UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok Adults will have to hand over credit card or passport details before they can access social media sites, the British government threatened this morning. Internet use age verification – first floated and then abandoned via the country's 2017 Digital Economy Act – will return in the UK's Online Safety Bill, digital minister …
This post has been deleted by its author
Having talked to some of the early critics of this on Twitter they did feel that VPNs could well be legislated against. Though it could be stopping payments to them more than anything else. Certainly the government was meant to be launching an advertising campaign against encryption costing half a million pounds. But I also read someone's blog yesterday that said that this would be easy to get round just using website's IPs rather than their names. The sheer scale of the internet simply militates against this kind of censorship. This won't be a Great British Firewall as Ofcom won't be given the resources of the Chinese authorities. If pop-ups annoyed you, then you'll hate the safest place to be in the world online. It'll make it a real hassle to get online for the ordinary & businesses will have hoops to jump through in terms of compliance.
This post has been deleted by its author
This is a fine example of Daily Mail politics: Take a subject that the DM have got their readers in a froth about. Introduce a law where you ban or encourage or restrict whatever the DM don't like/like. Distract the voters/Get more votes/hide some other piece of legislation as a result. Doesn't matter if the whole thing is dumb and unworkable.
All this will do is make the IT savvy kids the most popular ones in school. The ones who have their parents Age Verification password, know how to use a VPN etc. They then just share it around possibly for a small fee. A few years ago I was on the way to the post office just after kicking out time at the local Schools. On the bus ride there I was joined at the back of the upper deck by several spotty teenage youth in uniform. One of them had an impressively high resolution image of one lady and four men engaged in what I now understand is a position referred to as 'airtight'. His phone was filled with such images and films and as this was the latest addition he was bluetoothing or wifi sharing it to his mates sitting around him.
I make a lighthearted attempt at poking fun at the typoes that we all make occasionally, and you take it as the opportunity to denigrate somewhere around 85,000 kids who, through no fault of their own. are enrolled in a school in the BCPSS.
One of us is truly fucked up, and it ain't me.
Yup I've met many Daily Mail readers and also many Guardian readers and it's the Guardian readers that tend to froth. Mainly because it's all wrong and it's all someone elses fault. I'm guessing your a Guardian reader :-)
Nope I don’t read the newspapers, nor support any political parties. I do read the rather excellent Private Eye and El Reg though.
The Guardian is like bait and switch of late, can't stand the paper any more. Comments are so heavily moderated (to the point the issue needs raising with press complaints to push back on the moderation, because the Guardian now dictates the narrative, i.e. block comments that don't even cause offence, just not the paper's point of view) and are only open on selected fluffy cat articles and for such a limited time.
The comments in general, used to be constructive and thought-provoking, now they are just like dumb Facebook style comments. Maybe that is just how the readership has changed.
The days of it being a quality broadsheet under editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger are long gone. On occasions, going by the recent headlines, you can't tell if you're on the DM or the Guardian without looking at the web address, they are often the same headlines and it's so pro vaccine, (and not to go to the other extreme, just allowing even a small amount of rational debate) discussion on that front is all but prohibited. So much clickbait.
Shocking how far that paper has fallen, bring back someone like Rusbridger, who took the risk, of having more open debate.
Thank goodness for El Reg.
Just glance to the right, if there's some pretty twenty year old showing off her dangerous curves then it's the mail.
Find an old issue of Class War, that's what it looks like when the left decides to froth.
>Thank goodness for El Reg.
On that we can agree :-) To be honest, it's stretching it to call what goes on BTL on any of the online newspaper sites debate, though to be fair it does mimic quite closely the political "performance" one can observe on a regular basis in the House of Commons: lots of immature posturing, jeering, braying around lies, smears and innuendo.
Euronews is worse, unless they're actually trying to limit comments to trolls their moderation system is broken. Sensible comments disappear rather than going into moderation as before, even then nothing ever came out of moderation and theres a new category "comment reported by other users" which means nothing that annoys the trolls stays more than 5 minutes.
We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you Politicians and newspapers are not the least bit interested in solving it. They are interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections and sell papers. You get a group of middle age, middle class, middle income voters/readers who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family, and national values and character, and you wave something they’ll find objectionable and you scream about protecting the children.
With serious apologies to Aaron Sorkin.
How things change. Back when I was of school age it was all about who looked old enough to score a four-pack of kestrel from the local offy.
At my school he was a lanky kid called Antony and his speciality was Pron. It wasn’t through choice I don’t think, it was more that the local off-licence actually checked IDs very carefully. Think they’d been caught before by the local plod/trading standards etc.
At my school he was a lanky kid called Antony and his speciality was Pron
At my school all our pr0n requirements were met by a lad named Bosse, who was the son of some bigwig Swedish diplomat and went home for the summer holidays to stay in Malmo with his uncle. A couple of trips to Copenhagen on the ferry meant we were well supplied with everything from "OMG! pubic hair!" to "Hang on, what's he doing with that?"
Newsflash: Newspapers these days have increasingly little to do with educating or informing their readers and instead aim to indoctrinate their readership with the aim of using the readership as a pressure group to achieve whatever political aim the editor of said newspaper has.
They all do it, no particular newspaper is actually better than another.
At one party I was at it came up that I was quite good with technology. One of the other people in the group I was talking to told me that the modern world with the internet was the reason for the world “Going to Hell in a handcart!” I said I know what you mean and I said I saw some offensive things on seemingly the most innocent of websites. I then read out a selection of bylines from a supposedly tame website. I asked people to guess where they came from. I had
“Megan Fox sets pulses racing as she showcases her ample cleavage in low-cut sheer dress for the Jimmy Choo X Mugler event in LA”*
and
“Bebe Rexha stuns in pink lace teddy as she takes on Celine Dion Challenge”*
Also a piece about immigration. One lady there said that’s precisely the sort of thing that pollutes the internet and makes me sick. Her husband was smiling and I thought I knew why. I said to her was this is the sort of thing that she was on about? She said yes this was just the tip of the iceberg though was it necessary to put pictures like that up? These sites were like a gateway to stronger stuff and the internet is full of that etc.
