The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety Implementation of the UK's Online Safety Act is giving internet users around the globe – including those in US states moving to enact their own age verification laws – real-time proof that such laws impinge on everyone's rights to speak, read, and view freely. The new OSA rules require all online services accessible in the UK …
What’s to stop each porn site logging your viewing list of your verified profile, which they may already do under quite legally as defined in their T&C’s. Then that database is hacked/mistakenly left unsecured on a cloud server (cos we’ve never seen that happen) and then people find out what you’re into, especially if it isn’t of a vanilla flavour. That’s before you get into the problem of creep, where things get added to the list of content that websites are required to have age verification for before you can view them. One day you wake up and discover your favourite technology website is on a list of sites that someone in power believes should require verification. Why? Because they discuss things that may help circumvent such requirements. Then OFCOM say that the visual verification checks aren’t effectIve enough and children are able to bypass them. So ID upload is required……..
My university when the internet was first introduced there had a draconian list of words and subjects that you weren’t allowed to search for. No one had thought that this might have unintended consequences. So for example the popular music students who were given an assignment on punk music found that they couldn’t access anything about the Sex Pistols because the word Sex was on the banned list. Anthropology students and criminology students faced similar problems. This was swiftly reversed and “Sex” along with some other terms/words were searchable for the first time. Although the draconian restrictions still applied because you didn’t have to log in to the university system to surf the net but did have to use specific computers. There were unfiltered computers available for faculty use, which meant that most of them had no idea there were blocks.
When I was looking for a new TV for the spare bedroom recently I found myself going past a Currys store. I went in to see what they had on special offer, and whether they had anything really cheap, such as one that was a cancelled order etc. The sales droid tried to interest me in TV’s with “Freely” on them and said that it was better than freeview. I therefore googled it and looked at the Freely site and they list the following ‘great’ features:
One press of the Freely button on your remote... and you’re in! - One press on my power button suffices at the moment!
Glammed-up TV Guide to find what’s on now, next, and later - Why do I want a ‘glammed up’ TV guide? What’s wrong with an EPG like I have now?
Brand new MiniGuide to help you find more of what you love! - Why do I need a ‘MiniGuide’?
Pause and restart live TV – snacks, anyone?! - I can already do that on my existing TV.
Find and watch new shows and old faves on your Browse page - See above comments about guides
Accessible TV Guide so everyone can enjoy great TV - There’s already one of those on channel 555 on my current TV.
I told him that I didn’t see any of that being different to what I can do at the moment with my current TV. I can already find what I want to watch on TV without this new streaming thing, mini guide etc. I can pause live tv thanks to the hard drive attached to it. Wouldn’t this just be sending my viewing habits to people/companies that I don’t know? He unsurprisingly said he didn’t know about that. I said I don’t need streaming so please disregard that when showing me televisions. He mentioned that streaming wouldn’t be affected by the weather to which I said that my current set up isn’t either. It has to be torrential monsoon downpours before my satellite reception is affected and the terrestrial signal hasn’t ever been yet. I then explained what I wanted in a tv and apparently just buying a normal plug it in and watch the broadcast signal TV is very hard nowadays. I asked him when were the cameras going to be mandatory on TV’s so that surveillance of you as well as what you watch was complete? He hadn’t read 1984 nor seen the film from what I gathered from his response.
You can’t discuss what if’s as absolutes like you’re trying to do. That exactly the same argument the UK Govt is using in the opposite direction. What if kids see extreme porn?
If I thought the OSA was an effective way of making kids safe (I don’t but let’s pretend), of course that trumps the real but small risk of your nasty habits leaking online.
Both are weak arguments. The argument should only ever be about how effective the law could be for its intended goal with statistical modelling to show it’s got a chance of achieving those goals AND a similar analysis of the downsides.
In principle, it's correct that we can't assume anything negative will happen. You've gone so far the other way that you're a lot more wrong than that comment was. Your theory that our complaints should be based only on effectiveness is rubbish. Here's a really effective way to keep children away from content we don't want them to have: one government-written operating system for all personal computers which has an allowlist of sites, adults may enter government-operated facilities with that block removed and view anything else in there. That's really effective as long as the guards on those buildings are good at identifying children. Is it good? No, because of all those additional what ifs for how badly it can be abused and the many what ifs we don't have to ask because the abuses already happened. Effectiveness is not the big problem here.
The risks they commented about are not wild suppositions. They include that an age verifier may retain information, which they may be legally required to do (unclear) and some explicitly reserve the right to do in their terms and conditions, that they might store it insecurely, which we see happening all the time from others, and that once released, it can be correlated, which unless it's been designed with anonymity in mind, would be within the means of the kind of people who play around with leaked datasets. They also mentioned the risk that completely new classes of data would be categorized there for some reason, of which the article mentions existing examples. Nothing in that was outlandish.
