Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits
Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits
Finally it seems the end of Reddit is near.
The “won’t somebody please think of the children” rhetorical tactic is always just a pretext for authoritarianism, mass surveillance and data privacy intrusion. Always. It’s the perfect motte-and-bailey: when you attack the actual motives, the motte becomes, “So you don’t care about children?”
UK is full blown authoritarian now. They have been arresting journalists who are covering the genocide in Gaza and designated a direct action protest group as a terrorist organisation.
These assholes are all pedophiles and they use it to control the planet. To get to high levels of government, you must enter the shadow contract of pedophilia. It is easy to control people and trust people with that kind of shadow on them, so it is required.
Then they turn around and use pedophilia to control everyone else. Any tech that threatens their power, they can immediately shutdown by pedo-bombing it. The counter to pedobombing is authoritarian moderation. Once you have that, it is over. The government they control now can control the mods, and that means they control the narrative. THAT is one of the core enemies to fight. An alternative to Reddit or any other system is not enough.
Because pedophilia is such a taboo / social death sentence, it is among the most powerful shadow contracts.
Next in the news: "500k Usernames, Passwords and biometric data leaked in the latest hack"
So...coming soon: an app that can match up images of friends or colleagues with a summary of their pornography preferences.
This could at least liven up some boring meetings or dull parties...
Remember those are just the ones you hear about. Plenty happen and are never talked about by either side for obvious reasons.
Who is not "Rick Rolling" this with a selfie of a stock photo (or a frame from "Never Gonna Give you Up"?)
Yeah, I will definitely trust an internet stranger with my face so they can verify that I'm not underage to access content which could, in case of being leaked, damage my reputation or even destroy my life.
DEFINITELY
Yeah, fuck all that.
Guess we're transitioning into a VPN only future.
We have the opportunity to head into a utopic or dystopic future and we're absolutely choosing the dystopic one.
They'll criminalize personal VPN users for non-work purposes, next.
A VPN future? Haha. Not if they don't want to. There are many ways to prevent VPN from operating when you're a government.
You can just plain ban encryption, which sounds really crazy, but yeah, they're trying to.
You can just say "it's illegal to use a VPN". It'll technically still work, but if there's a trace of trafic from your house to a known VPN endpoint, you're it! Great!
They can force custom proprietary spying software on your devices. Sounds equally crazy as the thing above, right? But rest assured they're ALSO trying to do that. Multiple times, even. And in some places… they did. Of course, nothing forces you to have such software on your device. Especially if your devices are not supported; it also turns into a "you have to buy this or that big name device, everything else's de-facto illegal! Fuck you, we're the government!". And if you get caught for whatever, and your phone, PC, or anything isn't "compliant"? Bam. Guilty.
Plenty of option. All of them completely stupid and would weaken both privacy, individuals, and governments at large. It never stopped legislation from being pushed forward.
I don't think we ever really had a choice
Indeed. With our current system it was only a matter of time. As soon as the internet became a default thing which everyone needed to access just to function in their daily lives, it would of course be subjected to the exact same exploitative mechanisms that the non-internet part of our lives have suffered from since the dawn of history.
Like father, like son, I guess.
If the UK is going to require adult verification it should be built into your internet contract. Yeah, I'm an adult. I'm paying my bills, of course I'm a fucking adult. I over pay for this garbage internet.
Uploading a selfie? The ai is going to determine if you're over 18? Can the ai determine if the selfie is also ai?
Yeah, it's some serious BS. They are forcing you to hand over and trust Reddit with your personal information, yet I wouldn't trust them if my life depended on it.
At the very least, someone in charge of this legisltion should learn OAuth2 and force the sites they want to comply by only let those OAuth2 accounts access their adult content. If I was in the UK, I'd just pay for a VPN over giving my photo to Reddit. That site is a lobby brigade hellhole whose "we know your dark secrets, we know everything" owner is also probably trading your account details on the side.
Can the AI determine if I'm just uploading photos of Kier Starmer as my ID?
