A universal feature of traveling Europe as a Hackaday scribe is that when you sit in a hackerspace in another country and proclaim how nice a place it all is, the denizens will respond pessimistically with how dreadful their country really is. My stock response is to say “Hold my beer” and recount the antics of British politicians, but the truth is, the grass is always greener on the other side.
There’s one thing here in dear old Blighty that has me especially concerned at the moment though, and perhaps it’s time to talk about it here. The Online Safety Act has just come into force and is the UK government’s attempt to deal with what they perceive as the nasties on the Internet, and while some of its aspirations may be honourable, its effects are turning out to be a little chilling.
As might be expected, the Act requires providers to ensure their services are free of illegal material, and it creates some new offences surrounding sharing images without consent, and online stalking. Where the concern lies for me is in the requirement for age verification to ensure kids don’t see anything the government things they shouldn’t, which is being enforced through online ID verification. There are many reasons why this is of concern, but I’ll name the three at the top of my list.
As anyone who has helped their non technical friends secure their networks will tell you, nothing boosts technical expertise more than presenting a 13-year-old with an online restriction. It’s already been shown how a tech-savvy kid can use an AI generated fake ID to watch online smut, and I am thus certain that the Act just won’t work. Kids will trade ways to get round it just like they traded floppies full of dodgy JPGs in the playground back in the ’90s.
The scope of the Act extends way beyond merely the porn sites you might expect, so your average Brit is going to find themselves uploading their drivers’ licence or passport an awful lot. The probability of a data breach involving all that valuable data will approach one, and all those identities will be compromised. Making more laws won’t stop this happening, after all the very definition of a criminal is a person with a disregard for the law.
And finally, that broad scope is catching all manner of inoffensive and blameless online communities who don’t have the resources to put the age verification and other measures in place. Your classic car forum, a support group for people with mental health problems, even possibly Wikipedia. Of course it’s important to protect children from inappropriate content, but killing the British internet for everyone else shouldn’t be a side effect.
This issue is likely to rumble on for a while in the UK, as at the time of writing a petition for its reform stands around 350k signatures. Thus a further parliamentary debate seems very likely, and no doubt we’ll see a few of our overlords wriggling a little to avoid the inevitable repercussions. You can sign it if you’re a Brit, and meanwhile if you’d like to restore access to the internet that the rest of the world sees, you can join the hordes of Brits running to acquire VPN access.
Palace of Westminster header image: Diliff, CC BY-SA 2.5.
Fake ID business is going to be very profitable for a certain period of time before they patch that. AI is a fun workaround, I guess you no longer go down around an alleyway and meet somebody who has a photo booth and a machine to print the cards anymore. But somebody who knows how to use the AI properly will probably be collecting money from people who don’t inside some discord server.
The idea that this is about protecting children from pornography should be dispelled immediately. Everything which is clearly and obviously wrong (such as this law) will require an alibi. They don’t care about exposing kids to sex, that has been made abundantly clear in several different ways. They are essentially trying to stave off impending civil unrest; they’ve laid all the bones for a domestic mass conflict and are refusing to pay the bill, and the only tools of statecraft they are comfortable with are technocratic fiddling around, such as this. It’s not going to end well.
Lots of countries are stubbornly building the foundations for civil unrest or even war right now, and their own utopianism makes them unable to admit that to themselves… but the taboo won’t prevent it from eventually happening. Huge unforced error. They’ll just keep shouting at other people to be nice and kind and empathetic and tolerate what is going on for just a bit longer until bloodshed breaks out, never understanding that you cannot simply nag populations into peace.
The fun thing about this comment is that, depending on your mood, you can read it (at least) two ways:
Are you talking about my country? You are an idiot, or !
You are so right, those other blokes are stoking the fires they will be burned in. We’ll be fine over here, though.
Or, the comment can be read as “Looks like you forget to take your meds again.”
I’m usually the first person to call people out for the fairly regular cadence with which they post particularly unhinged comments here on HaD. That’s why I took on this moniker, after all.
Still, can’t see any particularly off-kilter things that TG is saying. Why don’t you explain your own perspective to all of us?
They’re whistling past the graveyard.
