Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told
Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told
www.bbc.com
Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told
This was bound to happen, and it’s ridiculous
148 comments
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Stop touching boys inappropriately
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The theme throughout my entire life is more and more control. I can't even go from point A to point B in my city without being recorded every step of the way.
Starting to look like a Big Brother future.
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The thing that annoys me the most about it (well, aside from the massive invasion of civil liberties and general dystopian behaviour) is that we don't even get any of the fringe benefits of it. By that I mean, if I contact the government because I need some information about myself (recent examples: vaccine history, polling information, National Insurance query etc.) they act as if they've never been contacted by a person before and seem to immediately go into a panic and send you in a big loop of Other People Who Might Have It, with the end goal seeming to be "nobody knows where it is, let's just hope they give up and stop asking."
Like if the government must insist on tracking every single thing I do and say and look at and place I go to, the least they could do is actually have that info to hand so I can use it too. It seems the more they track us, the less capable they are of actually doing anything useful with that information.
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Does the government actually own all this information about us though, or is it all outsourced with various private companies?
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Our representatives do not represent us.
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I skipped a word in that title and read
Stop using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told
Which i prefer, honestly
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This pisses me off so much. They don't give a single solitary fuck about kids OR their safety online. If they did, they wouldn't do it like this. If/when I have kids, they're not getting a smartphone until they turn 14. Until then, they'll be using a flip phone to contact me. THAT'S how you create a safe online environment for kids, not by banning VPNs which takes away privacy rights from everyone else. They just want to control us and take our right to privacy away but they don't realize that a strict government creates the best liars. If they ban VPNs, people WILL find a way to consume whatever content they desire regardless of what the government says. This can only end badly and make life hell for everyone below a certain tax bracket. Although, I guess that was their goal at the very beginning so I'm just being redundant.
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Kids with access to porn will put it on flash drives and sell it to other kids. Are they gonna ban flash drives next?
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No the next thing will be to ban porn completely. Look at Project 2025. It’s in the list. Granted this is a US based initiative but other countries seem to be speed running the checklist.
The document’s foreword asserts that pornography is not protected by the First Amendment and “should be outlawed,” calling for criminal prosecution of producers and distributors and shuttering tech/telecom companies that facilitate its spread
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I wouldn't be surprised if they did tbh. The ones at the top get what they want and if they see flash drives as a threat, they'll try to ban 'em.
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vpns being more regulated than guns aren't politicians awesome
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I'm so fucking sick of losing my rights to protect other people's kids. I don't have any fucking kids. Why don't they apply their idiotic rules to those that do and leave the rest of us be.
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I'm a parent and I'm sick of it too. It's so incredibly easy to monitor your kid today as modern parental control system literally do most of the work for you. Also you can just talk and be honest with your kids - 12-16 year olds are pretty smart contrary to what some want you to think.
Literally no one likes this except the bottom of the barrel brain washed idiots. I'm not a conspiracist but I meet other parents and while I'm not based in the UK, porn access was never an issue for any parent so this just reeks of propaganda.
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Seriously, they build parental controls into pretty much all modern devices and there's plenty of 3rd party software for added functionality and customization. The tools are there for parents. All they have to do is enable and configure them.
I think people who support this shit and other other laws that strip our rights away are virtue signaling, neglectful/lazy, or like you said completely brainwashed. I think that those in power want to slowly work towards banning porn completely and not just in the UK. I've said it elsewhere, but politicians and rich assholes like Elon Musk are worried about birthrates falling and this is just one of many tactics to try to get people to have more kids.
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Who is voting for these people?
I have a feeling that this is another example of the ruling class doing whatever it wants regardless of what the working class wants.
Our representatives do not represent us.
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Also, give up your rights for the kids, but don't ask for any justice towards the royal pedophile prince, that's bad.
Also, no more free school lunches, think of the children.
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Because it's all an excuse to eliminate all privacy. The empire doesn't survive if the workers are allowed to communicate freely.
