They tried to bring in digital ID and that failed. This will fail too in so many ways. Privacy is a human right and privacy from a Government is the ultimate human right.
Gonna say the thing: IDGAF if kids see porn online. I'd far prefer children explore pornography and learn what they are and are not comfortable with; rather than risk being exploited by less-naive children or adults. Open access to porn is the harm reduction. They are images on a screen.
Let's not pretend that today's adults never saw porn growing up. I, a Gen Z kid, saw porn at young ages. There are reasons I am "off" in the head but none of them have to do with porn; and many of them have to do from forces who, among other things, push the purity culture narrative. This is the exact same over-dramatic messaging as the USA's War on Drugs or its "Satanic Panic"—both of which source from purity culture and both of which have harmed significantly more kids than what they hoped regulate.
Jesus Christ, what the fuck is going on in the UK and the rest of Europe right now with this age verification nanny state shit?
If I ran a website that would be subject to these new regulations, do you know what I would do? I'd fucking IP ban all of the United Kingdom, not comply in advance with this fascist horseshit.
If there's one silver lining about this digital insanity going on right now, it's that governments and corporations are essentially forcing users underground, and the dark web (unindexed websites) has the potential to grow and thrive as a result. We might have an opportunity to take the internet back from those who are trying to tighten their grip around the free and unfettered flow of information.
A lot of websites have already done that. A lot of image hosting sites. If I forget to turn the VPN on my feed looks about 30% like this
It's a lot easier to do when people consolidate resources (cloudflare, aws, CDNs in general). I understand the need but now they have too much power to interfere in service.
They have to fast track the mandatory ID laws now because the Epstein files is rapidly making people realize what their true intentions are
The deepstate is real. Its Right here cumming for your porn.
To get a little more serious about it look into Who is buying our media outlets and who is buying our financial outlets (visa/mastercard).
This is almost always being pushed by a rightwing cult. Sorry "thinktank".
I feel like these anti-privacy legislations are less of a left vs right thing and more just that the government is always trying to strip citizens of their freedoms to give themselves more power and control.
Unless you're based in or have some kind of presence in those countries there's no reason to even ban them. Banning by geolocation isn't exactly trivial or reliable. Let them figure out a way to ban you instead.
newspapers owned by foreign billionaires and shitty childrens authors that give epstein tickets to her play for children
Age verification laws are just an excuse to kill anonymity on the internet.
So...what's the point in even using a VPN, if you have to identify yourself just to use it? The whole point is to browse the web anonymously.
It's not the only use. VPNs can be used to access local servers remotely, for example your jobs server while WFH.
I'd take it a step further and say it's not even a use of a VPN at all. If you want to browse the web anonymously a VPN doesn't provide that guarantee: it only affects your source IP, which most services probably understand is unreliable for tracking purposes anyway.
Even for changing your IP to aid in being anonymous on the web, TOR is the network layer tool to use, because you will have a much wider range of source IPs than the single one you'll get from the VPN, but there is still so much work to do to "browse the web anonymously".
I think a lot of people don't understand VPNs. They're great privacy tools if you don't trust the local network or your ISP, as all traffic is typically encrypted and headed for the same server, but being anonymous on the web is way more involved because you are much more than your IP address.
Btw I'm not replying here thinking you don't understand all that; just expanding on the conversation
Would you mind going a little more into depth about the aspects of anonymity other than masking the IP address you think people are unaware of?
I don't use a VPN for anonymity, I use it for privacy.
There's plenty of ways age checking could be decoupled from identity checking, and I find it extremely suspicious that the proponents of these laws aren't promoting them.
It's like a slippery slope of stupid. If they wanted kids to not see porn, or social media, they could have mandated ISPs, mobile operators and Apple / Google implement parental controls on < 18 accounts and provide parental control software for family accounts. Adults or families who did not explicitly opt in to this law would be fully exempt from it.
The UK is winning some and losing others, prosecute pedophiles but also creating a police state in the island. The surveillance level there rivals China. The internet is less free every passing year that we allow illiterate politicians decide for the people. The complete disregard of our privacy just because they don't understand the nature of the internet or technology is astonishing, at best, and that's giving them the benefit of the doubt that this is not plain out government overreach on the private citizens lives.
Every politician proposing such rules must first make their browsing history public, it should go both ways right?