How did you get “You r an id1ot” in your post? In the past I’ve gotten entire posts erased by a “nonce algorithm”. Which is cutesy, but doesn’t help me understand any nuance.
It’s like their political masters have got so close to China in avoid Trump because he’s apparently evil, that they haven’t spotted just how evil they are becoming by continuing to apologist for China.
Mainly cos they are flat broke and need the cash so cant offend them too loudly.
Pretty bad really.
Selling out your entire country because you’ve failed to implement brexit, failed to stop the boats and failed to deal with the people on welfare in a system which makes the USA’s free payout look like change to throw into a fountain.
USA is busy kicking out illegals but the UK is saying; come here, everything is free, including all the children we’re not really bothered about protecting.
This bill is a Stasi wet dream for crushing criticism and sending people to prison for daring to question the state. Just cos it’s not doing it now doesn’t mean it’s not a bright glowing neon sign in the not too far distance.
What’s wrong with you people ?? You pretty much brought democracy to half the world.
Be more French about it, have another revolution, it’s been a while.
After lowering the voting age to 16yrs to try and keep themselves in power, the current government also ban access to content which might form a decent world view point of those kids who cant see it till they are 18yrs old.
It couldn’t be more obvious and disgusting what is happening if they went and announced it on national TV.
It’s a dictatorship in slow motion.
Regarding links to China, you could also have mentioned that the UK Labour government recently announced that they were going to return to recognizing CCP extradition requests for Hong Kong refugees, sending them back to China and whatever fate awaits them.
And they sanctimoniously claim the moral high ground!
Wait what? When did they say that?
That is playing with fire so hot I’m shocked this mob of a government has the stones or stupidity to even try it…
Sanctimonious and hypocritical is to be expected though, there is usually an element of that in politician, though the scale of stupid coming out Labour is quite astonishing.
almost as stupid as the conservatives? i pity the Brits and Scots for their government. (althouth with what is happening here in the netherlands the last 12 years is also nothing to brag about…)
I’d say this Labour government is worse even than Liz Truss, who didn’t manage to outlast a cabbage as PM… But having that stupidly high majority of MPs with only 1/3 of the vote means they can get away with it for much longer, at least till the party fractures (which it seems to be doing)…
NB I don’t think very much of the Conservatives of late either, as a collective at least. However some of them like Ben Wallace did an amazingly good job considering, where all of this Labour mob seem to be inept, illogical, and rather tone deaf…
They probably wish it was, but there is no way they will get enough votes at the next election even though they have desperately gone for tossing children into the pool of voters. They might have a good enough PR campaign to sway many of the most ignorant of them, but nowhere near enough to make up for how unpopular they are already with the rest of the population. And I’d like to think with the rather obvious and rapid changes for the worst most 16 years old that actually would bother voting are at least somewhat aware of why.. Labour were not even popular when they got elected, even if they got a stupidly large majority of seats, getting barely got 1/3rd of the vote after decades of Tory governance and that party imploding with stupid and infighting for the last few years is actually embarrassing for them – they should have gotten a huge share of the protest votes and clearly didn’t. And since getting elected they have only upset more and more of the population…
The way things are going Farage is actually looking like a credible choice for the next PM, which given how polarising he has been at times…
What does the EFF have to say about this nonsense?
Not sure it has any jurisdictional clout (but maybe it does); perhaps it could use its considerable clout in things of this matter, stateside, to file the equivalent of an amicus curiae with the blockheads who started this nonsense.
The problem is that not everyone in the UK has an ID or the ability to get one, for instance people who dont have sufficient referee’s to link their legal ID the their physical one
The world is so thoughly saturated with VPN ads about bypassing Geolocks that this simply won’t work.
Humans have the remarkable ability to share knowledge so it always trickles down.
I was using proxies to bypass restrictions on school computers before I had any idea what any of it was..hidemyass.com was a school favourite and this would be early 2000s.
The problem is that it’ll lead people to using cheap VPN services which wille expose the users to far worse than the original smut.
I’m quite convinced that things like this are just a ruse for “powerful people” to gain more control over the masses of sheep. The “safety for kids” (or whatever) is just a thin veil to hide the true goals.
