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Age verification laws are just an excuse to kill anonymity on the internet.
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
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”.
They have to fast track the mandatory ID laws now because the Epstein files is rapidly making people realize what their true intentions are
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.
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.
Any examples?
There’s lots of cryptographic type approaches where the entity validating you is air-gapped from the entity certifying your age.
But if you don’t trust them it’s not hard to figure out a scratchcard system where for, say, £1 cash your local newsagent checks your ID and lets you pick a card that you scratch off to get a code that you can then use to obtain a cryptographic token online signed by a recognized CA. Neither the newsagent nor the card issuer have any way of tying you to that code, and if you don’t like the idea of using the same token on multiple sites you can always buy more. Of course you’d also have the option of obtaining codes online, but there’s something I think people would find reassuring about the existence of a visible physical gap.
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.
First: VPNs are also used by businesses to allow access for remote workers and sites to the company’s internal network. In fact, this used to be their most common use and maybe still is.
Second: what’s stopping a foreign VPN provider from offering a VPN service to UK customers without forcing them to identify themselves? If such a company doesn’t have UK owners, workers or assets all that the UK authorities could do to enforce a court judgement against them is force British ISPs to block the IP addresses of that provider’s VPN servers, which would easilly turn into an a whack-a-mole situation, more so if VPS providers started selling “easy personal VPN server setup” facilities for their virtual personal servers which would make that an insane whack-a-mole situation.
The “VPN server on a rented VPS” situation could easilly turn trully insane to try to block - there are A LOT of VPS providers outside the UK selling pretty cheap services good enough to run a personal VPN server and even without the VPS providers leaning into it by providing an out-of-the-box option (and merelly supporting Turnkey Linux images means having two linux server images that work as VPN servers out of the box), step by step instruction of how to make it work with normal server distros will soon emerge and become common knowledge amongst Britons with even just basic technical skills.
In summary, the UK is a pigmy trying to look like a giant when it comes to how much their laws will influence foreign VPN providers in a market which is pretty competitive and were there is no one dominant market participant which can be pressured to have an implementation “for UK customers only”, and even if they found a way to enforce that law on all foreign VPN providers, that’s not enough at a technical level to stop people altogether from having access to no-authentication VPN service since anybody can rent a VPS anywhere and run their own VPN server in it.
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?
UK is a joke, what is going on over there
When do we just start killing politicians?
46 years ago. Start with Reagan.
maybe if hinckley wasn’t a complete failure
How is the uk even a real country at this point
ssh -D 1337 anywhere@elseinthe.worldis this a VPN?
Oi, you got a loicense for that session?
Every politician proposing such rules must first make their browsing history public, it should go both ways right?
