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.
I’ve been saying almost exactly this for a year or two. I’d be astonished if we got though the next eighteen months without visible signs of impending disaster.
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.
Or, the model had been trained on stock photos that tend to include token minorities because of earlier demands of “balanced representation”. Think, just about any advertisement that includes people.
So, someone did put them there on purpose, but that wasn’t the people who trained the model. It simply inherited the biases and positive discrimination of corporations that wanted to appear socially conscious and progressive for profit.
The reason to leave for the politicians was so they could be nasty to their population more unhindered.
But after several economic Hara-kiris of the EU since brexit I have to wonder if they were actually wrong to get out.
This is nonsensical ignorance spinning into the realm of conspiracy theory:
“My suspicions are that these “hallucinations” are a deliberate part of AI programming to learn it to lie ever more convincingly. “
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.
Surely you jest? No, wait, you were being serious. The loss of the access to the largest single market in the world to the UK economy has destroyed hundreds – likely thousands by now – of companies. Cool Components, just this week!
The 17p a day per person for anti-war insurance with France was great value for money. And it got 26 other countries thrown in for free! And you could go visit or even live there, for free!
The brain drain in the UK continues too. Crap with visas and suddenly overturned Indefinite Leave to Remain for hundreds of thousands of well settled families after over 30 years of UK life is, really, disgusting. And just to pander to a handful of a percent of racists!
If you think that the UK takes “the majority” of EU refugees, you should check your sources, too. And those refugees are mostly caused by Putin anyway – Ukraine, Syria and so on.
There’s plenty more.
We are talking about the campaign leading up to the vote, and the dream presented of close ties of friendship with the EU, while actually having the right and ability to fix our own problems, to deny the massive Spanish trawler so our on fishing industry can thrive etc, etc. What actually happened in the real world afterwards is an entirely different thing to what made people believe in Brexit enough to vote for it.
The immigrant crisis has been building long long before Putin did anything. Putin and co’s recent actions and the shake up in the world just cranked it up to the point pretty much everyone in the EU becomes aware it is actually an issue that matters to us all, rather than something to ignore because the migrants are just passing through their nations. And I didn’t say the UK took the majority of them, but vast numbers of them do want to and have come here rather than stay anywhere else in Europe for years – they won’t stay in the poorer EU nations most of the time, as they are likely worse off as illegals in those places than they were at home, and then there is the language barrier – most of them speak some English already, etc.
As I said on that score you can assume before the vote during the campaigning that nothing will change there – relatively free trade is actually good for everyone so it isn’t a crazy thought. And while it has been in practice bumpier than many predicted to a large extent that is actually true that market hasn’t been lost, just made a bit more awkward.
Really not true, yes the more radial racist Briton only for the the White type folks do exist and almost certainly voted to leave, but they don’t make up even close to enough of the British population to win the vote, I’d suggest they don’t even make up enough of the population to sway the vote meaningfully, as on the whole while racial intolerance is growing now at the time of the Brexit vote that sort of extreme thinking was very, very marginalised. Vast numbers of folks voted to leave from across all the varied cultures that have been welcomed into the UK, its not just that ‘handful of percent of racist’ that wanted out.
And again for emphasis how the end result played out is not part of of the Brexit referendum vote – nobody at the time really knows what will happen in the future. Plus good or bad much of what has happened to make the world worse would have happened with or without Brexit anyway – we are just a small island..
A small point i feel needs correction, the UK needs EU much more than EU needs UK. There is little to nothing that britain produces that couldnt be procured elsewhere, Bovril being an exception.
And very little the EU creates the UK needs either – that goes both ways with neither side really needing the other. As we all import nearly everything from the cheaper labour and lax health and safety nations anyway…
Co-operation is better for everyone, more convenient and likely greener too, but need not really in either direction.
#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.
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…
Sorry that you have issues, there must be a pill for it though.
Who in his right mind would ever move to America?
And who would be so severely challenged that he talks about “Great culture”.
FFS dude. Is this a joke of some sort?
Name the shithole country you are from?
Bet you have net immigration to America.