I told her I agreed totally and that all of it was from the Daily Mail website including the immigration piece from Katie Hopkins. She looked at my phone in horror as her husband burst out laughing.
*Those are on the Daily Mail website today.
It's amazing how reactionary and conservative leftists are, isn't it?
"the internet was the reason for the world “Going to Hell in a handcart!” "
I also think it's such a massive cliche that some leftists were at a [dinner?] party talking about how bad it is that the proles read the Mail. Such a cliche that it can't be a serious post. Can it?
( Also you'd think those with smug knowing glances would know that The Daily Mail and The Mail Online are barely related, TMO being aimed at women ).
They both froth. Both froth about urban myths and moral panics. Just different ones.
Grauniad readers tend to be internationalist, mostly white middle class and think that they have a White Saviour's obligation to (selected) minorities.
DM readers tend to be nationalist, mostly white middle class ( but maybe a bit older) and think they only have an obligation to their "own kind".
'I object most strongly to your characterisation of DM readers. I am very familiar with readers of all the national press and it is Guardian readers who are the most inclined to "froth".'
Both Daily Heil and Grauniad readers do tend to 'froth', but GROLIES usually froth about somewhat different things. (Unfortunately, they are both likely to be taken in by the "think of the children" argument in this case, rather than the "think of the importance of personal privacy" one.)
It gets worrying when the far extreme of one end of the spectrum wants to attack you with a pitchfork / send you 'home' for some reason, and the other extreme at the other end wants to send you to a re-education camp / tape your mouth shut / cut off your goolies for a different reason, and then those extremes start to look not so different from each other after all…
(Different AC, who does read the Graun, but also rolls my eyes at some of the slightly over the top things it comes out with.)
I've noticed that the Brits most likely to froth are the ones who rattle on about the personalities of the various British newspaper readers ... especially the ones who are prone to make up and/or use negative nicknames for said papers, which I suppose they think supports their frothy cause and makes them look intelligent, but actually makes them look like fully indoctrinated/brainwashed pawns for the cause.
Umm, jake, you must have missed the bit where I outed myself as a Graun reader, and by implication also put myself down a little!
Making up amusing (or not) nicknames for things is a fine longstanding tradition, as is describing character trait caricatures (up to a point), along with a bit of self-deprecation. I have to say that it seems most unnaturally po-faced of you (British, even, perhaps too much of your time over here wore off on you) to, dare I say it, froth about this! :-P
Anyway, as it is now beer o'clock time this side of the pond, have one on me!
This post has been deleted by its author
"share it around possibly for a small fee" - Ah, encouraging the future entrepeneurs.
Even Richard Desmond was young once and had to start somewhere. For those not in the know, the Daily Express publisher Mr Desmond also used to publish such works as Asian Babes, Readers Wives etc.
Bluetooth messaging apps (Briar & Bridgefy) would work perfectly in a setting like a school as they can form a mesh network. I can see them becoming the future of messaging as they don't rely on WiFi or mobile signals. Not so good if you live in a remote area far away from others. Of course they'll probably put Bluetooth jammers in schools then.
If I was being cynical, I'd say forcing people to prove who they are before being able to access social media makes it easy for the Government to crack down on activist/opponents.
On the flip side, it should be able to make it easy to identify foreign bot accounts, unless they all register using the same credit card from Mr Sergei Meerkat.
Thing is the last age verification law was delayed over and over again until it was scraped because they just could not find a way to get it up and running but this will be the same but on a much larger scale. Its clear they not learned a lesson since 2019 and this is very likely to end up a huge mess that will never come into force.
Tell the politicians that by stripping e2ee that means everyone's porn habits will become open public knowledge. Including their own.
"How do you consider your chances of reelection if your porn habits were to become public knowledge?"
Oh look! The proposed legislation has been "tabled until certain technical issues can be addressed." Ding dong that bitch is dead. Which old bitch? This wicked snitch! Ding dong the wicked glyph is dead!
As is evidenced in the USofA by the snail's pace of the investigation into a certain GOP representative from Florida.
And the reluctance to arrest No 45 and his henchmen.
etc
etc
Our [redacted] in Westminster are amateurs in comparison which ironically is a good thing.
"Why would something be on the table if it is not under current discussion...?"
Because it's not figuratively in the hand of the current speaker, being waved around and having attention drawn to it. Instead, it has been figuratively placed on the table ("tabled"), where it can be ignored or brought up again at a later date.
"cards on the table" is something very different ... it means you have displayed your entire hand to all and sundry; you are not holding anything back.
Separated by a common language, indeed.
As I wrote back in July of 2018:
"My eldest Niece reports that comp-sci students at her Uni implemented a "students only" UUCP network over the existing school network a couple years ago. It's mostly used for email, small file transfer, and a private Usenet hierarchy. Seems the thirty-somethings who are supposedly the administrators never learned UUCP and have no idea that what they are doing even exists. No, I'm not naming the Uni ... but apparently they are connected to other schools, world-wide, and the PTB are none the wiser. To get around draconian filters, they even have a couple links that are dial-up, over POTS, if you can believe it. Good for them! :-)"
This post has been deleted by its author
FAIL
I expect the average 15 y.o. teenageris more tech savvy than their parents, and will get around this easily - not that some parents don't give a shit about their kids anyway on the Internet anyway.
