The VPN trick potentially won’t last long. We’ve seen it go stale already in the world of intellectual property rights. For at least the last ten years Netflix et al have been well aware of which AS numbers / IP netblocks correspond to people sat at home in front of the TV, and which correspond to servers in a rack somewhere (including those hosting VPN endpoints.)
One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.
The more troubling thing about these laws is enforcement. The threat of fines only works against websites that map to a business entity. For anything else there will surely see a ramp up in the size of The Great British Firewall Ruleset, edited by the courts, and distributed to the Big N (5?) ISPs.
What will become of the smaller ISPs that refuse to block illegal sites?
This is just a cat a mouse game. VPN services will start to offer residential endpoints when enough websites start blocking them enough to damage the value proposition. There is no way on the current internet to verify an ip address means anything at all other than it's an ip address.
There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale with sufficient bandwidth for anything other than simple browsing of text websites. As shown by the very effective Netflix strategy of blocking VPN addresses, it’s been very hard to slip through for a good four or five years now.
This cat and mouse game applies to OP's first category of sites that want to comply for fear of the British government, but not the second category of sites that actively don't want to comply. Let's refer to the second category as deliberately non-compliant.
The UK instructs ISPs to block access to deliberately non-compliant sites, however users want to make connections to the sites and those sites want to receive connections to those users. VPNs will be effective in allowing access to non-compliant sites as long as ISPs can't identify the VPN traffic.
Of course, the British ISPs can initiate the tactics used by China to identify and block illegal traffic. However there are limits to this. Unlike Chinese users, British internet users regularly make connections to international servers so various bridging techniques are possible. Like VPNs, proxies or even Remote Desktop.
> One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.
The UK does not have jurisdictional power over anything outside their country - they can not a foreign site to do age verification of foreign residents.
Now, the UK can say that they need to check for all UK residents, regardless of them using VPNs. But if there are no practical way to do this, I think the UK will have diplomatic issues enforcing anything to non UK companies breaking that laws - as they would need, eg. Germany, to help them enforcing the law on certain providers.
However, if I was running a foreign site not subject to UK law or other privacy law, with UK visitors, and I was a ruthless businessperson, I'd definitely implement this verification thing in order to collect and store a photo of every visitor.
Nobody has ever objected to blocking access to those sites. Most people think the justice system in any developed country is much too lax on people that operate those sites and create its content.
This is a red herring for authoritarian tyrants in the UK to get more control over their population, which is all they're ever looking for.
Porn sites don't have any interest in keeping this law either. Nobody with a functioning brain thinks you should have to upload your government ID to a website to browse content, no matter what that content is.
I don't know. A lot of countries in the Middle East block all sorts of stuff and yet VPN usage is ubiquitous, but the governments appear to turn a blind eye. Like "we've done our bit and made the law." So it remains to be seen how far they'll go with this.
A lot of countries in the Middle East throw gay people off the roofs of buildings as punishment, let's assume for the sake of argument that anything we do that moves us closer to the Middle East is the wrong thing to do.
>For at least the last ten years Netflix et al have been well aware of which AS numbers / IP netblocks correspond to people sat at home in front of the TV, and which correspond to servers in a rack somewhere (including those hosting VPN endpoints.)
If the vpn endpoint is in Rome or New York City, how will the UK government force that non-British vpn service and that non-British porn site to verify the age of anyone using it?
It's easy enough to get a list of IP addresses from those vpn services and just block them if you're Netflix, but to force compliance on anyone traversing the tunnel is another thing entirely. The UK government would have an easier time banning vpns outright.
These can be wildly effective at such matters. I'm sure most countries can come to some understanding with the UK on the matter; be that foreign aid, trade concessions, assistance with their own law enforcement, or perhaps acknowledgement/support on the international stage.
IP addresses are routed in aggregate groups using BGP. The groups are called Autonomous Systems and are handed out to ISPs. Your home ISP has a bunch. The ISP that hosts your virtual server has some too. You can see the one you’re connecting from right now with tools like https://bgp.tools and https://bgp.he.net.
The number of these systems scales in a reasonably tractable way — on the order of the number of ISPs and physical Internet infrastructure around which traffic needs to be routed.
As well as making aggregate routing possible you can use the ISP’s registration details see what location (or legal jurisdiction) a whole chunk of address space has. Hopping around IP addresses will give you unique ones every five minutes but they’ll all still be inside 2001:123::/32 from AS1234 aka Apathetic Onion’s Finest Habidashery and Internet Connections LLC, Delaware, USA.
> but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP
It's up to service provider to implement such involved checks. Not sure about e.g. Netflix allocating resources to implementing this, clearly resulting in customer loss.
I expect service providers to cut corners to both comply with local laws and not frighten customers away.
I don't think the incentive structure is there for porn sites to start blocking VPNs the way Netflix does. And legislation requiring them to would be pretty toothless since the only mechanism they rely on to enforce the rules is making local ISPs block the offending sites.
https://dn42.network/ - don't actually use dn42 since many participants won't be fans of your high-traffic idea, but make a new network with a similar design. (You may get some of the same people to participate in both networks)
I've found Tor is mostly useful for reading, not participating. Exit nodes get blocked from registering on most sites. One workaround is to register at a café or library then use the account over Tor, but sometimes even if you're being civil (see my comment history for a a pretty good picture of the style of discussions I have anonymously) sometimes you'll wake up to find the account nuked.
Tor exit nodes are the _first_ thing they ban! If your origin is not from within one of the top residential ISPs then you can expect to be selected for enhanced screening.
I think you may have misunderstood what "socialists" means (or accidentally written it instead of a different word which wouldn't be so out of place in that sentence?).
It definitely seems like she’s conflating two issues: access to pornography and child grooming. I don’t see why she thinks regulating VPNs would reduce the latter.
Everyone always does this. Then they conflate mention of LGBT topics with porn so they can equate it with "grooming". Not helped by the UK's anti-trans panic of the last few years (self-ID was such a mainstream idea that it was in the 2018 Tory manifesto)
It does not. As I have said before, pedophilia is rampant on Roblox and Discord. Go monitor those platforms, and hold these platforms responsible, not VPNs. Regulating VPNs will not reduce child grooming, and I am sure they are not stupid enough to actually think it does.
In the Project 2025 documents, the core things that they discuss regarding porn bans are "gender ideology" and "sexualizing children." Banning access to information with lgbt themes is not some incidental part of this but is a core goal of the effort, at least in the US.
I always keep hoping one of these authoritarian measures will kick off a resurgence of a truly uncensorable platform like Freenet or I2P - the big reason they're currently so unusable is mostly lack of participation.
same. as much as i ironically support social media age gating i do hope it creates a new internet frontier for the educated and technologically inclined
Seriously? You can't make this up: she represents the town that did nothing about a massive (and completely offline) child grooming and molestation network for years and she has the gall to say, "think of the children on the Internet"?
> “West Yorkshire Police denied any involvement in blocking the footage. X declined to comment, but its AI chatbot, Grok, indicated the clip had been restricted under the Online Safety Act due to violent content.”
I’m not involved with X or with its chatbot. Is its chatbot ordinarily an authoritative source for facts about assumptions like this one, that the law “was used to take down” politically sensitive video?
It’s a bad look either way, but I feel like there are important differences between the law leading to overly conservative automated filtering, vs political actors using it deliberately in specific cases. Bad symptom either way, but different medicines, right?
> that the law “was used to take down” politically sensitive video?
You've misquoted the chatbot, which is a new one.
The video wasn't "taken down" and Grok never said that. It was blocked for some users in the UK due to the new authoritarian age verification laws which everyone should be concerned about if access to newsworthy content requires "papers please".
A lot of people are going to be putting their ID details into all sorts of websites and giving this to all sorts of third parties because of this law. Its going to cause a huge increase in ID related theft and fraud in the coming years and its not even going to achieve its stated goal. Worse is its blocking sites it really shouldn't, wikipedia is fighting this in court at the moment because they want to censor it!
I've tried accessing one of the most famous porn sites, and I was asked to verify my age by giving either credit card details or bank details to a 3rd party company registered in Cyprus. Lol.
I'm temporarily living and working in UK, and I'm amazed how once big empire turns to a third-world country so easily.
> The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.
Our ability to filter and modify the content of the web constantly improves, and itchy trigger fingers might hover over many nation's "Great Walls", ready at the next galvanizing event to overnight change our relationship with this interchange we exist upon.
My current guess is that if things really went to hell with censorship and disjointedness, that we'd re-establish an ancient pattern - magazines. I recall as a child, my uncle would leave his "Big Blue Disks" around for perusing, and it was a magazine in the form of floppy disks, of various media - essays, games, primitive computer music.
The curation of these always struck me as a great favor. Perhaps not compatible with the current attention span, such a provision, in the absence of access, would, I believe, quickly become a surrogate for what we lost.
Of course, these magazines are editorialized, and so we're at the mercy of the editor's perspectives to discern the truth. I appreciate our current access to information, even in its weakening form.
But I suppose I'd prefer if we could not tinker more with censorship. I think I may be looking for a digital magazine in the next decade, or whatever else we can invent to replace our losses.
I'm under the assumption that the global, unfilitered Internet is on an irreversible course to lockdown and won't exist at all in its current form in 10 years or less. It's sad, and defeatist, but the forces on the lockdown side are too strong and will get what they want eventually, so I can either hit my head against a brick wall or do something productive for myself.
I've decided to deal with it by reevaluating the role of tech and Internet in my life. I certainly don't care about improvements to my residental Internet speed any more, or what the next wireless tech after 5G will be, or what protocols the IETF is working on, or net neutrality, because none of it matters to me any more. It's exciting what's going on with AI but it's all going to behemoths who will be able to tell the rest of us what we can and can't do with it. So... I don't care anymore. I can see myself honestly just not having a wired home Internet connection anymore in a few years and I would get rid of my cell phone if it wasn't necessary for day-to-day life. I don't need symmetric 1gbps fiber to stream the occasional show, text, and do normal-life things on apps.
But when you brought up magazines - it reminded me of that brief period of time of the late 80's/early 90's during the "multimedia" and "interactive" crazes; when BBSes were a thing--there were a lot of interesting CD-ROMs on diverse subjects.
I'm glad optical media hasn't completely died yet. Most new PCs don't come with one installed, but USB ones cheap and easy to find. PCs have come a long way since the early 90's. Fun fact, if your Android phone supports USB OTG I do believe a USB optical drive will totally work with it.
It is inevitable that the "World" in World-Wide-Web will disappear and each major economy will have its own local "government approved" version of the internet with interconnects between the other local internets of the world to access only curated content from abroad.
This genie is not going back in the bottle unless future generations will get fed up with all the safetyism propaganda at the core of internet censorship and unanimously vote against this.
I'm glad I was young enough to see and experience the uncensored and unrestricted version of the internet. God speed for the future generation being subject to this nonsense.
I really don't understand why it wasn't just a requirement for Apple and Google to include a client side filter. Parent sets up the phone and it's enabled by default. Much simpler option for everyone involved.
It's because this law isn't about protecting children, but about control of the Internet. They want online activity tied to real identity as a power grab.
Yea, it's all about a permanent Digital ID and the end of any independent forums. It's the first essential steps before you get to great firewalls and social credit scores.
Remember, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas already have similar laws in place in the US, so even a nation with better speech and gun laws is still not immune from the slow descent into technocracy.
I've been warning people in the USA about this for well over a decade. Laws like the states passing porn laws are the foot in the door to expand it to -any- internet activity. Freedom is had to take in a coupe, it's a a lot easier to nip at it around the edges until the structure cracks. Strange how people here in the states value the 2nd amendment so much (including me, I'm a proud gun owner) but they will ignore the 1st, 3rd, 4th .... This is particularly true here in Texas.
>It's because this law isn't about protecting children, but about control of the Internet.
Also in an overpopulated world it's not a given that children should be protected if it comes at the expense of basic freedoms. We need to move away from this narrative that "think of the children" is a persuasive argument. Little Timmy needs to avoid danger or the ghost of Darwin will work his magic.
Probably based on long term concerns that escalating inequality will lead to widespread unrest and violence. Which it will, if unaddressed.
Interesting that decades of government leaves half the country to rot, and their solution is to try to stop that half from rioting about it, rather than - perhaps - making society fairer?
Adding a browser header field would be sufficient, could be easily integrated into the OS and browser, and would let developers handle this issue in a few hours worth of effort.
ID verification is such an invasive measure and prone to the exact same failures as the simplest solutions.
While I'd agree, the issue with that solution is that validating against government issued identity solutions aren't always free. I don't know if this is the case with the UK digital ID, but the Danish version certainly isn't free to query. The Danish one has, to my knowledge, a solution that would allow you to do an age for a person, without getting any other information, so yes, the browser could do that, but there cryptographic bits ensure that now body messed with the header data is still missing. And again, who's suppose to pay for the API calls if the browser does it, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft... Ladybird?
I like this solution, integrated with whatever existing parental controls are in the OS.
That would empower parents to keep their kids from accidentally or casually accessing porn. Of course, an intelligent and determined teenager will probably find a way around it, which is also good; then they've learned a bit about computers.
Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society that's complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government. Like maybe Adolescence or basically any mention of the NHS. The crimes they cite like child grooming or terrorism/hate being incited sound pretty terrible too, but I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action - is the issue bigger there, or are they just more aware of and willing to act on it.
The UK is becoming increasingly authoritarian in ways that feel increasingly antagonistic to the majority of the population, regardless of political party. Taxes are rising (with tax take falling), crimes are going unchecked, just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up, but as GDP per capita continues to stall and even fall, the pressure it puts on services is a factor for many. And we're seeing those with a few quid to rub together leave, but as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income.
On the NHS, I tried for years to push for improvements to switch to digital cancer screening invitations after they missed my mother (offering to build the software for free), which is now happening, but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here. My sister who works in NHS DEI hasn't spoken to me since publishing a book on it.
Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it. Anecdotally, many of my friends have already left, some of the older generation want to leave but feel tied in. My flight out is in 6 weeks. Good riddance, no doubt.
One of these seems like the solution to the other.
> as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income
Having UK work experience and having talked to thousands of british folks over a decade, I find this hard to believe.
I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
The UK has always been an empire in decline, but the wheels didn't come off until everyone became glued to feeds. It's Garbage In, Garbage Out. If your view of reality is driven by stuff that you see online, it's a distorted lens which then leads to distorted decision making that then leads to authoritarian creep.
> but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here
I don't know anyone that doesn't complain about the state of the NHS. The only time I've heard anyone defending it would be when compared to countries without national healthcare (e.g. America).
I moved to the UK with my family just before the Brexit vote and left last year. I love the country, but the changes I saw over that time period were so stark -- and, similarly, so many of the friends I made in that time had already left the country.
That I could have multiple negative NHS experiences relating to missed cancer diagnoses of friends in that relatively short span of time is suggestive of a real problem. The institution seemed to have less of an issue with elder care (in the US, the phantom menace posed by Obamacare or any governmental involvement in healthcare was meant to be "death panels" deciding the fate of grandparents) than with avoiding at all costs detecting potential long-term problems in the young. It's a 'rational' fear in the sense, as you note, that such cases put tremendous pressure on services, but there's no world where the best health outcome is refusing to screen your working age population.
> suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here
That's really not my experience. In fact, almost everyone is surprised when I suggest that despite its many problems, the NHS does better for the people than most modern countries' health systems.
> The UK is becoming increasingly authoritarian in ways that feel increasingly antagonistic to the majority of the population, regardless of political party. Taxes are rising (with tax take falling), crimes are going unchecked, just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up, but as GDP per capita continues to stall and even fall, the pressure it puts on services is a factor for many. And we're seeing those with a few quid to rub together leave, but as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income.
Have they though about joining some sort of economic union, maybe one with like minded countries that share the same continent?
This mirrors my experience of the UK. A dysfunctional country whose wheels were slowly falling off and now not so slowly. I’m generally pro devolution but in the UKs case their political class is so god awful that giving them more power didn’t seem to be a good idea.
I left for greener pastures a long time ago and subsequently all of my friends and anyone I knew of any talent has also left, it feels weird visiting a place I once called home and not being able to see friends.
> Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it.
I left around the time of Brexit so I have no useful opinion on the recent financial/admin state of the UK, though it seems from afar that austerity has done the place no favours. But...
- this kind of authoritarian nonsense is just what Home Secretaries do. David Blunkett brought in RIP (then, to his very slight credit, changed his mind). Jack 'boot' Straw was famous for his I-AM-THE-LAWing. I don't think the Tories are any better.
- No, criticizing the NHS is not against the religion there. The newspapers are forever getting in digs about long waits, unpopular (but perfectly rational) decision from NICE about what drugs to pay for, and junior doctors and their apparent insistence on being paid properly.
- And with that in mind, having lived in three countries (four if you accept that the NHS in England and Scotland are different) I personally think the NHS is fucking fantastic. Someone close to me was diagnosed with a serious illness and immediately swept up in a production line of modern, effective treatment. Sure, it was somewhat impersonal, the biscuits are rubbish, and they were a widget on the production line, but they're also still alive ten years later, and we still have a house and savings.
- kudos to your sister. The UK is an ethnically diverse place, one of the least racist and divided that I've seen, but - like everywhere else - imperfect. The NHS always seemed to me to be a reflection of what things could be elsewhere with doctors, nurses and cleaners hired from all over the world. [which reminds me that while the right-wing press hates the NHS for being free, the left wing press occasionally hates the NHS for bringing in medical staff from poorer parts of the world. They just can't win]
The resistance to innovation in the screening invitations is more down to empire building by low-talent management than to the NHS 'religion'. Dr Ben Goldacre wrote a memorable X thread on a closely related topic some years ago.
Where do you see people leaving heading towards? What’s your emigration destination? It seems like most countries have their challenges and I’m curious where people who have inevitably done more research than me are landing, literally!
> but as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income.
Your comment was mostly on point until you decided to put straight presenting white guys as the victims
You missed out the housing!! How local authorities who issue notices of bankruptcy while in the background buying up properties at full retail market prices. Knocking up rental prices beyond affordability. Shoplifting increasing costs of living on top of the large supermarkets profiteering since covid. Slum lords offered a guaranteed rents for a 5 year Contracts including the maintenance and any works required to bring it up to standard of conditions. To house illegal migrants, while these previously extremely poor housing our citizens was and still are forced to live in. Well not for long as no fault evictions are forcing these tenants out of their home. So shady and greedy slum lords can take full advantage of this home office offer , LL are rubbing their filthy hand's together
In the UK attending a protest against putting illegal immigrants from Afghanistan in a hotel by your kids school is likely to have you on a watch list or arrested. This might not sound that bad to our European friends, but you guys in the US might be quite surprised to hear this.
It's not just "right-wing" positions which are dealt like this either, I should note for legal reasons that I strongly disagree with the actions and views of "Palestine Action", but arrests of peaceful protestors who simply wish to voice support of them as a group (without actually being part of the group themselves) is in my mind absurd. It's one thing to make membership of the group illegal, but to also make debating that judgement illegal is highly problematic in my mind. For those interested you'll find videos of the police arresting elderly women for terror charges for simply peacefully voicing their opinions on Palestine Action. It's vile.
No-one thinks the NHS is perfect. People are rationally defensive of it because the most likely alternative is not something like the German system (which is better, but has major problems) but a sale of the NHS to an American company such as Kaiser Permanente. Most people are well aware of the deeply rooted problems of the American system, and recognise that almost anything is better than that. Any systematic change would require a government which is trusted to handle it. That rules out the Conservatives (who are in power most of the time) as even their supporters don't trust them on this issue, and Labour is unlikely to either have the inclination to implement deep changes, or be in office long enough to effect them.
The worst part is I don't see really any western country that's not in decline at the moment. Seeing the "surrender"'s from EU and other countries on tariffs makes me feel so bad. It's like there is no place in the world that's socially and economically strong anymore. The US remains economically strong at least, but they're now run by bullies. Even so, I see people all over the world leaving to immigrate to the US. Canada has the same growing cynicism and economic troubles and emigration, maybe less of a police state though. We're all just pathetic vassals to the US now.
From tourist point of view UK felt to me like a police state, and I'm leaning more towards the former view. Cameras everywhere, non-stop reminders that you're being watched, being tracked everywhere(including which train car you're in now), constant reminders about possible dangerous bags being left alone etc.
Tracking would feel helpful and useful, if not for constant oppressive reminders that "Bad Thing could happen any second, be vigilant!".
While at the same time, it was vastly more unsafe than Eastern Europe.. and cities themselves were vastly dirtier.
Whole trip felt more like what i would imagine visit to mainland China would be like rather than a trip to a free western country.
To be honest and to give some context - they have been under threat of terrorism(due to The Troubles first - the name itself seems to reinforce this view, seems innocent..) roughly since end of WW2. well WW2 was a factor too.
To add a bit more context: this wasn't my first nor last trip to UK, and each time i visit it the worse it feels in every aspect:
Cleanliness of cities, safety, and oppressiveness.
I always thought a police state would demand identification at every street corner (perhaps I'm wrong?) and any minor breaking of the law being dealt with severe justice. The UK has always been against a "state ID" unlike a lot of European countries, so I'm not completely convinced the description of "police state" is accurate. In fact I think it's the opposite given people can freely break the law despite cameras being on every street corner.
The UK is basically an end-of-days advanced state: bureaucracy taken to the extreme, with a heavy dose of nanny-state "mind the gap" messaging.
Bureaucracy kills any kind of infrastructure project (see HS2), so don't expect any improvements any time soon.
We do have some nice cities: Manchester, York, Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge. (I've probably missed a few from this list). London feels pretty far from 30 years ago - and not in a good way.
In my experience the cleanliness of cities is a very good proxy for the overall health of the society. Societies that can't keep their cities clean often also have a lot of other problems. Government alone can't keep cities clean, it requires a society that believes in the common good, an an efficient government that can get things done.
> Whole trip felt more like what i would imagine visit to mainland China would be like rather than a trip to a free western country.
Have you ever been to mainland China? I've lived in both places and honestly, day-to-day life in major Chinese cities often feels more "free" in practical ways - safer, cleaner, more technologically convenient.
What is freedom really? In Shanghai or Shenzhen, I can walk out at 3am to get noodles or take the metro without a second thought. In LA or SF, I'm constantly aware of my surroundings, checking who's behind me, avoiding certain areas. The surveillance cameras in China never made me feel as watched as the constant threat assessment you do in many Western cities.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying China doesn't have serious issues with political freedoms and surveillance. It absolutely does. But the lived experience is way more nuanced than "oppressive dystopia."
I used to have similar assumptions before actually spending time there. Western media coverage (cough propaganda cough) tends to focus exclusively on the authoritarian aspects while ignoring that for many people, daily life feels safe, convenient, and yes - "free" in ways that matter to them.
Instead of imagining what China might be like based on western news coverage, why not visit and see for yourself?
Extremely unpopular opinion on HN, I'm sure. But I have a compulsion to challenge stereotypes when the reality is so much more complex.
> I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action - is the issue bigger there, or are they just more aware of and willing to act on it.
Other countries are moving in the same direction. The EU has repeatedly tried to push things like on device scanning or banning encryption.
> Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society that's complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government.
Mostly a failure of democracy - we have two major parties that are hard to tell apart.
They are both cynical and scared, and have for decades believed the future of Britain is managed decline. They also strongly believe the hoi polloi have to be forced to do what is good for them - e.g. the sugar tax and other "nudge politics", or the currently Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill which is basically about imposing central policy on how children are brought up and educated.
The sugar tax is a strange example to pick as an example of British decline.
As of 2022, the WHO reported on SSB (sugar-sweetened beverages):
> Currently, at least 85 countries implement some type of SBB taxation.
It feels to me like this was a rare step in the opposite direction - recognising that industry is the driving cynical force and pushing back on its over reach where it has failed. Most manufacturers reformulated their drinks immediately to avoid the tax, with what net loss? (The class-targeting comments were a straw man)
Is it though? Are other forms of government more successful while remaining respectful of privacy? Or is it more of a reaction to social or societal changes? Why would these social or societal changes be different than previous changes?
> They also strongly believe the hoi polloi have to be forced to do what is good for them - e.g. the sugar tax and other "nudge politics", or the currently Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill which is basically about imposing central policy on how children are brought up and educated.
A non insulting way to view that is that central goverments understand incentives, and in the same way there are child incentives for people starting families, having incentives for healthier eating is something a central goverment should use its taxation policy for.
More control over education standards is also a common purview of many good educational systems. Decentralisation is not necesirely better, with teh extreme being homeschooling failing every time its attempted. Centrally dictated standards was the method of the French revolution, believing that a society where everyone roughly understands the world the same way was a society that was more unified. French "equality , fraternity and legality " is a basis for modern liberal democracy almost everywhere, but they didnt get there without authoritarian imposition of their standards, with entire minority cultures getting trampled along the way.
The hyperbole and bad faith explanations of legislation is not a good representation or argument against why britain is more accepting of som legislation many feel intrusive.
A better argument is that this piece of legislation was passed late on the rule of a disastrous administration and the number of problems in day to day society largely are unaffected by it, so it got no time in the spotlight for people to complaint or know it was coming until it was days away from being implemented. Society is also largely technologically illiterate, this is pretty much the case everywhere in the planet, which means the nuances of tech legislation are lost even on the people writting and voting on it.
If most of the public are in favour of the Online Safety Act, then how is it a failure of democracy to have it? I give you the top FT comment:
>I, for one, am glad that porn is being age-restricted online. It gives young people false ideas. You'll never get a plumber to come around to your house that quickly in real life.
In a word, division. The UK is so divided that people are too busy pointing the finger at each other to realise the root cause of the deterioration of our quality of life is entirely generations of mismanagement of the public purse.
Instead of questioning how MPs are entitled to a pay rise while your average person gets made redundant, people are questioning why people fleeing persecution should ‘be paid for with my tax money’.
Brain fatigue and mixed signals combined with destitution and desperation drastically impede the average person’s ability and desire to fact check and extrapolate. We are moving towards a society of down and out people living with no hope serving the elite and those with a bit of money behind them.
My fiancée and I have had enough and are also leaving in October. No idea where to all we know is we have a one way ticket away and will figure the rest out.
^^^ This is such a great example of the deranged elitist groupthink that dominates the UK’s national discourse.
Holding the door open for fake asylum seekers costing billions while his fellow countrymen are laid off, and pointing the finger at MPs taking a few million between them.
>people are questioning why people fleeing persecution
Except many of them are not, they are economic migrants. And some have even realised that claiming that they're persecuted for lgbt reasons is an instant in - there was a case with a guy (with a wife and a bunch of children) that claimed to have written a pro lgbt article and now he's persecuted.
As a gay man the thought of that sickens me, economic migrants using who I am as a shortcut to entry, I have no problem at all with genuinely lgbt individuals seeking refugee status; we're still persecuted in so many places and there's not enough of us to make change happen in those places.
But the economic migrants...all they're doing is ensuring their home country never improves and that a steady stream of migrants continues into Europe. It'll never end.
Its because the popular press has, for a very long time, been pushing a narrative of a country under siege. It sells papers, but to keep selling papers, it has to keep steadily upping the narrative over time.
To me, the most disturbing part isn’t just the laws themselves, it’s the complete shift in the cultural zeitgeist. When I was younger, people distrusted the government by default. We stood for freedom of speech, anonymity, the right to speak without being censored. Now, even among software developers, people in tech who should know better, I see them practically begging Big Brother for more censorship, more control.
It makes me sick. It brings to mind that old quote from Mussolini: “The truth is evident to all who are unblinded by dogmatism, that men nowadays are tired of liberty.”
> There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.