I've always wondered why we aren't buying/hacking info about politicians that support anti-privacy legislation from these databrokers and leaking it to the public. If I had the knowledge that's what I'd be doing. I can't think of anything that would be more effective.
ssh -D 1337 anywhere@elseinthe.world
is this a VPN?
Oi, you got a loicense for that session?
When do we just start killing politicians?
46 years ago. Start with Reagan.
if people are technically inclined, a service like Tailscale can be used to circumvent things like the online safety act. with the exit nodes.
or just roll your own vpn
Roll up your own vpn? Where the server is in your name? Or your home IP?
yeah, it’s not even close to being anonymous, but at least you will get out of the OSA bullshit
It's not just age verification: the identity-verifying document's image is kept on servers for future use. Theoretically by governments verifying, practically so that everyone's identity can be highjacked in a leak.
Adult verification is simply determining a single bit: is this person an adult or not? We have had zero-knowledge proof for ages: if the government really wanted to determine this single bit, it could do so without jeopardizing everyone's privacy and online security.
I wonder if in the future we'll get to know exactly who pressed the digital freedoms crackdown button on the summer of 2025. Things were going backwards already before then but the sudden acceleration is curious and concerning to me.
Australia pressed it, as a result of parents who have genuine concerns about social media addiction in kids (but who aren't willing to do anything about it themselves).
And there's also this which explains why the implementation is the most annoying way possible. If I had my way age-verification would be solely tied to the addictive features of social media, but if that were the case the big tech companies would just lose users and wouldn't be able to insert themselves as an age-verification middle-man.
I wasn't meaning age verification in particular, Google deciding to mandate developer registration for Android apps and Samsung removing to option to unlock the bootloader on their phones also happened last summer
Regardless, my reply does explain why age verification on the internet is becoming a thing.
It's to move to a risk management based society. Look at the sociology behind all of this and you would see a counter example. this was already being accelerated the first step was facial recognition years ago. Surveillance states are defaults in risk management societies. In a nutshell if we treat everyone like a criminal then its only a matter of time before we catch someone is their consciousness going forward.
That's going to be a crazy policy to try and enforce. Reminds me of the US attempt to ban sports gambling online but only domestically. That just prompted people to make accounts overseas.
As usual, the governmental response is to increase the surveillance state and punish the end users, without addressing the incentive to create or distribute illicit content. They're just feeding a sprawling black market which... may be the intent. Black markets are notoriously unregulated and far easier to manipulate/gouge/swindle people over.
How should this be enforced? Mullvad doesn't even know where the customers are from (if they pay anonymosly), so they can't check if the legislation applies to a specific customer.
Also (and I'm not trying to legitimate such law projects), age verification without identity leak is possible. The government needs to distribute a ZK proof system linked to ID cards which creates a signed proof including "holder of the ID is over/under 18" and a service-dependend pseudonym (to prevent repeating the proof for other users).
I don't think it's intended to be enforced very well, just to 'boil the frog' so to say. Either that or incompetence & not realising it won't work.
Even if it passes and isn't enforced well it'll legitimise more surveillance & identity checks. It'll probably be terrible for privacy on people who aren't as tech literate to avoid it.
This is pretty much it. Someone will google "what's the best VPN" and get an AI generated answer that leads them to some bigger service that adheres to identification laws. That'll filter most regular users.
Gotta punish the peasants for daring to look into the private life of the pedophiles.
Have you considered how you use the internet and don't spend enough money to be a greater sin? You should.
I like how this is the same country that brought us 1984
Orwell was a British police officer in Myanmar, crushing independence movements and worker organizations, during the early parts of his career.
He wrote these books from lived experience. As propaganda tools to antagonize against the USSR, they were brilliant expressions of the very Doublespeak his most famous book coined. Using fear of the foreigner to rally people into the Two Minute Hate sessions he ostensibly pillared.
Just goes to show governments still don't understand technology.
Rent a cloud server somewhere and create a tunnel to it, done.
Rent a cloud server and create a financial paper trail
UK is a joke, what is going on over there
Next step will be a country wide captive portal where you need to log in with your digital id just to get on the Internet at all. We should all start looking into decentralized network infrastructure like a wifi&lora meshnet or community run satellite connection. There already is a network stack with an active community that allows that called reticulum. It can be incorporated into the existing infrastructure of meshtastic, i2p, wifi meshnets etc.
Is this actually possible to enforce? To stay with the example of Mullvad, you could still send an envelope full of cash over to Sweden to add time to your account (or create a new one).
A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy
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