Plus it will become a challenge for the teens to do so anyway.
You may or may not remember but the topless babe on a couch type channels had harder siblings on other freeview channels. These were ‘protected’ by a page that required you to enter a code you had to call a premium rate number to receive. You entered the unique code you saw on screen using your phone and the unlock code would be provided. The problem was that the system used for generating the codes was extremely weak. This is may be down to the fact that it was all done in MHEG, don’t know. Anyway code generators soon appeared which allowed you to bypass the premium rate phone number step.
If you actually looked into this though there wasn’t actually any encryption on the Pron being broadcast. The video and audio stream were broadcast unencrypted on the same multiplex. The average receiver/television wouldn’t let you tune to this though because the data stream lacked an LCN (Logical Channel Number). Once you entered your code however the MHEG switched you to the stream. A bit like how the BBC red button works on some TV’s. If you had certain receivers or a DVB-T USB stick and appropriate software however……..You just scanned the multiplex, found the otherwise unfindable channel(s) and then you had access. When a concerned parent (not me I don’t have kids) complained to Ofcom their response was “Meh”
It only takes one teenager to work out how to get past the Great Firewall of Britain and the knowledge will rapidly become common knowledge, known to all teenagers everywhere.
Given that the teens are already doing this to circumvent school internet firewall systems, it will take essentially no time at all for them to adapt and waltz around this new restriction.
All this will do is enrich VPN providers, and teach more people how to get around government restrictions.
How about allowing Parents to actually Parent?
If the UK Government doesn't think that modern parents are capable of parenting, surely the entire Government should resign, based on the fact that they don't think the UK's parents are capable of making proper Adult decisions, which presumably includes voting.
I think its less about whether they're capable I'm almost certain most are, the problem is do parents want to pay attention to what their kids are doing online probably not, I suspect a lot would say they don't have time, which they almost certainly do but can't be bothered.
It has been pointed out that in order to adopt you have to pass fairly stringent checks (in many places), but there is no limitation on who is allowed to get pregnant. Your local social services no doubt are well aware of this problem.
On the other hand, would we want a society where we allowed the government -- for our own good! -- to determine who was allowed to have children?
"Parents should do their job and government should stop interfering."
All this is not coming from mysterious ether. It's parents telling the government that the government "should do something!"... in regards to every hair-trigger social topic.
Some of the parents are constituents. Some of the parents are the politicians themselves. But the noise is, most likely, coming from parents far and wide.
Want to stop it? Direct your attentions into telling parents to DO YOUR JOB and stop trying to impress their singular viewpoint of the world on everyone else.
Everyone from interested web surfers to LGBTQ partners will thank you.
“ Parents should do their job”
Haha, nice idea. The real world, which has always been there and always will be, means that there will always be some that won’t.
It’s a bit like saying “nobody should ever steal”. Of course they shouldn’t steal. But this is no ideal world. Get over it.
@david bates
"How about if your kids are found watching porn etc, and you can't prove you took steps to try and avoid that happening you face a penalty."
Can we apply that retrospectively? That way we can lock up most grandparents who dont know their kid found a playboy in the bushes, or their parents secret stash, or their friends parents secret stash?
This is such a naive statement that I can only guess that you don't actually have children, or if you do, they're not teens. Only a small subset of teens' IP traffic passes through their home router. And what are you going to block - Instagram? Tiktok? Discord? Good luck with that.
I know that free internet is a sacred cow on el Reg, but the truth is we've created a world where toxic content is only ever a click away, and anonymity allows terrible people to do terrible things with impunity. Even worse, this toxicity is distorting mainstream discourse, and there is just no getting away from it.
I have 3 teens. 2 of them are self harming, and one has attempted suicide several times. I'd love to see your techno utopian ideals survive that experience. You all think that policing the internet is a stupid idea, but the internet is merely the virtual version of the real world, and we're quite happy to police that. What do you propose?
This “parents should do their job” crap betrays massive levels of arrogant, smug ignorance. Absolutely clueless about the real world. Thick as shit.
Our school lost two kids to suicide, and I’m now heavily involved in trying to find ways to catch this stuff before it gets to that stage. The parents mostly are trying all they can, but the circumstance are not all comfortable little happy families and they are usually not to blame, It’s massively painful to me to see this stuff.
btw, social media is often involved.
Meanwhile I regularly see unaccompanied kids under 8 years old on city streets in an area with junkies and alkies after 10pm. Usually wearing pyjamas and a coat - which is also how their mother and grandmother dress on the odd occasion I see them in the street.
Some parents don't even try.
... and your kids were driven to this by PORN?
... because usually that sort of thing has a lot more to do with what their peer group is doing and saying, on the Internet and off. Or with something else in their lives.
We don't police everything in the "real world" either, by the way. But admittedly the real world makes it easier to find refuge from bullies, stalkers, blackmailers, or even overbearing parents. None of which, again, have anything whatsoever to do with porn.
When I worked as a teacher we had an online system where parents could log in a report their child sick. Is anyone here even the slightest bit surprised that some of the little darlings had the password and could report themselves as sick when it suited their needs? So expect a number of teens being able to log in as their parent and approve Internet usage.
Of course, not all of them were smart enough to do this with sufficient moderation as to not cause concerned communications from the school nurse as to the frequent illnesses of the little darling...
Anyone else remember when schools tried to implement a healthy eating plan and ban the kids from loading up on junk food?
[Discussion on what is really "junk food" is a whole different thing!]
Parents lining up along the school perimeter to push junk food through the railings to their little darlings.
Path of least resistance for a lot of parents will be to authorise the kids accounts to stop them grizzling all the time.
This post has been deleted by its author
First thing that will happen....all the sane people with an ounce of common sense will finally have something that makes them think twice about even clicking anywhere near the crapfest that is social media, especially Facecrap, Twatter, Instasham and YouSluice.