Politicians have not taken action on a wide spectrum of problems (some of which are crime related, other problems in society below the level of crime) for many decades now. While the economy is good, this doesn't occupy the mind of the public too much, life is OK. Now that the economy is not good, and has not been good since at least 2008, the public has begun to notice these things. The public has even started to notice domestic opinion management (nudge unit, 77th Brigade etc). Passing this sort of "manage the symptom not the cause" legislation has become popular. It's easier to do than deal with the cause, it pushes the actions onto 3rd parties, and superficially it sounds good to the general public. At least for a while. To get an idea of how "off target" the state itself is in managing serious crimes look no further than [1] (warning, pretty grim story, but very typical).
Crime has, despite everything, gradually been falling. Scotland has a 100% murder clearup rate for the past several years.
The incident you mentioned is yet another piece of fallout from Rochdale, but if you look closely the offences mentioned are from 20 years ago. I don't think that should be used to talk about the present. There is a lot more safeguarding these days.
The main negative factor is the press, responsible for both "opinion management", doomerism, and sensationalist demands to Do Something in a way that doesn't help. The Online Safety Act and Brexit are both victories for the Daily Mail that are losses for the rest of the public.
It does seem to me, British people are very quick to call for "bans" on anything that they don't like. I always believed it comes from the average British person's mediocrity (and acceptance of) and crab-in-bucket mentality.
This country has so many (excuse my rudeness) lamearses, and they seem to revel in pulling everybody down to their level. Whenever they feel challenged by somebody else having genuine hobbies and interests (beyond consumption of food, drink, substances, and media), being fit and healthy, or being educated, they get threatened and start trying to pull that person down. I've seen it all my life.
However when you do find interesting and talented people here, they shine through. It's just needles and haystacks.
Don't believe the things that you read. Our newspapers have been openly biased for centuries, and there's some very shoddy journalism at times. See, for example:
It's about corporate control - the more regulations like this - the more entrenched the market becomes. Higher barrier to enter for smaller players plus government gets all the surveillance apparatus as a sweetener.
Basically Labour continues taking UK into corporate fascist utopia.
The bureaucratic and security infrastructure built to manage colonial subjects didn’t disappear, it just refocused inward. You see it in policing, immigration policy, and intelligence. The Home Office runs on a suspicion-first logic rooted in managing threats—real or imagined.
It's one of the reasons the UK has one of the highest concentrations of CCTV cameras in the world. Public tolerance for this took hold the IRA years and cemented post-9/11 and 7/7. The narrative of ever-present threat made "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" sound reasonable to a large portion of the population.
The press, especially the Mail, Sun, and Express, also thrives on outrage. They set the tone for national conversation, whipping up fear and anger that politicians then "respond" to with legislation. The broad assumption is that people can’t be trusted with unfiltered access to information or autonomy, especially online. You also saw it in lockdown, where Britain had to endure one the harshest COVID lockdowns among Western democracies.
Not saying I agree with the legislation, but the UK experienced a lot of pretty bad domestic terrorism in the rememberable past (namely IRA bombs detonating in towns and cities etc, often with devastating impacts). Then there were the tube and bus suicide bombings more recently. And there has also been a constant pitter-patter of "radicalised lone wolf" type things like the Ariana Grande concert bomber, the guy who killed a load of 8 year old girls at a summer camp and so on.
None of this is porn of course, but supposedly a lot of the lone wolf's are radicalised online so it creates a lot of "someone needs to do something!!!!" type attitudes (and no public gun ownership would not work like everyone says it would because the USA had that yet no one lifted a finger when they needed to recently, and now look what's happened), and sadly the older and more little-c conservative population carriers more clout in terms of policies because historically they tend to vote in greater numbers than younger groups. N.b. that 16 and 17 year olds have very recently been given the right to vote so things may change.
Because the media always paints other countries in certain lights, as it helps them build a narrative for their own governments?
> complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government
I disagree with this sentiment, however it does show how bad "democracy" can be when voting for a complete government change results in absolutely no change whatsoever.
While I appreciate the concern, it's worth pointing out that 30 or so years ago "government should mandate id checks for harmful content" was not some radical dystopian notion.
The UK was also one of the first nations to ban indoor smoking and in cars with kids. I think this is very much in that vein (politically).
> I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action
Historically there is no formal constitution in the UK so Parliament is not limited in their power. IHMO it's the main factor why the UK is an outlier.
You are approaching this from a uniquely U.S. perspective. The U.K. is pretty middle of the road as far as “surveillance” and while this may offend the freedom-at-all-costs sensibilities, it’s a fairly milquetoast change.
Visiting the Heineken website in the U.S. requires that you assert you are over the age of 21. Texas has instituted I.D. verification for pornography.
Regardless of how you feel about this law, it is not accurate to say the U.K. is unique in implementing it.
Do you know of other western countries that send cops to your house because you posted memes on X ?
Saying that illegal migrants should be sent back home can literally land you at the police station. A hotel worker was arrested for testifying to what he saw in his hotels, ie. migrants being hosted, given a phone, meals, and NHS visit once every two weeks.
It his law combined with all the other iffy laws in the UK which make this nefarious. This is the issue about discussing anything about how draconian the UK is. If you compare any single law in isolation, it isn't that different. However if you take how the British authorities and how they operate it, and all the other laws you start to see a more draconian picture.
That is what many people, especially those that do live in the UK don't appreciate.
>The U.K. is pretty middle of the road as far as “surveillance”
Just, no.
5-eyes is the most heinous human-rights-destroying apparatus under the sun, and it wouldn't be happening if it weren't for the British desire to undermine cultures they have deemed inferior.
Outside of techn journalism, this is a non story in the UK. I think it's hard to say much about the society's attitude when they don't know ow about this, never mind understand.
Average UKian is, IME, surprisingly technologically unsavvy. This might be the root cause of lack of interest or protest.
If I were to guess how this whole thing came to be, it would be thus: the UK government is increasingly dysfunctional and polarised. The attention of government and opposition goes increasingly into futile, high-stakes but always drawn battles. But that means that motivated and organised groups can push through things that look benign from the outside and don't trigger the Great Polarisation. Protecting children from suicide, what's not to like? The Parliament, where this should be shredded to pieces, is too busy trying to reshuffle deckchairs.
Meanwhile this is printed on vellum, welcome to the new reality.
> The crimes they cite like child grooming or terrorism/hate being incited sound pretty terrible too, but I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action - is the issue bigger there, or are they just more aware of and willing to act on it.
When it comes to pedos in specific, the UK got absolutely shaken by the scandals of the last few years - Jimmy Savile, Epstein being involved right into the Royal Family, just to state the obvious ones.
As for terrorism, the problem dates back a bit deeper, the UK has had the IRA conflict for decades, and to this day the conflict isn't resolved, the only thing that did happen was the IRA got formally disbanded in 2005.
Regulating porn, guns, gambling, tobacco, and alcohol has nothing to do with authoritarianism or a lack of freedom. It's about protecting people, just like we already do with seatbelts, speed limits, and food safety.
Why do you think shops ask for proof of age when you buy cigarettes? Not because they care about cancer or want to sell less, it's because they're required to by law. Of course, teenagers can still find workarounds. They can ask an older friend to buy it for them, just like they can use a VPN to access porn.
The difference is, regulation shifts accountability. It moves the responsibility from a greedy, insensitive business owner to the kids. And at least with the kids we can guide them, and help them spend their time and money where it actually matters.
Note: I know people who love guns or porn are probably going to downvote this, but someone has to say it.
“It’s for your own good” is always a laughable argument.
The state doesn’t regulate these things to protect people, it does so to manage risk to itself. Porn, guns, gambling, tobacco, alcohol, etc., are tolerated so long as they are contained, taxable, and politically useful.
Regulating porn is this system likely trying to move the needle on declining birth rates. You can look to a host of pro-natalist efforts in China as the likely inspiration.
And without a doubt, overreach by governments will continue.
That's the combined power of the worst tendencies of the media and a deliberate propaganda campaign.
Take this law: it's not new, it was passed in 2023 by the previous government. The law had a two year deadline attached to it, and companies didn't introduce any restriction before the deadline. The new government has a lot on its plate, so it's hardly surprising that repealing a law that was already passed with little attention to it was not high on the list of priorities compared to things like not defaulting or unblocking planning permissions. And yet, twitter and other places are full of very loud voices describing the law as new and designed to oppress them now, even though the deadline was set two years ago.
On a more general note, we have our problems, but the UK is in a pretty good place. Sam Freedman covered some bases in his recent post [1] (crime is down, the economy is struggling but improving, etc), but I'll add some more:
* We're probably the least racist, most integrated society in the world. The leader of the opposition is a black woman and first generation immigrant [2]. When Rishi Sunak became a PM, his race wasn't brought up once in any media, including very right wing; compare and contrast with all the bullshit about Obama and his birth certificate dog whistles.
* First time in years we're reducing the backlog of asylum applications. People applying for asylum can't work because they haven't proved their status yet, so naturally they need to be looked after. All the noise you hear is caused entirely by the conservative party defunding and then outright pausing application processing. This means that people looking for asylum had to live in limbo for years, which caused multiple problems. No backlog, no problems.
* We punch WAY above our weight in arts and theatre, and the industry is flourishing. Ever noticed how overrepresented British actors are in Hollywood?
* Compared to our main ally overseas, we have a very effective parliament. The executive is kept in check even with the very large majority Labour has now, and the Lords proved their worth during Brexit, putting brakes at the worst impulses of the previous government.
* We largely preserved our core military capabilities and alliances over the decade of austerity, slowly repairing, recovering, and expanding now. We're a major partner on nuclear programs, tier-1 partner on F-35, AUCUS is happening, we do a lot in Ukraine, and we're one of the only two nuclear countries in Europe and just signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with France.
* We are helping people in Hong-Kong, Ukraine, and Afghanistan with targeted immigration programs.
* We're rolling back anti-nuclear nonsense, building two large NPPs, and deployed wind generation at a massive scale.
* A bunch of important reforms are going through the parliament [3], from enhancing renters right to a YIMBY reform.
But very little of that filters into online environments. The most unhinged, xenophobic, paranoid voices get amplified, creating the impression that you cited, even though it can't be further from truth.
Britain is a beautiful country, open to the world, with a globe-spanning network of alliances and relationships, and an incredibly resilient democracy. We should do SO MUCH MORE, yes! But it doesn't mean we shouldn't celebrate where we are now, too.
> Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society
I feel like this is 100% true of the US as well, the only difference is there are multiple factions (the blue EAs, the blue EAccs, the red pro-Trump, the red anti-Trump, the red EAccs, ...) scared and cynical of different things.
The Bourgeois love to divide the working class, typical divide and conquer. Indigenous worker vs imported worker, men vs women, queer vs straight, old vs young, car user vs bicycle rider. This is important because it weakens existing solidarities and prevent the emergence of class consciousness. It's part of their modus operandi and has been for centuries, only now they master it thanks to algorithms and machine learning. This increased surveillance also happens to be extremely useful at taming future strikes and protests, or rat out future pro-workers groups
This view (“the Bourgeois’, etc.) seems to imply there’s a group of very clever manipulators somewhere, overtly planning and executing this (presumably in a dark room with armchairs and cigars). But I just can’t imagine this, in the UK’s example.
What I see instead is the other side of Hanlon’s razor —incompetence— coupled with a political class riven with pockets of self-interest, and very few seemingly with an intellectual hypothesis to explain the UK’s current predicament, or to chart a path out of it.
We have a history of trying banning bad stuff. Magna Carta in the 1200s against the right of kings, slavery abolition in the 1800s, now porn being pushed to kids.
I don't think child grooming or hate is particularly bad here but we tend to try to stop that kind of thing. We also had the first modern police force in 1829 and other innovations which have caught on in some other countries.
Some of the US alt right media pushes broken Britain stories because we have some muslim immigrants or something. The majority of the public support the bill https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-poll-finds-7-in-10-ad... I wonder if it's more the US is afraid of the their government that if they say they are promoting online saftey they are really going 1984 on the populace? Here people tend to assume they are in fact promoting what it says on the tin.
This seems like a hard fight to win against determined network engineers without OFAC-level co-encorcement around spending money abroad.
I rent servers in Hong Kong, Switzerland, Tokyo, and many other places, and route tunnels among them all, and this is just mundane aboveboard stuff, many of the providers happily accept PayPal and crypto as well as CC and wire. I haven't even tried to design a system for evading this sort of thing, I can only imagine the ceiling is pretty high: QUIC and shit are increasingly the default.
I oppose this on principle, very much oppose it. I'm merely noting that until they're willing to start licensing the right to spend money abroad, they're going to have a tough time outlawing VPNs with any effect.
Maybe this pushes everyone to switch to Tor all at once: fucking with people's porno is a pretty quick way to move things around in the App Store ranking.
It would serve em right if this backfired massively by getting everyone to go cypherpunk by default.
I understand that arbitrary oppression is possible even with computers, there are regimes that come close today.
My point is that it will cost them a lot of money in lost economic activity to make it happen: we should seek to make that cost as high as possible and make sure that powerful people understand how high it is.
The new online safety rules are already being used to shut down government criticism. How it works is their new elite protection squad, if someone is deigned an influential critic of government policy, trawls through your social media posts until they find something against the laws. A lot of government critique is coming from the working class here now, who have virtually no political representation in the UK. As you can imagine, some of these social media posters don't mince their words, and end up getting caught out and arrested.
There are discussions in parliament about grooming gangs on X. These are soft-censored (you can't see it without passing the the age verification). Few people will be bothered to make an account to see a post and pass age verification. Therefore it slows the sharing of information.
It isn't about outright banning the discussion, because that will cause considerable push-back by the public. So you dress up a policy as doing one thing knowing that the effect will be another. I don't take anything the British State says at face value. If you do, you are simply being naive.
I was thinking last night how many in some ways these age verification laws might actually have some upside for those of us who were fond of the early internet...
Ultimately what these laws will end up doing is pushing internet traffic towards the "normie web", create a separation between sites which refuse to implement these measures and those who will.
Ultimately for this filters to work authoritarian countries like the UK will need to ban sites like 4chan which do not comply with their age verification demands despite hosting adult content. As it stands until the UK do this the age filtering may as well not exist because kids (and adults) will just go to other sites.
Additionally search and content aggregators will likely come under increased pressure to blacklist these "rogue" sites so slowly both the ability to access non-compliant sites and the ability to find non-compliant sites will diminish.
Like in the old days when cool sites and blogs spread more by word of mouth than social media and search aggregators, we're likely heading back to a world where those who are savvy enough to work around the filtering of authoritarian states will have access to a new kind of "semi-dark web" or a "rogue web".
I almost like that idea. If the internet bifurcates it might actually become a more authentic place for those of us in know. I suppose the only question then is whether authoritarian countries like the UK will ultimately come after private VPN users as well, but I feel like that would be impractically costly to enforce.
Oh for sure. I personally think this was the whole point of the bill.
We've seen from online bans in recent years that it doesn't really matter if someone is still technically able to access a the banned content, at some point if you make the content hard enough to find its influence becomes increasingly irrelevant.
This new legislation basically gives the UK government an excuse to ban large sections of the internet from UK ISPs since they can say they weren't complying with UK law and shift the blame/responsibility in the eyes of the public – "it's not censorship, they're breaking the law!"
In doing this it will likely be enough to reduce UK traffic to those sites by 90%+. While it might technically be possible to buy and install a VPN to access them realistically most people won't bother.
There are a lot of comments and thinking along the demo and gloom lines.
On the "silver lining" side, could be a eye-opener for the population of the UK, that things they take for granted cant get summarily yanked away if they don't actually do something.
And with any luck it will pull up the technical competency of every person using these services (pretty much every adult).
With any luck parents might even be forced to gain the skill their kids already live and breathe and don't think twice about.
I used to be optimistic that way, but if you look somewhere similar developments happened before like China: yes, people adapted to circumvent their regime's oppression, but the laws never changed.
Since surveillance is only a 2nd tier issue in terms of mind share (at best), it's untouched by electoral democracy. And because rulers automatically support more surveillance, there are no mechanisms for positive developments on that side, both in the UK and in China.
But we did, I've been protesting against laws like this for 17 years now! Genuinely, they've always been trying to implement these laws, and simply relied on us missing the ship one time.
If COVID policies and mandates including the vaccine passports which absolutely paved the way for digital IDs for any action in society, didn't wake up populations around the world, nothing will.
You just need to scare them when there's an appearance of dissent and that's that.
Few people can combat them effectively from a tech and legal framework, for sure, but don't expect magic from nowhere.
Every time this comes up, an accusation with some label becomes sufficient to dismiss any arguments from a person.
Everyone with any ability to open their eyes migrated to the US from the UK ages ago. The civilization that exists today is what happens when people too scared to get on a boat live in the dregs of a dying empire.
What message does it send when your government tries to impose costs on your preferred behavior while at the same time being unable to do it when you download a single app?
The words that come to mind are malicious and incompetent. The only 'achievement' is to increase contempt towards the government. And the times aren't exactly stable to begin with.
I wonder what the (supposed) anti-censorship people that supported things like eSNI and DoH think about this. They took away our ability to filter our own networks, so now we can't even argue that filtering and monitoring is something that should be done on the client side (per network).
Sometimes I feel like both sides are actually just one side playing the long game. IMO the goal is to get verified digital IDs in use everywhere they can so they can lock down the internet to have absolute control. We'll end up paying inflated subscriptions for everything and watching all the ads.
These are the kinds of regulations that are deigned for incumbents because it becomes impossible for new market entrants to satisfy the requirements. I wouldn't be surprised if big tech companies are silently lobbying for this kind of stuff behind closed doors.
The solution is to have filtering on the actual client devices. There need to be specialized minor-friendly devices with parental controls at the OS level, and apps need a standardized framework to integrate with those parental controls. Then create regulation that devices used by minors must have such a system, with the standard that every new action (app install, first time visiting a website, new contact, joining a group chat, etc) first needs to be whitelisted by a parent, and that parents can see a timeline of all actions.
With this solution, kids are far safer than under recent UK/EU age verification laws, while adults and their free, open & private internet remain unaffected.
Phishing for material for sextortion has never been more trivial. The implementation of this is going to lead to mass fraud. Walk into parliament, ask who is willing to go to jail in defense of the act if and when the first lot of randy pensioners are bankrupted, or kid commits suicide out of shame - and if no one raises their hand, repeal it.
This is absolutely going to lead to the black mail of people in both the private and public sector. Ruling parties are going to have access to this information and will use it to force votes. Intelligence agencies will do the same. On top of that its only a matter of time before you get a Tea app style leak where this data was simply not secured. Forcing people to identify themselves before engaging in their sexual peculiarities is a recipe for disaster and the rationale behind it is weak at best. Its about control, nothing else.
Note: Forgot to add, this is going to give some low level data or software engineer access to all of your darkest secrets and what is to stop them from using that to blackmail you? Some guy is going to ring up their local millionaire and say "I see you are into X, give me a 100k or everyone else will know as well" There is no end to how bad of an idea this is.
The idea that you should verify your legal identity to load a website is reprehensible and not something that should be treated seriously. It should be ridiculed like the authoritarian nonsense it is.
Yes, in a perfect world the downsides are limited. But in the world we live in I predict a lot more leaks similar to the Tea app hack (which contained a lot of passports, linked to some quite private data from chats like medical documents)
The biggest hope I see is that the EU also wants to implement age restrictions, but with a lot more effort to get it right and make it compatible with a strong desire for privacy. Maybe that will make "proper" implementations easy and common enough that many of the downsides will be mitigated
The 2nd order effect is that nearly every creator will be sponsored by NordVPN - as the market expands. As well as not being able to identify legitimate vs illegitimate uses. So, I guess mission achieved!?
This is one of the times where law is outrunning technology. Apple and Google are both working on anonymous attestation but they're pulling the trigger before it's ready.
But that's not what laws like these are about. In the US at least these laws are driven by Christian Nationalists are setting up a situation where PII of porn users is able to be leaked. That's what they're counting on. They also want to have political control of platforms by continually holding a Sword of Damocles above any publisher's head.
>"Nigel Farage ‘on the side of predators’ with Online Safety Act criticism, says Labour"
Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist?
The end goal here is digital ID and censorship. Compare this to the perennial efforts for encryption backdoors. If there is a characterization that accurately encompasses this, it is the illiberal, statist, authoritarian impulse. Sure, they used a sex-panic to advance their agenda. However, this is merely symptomatic of the larger illiberal trend towards authoritarianism and the expansion of the state.
Interestingly while it'd be daft to call them Christian Nationalist the Labour Party does owe a lot of its early philosophy to various religious groups descended from the English Dissenters. This is also true for many groups that'd fall under the Christian Nationalist label in the US, even though their politics are very different.
Of course this just shows the English Dissenters ended up being quite influential on both the left and right over the course of Anglophone history.
Strictly speaking the law was passed under the conservatives, albeit in collaboration with Labour (it's bi-partisan). But I would agree that the drive is more authoritarian and it just uses moralistic arguments to shame people into siding with it.
The law could mandate that retail device OSs ship with a turnkey child safe mode complete with app and extensive site whitelists and run an educational campaign on the subject. But instead they've gone the needlessly invasive route which is telling about the true motives.
Americans don't understand that the liberal democrats are the "anti-authoritarian" party of the UK and would be who most American mainstream democrats would vote for in practice.
Labor during the Corbyn years made Bernie Sanders look like a fascist and the current labor is back to being milquetoast and embracing its social authoritarian roots.
Similarly, Americans cannot understand that the Canadians have an "NDP" and "Liberal" and they don't understand their differences - though these days I don't think the NDP knows their differences either!!!
> Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist?
Honestly? Yeah, pretty much. It's a little hard to think of them that way since they're the leftmost establishment party in the UK, the same as the Democrats in the US, but historically speaking they're pretty right-wing. And theocracy has pretty deep roots in Anglosphere politics, so it's not necessarily that visible from the inside.
All of our platforms are inundated by an overwhelming amount of well crafted, targeted (specific per person) campaigns of disinformation by foreign actors.
China, Russia, Iran, and others cannot even remotely hope to stand against the West. Yet if you cannot stand against your adversary, you must weaken them.
You promote infighting. You take minor issues which can be cooperatively resolved with compromise, and seek to turn them into issues of great division. You spread falsehoods, creating useful idiots in great numbers.
You find the most radicalized, most loony of citizens that you can, and then secretly fund them.
Understand, any concept of "we do that to ourselves" is like a gnat in comparison. This is a real threat, it's been getting worse, and the common person is not capable of even understanding the concept. The common person, even when told repeatedly, thinks there is no downside to having their Pii stolen, or hacked. They simply read click bait titles, youtube or tiktok videos and 100% believe every word without any skepticism.
You may disagree with any or all of the above.
However! The above is what is actually behind the move for KYC to this extent. It's not about age verification, it's about identity. And it's not even about one westerner talking to another, it's about a foreign adversary seeking to pretend to be a domestic.
Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater.
And I say this as someone that has fought for an open internet. It's already dead. It's dead because foreign interests use it as a tool to destroy our societies. It's dead because soon AI will replace most generated information.
Age verification laws are really identity laws, and any work to provide anonymous verification will fail, sadly, unfortunately, because the perceived threat is so large.
(I do not even necessarily agree with this, but if we don't understand the logic and the why of this, of why it is happening, then we're complaining about the wrong thing...)
Worth noting that this bill was introduced in 2021 and passed in 2023 under the previous Conservative governments, all of which were fairly libertarian/anti-state at least in their rhetorical positioning.
I mean arguably, Labour could have repealed it or could have decided to disown it and discourage implementation, but the terrible design of the legislation is pretty much entirely the responsibility of the last government.
Screw anonymous attestation. We don't need to be controlled at every frigging second by people who are time and time again proven to be corrupt and working for their own interests. *Oh, I just received this thousands in gifts but it doesn't affect my decisions".
The only thing to do is denounce every bit of bullshit and not try and "find a way to make it work". Just stand for freedom for once instead of bending the knee or pushing for authoritarianism like most people do with every invasion for oil, during covid, when there's an accusation of some -ism or whatever the next label is.
Agreed. This is our Prohibition Era for free speech and expression and privacy. We must act as bootleggers, creating and maintaining private spaces which strengthen communities, preserve autonomy and discovery while still protecting its users from harm or predation. I owe everything in my life to websites I wasn't allowed on as a kid.
The UK is an increasingly authoritarian nightmare. The US should start a refugee program for UK citizens who understand what freedom actually means and want to live in a free country again.
This is not pushed by Christian Nationalists in the same manner that the Steam bans were not pushed by Collective Shout. They are just a good scapegoat. You find a group that preaches what you want to do, you do it, and then say that it was because of them, not because you wanted to do it. This way you can claim that you didn't want to do it, but do it anyways.
>This is one of the times where law is outrunning technology.
Not really. China's great firewall has been doing that a long time before these laws. It was only a matter of time till our leaders ask Big Tech "do for us what you did for China, except add a coat of paint over it so it doesn't look evil".
Not just porn and abortion, but the US is also targeting political speech now. The moral nuts are overlapping with the corporate and government interests such that the public loses.
Several examples: government employees are being vetted for loyalty instead of qualification; public corps like CBS are not only self censoring political speech but they also have a "bias monitor" to appease the government; normal people are being denied entry to the country for various wrongspeak on socials.
My understanding is that the way they do these attestations still links whatever account you did the attestation for and your real identity.
It's possible to do truly anonymous ZKP's of being a member of a set (eg. over 18s) but in practice it would be very cumbersome. It would involve having a setup with a central authority (government) to build a Merkle tree where users would submit hashes of randomness and then a user would generate a token through a ZKP that would decouple them from their real identity with the anonymity dependent on the set size. New participants can be brought in but the anonymity set sizes would fluctuate.
Even with this method it will link together all services utilizing the token. And if you attempt to solve this by allowing to generate multiple tokens the entire scheme becomes somewhat meaningless as durable bypass services would emerge.
I know lots of companies working on anonymous attestation, and have been myself interested in this for decades. I don't get why we would need any form of age verification for porn at all though, since the cost outweighs whatever little benefit exists given that it's so easy to work around. Online age verification is like the NFTs of internet law.
I don't particularly want to be required to have an Apple or Google device (and to accept their EULAs) to use social media either! If we're going to do age verification (and if we must, doing it in a privacy-preserving way would be best), can't we make it an open standard?
Christian nationalists have properly been identified by James Lindsay and others as the "woke right." They deserve that title because they think, like the woke left, that their needs to be some vanguard with unlimited power to "fix" society, and that the constitution, separation of powers and objective justice and meritocracy need to be done away with. Of course as soon as they gain power, all the white christian people who supported them get sent to die in a stupid war in a trench somewhere. That's the big joke with communist/fascist revolutions. Their supporters all think they will have a special place in the government after the revolution, but most of them wind up dead in a trench(Hitler) or doing hard labor in primitive conditions in the countryside(Mao), or purged (Stalin).
Until you really restrict the net, it's just a matter of building new software that can't be the target of those laws by design. If you restrict the net, there's no inter-net.
Especially since different countries/cultures have very different sentiments on most topics. For example Western Europe and the US mostly agree that minors should be protected against alcohol, drugs, pornography and excessive violence, but the thresholds are wildly different.
Europeans like to joke about the Americans being fine with gratouitious violence in kids movies as long as there's no blood, but a single female nipple immediately makes it R rated. Now consider that even France and England have different nuances on what is considered acceptable. If you extend beyond Western culture it becomes even more diverse. In some of the more religious Muslim countries a women shaking her full head of hair might be seen as erotic content. A lot of Japanese anime skirts very close to sexualizing children (from a Western perspective).