And I’m having similar thoughts about AI and their “hallucinations”. AI is becoming an ever more important tool and it can and will be (ab)used to manipulate people and opinions. My suspicions are that these “hallucinations” are a deliberate part of AI programming to learn it to lie ever more convincingly. Apparently already 1/3 of the accounts on “social media sites” are fake and I won’t be surprised if they will outnumber “real humans” soon, and I’m horrified for what that will mean for democracy.
And as this is an article over GB… The whole Brexit thing was a huge effort by a small number of people and a lot of manipulation. I’m still confused how so many people were manipulated to make them believe that was a good idea.
And a part of the problem is that the EU does not work very well. One of the ways I’ve got it explained is that somewhere in the ’90-ies we stopped voting for “leaders” and started voting for “managers”. But managers are not good enough to lead a country. It’s also the change from “things that work well” to “things that sound good” with the goal to get to the next election. As far as I know China is the only country which has a long term strategy. (I.e. > 10 years, and even 50 year plans).
I’m sorry about the rant. I know Hackaday is no good place for politics. But this article is already to much drenched in politics anyway, and it’s all part of the fundamental disconnectedness of all things.
Drinking the Kool-Aid ?
When one side has no arguments except gaslighting i.e. “meds” or “kool-aid”, you know they’re losing the culture war lol.
Care to explain exactly what you think they got wrong and why? This is a called a “discussion section” not the “ad-hominem section”
Well, the part where they’re saying that AI hallucinations are a nefarious plot instead of a product of over-hyped technology that was sold to the public on false premises. That’s a classic conspiracy theory.
It’s easier to think that someone’s actively out there to get you than admit nobody has any control and the whole bad situation is due to sheer incompetence and stupidity. That at least opens the possibility of defending yourself against whatever harm awaits.
Brexit was a result of a 20-year misinformation campaign by the “yellow press” and their associates, but it’s just as well they were victims of their own success in selling anger. They kept selling newspapers by playing into the fears and misunderstandings of the public, and in doing so they stoked more anger and spread lies about the EU, to the point that even the people involved started believing in their own stories. They kept making up more in order to convince other people that they should leave the EU.
Thinking that this is a real conspiracy is secretly hoping that there was and is something you could do about it, whereas thinking that it was just a colossal c–k-up would be admitting that regardless of your efforts, it will probably happen again.
Conspiracies are everywhere, by definition all you need are 3 people conspiring in secret to effect change.
Take the MS ai. I’m sure all those images of asian and lack 16th century englishmen / asian and black nazis were the product of it being trained on all those real photos of asian and lack 16th century englishmen / asian and black nazis. Surely that is easier to believe than gasp someone put them there on purpose. I wonder why someone would do that? I wonder which subtler manipulations aren’t noticed.
‘Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity’ — Hanlon’s Razor.
In the rush to publish the Generative AI all sorts of mistakes must have been made. “I have not got what you want, but here is something you can look at”. In a similar vein, who has never received a list of everything on a website when searching for a topic not in it. Maplin used to be particularly bad for this, and other (UK) websites still are.
For the avoidance of confusion I am not apologising for the ‘hallucination’ phenomenon; in fact I worry that such things will poison the global knowledge base to the point that nothing can be trusted in future.
Brexit if it had been delivered correctly would have worked.
The problem was despite democracy telling the government at the time and each one since exactly what the majority of people wanted, the task of getting it done was left with a party that firmly were in the camp that wanted to remain and so they frustrated it and failed to achieve anything useful.
Because of that utter refusal to do want the vote asked for, they created all the problems the UK is now suffering from.
Direct result. That & all of the fraud under ridiculous covid rules.
There is nothing left but authoritarianism.
The fact that parties which claim they are defenders of democracy often force through massively undemocratic and unpopular things is a huge contradiction which will eventually cause very serious backlash… and of course, as usual, the people involved will not even be capable of perceiving that they share responsibility for it.
“Yeah, we massively transformed society over a shockingly short timescale, but the reaction is all the fault of the reactionaries!” It’s called reaction because it’s basically an automatic response.
Legislation that will be impossible to “deliver correctly”, shouldn’t be approved. Can you imagine any world where Brexit was implemented “correctly”? It was a mistake for voters to approve it, despite “telling the government… exactly what the people wanted”. Just read that phrase again, and tell me there was any chance that would happen.