I got suckered in, 9 months of checking my phone every 10 mins all day until I realised I had a serious problem! I gave my logins to my wife, she locked them with passwords she generated and I've not been back on since. That was 3 years ago now. My wife uses them to market our small business and that's all. She has more self control than me.
Social media is mostly an aspirational crapfest, designed to get people addicted and depressed that their lives are not as supposedly wonderful as those they see on social media. The quicker social media is taken out and burned in the market square, the quicker humanity can carry on with the plan to keep evolving.
Many credit cards, including mine, allow you to set up one-time card numbers that you can use. The CC company knows which real card is behind the fake number, and the fake number can be used exactly once and never again. So send the snoopers a fake number. It's useless to anyone who hacks their site. If possible, send a fake address, too. 935 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC, is a popular choice. 300 E Street SW, Washington, DC, is also popular. In the UK, Whitehall. London SW1A 2HB or perhaps 1 Horse Guards Road, London, SW1A 2HQ might be useful. Alternative addresses for those in other countries are left as exercises for the student.
Revolut failed to pay me £200 it owed me[1], constantly tries to sell me shares in itself, offers me inducements to sign up friends, deal in cybercurrencies and is run by a gang of Russians. They couldn't look more scammy if they actively tried.
There is no way of cancelling without downloading their app. As if.
[1] Insisted that without an email I hadn't received they could not track a transfer or even tell me where it was sent.
You can get a reloadable debit card at thousands of places in the US like Walmart, grocery and convenience stores, so I assume they are as widely available in the UK. It isn't linked to your bank account, you load money into it online or maybe via an ATM (not sure)
There are fees attached to it so they are a terrible option for day to day use but for something like this where you wanted to preserve some anonymity it would be worth it (with the bonus you don't give a company as shady as Facebook your real credit or worse debit card number)
DS999,
AFAIK, such 'Reloadable' cards are not generally available in the UK.
I would expect the Banks here would not like the risks of handling such cards that do not link back to a bank/account they can ultimately charge handling fees !!!
British banks are a very conservative group as a whole and Credit/Debit cards are very easy to get from our banks.
i.e. They would not be very welcoming to external/foreign banks dipping their snouts in the(ir) trough !!!
I am sure there must be some risk of 'reloadable' cards that are 'topped up' via dodgy means, such as from stolen Credit/Debit cards etc.
The "handling fees" come out of the money you put into the card. There's a fee to put money in and often a monthly fee for keeping a balance.
Like I said it is dumb to use as a real account, but if you need to give some sort of card to something shady like if you wanted to buy something from a Chinese seller, it is a good since the amount of money that can be taken out is limited by how much you've put in.
The "virtual account numbers" may serve the same purpose of buying from a shady seller, though I'd pay a few bucks extra for having something that's completely divorced in all ways from my actual account. I know for instance that if you set up a recurring payment and you change your card number, sometimes those recurring payments are able to follow to the new card number. Supposedly that's a "convenience" feature, but if they can do that who says someone trying to get your money can't follow from a virtual account number to the real one.
You can get them in the UK but there would be another problem with their use for Pron Age Verification. The numbers at the start of the card identfy the issuer, the network (Visa, Mastercard etc.) and the type of card is also possible to determine. So using a prepaid one will normally flag up as such.
People who live in oppressive regimes have to think about these kind of things everyday, how to go around things regime throws at them. They lose ton of energy and it is draining.
Also you can be sure they'll be plugging any holes like these to ensure they know exactly who is using social media account.
It is crucial for other plans like social credit system. They need to know what you think and how you behave to appropriately set expiration date on your salary paid with digital currency.
It'll probably get shot down again but they'll keep trying this one, I'm fully expecting the undiluted version of RIPA that was originally proposed is lurking in the wings as well.
Priti Patel and her henchmen want to know everything about everyone, just in case (you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide of course.....) and Nadine Dorries has self-awareness only as far as she knows that if this Government falls she's first out of the cabinet hence why she is so incredibly on message for supporting them despite the steady flow of cock-ups.
As said above, porn-blockers on routers aren't full proof but are probably the best solution for now, given that the likes of NordVPN advertise on tv and pretty much every internet site and youtube channel there can't be many people with even the slightest amount of tech-savviness who don't know about VPNs these days.
All the alphabet agencies watch traffic coming out
yes, this is true, but you can still bypass country-level blockages, and various access restrictions on citizens, with Tor.
A large number of Tor endpoints are operated by alphabet agencies. The intent is so that people behind a national firewall (let's say Iran, N. Korea, CHINA) can still access the FULL internet with some level of anonymity, hopefully to spread freedom (but probably just enables bad actors more often than not). Whether or not some of those countries have found a way to detect that you're doing this remains to be seen.
(thinking of Tor, the other day I saw a boatload of 'Fail2Ban' detected activity (ssh) from what appeared to be Tor endpoints - so the bad guys are using them on occasion. I wonder if they've been contacted by alphabet agencies yet? They must have forgotten about that, heh)
The rumours of a mini reshuffle (now that the adults are in charge) quieted the more ambitious and integrity-free MPs who were looking for an excuse to ignore the noise from their constituency parties. One more news cycle, one more dead cat on the table, and they'll all be wiping their brows in relief and putting it all behind them. Then they'll be free to get back to the most important task of government, handing over money to the wealthy.
More like, given also the threat of criminal proceedings against the bosses, the social media crapfest will simply block all UK IP addresses with a big red screen explaining why in simple words, and leave it to the hollering citizens unable to get their hourly shot of bullshit to rage at the politicians. Especially if the red tops are with the people and not the government.