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I know. If they really cared about protecting kids they could force ISPs to sell a whitelisted or blacklisted "Family" service. They could even go further into insanity and force parents to only use that service until their kids turn 18. They could even force parents to install tracking software to make sure kids only connect to safe networks and use school registration records to keep track of homes with children.
Of course that's all rediculous, but obviously they don't want to protect kids. They want to take away our rights and privacy and with the way politicians all over the world have been harping about falling birthrates, making it harder to access porn might cause fewer people to use it in the hope that more people have kids.
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Because we're fine with kids not having rights, but when anyone else gets mildly screwed by regulation like this we get angry. Great. How about we did something about it before it started affecting us?
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It is not about the children, nor their parents. Redirect your anger towards the perpetrators, not towards the scapegoats...
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I have no anger towards children or parents in general. I just think it's the parent's responsibility to monitor their kids not the government's. Thus, the only people who should be affected by rediculous rules and laws that "protect children" are people who have children. Plus, there are plenty and religious and right wing parents who support shit like this.
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Keep watching this bit, so you dont focus on the other bit... which will be to attack end to end encryption in message apps. ie you must put a back door in, so we can see who is saying what, whenever we want.
This labour government, makes me want tories back. Thats how fucking bad they are.
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you know, a federal europe with a shared, rotated heads of governments (always at least 3 countries) would help a lot, geopolitically too come back you fools, we miss you. Put Starmer and Farage together into a padded cell and let them fight it out
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Either introduce legislation that enforces standardized parental controls for parents to monitor or shut the fuck up.
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Watching the children whack off and being judgemental is Yahweh's job, not his ministers.
/s?
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How about tell the parents to pay attention to what their fucking kids are doing online instead of dragging the rest of us into it?
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How about nobody else'a fucking children are anybody else's fucking problem.
Fuck your stupid fucking kids.
Not literally of course. I'm not a republican.
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I don't think helicopter parenting is the solution.
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I don't believe monitoring your child's online habits is "helicopter parenting." It's just being a responsible parent.
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When you teach your child to look both ways before they cross the street, is that helicopter parenting? Or how about when you teach them not to talk to strangers even if the stranger is wearing a uniform? Do you allow children into your liquor cabinet to pour themselves a tall shot of whiskey? Etc et al. I don't consider it helicopter parenting to put age appropriate restrictions on what your child can engage with on your network. I call that sound, responsible, parenting.
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Well they should just leave it be, but If they have to do something better that than invading everyone else's privacy and ruining the internet.
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What an obnoxious excuse, there are far worse problems children have to face besides bad parenting.
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Josh Lane was addicted to porn by 14-years-old after first finding it via a Google search when he was aged 12.
Now 25 and happily married.
Wow. Porn really destroyed this mans life. What a tragic tale.
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Addiction to porn is not a real thing. No reputable source classifies compulsive viewing of porn as an addiction as far as I know. These people just find it to be a convenient excuse for their compulsions.
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If jacking off constantly at age 14 doomed a person we would never have left the Miocene epoch.
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We would have gone extinct before we discovered fire.
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Tho not so prevelant in this current timeline with internet access, there is a global phenomenon that most little boys can attest to. When we were growing up, there was forest porn. No one knew how it got there. No one claimed it. But in every town, county, village, city, et al, there were some woods with forest porn.
I do not condone children viewing porn because they are not mentally or emotionally ready for that. However, I do know it exists and gosh, it seems to me that some proper parenting skills would solve a lot of problems.
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He told Newsnight the addiction caused him to isolate himself from friends and family because he was "afraid of anyone discovering that I was hooked."
Mr Lane described finding "the only place I could get, I guess, love and intimacy was from pornography" at the same time as feeling "heaps of guilt and shame"
The problem seems to have more to do with lack of proper sex education and social pressure rather than pornography. Why did he have to feel so ashamed that he isolated himself? That's a real issue here!
