The Age-Checked Internet Has Arrived

It still doesn't have to be this way.

Age-checking is just a backdoor to force everyone on the internet to identify themselves. Nobody cares about the kids, they care about purging the internet of political dissent and opposition.

See, there are a few ways this could go.

Age verification is as secure and private as promised, and it's left at that. I like to call this "the miracle", and we all know those don't happen.
Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a government asks for "access to data to prevent crime" - things degenerate from there. This is the "systemic failure" scenario.
Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but new scams evolve around it to make it dangerous. This would be the "criminal element" scenario.
Age verification is not as secure and private as promised, and a leak occurs destroying lives and careers. This is the "system failure" scenario.
Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a few companies start scraping and selling data, leading to widespread harms. This is the "unethical merchant" scenario, and the most likely outcome.

All in all, there is only one "ok" scenario, and a lot of horrific ones. The math says we're entirely boned _

I feel like people are downplaying how dangerous even the possibility of #2 is. A lot of nations are already targeting the LGBTQ community on a regular basis and this would massively assist to streamline persecution of "certain" citizens as well as the rapid spread of religious dogma. Both the U.S. and Australia are current testing grounds for these outcomes.
Or all of the above while still not being "as secure and private as promised".
- Nothing is ever as secure and private as promised.
4, as it's already happening. It's just to be seen if people will have their lives ruined
- We would need politicians to be the victims. Then these fascist laws will suddenly be cancelled.
Five seems to be the most plausible. Although knowing how shit corporate security is, I foresee a mix of three and four being common.
In theory, it isn't hard to make it work, give everybody born on the same day a specific UUID and use that to authenticate with a database if it is true or false. Store the ID somewhere where the person has access to (ID/Passport/Digital passport etc) and it should be enough. Get IT persons and accountants to regularly audit it for security and if they keep logs/don't have UUID's per person etc.
But that's not how it seems to work for the UK at this time

Man... When I was younger I used to fake my age, I know that some kid's still going to find a way to bypass the system like giving their parent's verification IDs or something..

these laws are all about control and tracking what you do online. they make the internet MORE dangerous, because (as with everything the government restricts or bans) there will be a black market, which is always more dangerous and exposes people to more things than they were looking for in the first place. you think dark web providers are gonna make you upload your id to stay compliant? no, they’re gonna continue anonymously operating through TOR and serve up some very questionably sourced content to those teens that are searching “boobs” and can no longer access pornhub

Fuck it, let's get back to something like the way it was.
Anonymous, amateur, just slightly hard to access to keep the mouth breathers out.
- being able to use obscure internet forums does not preclude you from being a mouth breather
- Well now that sounds a little like the fediverse itself!
I really, really dont want to search for porn on the dark net...
- There's like a gazillion porn sites on the clearnet though, I can't imagine them being able to track then all
- That’s what this is going to become. And that’s another point to this. They can just go after people using the dark net claim it was for kiddie porn even if it wasn't. the masses will just believe them.
- Premiumporn.org

What is it with Neo-Liberal governments and implementing over-reaching state controls that will eventually grant a tyrant unprecedented levels of control over public life?

Because they want to privatize all aspects of living so that a handful of exorbitantly wealthy people can build larger hoards. There's no end to it; it's a mental disease, enabled by Capitalism and the death of real Labor laws and rights.
Every industry should have unions that actively work to dismantle owner authoritarianism, but for 40 years Boomers have been paving the way for every awful piece of shit "business owner" to have some idolized place at the top of our society. And of course, the knock-on effect of that over time is that the pieces of shit have carved into the legislative and political arenas that provided even a modicum of worker/commoner protections. The digital divide is just a coefficient on the slippery slope.

This isn't about being "age-checked". It's about IDing everyone on the internet and tracking where they go and what they do.

The world we live in is far far worse than anything from 1984.

No, 1984 is way worse, but what we have is still awful.
Exactly this.
Governments have a rock hard boner for detailed face scans of every person.
I think that's the tech side windfall, the age checking is entirely to put road blocks infront of boobies. They it will force places to just not service those regions because of the hurdles of convincing enough people to give their ID, some will, and more over time.
And it now gives I people a reason to actually create fake IDs or just more identity theft uses. Raise the value of obtaining people's ID is the windfall for the data rapers

It is not age verification.