The current answer is that it is very difficult to determine if something was AI generated at scale, and if someone puts some effort in its effectively impossible currently.
What if I'm actually a set of traffic lights and the AI can't work out what I am from my selfie?
I identify as a zebra crossing.
it should be built into your internet contract
This works fine with personal contracts like your mobile. (EE has a porn filter that you can disable in your account.)
But it doesn’t quite work for contracts that usually have multiple users. Like your home Internet. Because a child could connect to your WiFi and access that shmutz.
Just send an AI selfie problem solved.
Well, I guess i am going to be regularly updating the metadata on my most recent selfie.
POV: You're the intern tasked with reviewing the selfies.
It'll almost certainly be an AI model doing it.
That brings up an interesting thought. What if people uploaded AI generated selfies?
Yeah, this is showing up at roughly the same time we can get (almost) free 5 second video generation from some services, and fast still picture generation on consumer grade hardware. It's the perfect combination of useless, stupid, and obsolete, all in one very pricey and very dangerous precedent-filled package.
It'll almost certainly be an AI model backed by 1000s of "trainers" in 3rd world countries doing it, but only until the model is fully trained.
thats not what pov means, upload a selfie as punishment
That could very well be the POV of the intern having to approve career gooners
POV = point of view. The intern's point of view. They're looking at the selfies submitted by gooners. The picture is a gooner. Idk what you're talking about.
This whole thing is a security disaster waiting to happen.
“Oops, our password was ‘Reddit’ and we’ve had a leak” in coming.
Username: admin Password: admin
u/spez was the lead moderator of r/jailbait, and when he was caught, he got rid of mod transparency. Ghilisaine Maxwell was likely a l lead moderator of news Reddits as well (u/MaxwellHill). Reddit has always been compromised.
I’m not defending Spez, I think he’s a piece of shit and he did edit other users’ comments that were critical of him, which is fucked up, but I don’t think he was actually involved with that sub. It was possible to appoint mods without their knowledge or consent, and he’s a huge target, someone must have done it as a joke.
what's the topic of r/jailbait?
What's to stop uploading a random picture of a person? Or even an AI generated person? I get what they're trying to do, but seems like legislative theater more than anything.
I've once attempted to open a bank account where they wanted video proof, and expected me to say a randomly assigned phrase, to solve the issue you mention.
I didn't do it. Fucking KYC is BS.
So from my experience of these type of systems (mostly in the context of banking services) they normally want to use your devices camera to take the picture directly, and normally also want a photo of a photographic ID to compare against.
Let’s not forget all that lovely metadata they can harvest by accessing the camera module, including the exact GPS co-ordinates the picture was taken.
Within banking apps it has become the norm, it shouldn't mean it's acceptable, but for the wider community it is accepted.
But for a fucking forum?? Christ. Especially at a time when Europe are trying to establish digital sovereignty and all of the stories coming out about the US government having access to data. We already know that they are willing to share that with the highest bidder (s).
People would have to be absolute morons to upload anything personal to Reddit, nevermind your photo ID like a passport or driving licence. But obviously that's what they're banking on (people being morons).
Sounds like a good area that's about to get a whole lot better at faking this system. I would just take a picture of a picture if that's what it takes. Then again, I would never do this and will just look elsewhere.
Lmao when the "anonymous" online forum requires de-anonymizing, I want to hope everyone leaves
Some people will leave, the rest will ride it out as Reddit continues to transform itself into Facebook
To your point, it's insane how much data reddit collects about you.
To be clear, this is a UK law now applied to any website that serves UK citizens. Anything that hosts adult content requires UK citizens to provide some form of age verification. Like a photo (for AI age estimation), credit card, utility bills, and so on. The government is dumb, and I guess it's time to just sit on VPNs 24/7 now.
Meh, just upload a dick pic.
I'll never forget how he changed users' text without them knowing it before the 2016 election. Reddit was going downhill before, but that was a turning point.
