and fuck the UK goverment
That is, I believe, a British law that they’re following for users that appear to be in the UK. Not like they’re going to just disregard the law.
kagis
Yeah, the Online Safety Act 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
The Online Safety Act 2023[1][2][3] (c. 50) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate online content. Designed to protect children and adults online, it passed on 26 October 2023 and gives the relevant Secretary of State the power, subject to parliamentary approval, to designate and suppress or record a wide range of online content that is illegal or deemed “harmful” to children.[4][5]
The act creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be “harmful” to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher. It also empowers Ofcom to block access to particular websites.
So that’s what they’ll be aiming to do.
Some websites and apps stated they would introduce age verification for users in response to a 25 July 2025 deadline set by Ofcom.[47] These include pornographic websites,[48] but also the social networks Bluesky and Reddit.[49][50]
Probably should be mostly irritated with Parliament.
I expect that using a VPN that terminates in another country will avoid it, though I bet that then you can’t do things like buy Reddit Gold, if that’s still a thing.
I’d add that if you pick Ireland as the VPN exit country, it will have notable benefits:
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Sites that pick language based on IP will probably do English.
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It probably won’t add much latency.
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Ireland isn’t too bonkers and hopefully won’t have any large collection of online laws of their own that become an irritant.
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Because Ireland has a considerably smaller population than the UK, if people in the UK do this at scale for pornography, it will make the Irish statistically look like absolutely indefatigable horndogs, which I think will be pretty funny on visualizations.
the Irish statistically look like absolutely indefatigable horndogs
What did you think that “wild rover” they keep singing about was? 😉
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Lol yeah I’m not doing that. VPN all the way.
Today I’m french.
Tomorrow, who knows?
The possibilities are endless.
Too bad VPN server addresses are on-sight to reddit’s IP blocking strategy for years now. For whatever good internet choice you make, reddit reciprocates with an equally bad one
Mullvad has couple of USA exits that don’t get blocked by Reddit. Texas and D.C., I think.
What’s funny about that is the VPN I use I saw advertised on Reddit. I wonder if these companies know that they ban users for using their products? Well I guess they don’t really don’t care.
Other companies: Thank you for buying from our sponsors! Here’s a code for 15% off!
Reddit: You bought from our sponsors? Lol, you’re banned.
Try using old.reddit.com. Literally just replace
www
withold
, or addold
in front ofreddit.com
. This should take you to a version of reddit’s interface which isn’t complete trash and it usually also allows you to bypass the need to login for NSFW content.Once they figure that out they will no doubt get rid of old.reddit.com.
And once they do that, this place will get some new users. Guaranteed.
I mean Lemmy has been growing. Think of it as anarchist reddit- no CEO, no ads, no data collected.
I’m only back on reddit because I like to be evangelical from time to time, and I used to mod r/mapporncirclejerk so I like to pop by and say hi.
Edit: I forgot I was on Lemmy lol
I use it for local subreddits. There’s not enough people here for local communities.
In this one instance I’ll give Reddit a pass. This is 100% a fuck the UK government moment
If any service requires me to send a photo of myself to use it, I ain’t using it.
EDIT: lol wut, Facebook and YouTube want photo ID now?? I must be old enough to have missed out. My comment stands though, if I wasn’t already a member on either of those I guess I wouldn’t become one!
It’s a UK law, you either comply or get banned. Obviously everybody now has a VPN subscription.
Italy made VPNs practically illegal. The UK might soon follow. And surfing the web with a VPN is a painful torrent of capchas. And email addresses you can get without revealing your phone number to identify yourself are becoming sparse too.
If you’d want to actually address the issue (insofar unsupervised teenagers watching porn is an issue) you’d need something like a U2F security key that can be used as anonymous age verification and be bought anonymously in a physical shop for cash, just by showing your ID to a clerk (without your details being stored). Keys being stolen or misused could then also be flagged in a public database.
My VPN for about 7-8 years is run by Italian hacktivists (airvpn, it’s a nonprofit, they’re good people), I haven’t heard about this ban. Perhaps it only applies to Italian citizens using VPNs, not to Italians running VPNs. Wait, that doesn’t make sense… I’ll check out their newsfeed.
Yeah, afaik airvpn basically can’t offer VPN to Italian citizens any more because they’d be forced to keep logs. But they can still get customers from outside Italy. And presumably Italians can still use VPN outside Italy. I think, let me know if I’m wrong.
That’s terribly disheartening. I’m sorry, Italy.
I think it’s better to reject these sites rather than work around it. Especially for major platforms. Make it hurt financially.
I got perma banned from reddit after pissing off a few of their nazi mods. Pro tip, if you wanna keep your account then don’t call out blatant far left nazis.
I’m as progressive as the next but reddit has a serious issue with "extreme left ideology "
The downvotes allude to the far left nonsense already being on lemmy. It was fun while it lasted
Brit here, I say fuck the UK government
Fucking Red Tories
Was using a VPN to watch iPlayer last night and then hopped on reddit and was like “whereintheactualfuck is all the porn‽” Before realizing I had it set to the UK. Blew my mind for a minute
Age verification is insane in it’s entirety and no payment processor, corpo, government, or think-tank has any right to enforce their puritanical views on sex and Orwellian techno-fascist policies on everyone.