You rather hit the nail on the head for why many folks voted for Brexit yourself, to the point it almost sounds like you where arguing to leave. As the EU was a broken, fractious bureaucratic mess where The UK where just about the only nation actually following the rules to the detriment of some of our industries. With a mass migration problem that nobody in the EU wanted to deal with, in part because so many of them want to come here so it isn’t the EU as a whole’s problem, etc, etc.
So in the case of the UK as we paid in vastly vastly more than we got out, and are isolated enough with our natural moat anyway it makes it easy to argue out is better than in. Especially when you have no idea what the eventual trade deals will be with the EU, so can assume they will be pretty much free trade if you like, and even if they are punitive and petty on the continent we don’t actually NEED them – vast amounts of the imports happen to come from Asia etc – obviously loss of trading in both directions would hurt some but not the end of the world…
About the only remotely convincing and argument put forward for staying where ‘eh things aren’t so bad now, why rock the boat?’ and ‘Passports and Visa are so inconvenient’. The latter of which for a good portion of the folks old enough to vote when the Brexit vote happened is something they’d have already lived with, and it did not put them off their holiday in the EU or travel for work.
Personally I quite like the concept of Europe, but with the execution of that idea at the time being so poor it isn’t surprising many folks decided that out was better than in – and its not like the UK was the only nation with that sentiment growing. Though Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has largely patched the visible cracks, or at least made them less relevant as with a now openly aggressive bear on the doorstep internal bickering and red tape suddenly seems much less important.
#3 (communities who don’t have resources …)
not to worry … I’m sure Google and Meta will happily provide a nice easy to incorporate widget for them
I’ve read an article on tweakers.net (dutch) about the same subject. The headline was that google might be used with their identity api to check for the age of people, but this turned out to be just a rumour. I shudder at the thought of google gaining even more information.
When the persons age has to be proven, the identity needs to be proven, so you’ll leave more of a trackable trace behind which is a great cause for concern.
At least here in the Netherlands I believe there’s a law that doesn’t allow companies to store IDs for long. I know of at least one company that uses the ID for identification but destroys it after verification, so no data can be leaked if this doesn’t fail. But you guessed it, removal may fail, backups may be made and things stick around for much longer than intended and stuff can get leaked. That’s just reality.
For me the effect of age verification and as a result identification as a whole, I’d stop visiting those websites.
It feels a little bit like the under age magic use trace in the magical world of Harry Potter. But this has the side effect that everyone is subjected to verification, not just kids. And I’m a firm believer that parents should be the ones to place restrictions on kids because they are responsible for their kids actions and upbringing. That said, I’m in favour of restricting access to social media (evil in my opinion) and smart phone use. Just not the way it’s implemented (or how they plan to do it).
I guarantee companies will be breaching those laws, hell there are regular breaches of online retailers where they’re discovered to have stored all sorts of financial stuff, personal stuff, even medical records, therapy sessions etc. unencrypted, for longer than permitted etc, this will be no different.
…Kind of like leaving a bunch of user identification photos and government IDs on a public firebase bucket without even so much as a login required to view and scrape it all? Surely that wouldn’t happen, that would be silly!
Perfect time for vibe coding to be en vogue.
The UK is letting in nearly 1000 illegal immigrants per day over the channel which once protected them from invasion by entire countries.
They get free hotel accommodation, front of the queue access to the national health service and many of them are working illegally anyway, which is finally starting to cause civil unrest because the UK population has just had enough of this utter nonsense.
But they are more interested in real ID for pointless age checks for somehow protecting children online from seeing porn which can be found via any search engine with image or video search, plus any free proxy or VPN.
Really.
That’s the government’s priority?
It’s quite clear it’s NOTHING to do with children.
