Rule34 blocked the UK entirely rather than comply due to the new law.

Part of me wants every website to do this. The UK just gets blocked from majority of the internet then people in the UK can get angry and rebel.

So of all the fucking things to restrict, why this? Facebook is a hundred times more dangerous than any porn. Ban that shit instead.

Because it’s something where the current government can claim they’re “doing something” or “addressing a real problem” but it also doesn’t threaten the rich and powerful.
Going after Facebook would threaten the rich and powerful, for who it is an important tool for manipulating people, who think they can use it to mold culture to what they want it to be my breaking the minds of children.
The current UK government is desperate to say to the public that they’re governing and fixing problems, but they also really don’t want to piss off the rich and powerful.
because Facebook is an abstract danger, porn is (relatively) well defined

I don't understand how this is a controversial opinion, but maybe parents should actually parent their children instead of expecting the Internet or the government to decide what their kids should see for them? Maybe talk to your kid about safe and ethical sex, the dangers of porn addiction, and not to take anything away from pornographic content instead? Maybe we shouldn't be giving children smartphones and tablets with unfettered internet access in the first place instead of spending time with them? Wild concepts I know.

because these laws aren't about protecting children they're about elimination of access to things the government doesn't like... like queer spaces
- This, right here. It's like Nixon's "war on drugs" that went on, and on, and on... The goal was not drugs, per-se, but to use drugs as a pretense to police people of color.
- And giving them sweeping ability to track everybody via their identity papers, to see what websites and services they're using, what all their online identities are, etc.
  They claim the info isn't being saved or passed on to the government to form a big surveillance database to one day use against people - sure, it's legal to, say, be gay or a socialist or of a particular religion today, but societies and regimes change, and the info they collect on you today may become ammunition against you in 10, 20, 40 years time.
  But I don't for a moment believe their obvious lies.
  This is nothing but authoritarian police state monitoring and control. It's extremely obvious. Yet, who are we to vote for in the next election? Not Labour, thanks to this (and a few other big reasons perhaps), not the Tories because, well, you've seen what they're like.
  It's not impossible for a third party to be elected of course, not as impossible as places like the USA that have a very worryingly solidified two party system, it's just very unlikely.
  Knowing the British people and their seeming apathy and poor judgement at scale these days I wouldn't be surprised if they elect the racist bigots at Reform - who ironically would be even more authoritarian and evil than what we have now.
  As usual, there's no hope for the future and no possibility of good outcomes.
  Humanity is doomed to repeat it's failures for all of history again and again, and we're just along for the miserable ride.
- Not the government per se, but the powerful lobby groups that want a new world order. Usually linked to religion. Looking at you, Collective Shout.
Don't give your children unrestricted acces to a smartphone until they've proven they can use it wisely. No smartphone before age twelve. Limited use until age 15. And ffs. Ban smartphones at school.
Teach your kids about the internet. It's part of sexual education.
And don't leave it up to private companies to identify me and collect sensitive data on me. Fuck that. If you really want age verification. Deliver the framework.
- completely agree, if kids want a phone at school they can get a dumbphone
I've been saying this a couple places recently, but why not pass legislation requiring every site to provide a content rating. Then parents can choose if they want to restrict content by ratings or not. Yeah, you could have malicious actors, but it makes it easier and simpler for everyone to work than having ID laws.
- But that would actually solve the problem and not enable massive government overreach. We can't have that.
- I imagine it would work about as well as YouTube Kids would.
  Which is to say not at all
My 5 year old son does have access to an android tablet, but i restrict, selectively, what he can do on it and time limit his usage so it locks down after a few hours. I curate his youtube and frequently spend time watching kids content to decide if i want him watching it. If its good and educational i will share it to his kids youtube account. He cant browse the web, he cant buy things on the play stores. He has to get me to approve any app install and i will always install first and play to ensure it safe.
Its hard work, but its worth it to protect him online. And this has lead to it just being another one of his toys, it doesnt absorb his whole existence. He can take it or leave it. Which i am chuffed about.
When he is older and i can help him understand for himself how to be safe, i will help him however i can. Rather than restric, i will help him understand what the internet is, the good the bad and the ugly.
That requires effort, which most parents are unwilling to do, and newspapers will still want it banned and governments would still want to ban it so they can ban other things too.
This is a conservative idea if conservatives weren't evil lmao. And I agree