It is privacy invading, morality policing, de-anonymizing, state surveillance.

Nothing less.

PS. If you want to download a video from a site that doesn't have a download button, use the Inspect feature (right click on the page, not the video, and click inspect)

*On the Network tab - Sort by size. Reload page. Find the video. Open the video in new tab. It will be just the video. Right click and save as, or click the download button, or click the 3 dot menu button and select download.

On Firefox you can often bypass this entirely by shift + right click. And should see a save video as option. If not, the inspect feature works the same.

For hls/TS videos (m3u8 streams), if you reallllly want, you can copy the link for the stream and use VLC to convert the stream to a file.

This also often lets you download at higher resolution than they offer to download.

Yes, I porn.

*forgot Network tab

And thanks for all the suggestions. I'd rather not install browser plugins if I can do it without. CLI tools are cool though. The less I need to install the better.

Shout out to yt-dlp, the absolute unit of software beneath lots of media scraping tools.
You can also use MPV Video player, should be able to play many URLs you throw at it.
Its easier to just sail the torrential high seas and get that 4k h265 quality shit that sites keep for paying members only. Once you know the models name its easy to get their entire collection.
I professionally pron too.
- ARRRR!
- Nowadays I'm also worried about acquiring a stealerlog collection as well.
yt-dlp is also insanely good for this - just install it, point it at the URL and it'll usually figrue out how to grab the video without any fuss.
to convert from hls (m3u8 streams) to mp4, you can also use ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i https://y.com/path/to/stream.m3u8 -c copy output.mp4
-i <input> specifies the input file
-c copy specifies that the contents should not be re-encoded (which would take a lot of time and computing power)
output.mp4 is the output file
- Now this I can use.
  Vlc can be a bit... Tedious.
  Thanks.
How would one do this on a mobile browser?
- Chromium based browsers have an option that lets you view the source code by putting "view-source:" before the URL to see embedded videos
  So
  https://www.website.com/pagewithvideo
  becomes
  view-source:https://www.website.com/pagewithvideo
- I'd imagine you'd need a browser that has developer tools, which is far less common on mobile. A simpler solution would be to use a separate app that just takes the page URL and downloads the video for you, such as this one: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.junkfood.seal/
- If you're on Android you can use yt-dlp in Termux. A little inconvenient but it works.
- Note: this isn't free but I use 1DM+. It has it's own browser that filters out the videos for download. It won't work with YouTube and a bunch of other websites because Google acts like a little bitch to the developer.
Or just Video Downloadhelper.
That is fucking amazing. Thank you!
I really wish I could upvote this more than once. This is awesome.

I legitimately dont understand who supports this. Who are these parents that can't parent their kids properly? It's so incredibly easy these days.

So instead of handling shitty parenting we restrict adults and with surveillance. Make it make sense.