Perhaps your post raises some significant concerns about immigration but I can’t help but feel that the tone and implications of your argument lean forward towards outright nazism. This is a technical site and it’s not welcome to discuss the challenges posed by immigration framing it as an “invasion” and suggesting that immigrants are responsible for native UK citizens being the fascist morons they are. It’s crucial to remember that many immigrants are fleeing war and economic hardships. They are seeking a better life for themselvs and it doesn’t matter whether they are willing to contribute to society in ways envisioned by extremist political parties. Additionally focusing solely on the immigration distracts you from the broader more nuanced discussions about how to effectively manage decline in IQ of native britons. Promoting dialogue based on understanding and empathy must be used until it becomes far more productive than resorting to racial violence. Let’s aim for a conversation that seeks unity among all humans rather than one that fosters divisions.
Well then, perhaps you will be the first to invite some of those unfortunate souls into your humble abode and offer them “understanding and empathy”.
Let us know how you do.
Oh, and by the way, so far >70% of the illegals apprehended by ICE here in USA have criminal histories of appalling acts (assaults against minors, capital offenses, etc). So by all means invite a few of these outstanding folks into your home.
London (that I knew) is completely unrecognizable.
Inmigration is part of the human nature, we did it in the past, we are doing now and we will do it in the future, Sadly the trend in a global scale is to blame inmigrants for everythnig that is wrong in the country,this is nothing new, there was a guy with a funny moustache that blamed inmigrants and minorities for the country’s problems, we have an orannge dude doing the same, I don’t remember the name :) , it is nothing new, the sad part is that everyone is taking the bait. In the other hand, the core of society, family, is being sourronded by geofences in order to “keep them safe” and make money of their digital footprints in the process. So keep everyone in their own bubble and feeded with media and blame someone else for any problem that all countries has. So I guess in the case of the Oline Safety Act, they are “protecting you from…?? reality???”
Yes immigration always happened, but at this scale, immigration leads not into assimilation, but to balkanization, which then again leads to unrest, which enables politicians to introduce draconian laws, such as this one, because people are more afraid. Furthermore, given that the wages have stagnated over the last decades, an influx of low wage workers (which most of the immigrants are, at least those who will work), presses the wages for the local population further down. At last, the inner cohesion of society is destroyed, which might be wanted by capitalists, due to a less cohesive workforce being less likely to create unions (see for example amazon, which actually did some research on this, and which is why they pushed so hard to diversifying their workforce).
Furthermore it leads to the enshittification of software and products,, suh as what we see with windows and google, since firms will hire cheap engineers which have got their diploma in “fake” universities, and only got hired because their cousin is head of HR or another department.
Thus the root to it all may simply be greed or the strife for power, which is hardly a condition you can fully treat. However, for conditions which we are unable to fully heal, we are forced to treat the symptoms as well as possible.
Immigration causes friction in the society, regardless of what you think about the immigrants.
It’s easy to dismiss this as just racism and political extremism, but when you have a million people without jobs or social ties just walking in and hunkering down in some ghetto because they can’t afford anything else, demanding free social services and money from the majority – and crocodile tear shedding politicians demanding power to themselves to “help” all the poor immigrants – you get problems. It means economic, social, and political instability that causes and enables the kind of extremism that our little fellow with the mustache represents.
Balkanization? That’s an interesting point because the recent conflicts in the Balkans were a consequence of the “divide and conquer” politics of the West, most notably German, UK and US governments… They know how to do it. Of course, for it to work the people should be willing to play along by hating the other poor soul instead of the hypocrites that run the show.
Simple statements of fact can’t make you a Nazi…
They might lean that way, and there certainly is a growing sentiment against the illegals here – as bob mentions, but in a way that to me sounds more sad things have gotten so bad that the famously patient, tolerant British population as a whole is starting to think it is time to act like a Frenchman and revolt (tongue is firmly in cheek there just in case you can’t understand the unique history between Britain and France)…
But facts which everything up to the last 3 lines are nothing but fact, and easily verifiable facts can’t make you Nazi or anything else. And to imply such a thing about somebody simply because you don’t like the facts they report doesn’t make you out to be a paragon of empathy and virtue. If anything it makes you the more fascist dictatorial type wanting to stamp out anything that doesn’t fit you view on the world.
factually I’d have to say that is rather dubious, as if they really where fleeing you’d see way way more older folks, children and women, where it turns out most of them are working age men… A rather tricky thing to really prove the root causes, but when the vast majority of the folks coming here illegally are male. With plenty of cases of them wanting to bring their family over by safer means later it rather suggests their home didn’t actually need to be fled. So they could have applied to come here legally instead…
This is just grandstanding BS to further their own hidden agenda, while not solving the problem at all.