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It's not like it can't happen, i also found porn very early on. I got addicted and it ruined my early sex life. Real women weren't "exciting" anymore and I'd lost my sensitivity as well.
This is NOT the solution but it's also not not an issue
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Thank you for speaking up. I'm going to share a bit of my experience (unrelated to you, OP.)
I suspect (from my experience dating men) that the desensitivity issue is more common than most people will admit. Few men want to admit that their dick doesn't work properly, and a subset of those men will attempt to frame this problem as a benefit instead ("I can keep going for so long without cumming, it's my super power!") I don't expect most men will talk with each other like this, but it's one of the justifications such men tell their partners.
From the partner's perspective, I hate to have to say this, but... no, it's not a power. It's a weakness. A desensitized dick turns sex into a frustrating act that only ends when I get physically sore. If he doesn't have that "natural stopping point" that usually signals an end to penetration, and the act still feels good to him - he doesn't want to stop, so why would he? But it's a very different experience from the "receiving" partner's perspective. Most people who "receive" in sex don't want to keep going until they end up in pain. We don't want to always be the buzz-kill whose role is to decide, "Okay, sex time is over!" I want to have fun, too; not be the playground monitor that has to announce when recess is finished. Going on and on is a porn fantasy, and just like many porn fantasies, it's not that fun in real life.
The issue of porn-induced desensitivity is absolutely real. However, taking away people's privacy online is not the solution. These laws are absolutely absurd and a terrifying glimpse of the future the fascists in power are aiming toward. (And for anyone overly-concerned about my sex life that feels the need to chime in with advice - I learned from the lessons of my past, and I share those lessons in hopes that others can learn from it too.)
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I know none of this is actually about protecting kids... But even if it was, their reasoning and methodology sucks.
some of the 16 to 21-year-olds surveyed saying they had viewed it "aged six or younger".
So there may have been a problem at least 10 years ago. Does that problem still exist? (never mind the obvious "is the problem parents ignoring their kids on a tablet"...)
Josh Lane was addicted to porn by 14-years-old after first finding it via a Google search when he was aged 12.
Okay, now let's address the parents being the problem. By default, Google's "Safe Search" is on, and the kid actively searched for porn. So no parental supervision of the 12 year old kid on the internet. Someone setup a google account, and changed the default settings to show those results. (oh, but that person is 25 now, so that was also 13 years ago...)
Almost all of the big websites have parental control settings that would alleviate the vast majority of these "problems" if parents actually used them. Parents being willfully ignorant isn't going to be resolved by legislation. They know that. This is all a smoke screen to put the entire population behind a firewall and control the narrative. It isn't even a very thick smoke screen.
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Almost all of the big websites have parental control settings that would alleviate the vast majority of these "problems" if parents actually used them.
Nope. Parental controls in general suck and are often bare bones just for a semblance of legal compliance. Parents don't have access to every device children have access to either
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Parents don’t have access to every device children have access to either
Either parents or the school... and if the school doesn't have a pretty significantly locked down network, that's a separate problem.
Also, you're right, I misspoke. While some of the bigger websites have decent-ish parental controls, I was more thinking of device specific parental controls. The amount you can lock-down (and monitor) a phone you give your 12 year old is pretty impressive. I'd rather parents did that than hand the monitoring, censoring, and access over to various government agencies all over the world.
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Even if kids see porn the lessons they learn are directly a result of how their parents approach the topic with them. Public education can't functionally provide useful sex ed due to politics.
I guess if you can blame your kids for breaking the law you never have to have "the talk" with them.
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Why not just gouge out their eyeballs, it's the only way to make sure!
Oh, what's that, it's not actually about the porn, it's about getting everyone to self-submit personal info to your shitty databases? Ooh, ok, gotcha!
Edit: sorry about the non-sequitur, I'm losing my fucking mind...
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You spelled 'squirting' wrong, I think 🫡
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Good point, I do feel my brain liquefying and gushing out through my friggin' ears when seeing what we're doing to ourselves...