Who supports it? Fascists. It’s about controlling access to information and robbing the populace of privacy at the same time. An oppressive, authoritarian police state needs tools to maintain control. These are the tools.
There are SO MANY parents that are not willing to teach and monitor their kids online safety. I would even say most parents don't take that responsibility themselves.
- Totally in agreement. I think a bigger part of the issue is most people are completely tech illiterate. People can’t tell a computer from a monitor anymore and then we expect them to outsmart a kid with nothing better to do than stare at a screen for hours on end who will no doubt figure out ways around things. There has to be some feeling on the parents part of defeat. If only the politicians knew what the fuck they were doing we might get actual regulations for engineers to implement proper controls. The percentage of parents attempting to monitor their children appropriately while also having enough tech knowledge has to be low.
One of the biggest problems with human societies is that parents, by necessity, have their brains broken and, due to modern values/life, are under constant strain. Being a parent means (generally) the kid is priority 1, then there's everything else. This is a necessary irrationality, but if this means you have to do the occasional genocide or violate someone else's civil rights to 'keep our kids safe' then, by god, those people are just going to have to suck it up and die. Sometimes, if you have the time, you can talk some people around and remind them, one day their kids are going to have to live in society as one of those 'someone else's and won't always be their precious little baby, but almost no one has the time and energy for a more nuanced thought than 'save the babies!' much less if they also have to work 48 hours, commute 10 hours, and parent their kid(s) for 167 hours each week.
Age verification has it's place online, but not for porn. That is just gonna push peopel to worse sites.
For gambling and stock market sites and the like I can understand it, but I would prefer if we wouldn't need to send our ID to those sites. Heck if Valve would implement it I could actually gamble on steam again cause currently I cannot open a Tf2 crate ...
- That’s not age verification, that’s KYC (know your customer) which includes age verification. I agree, KYC has its place on the net, but this is definitely not it.
a lot of people. The other day I saw a post on mastodon by some politician or someone in the UK stating that if people find any site that is geoblocking the UK because of the age verification to report it to some link he provided. it was boosted A LOT with a lot of replies in support.
bootlickers.
- report, lol. what does that douchebag want to do? fine a foreign website for not serving content to his oh so precious country?
- Report why? They're entirely within their rights if they want to geoblock them.
Parental controls for internet use have been around since the 90s. There are even some vintage porn sites that have been running since then that have ads for them. I know this. I saw them back in 1999 and 2000... when I was an underage guy looking at porn online.
It's the parents that wont face the fact that it's them paying for their kids internet access.
Parents intentionally and deliberately pay for their kids to access this shit. But none of them want to accept that when it can all be someone elses fault.
- I don't see why they need to force it on the rest of us though.
Most parents are way less literate than their kids. Most censorship/site restriction, can be circumvented easily.
- We're at or reaching a tipping point where I'm not sure that's true anymore.
  Most people with kids now are (roughly) in their 20s-40s. At the older end of that range, you have some gen-xers who might have missed the boat on computer literacy, but by and large we're talking about millennials and older gen-z at this point. Kids who grew up with the internet, probably very clearly remember their family getting their first computer if they didn't already have one when they were born, had computer classes in school, etc.
  And we're running into an issue where younger Gen z and alpha in many cases are less computer literate in many ways. A lot of them aren't really learning to use a computer so much as they are smartphones and tablets, and I'm not knocking how useful those devices can be, I do damn-near everything I need to do on my phone, but they are limited compared to a PC and don't really offer as much of an opportunity to learn how computers work.
  There's a ton of exceptions to that of course, some of my millennial friends are still clueless about how to do basic things on a computer, and some children today are of course learning how to do anything and everything on a computer or even on a phone.
  But overall, I don't think there's as much disparity in technological literacy between the children and parents of today as there was in previous generations, and in some ways that trend may have even reversed.
It plays quite well with the “I think about things for two seconds, and mostly think with my lower intestine” crowd.
They hear “kids shouldn’t be able to access porn” and they think yeah what’s wrong with that. Then they hear “Democrats want your kids to get porn” and they hit share.
It's more like who supports this in theory vs. who supports this how it's written and implemented.
Realistically, no one should love how easy it is for anyone of any age to go to any search engine and search for (Edit) "sex" and just get a million images of genitals and porn. I'm not a parent, but I know my parents when I was a teenager would have loved something like this. Kids are sneaky and smart, and this is a blanket thing parents think will once again put porn behind a barrier.
In a perfect world, a system could very easily exist that would 1) allow for a super-secure government owned digital ID system that isn't a surveillance nightmare, 2) that system use a hash to verify over 18 age anonymously in real time. That's how it's supposed to work with digital IDs - only the data you need to verify is displayed to a vendor. Over 18 is a binary yes/no - a full DOB or name isn't even needed.
The government ID wallet or site would use a no-log system to generate a hash value for you when you ask for one. You ask your ID app or site for an age verification hash. You get one that's valid for about 2 minutes. Copy, paste as needed. The site uses the hash to only know "is this person over 18 or not?" and nothing else. The ID system shouldn't keep the logs of which site asked back to confirm "is this hash valid?" This is exactly as secure as going to a liquor store with your passport or ID card and having tape over the name, address, and doc number. It's even better because your face is not displayed, and your actual DOB should not be displayed either.
However, in our present shitty reality, companies who are trying to get contracts for these systems can't help but feed their existing, and lucrative, addiction to selling our data and using poor security to store that data. So they want your Google/Apple/Samsung wallets connected to a government system that is actually ran by a 3rd party vendor with questionable security practices, and to provide far more information because no one has set an international standard for neither digital ID checks, nor IDs in general, enough to make it anything less than the surveillance state nightmare that is holding a government ID with all your info, while you move your face around and give them a 3D face scan that the platform doesn't keep, but the verification company does.
- Realistically, no one should love how easy it is for anyone of any age to go to any search engine and search for “boobs” and just get a million images of boobs.
  First. let's not pretend the idea of a kid seeing "boobs" is in any way shape or form actually harmful. Pushing that taboo is why there is any issue in the first place.
  Second: This is always a slippery slope. Even if we gave the benefit of the doubt that these things are done in with honest intentions, someone will abuse the system eventually. At least in the US the fascists have already laid out intention to classify LGBTQ people as "porn" in an effort to both silence us online and ban us in public. And what of the countless queer kids in an abusive home?
  And even without someone explicitly exploiting it, there had already been instances where kids who were being actively sexually abused by the adults in their life were blocked from resources that could get them help because of content blocking like this.
  Thirdly: People can take responsibility for their crotch spawn and be a fucking parent.
- Hard disagree with your initial premise that seeing boobs in google images is somehow a bad thing. What is it supposed to achieve? Hide the existence of breasts from kids until they turn 18? Thats absurdly repressive.