All this does is actually increase the risk to the children, as the more this sort of crap spreads the more parents and children will have no choice but to bypass it to get the essentials done. Hence the massive surge in VPN…
Also they claim this filters the scumbag adults away from Children keeping those children safe… Which it just won’t, as how is it supposed to do that! You have to allow children to play online with their friends, interact with their often online homework, help each other with it etc, and as soon as you allow them to connect to anything on the internet with other people, and with filters that are only supposed to keep out those too young out…
A lot of porn browsers on this thread…
I’m in the UK and something did need to be done but this dodgy legislation brought into existence by the previous government smacks of ‘be seen to be doing something’ because ‘wunt sumone fink ov the kiddies’, it’s a poison chalice for the new government because it’s wildly unpopular.
It’s flawed, intrusive, easy to bypass and for people who are already feeling marginalised for their sexuality, gender, particular (legal) proclivities and tastes etc. it’s potentially devastating.
Plus it’s only a matter of time before these ID documents are leaked and abused.
I don’t know what the solution is but, perhaps one idea, most WiFi routers these days offer more than one WiFi network so it would be very simple to have an ‘unfiltered’* internet connection offered on one SSID, perhaps secured by certificate tied to user login on devices, and a filtered, child safe one on another.
Then it becomes the responsibility of the ‘adult’ in the home to ensure the underage users don’t get access to the unfiltered connection.
Every inernet service is filtered at the ISP and higher levels and, trust me on this, you have no idea how much horrific stuff is already blocked before it even gets to your ISP’s backbone (and I kinda wish I didn’t know some of the sort of stuff that’s on those lists. )
Yeah it’s obviously a desperate move and furthermore the rapidity with which they pushed it through is telling. Looks like the legislation and technical implementation was whipped up in about a week or so? Obviously there will be bugs to sort out for quite some time, but it’s extremely fast-tracked for a piece of legislation ostensibly meant to keep kids away from smut.
And of course there’s lots of domino legislation happening in other countries. Weird.
This is shades of the failed gun and knife laws and the laughable war on drugs.
Much like them, the only thing it really does is stop law abiding people going about their business and enjoying things that are quite legal because they’ve been made really hard to do without fear of the law.
Meanwhile the criminals who dont care about the laws continue to break them.
And they get let off under a 2 teir system because we “apologise” as they had a hard background or some other nonsense.
Consequences::
Gun crime, record levels.
Knife crime, record levels.
Shoplifting is off the scale.
The government doesn’t want people to parent. It wants the state to be responsible for it. To brain wash them at school so they can buy their vote at 16.
It doesn’t want kids to see things that aren’t on the baby internet – they might then vote for the “wrong” party.
Nah I am sure the current Gov is all for it as well. Anything to slurp up and track more people in the country with one of the most pervasive camera and facial recognition programs in the world. Not only can they track you in person, they can also track you on the internet.
Sadly with however much you can agree and tell people multiple times, that yeah keeping kids off nsfw is good. Any arguement no matter how well founded against these types of restrictions is going to have people pointing at you going “so you want kids looking at porn?”, and the various flavors of “”its for the children”.
And with all this ID verification you think the government is going to just let an opportunity to tie real world identities to digital ones by?
It’ll start good intentioned “oh we will only use that database if someone gets convicted of a crime or you start plotting violent actions online” but where do think its going to go, where will this end?
Do you want to play one degree hotter in the frog pot? Its bad enough already with how much not just the government but corporations can get your data. Hell me a regular dude can get the magnet link for the hundreds of thousands of photos and names of everyone who signed up for that Tea app with location data (that Tea salted a little and tampered with by spreading out people to puff themselves up for advertisers).
Absolutely, same reason the UK has ETR’s now which require facial rec pictures.
People try to claim the US is “Authoritarian”….
Both are, however the UK is more.
Which particular ETR did you mean? Google is not my friend here.
There was a time when seeing Goatse and showing it to one’s friends (preferably using school computer) was the rite of passage for any teenage boy. Now people are super-tight about children using the Internet to stretch their imagination and widen their horizons. What a sad world we’re living in.