I’m from the other pit, the EU, and no they don’t flock to go to the US, but not because it’s so wonderful in the EU but because it’s a pointless exercise. If you are already used to a certain mess, so why move to another mess and go through acclimatization?
But you are right, mass immigration comes from ‘shitholes’, ignorant people and those who will always be better off, regardless. Oh and those with a certain fanatic goal of course.
But would you want to move to the EU from the US? I can’t imagine – unless you are able to convince yourself of some rosy fantasy, and of course it always helps if you don’t speak the local language and can extend your self-delusion. So if you can fool yourself, give it a shot, should work for a while at least.
Yes I agree, in fact nobody should be able to move here. It’s just too terrible, our culture is awful, we should simply close it off and leave the nation to its fate…
Build a wall, eh?
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.
Aside from you being way off on gun crime, all true. “gun crime” is up due to more draconian laws and mendatious enforcement, but violent gun crime is way, way down.
Correct. The statistics consider crime involving replicas to be gun crime. It’s bananas.
Makes no difference to the victim if they don’t know it’s a replica. Same as getting robbed by a guy holding an unloaded gun – you don’t want to call their bluff.
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.
just as a side note, EU is also trying to implement a similar law, so at least UK wont be alone. Naturally, once digital identification becomes mandatory, the provider will hike the prices for their services massively. Legalized robbery in other words.
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.
The uk is run by a load of right and fascist wing nutters, the usa is run by a single fascist nutter with a vision. I know trunp is more dangerous in the short term, and that the group are worse in the long term.
Which particular ETR did you mean? Google is not my friend here.
Visiting the UK requires advance approval including payment, passport picture and face shot framed for facial rec. Via an ETR.
Thank you, I think ETA was meant. There are too many different things resolving to the same TLA, and ETR is a prime example!
ETA = Electronic Travel Authorisation.
ETR = at least six different things on the first page of Google results, none of them relating to border control.
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.
Speak for yourself, if I had kids I’d love for them to know the holy trinity of Goatse, Lemonparty and Meatspin. I’d teach them the art of trolling, IRL vandalism, sabotage* and so on.
Frequenting pre-chanology 4chan and other dark corners of the Internet might’ve messed me up a bit, but it also made me resilient against cultural marxism and social media disease that’s currently sending people en-masse into depression. Those suckers watch imaginary world on their screens, then pay thousands of dollars (or Euro or whatever currency you’re in) to visit shrinks and complain about imaginary life they can’t have. The preferred therapy is to eat meds which turn them into numb, chemically happy zombies.
* a simple example: I lived next to an apartment which got turned into Airbnb. It meant that pretty often when I (and in fact everyone else around) wanted to go to sleep, its guests would be partying with loud music until morning hours. Calling the police with reaction time (from call to arrival) measured in hours was useless.
Since the legal way was of no use, I decided to find out how to cut their power instead. Turns out electrical cabinets located at the common staircase (where the meter and main breaker for each apartment is located) are all locked using a few common “service” keys. In my case it was 25001 Eurolocks key. (Only electricians and emergency services are supposed to know this… too bad I am an engineer too!)
When the guests next door started late partying I’d quietly sneak out to a staircase, open the cabinet and put a loop of fishing line (which is rather slippery) around the breaker switch. Then I’d close the cabinet again (with fishing line now going through a tight slot between its doors and the casing) and pull the line, instantly disabling the breaker.
Poof! No power, no Internet access, no partying and – for guests – no way to bring back power except for calling the owner. Cabinet is still locked shut so it must be some electrical fault that tripped the main breaker. Owner gets woken up at 2 AM with bullshit call: “sir please help we paid $250 for a night in your apartment and there’s no power”. Now he has to call 24/7 electrician assigned to our building, who, since this is not an emergency, would take about 2 hours to arrive, only to open a cabinet and flip a breaker into “ON” position again 😂 He’d blame guests for turning on jacuzzi tub while other loads were running.
It went on for some time, finally the owner of the apratment must’ve got fed up with angry, drunk 20y old kids calling him at 1 or 2 AM complaining about lack of power so he introduced a strict “no partying” rule which mostly solved the noise issue.