I will not be participating. I'll get around any barriers they put in place.

And if I can't, I'll just stop using the internet for anything I don't absolutely have to.
I don't really need my smartphone. A laptop will do.
- Anything you can do on a smartphone that would require Internet would also require Internet on a laptop no?
  I suppose you could download offline installers to a thumb drive at the library or smth
- You don't use the internet on a laptop?
I'm sure some countries will gladly setup VPNs for accessing this stuff even when all other countries block adult stuff.

I am 420 years old.

That's a respectable age! Personally I'm 69 years old.
- I'm somewhere between 21 and 98, depending on where my scroll wheel happens to stop.

I mean, schools (k-12) pretty easily blacklist websites you can access, not sure why parents can't just do that if they want as well.

Parents can, and the only thing the government should be doing here is teaching parents how.
Because it was meant as a "soft ban". First you make it troublesome to access porn, but also blame the providers if kids are circumventing it in any shape or form (no section 230-esque protections). This, alongside with payment processors, act as a chokehold on the industry, and also on the LGBTQIA+ community as a whole if you can read between the lines. The long game is to make it unpopular enough in a few years, that it can be easily outlawed.
The amount of parental controls available now really give parents little to no room for excuses.

All the big adult sites will probably just die or at least shrivel in popularity. Most Europeans simply will not use whatever "tell Brussels or London where or what what you are watching" option is. In the place of the big sites there will be a billion shady and likely virus-lottery proxy sites whose only selling point is that they do not do age checking or require registration. Those then get occasionally smacked down by Brussels, just to be replaced with 10 more clones the by the next week. On the side piracy and vpns will thrive. Kids will not be protected nor will people's privacy, quality will be worse.

I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix that will get through through the cracks since massive established sites had to actually fear shutdown and losing all revenue unless they had robust gatekeeping mechanisms. If Brussels wants your 2 month life-expectancy site dead anyway, because of it's only selling point of having to show id, then why really bother with the quality control of the material. Especially if site holder has no personal qualms about that stuff.

I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix
Oh, count on it. I remember the early days of the internet and file sharing. There was no validation or accountability and you really could stumble on some of the most terrible stuff without meaning to.
Yeah, even though I hate the whole thing, I can't deny it brings me joy to hear about "VPN use surge", centralized sites dying in favor of shady clones, etc. I'd take total wild west any day over somewhat-free-but-very-polite-mild-and-centralized status quo of yesterday's internet. The only problem is that there's no guarantee people actually go that wild. They already did with VPNs, but regarding big site alternatives - I'm not so sure.

Since the earliest days of the internet, governments have been scheming to gain control over the dissemination of content - to have authority over what people can and cannot see.

Autocracies like Russia, China and North Korea simply established censorships regimes, but the best that western governments have generally been able to do is ban content that is illegal in and of itself, like child porn. Their goal, all along, has been to establish systems by which to censor content that is not in and of itself illegal.

This is the most success they've had yet.