Unpopular opinion: this is a good thing - there should be more barriers to porn. I know some teens will find a way around it, but it has been proven to affect the developing brain negatively and normalizes some really harmful behaviour.
There is no meaningful barrier to porn without changing what makes the internet the internet. There are only old tech illiterate law makers virtue signaling about their children while those children run circles around arbitrary shit like this
What is worse is that the politicians have totally forgotten the typical behavior of youth. The are going to end up making porn seem really cool and rebellious which will increase porn addiction.
We can change anything, and if it makes society a better place then we actually have a moral obligation to try.
I’m also not asking for perfectly monitored total surveillance. Just some barriers for surface level use.
A kid can camp outside a liquor store, offering strangers money to buy them alcohol. But this is difficult, and has a chance of having them turned in.
In the same way an ID pop-up can be circumvented with savvy use of VPNs etc., but it will easily block many of the youngest and most vulnerable. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be effective.
We can change anything, and if it makes society a better place then we actually have a moral obligation to try
The problem is that “better” in the context of society is usually subjective. We’re talking about a form of censorship, for which change in a positive direction is very complicated at best.
Lawmakers in the US want people to think that ISPs taking responsibility for pirates on their network is a change for a “better” society, for example. Or that net neutrality is unfair to businesses and would result in a “better” society if abolished.
The truth is that it’s a ploy to gather unprecedented amounts of data on citizens hiding behind a “won’t they think of the children” moral take.
FUCK THAT NOISE WTFFFFF give me 2015 back
Lucky we’re on Lemmy, where it’s basically 2015 😁
I’m going to do the Harlem shake at a David Bowie concert!
What I don’t understand is that there are ways to prevent kids from looking at porn that don’t rely on crazy shit like this, even if they do involve some government action. Having to send a picture of your face to a porn provider to view porn is the dumbest possible way to fix this. I suspect the real reason for all of this is people want to effectively ban porn altogether and dumb fucks are letting them.
@markovs_gun @Abraxas Kids are being banned from all social media here in Australia soon. Including, it seems, YouTube lol.
Expensive and completely unworkable. Reminds me I must spin up that Mastodon instance for my kids and their mates :mastodondance:
It’s absolutely not about making sure everyone signs up to DigitalID.Having to upload your ID anywhere is already sketchy as-is, let alone a porn site. What ever happened to the days of “never use your real name on the internet”? Computer class teachers would drill that into students’ heads all the way through K-12.
When Facebook came along, I thought people were insane for posting things under their full name with their photo attached to it. I thought MySpace was asking for too much personal info as-is! Fast forward ~20 years, and not only are you expected to provide your real identity on several websites, some American states even require it now!
Honestly blows my mind how willingly we gave up our online anonymity without even the slightest bit of pushback. We all just accept it as normal now.
The world and the internet are so low on trust, I kind of wish there was some entity we trusted.
Some website where you could upload a photo, and people would actually know for sure that all the site is going to do is compare the photo to an ID, verify you’re over a certain age, and send a simple boolean “Yes” to the website that wanted to know if you were over-age. Or, to somehow know that your account is human and not a duplicate.
We could do a lot with that, but as it stands, no person or entity can ever really be trusted with that kind of data; I think most wouldn’t even trust the same governments that issue those IDs.
It’s simple, librarians or even gas station clerks look at your license and they give you a code that you can use idk 10 times for account signups.
No scanning or tracking of who is requesting. Just make it an ID check like buying cigarettes
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This is why we can’t have nice things.
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In this case I blame the UK government
I’m not sure what you all are doing
I blame all the people with “purity” kinks who took it so far they actually created movements and entire societies based around denying the most natural and harmless feelings we have as a species.
Here’s an interesting point. I just went to an nsfw sub to see if I’d get that prompt, and it gives me two ways to verify - selfie or photo ID. The photo ID has to be “government issued”, and maybe I don’t have one of those. The selfie is a link for a phone, using a QR code and I don’t have a phone that can scan QR codes.
This means that in order to access said sub, I’d need to buy a new phone or wait 30 days or whatever to buy some kind of ID. Even with all the other reasons this sucks, that seems discriminatory.
I don’t have a phone that can scan QR codes.
QR codes are a plain text encoding scheme. If you can screenshot it, you have access to FOSS software that can decode it, and you can paste that URL into your browser.
I know this, but it’s a barrier for anyone who doesn’t.
Who’s in the middle of this Venn Diagram between “uses some kind of custom OS on their phone to where their camera app doesn’t automatically read QR codes” and “doesn’t know how to install or use software that can read QR codes”?
My phone is Android from 2016, and it doesn’t have a QR scanner built-in. I know I can download something to do it, but someone like my mother for instance wouldn’t know that. Why do I have such an old phone? It still lasts for days on a charge and does everything I need.