Imagine a Venn diagram. On the left, people who use Facebook. On the right a much smaller circle for people who know how to use a VPN. How big do you think the intersection would be?
Blocking IP is not foolproof, but it would more than get the point across.
They can, and I do, use a VPN. But many content providers not only use IP geofencing, they also use VPN sniffers that have lists of known endpoints. So it may take a few goes at reconnecting your VPN until you get one that works. It's a pain, but how else am I going to get my BBC shite TV ® programming delivered?
""If sites fail to act, the independent regulator... will be able fine them up to 10 per cent of their annual worldwide turnover or can block them from being accessible in the UK. Bosses of these websites could also be held criminally liable if they fail to cooperate with (the independent regulator.) "
Now, if that level of punishment was made standard for a corporation's monopolistic behaviour, egregious tax avoidance, hidden data gathering, contempt of court etc, I would be on board.
But apparently the only crime serious enough to warrant this is not spying on citizens on behalf of the government.
Seeing as children spend 99.99% of their time on their mobiles, isn't it a lot easier to incorporate nudity filters into the Android and IOS OS's on smart phones? Which a parent must then legally activate (if it's for their under 18).
If my company can block (or blur) all access to nude pics/videos via web/email, then why can't OS's do it? This would prevent nude underage pics of classmates/friends being passed around/revenge porn too.
"This isn't about pron, as Facebook & Instagram actively block it anyway."
I must be imagining all the pron that is being shown on Facebook then. The few technical groups that I read on FB are plagued with images that appear to be from gynaecology textbooks on how to remove (or is it insert?) objects in orifices. These are sponsored images which means Facebook is getting paid for them and is reluctant to remove them.
Mainly because everyone techie now knows what a VPN is and how to use it
But its not really about "protecting the children" or "Banning bad actors on internet"
Its about generating headlines in the daily (m)wail and the stun such as "Boris is saving the children.. evil labour wants pedofiles to eat your kids"(the daily excess loves Boris so much so it does'nt need to be fed such stories.. hell they'd support Boris if he announced a policy of mincing everyone who earns less than £60 000/yr)
But it will fail...... mainly because of how long it took them to ban pirate bay and how many times they changed IP ...
But what of the kids... well how about educating them on sexual matters such as pr0n movies are usually staffed by actors and actresses and bare about as much resemblance to real sex as an average 50's war movie does to actual war.
If you legislate for big tech, you'll ensure that only big tech exists on the market as smaller players will not be able to afford to comply.
And so how foreign social media service can ensure they are not available in the UK?
Is the law going to be tied to where someone is physically located or whether they are a citizen?
If so how foreign service can ensure they can block such person without having to check everyone?
The government should just give an anonymous randomly allocated password(ARAP)* of say 32chars to everyone on the voting register. Depending on how tech savvy each voter is they can either have it on a bit of paper or they can store it in a password manager. When you want to use a site which the government determines to be harmful, you paste in your ARAP, and the site checks with a gov.Uuk database to see it that ARAP has been issued. Only valid ARAPs get to login. Since the voter register is checked every year, a new ARAP can be issued each time and on local election day, all old ARAPs get revoked and the new ones take effect. This would slow down the ability of kiddies to copy their parents ARAP and pass it round amongst friends.
Kids could also be issued similar ARAPs, if their parents think they should be allowed access to FB etc. These non-voter ARAPs would tell the site the user is not a voter (ie. under-age) so they can still get into a non-adult version.
Obviously the database would need to check the credentials of the requesting site to prevent script kiddies pretending to be a site and trying every possible ARAP until the db said the ARAP was valid. Sites using the age check would also need to check for repeated age check requests all coming from the same client device.
*Alternatively it could use a system like "just three words" - maybe just 5 words - I can't be arsed to work out the maths.
I can see the argument for considering both to be porn sites, given some of what I've seen from their provisioning servers.
They claim they have community standards, but it is flat out amazing what they consider "acceptable." Certainly it wouldn't be considered "acceptable" in any community I'd be willing to live in. More like the seedy cesspool side of some other town, preferably in another province or nation... :P
So many parents struggle with monitoring and controlling their children's use of technology?
How about teaching this to older teenagers at school, along with use of contraceptives* and other essential life skills. There can be class discussions, led by specialist teachers - trained professionals, about morals and appropriate age. Eventually, those kids will be the new responsible parents.
The problem is, it would be seen as too expensive.
* Yeah, I know some places pretty much ban teaching about contraceptives, that's another problem to be fixed.
in some areas will already have a child of their own.
That's why relationship education starts in UK primary schools, with the content progressively shifting to cover those topics fully by 12-13.
Some parents still choose to opt their offspring out of this essential content. (icon for them ---->)
Unfortunately having a written constitution didn't stop the great (not great at all) orange monkey making a mockery of due process and the US's twisted ideal of democracy.
One of the few checks and balances against the UK government was the high court, which the current UK government is desperately trying to make as irrelevant as possible. They wouldn't want to be accountable to their actions after all...
It's in many ways worse than that. When the high court makes an unpopular ruling ( because sometimes "The Law" isn't what people want or imagine it to be) the populist politicians - in government or just near to it-see their favourite papers whipping up a little storm and try to take advantage of it, whether it's to use that to support their own agenda or simply to accrue populism points.
Unless they geo-fence VPN access for UK to UK access I think business's will be up in arms. How are we supposed to connect to work remotely? How will governments communicate securely when out of the office? I don't care what they call it a connection tunneled over the network with its own ip is a VPN. SSH, TLS are all up for grabs. Besides if I want to look at porn Google with safe search off "boobies" and you don't get many blue footed birds returned.
So go on then, shoot me down why don't you! I have literally just joined this forum to pose this one response to some of the crap being posted here.