If every country became serious about enforcing age verification for their value system you could post barely any image or video content without marking it as age restricted for some jurisdiction. And the lines wouldn't neatly follow communities but you really would need a judgement for each piece of content. That's obviously not going to happen, so you will always have people from one place visiting communities in places that are more lax on one specific measure they are interested in.
And that's assuming all software and platform operators want to follow the restrictions, despite the obvious profit motive of not doing so. Restricting the supply isn't completely useless, but also provides huge incentives for those able to meet demand
I liked the series, but that part seemed like they jumped on some kind of blockchain bandwagon and jumped the shark.
It's a shame, the previous seasons were kind of timeless, but it feels like they jumped onto a buzzword that backfired before it was well understood. Although I may have dropped it early and it would have backfired on them after their cryptochain is used by criminals or whatever, but IIRC it was very early Bitcoin era and the themes were something like a 51% attack by china, it was way too early to make a comment on Blockchain, they were able to do good satire on the dot com era precisely because it was already dead.
> I daydream about some kind of overlay network, without censorship and surveillance, where only people 'in the know' participate.
These have been getting build for years now, and the rate is increasing. The open, public web is on its last legs and is being replaced by a multitude of private networks.
How should small social network sites, forums or any sites that post user-generatrd content etc who can't afford to do age verification respond to this law?
Block all requests from UK IPs?
We are building a niche social network and don't want to be in the cross-hairs.
Is anyone in a similar position? How's your company dealing with this?
Edit: apart from cost, storing user IDs etc goes against our goal of building a private social network. We would like to retain least amount info
(also applies to GDPR, and even though GDPR has wider applicability, devs should focus on the low-hanging fruit first instead of going around in what-ifs and exceptions)
Leaving the complexity of attempting to circumvent the great firewall aside, VPN isn't free. Not many are willing to drop £60+/year just to avoid identifying yourself on PH. Easier to find a website that doesn't enforce it.
"Seems to be working in China."
Yeah, let's follow the example of the authoritarian countries just to prove how liberal "democracies" have nothing to do with freedom.
This is how it worked out in Russia. First, around 10 years ago, they adopted very limited laws that required ISPs to block websites. Things like drugs and suicide, with the classic rationale "won't someone please think of the children". Then piracy websites were added to that. Fast forward to now, ISPs were mandated to install black-box "ТСПУ" devices on their networks, "to protect against threats", so now Roskomnadzor doesn't even pretend to care about the law. Half the internet is broken. More if you're on mobile data. Everyone knows what a VPN is. I personally have set up DPI bypass tools for many of my relatives.
In other words, if you censor enough of the internet that your population knows ways around that, your censorship simply ceases being effective.
At least in Russia and in china, the governments don't pretend that what they are doing is to save the children(TM) whereas in the west we like to drape our authoritarian tendencies under such false pretenses.
If you need to use a VPN in your country, maybe your government and elected officials have failed you, are not representing you, and need to be voted out.
Yeah, that's the problem. In the UK, thanks to the party system, "first past the post," and certain longstanding procedural and cultural norms, it's literally impossible to vote them out.
At best, as we're now seeing, they'll go from Tories to Labour to Tories to Labour. With the members of both parties from the same schools, the same social circles, living in the same neighborhoods, and supporting the same policies.
There's no voting their way out of this mess. At this point they need something like the Restoration of the Stuarts. Failing that, they need divine intervention.
It sounds like it is time to create a new internet and not invite these people. I wonder how difficult it would be to create an entirely new internet infrastructure that doesn't rely on anything that currently exists and doesn't or can't connect to the existing network.
It'd seem that local mesh nets with some sort of satellite relay/backbone would facilitate this. That's just moving the goalposts to a certain extent, though. If a system like this came to be and they weren't happy about it, you'd have to figure out a covert way to get satellites up and keep them there.
If wifi meshnets were actually popular and not just some enthusiast thing that's mostly used for better free wifi you could reasonable route around network-side blocks. Most of the content might move through some kind of high-capacity backbone, but anything blocked on the backbone could still find its way through the mesh. At least in places with high enough population density that linking across cities and villages with just wifi or other low-cost methods is viable (Germany and surroundings come to mind as the obvious example)
Yeah, how hard can it be connecting every damn home on this planet with each other, again? Piece of cake! The internet was created in two days, so I’m sure we’ll be able to do it again. Especially without clear financial incentives.
Maybe pivoting to things like Tor makes more sense.
It already exists; Yggdrasil. It's a fully decentralized IPv6 mesh network. Most users do primarily use the internet for transport now, but it can work just as well over link-local (e.g. ethernet, P2P wireless). It's fast, end-to-end encrypted, and relatively simple to set up.
And that doesn't rely on or comply with the law? Enjoy your CSAM filled network. This has happened with TOR and Freenet, and Telegram (although they rely on law for their benefit but they don't comply themselves).
If you want to make a new internet and take all the trash that is on the current one with you to the new one, please do! It will make the current one much more tolerable for the rest of us.
Or target it under the same law. All you need to do is shift the blame for providing adult content onto the vpn provider and suddenly they'll stop providing services to the UK. Might be a little more tricky to enforce globally but perfect enforcement isn't necessary to be a deterrent
This sort of thing is why the US has turned into a governance-averse society in some pretty bothersome ways.
People suggest some sort of regulation for something, or some social service, often ones that are similar to those in the UK, and people who oppose it will point to things like this and use them to illustrate the slippery slope fallacy.
The US is a "governance-avere" society from conception. The Constitution decrees that the government should only have a few explicitly enumerated responsibilities, and nothing else. The country was set up such that the laws that affected a person were supposed to be from as much of a local level as possible. It was set up such that there wouldn't be some rulers (even if democratically elected) lording over the country, deciding things for everyone. A huge chunk of the founding fathers argued for not having a federal government at all.
The US was literally the people rejecting the UK governance system and starting their own, setting it up in a way so that it would never be the UK governance system. And here you are complaining that people in the US point to government happenings in the UK as something to be wary of, saying that the US has become "governance-averse"? Seriously?
Well, if you look at the US, similar laws are being enacted at the state level as those you see in the UK, often by the same people who would reject the other features of governance you see in the UK (the NHS, stricter firearms regulations, etc.) because of them being "overbearing".
I don't really understand why every adult should need to jump through hoops because parents won't spend 5 minutes enabling it on their kid's devices.
Hell, modern parental control software with an image classifier is arguably better than these online age verification systems since it works with anything that appears onscreen.
This is the exact system I suggested to a friend. I don't mind having to 'prove' my age, but I do not really want a third party to have my identifiable information nor do I really want the Government knowing what fetishes I may or may not have.
For a digital only solution, I think the best system would be some form of public-private key attestation:
The government advertises their public keys for 18+ verification.
A website generates a unique token - this token is then taken by the user and submitted to the government receiving a signed attestation. This can then be given back to the website to prove the user is 18. It only has to be done once per profile and no information is shared between the Government and the website on who is who.
Unless of course the token is saved by both the website and government in some forever database and then a lookup is done.
Another solution could be a timed/signed token produced by the government that has no input from the website. But this still has the downside that this could just be saved by both parties and in future you could identified if both sides compare data.
That also happens with alcohol and tobacco. Cops can run sting operations to catch illegal dealers. But IRL id verification removes easy access for most children while preserving the privacy of adults.
There's a bunch of other "digital wallet" development going on in general, effectively providing digital certificate-backed identity documents and similar (driving licenses, passports). The plan for age verification is that these wallets will also be able to provide a cryptographically signed attestation of age (signed by an EU verification authority, i.e. your id-issuing government org) but with no other personal info included. Then you can present this to anybody, and they can independently verify the signature to confirm it's a recent proof-of-age attestation without knowing anything else about you.
It's still fairly early - lots of blueprints and proof-of-concepts, not yet rolled out anywhere AFAICT - but looks like a reasonable solution I think. In practice I suspect most people's experience will be a government-backed mobile app that you authenticate with once, and then it can handle verification requests on-device or show a QR code that other people can scan & verify.
This reminds me that when payment processors cut off an adult site in Japan, they were able to fall back on users paying for points in cash at convenience stores instead or something like that.
Not a bad system really? Pseudo anonymity and avoids some third party tech firm getting involved?
This is just moving personal data responsibilities from service providers (e.g. porn sites) to the central authority (QR code maker and verifier). Unless there is a semi-anonymous way of purchasing age proofs, e.g. over the counter.
I don't think anyone has a problem with verifying their age.
What many people do have a problem with is requiring disclosure of unmodifiable biometric data and government documents that once "hacked"/sold into the data collection pipeline becomes forever tainted and easily stolen.
You can't "reset my password" with biometric data once a malicious actor has it
I have a problem verifying my age or any other piece of information that isn’t critical to whatever service you are providing to me. Beyond that it’s none of your or anyone else’s damn business. If you don’t have a legally issued warrant then leave me the hell alone. This isn’t an area for compromise.
Critical thinking is quite literally the most difficult thing for children to do. It's one of the very last skills we develop. So yes, the idea is to teach them, but while they're still young and dumb and physically incapable of the critical thinking required here, we need guardrails for them.
I’m sure it’s only the adults using VPNs so don’t worry, this is still a fantastic law that is definitely helping children not watch porn and absolutely not just a massive attack on civil liberties in disguise.
Not so much "threaten" as kill, right? Can't have an open Internet if access to it is gated and blocked. Maybe a semi open Internet or some new category.
Since it's about VPNs - what are good VPNs for someone looking for safety/privacy but not anonymity or even IP hiding?
Not even for streaming. But for general "safety while on the Internet" when the devices (Mac, iPhone) are mostly on public or not-so-secure WiFi (at the residence or on the go). Plan is to keep it always ON or almost always ON.
The best VPN is to host your own. I used Digital Ocean. They have preconfigured droplet images for OpenVPN access server. The droplet even serves a client pre-configured with the connection settings.
Oh god. I should have said "other than self-hosted". I swear to god I thought about it but forgot and added only Mullvad. I can't edit it now.
And thank you for saying this but I have tried. Both on DigitalOcean and on a VPS bought from a deal on LET - didn't do it for me. It was a pain unless I left it literally untouched, un-updated, un-upgraded forever and ever. I know, I know - I must have done something wrong or I need more patience or both. But sadly it didn't cut it for me. It made it hate the entire thing.
Other self-hosted option could be one of those sites where you can use one service and pay for it like pikapods or so but then if I am doing that then why not just use a VPN because anyway I would have to sign up for different services and then pay for it too while not having the control a droplet or vps will offer (talked about above)
I have tried NextDNS and I think I should try it again but the last few experiences ended in a lot of sites breaking. Maybe this time I will try someone from country who has written a tutorial about it.
But a VPN would have been more appropriate for this task and if ever I needed to use a different IP from a different country (that would be rare and mostly to access websites for a short period) I could just do it easily.
Connectivity and IP blockage (I assumed) issues last time I tried it.
But the main reason is — it’s the default recommendation on HN. So I would prefer to know what else good there that people are using. Because it would be really sad if it’s the only one. I kind of refuse to believe that.
iCloud Private Relay has the benefit of more accepted by payment processors etc, but the downside is that because it doesn't mask your country of origin the UK censorship rules still apply whilst using it.
I've found that Mullvad generally has the best privacy reputation, but I've also been blocked by a lot of sites whilst using it.
The mainstream consumer VPNs like Nord, Proton etc aren't as great for privacy but I suspect they're less likely to be blocked. I'd love to have more data to justify this though.
I genuinely think that some 20% of the population are incurable moral busybodies, and the main function of liberal democracy is to protect the rest of society from these people. In this case liberal democracy has failed to protect us from some truly terrible legislation. Its impact goes far beyond adult content, it's an open attack on freedom of expression in this country that will lead to the proliferation of scams and identity theft. The amount of absurd things I've been asked to show ID for already when I've forgotten to turn on the VPN is exactly as bad as predicted, and I'm not going to trust some two-bit identity checking service.
The depressing thing is this seems the one thing a government that's famous for U-turning won't U-turn on. Even if (let's be honest, when) a list of MPs proclivities emerges from a data breach the most they'll do is exempt MPs from the provisions rather than admit this is a terrible law that makes the UK more dangerous rather than safer.
Liberal democracy's actual function is to convert the will of the people into a functioning government.
If it was actually true that 80% of the population opposed this law, MPs would be falling over themselves to run against it and it would be gone immediately after the next election cycle.
I think it's a dumb law, but I also don't think the UK's democracy is that broken. It's pretty clear a majority of UK voters support or are at least ok with this law.
UK and Australia are slowly going the way of China in their blocking, and the eventual end effect could be that they will get their citizens cut off from the internet.
I run a website that provides English articles to trending topics from Chinese social media. It’s kinda funny that topics discussed there are sometimes “too sensitive” for western LLMs who will straight up refuse to write about them.
Take from that what you will re: China vs western censorship
It's just that Australia and UK tend to lead the way when it comes to authoritarianism and then it becomes "this has always been like this, you conspiracy theorist".
They're coming for AI tools next. Here in Australia they're rolling out the academic socialist activists on the public broadcaster. These experts know how to keep us safe apparently.
This morning it was all about "think of the children" in the context of banning AI tools that could potentially be used to make AI generated CSAM. Even adult nudity is in the firing line. Ban the lot was the advice from the expert. Not just banning access, but making it a crime to even possess the tools.
What next? Ban paint brushes because someone might use them to paint offensive images?
Just a reminder “Brexit” happened just a few years ago. Suddenly no British man can be more than 3 months in another European country before being “banned”. You can’t even move to Switzerland and setup a company.
Yes technically it’s possible but I was told my a Swiss accountant “just don’t bother trying unless you can get a European passport - if you can”
This is from personal experience. As odd as it sounds Brexit really affected business ( always thought it was posturing) I can’t imagine what it did to mega corps etc
> As odd as it sounds Brexit really affected business
With all due respect, this was never odd. It was immediately predicted from the day the UK voted for Brexit, along with many of the other very obvious side effects of leaving the EU, like free movement & ability to work, logistical challenges etc.
Unironically, people thought it would end free movement for other people and not them.
When Brits go to another Country, they are expats, bringing their wealth and culture with them. When people come to the UK they are immigrants or economic migrants refusing to get jobs, learn the language or integrate while taking all the jobs.
> Suddenly no British man can be more than 3 months in another European country before being “banned”
That’s how visas work in most of the world.
I’m curious now, did you vote for it and not expect this? It doesn’t sound odd at all, it is exactly what everyone said would happen other than people promoting Brexit as some form of nationalism/pride movement.
As a Brit that was too young to vote in the referendum I feel like I’m stuck in a venus fly trap and the jaws are closing. I would have liked to live in Europe for a while, but welp, now that option’s gone. An image of a frog boiling in a pot also comes to mind.
Alot of people seemed surprised, that I was surprised.
I was surprised, because I dont follow politics.
I just sort of stumbled upon issues when travelling around Europe.
The point of my comment is not that I was surprised, but that Brexit "happened", from my pov. Im sure many others understood the repercussions like gifted clairvoyant giraffes before it occurred, but I alas did not.
In fairness there was a lot of uncertainty between 'hard brexit' which we got and 'soft brexit' which wouldn't have changed much. My biggest gripe about the whole thing from a democracy point of view is no one really knew what exactly we were voting for. I think it should have been two stage - do you want to leave and then here's the deal - do you still want to do that? I think we would have remained if people had seen the real terms and condition rather than "have our cake and eat it" make believe pushed by certain politicians.
If anything I would have expected the market to explode in Portugal. The digital nomad visa they offer is one of the easiest for us to get and after living there for five years you regain the right to live in the EU. I’ve considered moving there but their immigration system is dysfunctional apparently.
Destroy cultural integrity, national identity, create a low-trust society, become more authoritarian to manage low-trust society, import more immigrants at an exponential rate while house costs rise along with unemployment. The list keeps going. This is why far-right is surging on the polls. The country has completely lost all sense.
UK needs immigrants to increase stagnating productivity. this has been the case for decades and it's why no government has done, or will do anything serious to curb it.
Note that to the best of my knowledge, these numbers don't include the Afghan resettlement scheme which would further lower the proportion of employment driven visas.
How does immigration boost productivity? It's labor-saving automation and machinery investments that boost productivity. I would expect these to be driven mainly by labour scarcity. Growing the labour pool seems like it would drive exactly the opposite. As two examples, Japan has low immigration and an aging population and despite that its productivity has never been higher. By contrast Canada has had extremely high immigration and rapid population growth, and its productivity has flatlined since 2019.
I don't think that should be the be-all and end-all overriding the natives qualms but regardless.....Is it increasing productivity? In nearby mainland European countries that doesn't appear the case.
We have had more immigration every year since 97 than almost anyone could imagine prior to that, peaking at a million a year, productivity remains shit.
It's not about productivity, it's about the gross GDP numbers (and initially new labour were 100% OK with a demographic transformation project at the same time)
Welcome to the sticking plaster economy. This may be the economic orthodoxy, but it completely ignores the root causes of poor productivity - and ultimately leads to the state of xenophobia you're seeing today in Britain.
Sad thing as that the good times are very likely never coming back, and the far-right in power will only make everything worse by bolstering even more tribalism and mistrust among the public.
Incredible that you’ve managed to bring this conversation to immigration. In fact, it sounds like you’re saying the root cause of this crappy policy is somehow immigrants.
It's a valid topic for discussion. Even as a foreigner who was in UK on a visa and eventually got ilr I'm still concerned about it.
The current situation regarding small boats is not sustainable, particularly when it's proven that the majority are not fleeing persecution but are economic migrants. They're taking advantage of a system designed to help people in trouble, how could you defend that?
And when does it end? Will the UK always accept small boats ad infinitum?
I played by the (harsh) rules and got here legitimately. Why should I have bothered.
Immigration is becoming the #1 political issue in the UK for a reason.
If they didn't want this, they could have just restricted it and it would have largely gone away as a topic of discussion, but current levels makes it inevitable it will become the main thing people think about
None of these problems live in isolation. It all feeds back to the same system that is driving itself into the ground.
The refusal to accept these problems is what is creating a surge in far-right popularity. The very people that oppose them have inadvertently become their biggest cheerleaders.
Why is it that the only people who have to justify their beliefs are those who are not in favour of enormous demographic, economic, and political change required to facilitate mass immigration?
One of the reasons they want to make discourse on the internet as painful as possible is because immigration has become an mainstream concern in the UK. Many of the things that are being soft censored is clips about from the British parliament where this and related issues are being discussed.
Just because people like yourself happen to think it is uncouth to discuss, doesn't mean that it isn't part of the equation.
Everyone always wants to bring it back to immigration, because they've seen US ICE snatch squads and internment camps and decide that they want some of that here.
If you believe that this law really is just about protecting our dear sweet children, then they're completely unrelated. But if you really, truly believe that, I'm not sure anything could explain the link simply enough that you'd understand it.
So the law isn't about little Johnny wanking it to PornHub. It's about control. It's a government that has proven time and time again the only thing it cares about is more control over the people it should be serving being able to get a little more control.
If you already have a faltering cultural and national identity, and immigration - both legal and illegal - is skyrocketing[0][1], it's basically a straight line to see a large cohort of people link the two and and vote for the people saying they will end it. It's also not a remotely "far right" opinion to think that people should not be allowed to come into a country illegally, and if you do come into a country illegally, you should be removed. The idea that this is somehow bad is itself the fringe opinion.
Malicious actors are now harder to distinguish than legitimate actors, since they both will use VPNs. This is because in essence what VPNs are used for is always to evade the law, regardless of whether it is a law with high approval, like CASM, malware, spamming, drug trade; or laws with high approval for breaking them, like pornography age verification laws, or Intellectual Property laws on movies and music.
This is regardless of who is to blame for this issue, some will argue that it's the fault of those that break the laws with VPNs, some will argue that it's the fault of lawmakers for making stupid laws that deserve to be broken, muddying the waters. Undoubtedly, the third party, strong criminals, will make or amplify propaganda to legitimize breaking small laws, so that they can have legitimate alibies for breaking the law.
The next law will make it illegal to accept traffic from VPNs. They’re letting VPNs exist for now so people think they have a simple bypass. They’ll close that off as soon as the onerous laws pass.
It’s already done a bit voluntarily. Try to use a VPN and pay for something with a prepaid credit card. Try to make a Steam account. Etc.
Get ready for a verified ID that’s required to access anything online because that’s the end goal.
It'd make sense, VPNs are fraudulent in that they lie about the origin of a connection.
There's precedent in financial regulation, is it legal to send and receive wires to and from a swiss bank to conceal their russian or chinese or congolese or iraki origin?
Similarly in intl. trade it is illegal to hide the origin of imports, it is even illegal to reroute imports for the purpose of evading tariffs or compliance.
If y'all want to keep VPNs legal, I suggest you find better excuses than downloading porn and evading netflix restrictions, because the other side argues about infinitely higher stakes.
I'll say it again, if I can sign my consumer rights away with a checkbox and agree to terms and conditions with only a checkbox.. Then I can verify my age with a checkbox.
You shouldn't be able to do those things with a checkbox though, and we should all be ripping apart the fact that practice was normalized almost entirely and unilaterally by the tech industry.
I see you’ve never been anywhere that blocks VPNs.
First they will make it seem like only criminals would use VPNs, then they’ll target some actually shady VPN services to use as a scapegoat, then they’ll apply punitive measures to them specifically; then they will use the fact that they have already used punitive measures as a reason to use them blanketly.
Technically: it’s pretty trivial to block almost all VPNs at an ISP level. I think only anyconnect/openconnect is difficult (not impossible) to block.
That this would affect businesses is of no consequence.
It doesn't have to work on a technical level. Just grab a few people at random, torture them until someone admits guilt, then televise the guilty verdict and life-destroying sentence. Do this two or three times and fear will do the rest of the work for you.
Get the websites blocked too, some kinda minor fine if you're identified as using one, make it seem scary in the public eye to discourage it, ban advertisements?
You can't really stop it, but you can start treating it like Piracy. Maybe ISPs could snoop and report traffic that seems to be going to a VPN even if they can't inspect it.
They could probably manage to deal with the big players (who have enough advertising reach to be used by "ordinary" people). I doubt they could ever block the long tail of non-standard VPNs, especially those that share infrastructure used for legitimate purposes (are they going to ban SSH connections to AWS?).
I can be extremely wrong and so pardon me but I have only ever felt as if China/Iraq/Russia blocks vpn which are extremely authoritarian
if Britain does block vpn, it would look extremely authoritarian but yeah tbh, its looking the same right now too...
I do think that there is some level of bottom tech that needs to go unsupervised/unrestricted otherwise vpn's can fail (china?)
If however they restrict that level of tech too using (packet filtering?) etc., I don't really know, maybe there could be some side consequences too,like maybe some websites can stop working (like how china is cut off from the world from the outside websites primarily)
And honestly, the vpn providers can just change their techniques to be more sneaky and hope that UK govt. doesn't catch them and the UK govt. can try the vpn and find its techniques and then block them too
Its a cat and mouse game really.. The one where there is money incentive on big vpn players to play this game forever, so I wouldn't be too worried I guess.
What I am more worried about is that UK users might download free vpns or bad premium vpns which might make their phones botnets etc., so I would recommend proton vpn or mullvad but I don't want to recommend them too much because I don't want to imagine these products turning bad if a lot of people use it. (enshittenification)
Every day preteen boys around the world are destroying their premature brains by watching stuff that should be 18+ by simply clicking a single button that says "I am over 18". They form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button. Many of these kids are never the same after their innocence is stripped.
You can blame the parents for allowing them unfettered access to the internet, but their classmates will show them something while they're hanging out after school or waiting for the bus. This doesn't even include the softer stuff that gets _recommended_ to them every day on tiktok and instagram reels - actively pushing them towards more explicit content.
I don't necessarily agree with the politicians here and I do believe there are ulterior motives at play such as information gathering for blackmail on adults, etc.
What is the solution here? I don't think there is one that satisfies everybody.
These sites implementing this could also implement a DNS TXT record or similar saying they are over 18s only (gambling sites would be included here too, and with a little thought you can categorise the sites).
They could publish their IP addresses so that the traffic can be blackholed at the router by the account holder.
The choice would then be down to the person paying the bill whether to block or not.
It won't apply to shady sites, but those sites won't do age verification anyway.
The problem is nobody wants the account holder to have the power.
I feel much the same way. This is a real headache of a problem for me because I'm pretty privacy-oriented, but this is a serious, serious problem that needs real intervention.
Way too many kids are rotting their brains away either becoming gooners or clout-chasers. I thank God every day I was born too early to have access to this stuff as a kid. I can't imagine what this "you must always be online and also sexy" culture is doing to our youngest generations.
Give me the IP addresses of every site and I'll blackhole them on my router if I want to. That solves the home problem. I'll also ask why gambling sites, which litter sports broadcasting, aren't included, and indeed why gambling is allowed to be advertised to under 18s at all.
Doesn't solve the away problem, which is mainly 5g. I should be able to do that as the account payer.
Interestingly, the youngs in the US seem to be much less into sex and drugs than previous generations. The stuff we got up to as GenX youth are legitimately shocking to our children.
Pornography addiction doesn't exist. No major medical body in the world considers it an actual condition. Studies show that self-reported pornography addicts consume the same amount of pornography as non-addicts, but have much higher rates of religiosity and conservative sexual norms. Pornography "addiction" is a moral panic narrative, not a medical reality.
I agree that children should not have access to sexually explicit material and that it can warp their relationships to sex. I also agree that some people have unhealthy relationships to pornography; there are plenty of psychological and psychiatric factors that lead people to engage in disordered sexual behaviours.
But people NEED to stop bringing medical pseudoscience into these discussions. Statements like "[children] form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button" are neither true nor useful.
I mean, ZKP of age seems to be a good enough compromise. Does it add friction? Yes. I used it a week ago to test, it isn't a smooth experience, but honestly, it's good enough.
The fact that people need to install vpn to access porn is also a solution. I doubt children younger than 13 could do it.
A 13-year-old is one year away from highschool. You're underestimating the user-friendliness of VPNs and the tech-savviness of, if not the average middle-schooler, than the 85th-percentile middle-schooler at least.
> They form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button. Many of these kids are never the same after their innocence is stripped.
[citation needed]
> What is the solution here?
The kids who grew up on violent games and unlimited free internet porn are adults now. We're fine. I don't understand what's all the ruckus about.
Unless the real issue is that people are noticing certain societal changes that are very difficult to combat so the politicians blame porn because otherwise they'd have to admit that they have no solutions to more pressing problems. Please note how suddenly the housing crisis, vote manipulation, inequality, fucked job market, mental health crisis, genocide in Gaza, war in Ukraine, loneliness epidemic, unchecked immigration, phone addiction all became irrelevant side topics because right now we're laser focused on making sure that boys going through puberty won't see a naked titty. Truly a clown world we live in.
I went through puberty in the golden age of internet porn. After widespread high-speed internet became a thing, but before we started algorithmically monetizing every second of people's attention. I'm so happy of that. I still have my collection of porn I downloaded as a horny teenager.
To any Brit citizens, do you feel like the general populace won't fight back about their freedom being taken, or do you think that this will continue until a semi-autocracy result? Is it a topic of conversation in the general population, or is it just a shrug of acceptance?
Tech savvy like me think maybe I'll have to click the vpn button on the browser one day - not that big a deal.
Non tech savvy probably haven't heard of it.
Semi-autocracy result? It's a democracy. The policy was fairly popular. The next election, quite likely Reform will win and scrap it.