They’ll still easily find Goatse, the agencies concerned aren’t going to be spending too much time plugging their fingers in the dam to stop those kinds of leaks because it’s clearly not about stopping kids from finding Goatse.
More like a lot of people are going to be getting arrested for trying to access certain methods of communication, kind of like they already do with boomer facebook posts disagreeing with certain government policies.
It’s like they pretend none of them have whatsapp or all the other social media platforms I know nothing about at all.
They dont need the internet for porn.
The UK is running around prosecuting children for sending nudes of themselves to each other, because technically it’s distribution of child porn and they damn well prosecute them for it.
Is that protecting children???
What if one party is a catholic priest pretending to be a 13 year old girl and the other party is a catholic priest pretending to be a 13 years old boy and they’re unknowingly exchanging CP. I’d say in such case it’s worth prosecuting them to actually protect children against foreign agents of Vatican.
Hey! Name-stealer!
It’s a pretty good gag actually, I’m not mad at it. I need to start stealing some people’s names around here, after all you’re simply allowed to do it.
Noice! Got the same nonsense happening in Germany. Even prosecuting at least one Teacher who at some point made screenshot or something of a students phone to alert the parents and/or police (in agreement with the student) – because they technically distributed “c-porn” material.
(^^this is an imprecise recollection of what actually happened but it’s close enough)
A lot of us in that age bracket realize how much it messed us up, and don’t want that for our kids.
It’s the same way they used to run adds on TV to ask “It’s 10 PM, do you know where your children are?” and now you can get a knock on the door from CPS for letting them walk to the store for ice cream in broad daylight. Those kids who used to run wild at 10 PM grew up, realized all the horrid things that could have gone wrong (and sometimes saw it happen to themselves or their friends) and massively over-corrected into helicopter parents.
The sentiment behind these rules is very similar: digital helicoptering. A mob can only overreact, after all. The government can then use that mob overreaction as an excuse to clamp down on its citizens is just government doing what governments do. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” as they say.
Signed (the petition). This has nothing to do with children watching age-inappropriate material. Worse, those that are pushing it might actually believe that it is (for plausible credibility). This is about Orwellian control over the populace. It needs to stop now.
They tried this in the late 90s/2000 in the USA. A way to prove you were older than 13 I think. I remember many services like Yahoo started asking for proof via credit card validation. I was old enough but had no card. So I found a list of stolen credit cards online (oh the irony) and used those to log in.
I didn’t feel bad because it was not a payment but just authorization and release so no funds were consumed.
I think the article is entirely reasonable in the context of its title.
It wasn’t “What can you do about this obviously flawed law that the gullible masses were collectively led into voting for against their own self-interest.”
It was, “When online safety involves surrending your ID, what can you do?”
Well, there’s a grand total of three possible things that you can do: Use a VPN, hold your nose and fork over your personal details, or boycott the site entirely.
Frankly, I tend to lean towards that last option because it’s the most openly hostile to the end user. The same end user that, statistically, might very well have voted for this legislation.
Let the people who voted for these things have to live with their poor decisions, that’s my view.
If the collective downturn in user-count ends up being significant enough, the haves (as opposed to the have-nots) that run sites will rattle some political cages on behalf of everyone.
If they don’t, then the people who voted for the politicians that enacted this short-sighted legislation should never live another day in their lives without being reminded of precisely what it is that they did, and how it has affected other people. They should go to sleep being reminded of their short-sightedness, and wake up with it fresh in their minds.
Social pillorying is something that has fallen by the wayside not because it wasn’t effective, but because nowadays, everyone wants to be an astronaut, and everyone wants to be able to feel good about themselves no matter how many other people their poor decision-making ability affects. Let’s get back to it. Make them feel it. Make them realise what it is they’ve been inflicting on others.
Well, its not that the poeple did get a vote in it. They voted for some parties which have never mentioned that they wanted to do this untill a few weeks back. Its like they voted for a guy who promised that he will stop the country in sending money abroad, and the first thing he does after he did get voted in is to increase the amount of money being sent abroad.
