*eye roll*
"they can comply with the Act and that their users are in safe hands"
I bet they are!
A startup is claiming to have signed age verification contracts with a host of smut site operators – and is hoping 40 per cent of Britons will display their privates to it in July. 1Account, a business run by Ben Keirle and which was incorporated as One Account Mobile Ltd in August last year, claims to have inked deals with “ …
The number of people who will verify their ID on free-to-view sites is approximately zero.
The number of people who will buy subscriptions without first seeing a sample of what is on offer is approximately zero.
And remember, you will have to verify your ID before you can have any clue whatsoever about what they are offering.
Not to mention that this is a company that states it will start making money later, with something that I very much doubt anyone is interested in.
I mean, who is going to give a damn about 1Accounts' "pay service" when they're already paying for their porn ? is 1Account going to have an agreement with every single porn site out there ?
Somehow, I doubt that.
My business model is to spam out blackmail emails threatening to expose the receipient for registering for a pr0nz age verification service and claiming to also have a record of their browsing history.
Sometimes a low-tech approach offers a better rate of return than actually going to the trouble of compromising a service and properly targeting your blackmail.
>I wonder how long that will remain free when it has to start coping with the volumes of video streaming...
It doesn't necessarily have to.
The url to sexy-anne-widecombe.com goes through the VPN but the video download from akamia can go direct to the user. Unless the UK's Gret British Firewall is intending to block all CDNs or do AI video inspection on all video streams to decide how naughty they are.
Errr, no. Opera has a built in limited web proxy service. It will get you around geo-blocking on a limited basis but will not provide secure browsing or ehnanced privacy. You also need to be asking what Opera are doing with all that "free" browsing data that you are providing them with.
I doubt DNS settings being changed will make a difference - it'll be blocked using the IWF system that was originally designed to block illegal porn (kid stuff mainly) that got gradually expanded to cover "extreme" porn (you'd be surprised what counts as that) and torrent sites. It doesn't usually do this at the DNS level.
I do recall at the time many people arguing that the IWF system would be exploited over time. Looks like that's becoming the case.
The "extreme porn" laws have since been pretty much gutted, and there were almost zero convictions anyway.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47069414
The advice is now a much more sensible "so long as it's consenting adults that aren't causing serious harm".
Somewhere in deepest darkest Whitehall..
Mandarin: Naughty, naughty plebs, tsk tsk...ah, well, it wasn't as if we weren't expecting this sort of response (pulls out his copy of the already drafted more draconian legislation targeting circumvention technologies and services) in light of what GCHQ have reported back on how people have been bypassing this system, let's have a final look to see if we need to alter this to cover anything we'd missed...
Best look at this nonsense as some sort of legal Trojan that the spooks(?) wanted through for future (ab)use, the whole thing is too bloody asinine on the surface to be anything else but....well, there's always good old incompetence, I suppose, as well, oh, and maybe someone, somewhere getting a nice future backhander out of it as well at some point for current services rendered to their friends..
nah, I think I'll stick to my spookery-pokery theory...
I have never understood the porn anti-porn battle, and all the hype surrounding it. What agenda is hidden under or behind all the rhetoric? I mean once you have seen one PM shagging a goat, you have seen them all. It can't be about all about a few blokes buggering a nun can it?
"[...] in which case you are a Sex offender in Scotland"
In Scotland it is illegal to have sex with a bicycle - or at least it was in 2007.
It's all about control of the population. Hearts and minds and all that. Anytime "morals" are reason for laws it should be questioned as to why.
Sidenote: If the system is hacked, I do wonder how many MP's will be found out and either exposed or blackmailed? Surely they all can't be as pure as the driven snow?
"All of them, of course."
Now *that* I doubt. For example, if we refer back to Miss Widdecombe, as mentioned in a previous message, on a whole range of issues I'd be *really* surprised if she turned out to be a hypocrite, rather than just wrong. Credit where it's due ... and all that.
Fake ID, VPNs, criminals, paedophiles, free or paid content - all irrelevant.