We also have to consider how important the goal originally is. Your conclusion that "If I thought the OSA was an effective way of making kids safe [...] that trumps the real but small risk" is an opinion that I don't think is as universal as you say it is. Partially, it depends on what you mean by "make kids safe", but some of us might think that losing our privacy is not justified, even if there's a more effective legislation, that the problem is different or smaller than you might think, or that the problem they're trying to solve is the wrong one. If all you care about is whether the law does what it is trying to do, you're missing our discussions about whether they should be doing what the law tries to do and what damage they'll do while implementing that, successfully or otherwise.
You're confusing "intended goal" with "stated goal".
The stated goal is "anything you can justify by saying 'think about the children' ". The intended goal will pretty much be "disagreeing with what some entitled government ignoramus believes should be prohibited" - a list which will only grow over time.
I don't disagree with you on the ease-of-use and privacy issues you raise, but as for "Freely" itself, the main point are:
1) It's *replacing* FreeView and FreeSat. (although freeview won't be shutdown for at least another 9 years, but expect it to stagnate somewhat)
2) It combines terrestrial, satellite, and internet delivered channels into one EPG. In fact, you could be watching a channel via terrestrial, and if the transmitter breaks down, it should seamlessly switch to another source.
This makes it MUCH easier for people with accessability issues - there are a wealth of extra internet only channels out there that my mum can't access because she can't navigate an app. Now every source will have its own "TV channel", with the source being irrelevent.
Of course, there's always a hidden motive - the main drive for this is to allow terrestrial broadcasts to be phased out so that they can resell the frequencies.
(Not my downvote!)
They ask you to prove your ID when you've won money.
So you can sign up today, load £20 in to an account, spunk it on Man Utd to win the World Cup in Thailand. If they don't win, they don't care. You can put more money in. But if you win money, they won't pay out until you provide some sort of verification.
Happy to be wrong on that, but the last time I signed up that's how it worked.
I don't bet often, but the last time I did sign up for a betting site, they did require that I send them copies of identity documents before depositing any money. Now, it may be the case that there are sites that offer free bets to new users without verifying their identity (which seems stupid as such an offer could be easily and obviously gamed), but I would suggest that a site that allows you to give them money, but which puts restrictions on withdrawing it again, is quite likely to not be operating within the law.
Matched betting probably explains why they want IDs. There are people that 'game' the gambling sites, exploiting free bet offers and promotional offers to get a bit of cash. If you can treat it as purely a statistical exercise it can pay out moderately well. Some people don't and just get stuck in a cycle of gambling.
There is shit ton of ML stuff based on analysing your logins, device IP, various other metadata to try and correlate users of gambling sites for revenue protection and money laundering detection.
You will have to prove you are legit enough to lose your shirt or the ability to turn RNG requests into money (license) is in jeopardy.
People avoid the word 'porn' because for some nations that is now or will be grounds to block the page.
It is censorship, plain and simple, and it works like censorship, as the government wanted it to. Once they screw over Wikipedia, 'to protect the children', they will be able to put people off seeing stuff like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_scandals_in_the_United_Kingdom
I really hope Labour get wiped out of power at the next election for joining hands with the Tories over this. Given that they have gone from landslide victory to widely vilified in a few months, they will be out of power then and serve them right.
No love for Reform, but nobody votes to be dictated to. The UK have had optional ISP blocks and mobile blocks for adult content for years. If parents are too lazy to use them, that is not an excuse for blanket censorship.
I would encourage any Brit annoyed by this to avoid doing stuff online as a protest. Pay with cash, use a phone call, write a letter. They want to censor our net, we can say no to their precious digital transition. However much extra work it requires, do it. If you can only do it digitally, don't do it. Either we get an open internet with parents doing their job, or we walk away from all of it. Take your digital pivot and stick it where the sun doesn't shine, including pointless smart meters. All digital or no digital.
What about gambling websites and gambling adverts on TV ?
Surely they are adult content too ?
As per article below, "Number of child gamblers quadruples in just two years" from 2018.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46286945
Gambling is a serious issue, yet the UK government does not see the exposure on TV, or in the high street, as an issue.
It's almost as if an industry which has as its sole purpose taking money from people, might have money put aside to influence political decisions. We can blame Blair for loosening the rules about allowing advertising of gambling for the proliferation of adverts for what I like to refer to as "gamblecunts".
It's not porn. It's content that should be deemed restrictable based on the most tenuous connection to reality.
For example, I would like to restrict access to legal briefings, that is a topical example, previously some sort of reason would need manufacturing. Now you can have all the briefings you'd like, but you'll need to be verified, and I'm sure that won't deter you.
It's a treasure trove of legal compulsion which is aimed at service providers, leading to the Met telling Zoom to nix legal briefings for the next round of granny protestors with placards. https://defendourjuries.net/
Which is mildly hilarious since the most likely demographic to be able to manage without Zoom.