For those unaware, this isn't something like replacing a slur with removed, he edited users' comments, turning them into insults to other users.
I don't care that those original commenters were (likely) pieces of shit, and the people who he made the comments insult were definitely pieces of shit, putting words into people's mouths to make them fight each other is unforgivable. Even if you put out a shitty apology.
To follow compliance with the Know Your Customer Pornographic Materials Act, please use the following guidelines for your photograph:
Thank you for using Persona. For any questions or complaints, please direct them to: BigDaddyGuns6969@aol.com. Please allow up to 14 days for an initial response, and 88 hours for subsequent replies.
I know this is a joke but I'm worried it might not be in the future.
Harassment will not be tolerated. Your comment has been sent to the board for review and we will decide whether your identity will be removed from Persona. We are not obligated by law to communicate the outcome. You may receive a writ for violating Amendment 3 C, "Requirement of official identification", the pecuniary fine is at our discretion.
I'm a UK citizen, fuck everything about this law. I'm so sick of the current authoritarian trend amongst some western countries. The UK is one of the worst offenders.
It's not even about protecting kids. It's about control and appeasing puritanical elements in society. We're the 6th richest economy in the world and we can't even offer some of the poorest kids food security. But at least they can't see a pair of tits on Reddit.
They better be NSFW selfies.
Sharpies
Just upload a picture of any politician who voted for this.
Kier Starmer voice: “We are an island, of wankers”
"I don't hate the English. They're just wankers. But we ... we were colonized by wankers!"
We thought the same thing about Netflix with the sharing password bans. Yet they retained more profit than ever the next year.
Who's to say if this is what will make Reddit end, or did they actually just got more successful after the end of 3rd party apps compared to the declaration of so many users back then?
Digital personal verification is just going to become a fact of life in the future for everyone born after about 2012. They will use online ID cards, biometrics, location metadata that is constantly uploaded by our devices, maybe even implanted RFID encrypted chips for account verification. Passwords are becoming outdated and outmoded for security as we speak here. 2FA is the minimum security for online today but that may soon become outmoded as well.
I literally haven't had a Netflix sub since that year and I sometimes miss the convenience of it even. Haven't been very frequent on reddit in 2 years. Neither company is going to miss me though.
Soon it'll just be piracy and the fediverse for me, and maybe I'll be able to show my daughter how to download movies and shows, but I'm sure within within her lifetime, piracy will just become so unpopular that all the good sources of content die out. I do hope the fediverse will stay around though. It has a similar problem to piracy: It's not that it's hard, it's more that the people making everything work get tired and it's hard to convert people.
LOL. No "we" didn't. A few idiots did.
These large tech companies have e focus groups and can do extensive research on how their markets will react to these changes.
Any analysis on social media just doesn't have access to that data.
Keeping the age verifier seperate from the content host is good. Destroying the files used for verification is good. On paper it's not too a bad system for age verification, but it really hinges on if you can trust them. Given the track record of basically almost every company and government ever...
Problem is, how do we know that the company is reputable, audited, and so on?
I’ve seen more places requiring verification - and each one of them seems to use a different verification company. How are there so many of these places, and why aren’t they more commonly known? Like Experian for credit, etc.
Sure it might sound good to keep them separate - but all that is doing is absolving the content host from liabilities for providing the adult content (somewhere) on their platforms and sites. Reddit don’t want to get involved, and I’ll bet they found the cheapest and easiest provider, or the first one in the search list and thought “good enough”.
I think it's good that Reddit is trying to continue to allow adult content within the legal framework in which it must operate.
I guess what I'm not clear on it is what the legal framework is for verification services. Absent rules that require robust privacy protections market forces will push a race to the bottom in terms of cost and data security will be the first to take a hit.
I know this might seem weird but I think this is one of those cases where a blockchain based smart contract might be the best solution. I'm not exactly sure, as any system that allows one to consume content generally also allows one to copy it, but having a system defined in code in a publicly auditable manner that cannot be changed without notice seems to me to have the capacity to grant the most reassurance.