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It feels like a return of the pornography/video games/rock music moral panic of the late 20th century. I wish these conservative idiots would just fuck off. We'll do anything before we tackle things that are really affecting children. Like poverty and hunger, in one of the world's richest countries. We're a joke of a country, no wonder people keep making fun of us. We deserve it.
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Honestly, it feels more sinister. Sure, they say they want to eliminate this privacy tool because children could use it to watch porn, but realistically they’re not a fan of anybody using a VPN.
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It seems like a perpetual panic, sustained because it creates a lever of exploitation to control the gullible. Like you can read complaints about "oversexed youth" from time periods when pornography was totally banned and women were essentially chattel. And hey, Boomers didn't have internet porn and they are fucked.
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Satanic Panic
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Are not the US citizen a joke, you can not blame people who were educated in ignorance by the Governments, more in the fear of God than in the lack of reasoning capacity in a pseudo-democracy. Living in abubble and helpless in shock, when they visit Europe, seeing what means living safe and protected, with rights they even didn't know that they exist. This is only sad, we make fun of your crappy fascist system and the current pedo-nazi asshole of president, not the people which don't know it better.
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I mean who was asking for the government to show their ID to view porn as the solution to children having access to pornographic material (has never been an issue until now randomly)
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Alt-right Christians. They've been saying for ages that all porn should be banned and I guess the government took this as an excuse to invade our privacy "legally."
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Don't believe for a second that this is about children.
Imagine the policies of someone who actually cared about children's wellbeing? Those policies would not look like bans or restrictions for the children.
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Google and Microsoft have to be dragged kicking and squealing into proper policy that actually damages their business models.
They have been completely silent on these age verification checks, in Aus this is being implemented by an un-elected government official whose career was largely working for Microsoft for the past 20 years.
This is all about data mining.
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Talk more openly about how none of these people give a fuck about protecting kids, and just want to
make life shitty for everyone including themgrab power.Point out bad faith and don't let it be about anything else, until it actually is. We can't get anywhere because nobody's actually dealing with the actual situation, which is people lying publicly.
Stop going along with that shit. Every time you talk about the fake issue, you're helping them by pretending they're telling the truth when they aren't.
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Its simple. Give them more control and power over you or youre a pedophile.
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Their families are in for a rude awakening.
Some people can only take so much abuse before they snap and take it out on their abusers.
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Pedophile or minor, there isn't another option in the UK. Just let us know you're old enough and when you view porn.
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I've been biting my tongue hard these past few months in a concerted effort not to be offensive. I'm not trying to be intentionally offensive, however, I feel there is an element in this situation that is being disregarded in favor of someone else doing your work. When I say 'You', Your', etc, I mean it in the royal sense. So, warm up the downvote finger and man the flame throwers.
If it's genuinely for the children, then when are we going to require parents to be parents? Look, you brought this service into your home voluntarily. You might say 'Well I need it for work' or 'I need it for school'. Tons of people use hundreds of thousands of hotspots daily to do their thing on the internet. This service you voluntarily brought into your house, has both the ability to be highly beneficial and highly detrimental all in the same breath. Technology always, always, always wields a double edged sword.
And what do the majority of parents do with such power? They give it to their vulnerable, under aged, highly curious, children, un-monitored, uncensored, and uninhibited. Are you insane? So when little Johnny is caught surfing porn hub, the parents freak and cry out to their government 'We need to ban porn!' No! What we need is for parents to be parents.
There are literally hundreds of services, and ways to lock down your internet. I hear parents say 'I'm not technologically inclined.' Get there. The safety and well being of your children hang in the balance. Take a class at your local Tech College. I'd be willing to bet that when little Johnny's mom was pregnant, she most likely did some reading on the topic. Some even take a class on childbirth. The internet should be no different. Access one or two of the billions of tuts out on the internet.