What can you say that already hasn't been said about this stupidity?
Suggesting banning VPNs shows how little the politicians know about computing. Let's silence people and start destroying democracy in the name of the children!
The Australian government is about to climb aboard the stupid wagon with its ban on kids accessing social media.
There is no fecking way in hell that I'm providing a photo of my license or a face scan to access YouTube etc. Not gonna happen.
Looks like I'll be using Tor a lot more in future.
Calling it “stupidity” is comforting but wrong. Politicians aren’t clueless about tech - they’ve got advisers who map out every implication. They know full well what VPN bans and ID checks mean. The “protect the children” line is just bait for the cognitively deficient; the real target is control.
Saying “I’ll never upload my licence or face scan” is just bravado. Give it a year or two and you’ll have no practical choice. That’s the playbook: voluntary → normalised → mandatory. Sure, a minority will keep using Tor or workarounds, but that’s not a bug, that’s a feature. In authoritarian logic, those who refuse to comply self-identify. They already have your personal data - if you’re not in the age-checker system, congratulations, you’ve just flagged yourself as a potential dissident.
"Saying “I’ll never upload my licence or face scan” is just bravado. Give it a year or two and you’ll have no practical choice."
It's more than bravado. I never will. End of story. But you go ahead and upload your photo. Become a sheep. Everyone needs to push back on this shit
Oh, and I'm happy to be flagged as a "potential dissident", because I absolutely refuse to play by their stupid rules.
They clearly don't, or they'd understand that every local authority would immediately shut down if VPNs were banned. We all use them, not just for WFH but for central networking across hundreds of operational sites. Their removal would potentially expose the details of every schoolchild, every pensioner in sheltered housing, every vulnerable person fleeing domestic abuse. We'd actually be breaking the law if we stopped using them.
They won't ban VPNs outright, every government body will use them. Instead they'll just require age verification checks when signing up to use a vpn provider such as proton/nord. I would not put it past them to pressure larger providers to block VPN ranges too, like youtube currently do for some region locked content (as requested by the content provider - usually paramount owned content).
What about VPNs that you can pay in cash / crypto for, like Mullvad? What about VPNs offered via AWS or GCP, which could be created by online communities and managed informally? There are many ways around such a block. Unless you ban encrypted traffic, you can't ban VPNs.
" if VPNs were banned
Did you even read the article? Or the previous one about OSA and VPNs? Both talked about extending age verification to VPN usage, NOT banning VPNs. If you start writing to your MP or campaigning based on a false premise, you'll just get ignored as an ignorant nutter.
When you protest against something, make sure are protesting against the right thing. That will benefit everyone instead of making you and anyone else making the same mistake end up wasting everyone's times, especially your own.
Not that I'm defending them, but there's a clear difference between private VPNs used to connect to internal networks, and commercial VPN providers that just provide an alternate exit point to the internet.
Clearly, they mean the latter.
To pass cursory inspection, the fake license must use a credible licence number. Plenty of other things stand out compared to mine, but some of them could be explained by my license predating brexit.
Mine pre-dates Brexit by decades, but the number still matches that definition accurately. It wold still have been a green paper one if I'd not lost my wallet many years ago, so have a "new style" pink paper one. Sometimes it causes an issue when I use it as proof of ID because some people think it's not a legal document as they've never seen a paper driving license other than during the cursory "training" the didn't pay attention to on what documents can be used as ID.
Recently I did an online survey, not something I normally do but I was on a bus stuck in traffic. It was on a site I had clicked on from a google search, a “take our survey” type affair but wasn’t being conducted by that site. They were asking in one question whether you would still access sites if you were required to log in to get access to the site. I said no to that one, next question sort of a follow up was would your answer change if you had to verify your identity to which I again said no. In the comments section I mentioned that I’d stop visiting sites that required log in to view them or verify my ID.
The majority of people using paid porn sites are adults.
The majority of people now using paid VPNs to access those paid porn sites are adults.
The pachyderm on the premises is that the majority of unsavoury content seen by children is on social media, which somehow seems to escape this regulation.
For example:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd0d31r423ko - "Police investigating death of French streamer seize equipment and videos", article includes "Raphaël Graven, also known as Jeanpormanove, was known for videos on the platform Kick in which he endured apparent violence and humiliation." Not covered by the OSA.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dpmlvx1k2o - "Meta investigated over AI having 'sensual' chats with children." Not covered by the OSA.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c15lpwzzzqgo - "Firm apologises for saying it would not process LGBTQ+ payments", the root cause of the article is a Christian-fundamentalist campaign against anything online that doesn't fit their narrow prejudices. Which is pretty much everything - obviously not including the Bible, which starts with murder, incest (only one woman created, Adam only had two sons, where did everyone else come from?), and goes downhill from there including God 'nuking the site from orbit to be sure' and starting again with Noah+family. None of it covered by the OSA.