The conversation seems to go something like: UKgovt: "kids are being hurt by porn and self harm stuff on mostly US and overseas sites - we'll stop it and fine them £18m if they do" US folk: - freak out - "how can they harm our precious websites? The UK is over. It's going 1984!" UK people - whateves.
Bear in mind we wrote 1984 and are familiar with that stuff and this bill isn't it. That agent Krasnov guy is more of a worry.
I think a decent amount of people don't even realize what is happening. For example, lots of people still don't know about the iCloud backdoor that's trying to be implemented by the government.
Those who know are annoyed but not enough that it will cause change; I don't think most believe it will get worse either.
Unfortunately the default will be people going on the App Store, getting the first app that has 'VPN' in the title, download, and forget. Completely failing to address a systemic issue.
This alternative approach is fine. When people use extra money to pay for such services, it boosts economic activity and creates a market-driven filter. If you are economically advanced, you can afford this workaround. If you are not, well you are surrendering to govt safety rules. And thus everything works.
I'm guessing this is technically challenging. There are VPN protocols designed to be difficult to differentiate from other encrypted traffic. As a result, VPN providers based outside the UK know that they can just ignore the UK law and probably won't be successfully blocked in the UK.
Enforcement, one countries laws don’t apply in another. Which is kind of why the age verification thing won’t work… There will always be some jurisdiction that’ll ignore things for profit.
Not entirely true. If I'm incorporated in country A and want to offer a service in country B, I'll have to comply with the local regulations. Furthermore, most VPNs have local presence in the EU as well. NordVPN is incorporated in Panama, but also has an entity in The Netherlands.
They banned porn with choking in it. They banned toy advertising in the evening. They tried to ban client side encryption for iCloud. Make no mistake they will go for vpns too.
Funnily enough. They just need to claim it's "protecting the children" and people fall for it.
The funniest part is that high profile criminal cases go unpunished very visibly. Even if they have minors in their context, because the elite figures in question must be protected from the enforcement of rules.
Banning porn depicting choking "to protect women from violence" is so funny. You could not ask for a better example of moral panic from people that didn't do their research. Choking is a strongly women preferred kink.
I mean, it's a sovereign state. The government can legislate for the sky to be purple if it wants to (though obviously that won't affect actual reality).
I don't care for the framing: users evading the law.
First, this is a law limiting the actions of service providers not users.
But by using a VPN, I'm making my own safety choices. I wish there was an easier opt-out (like an ISP account-level flag), but it I want to present to service providers as (eg) Swedish, so what? I'm an adult, the "safety" laws do nothing for my safety.
The truth is service providers and ISPs have done next to nothing to stop children signing up for (eg) Snapchat, despite a plethora of laws. Of course the parents are to blame, but fixing shitty parenting is hard.
I went on a weekend vacation with three guys. I was asked what I thought a good VPN was. They all have VPNs on their phones apparently. Here I am thinking they are technologically adept, maybe a little bit security conscious. Or maybe misled by advertisements.
It wasn't until after I got home I realized it was because of adult content.
They listen to podcasts and watch youtube. They know that a good VPN will stop their internet banking details being stolen, protect their family in their home and add 2-4 inches to their manhood.
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Until like a week ago there was no age checking system for porn and no reason to use a VPN really. Although your friends could have been into some very strange stuff.
The "VPN use surges in UK" articles are bought and paid for by the VPN industry.
I don't believe it is possible to convince me that VPN's as sold and marketed are anything but a massive scam. Yes, that includes the company that you say is honest.
What do you mean by "scam"? That you pay and that they don't work at all? That they don't bypass the geo restrictions? Because they do.
Perhaps you mean that they are bad value(ripoff vs scam)? Then sure, probably they are. But you're basically paying to not get flagged by cloudfare. Back in the day, you bought a cheap server from OVH or some other lowcost provider, stuck openvpn on it (nowdays wireguard) and you were golden. But now that Cloudfare middle-mans half the internet, it doesn't really work anymore.
You pay the VPN providers for "clean"(ish) IPs so you don't get stuck behind Cloudfare captcha-loops.
I use Veepn, free version. It works well and costs nothing. I doubt they are extra honest but I fail to see how they are scamming me. Their monetization seems to consist of nagging me to switch to the paid version approx weekly.
Doesn't seem to be paywalled here. It is behind a consent box with multiple “legitimate interest” lies (or “we see your preferences not to be commercially stalked, but fuck you and you poxy preference we want to anyway”), which archive.today works around nicely: https://archive.is/4QlDl
As is the next step: a slow but steady expansion of what's considered "unsafe" or "harmful" used to justify ever-increasing restrictions and censorship.
As a student of 1930s and 1940s history, I can say for sure that the most terrifying aspect of what took place wasn't the "Gestapo" and all the open terror, it was the propaganda that fooled so many people and the censorship that kept the lies alive. Humanity still has not fully come to terms with the layers upon layers of lies that took place before and during WWII.
I've posted this before: We shouldn't need Age Verification checks for adults in the first place.
Create a better, standardized, open-source parental control tool that is installed by default on all types of device that can connect to the web.
The internet aspect of the parental control should be a "Per Whitelist" system rather than Blacklisting. The parents should be the ones to decide which domains are Whitelisted for their kids, and government bodies could contribute with curated lists to help establish a base.
Yes, there would be some gray area sites like search engine image search, or social media sites like Twitter that can allow you to stumble into pornography, and that is why these devices that have the software turned ON, should send a token through the browser saying "Parental Control". It would be easier for websites to implement a blanket block of certain aspects of their site than expect them to implement whole ID checks systems and security to make sure that no leaks occur (look at the TEA app) like the UK is expecting everyone to do.
Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography. I was once a teenager, every adult was, and we know that it's a natural thing to masturbate which includes the consumption of pornography for most in some way. Repressing their desires, their sexuality, and making this private aspect of their life difficult isn't the way. Yes, yes, there is nuance to it, (very hardcore/addiction/etc) but it should be up to the parents to decide with given tools if they trust their kid to consume such a thing.
As for the tool itself. Of course we have parental tools, but they can be pretty garbage, their all different, they're out of the way, and I understand that many people simply don't know how to operate them. That's why I believe that creating a standardized open-source project that multiple governments can directly contribute to and advertise for parents is the way, because at the end of the day, it should be up to the parents to decide these things, and for the government to facility that choice.
Obviously, besides the internet aspect, the tool should have all the bells and whistles that you'd expect from one, but that's not the topic.
And yes, some children would find a way, just like they're doing now for the currently implemented ID checks. It's not lost of me that VPNs with free plans suddenly exploded in 4 digits % worth of downloads. A lot of those are tiny people who are smart enough. Or using an app like a game to trick Facial Recognition software.
Also, I'd be remiss to not point out a very obvious fact. This, and I'm not just referring to the UK, isn't about children, it's not about terrorism, it's not about public safety. It's about control, it's about tracking, it's about documenting, it's about power over the masses. I know some people will hand wave this away, but we have been seeing a very obvious, very fast, rise of authoritarianism since COVID and later the war in Ukraine. It's not a new trend, but it is one that got accelerated at those stages and has been progressively getting worse world wide.
> Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography.
I'm against: pornography, as found in search results, is generally quite bad. Sexism, racial stereotyping, misrepresentations of queer issues: and that's just the titles. Page 3 has nothing on porn sites.
Maybe I'm judging a book by its SEO spammers here, but I've not read anything that'd disabuse me of this notion: indeed, people raise concerns about unreasonable body image expectations, normalising extreme sex acts like choking without normalising enthusiastic consent practices, the sites allowing CSAM and "revenge porn" that they've already taken down to be re-uploaded…
That said, I routinely come across nudes / sexualised imagery on the Fediverse, and that's… not an issue? Sometimes I find it a bit squicky (which teaches me not to play lift-the-flap with clearly-marked content warnings – I don't know what I expected), but the only times I've seen something viscerally offensive has been people re-posting from porn aggregation sites. (I've blocked three or four accounts for that, and I don't see it any more.)
If porn sites had the kind of stuff that queer / disabled techies post on main on niche social media sites, then I'd be absolutely fine with teenagers accessing porn. As you say, a safe environment for adolescents to explore their sexuality is unequivocably a good thing. I just don't think commercial porn sites provide that.
This is what concerns me the most about the Online Safety Act. It's shutting down the aforementioned queer / disabled techies on their social media sites, and surely plenty of other pro-social sex communities I don't even know about, but it's not going to do a thing about the large aggregators that are the real problem. It in fact makes the whole problem worse.
There is certainly good and bad porn - in terms of quality, messaging, and ethics of production. The most successful and widespread porn falls on the bad side of all of these - partly because the industry is just historically broken, partly because good porn is more expensive to produce, but subject to all the same restrictions and costs as bad porn.
Your post reads like a parody of itself. If you're being genuine, I encourage you to step out of your attachment to your own views and meditate on what you said here, and what it looks like to an outside observer who does not share your views.
“Queer/Disabled techies post porn that I think is good for kids, which is great because otherwise children would have to just use PornHub” is a GREAT ideology to viscerally radicalize the majority of people against you AND the people you’re speaking about.
I see many are focusing on the aspect of VPN itself and not enough as to why this is occurring in UK in particular and we should expect it in countries like Canada, and other EU countries as well in the near future.
The fact of the matter is conservative movements are surging not only in UK, EU, US but in Asia as well (ex. Recent surprise seat gains by moderate right parties).
The reason there is a common reaction across borders is the decoupling from globalism which pushed the overton window so far left that its brought a yo-yo effect to the right.
Globalism isn't a conspiracy theory its real established and demonstrable political movement to dilute all cultures by attacking their national identity, heritage through mass immigration which ultimately leads to a low trust social dynamic via crime (proven by statistics) or incompatibility (belligerence against their host counry and refusal to integrate and pushing imported foreign culture and values).
It's no wonder that such reckless push to gaslight its own ethnic/religious incumbents have swung polls in the opposite direction, and in a desperate attempt to hold on to the power that globalism has given to those that preach it, ironically turn to fascist tactics such as censorship, criminalization of speech and increased surveillance that only emboldens more overton window shift to the right.
You kept calling people "far right" yesterday for slightest disagreements to progressive policies in order to censor and intimidate them and today you have huge number of people who no longer care for that label as they find safety in size and number.
At this rate, given the way things are going in UK and EU and many other countries, its going to manifest in extremely far right wing policies being normalized and coming to power as majority of the population becomes "far right" and the new normal center, and those that called themselves "liberal progressive left" will find themselves outside the Overton window.
We've probably seen these ebbs and flows in politics countless times throughout human history and I understand better as to why things like Bolsheviks, Nazis, Communists came to rise.
The demand to bypass political censorship and surveillance increasing in the West, the so called bastion of democracy and freedom, will backfire into wide scale civil unrest. We've already seen a preview of it in Spain recently, where a group of Moroccan migrant gangs have attacked locals and in turn locals fought back and burned down a large mosque.
I've been to UK, France and Ireland recently and there is deep deep resentment from the locals towards the Muslim and North African population, and it reminded me of my childhood growing up in Lebanon, witnessing the arrival of Muslim refugees, neighborhood demographics changing, ppl being jailed and labeled racist for complaining, then came civil war between the new majority group and the incumbents, political concession by virtue signaling equity and harmony which lead to even more corruption within those demographics that did not respect agreements and its ultimate demise today.
I cannot see a future without the same events unfolding in Lebanon playing out in UK. All it takes is one major event (for us in Lebanon, it was Muslim militant group attacking a church) to ignite the flame, and as you saw Torres, Spain it finally took an elderly Spain man being victim of attack by 3rd gen Moroccan youth to explode into violence.
Remigration unfortunately is the only way that can peacefully diffuse smoe of the tensions and to avoid the same fate as Lebanon but I can see this will be a difficult path especially innocent individuals of that demographic caught in the middle during this rapid Overton Window shift accelerated by an increasingly sophisticated users and dystopian surveillance apparatus....
I really think the whole human race's ability to exchange information freely is bigger than "porn addiction" bs. We do this over and over and it always ends the same stupid way--millions upon millions of deaths that were avoidable.
The application of that law has nothing to do with online safety. Soviet-style politics are very good at taking a law ("we need to protect children from suicide websites") to turn it into something completely different ("... so we need to censor footage of protesters outside of the Britannia hotel").
That is an incredibly neive view which has been proven wrong many times over.
Exposure to pornography early on in life dramatically increases the chance that person will be affected by things like sexual addiction, or gravitate towards extreme views in the same vein like incels.
Testosterone is a very powerful drug, and young brains need protecting from explicit content if we want to bring up mentally healthy males in our societies.
I must be honest with you, as far as I am pro net-neutrality, I can observe people using internet irresponsibly. As the internet stood up to allow sharing of science publications, now mostly shared is the pornographic type of content. When Tim Berners-Lee was thinking about people sending themselves a book he probably (we still may ask him) haven't predicted people sending boob/dick pics. As the content technical level lowers, amount of people sharing their stupidity increases. Meanwhile other irresponsible people give phones to their children (I am amongst them) hoping the children won't go into the bad places and trusting in freedom.
Currently my kids got already out of my hand, and I really wonder how could I filter the content that goes to them. Internet became something else, so maybe I won't install a VPN to their phones and they won't be able to see the most horrible things anymore.
> now mostly shared is the pornographic type of content
What is your source? I believe you are incredibly biased. Netflix is one of the biggest user of bandwidth worldwide, and if we're talking about the percentage of "pornographic" IP packets, I think it's even less than the former.
> and I really wonder how could I filter the content that goes to them
Parental control on device and DNS-level blocker (think AdGuard, PiHole, ...). Hosts file could also work as long as they're not admin on their PC. If they're skilled enough to circumvent all of that, then I think your kids will be fine.
I must admit the amount of pornography in different forms is now apparently everywhere on social media. Including social media I thought was "safe":
I see videos that I think are overtly sexual in nature on YouTube, even if the video is something supposedly "innocent". If you click through to their profiles there is an inevitable link to 18+ content most of the time. I am subscribed to only tech/film/gaming channels on youtube and this content is now always put into my feed. I probably have cursed myself by checking these people's profiles after the fact.
You are right though that by bandwidth, streaming services including Netflix make up the majority of data over the Internet and it is not pornographic/dangerous for children at all.
You obviously have no experience with trying to block a modern teenager from the web. That will stop them for seconds, maybe minutes.
Im not for this bill at all, but I agree with what the government are saying about parents being unable to protect their children because the children know more about the systems than the parents do.
>When Tim Berners-Lee was thinking about people sending themselves a book he probably (we still may ask him) haven't predicted people sending boob/dick pics.
You are asking tech to solve people problems. That is a recipe for disaster.
We require people to verify their age in person to access pornography, it doesn't seem like that far a stretch to require it online. You can't even by a ticket to an R-rated movie without age verification. That seems reasonable to me. I see I'm in the minority here. I understand the slippery slope argument but if we succumb to that then nothing could be done anywhere ever. I understand this could be abused, but it's up to us to make sure it isn't. I think that's why people don't like it, it requires diligence and effort to keep things sane. Much easier to just allow children to view content they absolutely shouldn't then be politically active and make sure our laws are sensible and our representatives are held accountable.
I understand this could be abused, but it's up to us to make sure it isn't
Exactly, by protesting and fighting laws like this.
What exactly do you want people to "make sure of" with the law in place? If someone is concerned about this law, what specific action should they be taking in the name of "diligence"?
Having a law saying children shouldn't view pornography isn't abuse. It's common sense. Just like saying a 12 year old can't legally buy weed. Is that a slippery slope? Should 12 year olds be able to buy weed? If not, why is that not a slippery slope and this is?
What needs to be kept in check is the scope. Let's say they try to age restrict sites that are subversive, but not obscene. That's what I'm talking about.
It's up to the people who WANT age verification to ensure that it can't be abused rather than up to US to prevent it from being abused after the fact.
Invoking the "slippery slope" fallacy when the country with the greatest military in the world is abusing public records to grab people off the street and out of court rooms is an interesting choice.
1. Verify the ID without storing it in your system. Someone just looks at it.
2. Visually confirm that the photo on the ID matches the person entering the building.
Neither of these apply online.
Has everyone forgotten how kids operate? They’re not clueless. They’re going to realize that they don’t need to submit their ID. They just need to submit someone’s ID.
At first they’ll just use fake ID generators and submit those photos.
If that loophole gets closed somehow, a market will appear for buying ID verified accounts for trivial prices. People will create ID verified accounts and sell them cheap for side money. The only way around this is to start storing ID information for every account to make sure IDs aren’t used multiple times.
It’s one giant slippery slope of consequences for the adults forced to submit IDs, while the people who want to work around it do so trivially.
Right. Just like kids would hang out outside a 7-11 and ask someone older to buy them a Playboy. Or pay a homeless person to buy them beer. Should we remove the age limit on alcohol purchases because kids aren't clueless? That's not a rhetorical question. Should we remove all laws that can be abused? Your argument falls apart very quickly.
These laws aren't just about porn sites though. They affect sites like Wikipedia. [1]
You don't need to verify your age to enter a bookstore or a library.
And if you really want to control who can access porn then the only way to do that is with a whitelist filter on the device being used.
These laws are onerous without being effective.
I do think a standardized requirement for commercial websites to have content rating meta tags (like the existing content=adult and content=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA) would be a good thing though, just to make more lenient filtering easier.
Read the actual guidance. They in no way require "send pictures of your official identity documents to every site".
There are a bunch of ways (some advisable, some not) where an existing entity that knows you are an adult can extend just that -- we know they are an adult.
Credit card providers know all their customers are adults, for example -- because you have to be an adult to enter into a credit agreement. And credit cards are insured.
Mobile phone companies in the UK block adult content by default and have done for some time; you have to unblock it by telling them you are an adult. But once you've done that, adult content can be verified quite trivially with an SMS.
And there are other methods still. For example a site with longstanding members is allowed to estimate the age of members based on how long they have used the same email address!
It's not a porn filter. It's a set of rules for companies to follow to identify adult users.
Is it the best law? No. But it's not the Texas law, that's for sure, and that law has survived a US Supreme Court challenge.
Maybe by the authorities, furthering policies already in place to deal with people who don't toe a certain line of thought.
Probably by people outside the law, who now have a fantastic system to relentlessly attack. A place to source identity information that can be used for almost any part of a criminal enterprise, from buying credit cards to selling new names to carry.
And when security of government systems fail, in a way where damage is irreversible like this case, it is... Rare... To see fair outcomes.
I know all the other comments are massively disagreeing, but I'm relieved to find I'm not completely alone.
It's not even that I think this is a good idea, but it does seem a fairly standard extension of existing laws. Potentially I'm missing something? Everyone else seems to be enraged by this.
I think the biggest difference compared to in-person ID checks is that I've never had to take a picture of my ID or face for an in-person check. Some bouncer or other person takes a quick look at my face and my ID, and that's the end of it. I don't have to wonder if there's a picture floating around forever of my face and ID, because none got taken. For such physical interactions, I'm thus less worried that all that information is getting stored in some database that's inevitably going up be leaked.
Honestly, if the way this worked was that you could head over to the Pornhub office and get unlocked access from the bouncer at the door, that would probably be preferable.
Why don't we just require kids to price they're an adult before accessing the Internet then? The issue with these laws isn't the goal, but the implementation is fatally flawed. Do you think websites like Worldstar are going to implement age verification? Of course not, no foreign site will. Then the next step for a law like this must be censuring all of those sites across the country.
Who defines what should be censored? The law certainly doesn't; it's purposefully vague to give the most latitude possible to the implementers. There's already been cases with the new UK law where peaceful arrests were censored by the law due to "violence."
VPNs exist, proxy websites are easy to setup, and frankly parents need to take some ownership.
Two alternative laws that'd have been much better: a) Require ISPs to provide a child friendly Internet gateway that would blacklist large weather if the Internet without a login. And b) legally require websites to accurately describe the content on their page and it's age appropriateness in headers sent back to the user, so the ISP or end device can decide whether to age gate a website.
These are much better solutions, the burden on websites isn't so onerous (many small sites have already had to shutdown due to the burden of the UK law). Implementation is distributed, preventing a single state actor from having full control of a censorship machine. Parents are empowered to decide what content is okay for their children. And you don't have to upload your fucking ID to use the Internet.
People who support this crap need to stop believing politicians every time they say "think of the children!"
> and frankly parents need to take some ownership.
This. None of this is the state's job, it's 100% on the parents to educate themselves, their children, and be the responsible party for determining and controlling what their kids can or can't do with technology and the internet.
If the state feels like they need to do something, they would be better served providing education and tools to parents. Hell, for the really tech illiterate the state could just offer a managed MDM service that they could enroll their kids devices into if they really can't figure out parental controls themselves.
https://archive.is/GWdx5
The VPN trick potentially won’t last long. We’ve seen it go stale already in the world of intellectual property rights. For at least the last ten years Netflix et al have been well aware of which AS numbers / IP netblocks correspond to people sat at home in front of the TV, and which correspond to servers in a rack somewhere (including those hosting VPN endpoints.)
One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.
The more troubling thing about these laws is enforcement. The threat of fines only works against websites that map to a business entity. For anything else there will surely see a ramp up in the size of The Great British Firewall Ruleset, edited by the courts, and distributed to the Big N (5?) ISPs.
What will become of the smaller ISPs that refuse to block illegal sites?
This is just a cat a mouse game. VPN services will start to offer residential endpoints when enough websites start blocking them enough to damage the value proposition. There is no way on the current internet to verify an ip address means anything at all other than it's an ip address.
There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale with sufficient bandwidth for anything other than simple browsing of text websites. As shown by the very effective Netflix strategy of blocking VPN addresses, it’s been very hard to slip through for a good four or five years now.
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This cat and mouse game applies to OP's first category of sites that want to comply for fear of the British government, but not the second category of sites that actively don't want to comply. Let's refer to the second category as deliberately non-compliant.
The UK instructs ISPs to block access to deliberately non-compliant sites, however users want to make connections to the sites and those sites want to receive connections to those users. VPNs will be effective in allowing access to non-compliant sites as long as ISPs can't identify the VPN traffic.
Of course, the British ISPs can initiate the tactics used by China to identify and block illegal traffic. However there are limits to this. Unlike Chinese users, British internet users regularly make connections to international servers so various bridging techniques are possible. Like VPNs, proxies or even Remote Desktop.
> One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.
The UK does not have jurisdictional power over anything outside their country - they can not a foreign site to do age verification of foreign residents.
Now, the UK can say that they need to check for all UK residents, regardless of them using VPNs. But if there are no practical way to do this, I think the UK will have diplomatic issues enforcing anything to non UK companies breaking that laws - as they would need, eg. Germany, to help them enforcing the law on certain providers.
Other counties and regions have or will have similar laws. I can definitely see the EU, UK and US collaborating on something like this.
However, if I was running a foreign site not subject to UK law or other privacy law, with UK visitors, and I was a ruthless businessperson, I'd definitely implement this verification thing in order to collect and store a photo of every visitor.
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This isn't about illegal sites?
I don't think many people object to blacklisting known sources of child pornography etc.
The fact is you now have to verify your identity (name and photo id) in the UK to access an adult subreddit.
Nobody has ever objected to blocking access to those sites. Most people think the justice system in any developed country is much too lax on people that operate those sites and create its content.
This is a red herring for authoritarian tyrants in the UK to get more control over their population, which is all they're ever looking for.
What kind of photo ID does the UK have? I didn't think there was any kind of national ID if you didn't drive?
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You need to be able to shut down websites and apps which do not implement age verification.
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Doesn't make any sense, it's in Netflix's interest to prevent this, but it's the opposite for porn sites.
Porn sites don't have any interest in keeping this law either. Nobody with a functioning brain thinks you should have to upload your government ID to a website to browse content, no matter what that content is.
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Only a little bit of legislation would be needed to change incentives around though
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I don't know. A lot of countries in the Middle East block all sorts of stuff and yet VPN usage is ubiquitous, but the governments appear to turn a blind eye. Like "we've done our bit and made the law." So it remains to be seen how far they'll go with this.
A lot of countries in the Middle East throw gay people off the roofs of buildings as punishment, let's assume for the sake of argument that anything we do that moves us closer to the Middle East is the wrong thing to do.
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It's probably more a matter of, "let everyone engage in illegal activities, which we can then use to turn the screws on them if they ever need to."
This is a ubiquitous tactic at the highest level of law enforcement.
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>For at least the last ten years Netflix et al have been well aware of which AS numbers / IP netblocks correspond to people sat at home in front of the TV, and which correspond to servers in a rack somewhere (including those hosting VPN endpoints.)
If the vpn endpoint is in Rome or New York City, how will the UK government force that non-British vpn service and that non-British porn site to verify the age of anyone using it?
It's easy enough to get a list of IP addresses from those vpn services and just block them if you're Netflix, but to force compliance on anyone traversing the tunnel is another thing entirely. The UK government would have an easier time banning vpns outright.
International treaties.
These can be wildly effective at such matters. I'm sure most countries can come to some understanding with the UK on the matter; be that foreign aid, trade concessions, assistance with their own law enforcement, or perhaps acknowledgement/support on the international stage.
There’s also P2P VPN services which pretty much make it impossible to block
"All VPN services must also perform age verification." Done.
All this will do is put UK-based VPN businesses, if that's not already an oxymoron, out of business.
The UK can't tell a company in Cyprus or Switzerland to do anything unless they're ready to tell the SAS to put their boots on.
Does IPV6 change this dynamic at all?
It's conceivable that a VPN provider could change the V6 IP on their server every hour for the rest of time and still get unique addresses.
If the VPN server only has an IPV6 address and no V4 address, can they connect to the target website?
IP addresses are routed in aggregate groups using BGP. The groups are called Autonomous Systems and are handed out to ISPs. Your home ISP has a bunch. The ISP that hosts your virtual server has some too. You can see the one you’re connecting from right now with tools like https://bgp.tools and https://bgp.he.net.
The number of these systems scales in a reasonably tractable way — on the order of the number of ISPs and physical Internet infrastructure around which traffic needs to be routed.
As well as making aggregate routing possible you can use the ISP’s registration details see what location (or legal jurisdiction) a whole chunk of address space has. Hopping around IP addresses will give you unique ones every five minutes but they’ll all still be inside 2001:123::/32 from AS1234 aka Apathetic Onion’s Finest Habidashery and Internet Connections LLC, Delaware, USA.
> but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP
It's up to service provider to implement such involved checks. Not sure about e.g. Netflix allocating resources to implementing this, clearly resulting in customer loss.
I expect service providers to cut corners to both comply with local laws and not frighten customers away.
I don't think the incentive structure is there for porn sites to start blocking VPNs the way Netflix does. And legislation requiring them to would be pretty toothless since the only mechanism they rely on to enforce the rules is making local ISPs block the offending sites.
Maybe time to start a second, parallel version of the internet. Something with mesh networks.
https://dn42.network/ - don't actually use dn42 since many participants won't be fans of your high-traffic idea, but make a new network with a similar design. (You may get some of the same people to participate in both networks)
Netflix in fact works better on a VPN for me . Maybe they made it that way.
is TOR an answer to this ?
>is TOR an answer to this ?
I've found Tor is mostly useful for reading, not participating. Exit nodes get blocked from registering on most sites. One workaround is to register at a café or library then use the account over Tor, but sometimes even if you're being civil (see my comment history for a a pretty good picture of the style of discussions I have anonymously) sometimes you'll wake up to find the account nuked.
Tor exit nodes are the _first_ thing they ban! If your origin is not from within one of the top residential ISPs then you can expect to be selected for enhanced screening.
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I heard on here I think (but can't confirm) that renting a cheap server in a data centre and sticking your own tailscale on it is the best way to go.