I mean I assume that all the verification company is doing now is verifying a person's age and then giving a kind of authorization token that's cryptographically secure that basically says "the owner of this cryptographic key is of age".
Good take. You are right. Still fuck this.
There's a bunch of AI face generating pictures. I wonder if you can just use those. Or maybe this is just to create a new law to arrest people of uploading fake pictures...
Hm, I'm going to need some software engineers to critique an idea I have that could at least partially solve the fears people have about their personal details being tied to their porn habits.
The system will be called the Adult Content Verification System (or Wank Card if you want to be funny). It's a physical card, printed by the government with a unique key printed on it. Those cards are then sold by any shop that has an alcohol license (premises or personal). You go in, show your ID to the clerk, buy the card. That card is proof that you're over 18, but it is not directly tied to you, you just have to be over 18 to buy it. The punishment for selling a Wank Card to someone under the age of 18 is the same as if you sold alcohol to someone under 18.
When you go to the porn site, they check if you're from the UK, they check if you have a key associated with your account. If not, they ask for one, you provide the key to the site, the site does an API call to https://wankcard.gov.uk/api/verify with the site's API key (freely generated, but you could even make the api public if you want) and the key on the card, gets a response saying "Yep! This is a valid key!" and hey presto, free to wank and nobody knows it's you! If you don't have an account, the verification would have to be tied to a cookie or something that disappears after a while for all you anonymous people.
As a result, you can both prove that you're over 18 (because you have the card) and some company over in San Francisco doesn't get your personal data, because you never actually record it anywhere. All you have is keys, and while yes, the government could record "Oh this key was used to verify on this site", they'd have to know which shop the key was bought from, who sold it, and who bought it, which is a lot more difficult to do unless the shopkeeper keeps records of everyone he's ever sold to.
So... Good idea? Bad idea? Better than the current approach anyway, I think.
This would be better than most of the crap being proposed or implemented.
But, since the keys are presumably reusable, they'll presumably get borrowed shared by and among minors almost immediately.
There could be some "Netflix account sharing" style work to deter that, of course.
Yeah I did consider that people are going to share keys, but people are going to share accounts too so that's always going to happen. The best thing you can do is stick some safeguards on the keys where if a key is found online, it can be deactivated and potentially investigated since you can tell which shop sold the key. If there's a shop out there just giving cards away to minors, well they're in for a world of trouble.
Under the Licensing Act of 2003, it's illegal to sell alcohol to an adult if you reasonably suspect that they will be then giving that alcohol to a minor. You can assume the same will apply to people selling Wank Cards.
I'm a security dev and this is a good idea!
How would you solve replay attacks? Like a million people, of age or not, sharing the same key?
Maybe you could limit the number of verifications a key can have in a day? Limit it to say 10 verifications per day. So if you're on Pornhub and have an account, you can have the key associated with the account, verified, and so you don't need to re-verify. But if you go on 10 completely different sites and verify for each one, you can't verify after that 10th one within the same 24hr period?
You could maybe also include guidelines for integration where if a key is associated with an account, that key can't be used for any other account. You can include that under some requirement that says you have to make 'best efforts' to ensure that a key is only ever used by one account at a time. That way, if a million people are sharing the same key, you'd have to trust that all one million of them will never associate that key with their account because if they do, it invalidates that key for every use other than through that account on that site.
Let's see how much VPN subscription count will go up
You're overestimating Reddit's value.
This is the facebook "show a video of your face" bs all over again. glad i don't have an account on either site bc not only is it a huge privacy concern, you know they store all that data and are going to sell it and/or use it to train AI models
Just post on them. Two birds with one stone.
But if you do comply, double down by ringing Kier Starmer up and letting him (and your local MP) know what you've been wanking off to, since he's so fucking interested. He could have blocked this, but he let it run because he also agrees with it.