And that's just BBC articles I've read in the last 2 days.
Given the subjective nature of theology*, whether or not something contains verifiable theology is entirely incidental.
*Yes, I am aware that objective arguments can be built in theology, but even those rely upon subjective assessments being agreed between theologists first.
"Firm apologises for saying it would not process LGBTQ+ payments", the root cause of the article is a Christian-fundamentalist campaign against anything online that doesn't fit their narrow prejudices.
This shouldn't be unexpected to those with foresight. When the payment processors stepped in to shut down legal but deeply unpleasant right wing pundits from receiving funds, I was aghast at the cheers because it seemed obvious that the same processors would be susceptible to pressure groups on all sides.
It’s not just about data. Imagine someone in an abusive household: the abuser keeps hold of their documents, or they’ve been advised to hide them for safety. Now every time an ID check is required, the abuser has one more lever of control - deciding what sites they can or cannot access.
The system paints it as ‘not censorship’ because the sites are technically still accessible - but in reality it slams the door on the most vulnerable.
In principle, I like the idea of age checks to protect children from seeing pornographic content online. It’s easy to say that it should be up to the parents to carry out this protection, but many parents don’t have the capability to do so.
But there’s an enormous gulf between principle and practice - and, in practice, this is a bloody stupid idea that won’t work. It isn’t even necessary to use a VPN to access pornography in the UK - the ‘respectable’ sites, the ones that follow the law about content that may be shown, have age verification. But what about the sites on the ‘normal web’ which are a little more lax about what they carry? They don’t have any kind of age verification.
We can’t stop children, and especially teens, from trying to access this content. Pushing boundaries is their raison d’être. But we can at least ensure that it’s easier for them to access safeish content that they aren’t supposed to see than possibly really vile content that no one should see.
Unintended consequences. Age verification is a bloody stupid idea.
> It’s easy to say that it should be up to the parents to carry out this protection, but many parents don’t have the capability to do so.
If we keep excusing parents from their responsibilities, and force them onto the government, then the situation becomes ever worse, not better. Turning on parental controls is not difficult, the real problem is that too many parents don’t want to parent their children, they want to be their best friends, and are unwilling to be the ones to put any restrictions at all on them.
My new ISP has something interesting in the terms and conditions. By using their service I agree to only access content suitable for all audiences. So technically, if I watch a program rated PG on iPlayer, I have breached their T&C's.
Do I think they are watching me closely enough to terminate my account if I watch an episode of Dr Who? No.
Do I think they will use this as an excuse to terminate my account if they get a request asking "Who was using this IP address at this time" or I become difficult in any other way? Oh, yes.
Well of course. They will have verified you as the account holder before actioning any change to your account so at that point they knew they were dealing with a legal adult and since they never wanted to have to enforce this anyway, I'd expect no less of them. Unless, of course, your ISP is "Fundamentalist_$religion_OnLine", in which case they'd probably just suggest you pray harder or cancel your account.
While this is true, there's also a lot of parents who cannot parent their children because they're having to work multiple jobs to keep the family fed, clothed and housed. This isn't a fault with them - it's a fault with our ultra-capitalist society that only values an individual's time and life as something that can be used to generate profit.
@Jedit
"While this is true, there's also a lot of parents who cannot parent their children because they're having to work multiple jobs to keep the family fed, clothed and housed."
Lets excuse a change in circumstances. So people incapable of looking after a child have a child regardless of the many means of not having a child? So since they cannot be parents do they not have any support structure (used to be called family) to help? If the answer is still no then why are these supposed adults too selfish to care about the life of their child not giving up the child for adoption and avoiding having more?
If you got a pet there is an expectation that you would only get one with the intention of looking after it and give it away if you find you cannot. It would be selfish to think we dont expect a higher standard from adults who decide to have children. If you cannot parent then why have children?
"This isn't a fault with them - it's a fault with our ultra-capitalist society that only values an individual's time and life as something that can be used to generate profit."
Eh? In an ultra capitalist society why wouldnt the offspring be working instead of sitting in the middle of roads, enjoying the glorious technology and time to rub one out and generally living a wonderful standard of living? Maybe ultra capitalist has given them too good a life? I guess they could live under a socialist utopia without phones and standing in a field picking turnips.
I don't disagree that many have to work multiple jobs or long hours in one job. That said, whilst regularly bursting to ~80-100hrs per week from 2017-2021 (occasional 130hrs but that's a different story), having bought our 3yo first an Amazon Kids tablet and then later an iPad, I was perfectly able (and insistent) to set up parental controls. Her Switch has parental controls. The iPad has become easier with revisions to do so, but plenty of spoon-fed guides exist for the layman or newcomer.