It is incredibly easy to tell if someone is using TOR. It would be banned before VPNs
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Only if you want your traffic to flow through NSA-backed honeypots and get caught up in a dragnet.
I mean, it's probably the case that traditional VPNs are also dragnets to some degree, but TOR is a confirmed NSA dragnet.
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I think you may have misunderstood what "socialists" means (or accidentally written it instead of a different word which wouldn't be so out of place in that sentence?).
For rules introduced by Conservatives?
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Huh?
It is only a matter of time before they attempt to regulate VPN usage. Here is an article written by a British MP hinting at that:
https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/columnists/onli...
It definitely seems like she’s conflating two issues: access to pornography and child grooming. I don’t see why she thinks regulating VPNs would reduce the latter.
Everyone always does this. Then they conflate mention of LGBT topics with porn so they can equate it with "grooming". Not helped by the UK's anti-trans panic of the last few years (self-ID was such a mainstream idea that it was in the 2018 Tory manifesto)
It does not. As I have said before, pedophilia is rampant on Roblox and Discord. Go monitor those platforms, and hold these platforms responsible, not VPNs. Regulating VPNs will not reduce child grooming, and I am sure they are not stupid enough to actually think it does.
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She doesnt, she just wants to put in Putin-like levels of control and surveillance for the same reasons Putin does.
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In the Project 2025 documents, the core things that they discuss regarding porn bans are "gender ideology" and "sexualizing children." Banning access to information with lgbt themes is not some incidental part of this but is a core goal of the effort, at least in the US.
I always keep hoping one of these authoritarian measures will kick off a resurgence of a truly uncensorable platform like Freenet or I2P - the big reason they're currently so unusable is mostly lack of participation.
same. as much as i ironically support social media age gating i do hope it creates a new internet frontier for the educated and technologically inclined
> Sarah Champion is Labour MP for Rotherham.
Seriously? You can't make this up: she represents the town that did nothing about a massive (and completely offline) child grooming and molestation network for years and she has the gall to say, "think of the children on the Internet"?
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is a classic YooKay 2025 moment
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The safety rules are also being used to block content about protests in the UK. How convenient for them.
https://freespeechunion.org/protest-footage-blocked-as-onlin...
> “West Yorkshire Police denied any involvement in blocking the footage. X declined to comment, but its AI chatbot, Grok, indicated the clip had been restricted under the Online Safety Act due to violent content.”
I’m not involved with X or with its chatbot. Is its chatbot ordinarily an authoritative source for facts about assumptions like this one, that the law “was used to take down” politically sensitive video?
It’s a bad look either way, but I feel like there are important differences between the law leading to overly conservative automated filtering, vs political actors using it deliberately in specific cases. Bad symptom either way, but different medicines, right?
> that the law “was used to take down” politically sensitive video?
You've misquoted the chatbot, which is a new one.
The video wasn't "taken down" and Grok never said that. It was blocked for some users in the UK due to the new authoritarian age verification laws which everyone should be concerned about if access to newsworthy content requires "papers please".
Of course LLMs are a rubbish source for facts, one should always verify. Not possible in this case so I would assume it just made it up
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The fact X flags protest videos as adult content is not entirely the fault of the UK government.
A lot of people are going to be putting their ID details into all sorts of websites and giving this to all sorts of third parties because of this law. Its going to cause a huge increase in ID related theft and fraud in the coming years and its not even going to achieve its stated goal. Worse is its blocking sites it really shouldn't, wikipedia is fighting this in court at the moment because they want to censor it!
This is terrible legislation, there is a petition that has reached 350k already to repeal it. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903
I've tried accessing one of the most famous porn sites, and I was asked to verify my age by giving either credit card details or bank details to a 3rd party company registered in Cyprus. Lol.
I'm temporarily living and working in UK, and I'm amazed how once big empire turns to a third-world country so easily.
This. Even sites who don't want to store IDs because they are small or it's against their ethos have to do it or pack their bags
There is definitely some questionable VPN providers.
There is a petition to repeal the Online Safety Act[0].
The initial government response can be read as “lol, no”.
[0] https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903
Whether age verification is a justified idea or not, it feels awfully like the UK is createing a new generation of single-issue voters here.
Even wilder, they're lowering voting age to 16 [0]. So there would be a demographic group who can vote but cannot watch porn...?
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c628ep4j5kno
Or watch certain films because they can’t be trusted to contextualise them correctly. It’s pretty absurd.
Well, you cannot drink alcohol if you are less than 21 in the USA, but you can vote.
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I'm not sure I've ever seen a petition on that website with a positive outcome.
Online petitions aren't worth the paper they're written on.
If people want change, they'll need to find alternative avenues. (Like civil disobedience.)
Or write to your MP. They care slightly more about that.
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> The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.
Government responded
"I would like to thank all those who signed the petition."
Who "I" ?
i dont understand after (15?) years of petitions with zero results, how anyone is stupid enough to keep thinking they should be mentioned
Our ability to filter and modify the content of the web constantly improves, and itchy trigger fingers might hover over many nation's "Great Walls", ready at the next galvanizing event to overnight change our relationship with this interchange we exist upon.
My current guess is that if things really went to hell with censorship and disjointedness, that we'd re-establish an ancient pattern - magazines. I recall as a child, my uncle would leave his "Big Blue Disks" around for perusing, and it was a magazine in the form of floppy disks, of various media - essays, games, primitive computer music.
The curation of these always struck me as a great favor. Perhaps not compatible with the current attention span, such a provision, in the absence of access, would, I believe, quickly become a surrogate for what we lost.
Of course, these magazines are editorialized, and so we're at the mercy of the editor's perspectives to discern the truth. I appreciate our current access to information, even in its weakening form.
But I suppose I'd prefer if we could not tinker more with censorship. I think I may be looking for a digital magazine in the next decade, or whatever else we can invent to replace our losses.
I'm under the assumption that the global, unfilitered Internet is on an irreversible course to lockdown and won't exist at all in its current form in 10 years or less. It's sad, and defeatist, but the forces on the lockdown side are too strong and will get what they want eventually, so I can either hit my head against a brick wall or do something productive for myself.
I've decided to deal with it by reevaluating the role of tech and Internet in my life. I certainly don't care about improvements to my residental Internet speed any more, or what the next wireless tech after 5G will be, or what protocols the IETF is working on, or net neutrality, because none of it matters to me any more. It's exciting what's going on with AI but it's all going to behemoths who will be able to tell the rest of us what we can and can't do with it. So... I don't care anymore. I can see myself honestly just not having a wired home Internet connection anymore in a few years and I would get rid of my cell phone if it wasn't necessary for day-to-day life. I don't need symmetric 1gbps fiber to stream the occasional show, text, and do normal-life things on apps.
But when you brought up magazines - it reminded me of that brief period of time of the late 80's/early 90's during the "multimedia" and "interactive" crazes; when BBSes were a thing--there were a lot of interesting CD-ROMs on diverse subjects.
I'm glad optical media hasn't completely died yet. Most new PCs don't come with one installed, but USB ones cheap and easy to find. PCs have come a long way since the early 90's. Fun fact, if your Android phone supports USB OTG I do believe a USB optical drive will totally work with it.
Well giving up is certainly an approach
It is inevitable that the "World" in World-Wide-Web will disappear and each major economy will have its own local "government approved" version of the internet with interconnects between the other local internets of the world to access only curated content from abroad.
This genie is not going back in the bottle unless future generations will get fed up with all the safetyism propaganda at the core of internet censorship and unanimously vote against this.
I'm glad I was young enough to see and experience the uncensored and unrestricted version of the internet. God speed for the future generation being subject to this nonsense.
I really don't understand why it wasn't just a requirement for Apple and Google to include a client side filter. Parent sets up the phone and it's enabled by default. Much simpler option for everyone involved.
It's because this law isn't about protecting children, but about control of the Internet. They want online activity tied to real identity as a power grab.
Yea, it's all about a permanent Digital ID and the end of any independent forums. It's the first essential steps before you get to great firewalls and social credit scores.
Remember, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas already have similar laws in place in the US, so even a nation with better speech and gun laws is still not immune from the slow descent into technocracy.
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I've been warning people in the USA about this for well over a decade. Laws like the states passing porn laws are the foot in the door to expand it to -any- internet activity. Freedom is had to take in a coupe, it's a a lot easier to nip at it around the edges until the structure cracks. Strange how people here in the states value the 2nd amendment so much (including me, I'm a proud gun owner) but they will ignore the 1st, 3rd, 4th .... This is particularly true here in Texas.
>It's because this law isn't about protecting children, but about control of the Internet.
Also in an overpopulated world it's not a given that children should be protected if it comes at the expense of basic freedoms. We need to move away from this narrative that "think of the children" is a persuasive argument. Little Timmy needs to avoid danger or the ghost of Darwin will work his magic.
Probably based on long term concerns that escalating inequality will lead to widespread unrest and violence. Which it will, if unaddressed.
Interesting that decades of government leaves half the country to rot, and their solution is to try to stop that half from rioting about it, rather than - perhaps - making society fairer?
Because the people who wrote this bill don't care about children. They care about giving the government the power to regulate everything.
Adding a browser header field would be sufficient, could be easily integrated into the OS and browser, and would let developers handle this issue in a few hours worth of effort.
ID verification is such an invasive measure and prone to the exact same failures as the simplest solutions.
While I'd agree, the issue with that solution is that validating against government issued identity solutions aren't always free. I don't know if this is the case with the UK digital ID, but the Danish version certainly isn't free to query. The Danish one has, to my knowledge, a solution that would allow you to do an age for a person, without getting any other information, so yes, the browser could do that, but there cryptographic bits ensure that now body messed with the header data is still missing. And again, who's suppose to pay for the API calls if the browser does it, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft... Ladybird?
I like this solution, integrated with whatever existing parental controls are in the OS.
That would empower parents to keep their kids from accidentally or casually accessing porn. Of course, an intelligent and determined teenager will probably find a way around it, which is also good; then they've learned a bit about computers.
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Because reinforcing a natural monopoly is bad? The law is specifically written to allow a range of different business models etc.
Also, because desktops/different browsers are a thing?
> Also, because desktops/different browsers are a thing?
I mean, i'd think primarily this. They may hold a significant marketshare, but they dont hold all of it.
> it wasn't just a requirement for Apple and Google to include a client side filter
I am old enough to remember when Apple proposed client side filtering and everyone absolutely lost their shit.
That was client side content scanning, unless there’s another incident you’re referring to.
Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society that's complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government. Like maybe Adolescence or basically any mention of the NHS. The crimes they cite like child grooming or terrorism/hate being incited sound pretty terrible too, but I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action - is the issue bigger there, or are they just more aware of and willing to act on it.
The UK is becoming increasingly authoritarian in ways that feel increasingly antagonistic to the majority of the population, regardless of political party. Taxes are rising (with tax take falling), crimes are going unchecked, just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up, but as GDP per capita continues to stall and even fall, the pressure it puts on services is a factor for many. And we're seeing those with a few quid to rub together leave, but as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income.
On the NHS, I tried for years to push for improvements to switch to digital cancer screening invitations after they missed my mother (offering to build the software for free), which is now happening, but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here. My sister who works in NHS DEI hasn't spoken to me since publishing a book on it.
Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it. Anecdotally, many of my friends have already left, some of the older generation want to leave but feel tied in. My flight out is in 6 weeks. Good riddance, no doubt.
> Taxes are rising (with tax take falling)
> just mentioning increased immigration
One of these seems like the solution to the other.
> as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income
Having UK work experience and having talked to thousands of british folks over a decade, I find this hard to believe.
I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
The UK has always been an empire in decline, but the wheels didn't come off until everyone became glued to feeds. It's Garbage In, Garbage Out. If your view of reality is driven by stuff that you see online, it's a distorted lens which then leads to distorted decision making that then leads to authoritarian creep.
Just my 2¢.
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> but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here
I don't know anyone that doesn't complain about the state of the NHS. The only time I've heard anyone defending it would be when compared to countries without national healthcare (e.g. America).
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I moved to the UK with my family just before the Brexit vote and left last year. I love the country, but the changes I saw over that time period were so stark -- and, similarly, so many of the friends I made in that time had already left the country.
That I could have multiple negative NHS experiences relating to missed cancer diagnoses of friends in that relatively short span of time is suggestive of a real problem. The institution seemed to have less of an issue with elder care (in the US, the phantom menace posed by Obamacare or any governmental involvement in healthcare was meant to be "death panels" deciding the fate of grandparents) than with avoiding at all costs detecting potential long-term problems in the young. It's a 'rational' fear in the sense, as you note, that such cases put tremendous pressure on services, but there's no world where the best health outcome is refusing to screen your working age population.
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> suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here
That's really not my experience. In fact, almost everyone is surprised when I suggest that despite its many problems, the NHS does better for the people than most modern countries' health systems.
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> The UK is becoming increasingly authoritarian in ways that feel increasingly antagonistic to the majority of the population, regardless of political party. Taxes are rising (with tax take falling), crimes are going unchecked, just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up, but as GDP per capita continues to stall and even fall, the pressure it puts on services is a factor for many. And we're seeing those with a few quid to rub together leave, but as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income.
Have they though about joining some sort of economic union, maybe one with like minded countries that share the same continent?
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This mirrors my experience of the UK. A dysfunctional country whose wheels were slowly falling off and now not so slowly. I’m generally pro devolution but in the UKs case their political class is so god awful that giving them more power didn’t seem to be a good idea.
I left for greener pastures a long time ago and subsequently all of my friends and anyone I knew of any talent has also left, it feels weird visiting a place I once called home and not being able to see friends.
There is an old irish song called "The man of the daily mail", I think they could use your views to update the song for our times.
> Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it.
This is the issue.
I left around the time of Brexit so I have no useful opinion on the recent financial/admin state of the UK, though it seems from afar that austerity has done the place no favours. But...
- this kind of authoritarian nonsense is just what Home Secretaries do. David Blunkett brought in RIP (then, to his very slight credit, changed his mind). Jack 'boot' Straw was famous for his I-AM-THE-LAWing. I don't think the Tories are any better.
- No, criticizing the NHS is not against the religion there. The newspapers are forever getting in digs about long waits, unpopular (but perfectly rational) decision from NICE about what drugs to pay for, and junior doctors and their apparent insistence on being paid properly.
- And with that in mind, having lived in three countries (four if you accept that the NHS in England and Scotland are different) I personally think the NHS is fucking fantastic. Someone close to me was diagnosed with a serious illness and immediately swept up in a production line of modern, effective treatment. Sure, it was somewhat impersonal, the biscuits are rubbish, and they were a widget on the production line, but they're also still alive ten years later, and we still have a house and savings.
- kudos to your sister. The UK is an ethnically diverse place, one of the least racist and divided that I've seen, but - like everywhere else - imperfect. The NHS always seemed to me to be a reflection of what things could be elsewhere with doctors, nurses and cleaners hired from all over the world. [which reminds me that while the right-wing press hates the NHS for being free, the left wing press occasionally hates the NHS for bringing in medical staff from poorer parts of the world. They just can't win]
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The resistance to innovation in the screening invitations is more down to empire building by low-talent management than to the NHS 'religion'. Dr Ben Goldacre wrote a memorable X thread on a closely related topic some years ago.
Where do you see people leaving heading towards? What’s your emigration destination? It seems like most countries have their challenges and I’m curious where people who have inevitably done more research than me are landing, literally!
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Which countries would you recommend to move to?
Isn't the cost of living crisis and rising wealth inequalities a problem that many western countries face?
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> but as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income.
Your comment was mostly on point until you decided to put straight presenting white guys as the victims
You missed out the housing!! How local authorities who issue notices of bankruptcy while in the background buying up properties at full retail market prices. Knocking up rental prices beyond affordability. Shoplifting increasing costs of living on top of the large supermarkets profiteering since covid. Slum lords offered a guaranteed rents for a 5 year Contracts including the maintenance and any works required to bring it up to standard of conditions. To house illegal migrants, while these previously extremely poor housing our citizens was and still are forced to live in. Well not for long as no fault evictions are forcing these tenants out of their home. So shady and greedy slum lords can take full advantage of this home office offer , LL are rubbing their filthy hand's together
We had talented people piling in and GDP going up and all that pre Brexit. It's the gift that keeps giving.
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The funny thing is that NHS doctors want the money that doctors get in Australia, which is… a market rate.
> mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up
Skilled immigration or the Channel crossing?
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> just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up
This significantly underplays the situation here. The UK state views "anti-migrant" views as extreme: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/07/26/elite-police...
In the UK attending a protest against putting illegal immigrants from Afghanistan in a hotel by your kids school is likely to have you on a watch list or arrested. This might not sound that bad to our European friends, but you guys in the US might be quite surprised to hear this.
It's not just "right-wing" positions which are dealt like this either, I should note for legal reasons that I strongly disagree with the actions and views of "Palestine Action", but arrests of peaceful protestors who simply wish to voice support of them as a group (without actually being part of the group themselves) is in my mind absurd. It's one thing to make membership of the group illegal, but to also make debating that judgement illegal is highly problematic in my mind. For those interested you'll find videos of the police arresting elderly women for terror charges for simply peacefully voicing their opinions on Palestine Action. It's vile.
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Who said good riddance? Maybe they thought good riddance to racist privileged white people.
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> just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up
okay what are you implying tho?
> My flight out is in 6 weeks
Where are you going?
> as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance"
This is totally untrue. As long as it's selfish, unpatriotic people leaving, I couldn't care less what their skin color or sexual orientation is.
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And to what promised land are you headed, might I inquire?
No-one thinks the NHS is perfect. People are rationally defensive of it because the most likely alternative is not something like the German system (which is better, but has major problems) but a sale of the NHS to an American company such as Kaiser Permanente. Most people are well aware of the deeply rooted problems of the American system, and recognise that almost anything is better than that. Any systematic change would require a government which is trusted to handle it. That rules out the Conservatives (who are in power most of the time) as even their supporters don't trust them on this issue, and Labour is unlikely to either have the inclination to implement deep changes, or be in office long enough to effect them.
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Out of curiosity, where are people going?
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"suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here."
Errr, what? A lot of people complain about the NHS, whilst conceding there are issues that are difficult to address eg staff, lack of investment etc.
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Why stay in a declining 1st word country when you can move to Bulgaria and live like a king?
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The worst part is I don't see really any western country that's not in decline at the moment. Seeing the "surrender"'s from EU and other countries on tariffs makes me feel so bad. It's like there is no place in the world that's socially and economically strong anymore. The US remains economically strong at least, but they're now run by bullies. Even so, I see people all over the world leaving to immigrate to the US. Canada has the same growing cynicism and economic troubles and emigration, maybe less of a police state though. We're all just pathetic vassals to the US now.
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From tourist point of view UK felt to me like a police state, and I'm leaning more towards the former view. Cameras everywhere, non-stop reminders that you're being watched, being tracked everywhere(including which train car you're in now), constant reminders about possible dangerous bags being left alone etc.
Tracking would feel helpful and useful, if not for constant oppressive reminders that "Bad Thing could happen any second, be vigilant!".
While at the same time, it was vastly more unsafe than Eastern Europe.. and cities themselves were vastly dirtier.
Whole trip felt more like what i would imagine visit to mainland China would be like rather than a trip to a free western country.
To be honest and to give some context - they have been under threat of terrorism(due to The Troubles first - the name itself seems to reinforce this view, seems innocent..) roughly since end of WW2. well WW2 was a factor too.
To add a bit more context: this wasn't my first nor last trip to UK, and each time i visit it the worse it feels in every aspect: Cleanliness of cities, safety, and oppressiveness.
I always thought a police state would demand identification at every street corner (perhaps I'm wrong?) and any minor breaking of the law being dealt with severe justice. The UK has always been against a "state ID" unlike a lot of European countries, so I'm not completely convinced the description of "police state" is accurate. In fact I think it's the opposite given people can freely break the law despite cameras being on every street corner.
The UK is basically an end-of-days advanced state: bureaucracy taken to the extreme, with a heavy dose of nanny-state "mind the gap" messaging.
Bureaucracy kills any kind of infrastructure project (see HS2), so don't expect any improvements any time soon.
We do have some nice cities: Manchester, York, Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge. (I've probably missed a few from this list). London feels pretty far from 30 years ago - and not in a good way.
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In my experience the cleanliness of cities is a very good proxy for the overall health of the society. Societies that can't keep their cities clean often also have a lot of other problems. Government alone can't keep cities clean, it requires a society that believes in the common good, an an efficient government that can get things done.
> Whole trip felt more like what i would imagine visit to mainland China would be like rather than a trip to a free western country.
Have you ever been to mainland China? I've lived in both places and honestly, day-to-day life in major Chinese cities often feels more "free" in practical ways - safer, cleaner, more technologically convenient.
What is freedom really? In Shanghai or Shenzhen, I can walk out at 3am to get noodles or take the metro without a second thought. In LA or SF, I'm constantly aware of my surroundings, checking who's behind me, avoiding certain areas. The surveillance cameras in China never made me feel as watched as the constant threat assessment you do in many Western cities.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying China doesn't have serious issues with political freedoms and surveillance. It absolutely does. But the lived experience is way more nuanced than "oppressive dystopia."
I used to have similar assumptions before actually spending time there. Western media coverage (cough propaganda cough) tends to focus exclusively on the authoritarian aspects while ignoring that for many people, daily life feels safe, convenient, and yes - "free" in ways that matter to them.
Instead of imagining what China might be like based on western news coverage, why not visit and see for yourself?
Extremely unpopular opinion on HN, I'm sure. But I have a compulsion to challenge stereotypes when the reality is so much more complex.
> I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action - is the issue bigger there, or are they just more aware of and willing to act on it.
Other countries are moving in the same direction. The EU has repeatedly tried to push things like on device scanning or banning encryption.
> Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society that's complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government.
Mostly a failure of democracy - we have two major parties that are hard to tell apart.
They are both cynical and scared, and have for decades believed the future of Britain is managed decline. They also strongly believe the hoi polloi have to be forced to do what is good for them - e.g. the sugar tax and other "nudge politics", or the currently Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill which is basically about imposing central policy on how children are brought up and educated.
The sugar tax is a strange example to pick as an example of British decline.
As of 2022, the WHO reported on SSB (sugar-sweetened beverages):
> Currently, at least 85 countries implement some type of SBB taxation.
It feels to me like this was a rare step in the opposite direction - recognising that industry is the driving cynical force and pushing back on its over reach where it has failed. Most manufacturers reformulated their drinks immediately to avoid the tax, with what net loss? (The class-targeting comments were a straw man)
https://www.who.int/news/item/13-12-2022-who-calls-on-countr...
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The EU is also increasingly against free speech. It turns out banning hate speech was a slippery slope to government overreach after all. Huh.
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> Mostly a failure of democracy
Is it though? Are other forms of government more successful while remaining respectful of privacy? Or is it more of a reaction to social or societal changes? Why would these social or societal changes be different than previous changes?
> They also strongly believe the hoi polloi have to be forced to do what is good for them - e.g. the sugar tax and other "nudge politics", or the currently Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill which is basically about imposing central policy on how children are brought up and educated.
A non insulting way to view that is that central goverments understand incentives, and in the same way there are child incentives for people starting families, having incentives for healthier eating is something a central goverment should use its taxation policy for.
More control over education standards is also a common purview of many good educational systems. Decentralisation is not necesirely better, with teh extreme being homeschooling failing every time its attempted. Centrally dictated standards was the method of the French revolution, believing that a society where everyone roughly understands the world the same way was a society that was more unified. French "equality , fraternity and legality " is a basis for modern liberal democracy almost everywhere, but they didnt get there without authoritarian imposition of their standards, with entire minority cultures getting trampled along the way.
The hyperbole and bad faith explanations of legislation is not a good representation or argument against why britain is more accepting of som legislation many feel intrusive.
A better argument is that this piece of legislation was passed late on the rule of a disastrous administration and the number of problems in day to day society largely are unaffected by it, so it got no time in the spotlight for people to complaint or know it was coming until it was days away from being implemented. Society is also largely technologically illiterate, this is pretty much the case everywhere in the planet, which means the nuances of tech legislation are lost even on the people writting and voting on it.
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If most of the public are in favour of the Online Safety Act, then how is it a failure of democracy to have it? I give you the top FT comment:
>I, for one, am glad that porn is being age-restricted online. It gives young people false ideas. You'll never get a plumber to come around to your house that quickly in real life.
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In a word, division. The UK is so divided that people are too busy pointing the finger at each other to realise the root cause of the deterioration of our quality of life is entirely generations of mismanagement of the public purse.
Instead of questioning how MPs are entitled to a pay rise while your average person gets made redundant, people are questioning why people fleeing persecution should ‘be paid for with my tax money’.
Brain fatigue and mixed signals combined with destitution and desperation drastically impede the average person’s ability and desire to fact check and extrapolate. We are moving towards a society of down and out people living with no hope serving the elite and those with a bit of money behind them.
My fiancée and I have had enough and are also leaving in October. No idea where to all we know is we have a one way ticket away and will figure the rest out.
> No idea where to all we know is we have a one way ticket away and will figure the rest out.
You'll probably find how few places let you in as economic migrants.
MPs pay is a drop in a bucket there are many better things to question than that.
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I recommend you go, but I bet good money you'll see that the UKs problems aren't remotely unique.
^^^ This is such a great example of the deranged elitist groupthink that dominates the UK’s national discourse.
Holding the door open for fake asylum seekers costing billions while his fellow countrymen are laid off, and pointing the finger at MPs taking a few million between them.
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>people are questioning why people fleeing persecution
Except many of them are not, they are economic migrants. And some have even realised that claiming that they're persecuted for lgbt reasons is an instant in - there was a case with a guy (with a wife and a bunch of children) that claimed to have written a pro lgbt article and now he's persecuted.
As a gay man the thought of that sickens me, economic migrants using who I am as a shortcut to entry, I have no problem at all with genuinely lgbt individuals seeking refugee status; we're still persecuted in so many places and there's not enough of us to make change happen in those places.
But the economic migrants...all they're doing is ensuring their home country never improves and that a steady stream of migrants continues into Europe. It'll never end.
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Its because the popular press has, for a very long time, been pushing a narrative of a country under siege. It sells papers, but to keep selling papers, it has to keep steadily upping the narrative over time.
I agree, but isn't that the case in lots of other countries? I think it's a contributing factor, but there's more to it.
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Westerners point fingers at China for its Great Firewall, citing a lack of freedom.
Being a free society comes with both good and bad. This type of law, whether it's good or bad, is akin to China's Great Firewall
To me, the most disturbing part isn’t just the laws themselves, it’s the complete shift in the cultural zeitgeist. When I was younger, people distrusted the government by default. We stood for freedom of speech, anonymity, the right to speak without being censored. Now, even among software developers, people in tech who should know better, I see them practically begging Big Brother for more censorship, more control.
It makes me sick. It brings to mind that old quote from Mussolini: “The truth is evident to all who are unblinded by dogmatism, that men nowadays are tired of liberty.”
Scary times indeed.
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And the EU is following suit. Brexit has never looked so stupid. They could have worked on expanding an authoritarian regime together.
It's making me cynical, and I don't know what to do about it.
> There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.
- George Orwell, 1984
Politicians have not taken action on a wide spectrum of problems (some of which are crime related, other problems in society below the level of crime) for many decades now. While the economy is good, this doesn't occupy the mind of the public too much, life is OK. Now that the economy is not good, and has not been good since at least 2008, the public has begun to notice these things. The public has even started to notice domestic opinion management (nudge unit, 77th Brigade etc). Passing this sort of "manage the symptom not the cause" legislation has become popular. It's easier to do than deal with the cause, it pushes the actions onto 3rd parties, and superficially it sounds good to the general public. At least for a while. To get an idea of how "off target" the state itself is in managing serious crimes look no further than [1] (warning, pretty grim story, but very typical).