Now, will locking down your internet like a multi-billion dollar enterprise with a Brinks Kit keep little Johnny from seeing some skin? No! Why? Because it's natural for humans to want to see what other humans look like naked. Children are naturally inquisitive. The prime directive of all life is to replicate. So, have frank, open, direct, and yes, awkward conversations with your children. Let them know in no uncertain terms what is acceptable on your network. Tell them why these things are not appropriate for their age group. This relationship with your children starts at Day 1.
You have 18 years of boot camp to equip your children with all the tools necessary to make wise, prudent decisions in life. You probably taught them how to ride a bicycle, or drive a car, or any number of teaching opportunities parents have with their children. The internet should be no different. We live in a technological time line that is ever changing, so it behooves parents to know exactly what is going on with their technology and how their children are using it. Get with it.
Being a parent takes work. Being a network administrator also takes work. Anyone who is a seasoned veteran of this chan knows, to secure a network in order to be as private, secure, and anonymous as possible on the internet, takes work. I find, a large portion of parents are unwilling to do the work and would rather fob off their responsibilities as a parent, to the government having jurisdiction. I'm not painting all parents with this brush. Kudos to parents who are very involved in their children's lives. There are enough of them tho, that are not, and this is a big issue. It gives governments the justification they desire to surveil their citizenry.
Let the roast begin.
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So, warm up the downvote finger and man the flame throwers.
cracks knuckles, pulls out pitchfork and flamethrower
reads full comment
Goddamnit.... they're right.....
throws toys out the pram
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"I need internet at home for work!" - Okay, so plug in the one computer you work on? Do you really need to blast 100% of your home with internet via Wi-Fi, probably not. Even if you do (for some reason), why do you then also have to give little Timmy a Wi-Fi capable tablet at all? Download some episodes of Paw Patrol and let your kid watch them offline...
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How about parents supervise their own kids them-fuckin'-selves?
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Naturally is a problem of the parents and of nobody else, but the childrens are only an excuse of legislators to impose control, the only reason. If not the children than are crimes or terrorism to justify surveillance. More fascist an gov, more censorship, more biased information and less privacy is supported, it's an axiom, the best citizen is an ignorant and submissive one. "First they banned childs from porn sites, than they banned anonym access to Wikipedia and VPN....." recipe how to cook a frog
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO02/20220407/114616/HHRG-117-GO02-20220407-SD018.pdf
Repeating history by the same assholes to kill the free and open internet and information.
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Honestly I think access to AI chatbots at an early age is way more harmful to the developing brain. Character.ai is a very popular platform among younger gen z. LLMs are giving grown adults full blown psychosis, where's all the concern for the children when it comes to a dangerous tool like that? What a bunch of geriatric fucking clowns.
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I agree, using saas services is a curse.
If you don't self host your goon llm she's a prostitute
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This is so fucking stupid, you cannot stop VPNs, because things like ShadowSocks exist. When will they learn that the only way to stop VPNs is to disable the internet completely. As long as the internet exists, VPNs will too. Ask your friend Xi Jinping about that.
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Xi Jinping will be more than happy to provide consultation work for the UK government. Stop giving them ideas.
VPN use in China is effectively banned. Big corporations serve shittier Facebook that 99% of the population is satisfied with.
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And yet people in still china use VPN when wanting to access outside of their own net.
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I think they will ban vpns but as this article hints at, more regulation
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children figuring out VPNs in a week while these bumfucks (state that they) didn't manage to understand it in the years they've been given just goes to show the many orders of magnitudes of difference in their intelligence
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I guess it's just too late for all those children that viewed porn. The piles of their dead bodies must be enormous!
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Same religious garbage they've been trying to pull for the last 75+ years.
"Someone think of the CHILDREN!!!".
They scream, as they take away your rights to information, privacy, and anything else that they possibly can. They don't want you to have rights.
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Stop blocking Wikipedia
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Could we take wind out of the excuse "it's to protect the children" by implementing a signal like DoNotTrack/GPC but for NSFW content?
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Age restrict vpns...