This is the second time in my life that Labour have gained power after a long Conservative tenure, only to dive straight into enacting policies that were more right-wing than their predecessors.

if i had a nickel for everytime a labour government came into power after a prolonged tory government and immediately started governing further right id have two nickels which isn't a lot but it's weird it happened twice in a row
It's less of a left - right thing (that's mainly economics). It paternalism Vs liberty thing. Labour have always had a very strong "we must protect the populace" theme to their policies. Conservatives have it too, but they want to do it in a different way.
Sadly it's a really difficult thing to stand against. Who wants to be labelled the person enabling paedophiles, when all you want is the right to private communication.
- To be honest I don’t think much of this is about catching or preventing paedos, and is just straight up authoritarianism.
- Part of that is allowing labels to be so powerful. Someone doesn’t have to watch kiddie porn or molest children to be branded a pedophile, but when you have that label for someone, it’s implied that’s what they did. We saw this same shit during the Bush years with the “terrorism” label. We’re actually seeing it again with Luigi Mangione and people protesting at Tesla dealerships. People don’t care about reality if there’s simple branding that wipes critical thinking away.
- To correct one thing, the left-right political spectrum is based on authority. It goes back to the French Revolution, in which the nobility - favoring top-down power hierarchies - literally occupied the right side of the assembly hall while the revolutionaries - favoring true equality and egality - sat on the left.
  This cannot be separated into distinct domains since power is wealth and wealth is power. The political compass fallacy is, and always was, nothing more than rightist propaganda to muddy language and ideology in an effort to hold on to their wealth and power.
- Paternalism vs liberty. Tell me more. I haven’t heard of this comparison before.
Illusion of choice.
The OSA was brought in by the tories. Labour agree with it as well. Both of them are authoritarian bastards.
Don't get me wrong, but why are matters of governmental surveillance and control inherently "right-wing" rather than a totalitarian policy not otherwise directly connected to wing politics? Extremists on both sides have a history of creating totalitarian, Big Brother states (which the UK is certainly headed towards).
- Big Brother states (which the UK is certainly headed towards)
  When the Snowden Revelations came out, the UK had even more civil society surveillance than the US.
  As a consequence of those revelations, in the US some of the surveillance was walked back, whilst in the UK the Government just passed a law that retroactively made the whole thing legal, issued a bunch of D-Notices (the UK system of Press Censorship) to shut up the Press, got the Editor of the newspaper that brought it out in the UK (The Guardian) kicked out, and the Press there never talked about it again.
  Also, let's not forget the UK has the biggest number of surveillance cameras per-capita in the World.
  Oh, and they have a special and separate Surveillance Tribunal (the Investigatory Powers Tribunal) were the lawyers for the side other than the State are not allowed to be present in certain sessions, see certain evidence or even get informed of the final judgement unless their side wins.
  They easily have the most extreme regime of Civil Society Surveillance in Europe, and in the World are probably second only to the likes of North Korea and China.
  Britain is well beyond merely "headed towards" Big Brother and has been for at least a decade.
- It's not so much the control aspect as the anti-porn stance. It also comes in at the same time as a series of anti-trans moves from them.
- In the case of Labour, the party's politics these days are over to the right on any measure. Under Starmer they seem to have abandoned their left-wing roots.

It's yet another step in seeing the Internet becoming owned by big corporations. Only big corporations can implement these things.

Art, creativity, people doing internet things as a hobby, that is dying more and more everyday.

I miss the 90s internet :(
- Me too, so much!
  A big reason why I've come to like Lemmy communities so much is really because they give me some old internet feeling. It's not super crowded, it's an app that isn't design for brain rot, it allows interesting online discussion etc.
  I think projects like this can continue to exist, even in a bleak corporate owned internet.
- There was a site I found in highschool around 1998 - the paradigm of pessimism.
  Full of dark humor and anti-jokes, in glorious web 1.0 - that site had a huge impact on my humor. I've never been able to find it again. Just a random site someone hosted somewhere on the Internet - no scams, no paywalls, just a bunch of weird humor.
- I tried gemini protocol for a bit to see if it did a decent job addressing this, but it doesn't. We do legit need a 'smallweb' non-commercial sort of thing, but I suspect retreating to a BBS model is probably what is required.
- It took like 2 minutes to download a single photo though.