First up, I’m quoting from a long gone website:
“”The net is not a babysitter! Children should not be roaming the Internet unsupervised any more than they should be roaming the streets of New York City unsupervised.
We cannot dumb the Internet down to the level of playground. Rotten dot com serves as a beacon to demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is impractical, unethical, and wrong. To censor this site, it is necessary to censor medical texts, history texts, evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries, and other sources of information vital to functioning of free society.
Nearly all of the images which we have online are not even prurient, and would thus not fall under any definition of obscenity. Any images which we have of a sexual nature are in a context which render them far from obscene, in any United States jurisdiction. Some of the images may be offensive, but that has never been a crime. Life is sometimes offensive. You have to expect that.
The images we find most obscene are those of book burnings.
Please remember that no child has access to the Internet without the active consent of an adult. And absolutely no child should be left on the Internet alone. Supervision of children remains the responsibility of parents and teachers, as it always has and always will.””
For my next point, Deutsche Telekom made a video about protecting children: A Message from Ella | Without Consent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4WZ_k0vUDM
Third, I wonder how well these ID’s would work? https://use-their-id.com/faq
Finally: This Act is affecting companies worldwide. The choice will be to either reconfigure their websites to block the UK (and other countries, Australia is mooting a similar law) or to just blanket implement the restrictions worldwide. Guess what they’ll choose with a minimum £18 million fine (US$25 million) on the line.
Governments become concerned about narrative-control failing due to free-flow of information.
Governments consult think-tanks to work out how to constrict free-flow of information.
Think-tank says that “we need to protect the children” will probably be effective.
Censor legislation is later expanded to make circumvention (e.g. VPNs and other bypasses) illegal, thus constricting free-flow of information.
“And for everybody who’s out there thinking of using VPNs, let me just say to you directly, verifying YOUR age keeps a child safe.”
https://tan-glorious-boa-187.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/bafybeib7mvi6tfwnhqarmhevhjmptr74er33lvhbts3g4voh2rmd37hhkm
Had removing comments… do you see the irony?
HaD’s reporting system allows people to abuse the report button, so any controversial messages are reported and removed for a short period of time until the moderators check them and restore them.
It also means that pretty much everyone is pressing the report button to get rid of opposing opinions on both sides, and the moderators can simply pick and choose which opinions shall remain.
This, sadly.
The idea of uploading your passport or drivers licence to a porn site and it being even remotely secure is laughable given that all the tech giants have experienced data breaches over the years and will again.
Hell, while this was being rolled out this story broke:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7vl57n74pqo
And that’s an app designed to protect women that promised they were handling the data super-securely and NOT storing anything longer than necessary.
The idea of verifying with a credit card is a privacy / tracking nightmare as well as massively opening up the door to scammers and fraud. Plus many payment processors are subject to the whims of puritanical investors so it would be a devil of a job finding a reliable one who’s actually willing to do business with many of these sites.
As always, a few useful idiots crying “won’t someone think of the children” plus some politicians who don’t understand how any of this works have contrived to come up with the worst possible “solution” to a problem.
I don’t believe in giving more power to governments or ISPs to restrict internet access to protect children.
Parents need to be empowered and informed more.
Not sure if the link for the “tech savvy kids use AI for fake ID” is correct? It links to the sky news feature which looks at some of the tech trying to do age verification, ofcom and then some ethical hackers using vpn’s. I don’t see any stuff about fake ID using AI? I only mention as if there is a correct link I’d quite like to read that story aspect.
I’m in the Netherlands and have friends that moved to England. They want to move back and eventually move away from this entire continent, but one gave up his Dutch citizenship (only has an English passport now) so he’s in a bit of trouble because of it. Makes it much more difficult to get out. England is jailing journalists and jailed thousands and thousands of people who make normal comments online that go against the ideas the government has. Not calling for violence or anything. Germany and Belgium are heading towards the same thing and I’m afraid that my government will move in the same direction as they have already done some criminal lawsuits over memes and simple comments. Our rights are removed in the name of “safety”. It’s getting pretty scary. I already applied for US citizenship but no idea if I will get it. I’m considering applying for citizenship of Argentina as a second option, but Idaho seems like best place to move to. Great culture, beautiful. Wyoming also seems nice.