Firstly, I think social media can be/is one of the the most dangerous things on the internet!
Secondly, I do believe (when it is lawful) that adults are entitled to read what thay want!
Thirdly, I do believe (when it is lawful) that adults are entitled to post what they want!
I do not believe that chilfdren should be exposed to some of the crap that gets fed down their throats by some of the nastiest, vilest members of society on websites that they are able to access - and don't talk about parental responsibility - kids today are very technically savvy and able to hide what they do online and fixing a router doesn't do any good outside of your home.
We have laws in place to protect children from many things in life so here's my finishing thought, instead of completely panning the aims of what the government is trying to do with age verification why not try and be more constructive with HOW the govt/anyone can put something in place that protects children and vulnerable members of society.
Disclaimer - I can't stand the current UK Govt and think they are an absolute bunch of scumbags but protecting the vulnerable should go beyond politics!
So, off you go then.......let me have it or does anyone have anything meaningful to say???
Why should parents let others sort their own responsibility out, it's their child so it's their problem, not a right to remove everyone eleses privacy. Do parents just push children out of the front door these days and just let others deal with getting them safely across the dangerous roads to school?
This is just rooted an attempt at a backdoor way of introducing the bamboo curtain of internet identification of every user out there and what they are up to,just as the attempted introduction of individual identification cards were. its nothing to do with poor johhny, that is just a cheap political trick to push it through parliament.
The trouble is that there is no easy way for the government to "put something in place that protects children and vulnerable members of society" and that's why the technologically illiterate idiots receive so much derision every time this nonsensical idea is raised by various cretins.
I won't need a credit card or passport. I'm not on social media ... unless Drowning Street defines being on The Reg's commenteriat as a social media thing.
Why not just turn the entire internets off and be done with it. They have no idea how it works anyway, seeing as how almost none of them have any technical understanding at all, and mistrust anyone who does as an 'expert'.
And we've all had enough of those, haven't we?
I first wrote about this in 1995. They were still scraping afterbirth off the WWW when a French European Commissioner put forward a proposal to mandate use of an offline ID to verify online identity - that never even made it to the european parliament, but it Keeps Coming Back. It is clearly a global objective, and the biometric-linked identifier many of you now carry - also known as a covid pass - will likely form the basis of a global ID system indelibly associated with your very own genomic signature
Yeah yeah, tinfoil hat etc. Laugh at someone who's been right for thirty years, it really makes you look clued up. Just wait and see.
Surely the government could develop some system of age verification for the Internet that wouldn't involve a risk of credit card theft or identity theft, instead of something like this. If they're not going to make that effort, how can they be viewed as serious?
Of course, it would cost money for people to go down to a government office to get an additional card...
The answer of course is that there is no workable age verification system that doesn't involve sharing one's ID. This was pointed out in tedious detail last time round, but naturally the same knuckle-dragging mouth-breathing pin-headed conspiracy theorists come creeping out of the woodwork with the same old cobblers.
I'm pretty confident many western nations like the UK are monitoring China's Social Credit System and may introduce it here under some daft acronym.
Obviously the western system would be slightly more gentle in its repercussions, but essentially the same. When some western politician proposes this I officially declare the Free Western World dead.
They were trying to slip it in with the covid passport schemes. It's no coincidence that a bunch of politicians and media types started declaring racism and other such things as "public health crises" around the same time those schemes were proposed, nor that the EU was already discussing a general EU-wide vaccine passport before corona even came along. It's not far between hinging your right to interact with society on up-to-date vaccination status and hinging the same right on your general behaviour. It would start with innocuous things like alcoholism and drug use, and then next thing you know, you're locked out of the banking system because you were rude to the wrong person on the bus.
Typical government using a sledgehammer to insert a SIM card here. They don't know what they're talking about, and unfortunately is possibly going to happen. Thank of the ridiculous 'cookie warnings' that have no identifiable purpose - they happened.
And VPNs - as anybody in security knows - are not an answer to all security woes (unlike what the flashy ads say).
I spent some years in the ISP industry working on parental controls and anti-malware systems. These were not perfect, but they did help the ordinary user protect themselves and their children.
However, the internet's "chattering classes" presented a constant stream of objections based on the idea that the net should be completely free and unfettered and "no-one has the right to change that freedom". This is rubbish, and no-one was denying an individual the right to *have* that unfettered access, just *asserting* the right to use facilities to protect your children.
On the subject of age verification, if Facebook etc (and indeed the porn sites) were *required* to take, say, a credit card number as part of the signup, that would in itself prevent *most* kids from accessing Bad Stuff. You don't trust FB to keep your card details secure? Call the ICO. You don't trust government not to snoop on who is doing what? Write the law to *require* a court order before your details are released. Standard stuff. This alone would mean that not only would most underage porn access be blocked, but also hate speech, libel, and all the other crap that the social media platforms facilitate, would wither way as people realised that they lost their perfect anonymity. If you got slandered on FB, you have the right to ask the court to reveal the identity of the author, and the court can require FB to reveal it *only to you and the court*.
There should be an option where the social media platforms can offer limited access *without* taking ID - but this should be specifically limited so that such "junior" users do not have access to a wide range of topics, and cannot use a wide range of language. Don't let them kid you that they cannot do this.
This article then descends into the usual "throw the kitchen sink at the opposition" type of argument that the "chattering classes" uses: let's try and use any spurious argument we can think of to defend our god given right to say what we want whenever we want.
" Age verification is easily circumvented by any tech-savvy teen with a VPN" Really? if that teen didn't provide valid credit card (and hence address) details when he signed up, how will a VPN make it any easier for him to access the site and content?
