UK Official Calls for Age Verification on VPNs to Prevent Porn Loophole
UK Official Calls for Age Verification on VPNs to Prevent Porn Loophole
gizmodo.com
UK Official Calls for Age Verification on VPNs to Prevent Porn Loophole
126 comments
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Hurrah Brexit!
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Shithole country doing shithole things. The UK is acting like a red state, and their standard of living is dropping accordingly.
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I'd argue that causation may be the other way around.
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It's recursive
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I wonder how they figure that's going to work out.
I couldn't imagine being this pants-shittingly stupid about how the internet works.
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Don't forget to donate to Tor Project and/or a relay operator if you use it, even $1 covers like several TB of traffic.
We did the year of Linux. Let's make this the year of Tor.
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Real talk though, Tor for porn would be an awful experience and would slow down the entire Tor network. Tor is slow to begin with, and downloading large files (like videos) only slows things down even more for everyone. It should be a last resort, not the first thing people flock to. It’s the same reason people avoid torrenting over Tor; It’s slow and inefficient, so your downloads take fucking forever.
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You use Tor to pop out in any other more enlightened country where you use bitcoin or some other crypto to purchase access to a good vpn and download the installer.
Then download TBs of porn through your shiny new vpn subscription rather than bogging down the onion network
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Tor project has many retorts but imo, the easiest way to improve it is just use it, even without donating. If literally everyone used it at all costs, websites would be forced to support traffic from it and blacklisting relays would kill the whole internet, e.g. $$$$. Without these issues, it would probably be much easier to host a relay, or even embed relay hosting in the browser by default. ISPs would be forced to open incoming ports, and firewalls would include it. Then it wouldn't be slow or limited.
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lemmy and mastodon both have lots of porn. this is a dumb waste of time.
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Insert tasteless parody of the "First They Came" poem
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Let's extend our unpopular law to more places! Soon, you'll have to verify your age to see boobs in real life. Which will be pretty unfortunate for teens trying to get busy in the backseats of cars.
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Porn loophole? You can literally Google image search porn.
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Yeah, I noticed Google had evaded the ban.
Would have thought they'd be all over the opportunity to gobble up even more data.
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I fucking hate the UK, so much.
The MPs and Peers only fucking learnt about VPNs when this bullshit bill was being passed. They're so fucking clueless about the whole thing. They don't understand what a VPN exactly is and what it does and the fact their own government (hopefully) uses them, as do Banks (for security), Companies, and indeed, how it works.
This will lead to more bullshit.
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Wrote a email to my MP for this exact reason.
The OSA needs repealing. All it's doing is either teaching people to follow poor digital hygiene practices, or forcing people to follow more risky methods of bypassing the OSA controls.
Whole guise of child safety is laughable when they've made zero attempts to educate everyone (not just kids) on being safe online.
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There is no amount of blocking the Internet that will safeguard the children effectively. The real solution is this:
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If this were actually done to children/teens surely their brains would not form any associations between being restrained and horny, right?
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Right?
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They would definiyely want to employ that, if this bullshit actually had anything to do with protecting children.
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Like Idiocracy has been a manual for the US, V for Vendetta is a manual for the UK.
For fuck sake people, these are movies of worlds we DON'T want to live in.
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Quick! Someone make a movie where the population suffers from affordable housing, free and universal healthcare, fair taxation, and a healthy planet!
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You mean Star Trek? But where are the suffering people? It's no fun when there is no suffering. Why would fascists want a world like that. I don't understand why there are not more people willing to support the 1%ers. We might all be suffering, but their lives matter too you know! The world we live in right now, like in Don't Look Up, is much more appealing. I mean, fuck poor people, fuck sick people, fuck hungry people. It's their life choice. They just should have been born more fortunate. It's their choice to have no life, no future, no opportunity. Might as well lock them up in prison (concentration camps) and use them for forced labor.
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Honestly, the us is going full vendetta too. Our president is really reminiscent of Adam Susan
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The US would be better off with president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
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UK has a massive budget problem and they still keep increasing expenditure on surveillance. That social value is negative at this point as its taking money away from critical services. Well done to the Government continuing the worsen debt, health, and wellbeing of the population. A terrorist will kill 5-10 people, failure to protect the health & well being of population (who needs a roof over their head) it just pales in comparison.
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UK has a massive federal budget problem...