I wonder if there's a browser addon to make an itemised list of all the videos and camgirls and then I can send it to him on a regular basis. It should log when you close the browser window so it knows when you've "finished" so to speak. Maybe I could highlight those videos in bold for him, so he can skip right to the good ones.
There's an app for that. Talk to Mike Johnson.
Browser history? Just export as html or something and email it over…
this is actually a really good idea. nice proposal
Sending a dick pick. Now it's whatever is in front of these to make a though decision.
A very hard decision indeed.
Parental controls exist. Use them instead. I fucking hate this.
tale as old as time even since I was a kid and I'm in my 40s. Reminds me of the original videogame rating system that Sega originally implemented in NA when the first Mortal Kombat came out. Parents, to this day, are still unable to manage what their kids consume.
I mean my parents never had an issue with this. Like when they'd rent movies, I wasn't allowed to watch Terminator 2 until I was like 13 and it was my Dads favourite movie. He put it on "ok, you have to leave the room now we're watching a movie" and I did.
is reddit still alive? it must be 100% bot on bot action by now...
Lemmy is heavily botted as well. They are the ones making the majority of the posts.
no?
Probably. reddit has tons of content from back when humans were the dominant posters there and that comes up in search results. I can see a future where text searches will turn up reddit posts much like image searches flood you with pinterest shit.
techno-archeology is a thing I guess
That's how they get your real identity and kompromat you/send you to jail for opposing the Western genocide du jour...
I keep thinking about some of RPs I've done in my life. Hot, vile, smutty text based RPs. I think about them and wonder if there will ever be a time when those words would be considered illegal and I would be arrested for posting them. This doesn't just protect minors. It tags deviance. Some of you may know the darker corners of Reddit. Imagine if an AI flagged your subs. The delete-rebuild cycle doesn't work anymore. Reddit will always know. If the law asks for suspects for newly illegal thought crime, Reddit will be able to point to all the users on those dark corners. We are moving into a future where privacy doesn't matter and I fear what that means for the kinky among us.
I'm nowhere near as worried about this for kink stuff as I am about us LGBTQ living in the US.
amongus
That's a subject many never talk about: it assumes we (1) have morality all figured out and (2) it's the same for everyone, everywhere.
so those scam popups that scare people by saying their webcam was hacked and took pictures of them while looking at porn is getting state sanction!
Lol. Fuck off reddit.
vpn⬆️⬆️⬆️
Perfect use for that old "This Person Doesn't Exist" website.
does the federated nature of lemmy/piefed/kbin/etc prevent governments from taking action against them?
It makes it harder at least.
The government can try to take action on an instance, but there's still every other instance.
Kind of
I can't tell you how tired I am of hearing about all the absolutely inane batshit coming out of the UK. Holy shit your country is a dumpster fire.
"Stephen Fry has an awful lot of Reddit accounts."
...yet the most wonderful thing about the atman-brahma is that everyone is no one and everyone...anonymity is required for nirvana...
I didn't expect to find my fellow Advaitins on this particular thread, but hello, well met!
...fellow traveler in gaseous environs, hail and well met...
This is what Facebook does to verify accounts, they also autoban if you try to register with a temp email
What’s considered a temporary email? How do they know?
Proton mail has a feature where you can create a new address that ties to your main one, but nobody except proton knows it is you. They end in passmail.net. I'm sure there are other providers that do similar things
Going the way of tumblr? I’m sure it will work out well for them. /s
So can I upload a dick pic?
NSFW selfies?
...yet the most wonderful thing about the atman-brahma is that everyone is no one and everyone...anonymity is required for nirvana...
I'd send them a pic of my hairy bollocks as proof.
Is it just a selfie? I can still access NSFW reddit content without even logging in though.
Is it only a selfie? AI gen go brrr?
just use one of the libreddit instances like safereddit.com or something. I mean why would you need to comment in a NSFW subreddit? worse comes to worse just use a VPN like mullvad. So many ways to circumvent this.