The ONLY things that matters is that Theresa May (first as the then Home Secretary, now as PM) and the Tories can tell the Daily Mail "we put the protection in place you screamed for, please vote for us in the next election" That it can be circumvented, is impractical, and that it weakens security is not important to MPs today. Wait until they're personal details are breached (and MPs have a history of kinks being made public, so this is just another avenue).
> it "does not and will not store any of our users’ browsing history, ever" - something no company could do unless it installed surveillanceware on the user's device
Gareth how do you think Google and Facebook track everyone around the web? They certainly don't install 'surveillanceware' on every device (although google really tries with Chrome) yet they can follow your every move and report it to advertisers, Russian researchers, etc. All it would take is a tracking cookie as part of the AV process and Rab's yer faither's brother.
Apparently it is often the people who impose such laws that are responding to their own dark thoughts. Knowing how they themselves behave - or would seriously like to - they assume that everyone else is even weaker in self-control. There's no one as extreme as a convert. By their loud utterances they hope to convince others - and themselves - of their impeccable conformity to their group.
Remember the prayer one of the Church's moral crusaders St Augustine - "[God] grant me chastity and continence - but not yet".
(NSFW discussion but no images)
Turns out 17,435,654 people and counting...
It is going to be very interesting to see how this is will be applied, enforced, and (inevitably) sidestepped by end users. I wonder how much attention this will get from the political class, though. They seem rather busy at the moment, no doubt being very productive on something more intelligent.
No popcorn icon, so beer'll have to do...
I've just watched the 'how it works' video on the 1Account website and it has reassuring plinky-plonky music.
Just like the music TV programme makers put on documentaries about puppies.
So I have total faith in this upstart company and will be using their services to do all my puppy watching in future.
I feel warm and fuzzy already.
first they came for the terrorists
and I said nothing, because 7/11 and all that
then they came for the bin-dodgers and other terrorists
and I said nothing, because it wasn't my council
then they came for the pirates financing terrorism
and I said nothing, because who wants to be seen defending thieves and terrorists
now they've come for the wankers
and I say nothing, because who wants to be seen as a wanker
wankers
Watch this space, wankers are only some way down the list, and the list never ends, like that facebook or google feed you scroll. Look to our partners in China and Russia for future developments.
great! so they want people not only to flag themselves, voluntarily, as wankers, but also as gamblers (adult), cinema goer and buyers of whatever-other-filth (other e-commerce sites). And they think people will happily give their details to all the 2nd tier users of that data, e.g. government agencies and "carefully selected business partners". Who knows, maybe the post-millenial generation will happily submit all their details to anybody who asks. If so, they're fucked.
Twitter is exempt. So is Tumblr - which may soon be in a fire sale since it banned all its NSFW user profiles.
Come to that exemption - so is any site with only 33% NSFW content. They just need to get the mix of pussies and farmyard animals right.
It will be interesting to see how easy it will be to get around the 1account age verification using fake info once they start asking for proof of age.
Or whether it will be as simple as viewing the source code for a page to find the code to get around the age checks.
But on another note how long before the scammers set up fake age verification pages to collect peoples details for ID theft. Such a poorly thought out law, I hope whoever gets in power next decides to can it as it such as waste of money.
what the sign-up rate for these schemes will be. Given that this is giving people almost the most useful data they could have if they want to blackmail you and given that organisations are not famously good at preventing sensitive data like this leaking I'd assume really, really low. (OK, there's more useful data for blackmailers, but probably not more useful data that does not require the blackmailee to have broken the law.) But then, people sign up for Facebook, don't vaccinate their children, believe the Earth is flat &c, so what do I know?
iPlayer content is neither BBFC rated R18 nor contains the percentage of material to make any of this law apply to it.
Likewise All4 and the Channel5 streaming services with their occasional titillating documentaries about the adult industry, wouldn't make up the required amount of content to have an impact.
"Xhamster, beeg, txxx and others with URLs that are too explicit for a, er, family-friendly website"
I can't believe I've been pr0n surfing for over a dozen years and have only come across two of those three today! How is one supposed to find these darn things? Google clearly isn't the best search engine in the world