The UK isn't a Federal Country. It's a Unitary state with Devolution. I know it is basically a Federal state in Practice (Holyrood, Cardiff Bay and Stormont all have varying amounts of autonomy) but the distinction is significant.
and they still keep increasing expenditure on surveillance.
This is the fucked up bit though: The OSA doesn't put the burden of Age gates on the State. They put it on The Service Provider (Websites and services). This is why so many non-porn forums, lemmy instances, and mastodon instances have either had to shut down or geoblock the UK, all the responsibility is on them to institute this lest they get sued out the arse. They can't afford to get YOTI or whatever, or don't have the manpower or money to institute their own system, so they shut down.
It's also why overblocking is a thing: because the OSA's official defination of what should be blocked is so vague so the two people who decide what get's blocked are the Service Provider and the Government effectively in that order. This is why Reddit is blocking things that should not be agegated (like support groups), because the law is so fucking vague, and why sites like Twitter are blocking tweets that don't need to be blocked under the "news" exception (yes, there is an exception for the news).
All of this, by the way, is because an investment trust and thinktank (yes, a lovely little conflict of interest) called Carnegie United Kingdom Trust pretty much wrote the OSA for the government. As an investment trust, they invest money in things, but being private, they don't need to tell Joe Public what they invest in, nor to the Investees need to tell us. So basically, they invested in YOTI or some others like it, and are making money from it because so many sites are forced to have it to work in the UK.
And all the other major tech players (Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft) are developing "Digital ID" systems as a "solution" which will not only make it easier to track people for them and the government, but also for advertisers, so they aren't complaining either.
TL;DR, The UK basically put all the pressure on the Websites so their friends can make loads of money.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if this shit starts pushing Scotland to want to be its own country again.
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How these taxes are applied either reimbursed, taxed directly, or passed on: its still is a tax burden increasing the cost of living. This and previous Government's have only further worsened the problem. The police state reduces life expectancy.
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All of this, by the way, is because an investment trust and thinktank (yes, a lovely little conflict of interest) called Carnegie United Kingdom Trust pretty much wrote the OSA for the government. As an investment trust, they invest money in things, but being private, they don’t need to tell Joe Public what they invest in, nor to the Investees need to tell us. So basically, they invested in YOTI or some others like it, and are making money from it because so many sites are forced to have it to work in the UK.
Can you link more information about this conflict of interest? I can't find anything about it.
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Economy and climate change is getting worse and they need to protect their rich, so more control of us low lives are needed. They laying the groundwork.
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Why is the UK such a hell hole all the sudden? I've never had such a terrible opinion of the place until now with encryption and authoritarian fuckwitism against the last bastion of real democracy on the internet.
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knowingly leaking everyones medical information, fucking surveillance camerason every corner.. my opinion didn't meaningfully change by these, they are being a hell hole for a longer time
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Tony Blair thought that the Labour Party would win if it were more like the US Democratic Party. That began an electorally successful period of unprincipled triangulation and petty authoritarianism. Eventually that momentum fizzled out due to the gloomy paranoid leadership of Gordon Brown, corruption of people like Peter Mandelson, and the loathsome hypocrisy of Blair's lies in support of GW Bush's second Gulf War.
Then the Conservatives got in for 14 years and fucked everything up even worse. Now the Blairite authoritarian-centrist faction is again running Labour, and so far has shown none of the political cunning that kept Blair on top. And the media fawns over the smarmy mini-Trump Nigel Farage despite his party having no policies.
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All of a sudden?
This is the country where 1984 was written, where they have more cameras than anywhere else, this sort of social surveillance and quiet, polite fascism is normal for the UK.
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When the Snowden Revelations came out, it turned out the UK did as much or maybe even more civil society surveillance as the US, and unlike the US it doesn't even have constitutional limitations on surveillance of people on their own soil (in fact the UK doesn't even have a written Constitution).
In the US they actually walked back on some of the surveillance (because of said constitutional protections), in the UK they just passed a law that retroactively made the whole thing legal, got the editor of the newspaper who brought out the Snowden Revelations kicked, fired a bunch of D-Notices around (the UK's Press Censorship mechanism) out and nobody ever talked about it again.
As soon as the technology was good enough for that the UK created a Digital Stasi and it's only gotten worse since.