Yes, there are risks of data breach. As there are with all places you enter PII - so any bit of online shopping, banking and so on. I trust Facebook less than almost anyone, but they are a legitimate company operating under well-proven laws in this respect. Giving them your home address, with suitable legal restrictions on what can be done with the information, does not increase your risk materially.
Encryption is another red herring: you can mediate the exchange between user and facebook any way you like - carrier pigeons - and the basic fact remains that if you have verified who you are the means of communication has no bearing on your rights and limits on what you can use it for.
An so on. The problem is that this "kitchen sink" approach makes government (who Don't Understand this stuff) go into more and more elaborate detail and spread a wider and wider net, and so ends up doing exactly what you don't want - trying to control everything, all the time, when that is not the actual requirement.
Just make sure users are identifiable, that the law controls who can access that identity, the SHUT THE F*** UP.
But from experience, comments like this are a total waste of time: the "chattering classes' are blinkered by their worship of an imaginary "net neutrality" and are incapable of listening or thinking rationally. So you will, by your actions, get exactly what you so earnestly want to avoid. Well done.
Finally: THIS is a form of social media. If someone thinks the above is personally objectionable or has other legal implications please ask El Reg to identify me to you, and we will discuss it in court. They can't of course: they don't know my name or address.
" if that teen didn't provide valid credit card,,,,,,,,,,,, "
You do know there are "free" and "made free" VPN software solutions available to under 18s don't you, or are you so biased as to be blind to the opportunities youngsters have on the tinternet?
"Just make sure users are identifiable"
Thats the wholse point of the exercise its to make a system similar to the bamboo curtain of China where every person is identifiable every time they log onto the Chinese version ( NOT the World version which is blocked ) of the internet.
"they don't know my name or address."
It is possible to backtrack your unique IP address should the relevant interested alphabet agencies using their unique resources make it so and compare this with ISPs log of allocated addresses. At times your not as alone as you think you are.
"You do know there are "free" and "made free" VPN software solutions available to under 18s don't you"
- Yes of course. But this is irrelevant. The VPN is a transport mechanism, the problem is end-point verification. If I cannot set up an account on FB without providing some simple ID, it matters not a jot if I access it via VPN, carrier pigeon or tarot cards.
BTW, no need to be rude. That's for Facebook and Twitter.
And as for another comment: yes, of course you can get relatively anonymous top-up cards. But as always, the category error is to say "because there are ways around this, you should not even try. MOST people will use normal cards, so you've protected most people.
We used this point to great effect when selling our parental controls system, and even included "ways to circumvent" in the sales literature. Customers realised that 99% of theri users would not be able to
circumvent
Daily Mail: yes, an awful newspaper, but that doesn't mean everything they say is automatically wrong.
In the wider sense, if all those "free" services we use on the Net were tkaing small payments all sorts of societal and economic problems might be alleviated.
This post has been deleted by its author
It might be a good thing. I for one have never and won't ever enter my credit card for age verification.
Goodbye Facebook (thank god), and all the rest of social media, I assume that means El Reg too.
At last back to the real world and good riddance to this virtual nightmare we have all become programmed into.
Given that a lot of people (the majority) are addicted to social media how are you going to take it away from them?
A few vociferous Luddites aren't going to cut it.
Governments, corporates etc use it as their main communication and feedback channel.
Sadly the most effective way to ask for help or register a complaint isn't a call centre or web site but Twitter.
So getting rid of social media would require enormous investment.
Policing it to death is also likely to get enormous push back.
This means:
* BitTorrent is fine
* Gnutella is fine
* All of FreeNet is fine
* All of I2P is also fine
Also, the required credit card checks are easy to bypass in an unfixable way by implementing token sharing services.
Token sharing has existed for YouTube for a long time so folks without accounts can watch 18+ videos anonymously. It took me all of 10 minutes to bypass the credit card checks using GreaseMonkey, allowing full porno access. This all works across platforms, including iOS.
This is all *without* using a VPN.
With VPNs included… lol no kid will be “saved” from the porno.
If Facebook and Goggle can work out who I like, where I have been, what I like, what I want to buy and make lots of money from it then they can spend some of it on more robust ways to block children from content.
20 years ago, we would have considered what they can do by tracking us as being magic, and I have no doubt that if their business model is threatened then in the future there will be more magic.
We need them to introduce systems that can't be defeated by VPN's, Token Sharing and anything else that can be used now.
And this comment "lol no kid will be “saved” from the porno" is just ignorant and crass.
Then you're not protecting your own privacy properly in an age the where failure to do so carries more risks than ever before. These trillion dollar companies with GDP bigger than the UK can't "introduce systems that can't be defeated by VPN's, Token Sharing and anything else that can be used now" because to do so would make the uncensored non-WWW options I mentioned previously appear much more convenient, turning them into the defacto standard choices for everyone (whether adult or child).
Case in point: LimeWire still works right now despite authorities across the globe "shutting it down" many years ago. It's incredibly convenient. Wikipedia explains all, only a handful of versions fail to work.
You can always NOT try it yourself to see how NOT easy it is: Download it, run it, wait a minute or so for it to connect, then search for 'xxx'. When you see a result you like, feel free to NOT select it and NOT click download. Your PC will then NOT connect to every other PC which hosts a copy (seeders) and totally NOT download chunks of the file from each of them. I think you get the idea.
Folks only use porn websites because waiting 30-40 seconds on a download is very slightly less convenient than instant streaming. Add barriers to accessing the content and that changes things. It's also worth noting that the content on mainstream porn websites is now all verified (with performers having to supply proof of ID before uploading) while P2P content is an unvetted free for all.
In conclusion: "lol no kid will be 'saved' from the porno" is an informed opinion, it's just an opinion you don't like. In fact, not only will no kid be "saved" they'll end up more exposed to it than ever before if this proposal becomes statute.