The people technologically competent enough to pull it off are usually not stupid enough to want to pull it off and make their lives harder.
They also generally make more money not working for the government.
- That's likely true.
  But that's not going to stop governments from trying, and mostly succeeding, since beating their censorship will require both the will and the ability to break the law. Granted that their systems will certainly be flawed, it will still require at least some minimal technical ability to beat them, which will put it out of reach of many.
  And it will also provide the governments with a handy fallback charge to bring against pretty much anyone they deem troublesome enough, since they'll almost certainly be among those who are breaking the law by beating the system.
If that's been their goal for decades then there would be something written down to that effect. Policy statements, press releases, meeting minutes.... Got anything?
- Of course there is no public evidence. It's just a very probable speculation that governments want to control the internet.
  Back in the days of newspapers/radio/tv, governments had control as they could easily go after news outlets.
  However, with internet, they lost this power. They have been trying hard to regain the power of controlling information. The latest success was masking moderation as child protection.
- There is a long history of proposed bills, and other legal maneuvers, to require ID for things like age verification, and other purposes, from around the world, dating back to the 90s. When COPPA was in the proposal state there was tons of discussion about ID requirements, it was ultimately struck down, but the conversation was being had.
  I can remember this being discussed on CSPAN back when I was in high school, in the 90s.

Sucks, because it's going global and we can't seem to stop it. I'm fine with laws to age gate in terms of a button you click. If some kid is willing to say they're 15... well, let's make sure people are treating them as a 15 year old. But... making everyone deal with real verification is at best going to further entrench big business, and at worst, destroy the internet we love. And it raises the question: are trans teenagers talking to each other now creating adult content because the UK hates trans people?

For porn and games etc. that should be enough yes, but for online gambling, opening stock market accounts etc we do need actual verification, but there are tons of methods of doing it so that the site only gets a true or false (18 or above) and the government gets obfuscated URL's so that the government doesn't know what you visited.
- If I'm opening a stock market account, I'm trusting them with generating my tax receipts! If I don't feel comfortable trusting them to hold my personal data directly, I probably should choose a different brokerage...
  Edit: Anyways, I'm annoyed enough that everyone has gone to phone based 2 factor that requires me to buy a phone and keep it on a cell network, so you can imagine how much I despise even an easier version of this.
how do you know it's going to be global?
- Canada currently has a bill looking to do the same thing. AFAIK, Australia's already passed one, many US states are looking at them individually. The EU is looking at frameworks for it. I suppose there will be some places that won't, but this is increasingly looking like what governments have decided to do, and rather than geofencing, once a large number of money-making territories want this, I think most corporations will do it globally, and smaller sites simply won't be able to run.

On the internet everyone will know you're a dog.

Mrreow? 😾

Well time to sell thumbdrives to teenagers filled with "tutorials.mp4" and "online class.mp4" lol.

Just give em live distros with tor installed.

a global wave of age-check laws threatens to chill speech

You’ve read your last free article.

They are allowed to chill their own speech. The government does not have the right to restrict speech, at least in the US.
- Regardless, there is a contrast between how I have interpreted the article and how I feel about the page as a whole.
  The Supreme Court of the United States has recognized several categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment and has recognized that governments may enact reasonable time, place, or manner restrictions on speech.

I wonder what it was that made Pornhub cooperate this time around. Iirc in texas and france they just "left" instead of implementing the age verification.

Maybe Britons are depraved porn fiends and spend so much that Pornhub can't afford to lose this market!
Maybe now they have a chance to demonstrate that these filters don't work.

Haven't seen any age verification in BGP.

I'll make my own internet... with blackjack

No hookers?
- They haven't verified that they're old enough for those.
but i want to protect my kids from the sin of gambling how dare you try to bypass my protection
Isn't this basically what TOR and I2P are for?

norman Reedus' face https://mashable.com/article/discord-uk-age-verification-death-stranding-hack

Ok, I have already been asked to enter a credit card to verify my age on yt a few times before. It was pretty annoying, really, given how much google already knows about me.

And you did this? I would just abandon the idea of seeing that video and move on with my life.
- I...went around teehee (something like piped) :) I'll never give google access to any banking info, they already know too much.

That's fine. The actual internet will still be here.

Not for me, bitches!