Websites exist that support child protection approaches. Yes, few "regular" parents would be able to set a time-bound secondary SSID to route through a Pi-type gateway and custom DNS, but you bet your ass they're capable of locking down their old iPhone with Family controls (~1hr), using parental controls on a Switch (~minutes) or visiting their ISP's page on that safety control (~20 seconds). None are perfect but the WoNT sOmeONe ThINk OF mY cHIldrEN brigade who can't be bothered with a cursory search on protecting their children shouldn't take priority over the basic freedoms of the general public. I extrapolate to children on unregistered dirt bikes, those that aren't potty trained when they get to primary school or ones seemingly out after midnight without curfew, all similar levels of parenting.
"Lack of time because of multiple jobs" is not an excuse for "I gave my child unfettered access to the internet"
> I guess they could live under a socialist utopia without phones and standing in a field picking turnips.
Typical MAGA maggots idea of socialism, along with the view that pure socialism is the only alternative to the late stage capitalism we are forced to live under.
I bet you also hated everything Russian too until your orange cult leader came out with his putin man-crush.
Being a parent is a large and difficult responsibility. Those who choose to do it should take that responsibility. Yes, if you're busy, any other action, from ensuring the parental filters are set up the way you want them to getting your child to medical attention when needed will be harder on your time. You won't be excused for failing to do the latter. I'm not sure the former should get a special difference, especially as there are many non-filter options like talking with the child or even trusting them after they've proven trustworthy which can be acceptable alternatives and I'm willing to accept the parent's judgement on which one they want to use. Also, for most filters, it's really not that time-consuming to set one up. If you have to fight a child who is intent on bypassing them, then setting up something larger will take more time, but it's likely that at that point, something other than a filter is needed.
If we've decided that the solution to this problem is trying to properly raise children without the parents needing to do anything because the parents are busy, we've got much more important things where no law exists. I don't think that's a good approach. If you have an alternative suggestion, that would not justify this law, and I have a suspicion there will be serious problems with that one too but don't know for sure because I haven't heard it.
They should have the capability, but they may not. At best this might be due to their own lack of education in technology. At worst it might be that they’re shitty parents - as witnessed by the number of children with, for example, poor dental hygiene (picking that as a proxy for any number of symptoms of neglect).
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Not everyone -- I've done helpdesk with a lot of clueless users who dealing with tech don't know arres from st elba. Doesn't make them bad people or uncaring parents but their children can run rings around them when it comes to using computers. And that is the problem with not having ways of checking age for nasty stuff. However as usual there can be mission creep.
And, particularly if they crack down on VPNs, we are raising a generation who all know how to use Tor and use it routinely!
So they won't just be seeing legal pornography but the most vile, illegal and hateful sites. And from there... how to earn or steal bitcoin (including sex work, selling pics of family members, buying and selling drugs, ...) and maybe even knives, guns and violence.
Wonderful
In principle, I like the idea of age checks to protect children from seeing pornographic content online. It’s easy to say that it should be up to the parents to carry out this protection, but many parents don’t have the capability to do so.
In my case, I treated my adolescent kids with the respect they merited and simply told them "Every device you can log into on my network goes through MY firewall to access the net. Yes, I know VPNs exist but I'm the sysadmin as well as the network admin and I'm already inside that loop. I am not blocking anything from you, not filtering anything apart from sites I filter for everybody because I know they are malicious. Just remember that I could, theoretically, go back and see everywhere you go from my net. It would be a pain in the arse so I will be extremely pissed off at you if you give me a reason to go look. Don't give me that reason."
Oddly enough, they ended up learning better digital hygiene than 90% of their peers and never did give me any reason to go check up on "where they'd been."
My brother bought his daughters laptops when they started secondary school. He told them that he'd installed key loggers so that if he ever had any suspicon that they weren't being sensible about using the laptops, regardless of whose network they'd connected to, he'd always be able to check (they had already been taught about safe behaviour in chat rooms, etc, at school). And then he talked about security and the risk of dodgy sites with iffy content dropping spyware et al, and that if they did do something careless they risked losing all their schoolwork and photos and videos, etc, and maybe even bricking the hardware so that they'd have to go without a computer for months until he could afford to buy a replacement. That was enough to scare them into being careful -- well, at least as far as we know, but they're grown up now and haven't turned into fascists or pick-up artists or anorexics or bankrupts or anything but normal well-balanced adults.
"but many parents don’t have the capability to do so."
Really? Most parents of children (in OSA terms) were still at school when it became normal to access the Internet as part of school lessons and very likely had access from home too. IIRC, it was the mid-2000's when internet access surpassed 50% of households in the UK. That's 20 years ago, so cherry picking some numbers, an average parent is 30ish and so was 10ish when they were first exposed to the internet. I fully accept that some could not then access the internet due to costs etc and that "many" is a vague term, but I do wish people would not trot out the old "parents don't understand the internet" meme so easily and glibly when it gets less and less true every year.