Perfect response. This gets the message across, "governments of the world, the Internet doesn't need you, you need the Internet".

hand wringing over objectionable video games is why queer artists are now having their platforms removed. if you dont want to see certain kinds of fictional porn, then either avoid the website it is hosted on, or make an account and edit your blacklist. also, if youre worried about your children having access to gay yiff, then restrict their access

fuck the UK

Oh no, what ever will I, resident of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, do.

Boots up Tor.

this will work until every country does this.
- Trying to get every country to do something is like trying to herd cats.

There's a UK Parliament petition to repeal the Online Safety act. There's no guarantee it'll do anything but might be worth a try for anyone in the UK.

Don't forget to write to your MP - being polite but angry helps. Explain the issues, shortcomings and why you feel this should be repealed and a better user-friendly and privacy respecting alternative needs to be found BEFORE implementing stupid asinine knee-jerk legislation like this.
My poor MP is getting it in the jugular because they boasted about working in data security and I'm exploiting the hell out of that statement so they can't easily weasel their way out of it.
I'm just waiting for the response to be something along the lines of... "According to existing law (see Online Safety Act), websites are required to do age verification... blah blah blah, no changes will be made, thank you for your inquiry"
- Most likely, or maybe someone will try to use this to score some easy points with more online conscious voters. Probably not but one can dream.

This is sadly the way to handle it, users of these places need to learn how to vpn instead of giving their private information for age verification online.

VPNs aren’t going to be a practical solution going forward. You are creating dependancies that governments can target, spying on traffic and enforcing censorship for these relays is something any country can and likely will implement at some point. The clearnet is dying because the evangelicals are killing it.

I sort of don't understand why these places which are hosted somewhere else would even bother?

Yeah, it's a lot of admin for most small providers to be bothered with. Less of a hit to just block the whole UK.

Which is why big tech is actively lobbying for these laws because they know that they will be the only ones who can comply and therefore exist.

Fuck off with your device based verification system. That's just the same service, but as a more invasive app installed on your phone.

Instead of scanning a face or ID and uploading it to a service, we're expected to run unverified closed source code on the device we carry everywhere in our pockets?!

Fuck off with your device based verification system. That's just the same service, but as a more invasive app installed on your phone.
not necessarily. you give a phone to your children. you partly lock it down by setting it up as a child account, with its age. you make sure to install a web browser that supports limiting access to age appropriate content according to the age set in the system, maybe taking a parent allowed whitelist. the website is legally obliged to set an appropriate age limit value in a standard HTTP header.
that way, the website does not know your age. the decision is on the web browser.
the web browser checks the configuration in the system, that only the parent can change. it does not send it anywhere, only does a yes/no decision. if the site is not ok, it'll show a thing like when the connection is not secure or it was put on the safebrowsing list, except that you can't skip it, only option is to request parent permission.
and finally the age is set in the operating system, without verifying its truthiness, but once again requesting lock screen authentication.
oh and app installs need parent approval for kid accounts, like it should almost always be.
this way it's as private as it can get. the only way a website can find out information about you from this, is to log if your browser loaded the html but not any other resources, because that means you were caught in the age filter. but that's it.
there's multiple pieces in this that is not yet implemented, but they should be possible with not too much work.
this is all possible with open source code, if you make sure the kid can't install anything without parent approval. stores like fdroid could have some badge or something if a browser supports this kind of limitation.
- All of this is precluded by you using a browser that is authorised and approved by the government.
- This is kinda genius
Who said the device based service has to be closed source?
- It doesn't have to be, but the businesses making it claim it needs to be.
- Experience, most proposal for "age and identity verification" being badly implemented mostly closed-source solutions that only works on devices they deem trusty, meaning (seemingly) non-rooted phones with specific OSes.
To be fair, this already applies to any baseband blob.

Yeah, we're all mad, fuck the suits and all that.

But why does the distinction between "real-world adult material" and "creative, non-realistic", "artistic, animated works" that "do no harm" matter? Last time I checked, realistic adult material can be just as artistic, and the harm done by negligently letting children watch it seems comparable.

Are they in favour of age verification for "uncreative, realistic" pornography, or is the real distinction just between real-life and online?