[1]. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg87yvq529o
Edited for typo.
Crime has, despite everything, gradually been falling. Scotland has a 100% murder clearup rate for the past several years.
The incident you mentioned is yet another piece of fallout from Rochdale, but if you look closely the offences mentioned are from 20 years ago. I don't think that should be used to talk about the present. There is a lot more safeguarding these days.
The main negative factor is the press, responsible for both "opinion management", doomerism, and sensationalist demands to Do Something in a way that doesn't help. The Online Safety Act and Brexit are both victories for the Daily Mail that are losses for the rest of the public.
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Australia is doing its best to hardline digital (and more broadly social) authoritarianism too. It’s a sad future we’re accelerating towards.
It does seem to me, British people are very quick to call for "bans" on anything that they don't like. I always believed it comes from the average British person's mediocrity (and acceptance of) and crab-in-bucket mentality.
This country has so many (excuse my rudeness) lamearses, and they seem to revel in pulling everybody down to their level. Whenever they feel challenged by somebody else having genuine hobbies and interests (beyond consumption of food, drink, substances, and media), being fit and healthy, or being educated, they get threatened and start trying to pull that person down. I've seen it all my life.
However when you do find interesting and talented people here, they shine through. It's just needles and haystacks.
Neither, they’re just the most convenient excuses for instituting draconian laws.
Don't believe the things that you read. Our newspapers have been openly biased for centuries, and there's some very shoddy journalism at times. See, for example:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44623091
Idk I think the main cause of public discontent in the UK isn't what anyone is reading, it's the extremely obvious change in material conditions.
It's about corporate control - the more regulations like this - the more entrenched the market becomes. Higher barrier to enter for smaller players plus government gets all the surveillance apparatus as a sweetener.
Basically Labour continues taking UK into corporate fascist utopia.
The bureaucratic and security infrastructure built to manage colonial subjects didn’t disappear, it just refocused inward. You see it in policing, immigration policy, and intelligence. The Home Office runs on a suspicion-first logic rooted in managing threats—real or imagined.
It's one of the reasons the UK has one of the highest concentrations of CCTV cameras in the world. Public tolerance for this took hold the IRA years and cemented post-9/11 and 7/7. The narrative of ever-present threat made "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" sound reasonable to a large portion of the population.
The press, especially the Mail, Sun, and Express, also thrives on outrage. They set the tone for national conversation, whipping up fear and anger that politicians then "respond" to with legislation. The broad assumption is that people can’t be trusted with unfiltered access to information or autonomy, especially online. You also saw it in lockdown, where Britain had to endure one the harshest COVID lockdowns among Western democracies.
Not saying I agree with the legislation, but the UK experienced a lot of pretty bad domestic terrorism in the rememberable past (namely IRA bombs detonating in towns and cities etc, often with devastating impacts). Then there were the tube and bus suicide bombings more recently. And there has also been a constant pitter-patter of "radicalised lone wolf" type things like the Ariana Grande concert bomber, the guy who killed a load of 8 year old girls at a summer camp and so on.
None of this is porn of course, but supposedly a lot of the lone wolf's are radicalised online so it creates a lot of "someone needs to do something!!!!" type attitudes (and no public gun ownership would not work like everyone says it would because the USA had that yet no one lifted a finger when they needed to recently, and now look what's happened), and sadly the older and more little-c conservative population carriers more clout in terms of policies because historically they tend to vote in greater numbers than younger groups. N.b. that 16 and 17 year olds have very recently been given the right to vote so things may change.
The IRA was active before internet even existed. This is more about controlling the internet discourse, rather than preventing terrorism.
> Then there were the tube and bus suicide bombings more recently.
That was 20 years ago. Not really recently.
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Because the media always paints other countries in certain lights, as it helps them build a narrative for their own governments?
> complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government
I disagree with this sentiment, however it does show how bad "democracy" can be when voting for a complete government change results in absolutely no change whatsoever.
Authoritarian CCTV cameras in Shenzhen Vs democratic CCTV cameras in London
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While I appreciate the concern, it's worth pointing out that 30 or so years ago "government should mandate id checks for harmful content" was not some radical dystopian notion.
The UK was also one of the first nations to ban indoor smoking and in cars with kids. I think this is very much in that vein (politically).
> I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action
Historically there is no formal constitution in the UK so Parliament is not limited in their power. IHMO it's the main factor why the UK is an outlier.
You are approaching this from a uniquely U.S. perspective. The U.K. is pretty middle of the road as far as “surveillance” and while this may offend the freedom-at-all-costs sensibilities, it’s a fairly milquetoast change.
Visiting the Heineken website in the U.S. requires that you assert you are over the age of 21. Texas has instituted I.D. verification for pornography.
Regardless of how you feel about this law, it is not accurate to say the U.K. is unique in implementing it.
> You are approaching this from a uniquely U.S. perspective.
It’s not uniquely U.S. at all
What other countries require ID checks for services like Discord?
The U.K.’s implementation of this law is much more unique than you’re claiming.
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Do you know of other western countries that send cops to your house because you posted memes on X ?
Saying that illegal migrants should be sent back home can literally land you at the police station. A hotel worker was arrested for testifying to what he saw in his hotels, ie. migrants being hosted, given a phone, meals, and NHS visit once every two weeks.
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It his law combined with all the other iffy laws in the UK which make this nefarious. This is the issue about discussing anything about how draconian the UK is. If you compare any single law in isolation, it isn't that different. However if you take how the British authorities and how they operate it, and all the other laws you start to see a more draconian picture.
That is what many people, especially those that do live in the UK don't appreciate.
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This is objectively untrue when compared to other western countries. You have people arrested for posting memes on their mums Facebook page.
>The U.K. is pretty middle of the road as far as “surveillance”
Just, no.
5-eyes is the most heinous human-rights-destroying apparatus under the sun, and it wouldn't be happening if it weren't for the British desire to undermine cultures they have deemed inferior.
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Outside of techn journalism, this is a non story in the UK. I think it's hard to say much about the society's attitude when they don't know ow about this, never mind understand.
Average UKian is, IME, surprisingly technologically unsavvy. This might be the root cause of lack of interest or protest.
If I were to guess how this whole thing came to be, it would be thus: the UK government is increasingly dysfunctional and polarised. The attention of government and opposition goes increasingly into futile, high-stakes but always drawn battles. But that means that motivated and organised groups can push through things that look benign from the outside and don't trigger the Great Polarisation. Protecting children from suicide, what's not to like? The Parliament, where this should be shredded to pieces, is too busy trying to reshuffle deckchairs.
Meanwhile this is printed on vellum, welcome to the new reality.
Strange how close V for Vendetta got, even though Alan Moore was ostensibly complaining about Thatcherism at the time, innit?
The government is doing this because it's scared of the press that runs all these scare stories.
> Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society
Empires take a very long time to die, but when they finally do, it is never pretty.
Historical example are abundant.
It's nothing to do with child safety. It's about control of what British people can see or hear on the internet.
Every story about every law from everywhere paints that picture because those are the only ones that make it to stories.
> The crimes they cite like child grooming or terrorism/hate being incited sound pretty terrible too, but I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action - is the issue bigger there, or are they just more aware of and willing to act on it.
When it comes to pedos in specific, the UK got absolutely shaken by the scandals of the last few years - Jimmy Savile, Epstein being involved right into the Royal Family, just to state the obvious ones.
As for terrorism, the problem dates back a bit deeper, the UK has had the IRA conflict for decades, and to this day the conflict isn't resolved, the only thing that did happen was the IRA got formally disbanded in 2005.
So they crack down on the internet while letting Prince Andrew walk around without any real consequences?
The U.S. is only slightly less far down this path, but we are trying our best to catch up.
Speed cameras were the start of this normalization of authoritarianism
Regulating porn, guns, gambling, tobacco, and alcohol has nothing to do with authoritarianism or a lack of freedom. It's about protecting people, just like we already do with seatbelts, speed limits, and food safety.
Why do you think shops ask for proof of age when you buy cigarettes? Not because they care about cancer or want to sell less, it's because they're required to by law. Of course, teenagers can still find workarounds. They can ask an older friend to buy it for them, just like they can use a VPN to access porn.
The difference is, regulation shifts accountability. It moves the responsibility from a greedy, insensitive business owner to the kids. And at least with the kids we can guide them, and help them spend their time and money where it actually matters.
Note: I know people who love guns or porn are probably going to downvote this, but someone has to say it.
Except in Britain you can be arrested for complaining about the quality of your school, or an offensive Halloween costume: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
This isn't about protecting people.
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“It’s for your own good” is always a laughable argument.
The state doesn’t regulate these things to protect people, it does so to manage risk to itself. Porn, guns, gambling, tobacco, alcohol, etc., are tolerated so long as they are contained, taxable, and politically useful.
Regulating porn is this system likely trying to move the needle on declining birth rates. You can look to a host of pro-natalist efforts in China as the likely inspiration.
And without a doubt, overreach by governments will continue.
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Inequality, falling social cohesion and severe cost of living pressure has a lot of people down
Plus really shit media that loves negative clickbait and low effort outrage stoking.
That's the combined power of the worst tendencies of the media and a deliberate propaganda campaign.
Take this law: it's not new, it was passed in 2023 by the previous government. The law had a two year deadline attached to it, and companies didn't introduce any restriction before the deadline. The new government has a lot on its plate, so it's hardly surprising that repealing a law that was already passed with little attention to it was not high on the list of priorities compared to things like not defaulting or unblocking planning permissions. And yet, twitter and other places are full of very loud voices describing the law as new and designed to oppress them now, even though the deadline was set two years ago.
On a more general note, we have our problems, but the UK is in a pretty good place. Sam Freedman covered some bases in his recent post [1] (crime is down, the economy is struggling but improving, etc), but I'll add some more:
* We're probably the least racist, most integrated society in the world. The leader of the opposition is a black woman and first generation immigrant [2]. When Rishi Sunak became a PM, his race wasn't brought up once in any media, including very right wing; compare and contrast with all the bullshit about Obama and his birth certificate dog whistles.
* First time in years we're reducing the backlog of asylum applications. People applying for asylum can't work because they haven't proved their status yet, so naturally they need to be looked after. All the noise you hear is caused entirely by the conservative party defunding and then outright pausing application processing. This means that people looking for asylum had to live in limbo for years, which caused multiple problems. No backlog, no problems.
* We punch WAY above our weight in arts and theatre, and the industry is flourishing. Ever noticed how overrepresented British actors are in Hollywood?
* Compared to our main ally overseas, we have a very effective parliament. The executive is kept in check even with the very large majority Labour has now, and the Lords proved their worth during Brexit, putting brakes at the worst impulses of the previous government.
* We largely preserved our core military capabilities and alliances over the decade of austerity, slowly repairing, recovering, and expanding now. We're a major partner on nuclear programs, tier-1 partner on F-35, AUCUS is happening, we do a lot in Ukraine, and we're one of the only two nuclear countries in Europe and just signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with France.
* We are helping people in Hong-Kong, Ukraine, and Afghanistan with targeted immigration programs.
* We're rolling back anti-nuclear nonsense, building two large NPPs, and deployed wind generation at a massive scale.
* A bunch of important reforms are going through the parliament [3], from enhancing renters right to a YIMBY reform.
But very little of that filters into online environments. The most unhinged, xenophobic, paranoid voices get amplified, creating the impression that you cited, even though it can't be further from truth.
Britain is a beautiful country, open to the world, with a globe-spanning network of alliances and relationships, and an incredibly resilient democracy. We should do SO MUCH MORE, yes! But it doesn't mean we shouldn't celebrate where we are now, too.
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/samfr.bsky.social/post/3luwmp2vpd62...
[2]: she was technically born in Britain, but she and her mother returned to Nigeria very soon after her birth
[3]: https://labourreforms.uk
I'd like to believe this is true. Maybe all the shit is just increasing disconnection between media portrayals and reality.
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> Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society
I feel like this is 100% true of the US as well, the only difference is there are multiple factions (the blue EAs, the blue EAccs, the red pro-Trump, the red anti-Trump, the red EAccs, ...) scared and cynical of different things.
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The Bourgeois love to divide the working class, typical divide and conquer. Indigenous worker vs imported worker, men vs women, queer vs straight, old vs young, car user vs bicycle rider. This is important because it weakens existing solidarities and prevent the emergence of class consciousness. It's part of their modus operandi and has been for centuries, only now they master it thanks to algorithms and machine learning. This increased surveillance also happens to be extremely useful at taming future strikes and protests, or rat out future pro-workers groups
This view (“the Bourgeois’, etc.) seems to imply there’s a group of very clever manipulators somewhere, overtly planning and executing this (presumably in a dark room with armchairs and cigars). But I just can’t imagine this, in the UK’s example.
What I see instead is the other side of Hanlon’s razor —incompetence— coupled with a political class riven with pockets of self-interest, and very few seemingly with an intellectual hypothesis to explain the UK’s current predicament, or to chart a path out of it.
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>why the UK specifically is taking action
We have a history of trying banning bad stuff. Magna Carta in the 1200s against the right of kings, slavery abolition in the 1800s, now porn being pushed to kids.
I don't think child grooming or hate is particularly bad here but we tend to try to stop that kind of thing. We also had the first modern police force in 1829 and other innovations which have caught on in some other countries.
Some of the US alt right media pushes broken Britain stories because we have some muslim immigrants or something. The majority of the public support the bill https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-poll-finds-7-in-10-ad... I wonder if it's more the US is afraid of the their government that if they say they are promoting online saftey they are really going 1984 on the populace? Here people tend to assume they are in fact promoting what it says on the tin.
"Magna Carta in the 1200s against the right of kings"
Seems like the pendulum has swung back now, doesn't it? Increasing authority/rights of the government instead of a king.
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Congratulations. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to compare stupid repression like the OSA to the Magna Carta.
This bill is similar the kind of government overreach that the Magna Carta was hoping to prevent.
This seems like a hard fight to win against determined network engineers without OFAC-level co-encorcement around spending money abroad.
I rent servers in Hong Kong, Switzerland, Tokyo, and many other places, and route tunnels among them all, and this is just mundane aboveboard stuff, many of the providers happily accept PayPal and crypto as well as CC and wire. I haven't even tried to design a system for evading this sort of thing, I can only imagine the ceiling is pretty high: QUIC and shit are increasingly the default.
I oppose this on principle, very much oppose it. I'm merely noting that until they're willing to start licensing the right to spend money abroad, they're going to have a tough time outlawing VPNs with any effect.
Maybe this pushes everyone to switch to Tor all at once: fucking with people's porno is a pretty quick way to move things around in the App Store ranking.
It would serve em right if this backfired massively by getting everyone to go cypherpunk by default.
They will block your tunnel. If you attempt to hide it you will be jailed once found out. Working encryption will be illegal.
I understand that arbitrary oppression is possible even with computers, there are regimes that come close today.
My point is that it will cost them a lot of money in lost economic activity to make it happen: we should seek to make that cost as high as possible and make sure that powerful people understand how high it is.
The new online safety rules are already being used to shut down government criticism. How it works is their new elite protection squad, if someone is deigned an influential critic of government policy, trawls through your social media posts until they find something against the laws. A lot of government critique is coming from the working class here now, who have virtually no political representation in the UK. As you can imagine, some of these social media posters don't mince their words, and end up getting caught out and arrested.
Do you have any examples of people being arrested for criticising a law?
Most of the time these dystopian descriptions of the UK turn out to be completely overblown nonsense when you look into them properly.
Yup, along the same lines as the “sharia no go zones” and “get stabbed six ways to Sunday every time you go outside” myths
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I suppose the most recent example are the people from Palestine Action being arrested en masse at protests.
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There are discussions in parliament about grooming gangs on X. These are soft-censored (you can't see it without passing the the age verification). Few people will be bothered to make an account to see a post and pass age verification. Therefore it slows the sharing of information.
It isn't about outright banning the discussion, because that will cause considerable push-back by the public. So you dress up a policy as doing one thing knowing that the effect will be another. I don't take anything the British State says at face value. If you do, you are simply being naive.
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Look up the videos "blackbeltbarrister" on YouTube. He's doing a good job of explaining the law as it is and how it's really being applied in the UK.
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police...
Tons of people are arrested and charged every day for thought crimes in Britain.
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I was thinking last night how many in some ways these age verification laws might actually have some upside for those of us who were fond of the early internet...
Ultimately what these laws will end up doing is pushing internet traffic towards the "normie web", create a separation between sites which refuse to implement these measures and those who will.
Ultimately for this filters to work authoritarian countries like the UK will need to ban sites like 4chan which do not comply with their age verification demands despite hosting adult content. As it stands until the UK do this the age filtering may as well not exist because kids (and adults) will just go to other sites.
Additionally search and content aggregators will likely come under increased pressure to blacklist these "rogue" sites so slowly both the ability to access non-compliant sites and the ability to find non-compliant sites will diminish.
Like in the old days when cool sites and blogs spread more by word of mouth than social media and search aggregators, we're likely heading back to a world where those who are savvy enough to work around the filtering of authoritarian states will have access to a new kind of "semi-dark web" or a "rogue web".
I almost like that idea. If the internet bifurcates it might actually become a more authentic place for those of us in know. I suppose the only question then is whether authoritarian countries like the UK will ultimately come after private VPN users as well, but I feel like that would be impractically costly to enforce.
> the UK will need to ban sites like 4chan which do not comply with their age verification demands
They will not hesitate to do so, the UK has the power to quickly and easily blacklist sites.
Oh for sure. I personally think this was the whole point of the bill.
We've seen from online bans in recent years that it doesn't really matter if someone is still technically able to access a the banned content, at some point if you make the content hard enough to find its influence becomes increasingly irrelevant.
This new legislation basically gives the UK government an excuse to ban large sections of the internet from UK ISPs since they can say they weren't complying with UK law and shift the blame/responsibility in the eyes of the public – "it's not censorship, they're breaking the law!"
In doing this it will likely be enough to reduce UK traffic to those sites by 90%+. While it might technically be possible to buy and install a VPN to access them realistically most people won't bother.
There are a lot of comments and thinking along the demo and gloom lines.
On the "silver lining" side, could be a eye-opener for the population of the UK, that things they take for granted cant get summarily yanked away if they don't actually do something.
And with any luck it will pull up the technical competency of every person using these services (pretty much every adult).
With any luck parents might even be forced to gain the skill their kids already live and breathe and don't think twice about.
:)
I used to be optimistic that way, but if you look somewhere similar developments happened before like China: yes, people adapted to circumvent their regime's oppression, but the laws never changed.
Since surveillance is only a 2nd tier issue in terms of mind share (at best), it's untouched by electoral democracy. And because rulers automatically support more surveillance, there are no mechanisms for positive developments on that side, both in the UK and in China.
But we did, I've been protesting against laws like this for 17 years now! Genuinely, they've always been trying to implement these laws, and simply relied on us missing the ship one time.
If COVID policies and mandates including the vaccine passports which absolutely paved the way for digital IDs for any action in society, didn't wake up populations around the world, nothing will.
You just need to scare them when there's an appearance of dissent and that's that.
Few people can combat them effectively from a tech and legal framework, for sure, but don't expect magic from nowhere.
Every time this comes up, an accusation with some label becomes sufficient to dismiss any arguments from a person.
Any suggestions?
Everyone with any ability to open their eyes migrated to the US from the UK ages ago. The civilization that exists today is what happens when people too scared to get on a boat live in the dregs of a dying empire.
What message does it send when your government tries to impose costs on your preferred behavior while at the same time being unable to do it when you download a single app?
The words that come to mind are malicious and incompetent. The only 'achievement' is to increase contempt towards the government. And the times aren't exactly stable to begin with.
British VPN users right now:
https://x.com/NoContextBrits/status/1949181229791592887
or
https://xcancel.com/NoContextBrits/status/194918122979159288...
[flagged]
I wonder what the (supposed) anti-censorship people that supported things like eSNI and DoH think about this. They took away our ability to filter our own networks, so now we can't even argue that filtering and monitoring is something that should be done on the client side (per network).
Sometimes I feel like both sides are actually just one side playing the long game. IMO the goal is to get verified digital IDs in use everywhere they can so they can lock down the internet to have absolute control. We'll end up paying inflated subscriptions for everything and watching all the ads.
These are the kinds of regulations that are deigned for incumbents because it becomes impossible for new market entrants to satisfy the requirements. I wouldn't be surprised if big tech companies are silently lobbying for this kind of stuff behind closed doors.
The solution is to have filtering on the actual client devices. There need to be specialized minor-friendly devices with parental controls at the OS level, and apps need a standardized framework to integrate with those parental controls. Then create regulation that devices used by minors must have such a system, with the standard that every new action (app install, first time visiting a website, new contact, joining a group chat, etc) first needs to be whitelisted by a parent, and that parents can see a timeline of all actions.
With this solution, kids are far safer than under recent UK/EU age verification laws, while adults and their free, open & private internet remain unaffected.
This is 100% correct IMO. Even just the timeline of actions would be enough for most people I know.
Phishing for material for sextortion has never been more trivial. The implementation of this is going to lead to mass fraud. Walk into parliament, ask who is willing to go to jail in defense of the act if and when the first lot of randy pensioners are bankrupted, or kid commits suicide out of shame - and if no one raises their hand, repeal it.
This is absolutely going to lead to the black mail of people in both the private and public sector. Ruling parties are going to have access to this information and will use it to force votes. Intelligence agencies will do the same. On top of that its only a matter of time before you get a Tea app style leak where this data was simply not secured. Forcing people to identify themselves before engaging in their sexual peculiarities is a recipe for disaster and the rationale behind it is weak at best. Its about control, nothing else.
Note: Forgot to add, this is going to give some low level data or software engineer access to all of your darkest secrets and what is to stop them from using that to blackmail you? Some guy is going to ring up their local millionaire and say "I see you are into X, give me a 100k or everyone else will know as well" There is no end to how bad of an idea this is.
Not just blackmail, but also harvesting of ID.
They are normalising people being asked by potentially shady sites to subject to identification procedures, after all.
If I was inclined to sell such information illegally, I'd set up a bunch of honeypots and "verify" users and just hoard the data to sell.
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It seems that your argument is more about the way the verification is implemented and not about the idea of verification by itself.
The idea that you should verify your legal identity to load a website is reprehensible and not something that should be treated seriously. It should be ridiculed like the authoritarian nonsense it is.
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To be clear - I disagree with both the implementation and the idea of verification. I believe one is criminal and the other is misguided.
Yes, in a perfect world the downsides are limited. But in the world we live in I predict a lot more leaks similar to the Tea app hack (which contained a lot of passports, linked to some quite private data from chats like medical documents)
The biggest hope I see is that the EU also wants to implement age restrictions, but with a lot more effort to get it right and make it compatible with a strong desire for privacy. Maybe that will make "proper" implementations easy and common enough that many of the downsides will be mitigated
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The only property of the implementation necessary for sextortion to happen is that it will be imperfect, at least once. Which is guaranteed.
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The 2nd order effect is that nearly every creator will be sponsored by NordVPN - as the market expands. As well as not being able to identify legitimate vs illegitimate uses. So, I guess mission achieved!?
Governments already want encryption back doors, this just adds more ammo.
Thankfully, encryption is math, and math doesn't have backdoors, so it's only about using proper tools.
This is one of the times where law is outrunning technology. Apple and Google are both working on anonymous attestation but they're pulling the trigger before it's ready.
But that's not what laws like these are about. In the US at least these laws are driven by Christian Nationalists are setting up a situation where PII of porn users is able to be leaked. That's what they're counting on. They also want to have political control of platforms by continually holding a Sword of Damocles above any publisher's head.
I have to disagree with the "Christian Nationalist" characterization.
https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2025/07/29/nigel-farage-taki...
>"Nigel Farage ‘on the side of predators’ with Online Safety Act criticism, says Labour"
Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist?
The end goal here is digital ID and censorship. Compare this to the perennial efforts for encryption backdoors. If there is a characterization that accurately encompasses this, it is the illiberal, statist, authoritarian impulse. Sure, they used a sex-panic to advance their agenda. However, this is merely symptomatic of the larger illiberal trend towards authoritarianism and the expansion of the state.
I believe the commenter said "in the US".
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Interestingly while it'd be daft to call them Christian Nationalist the Labour Party does owe a lot of its early philosophy to various religious groups descended from the English Dissenters. This is also true for many groups that'd fall under the Christian Nationalist label in the US, even though their politics are very different.
Of course this just shows the English Dissenters ended up being quite influential on both the left and right over the course of Anglophone history.
Strictly speaking the law was passed under the conservatives, albeit in collaboration with Labour (it's bi-partisan). But I would agree that the drive is more authoritarian and it just uses moralistic arguments to shame people into siding with it.
The law could mandate that retail device OSs ship with a turnkey child safe mode complete with app and extensive site whitelists and run an educational campaign on the subject. But instead they've gone the needlessly invasive route which is telling about the true motives.
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Americans don't understand that the liberal democrats are the "anti-authoritarian" party of the UK and would be who most American mainstream democrats would vote for in practice.
Labor during the Corbyn years made Bernie Sanders look like a fascist and the current labor is back to being milquetoast and embracing its social authoritarian roots.
Similarly, Americans cannot understand that the Canadians have an "NDP" and "Liberal" and they don't understand their differences - though these days I don't think the NDP knows their differences either!!!
> Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist?
Honestly? Yeah, pretty much. It's a little hard to think of them that way since they're the leftmost establishment party in the UK, the same as the Democrats in the US, but historically speaking they're pretty right-wing. And theocracy has pretty deep roots in Anglosphere politics, so it's not necessarily that visible from the inside.
The elephant in the room, is 'foreign actor'.
All of our platforms are inundated by an overwhelming amount of well crafted, targeted (specific per person) campaigns of disinformation by foreign actors.
China, Russia, Iran, and others cannot even remotely hope to stand against the West. Yet if you cannot stand against your adversary, you must weaken them.
You promote infighting. You take minor issues which can be cooperatively resolved with compromise, and seek to turn them into issues of great division. You spread falsehoods, creating useful idiots in great numbers.
You find the most radicalized, most loony of citizens that you can, and then secretly fund them.
Understand, any concept of "we do that to ourselves" is like a gnat in comparison. This is a real threat, it's been getting worse, and the common person is not capable of even understanding the concept. The common person, even when told repeatedly, thinks there is no downside to having their Pii stolen, or hacked. They simply read click bait titles, youtube or tiktok videos and 100% believe every word without any skepticism.
You may disagree with any or all of the above.
However! The above is what is actually behind the move for KYC to this extent. It's not about age verification, it's about identity. And it's not even about one westerner talking to another, it's about a foreign adversary seeking to pretend to be a domestic.
Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater.
And I say this as someone that has fought for an open internet. It's already dead. It's dead because foreign interests use it as a tool to destroy our societies. It's dead because soon AI will replace most generated information.
Age verification laws are really identity laws, and any work to provide anonymous verification will fail, sadly, unfortunately, because the perceived threat is so large.
(I do not even necessarily agree with this, but if we don't understand the logic and the why of this, of why it is happening, then we're complaining about the wrong thing...)
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Worth noting that this bill was introduced in 2021 and passed in 2023 under the previous Conservative governments, all of which were fairly libertarian/anti-state at least in their rhetorical positioning.
I mean arguably, Labour could have repealed it or could have decided to disown it and discourage implementation, but the terrible design of the legislation is pretty much entirely the responsibility of the last government.