Nah. An image of government ID. “But we don’t need your information, just confirmation of age” 🫠 forget that.
I don't have any government ID
closeted wizard porn enjoyer seeks alternatives
For some reason I immediately thought of this.
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UeAWPSB2toQ&pp=ygUXamF6eiBlbXUgbG9ja2Rvd24gbG92ZXI%3D](Jazz Emu - Lockdown Lover)
🤮
....tests for science
https://files.catbox.moe/2scf3y.jpg
No we don't?
Alas, old.reddit wankers ahoy
How old is your account?
Ah there we go, same old shit
https://files.catbox.moe/6bn13q.jpg
If you visit via old.reddit you can dismiss the modals to sign into the app or your account.
Reddit account?
Pretty old since I haven't nuked it yet, but I'm not even signed in above as you can see from the above screenshot
https://files.catbox.moe/uebjhh.jpg
I should really login sometime to see if I have lots of threats from mister greedy Spez piggy again, but the headline here doesn't match up to me trying it in the UK rn.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/oldlander/
This addon makes using old reddit on mobile bearable.
Why do I have a feeling that a handful of people are going to suddenly become n-tuplets?
Reddit stopped being any good when that guy doing a batman/joker role reversal writing prompt stopped posting
That's what you get for using Reddit.
This applies to every single site that hosts adult content - not just reddit.
Unfortunately it'll be what UK users get for using any site, since it's the law.
It'd be only fair if they required NSFW selfies.
What if I just have AI generate a fake selfie with a fake ID? Are they gonna use AI to check it against a database? Well, I actually have my AI write a bunch of malware into the image and now I've hacked into the mainframe and downloaded your entire porn database. Suck on that harddrive
Question in general about that UK law while there's people here who seem to know things: What about my private, personal website that I run as a hobby? If I have nsfw content on there that I made myself with (one of (lolamirite)) my own two hands for free with no monetary gain whatsoever, they can't expect me to implement age verification, can they?
(I don't right now, calm down)
Edit: any non-profit thing, really. AO3?
Years later, you will find many then teen’s 80yo grandmas’ photos in the leaked database
Is this the onion?
They've been doing that for most NSFW communities for a while. It's called a Verification Post.
Verification posts are only for if you're uploading photos. This new verification will be required before you can even view these communities.
I also think you don't need to identify yourself in those? Like, you show your Internet nickname only?
Sorry, that comment was sarcasm. Or, maybe they could use the same pic for both types of verification. Hang some brain with your face and make someone's day (or nightmare), was my point!
Im using a UK based IP and everything is works the same
That said, as someone who has posted stuff like that and had it spread without my consent, screw (very much not literally) consuming that shit without taking the same risks as the people sharing what they get off to.
I do think its gross to require it for the other NSFW stuff. Drug forums are very important resources for harm reduction.
Didn't they ban NSFW a year ago?
They’re not banning NSFW, they’re trying to control it. It’s now login-gated (with a cheeky blurred background if you’re not).
Not globally at least. Let's just say I have an inside source
Makes sense. How do they know your a male looking for hetero pic unless you send them your penis to prove it.
“Reddit has stressed that this system is only to verify users' age, and it has no interest in your identity. Lee further stated that Persona won't know what subreddits you visit, and has promised it won't keep users' uploaded images more than seven days.”
Press X to doubt.
Time to go to LemmyNSFW
Under the new UK law, lemmynsfw would also need to have some kind of age verification for UK users.
That's always down when I want to use it :(
It is not just that, I don't trust Persona security, if a malicious actor installed a silent program that monitors users and sends it to a command and control center they probably won't know for months or even years. Cyber security is very bad in most companies.
https://xcancel.com/H4ckmanac
Very careful wording there to switch between Persona and Reddit to conveniently omit one from the justification given by the other.
Presses X furiously
Oh the cute little corpo is promising to delete your data, how can we not trust him🥺🥺
Google uses reddit for its AI training. Just saying.
God help us all.