I interpreted it as "can't possibly be doing harm to the people in the video" - eg as much of mainstream porn can do - since there are none if everything is animated fiction
- Admittedly, I'm pretty sure UK did this with the underage consumers in mind, not the industry actors, for whom both sorts of porn would have a similiar impact. (I'd assume)
  Personally though, the constant repeating to me sounded comedic and they were making fun of how seriously we're taking nude drawings with this, which sounds silly even if it's justified.
- And that is the correct interpretation.
It's because some arguments against porn says the actors involved have it bad. Something that can't happen in a drawing.
I think it's more about the legal distinction between drawn and 'real' porn.
TBH "negligently letting children watch it" seems like a sensless statement to me. The onus should be on parents to filter their kids' internet environments, not literally every accessible site on the open internet (which are never going to comply with a patchwork of age verification regs).
Yeah, the “it’s just cartoons so it’s not harmful” argument falls flat pretty quickly. There are much better arguments to be made for why the law is dumb.
It's the same schtick you hear from pedophiles in defense of their child sex dolls and it's unsurprising to see it coming from rule34 in particular considering they serve up a lot of that content in cartoon form.

The UK is destroying privacy of chaps! The people who want to watch porn, without being tracked! And now they have to fall under the VPN!

Imagine if people could just choose what country they’re browsing from

Not a long term solution.
Imagine if people could choose what country they're ~~browsing~~ from.
- just MOOOOOOOOOVE
Forget tax havens, eventually some countries will probably become content havens and sell server space hosted there. Probably some carribean island

Respect.

I agree with the message but making the argument that it's safe for kids to watch because it's cartoons is wrong. Kids can be fucked up by 2D furry porn, I've seen it happen. Still agree that age verification is a security nightmare, just think it's a weird argument.

I don't think it says anywhere that it's safe for kids to watch.
- Thhink they are referring to it saying "requiring age verification for fictional cartoon content is an overreach that fails to recognize the distinction between real world and adult material"
When is DeviantArt going to demand my ID, I wonder, it is chock full of all manner of fetish material.
- Age verification is a security nightmare, you shouldn't support it. Unlike you, I hope Deviantart never asks for users' IDs.
They're only thinking of the eventual harm done to actors, or, victims, in the case of child porn.
youve seen it happen, sure

There's a lot of rule34 comic sites out there, I just found out. Which one is this? Just for research and background.

https://rule34.xxx/
- In the name of science and curiosity, thanks!
Ah, that makes sense. The one URL I knew, paheal.net, isn't blocked but it looks basically identical to the above one
- Thats cause they are all boorus they are all based on the same thing.

My networking knowledge may be out of date, but can't you get around region locked sites with VPNs or Tor?

I was in Turkey in July 2019. Wikipedia was blocked. I had to use Tor to access it. On installation I think I had to tick a special box that said something like "use flux capacitor bridge for blablabla countries like China and Turkey"

Though In that case, Wikipedia didn't give a fuck if you were accessing it from Tor. The government did.

I know some sites block tor/VPN access for various reasons

You can
But most people will not go to those lengths, esp not kids.
- You vastly underestimate the interest young people can have into things, especially into forbidden things, especially when the workaround is trivial and works with a few clics, no tech skills required.
  Will this become a new venue for scam? Most likely. But kids motivation vs. a very easy "fix" is not what's gonna stop them. Adult surveillance would be way better.
- All it takes is one kid to work it out and it'll be common knowledge in that school within a week.
- Depends on what you mean by "kids". Elementary schoolers, no, but some teens are willing to do a surprising amount of work to accomplish something if it's important enough to them. And then they pass their method along to their friends, or offer to set up anyone in the school for the price of a couple of bags of snack food.
- Doesn't proton offer a free vpn with limits?
  Also, a vpn is pretty cheap. I wouldn't say that it's kids that would be using it, it would be adults who don;t want to upload their picture.

The Net is dead. Where's our R.A.B.I.D.S. when we need them?

What's Rule34?

My sweet, sweet summer child.
Rule #34: There is porn of it. No exceptions.
See also:
Rule #35: If there is no porn of it, it will be made.
- Right, how does this image relate to that?
Ah Lemmy, downvoting an honest question. Never change.
rule34.xxx is a website where users can post naughty drawings, renders, etc. of mostly anime or computer game characters. Think of your favourite character of your favourite anime, game, comic, etc. Chances are there’ll be images of them on there.
If it exists, there is porn of it.
- I know what rule 34 is, I'm asking where this image came from

w uk goverment