Screw anonymous attestation. We don't need to be controlled at every frigging second by people who are time and time again proven to be corrupt and working for their own interests. *Oh, I just received this thousands in gifts but it doesn't affect my decisions".
The only thing to do is denounce every bit of bullshit and not try and "find a way to make it work". Just stand for freedom for once instead of bending the knee or pushing for authoritarianism like most people do with every invasion for oil, during covid, when there's an accusation of some -ism or whatever the next label is.
Agreed. This is our Prohibition Era for free speech and expression and privacy. We must act as bootleggers, creating and maintaining private spaces which strengthen communities, preserve autonomy and discovery while still protecting its users from harm or predation. I owe everything in my life to websites I wasn't allowed on as a kid.
The UK is an increasingly authoritarian nightmare. The US should start a refugee program for UK citizens who understand what freedom actually means and want to live in a free country again.
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This is not pushed by Christian Nationalists in the same manner that the Steam bans were not pushed by Collective Shout. They are just a good scapegoat. You find a group that preaches what you want to do, you do it, and then say that it was because of them, not because you wanted to do it. This way you can claim that you didn't want to do it, but do it anyways.
>This is one of the times where law is outrunning technology.
Not really. China's great firewall has been doing that a long time before these laws. It was only a matter of time till our leaders ask Big Tech "do for us what you did for China, except add a coat of paint over it so it doesn't look evil".
Like clockwork as well, the attempts to shift the Overton window on the use of VPNs have now begun, using all the same arguments.
Not just porn, but in the US they target abortion clinics and discussion.
Not just porn and abortion, but the US is also targeting political speech now. The moral nuts are overlapping with the corporate and government interests such that the public loses.
Several examples: government employees are being vetted for loyalty instead of qualification; public corps like CBS are not only self censoring political speech but they also have a "bias monitor" to appease the government; normal people are being denied entry to the country for various wrongspeak on socials.
My understanding is that the way they do these attestations still links whatever account you did the attestation for and your real identity.
It's possible to do truly anonymous ZKP's of being a member of a set (eg. over 18s) but in practice it would be very cumbersome. It would involve having a setup with a central authority (government) to build a Merkle tree where users would submit hashes of randomness and then a user would generate a token through a ZKP that would decouple them from their real identity with the anonymity dependent on the set size. New participants can be brought in but the anonymity set sizes would fluctuate.
Even with this method it will link together all services utilizing the token. And if you attempt to solve this by allowing to generate multiple tokens the entire scheme becomes somewhat meaningless as durable bypass services would emerge.
I know lots of companies working on anonymous attestation, and have been myself interested in this for decades. I don't get why we would need any form of age verification for porn at all though, since the cost outweighs whatever little benefit exists given that it's so easy to work around. Online age verification is like the NFTs of internet law.
I don't particularly want to be required to have an Apple or Google device (and to accept their EULAs) to use social media either! If we're going to do age verification (and if we must, doing it in a privacy-preserving way would be best), can't we make it an open standard?
I don’t know, I think not giving 10 year olds unlimited access to porn is a deep enough reason. It is a legitimate societal harm.
Ok, so don't give your kids access to porn. You can figure out a way to do that without requiring age verification for adults on all sorts of sites.
More pearl-clutching "think of the children" nonsense.
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Christian nationalists have properly been identified by James Lindsay and others as the "woke right." They deserve that title because they think, like the woke left, that their needs to be some vanguard with unlimited power to "fix" society, and that the constitution, separation of powers and objective justice and meritocracy need to be done away with. Of course as soon as they gain power, all the white christian people who supported them get sent to die in a stupid war in a trench somewhere. That's the big joke with communist/fascist revolutions. Their supporters all think they will have a special place in the government after the revolution, but most of them wind up dead in a trench(Hitler) or doing hard labor in primitive conditions in the countryside(Mao), or purged (Stalin).
Until you really restrict the net, it's just a matter of building new software that can't be the target of those laws by design. If you restrict the net, there's no inter-net.
Especially since different countries/cultures have very different sentiments on most topics. For example Western Europe and the US mostly agree that minors should be protected against alcohol, drugs, pornography and excessive violence, but the thresholds are wildly different.
Europeans like to joke about the Americans being fine with gratouitious violence in kids movies as long as there's no blood, but a single female nipple immediately makes it R rated. Now consider that even France and England have different nuances on what is considered acceptable. If you extend beyond Western culture it becomes even more diverse. In some of the more religious Muslim countries a women shaking her full head of hair might be seen as erotic content. A lot of Japanese anime skirts very close to sexualizing children (from a Western perspective).
If every country became serious about enforcing age verification for their value system you could post barely any image or video content without marking it as age restricted for some jurisdiction. And the lines wouldn't neatly follow communities but you really would need a judgement for each piece of content. That's obviously not going to happen, so you will always have people from one place visiting communities in places that are more lax on one specific measure they are interested in.
And that's assuming all software and platform operators want to follow the restrictions, despite the obvious profit motive of not doing so. Restricting the supply isn't completely useless, but also provides huge incentives for those able to meet demand
The idea of a "New Internet" from the comedy series Silicon Valley seems like a more attractive and interesting idea every day.
I daydream about some kind of overlay network, without censorship and surveillance, where only people 'in the know' participate.
> I daydream about some kind of overlay network, without censorship and surveillance, where only people 'in the know' participate.
Mesh network powered by walking nerd nodes and shoe leather? Everything TOR-ed and encrypted and super-asynchronous? Radio?
I liked the series, but that part seemed like they jumped on some kind of blockchain bandwagon and jumped the shark.
It's a shame, the previous seasons were kind of timeless, but it feels like they jumped onto a buzzword that backfired before it was well understood. Although I may have dropped it early and it would have backfired on them after their cryptochain is used by criminals or whatever, but IIRC it was very early Bitcoin era and the themes were something like a 51% attack by china, it was way too early to make a comment on Blockchain, they were able to do good satire on the dot com era precisely because it was already dead.
> I daydream about some kind of overlay network, without censorship and surveillance, where only people 'in the know' participate.
These have been getting build for years now, and the rate is increasing. The open, public web is on its last legs and is being replaced by a multitude of private networks.
I wonder which company is gonna be the first one to leak all of the ID and Selfies. After that, I'm expecting these laws to be lifted off.
> After that, I'm expecting these laws to be lifted off.
Bollocks (nicely). A shit-load of 'the 1%', just got a free pass. If anything, after that!, 'I'm expecting these laws to be doubled-down on.'
If anything they will double down to "track cyber-bullying" or some other load of horsecrap.
My Reddit selfie was a bit rubbish looking. I think they'll have to abolish the law if that gets out.
its already happened that tea app got all its ID verification photos stolen and published online and yet were still going full steam ahead
How should small social network sites, forums or any sites that post user-generatrd content etc who can't afford to do age verification respond to this law? Block all requests from UK IPs?
We are building a niche social network and don't want to be in the cross-hairs.
Is anyone in a similar position? How's your company dealing with this?
Edit: apart from cost, storing user IDs etc goes against our goal of building a private social network. We would like to retain least amount info
https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev
The new legislation likely won't apply to you: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-... - the section "Threshold conditions for categorisation of services".
Focus on building and don't worry about being in regulatory crosshairs until you're actually in their crosshairs.
The less you know about this stuff the better.
If you are building competing service and your competition has links to government, you will be one brown envelope away from being crushed.
These regulations are meant to serve big corporations and protect their monopoly.
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This right here
(also applies to GDPR, and even though GDPR has wider applicability, devs should focus on the low-hanging fruit first instead of going around in what-ifs and exceptions)
You don't need to block anything, british ISPs will block requests to your site by themselves.
I'm not saying this is the intended consequence. But it's certainly something that has been considered.
Classic Streisand effect - attempts to restrict content access inevitably lead to widespread adoption of circumvention technologies.
seems to be working in China. While many Chinese use VPN software, many don't bother with the friction and are fine just using rednote and friends.
Leaving the complexity of attempting to circumvent the great firewall aside, VPN isn't free. Not many are willing to drop £60+/year just to avoid identifying yourself on PH. Easier to find a website that doesn't enforce it.
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VPNs barely work in China IME. NordVPN didn't work, for example, and my self hosted VPN would often get disconnected.
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"Seems to be working in China." Yeah, let's follow the example of the authoritarian countries just to prove how liberal "democracies" have nothing to do with freedom.
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This is how it worked out in Russia. First, around 10 years ago, they adopted very limited laws that required ISPs to block websites. Things like drugs and suicide, with the classic rationale "won't someone please think of the children". Then piracy websites were added to that. Fast forward to now, ISPs were mandated to install black-box "ТСПУ" devices on their networks, "to protect against threats", so now Roskomnadzor doesn't even pretend to care about the law. Half the internet is broken. More if you're on mobile data. Everyone knows what a VPN is. I personally have set up DPI bypass tools for many of my relatives.
In other words, if you censor enough of the internet that your population knows ways around that, your censorship simply ceases being effective.
At least in Russia and in china, the governments don't pretend that what they are doing is to save the children(TM) whereas in the west we like to drape our authoritarian tendencies under such false pretenses.
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> Then piracy websites were added to that.
Really? I thought it was de facto no care for piracy from the gov side. Maybe that is just how it looks from the outside.
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I think the UK govt is a bit more chilled about it all than Putin.
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If you need to use a VPN in your country, maybe your government and elected officials have failed you, are not representing you, and need to be voted out.
Yeah, that's the problem. In the UK, thanks to the party system, "first past the post," and certain longstanding procedural and cultural norms, it's literally impossible to vote them out.
At best, as we're now seeing, they'll go from Tories to Labour to Tories to Labour. With the members of both parties from the same schools, the same social circles, living in the same neighborhoods, and supporting the same policies.
There's no voting their way out of this mess. At this point they need something like the Restoration of the Stuarts. Failing that, they need divine intervention.
It sounds like it is time to create a new internet and not invite these people. I wonder how difficult it would be to create an entirely new internet infrastructure that doesn't rely on anything that currently exists and doesn't or can't connect to the existing network.
It'd seem that local mesh nets with some sort of satellite relay/backbone would facilitate this. That's just moving the goalposts to a certain extent, though. If a system like this came to be and they weren't happy about it, you'd have to figure out a covert way to get satellites up and keep them there.
If wifi meshnets were actually popular and not just some enthusiast thing that's mostly used for better free wifi you could reasonable route around network-side blocks. Most of the content might move through some kind of high-capacity backbone, but anything blocked on the backbone could still find its way through the mesh. At least in places with high enough population density that linking across cities and villages with just wifi or other low-cost methods is viable (Germany and surroundings come to mind as the obvious example)
Yeah, how hard can it be connecting every damn home on this planet with each other, again? Piece of cake! The internet was created in two days, so I’m sure we’ll be able to do it again. Especially without clear financial incentives.
Maybe pivoting to things like Tor makes more sense.
It already exists; Yggdrasil. It's a fully decentralized IPv6 mesh network. Most users do primarily use the internet for transport now, but it can work just as well over link-local (e.g. ethernet, P2P wireless). It's fast, end-to-end encrypted, and relatively simple to set up.
And that doesn't rely on or comply with the law? Enjoy your CSAM filled network. This has happened with TOR and Freenet, and Telegram (although they rely on law for their benefit but they don't comply themselves).
If you want to make a new internet and take all the trash that is on the current one with you to the new one, please do! It will make the current one much more tolerable for the rest of us.
The obvious stage two being the UK targeting VPNs as technology to get around think-of-the-children laws
I doubt they would bother - it's practically impossible without the investment of the level of China.
They will probably pass a law that says you have to be 18+ to purchase a VPN however.
Or target it under the same law. All you need to do is shift the blame for providing adult content onto the vpn provider and suddenly they'll stop providing services to the UK. Might be a little more tricky to enforce globally but perfect enforcement isn't necessary to be a deterrent
This sort of thing is why the US has turned into a governance-averse society in some pretty bothersome ways.
People suggest some sort of regulation for something, or some social service, often ones that are similar to those in the UK, and people who oppose it will point to things like this and use them to illustrate the slippery slope fallacy.
>the slippery slope fallacy
I see the slippery slope fallacy-fallacy more than the base fallacy.
The US is a "governance-avere" society from conception. The Constitution decrees that the government should only have a few explicitly enumerated responsibilities, and nothing else. The country was set up such that the laws that affected a person were supposed to be from as much of a local level as possible. It was set up such that there wouldn't be some rulers (even if democratically elected) lording over the country, deciding things for everyone. A huge chunk of the founding fathers argued for not having a federal government at all.
The US was literally the people rejecting the UK governance system and starting their own, setting it up in a way so that it would never be the UK governance system. And here you are complaining that people in the US point to government happenings in the UK as something to be wary of, saying that the US has become "governance-averse"? Seriously?
Given that there are some ideas from the UK that could do the US some good, yeah.
I mean, it quite literally is a slippery slope. Its only a fallacy if the causal indicators aren't so obvious.
Well, if you look at the US, similar laws are being enacted at the state level as those you see in the UK, often by the same people who would reject the other features of governance you see in the UK (the NHS, stricter firearms regulations, etc.) because of them being "overbearing".
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I need to prove my age to buy a lottery ticket or purchase alcohol. The merchant typically doesn't save my id info.
What if I could purchase a unique QR code, good for maybe a month, that I could use online to prove my age?
There'd still be problems in the US with 1st amendment issues, but I'd at least remain anonymous.
Why not just parental control software?
I don't really understand why every adult should need to jump through hoops because parents won't spend 5 minutes enabling it on their kid's devices.
Hell, modern parental control software with an image classifier is arguably better than these online age verification systems since it works with anything that appears onscreen.
This is the exact system I suggested to a friend. I don't mind having to 'prove' my age, but I do not really want a third party to have my identifiable information nor do I really want the Government knowing what fetishes I may or may not have.
For a digital only solution, I think the best system would be some form of public-private key attestation:
The government advertises their public keys for 18+ verification.
A website generates a unique token - this token is then taken by the user and submitted to the government receiving a signed attestation. This can then be given back to the website to prove the user is 18. It only has to be done once per profile and no information is shared between the Government and the website on who is who.
Unless of course the token is saved by both the website and government in some forever database and then a lookup is done.
Another solution could be a timed/signed token produced by the government that has no input from the website. But this still has the downside that this could just be saved by both parties and in future you could identified if both sides compare data.
> what if i could purchase a unique qr code, good for maybe a month, that I could use online to probe my age?
I can already smell a business opportunity to start illegally reselling/dealing age-verification qr codes.
That also happens with alcohol and tobacco. Cops can run sting operations to catch illegal dealers. But IRL id verification removes easy access for most children while preserving the privacy of adults.
It's called selling a fake ID, which is already illegal.
Yes, this is possible, and not dissimilar to proposals making progress elsewhere, notably in the EU: https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d....
There's a bunch of other "digital wallet" development going on in general, effectively providing digital certificate-backed identity documents and similar (driving licenses, passports). The plan for age verification is that these wallets will also be able to provide a cryptographically signed attestation of age (signed by an EU verification authority, i.e. your id-issuing government org) but with no other personal info included. Then you can present this to anybody, and they can independently verify the signature to confirm it's a recent proof-of-age attestation without knowing anything else about you.
It's still fairly early - lots of blueprints and proof-of-concepts, not yet rolled out anywhere AFAICT - but looks like a reasonable solution I think. In practice I suspect most people's experience will be a government-backed mobile app that you authenticate with once, and then it can handle verification requests on-device or show a QR code that other people can scan & verify.
Because it’s none of your or anybody else’s business what I do online. Don’t negotiate with terrorists.
This reminds me that when payment processors cut off an adult site in Japan, they were able to fall back on users paying for points in cash at convenience stores instead or something like that.
Not a bad system really? Pseudo anonymity and avoids some third party tech firm getting involved?
How is this different from a VPN? You don’t know that the purchaser is the user.
> that I could use online to prove my age
This is just moving personal data responsibilities from service providers (e.g. porn sites) to the central authority (QR code maker and verifier). Unless there is a semi-anonymous way of purchasing age proofs, e.g. over the counter.
I don't think anyone has a problem with verifying their age.
What many people do have a problem with is requiring disclosure of unmodifiable biometric data and government documents that once "hacked"/sold into the data collection pipeline becomes forever tainted and easily stolen.
You can't "reset my password" with biometric data once a malicious actor has it
I have a problem verifying my age or any other piece of information that isn’t critical to whatever service you are providing to me. Beyond that it’s none of your or anyone else’s damn business. If you don’t have a legally issued warrant then leave me the hell alone. This isn’t an area for compromise.
> The merchant typically doesn't save my id info.
Don't give adtech any ideas.
I guess we’ll do anything to protect children…except teach them to think critically.
Critical thinking is quite literally the most difficult thing for children to do. It's one of the very last skills we develop. So yes, the idea is to teach them, but while they're still young and dumb and physically incapable of the critical thinking required here, we need guardrails for them.
Speaking of teaching: time to teach everyone in the uk how to purchase cloud computing time and how to create ssh tunnels.
Good luck on that economy after you ban all https and cloud computing
Headline should be edited to put safety in quotes
I’m sure it’s only the adults using VPNs so don’t worry, this is still a fantastic law that is definitely helping children not watch porn and absolutely not just a massive attack on civil liberties in disguise.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the only people who _couldn't_ get around this were legal adults.
Yep that was my point really
Not so much "threaten" as kill, right? Can't have an open Internet if access to it is gated and blocked. Maybe a semi open Internet or some new category.
Since it's about VPNs - what are good VPNs for someone looking for safety/privacy but not anonymity or even IP hiding?
Not even for streaming. But for general "safety while on the Internet" when the devices (Mac, iPhone) are mostly on public or not-so-secure WiFi (at the residence or on the go). Plan is to keep it always ON or almost always ON.
Not necessarily for the UK.
(Other than Mullvad)
The best VPN is to host your own. I used Digital Ocean. They have preconfigured droplet images for OpenVPN access server. The droplet even serves a client pre-configured with the connection settings.
It took me all of 10 minutes to set up.
A personal cloud VM is very bad VPN for some purposes.
The static IP address, recorded by every site you visit, is directly linked back to you personally, and only you.
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Oh god. I should have said "other than self-hosted". I swear to god I thought about it but forgot and added only Mullvad. I can't edit it now.
And thank you for saying this but I have tried. Both on DigitalOcean and on a VPS bought from a deal on LET - didn't do it for me. It was a pain unless I left it literally untouched, un-updated, un-upgraded forever and ever. I know, I know - I must have done something wrong or I need more patience or both. But sadly it didn't cut it for me. It made it hate the entire thing.
Other self-hosted option could be one of those sites where you can use one service and pay for it like pikapods or so but then if I am doing that then why not just use a VPN because anyway I would have to sign up for different services and then pay for it too while not having the control a droplet or vps will offer (talked about above)
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In the year of our lord 2025, don't use OpenVPN. Use wireguard.
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This sounds more like a task for NextDNS than a VPN, tbh. Or are you worried about no TLS?
I have tried NextDNS and I think I should try it again but the last few experiences ended in a lot of sites breaking. Maybe this time I will try someone from country who has written a tutorial about it.
But a VPN would have been more appropriate for this task and if ever I needed to use a different IP from a different country (that would be rare and mostly to access websites for a short period) I could just do it easily.
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Can I ask - why not Mullvad?
Connectivity and IP blockage (I assumed) issues last time I tried it.
But the main reason is — it’s the default recommendation on HN. So I would prefer to know what else good there that people are using. Because it would be really sad if it’s the only one. I kind of refuse to believe that.
That’s all.
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if you're on apple... iCloud Private Relay.
though you may need to be more clear on the safety / privacy benefits you expect to gain
iCloud Private Relay has the benefit of more accepted by payment processors etc, but the downside is that because it doesn't mask your country of origin the UK censorship rules still apply whilst using it.
I've found that Mullvad generally has the best privacy reputation, but I've also been blocked by a lot of sites whilst using it.
The mainstream consumer VPNs like Nord, Proton etc aren't as great for privacy but I suspect they're less likely to be blocked. I'd love to have more data to justify this though.
Yes that Safari only? Has that changed? Though I don't think it offers much - esp if you compare it to a VPN or even NextDNS or so.
I genuinely think that some 20% of the population are incurable moral busybodies, and the main function of liberal democracy is to protect the rest of society from these people. In this case liberal democracy has failed to protect us from some truly terrible legislation. Its impact goes far beyond adult content, it's an open attack on freedom of expression in this country that will lead to the proliferation of scams and identity theft. The amount of absurd things I've been asked to show ID for already when I've forgotten to turn on the VPN is exactly as bad as predicted, and I'm not going to trust some two-bit identity checking service.
The depressing thing is this seems the one thing a government that's famous for U-turning won't U-turn on. Even if (let's be honest, when) a list of MPs proclivities emerges from a data breach the most they'll do is exempt MPs from the provisions rather than admit this is a terrible law that makes the UK more dangerous rather than safer.
Liberal democracy's actual function is to convert the will of the people into a functioning government.
If it was actually true that 80% of the population opposed this law, MPs would be falling over themselves to run against it and it would be gone immediately after the next election cycle.
I think it's a dumb law, but I also don't think the UK's democracy is that broken. It's pretty clear a majority of UK voters support or are at least ok with this law.
I think it is not that they are OK with it, the majority probably does not care, or has no clue of its implications.
Why do you think it's clear a majority of UK voters support this?
UK and Australia are slowly going the way of China in their blocking, and the eventual end effect could be that they will get their citizens cut off from the internet.
I run a website that provides English articles to trending topics from Chinese social media. It’s kinda funny that topics discussed there are sometimes “too sensitive” for western LLMs who will straight up refuse to write about them.
Take from that what you will re: China vs western censorship
Like what?
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The EU too. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...
It's just that Australia and UK tend to lead the way when it comes to authoritarianism and then it becomes "this has always been like this, you conspiracy theorist".
And several states in America.
They're coming for AI tools next. Here in Australia they're rolling out the academic socialist activists on the public broadcaster. These experts know how to keep us safe apparently.
This morning it was all about "think of the children" in the context of banning AI tools that could potentially be used to make AI generated CSAM. Even adult nudity is in the firing line. Ban the lot was the advice from the expert. Not just banning access, but making it a crime to even possess the tools.
What next? Ban paint brushes because someone might use them to paint offensive images?
Some countries (like the UK) make it illegal to draw things.
Hell, the UK are currently criminally investigating anime artwork websites.
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Just a reminder “Brexit” happened just a few years ago. Suddenly no British man can be more than 3 months in another European country before being “banned”. You can’t even move to Switzerland and setup a company.
Yes technically it’s possible but I was told my a Swiss accountant “just don’t bother trying unless you can get a European passport - if you can”
This is from personal experience. As odd as it sounds Brexit really affected business ( always thought it was posturing) I can’t imagine what it did to mega corps etc
Just thought I’d share my xp
> As odd as it sounds Brexit really affected business
With all due respect, this was never odd. It was immediately predicted from the day the UK voted for Brexit, along with many of the other very obvious side effects of leaving the EU, like free movement & ability to work, logistical challenges etc.
Unironically, people thought it would end free movement for other people and not them.
When Brits go to another Country, they are expats, bringing their wealth and culture with them. When people come to the UK they are immigrants or economic migrants refusing to get jobs, learn the language or integrate while taking all the jobs.
>It was immediately predicted from the day the UK voted for Brexit
It was predicted long before the vote. The government even posted leaflets in everyone's door explaining that.
Is that unexpected? You'd have the same issues immigrating to any country, right?
It seems like British people got very used to being able to move to the continent but how long was that state of affairs around for, I wonder.
> Suddenly no British man can be more than 3 months in another European country before being “banned”
That’s how visas work in most of the world.
I’m curious now, did you vote for it and not expect this? It doesn’t sound odd at all, it is exactly what everyone said would happen other than people promoting Brexit as some form of nationalism/pride movement.
> Suddenly no British man can be more than 3 months in another European country before being “banned”
People finding out that voting against free movement means movement will no longer be free remains my favorite Brexit trope.
As a Brit that was too young to vote in the referendum I feel like I’m stuck in a venus fly trap and the jaws are closing. I would have liked to live in Europe for a while, but welp, now that option’s gone. An image of a frog boiling in a pot also comes to mind.
Alot of people seemed surprised, that I was surprised.
I was surprised, because I dont follow politics.
I just sort of stumbled upon issues when travelling around Europe.
The point of my comment is not that I was surprised, but that Brexit "happened", from my pov. Im sure many others understood the repercussions like gifted clairvoyant giraffes before it occurred, but I alas did not.
In fairness there was a lot of uncertainty between 'hard brexit' which we got and 'soft brexit' which wouldn't have changed much. My biggest gripe about the whole thing from a democracy point of view is no one really knew what exactly we were voting for. I think it should have been two stage - do you want to leave and then here's the deal - do you still want to do that? I think we would have remained if people had seen the real terms and condition rather than "have our cake and eat it" make believe pushed by certain politicians.
Switzerland isn't in the EU either.
But it's in the Schengen Area, which is relevant here.
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I am surprised that the housing markets in Spain and Portugal haven’t declined due to Brexit.
If anything I would have expected the market to explode in Portugal. The digital nomad visa they offer is one of the easiest for us to get and after living there for five years you regain the right to live in the EU. I’ve considered moving there but their immigration system is dysfunctional apparently.
I uh, surely you knew about visas before this?
I think people assumed there would be an ongoing deal on free travel. Personally I thought there might be. Still no there wasn't and I'm German now.
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Destroy cultural integrity, national identity, create a low-trust society, become more authoritarian to manage low-trust society, import more immigrants at an exponential rate while house costs rise along with unemployment. The list keeps going. This is why far-right is surging on the polls. The country has completely lost all sense.
UK needs immigrants to increase stagnating productivity. this has been the case for decades and it's why no government has done, or will do anything serious to curb it.
Only a small minority of immigrants to the UK come through the skilled visa pathway, even if the health & social care visa numbers were added.
See figure 1.3a - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisor...
Note that to the best of my knowledge, these numbers don't include the Afghan resettlement scheme which would further lower the proportion of employment driven visas.
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How does immigration boost productivity? It's labor-saving automation and machinery investments that boost productivity. I would expect these to be driven mainly by labour scarcity. Growing the labour pool seems like it would drive exactly the opposite. As two examples, Japan has low immigration and an aging population and despite that its productivity has never been higher. By contrast Canada has had extremely high immigration and rapid population growth, and its productivity has flatlined since 2019.
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Then why has productivity never been more stagnant even though immigration has never been higher?
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I don't think that should be the be-all and end-all overriding the natives qualms but regardless.....Is it increasing productivity? In nearby mainland European countries that doesn't appear the case.
We've had the highest levels of immigration ever in the last five years and productivity hasn't increased proportionally or much at all.
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We have had more immigration every year since 97 than almost anyone could imagine prior to that, peaking at a million a year, productivity remains shit.
It's not about productivity, it's about the gross GDP numbers (and initially new labour were 100% OK with a demographic transformation project at the same time)
I'd rather live through a financial crisis than fascism, thanks.
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Yes, but only total GDP goes up. GDP per person goes down.
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This is the trojan horse as nothing has improved.
Welcome to the sticking plaster economy. This may be the economic orthodoxy, but it completely ignores the root causes of poor productivity - and ultimately leads to the state of xenophobia you're seeing today in Britain.
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Very sad to see this from the country that produced some of the most influential pro freedom of speech philosophy the world has ever seen.
Well they also produced pre-totalitarian authors, such as Thomas Hobbes and his advocacy of authoritarian states.
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Freedom of speech is not the same as age restrictions on porn.
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Sad thing as that the good times are very likely never coming back, and the far-right in power will only make everything worse by bolstering even more tribalism and mistrust among the public.