It's been possible for years to have your ISP enable opt-in filtering.
What the OSA should have been is a requirement for websites to advertise the "safety level" of the content. If it's adult, set a rating of 18+. Do it like the BBFC rating scale. Then you call up your ISP and say I'd like to put a filter on for anything 18+. Router does it all for you, and it can be device-dependent so the phones and laptops in the house stay <18 but dad's PC is 18+ for... y'know...
Meta/Twitter/whatever would be responsible for categorising the rating of any individual page, and only allowing 18+ content to be shown to clients that attest that they have access to 18+ content.
Could even make it an opt-out system, so it's on by default unless the setting is changed in the router software which would require a password. I wouldn't like this as much, but as long as the setup of the product gives a clear and unambiguous opt-out, then it could work. Obviously, advanced users would be able to use their own routers which would not filter anything.
This would retain the open internet for all, and keep the parents happy that want a nanny state. Yes, it does place additional obligations upon content providers, but way less than the OSA, and doesn't fundamentally censor anything.
It's a compromise but I doubt it will ever happen since OSA is not about protecting anyone but censoring the internet.
I once had a mobile provider that had such filters on at default - you had to login to your account on their website to remove them (the filtering is done at the ISP side, not the user side, so no modem or router override would help)
Also, the filters were quite generic, so it wasn't a big embarrassing red flag to click the "I'm an adult. Remove the restrictions please" button.
They'll argue that this was done "by their office" and for "essential research". Back in 2014/2015, around a quarter of a million attempts were made annually to access porn from parliamentary computers. Damian Green and Neil Parrish both got caught, but given those porn access attempts have reportedly fallen by 90%, what do we think has happened?
a) MPs have suddenly become New Model Citizens, and ceased watching grumble on the tax payers tab
b) They suddenly become technically astute and learned how to use VPNs and proxies
c) They've ensured that the monitoring of parliamentary computers is less stringent
d) They're now using personal devices and expensing those
My money's on a mix of c and d. Certainly isn't a or b.
Dear David Harper,
Do you really thimk we are that stupid that spelling PORN as pr0n is going to confuse and mislead us ?
Get a grip !
Regards,
Your friendly local IT SysAdmin (soon to be replaced by just as capable AI, although less likely to misspell PORN. Or need to)
If you, the age verification service, are "verifying" the age of a person using a device that the person being checked controls then you are merely presenting them with a technical challenge to overcome.
Please do not be surprised when any and every 12 year old with even average IQ works out how to work around it.
Censorship is not what the UK is doing. It's trying to stop kids looking at Porn because Porn is bad for women and that's bad for society. (Argue that point all you like, you'll still be wrong.)
So something needs to be done since nobody is attempting to legislate against porn, or control porn. And nobody is trying to address the rapid collapse of respect for women globally.
So what do we do about that?
UK Gov tried age controls. It was dumb, malformed, ill informed etc. But it isn't censorship, it's incompetence. Governments are good at that.
In my opinion, the 'Senior Speech and Privacy Activist' at the EFF avoided or completely missed the actual issue, picked up an ill informed and partisan political point and ultimately offered no suggestions to solve the problem from any perspective. If I was in charge there, this would be his last day.
Since no one else has any suggestions as to how to fix this - and Governments definitely won't figure it out - I have one: Stand up for women. Tell your kids, friends, colleagues and politicians to stand up for women. And don't stop telling them. This is the fight of our age.
Porn is a plague, the rot of civilisation - so half measures won’t do. Every citizen must be fitted with biometric chastity locks at puberty, with arousal levels monitored in real time by the Ministry of Morality. Only those granted an Offspring Licence may access VR training modules in state-approved positions, under strict supervision.
The rest will undergo quarterly Arousal Audits, with neighbours encouraged to report suspicious moans, sighs, or prolonged bathroom visits. Any deviation means ration cuts, housing downgrades, and mandatory re-education in Corrective Intimacy Centres.
Naturally, exceptions must be made for the nation’s elites. They will be permitted access to controlled adult entertainment zones - designated islands where they can indulge freely, far from the eyes of the common citizen. After all, safeguarding is for the masses, not for those tasked with ruling them.
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You say that "Since no one else has any suggestions as to how to fix this" but I disagree.
An awful lot of pornographic and other loathsome content is already barred under existing legislation but with Section 230 in the USA and equivalent "Get out of jail free" cards available to Faecesbook and the letter formerly known as Twatter in the UK and elsewhere enabling them to pretend that they're not publishers the law is largely unenforceable (even were PC Plod to be capable or interested in doing anything about it).