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And almost all those cameras are privately owned and operated, and not integrated into any kind of centralised surveillance apparatus. More typically, they're in place to deter graffiti or to keep drunks from pissing on the walls outside pubs. Police can and do request footage when investigating crimes, but if a camera owner's retention policy means the footage has been deleted, that's the end of the discussion. And such footage is useful if some arsehole has just jammed a broken beer glass into someone else's face.
The worse forms of authoritarian overreach are the increasingly pervasive number-plate recognition cameras that track the movements of every vehicle, and the inane attempts to regulate the internet and to ban peivate use of encryption.
As for "quiet, polite fascism," I've lived for extended periods in the US and the UK, and so far, despite the seemingly draconian laws, I've always found there to be more personal freedom in the UK. The police don't kill people very often, people tend to ignore the laws and the government can't be bothered to enforce the most intrusive of them, and there's far less social pressure towards brainless conformity and mindless obedience than there is in the States.
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That’s always such an insane fact to me compared to how many China has. Their traffic cams are impressive
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china has that too.
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Don't forget transphobia. They seem to have suddenly decided that's a good idea in the last 3 years.
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Because they have to protect the children!! Oh why won't anyone think of the children?!
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Or the poor adults who can't be bothered to parent their own spawn.
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andrew does every night.
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You should watch some Adam Curtis documentaries to get perspective on the UK.
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I don't know if it's the root reason, but one gets scoffed at harshly by the average Tom, Dick, and Harry when suggesting that a Monarchy is an archaic and, frankly, insulting form of governance in spite of protestations that the role of the sovereign is purely ceremonial.
Simply put, they (mostly) seem to prefer political masochism, and are ruled by sadists. Sadly, in 2025, aren't we all?
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Turns out Liberals are Fascists.
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Always have been, just with a better PR campaign.
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Uhh no... Idiots are fascists. Some idiots may call themselves liberal but that doesn't make it so. Liberals by definition cannot be fascist. The idiots are those that let fascists parade as anything but.
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UK is far from being liberal lol, they are closer to the US than not
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Only commercial VPNs? So HTTP proxying, Tor, SSH tunneling, SOCKS tunneling, running your own VPN node, etc are all allowed? There's plenty of VPS hosting companies that don't need ID or proof of age to sign up. Even if the UK requires this, you can just sign up for a server outside the UK.
There's also weird approaches that work but not many systems catch, like tunneling stateless data (like HTTP responses) over DNS TXT lookups.
When I was in high school in the 2000s, kids figured out how to bypass the internet filtering at school. Kids these days have way more resources available to them, making it even easier to do.
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I used a server on my personal computer that would just echo back the raw HTML from a PHP call back in the day. Definitely not the safest or best way to do things but ebaum's world had the best games. All fun til the principal wanted to talk about my friends putting porn on all the computers in the library.
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CGIProxy / PHProxy were definitely very popular when I was in school. Some of the more tech-savvy kids would get free hosting accounts and install a proxy in them and share the URL.
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You can easily make it a ton harder by blocking VPS IPs when serving certain types of content
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If you have issues with IP blocks, get the AWS equivalent of a VPS (Lightsail). It's expensive compared to other VPS services - $5/month for only 512MB RAM, 20GB disk and 1TB monthly transfer, whereas good deals usually have at least 8GB RAM for that price - but it's difficult for anyone to block Amazon/AWS IPs because so many services use them :)
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That's fine. We'll just use Tor instead
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They'll just block that too. Can't have a full blown dictatorship without taking away any freedom people have. Better not have a negative opinion about it either.
Holy Fuck 1984 was a warning, not a fucking manual on how to do things.
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Im guessing they'll make it illegal for users to try to bypass the restriction.
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Hello China my old friend ....
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You can just mail cash to mullvad and include a code that links it to your account.
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Seeing this from the US scares me. I already have an elaborate system for tunneling my traffic out of the country without it appearing I’m doing so from my end devices.
But seeing this happening in the UK and knowing there’s a chance of it happening here, I really feel the need to get into China-style circumvention with shadowsocks and what have you, and I need to figure this out sooner rather than later.
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Where will you peer to once these laws are active everywhere. That’s where this is actually headed
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21 states have laws for age verification on porn sites. 4 more states are in the process of passing laws for age verification. That's nearly half the states...