Fun times.
If you could open the panel door to hook the line to the switch, then why did you have to close the door before pulling it? Just flip the switch and close the cabinet.
Something about this story smells fishy.
You should be free to expose your children to that if you wish, and I should be free to shelter mine as I see fit.
Alas, these are the Crazy years Heinlein warned us about.
People are sheep and lazy. Protecting kids from porn is the parents responsability until the kids are of legal age, not the governments. Total BS to transfer guardianship of your offspring to the government.
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.
Children roaming the streets unsupervised?
That’s quite normal here in the Netherlands. From an age of 6 or 7 years old, children walk to school “unsupervised”. When school is a bit further away, they usually go by bicycle, and by what age that starts is at the parents discretion.
Doesnt change the fact that the legal guardians are responsible for the wellfare and safety of those children.
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.
“If the professors of English…complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell ‘friend,’ I say to them that something’s the matter with the way you spell friend.”
—Richard P. Feynman
[“If all the people who complain about the Hackaday comment section, after all these years…something’s basically wrong with Hackaday’s comment section.”]
Feint,fiend, feigned?
Gosh, that really is a difficult world you’ve chosen to spill over there.
If you want to protect children then stop broadcasting “the news”. It is hard to find a broadcast of the news that doesn’t open with death and destruction in a country far far away. Day-in-day-out war on the news here, disasters over there, scams, coverups and sexual offenders at high places it goes on and on. Why are my children not protected from that. It’s pretty depressing.
It’s an illusion to think that asking for an ID when browsing/uploading to certain websites will makes things safer. It will only make things more difficult for everybody and in the mean time it will make those who are “locked out” more creative to get in, which is a skill that might help them into getting things that are worse.
If you really want to protect kids then treat tobacco/alcohol/sugar as any other kind of drug. Not only for those kids but for everyone, because why stop protecting people when the reach a certain age.
If you really want to protect your kids, be responsible and raise your kid and monitor what they do. I got 0 interest to have my liberties restricted just because people are being retarded in how they raise their offspring. What their children see online is entirely the responsability of the legal guardians. Tough luck if you cant filter the content of the internet that your child accesses, maybe you should have taken this into account before giving them unrestricted access.
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.
The USA is already where you fear Europe is heading. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Random samples:
Idaho:
https://www.dw.com/en/idaho-usa-militias-and-the-new-far-right/a-67091085
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/19/idaho-moderates-combating-state-extremism-00151819
Wyoming:
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/23/nx-s1-5184500/in-wyoming-an-already-conservative-legislature-shifts-further-to-the-right
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/21/freedom-caucus-reins-in-wyoming-00360332
My reply of course was CNSR*D away, on this, the home of the free, platform.
this one?
https://hackaday.com/2025/07/31/when-online-safety-means-surrendering-your-id-what-can-you-do/#comment-8156801
The comment section reloads after sending a comment, but has a different URL(? the last part of it) then. The reply button has a “?replytocom=(number)#respond” attached to the URL, I’d have to post a test comment to see what exactly happens. Nowadays browsers hide that from the user :-/
Maybe you missed the memo about the guy with the orange pumpkin head.
And yes, there is some rot at the roots of democracy here in the Netherlands too, but moving away probably won’t improve your situation much. More people pushing back is probably a better strategy.
People tried pushing back though, then find the people they thought would rally people around something a bit less.. mad, turn insane just as fast and join the merry slide down the slide of insanity.
But there is not country you can go to to escape such I think, because it’s the people that are ‘going south’ en masse, the voters too, so you are left toughing it out and hoping a cure is found by accident. And of course are wondering if you yourself are part of the great decline and perhaps don’t even realize it, or at least not to what extend.
Maybe we all wake up and it was all a bad dream though :)
Sahara is a good place for free thinkers.
WoN’t SoMeBoDy ThInK oF tHe ChIlDrEn!
</sarcasm
“Be very careful regarding what you wish for.”—old Chinese saying
…and, its corollary:
“It’s easier to stay out than to get out.”—Mark Twain