I agree that an awfully large amount of pornographic content is poisoning society (as is "social" media and the use of "AI" LLMs) and should be prevented from general circulation (yes, there will always be people who use TOR to access disgusting material but most of the gen pop can't be bothered with anything that requires pressing more than a button) through the removal of publishers such as Meta from the current get-out. Give them a week of massive fines for every single infringement and they'll either stop business in the UK (a good thing IMO) or actually start doing something about the problem. Rachel from Accounts would probably also be happy with this as there's a large hole in the public finances that needs filling and you've got to start somewhere.
Hold on, are you suggesting that accidental censorship doesn't exist because they were trying to do something entirely different?
If I shoot myself in the foot, it's not an act of stupidity if I was trying to shoot that duck over there?
It doesn't matter what they are trying to do if the consequences are serious and wide ranging. This is the "just think of the children" argument writ large. No matter how big the moral panic may be, we still need to consider the consequences of our response.
We could go on to argue about the definition of porn, and whether anything related to adult sexuality is automatically harmful - but that's a much more complex discussion that requires more nuance than can be squeezed into a technical forum. The headline point is that allowing external activist groups to make decisions about what we can and cannot view *is* censorship, no matter how well meaning the stated intent is.
I'll bite.
Because the OSA is not about "Porn". It is actually about "Harmful Content", which for the purpose of rallying the troops, is Porn. But the definition of "Harmful Content" goes far beyond porn, and is subject to definition and re-definition without further recourse to Parliament.
Today, what *you* care about is not censored. Give it time....
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
That's exactly how these things go - start with the easiest things to stir up public opprobrium over, then you slowly drive in that wedge. We've seen it time and time again - like the "will only be used for serious crime" but ends up as "councils can use it to check if people are sending their children to the wrong school" (because it's such a crime for parents to want the best for their offspring.) Ands more recently, common vandalism (chucking some paint on some aircraft) gets defined as terrorism and an organisation gets proscribed - and them I'm thinking, does that statement then make me a criminal as it looks a lot like I'm supporting a proscribed organisation (I'm not, just criticising the blatant hypocrisy.)
So first they came for the illegal content, and I didn't speak out as I'm not interested in making bombs.
Then they came for the hate speach, and I didn't speak out as I'm not interesting in listening to that sort of thing.
Then they ...
Then they came for the (insert something I am interested in, but totally legal and benign), and there was no-one left to speak for me.
I can only go along with this
after all, finding out who let their dog shit on the village green falls well within the bounds of terrorism as defined by the RIPA, and as for the people leaving their recycling bins out on the wrong day with the wrong stuff in them.. well 25 yrs in max security.
Personally I think that the government should ban all under 18s from using the internet by having only 1 government ISP which checks your age and ID when you log into it, thus preventing children from seeing pr0n and other harmful content (and the rest of the population too)
Seriously though, theres something very wrong with the act if we cannot access an adults only discord server that has slightly erotic pictures of some of its members (they all show far less than you'd see on page 3 of the sun) without having to verify our age. and all because MPs are in thralldom to right wing media rags and pressure groups that yell 'think of the children' when ever anyone dares to criticise them
"(they all show far less than you'd see on page 3 of the sun"
To be fair,almost no child today would have a clue what that referenced :-)
It's 10 years since The Sun stopped doing "page 3 models" and most kids who remember that are likely adults now. I mean, your average 8 year old had little interest in nekkid wimmin and they are 18 and legal now (unlike some of the "models" at the time)!
So something needs to be done since nobody is attempting to legislate against porn, or control porn. And nobody is trying to address the rapid collapse of respect for women globally.
You’re wrong, there are laws already on the books and in the works on porn in the UK and worldwide For example:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/strangulation-in-pornography-to-be-made-illegal
Worldwide laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_laws_by_region
Try viewing porn in the UAE and see how long you last.
A friend of mine is into being spanked, paddled etc. That’s what turns her on and not much else really. She spent her teenage years in the eighties and early nineties basically miserable from a romantic/sexual standpoint. She was under the impression that there wasn’t anyone else like her. She would ask boyfriends to spank her and never found one who was willing to satisfy her desires. Then the internet came along and she found out from searching that she wasn’t the only one. She’s now happily married to someone who she is deeply in love with and is shares the same interest in her sexual kink as she does. She’s got no interest in signing up for age verification and instead uses a VPN to watch her type of porn with her husband. She’s pointed out that even if this isn’t censorship it’s an attempt to deanonymize the internet and she doesn’t like that thought. Neither do I.
"This includes footage of police attacking pro-Palestinian protestors being blocked on X"
I'm not sure if the editor intended to mis-state, but the linked 'footage' on Kiera Diss's account isn't police attacking pro-Palestinian protestors; it's police flattening an anti-migrant protestor who had been shouting at the pro-Palestine mob up in a tree behind him.
https://x.com/KieraDiss/status/1948804332960579816
The key point here is that the Labour government - largely advised by big American corporates - genuinely believes there's a big red button marked "protect the children" that they can push.