I'm hereby openly threatening to brand the UK a non-free nation, just like I did with Australia, if they continue on this deranged path of trying to save the childeren from pornography whilst thrashing citizens' privacy and anonymity online.
First of all, it has been proved that exposing children to pornography isn't harmful. In fact there was a BBC Panorama episode on this subject a few years ago.
Secondly, a massive surveillance system to check all online posts for pornography or "illegal activity" could result in an Orwellian control society where citizens will eventually revolt and turn the UK into a authoritarian state.
I'm hereby openly threatening to brand the UK a non-free nation, just like I did with Australia, if they continue on this deranged path of trying to save the childeren from pornography whilst thrashing citizens' privacy and anonymity online.
Authoritarian and corrupt.
It's really astonishing how corrupt the UK is. We like to think we're not because we're not bunging twenties to police officers on the street corner, but higher level corruption is basically endemic in the UK, mostly involving complex finance stuff so boring that everyone (including the regulators) just glazes over.
Whether it's second jobs (Owen Paterson being only the most recent); Matt Hand-in-cock and his brazen dodgy PPE deals; Grayling's ferry contracts to companies with no ferries; or Cameron giving Lex Greensill a desk in No.10 and telling the government's largest contractors that they needed to use Greensill's reverse factoring services. Some (like Carillion) didn't - but thought that shafting their sub-contractors sounded profitable and ran their own schemes. Nonetheless, Greensill managed to tank multiple businesses, crashed GAM before taking British Steel sideways. To say nothing of some seriously dodgy circular accounting for other SoftBank businesses before Credit Suisse finally cottoned on that the whole thing was held together with marketing and duct tape.
But it's okay because Greensill Capital was "a tech company, not a bank". So the regulators don't GAF.
Lex got a CBE of course (for "Services to fucking up the Economy"), and Cameron got his £7m working for Greensill after he left politics. KPMG are being sued by PwC for £1.5Bn because their "audits" basically involved signing off whatever shit the management gave them. PwC were the only viable Big Four administrator for Greensill Capital because KPMG and Deloitte had both been (asleep at the wheel) auditors, whilst E&Y had pocketed £10m as "turnaround consultants" shortly before it all came crashing down. Money well spent!
Meanwhile half of the UK's remaining big contractors and outsourcers have got reverse-factor time-bombs pretending that the company's debt is OpEx.
The whole institution is sadly rotten. We all just need to work out what sort of debt some fuckwit is going to package as a "diversified security" next so that we can short it and retire early.
Anything that harms the Meta pocketbook and cuts down on background rap music is good, but anything that gathers more data for the government is bad. I'm only reassured by the thought that they won't have anywhere to store it, any way to analyse it and will lose millions in the tenders for both systems. All they will be able to do is sell it back to Meta to better target ads
I have no difficulty in believing that government ministers, back benchers, and advisers know an awful lot more about pron than I do and have relevant practical experience. I think we can assume that this issue is as safe in their hands.
and have relevant practical experience. I think we can assume that this issue is as safe in their hands.
I'd rather not think about what's in their hands thanks :o
Elbow bumps are probably safer than handshakes. You might "come away" with more than you bargained for...
Fire (for obvious reasons). Sweet cleansing, purifying fire ->
This is very scary stuff. I had my identity stolen over 16 years ago now so can't even get a bank account....I survive on charity, basically a slave. When this goes through I won't be able to access anything....
Long been talk of forcing people to have webcams and submit to being filmed every time you make an online payment. Glad to read the IRS has abandoned that! But for how long? It's always been the long time plan to digitise currency completely, even make some of it programable....every where you go and every transaction you monitored, tracked and recorded for all time. Then you can be switched off at any time by any malicious employee who has access to the system! You can't buy food, have somewhere to live, work, or claim benefits! That's what i've been 'living' for the last 16 years! Although this isn't really living, just surviving.
People are being conditioned to it by the plandemic, it's only a matter of tim before it becomes lot easier for them to do to anyone that has been done to me :-(
Quote: "...Weakening encryption negatively impacts the global internet and means our private messages, sensitive banking information, personal photographs and privacy would be undermined...."
Annie Machon of the EFF is perfectly correct.
But an interesting question is this: "Exactly who deploys the encryption, and do you trust them?"
For example, can anyone tell me if Proton Mail encryption has been hacked by unknown bad actors?
The best answer (but not necessarily an effective answer!) is for citizens to deploy their own private encryption scheme BEFORE THEIR MESSAGES ENTER ANY PUBLIC CHANNEL. So....in the example, even if Proton Mail has been hacked by bad actors, when the snoops break in....all they find is....more encryption!
Not only that, but this approach also expands (perhaps by quite a bit) the number of encryption schemes which snoops have to deal with. This is a pretty good outcome, n'est pas?
***
QxB5mC7okHrjjct26w03dS8BRxVjAxMZ/ysdIxGgMBfqB1/Zbq2Hj0bcEGrlaSlrE+vwQm4+2hsE
U0dYrhv08D9ewqBtcA0/OdvF/aiCedUAH/1VUdLHBCBHcXgUURK34rIqQtFTxXq8d4KfONYUZUoB
BZt8vCzDp9L+Y/DtH2j8Twcsy0Om/hazMiC3+7qS2SrtngXAdTxKYwOwM5zFlKGN4ksd5tDZ5PKy
yYEZv7nuYnWOICqTdj7luH18kseJFEOrps98S6M=
***
So is everyone over 18 suddenly going to be eligible for a credit card?
I think we all know the answer to that one.
This yet another way to keep the peasants down and stays further into the distopian future we were warned about.
Given the way contactless payments have been rammed down our throats in the last few years, I'm surprised there's anything left for them to find out.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
