against enlistment. Politicians and the rich want their populaces to be patriots whereas the Internet makes people jaded when learning their countries history and present in detail.
I'm certain that's the real reason internet censorship picked up steam. The Internet has poisoned the well for so many countries when trying to build out some unified national message of righteous action. Can't like how negative the public reacts to bills described as for child safety. Internet makes it real easy to call it another manipulative cry of wolf. It's got to be the #1 marketing trick for the rich and powerful. #2 being those foreigners are evil. But shit now people see people across the world are mostly just getting by not even participating in politics or don't even have any voting power and are just caught in the crossfires of the power hungry
Today there are no heros from the invasions across Asia west to east. In recent times you don't get a marketing bump for fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya, wherever. That's problematic for patriotism and public support for future war fighting. Every government leader now has a mixed legacy while alive that makes their memory mute in history compared to WW2 and earlier leaders who committed just as much or likely far worse terrors but enjoyed widespread domestic support while in power and adoration in retirement.
National anthems before sporting events are tacky whereas just like 15 years ago damn near everyone bought into those. I swear one day there will monitoring software and crackdowns on hitting the mute button during national anthems and commercials
Are they gonna ban torrents next? Https? You can ssh to a remote server and wget files all day long, or setup vnc and have a vpn like experience.
Maybe not if you are thirteen years old...
It's funny, because that's exactly what I did around the age of 13 to bypass my school's firewall. I had everything on a USB drive, including Ghostzilla and PuTTY so I could browse through an SSH SOCKS tunnel. Mind you, my home computer was the SSH server -- but these days it wouldn't be hard to get a VPS in a less restrictive country:
"Hey [parent], can I borrow your credit card to set up a server so my friends and I can play [game] together?"
It takes one kid in a group to set something like this up.
The neighbours' seven-year-old suggested using a VPN to get around age checks. I don't know if he knows what one is, but he's definitely seen adverts for them.
Oh, here we go 🍿
they also thought oat meal and corn flakes would end masturbation, look how that went...
They hwat now?
I definately wasnt sneaking off to eat a bowl of cereal in my room when i thought nobody was around.
Of course.
Look, you are the county that came up with hooligan concept. Do try to apply it locally. I've seen the french act harsher for pettier reasons.
Honestly, it's not been terribly effective, and the ones who stir the most shit usually don't do it for the right reasons.
I feel you, protests in my country are not as effective as french or spanish protests, and usually devolve into large picnics instead.
Because you can't protest in an empty stomach. On the other hand, now we're too full to protest. Let's go home, Benfica is playing today.
Hooliganism is members of the Working Class fighting other members of the Working Class or Foreigners due to nothing more than tribalism and enjoying violence.
It has zero to do with pushing back on those with power over them or standing up for one's principles.
Hooliganism is actually a perfect example of the one of the ways the elites in the UK control the "lower" classes by having them discharge their anger at each other instead of going against the powerful.
It's always been like that - panem et circenses.
lemmy and mastodon both have lots of porn. this is a dumb waste of time.
Insert tasteless parody of the "First They Came" poem
Why aren't these chuds fearing for their lives? Why aren't they being dragged out into the street and strung up by their own intestines? I thought this world was supposed to defend freedom. Guess not.
Clown country
Hurrah Brexit!
They wouldn't be able to get this shit to fly against the other members of the EU, I don't think.
Those people are doing the Lord's work, forcing companies to give control over user data, to the users, making USB C a standard for all devices... I won't list everything, but shit. The rest of the world has benefited by proxy on so many things, because of the EU.
The UK is acting like a bunch of pearl clutching soccer moms.
all of the sudden these goody two shoes politicians want to control porn for "the safety of the children"
what a bunch of tards
Every british tech-literate person should participate in I2P. The Internet should be freedom.
Ah yes "The Porn Loophole", was one of my favorites , I should still have it on a DVD somewhere.
I've got one called the Porn Loopback Hole, wanna see?
Well they're going to suddenly see a lot of transexual porn streaming through Antarctica starting.... >click!< NOW.
Cant force your legislation on businesses out of your country, simple as that. I hope those VPN providers just tell them to fuck off.
Let's say we win the fight, what do we do with all those censoring pricks ?