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booo
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[Find in Page:] "Parent"=0 "Parents"=0 "Father"=0 "Mother"=0
It's their job to guard their kids from this content first and foremost. It's their job to put it into context for their children. But the article doesn't even mention that any of this is a humongous failing of parents.
Next this commissioner will want to outlaw computer mice because they're used to click pornographic content without verifying the age of the finger on the button. And roads because adult content actors use them to get to jobs.
The way forward is not banning or making worse all sorts of useful tools as collateral damage in this "think of the children" campaign. It is to get all adult content everywhere behind a barrier toddlers cannot break. We were fine with porn mags partially obscured on the top shelf at a news agent when that was a thing. And the salesperson making sure the customer wasn't a minor. The solution isn't closing all digital news agents.
And it's quite telling that the existence of VPNs didn't play a bigger part in this UK online safety initiative. Like it wasn't obvious that when the west entrance to porn central was closed off, people wouldn't naturally look for the ones in east, north, and south.
Edited typo
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I have a great job lined up in the UK, I'm not sure I can take it up considering that is turning into this kind of shit hole.
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Don't give them your human capital.
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I wouldn't take it up, honestly. Best to go for somewhere in the EU instead.
The UK is a US puppet state, and pretty much showing it.
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Don't worry, the rest of the world will follow suit in a minute
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A friend recently told me that palantir has some sort of stake in this data management for the OSA? Is this true? I know they’ve had a deal with NHS England for a few years
If so, our world is taking a very scary turn
If anyone hasn’t I’d advise to do research on palantir, Peter thiel and Curtis Yarvin for a window into the psychology of the people pushing us down this road
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If Thiel's mafia organisation (I refuse to call that scrap by desecrating sir Tolkien's works' names) has a deal with the NHS, then that should be ended ASAP. Fuck that, that's some serious spying.
Capitalism is shit, and there are things where it especially NEVER, EVER should have any access, power or influence, directly or indirectly:
- Health services
- Parliaments, committees, assemblies
- Nature
- Housing
- Water and food
- National security
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Parents really need to prevent the watching of pornography by children. That's getting out of control.
No VPN ban or OSA-style BS needed.
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stop making housing so expensive instead of thinking about children every hour ministers
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ffs, authoritarian overreaching technologically illiterate BS. This also won't work if you're determined, make sure you have a paid up VPS!
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What child has a VPN ?
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A tech savvy child who can Google free vpns.
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Who would have ever thought a small amount of water would ever fall on meeeeeeee??!
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Make controlled corn illegal.
Make VPN illegal.
Make horny illegal.
Make showing body and hairs in public illegal.
This little drama may be UK specified, but govs are pushing borders of how much they can squeeze us before society starts to boil. We should boil and explode fast and faster each time, making such gov illegal instead.
Just saying... And I did not speak out, Because I was not an UK citizen.
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If you think this isn’t gonna spread, you’re deluding yourself
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I'm bit worried, do You mean what will spread, gov and company greed, or citizen disobedience?
I won't delude anyone for hunger for power and money will only grow while eating. But citizens fighting for their freedom, uhm... well... sure, there is always breakpoint, when society will explode and do fight... but so far, it looks like, greed do 10 steps front, society explode, and greed do 1 step back, all calm, and greed do next 10 steps forward, another protest, another 1 step back, another chill, and next 10 steps...
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So they prefer to spy on what their kids are doing? Bah, those ministers are nonce creeps.
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Terf island is controlled by nonces
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Not their kids. Yours and mine.
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Brits can kiss their beloved VPNs goodbye.
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They can pry it from my cold dead hands.
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And hello to a VPS with RDP maybe.
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They're probably thinking --> "Damn it, how dare these future employees watch pornography and undermine their motivation to work?"
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stop dosing them up with antidepressants
The hell? Antidepressants literally saved my life
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El paquete - UK edition, coming to a flash drive near you XD
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..not really. Bat shit insane, sure.
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148 comments
Is it still legal for parents to cut up baby dicks there?
"Think of the children" is always bullshit.