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Quite insane honestly
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Gee I totally didn't see this coming and made a comment about it earlier. Oh wait I totally did.
The peoples republic of United Kingdom.
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A true People's Republic would have less surveillance noncence than this.
The UK is a literal 1984 in the works.
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Republic of UK, when did that happen
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Look, you are the county that came up with hooligan concept. Do try to apply it locally. I've seen the french act harsher for pettier reasons.
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Hooliganism is members of the Working Class fighting other members of the Working Class or Foreigners due to nothing more than tribalism and enjoying violence.
It has zero to do with pushing back on those with power over them or standing up for one's principles.
Hooliganism is actually a perfect example of the one of the ways the elites in the UK control the "lower" classes by having them discharge their anger at each other instead of going against the powerful.
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It's always been like that - panem et circenses.
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Honestly, it's not been terribly effective, and the ones who stir the most shit usually don't do it for the right reasons.
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I feel you, protests in my country are not as effective as french or spanish protests, and usually devolve into large picnics instead.
Because you can't protest in an empty stomach. On the other hand, now we're too full to protest. Let's go home, Benfica is playing today.
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Clown country
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This is how you get under-18s to use Tor browser
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Until the go government starts blocking entry nodes, then there will be a whole new country relying on the snowflake protocol.
Also, this doesn't affect only people under 18, any sane adult should never send a copy of their id to anything but the government, bank, insurance or employer.
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a whole new country relying on the snowflake protocol.
That would put them in the company of China, Russia, and Iran. Getting unrestricted Internet to people in those countries is why I am among those who run a snowflake node on a dedicated VPS (the link also has a simple browser addon -- it's easy to support the network, everyone should)
Yes, these moves suck for UK youth. But, anti-censorship tools do exist, and volunteers like me want people who could benefit from them, to know about & use them.
any sane adult should never send a copy of their id to anything but the government, bank, insurance or employer.
100% agree, take my upvote
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If they block entry nodes, just build an entry node. They can't block stuff inside your own network.
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Damn, what is going on there? This is scary even for 18+ users.
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they want to know POCs, immigrants, women, which political parties you support, of course criticism against trump.
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It's scarier. They will track everything you are doing not and not have to guess what device you are using behind a shared IP address.
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Doubling down on the batshit. Everyone knew VPNs were going to be the low effort workaround to this authoritarian batshittery.
I get what the (well meaning, I think) people lobbying for this are trying to achieve, but everything from the lobbying to legislation to enforcement seems to be happening in the worst way imaginable. Almost like it's an intentional "You want to see how badly can we do this? Hold my drink! YOLO!!"
For me, the tell was UK PLC leaving it up to the sites themselves to decide who/how the verification would be done. Classic bad management "I don't understand the slightest thing about any of this, but HOW HARD COULD IT BE?!" response. It's like the "series of tubes" stupidity all over again.
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I assure you these people are not well meaning.
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I assure you these people are not well meaning.
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Oh, here we go 🍿
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Of course.
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I'm certain a lot of politicians and veterans are bitter over the lack of universal adoration they get in their own countries. Politicians certainly annoyed with how easy it is for victims of war and veterans against war speaking out against enlistment. Politicians and the rich want their populaces to be patriots whereas the Internet makes people jaded when learning their countries history and present in detail.
I'm certain that's the real reason internet censorship picked up steam. The Internet has poisoned the well for so many countries when trying to build out some unified national message of righteous action. Can't like how negative the public reacts to bills described as for child safety. Internet makes it real easy to call it another manipulative cry of wolf. It's got to be the #1 marketing trick for the rich and powerful. #2 being those foreigners are evil. But shit now people see people across the world are mostly just getting by not even participating in politics or don't even have any voting power and are just caught in the crossfires of the power hungry
Today there are no heros from the invasions across Asia west to east. In recent times you don't get a marketing bump for fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya, wherever. That's problematic for patriotism and public support for future war fighting. Every government leader now has a mixed legacy while alive that makes their memory mute in history compared to WW2 and earlier leaders who committed just as much or likely far worse terrors but enjoyed widespread domestic support while in power and adoration in retirement.
National anthems before sporting events are tacky whereas just like 15 years ago damn near everyone bought into those. I swear one day there will monitoring software and crackdowns on hitting the mute button during national anthems and commercials
126 comments
Don't tell them you can buy a vps and run your own vpn in another country.