The unintended consequences (strangely beneficial to big American corporates and UK gambling companies) are invisible to them because that would involve questioning what they've been led to believe.
I'm fully aware of the origin of the idea. Remember that most MPs are clueless on these matters and rely on the civil service and advisors/lobbyists/activist groups to tell them how to vote.
As it is, Labour have more than embraced the idea, and are doing all they can to defend it even when the problems have been clearly pointed out.
If I log into Reddit, for instance using a third party service, eg. a gmail or apple account, surely they already know my date of birth? I'm not going to send my passport to some sketchy company out of the country I haven't heard of. The first rule of internet safety was always don't send sensitive information to an untrusted third party.
"If I log into Reddit, for instance using a third party service, eg. a gmail or apple account"
And why on Earth would you do that? Centralising your logins is a very bad idea.
"don't send sensitive information to an untrusted third party"
I count even my email address as sensitive information. Having several of my own domains, I tend to use a different email address (and of course a different, strong, password) for every new account I'm forced to set up for one pointless reason or another (before you ask: KeePassXC, locally hosted and shared across devices). That way, if some service gets compromised (or sells my data to spamming scum), I know exactly which one it was, and I can just turn it off. This also has many other benefits in terms of ID theft.
Even if it is supposedly "all about the children", which it isn't (it is censorship), it is about time that people that fuck children into existence take responsibility for these tech savvy rug-rats. Don't blame everyone else for your problems, at the same time as giving the kids mobile phones at 5 years of age etc.
These measures need to be fought tooth and nail. Just trying to bypass them with a VPN isn't going to work since the government will simply ban their use.
The lack of resistance to these measures is telling in that the UK population still believes "the government knows best." There's a lack of push-back from free media, editors, influencers and ordinary citizens for fear of being branded a terrorist or child molester.
The UK and Australia are merely "facade democracies" where the government is putting up more and more no-crossing lines and the territory to maneuver in is getting smaller and smaller. They're basically Orwellian totalitarian societies where people get to vote between two puppets just to make them feel they have something to choose.
Across the pond the same path is being pursued, but due to America's history this will take a much longer time. In the end the federal government will have to contend with 300 million armed-to-the-teeth Americans in order to push through these totalitarian reforms. I believe they'll think better of it.
" In the end the federal government will have to contend with 300 million armed-to-the-teeth Americans in order to push through these totalitarian reforms."
I strongly doubt that for many of the reasons already posted above. You only have to look at the political divide in the US to see that you'll never get anything close to 300 million on the same side of anything.
Of looking at the ladies in the underwear section in the Index and Littlewoods catalogue. Buying a porn mag in the one newsagent you knew you'd get away with it, "looking" at the sausy adverts that were in Viz, occasionally coming across boobs on a VHS you'd be watching (I'll save that for later) and picking up an adult mag from a market stall while in France on holiday as they didn't give a fuck.
"occasionally coming across boobs on a VHS you'd be watching"
Finally!!!! A market for all those recordings of Channel 4 "Red Triangle" films I hoarded all these years!
For non-UKians, Ch. 4, a nominally "public broadcaster" at the time, tried an experiment of showing films with soft porn scenes late at night, marked on screen with a red triangle logo to warn people off who might be offended. Naturally, it made those shows a "must watch" for every red-blooded teen in UK and spectacularly back-fired and was quietly done away with.
My biggest worry is honestly identity theft .
It seems to be a regular occurance about these types of site being hacked, not storing data correctly etc. Yes they say they don't hold on to the data, but how many other sites have claimed that only to turn around and go "uh oh, looks like we actually did... sorry"
And it's not even just about the hacking. Once it becomes commonplace what's to stop all the phishing attempts. When they asked for your bank details the scam was obvious to most, but when needing ID to view anything becomes the norm, what's to stop them making a fake site for us to upload our IDs to?
From a personal data standpoint, in my view this is a nightmare.
I'm not quite sure I understand what this comment is trying to say tbh. If you're saying that the OSA should not prevent children learning (in an age appropriate way) about gender dysphoria/incongruence or sexualities other than strictly straight they I'd completely agree with you. For a short while that wasn't the case due to 'errors' but that got corrected.
If, on the other hand, you're saying that children who may have gender dysphoria/incongruence and be gay should be blocked from accessing resources that help them understand it then I feel that would be a really, really, bad idea.
Rosie
Social media just would not be a profitable business if they were forced to moderate properly and refuse dangerous, libellous lying content. So of course there will be a push back on any attempt to civilise the internet.
Big tobacco wrote the playbook, big oil enhanced it and now its big techs turn.
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