Incredible that you’ve managed to bring this conversation to immigration. In fact, it sounds like you’re saying the root cause of this crappy policy is somehow immigrants.
Far fetched and not cool.
It's a valid topic for discussion. Even as a foreigner who was in UK on a visa and eventually got ilr I'm still concerned about it.
The current situation regarding small boats is not sustainable, particularly when it's proven that the majority are not fleeing persecution but are economic migrants. They're taking advantage of a system designed to help people in trouble, how could you defend that?
And when does it end? Will the UK always accept small boats ad infinitum?
I played by the (harsh) rules and got here legitimately. Why should I have bothered.
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Immigration is becoming the #1 political issue in the UK for a reason.
If they didn't want this, they could have just restricted it and it would have largely gone away as a topic of discussion, but current levels makes it inevitable it will become the main thing people think about
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None of these problems live in isolation. It all feeds back to the same system that is driving itself into the ground.
The refusal to accept these problems is what is creating a surge in far-right popularity. The very people that oppose them have inadvertently become their biggest cheerleaders.
Why is it that the only people who have to justify their beliefs are those who are not in favour of enormous demographic, economic, and political change required to facilitate mass immigration?
One of the reasons they want to make discourse on the internet as painful as possible is because immigration has become an mainstream concern in the UK. Many of the things that are being soft censored is clips about from the British parliament where this and related issues are being discussed.
Just because people like yourself happen to think it is uncouth to discuss, doesn't mean that it isn't part of the equation.
Everyone always wants to bring it back to immigration, because they've seen US ICE snatch squads and internment camps and decide that they want some of that here.
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I struggle to understand how your comment relates to VPN usage in the UK, in any way. Could you please help me understand the relation?
If you believe that this law really is just about protecting our dear sweet children, then they're completely unrelated. But if you really, truly believe that, I'm not sure anything could explain the link simply enough that you'd understand it.
So the law isn't about little Johnny wanking it to PornHub. It's about control. It's a government that has proven time and time again the only thing it cares about is more control over the people it should be serving being able to get a little more control.
If you already have a faltering cultural and national identity, and immigration - both legal and illegal - is skyrocketing[0][1], it's basically a straight line to see a large cohort of people link the two and and vote for the people saying they will end it. It's also not a remotely "far right" opinion to think that people should not be allowed to come into a country illegally, and if you do come into a country illegally, you should be removed. The idea that this is somehow bad is itself the fringe opinion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_Unit...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_Unit...
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immigrants are the only way to save this cluster fuck.
I don't really understand this comment. Can you elaborate?
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> The country has completely lost all sense. This is why far-right is surging on the polls.
Fixed that for you.
I don't think your modification really changes anything from the original comment.
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Here's a consequence few consider:
Malicious actors are now harder to distinguish than legitimate actors, since they both will use VPNs. This is because in essence what VPNs are used for is always to evade the law, regardless of whether it is a law with high approval, like CASM, malware, spamming, drug trade; or laws with high approval for breaking them, like pornography age verification laws, or Intellectual Property laws on movies and music.
This is regardless of who is to blame for this issue, some will argue that it's the fault of those that break the laws with VPNs, some will argue that it's the fault of lawmakers for making stupid laws that deserve to be broken, muddying the waters. Undoubtedly, the third party, strong criminals, will make or amplify propaganda to legitimize breaking small laws, so that they can have legitimate alibies for breaking the law.
The next law will make it illegal to accept traffic from VPNs. They’re letting VPNs exist for now so people think they have a simple bypass. They’ll close that off as soon as the onerous laws pass.
It’s already done a bit voluntarily. Try to use a VPN and pay for something with a prepaid credit card. Try to make a Steam account. Etc.
Get ready for a verified ID that’s required to access anything online because that’s the end goal.
It'd make sense, VPNs are fraudulent in that they lie about the origin of a connection.
There's precedent in financial regulation, is it legal to send and receive wires to and from a swiss bank to conceal their russian or chinese or congolese or iraki origin?
Similarly in intl. trade it is illegal to hide the origin of imports, it is even illegal to reroute imports for the purpose of evading tariffs or compliance.
If y'all want to keep VPNs legal, I suggest you find better excuses than downloading porn and evading netflix restrictions, because the other side argues about infinitely higher stakes.
Turns out the Great Firewall was ahead of its time and it will soon become the standard in the so called "free" world too.
I'll say it again, if I can sign my consumer rights away with a checkbox and agree to terms and conditions with only a checkbox.. Then I can verify my age with a checkbox.
You shouldn't be able to do those things with a checkbox though, and we should all be ripping apart the fact that practice was normalized almost entirely and unilaterally by the tech industry.
Kinda worried they'll just get to work banning consumer VPN use?
how would that work? Besides blocking the websites to download some VPN. Or if someone already has a VPN installed.
I see you’ve never been anywhere that blocks VPNs.
First they will make it seem like only criminals would use VPNs, then they’ll target some actually shady VPN services to use as a scapegoat, then they’ll apply punitive measures to them specifically; then they will use the fact that they have already used punitive measures as a reason to use them blanketly.
Technically: it’s pretty trivial to block almost all VPNs at an ISP level. I think only anyconnect/openconnect is difficult (not impossible) to block.
That this would affect businesses is of no consequence.
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It doesn't have to work on a technical level. Just grab a few people at random, torture them until someone admits guilt, then televise the guilty verdict and life-destroying sentence. Do this two or three times and fear will do the rest of the work for you.
The goal here is compliance, and nothing more.
Doesn’t need to be workable to outlaw it. Turning everyone into a criminal on paper and selectively enforcing is a win for gov
Get the websites blocked too, some kinda minor fine if you're identified as using one, make it seem scary in the public eye to discourage it, ban advertisements?
You can't really stop it, but you can start treating it like Piracy. Maybe ISPs could snoop and report traffic that seems to be going to a VPN even if they can't inspect it.
They could probably manage to deal with the big players (who have enough advertising reach to be used by "ordinary" people). I doubt they could ever block the long tail of non-standard VPNs, especially those that share infrastructure used for legitimate purposes (are they going to ban SSH connections to AWS?).
I can be extremely wrong and so pardon me but I have only ever felt as if China/Iraq/Russia blocks vpn which are extremely authoritarian
if Britain does block vpn, it would look extremely authoritarian but yeah tbh, its looking the same right now too...
I do think that there is some level of bottom tech that needs to go unsupervised/unrestricted otherwise vpn's can fail (china?)
If however they restrict that level of tech too using (packet filtering?) etc., I don't really know, maybe there could be some side consequences too,like maybe some websites can stop working (like how china is cut off from the world from the outside websites primarily)
And honestly, the vpn providers can just change their techniques to be more sneaky and hope that UK govt. doesn't catch them and the UK govt. can try the vpn and find its techniques and then block them too
Its a cat and mouse game really.. The one where there is money incentive on big vpn players to play this game forever, so I wouldn't be too worried I guess.
What I am more worried about is that UK users might download free vpns or bad premium vpns which might make their phones botnets etc., so I would recommend proton vpn or mullvad but I don't want to recommend them too much because I don't want to imagine these products turning bad if a lot of people use it. (enshittenification)
Why? They'll just force VPN providers to check users' ages.
I don't think proton or mullvad would let it slide so easily?
Slightly related question. How Matrix, Mastodon, Bsky and Nostr handling this? More specifically the small and personal instances.
Bluesky asked for a picture or a credit card auth.
That’s the main instance right? I am curious about the small and individual instances.
Every day preteen boys around the world are destroying their premature brains by watching stuff that should be 18+ by simply clicking a single button that says "I am over 18". They form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button. Many of these kids are never the same after their innocence is stripped.
You can blame the parents for allowing them unfettered access to the internet, but their classmates will show them something while they're hanging out after school or waiting for the bus. This doesn't even include the softer stuff that gets _recommended_ to them every day on tiktok and instagram reels - actively pushing them towards more explicit content.
I don't necessarily agree with the politicians here and I do believe there are ulterior motives at play such as information gathering for blackmail on adults, etc.
What is the solution here? I don't think there is one that satisfies everybody.
These sites implementing this could also implement a DNS TXT record or similar saying they are over 18s only (gambling sites would be included here too, and with a little thought you can categorise the sites).
They could publish their IP addresses so that the traffic can be blackholed at the router by the account holder.
The choice would then be down to the person paying the bill whether to block or not.
It won't apply to shady sites, but those sites won't do age verification anyway.
The problem is nobody wants the account holder to have the power.
> This doesn't even include the softer stuff that gets _recommended_ to them every day on tiktok and instagram reels
This is what needs regulated, not pushing “papers, please” Statsi nonsense on the adults.
I feel much the same way. This is a real headache of a problem for me because I'm pretty privacy-oriented, but this is a serious, serious problem that needs real intervention.
Way too many kids are rotting their brains away either becoming gooners or clout-chasers. I thank God every day I was born too early to have access to this stuff as a kid. I can't imagine what this "you must always be online and also sexy" culture is doing to our youngest generations.
Give me the IP addresses of every site and I'll blackhole them on my router if I want to. That solves the home problem. I'll also ask why gambling sites, which litter sports broadcasting, aren't included, and indeed why gambling is allowed to be advertised to under 18s at all.
Doesn't solve the away problem, which is mainly 5g. I should be able to do that as the account payer.
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Interestingly, the youngs in the US seem to be much less into sex and drugs than previous generations. The stuff we got up to as GenX youth are legitimately shocking to our children.
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Pornography addiction doesn't exist. No major medical body in the world considers it an actual condition. Studies show that self-reported pornography addicts consume the same amount of pornography as non-addicts, but have much higher rates of religiosity and conservative sexual norms. Pornography "addiction" is a moral panic narrative, not a medical reality.
I agree that children should not have access to sexually explicit material and that it can warp their relationships to sex. I also agree that some people have unhealthy relationships to pornography; there are plenty of psychological and psychiatric factors that lead people to engage in disordered sexual behaviours.
But people NEED to stop bringing medical pseudoscience into these discussions. Statements like "[children] form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button" are neither true nor useful.
Can you link the studies?
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Before the internet, preteen boys just had stashes upon stashes of Playboy and other forms of porn ;)
Honestly seems more fun if you think about it since you could technically trade the goods around
I mean, ZKP of age seems to be a good enough compromise. Does it add friction? Yes. I used it a week ago to test, it isn't a smooth experience, but honestly, it's good enough.
The fact that people need to install vpn to access porn is also a solution. I doubt children younger than 13 could do it.
A 13-year-old is one year away from highschool. You're underestimating the user-friendliness of VPNs and the tech-savviness of, if not the average middle-schooler, than the 85th-percentile middle-schooler at least.
> They form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button. Many of these kids are never the same after their innocence is stripped.
[citation needed]
> What is the solution here?
The kids who grew up on violent games and unlimited free internet porn are adults now. We're fine. I don't understand what's all the ruckus about.
Unless the real issue is that people are noticing certain societal changes that are very difficult to combat so the politicians blame porn because otherwise they'd have to admit that they have no solutions to more pressing problems. Please note how suddenly the housing crisis, vote manipulation, inequality, fucked job market, mental health crisis, genocide in Gaza, war in Ukraine, loneliness epidemic, unchecked immigration, phone addiction all became irrelevant side topics because right now we're laser focused on making sure that boys going through puberty won't see a naked titty. Truly a clown world we live in.
I went through puberty in the golden age of internet porn. After widespread high-speed internet became a thing, but before we started algorithmically monetizing every second of people's attention. I'm so happy of that. I still have my collection of porn I downloaded as a horny teenager.
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To any Brit citizens, do you feel like the general populace won't fight back about their freedom being taken, or do you think that this will continue until a semi-autocracy result? Is it a topic of conversation in the general population, or is it just a shrug of acceptance?
Shrug mostly.
Tech savvy like me think maybe I'll have to click the vpn button on the browser one day - not that big a deal.
Non tech savvy probably haven't heard of it.
Semi-autocracy result? It's a democracy. The policy was fairly popular. The next election, quite likely Reform will win and scrap it.
The conversation seems to go something like: UKgovt: "kids are being hurt by porn and self harm stuff on mostly US and overseas sites - we'll stop it and fine them £18m if they do" US folk: - freak out - "how can they harm our precious websites? The UK is over. It's going 1984!" UK people - whateves.
Bear in mind we wrote 1984 and are familiar with that stuff and this bill isn't it. That agent Krasnov guy is more of a worry.
I think a decent amount of people don't even realize what is happening. For example, lots of people still don't know about the iCloud backdoor that's trying to be implemented by the government.
Those who know are annoyed but not enough that it will cause change; I don't think most believe it will get worse either.
Unfortunately the default will be people going on the App Store, getting the first app that has 'VPN' in the title, download, and forget. Completely failing to address a systemic issue.
This alternative approach is fine. When people use extra money to pay for such services, it boosts economic activity and creates a market-driven filter. If you are economically advanced, you can afford this workaround. If you are not, well you are surrendering to govt safety rules. And thus everything works.
What's stopping lawmakers to require VPN providers to verify the age of their users?
I'm guessing this is technically challenging. There are VPN protocols designed to be difficult to differentiate from other encrypted traffic. As a result, VPN providers based outside the UK know that they can just ignore the UK law and probably won't be successfully blocked in the UK.
Enforcement, one countries laws don’t apply in another. Which is kind of why the age verification thing won’t work… There will always be some jurisdiction that’ll ignore things for profit.
Not entirely true. If I'm incorporated in country A and want to offer a service in country B, I'll have to comply with the local regulations. Furthermore, most VPNs have local presence in the EU as well. NordVPN is incorporated in Panama, but also has an entity in The Netherlands.
Well, what’s preventing the UK to ban the websites/VPN services that don’t comply at the ISP level?
This is what Russia is (semi-successfully) doing.
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If that were true, we'd see the adult sites just migrating to those other, friendlier countries - I don't believe we are.
So, is internet freedom still a thing in any countries? And what's their immigration policy like?
This might be a dumb question, but is it possible for the UK government to ban VPN usage within the UK?
They banned porn with choking in it. They banned toy advertising in the evening. They tried to ban client side encryption for iCloud. Make no mistake they will go for vpns too.
100%.
Funnily enough. They just need to claim it's "protecting the children" and people fall for it.
The funniest part is that high profile criminal cases go unpunished very visibly. Even if they have minors in their context, because the elite figures in question must be protected from the enforcement of rules.
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Banning porn depicting choking "to protect women from violence" is so funny. You could not ask for a better example of moral panic from people that didn't do their research. Choking is a strongly women preferred kink.
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No they can't. Myself, and quite a few other people, need it for work.
Do you think that will stop them? They tried to ban encryption for petes sake.
They could force you to provide ID in order to use it though.
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It's possible but I don't think they will.
I mean, it's a sovereign state. The government can legislate for the sky to be purple if it wants to (though obviously that won't affect actual reality).
there are five lights
Wild that Labour just let this go into effect without any changes.
I've been using a VPN exclusively in the UK on my home laptop and mobile phone for well over 10 years. Ever since the snoopers charter.
Australia is set to adopt these rules in December, it's going to be another boom for VPN providers.
So funny how countries move in lock-step
Complete joke. The state in Britain needs to be basically completely repealed back to about the early 90s.
I don't care for the framing: users evading the law.
First, this is a law limiting the actions of service providers not users.
But by using a VPN, I'm making my own safety choices. I wish there was an easier opt-out (like an ISP account-level flag), but it I want to present to service providers as (eg) Swedish, so what? I'm an adult, the "safety" laws do nothing for my safety.
The truth is service providers and ISPs have done next to nothing to stop children signing up for (eg) Snapchat, despite a plethora of laws. Of course the parents are to blame, but fixing shitty parenting is hard.
Any advice of which country I should set my VPN to for the best experience of freedom?
Albania works pretty well. I think Youtube doesn't show ads either.
I tend to select Singapore or USA in the drop down.
I think Singapore on balance. A lot of crypto type sites freak out if they think you are in the US.
...depends on your vpn.
I went on a weekend vacation with three guys. I was asked what I thought a good VPN was. They all have VPNs on their phones apparently. Here I am thinking they are technologically adept, maybe a little bit security conscious. Or maybe misled by advertisements.
It wasn't until after I got home I realized it was because of adult content.
Whatever it is for, let freedom ring. These puritanical laws do nothing but empower government with the end goal of totally controlling online speech.
> They all have VPNs on their phones apparently
They listen to podcasts and watch youtube. They know that a good VPN will stop their internet banking details being stolen, protect their family in their home and add 2-4 inches to their manhood.
Use code "Grifter Affiliate Marketing" for 10% off at checkout, thats code "Grifter Affiliate Marketing" for 10% off at checkout. Protect your privacy today.
Until like a week ago there was no age checking system for porn and no reason to use a VPN really. Although your friends could have been into some very strange stuff.
There has been a good reason to use a VPN for 25 years now (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000)
The "VPN use surges in UK" articles are bought and paid for by the VPN industry.
I don't believe it is possible to convince me that VPN's as sold and marketed are anything but a massive scam. Yes, that includes the company that you say is honest.
What do you mean by "scam"? That you pay and that they don't work at all? That they don't bypass the geo restrictions? Because they do.
Perhaps you mean that they are bad value(ripoff vs scam)? Then sure, probably they are. But you're basically paying to not get flagged by cloudfare. Back in the day, you bought a cheap server from OVH or some other lowcost provider, stuck openvpn on it (nowdays wireguard) and you were golden. But now that Cloudfare middle-mans half the internet, it doesn't really work anymore.
You pay the VPN providers for "clean"(ish) IPs so you don't get stuck behind Cloudfare captcha-loops.
I want to believe Mullvad is legit but I'm too old, have read too much and I'm way too cynical
They do what they say on the tin (i.e. not a "massive scam").
If people think they do other things, that's not a "scam", that's people being misinformed about what a VPN is and does. That's on them.
I use Veepn, free version. It works well and costs nothing. I doubt they are extra honest but I fail to see how they are scamming me. Their monetization seems to consist of nagging me to switch to the paid version approx weekly.
...that's a really wild take and I seriously wonder what it means.
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Mullvad is going to make a lot of money from English stupidity.
Clearly, the next step is to regulate VPNs
Sandford Police are on the scene
When will governments and people learn prohibition doesn't work?
Now they will ban VPNs
Welcome to the Cloudflare captcha on every site you visit, the internet is now broken for you.
Predictable own goal. If a lot of UK users end up routing their traffic through a foreign VPN then GCHQ's backbone taps become far less useful.
The article is behind a paywall
https://web.archive.org/web/20250729113546/https://www.wired...
Doesn't seem to be paywalled here. It is behind a consent box with multiple “legitimate interest” lies (or “we see your preferences not to be commercially stalked, but fuck you and you poxy preference we want to anyway”), which archive.today works around nicely: https://archive.is/4QlDl
It was not behind a paywall. It worked for me.
Wired has a paywall that allows users to read four articles per month for free before requiring a subscription.
the irony
This was an entirely predictable outcome.
As is the next step: a slow but steady expansion of what's considered "unsafe" or "harmful" used to justify ever-increasing restrictions and censorship.
As a student of 1930s and 1940s history, I can say for sure that the most terrifying aspect of what took place wasn't the "Gestapo" and all the open terror, it was the propaganda that fooled so many people and the censorship that kept the lies alive. Humanity still has not fully come to terms with the layers upon layers of lies that took place before and during WWII.
And VPNs will probably end up in that category too :(
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just use Tor
"if you want to watch this depraved porno let us just see your face and your ID card first"
(¬‿¬)
Paywall
I've posted this before: We shouldn't need Age Verification checks for adults in the first place.
Create a better, standardized, open-source parental control tool that is installed by default on all types of device that can connect to the web.
The internet aspect of the parental control should be a "Per Whitelist" system rather than Blacklisting. The parents should be the ones to decide which domains are Whitelisted for their kids, and government bodies could contribute with curated lists to help establish a base.
Yes, there would be some gray area sites like search engine image search, or social media sites like Twitter that can allow you to stumble into pornography, and that is why these devices that have the software turned ON, should send a token through the browser saying "Parental Control". It would be easier for websites to implement a blanket block of certain aspects of their site than expect them to implement whole ID checks systems and security to make sure that no leaks occur (look at the TEA app) like the UK is expecting everyone to do.
Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography. I was once a teenager, every adult was, and we know that it's a natural thing to masturbate which includes the consumption of pornography for most in some way. Repressing their desires, their sexuality, and making this private aspect of their life difficult isn't the way. Yes, yes, there is nuance to it, (very hardcore/addiction/etc) but it should be up to the parents to decide with given tools if they trust their kid to consume such a thing.
As for the tool itself. Of course we have parental tools, but they can be pretty garbage, their all different, they're out of the way, and I understand that many people simply don't know how to operate them. That's why I believe that creating a standardized open-source project that multiple governments can directly contribute to and advertise for parents is the way, because at the end of the day, it should be up to the parents to decide these things, and for the government to facility that choice.
Obviously, besides the internet aspect, the tool should have all the bells and whistles that you'd expect from one, but that's not the topic.
And yes, some children would find a way, just like they're doing now for the currently implemented ID checks. It's not lost of me that VPNs with free plans suddenly exploded in 4 digits % worth of downloads. A lot of those are tiny people who are smart enough. Or using an app like a game to trick Facial Recognition software.
Also, I'd be remiss to not point out a very obvious fact. This, and I'm not just referring to the UK, isn't about children, it's not about terrorism, it's not about public safety. It's about control, it's about tracking, it's about documenting, it's about power over the masses. I know some people will hand wave this away, but we have been seeing a very obvious, very fast, rise of authoritarianism since COVID and later the war in Ukraine. It's not a new trend, but it is one that got accelerated at those stages and has been progressively getting worse world wide.
> Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography.
I'm against: pornography, as found in search results, is generally quite bad. Sexism, racial stereotyping, misrepresentations of queer issues: and that's just the titles. Page 3 has nothing on porn sites.
Maybe I'm judging a book by its SEO spammers here, but I've not read anything that'd disabuse me of this notion: indeed, people raise concerns about unreasonable body image expectations, normalising extreme sex acts like choking without normalising enthusiastic consent practices, the sites allowing CSAM and "revenge porn" that they've already taken down to be re-uploaded…
That said, I routinely come across nudes / sexualised imagery on the Fediverse, and that's… not an issue? Sometimes I find it a bit squicky (which teaches me not to play lift-the-flap with clearly-marked content warnings – I don't know what I expected), but the only times I've seen something viscerally offensive has been people re-posting from porn aggregation sites. (I've blocked three or four accounts for that, and I don't see it any more.)
If porn sites had the kind of stuff that queer / disabled techies post on main on niche social media sites, then I'd be absolutely fine with teenagers accessing porn. As you say, a safe environment for adolescents to explore their sexuality is unequivocably a good thing. I just don't think commercial porn sites provide that.
This is what concerns me the most about the Online Safety Act. It's shutting down the aforementioned queer / disabled techies on their social media sites, and surely plenty of other pro-social sex communities I don't even know about, but it's not going to do a thing about the large aggregators that are the real problem. It in fact makes the whole problem worse.
There is certainly good and bad porn - in terms of quality, messaging, and ethics of production. The most successful and widespread porn falls on the bad side of all of these - partly because the industry is just historically broken, partly because good porn is more expensive to produce, but subject to all the same restrictions and costs as bad porn.
Your post reads like a parody of itself. If you're being genuine, I encourage you to step out of your attachment to your own views and meditate on what you said here, and what it looks like to an outside observer who does not share your views.
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“Queer/Disabled techies post porn that I think is good for kids, which is great because otherwise children would have to just use PornHub” is a GREAT ideology to viscerally radicalize the majority of people against you AND the people you’re speaking about.
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Anyone who supports literal children of any age viewing pornography needs their hard drives checked immediately.
“Literal children”, by which definition?
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Then you deserve all the censorship that comes your way. Treat others like you wish to be treated.
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I see many are focusing on the aspect of VPN itself and not enough as to why this is occurring in UK in particular and we should expect it in countries like Canada, and other EU countries as well in the near future.
The fact of the matter is conservative movements are surging not only in UK, EU, US but in Asia as well (ex. Recent surprise seat gains by moderate right parties).
The reason there is a common reaction across borders is the decoupling from globalism which pushed the overton window so far left that its brought a yo-yo effect to the right.
Globalism isn't a conspiracy theory its real established and demonstrable political movement to dilute all cultures by attacking their national identity, heritage through mass immigration which ultimately leads to a low trust social dynamic via crime (proven by statistics) or incompatibility (belligerence against their host counry and refusal to integrate and pushing imported foreign culture and values).
It's no wonder that such reckless push to gaslight its own ethnic/religious incumbents have swung polls in the opposite direction, and in a desperate attempt to hold on to the power that globalism has given to those that preach it, ironically turn to fascist tactics such as censorship, criminalization of speech and increased surveillance that only emboldens more overton window shift to the right.
You kept calling people "far right" yesterday for slightest disagreements to progressive policies in order to censor and intimidate them and today you have huge number of people who no longer care for that label as they find safety in size and number.
At this rate, given the way things are going in UK and EU and many other countries, its going to manifest in extremely far right wing policies being normalized and coming to power as majority of the population becomes "far right" and the new normal center, and those that called themselves "liberal progressive left" will find themselves outside the Overton window.
We've probably seen these ebbs and flows in politics countless times throughout human history and I understand better as to why things like Bolsheviks, Nazis, Communists came to rise.
The demand to bypass political censorship and surveillance increasing in the West, the so called bastion of democracy and freedom, will backfire into wide scale civil unrest. We've already seen a preview of it in Spain recently, where a group of Moroccan migrant gangs have attacked locals and in turn locals fought back and burned down a large mosque.
I've been to UK, France and Ireland recently and there is deep deep resentment from the locals towards the Muslim and North African population, and it reminded me of my childhood growing up in Lebanon, witnessing the arrival of Muslim refugees, neighborhood demographics changing, ppl being jailed and labeled racist for complaining, then came civil war between the new majority group and the incumbents, political concession by virtue signaling equity and harmony which lead to even more corruption within those demographics that did not respect agreements and its ultimate demise today.
I cannot see a future without the same events unfolding in Lebanon playing out in UK. All it takes is one major event (for us in Lebanon, it was Muslim militant group attacking a church) to ignite the flame, and as you saw Torres, Spain it finally took an elderly Spain man being victim of attack by 3rd gen Moroccan youth to explode into violence.
Remigration unfortunately is the only way that can peacefully diffuse smoe of the tensions and to avoid the same fate as Lebanon but I can see this will be a difficult path especially innocent individuals of that demographic caught in the middle during this rapid Overton Window shift accelerated by an increasingly sophisticated users and dystopian surveillance apparatus....
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Don't underestimate the will of young children to do what is 'forbidden'. Especially when in puberty, they will find ways.
They are humans as well and can therefore think ;)
I should not let your 8 years watch tv alone, nor should you let 8 years old alone in the internet.
I really think the whole human race's ability to exchange information freely is bigger than "porn addiction" bs. We do this over and over and it always ends the same stupid way--millions upon millions of deaths that were avoidable.
It baffles me that some people vote for socialists and are then surprised to have soviet-style laws.
The Online Safety Bill was introduced by the previous Conservative government.
And criticised by the current party in power for not going far enough. Then passed by them
The application of that law has nothing to do with online safety. Soviet-style politics are very good at taking a law ("we need to protect children from suicide websites") to turn it into something completely different ("... so we need to censor footage of protesters outside of the Britannia hotel").
It baffles me that some people blame "the other side" for the things "their side" gleefully ushered in.
socialism is when you have to provide ID to download porn
Gee, maybe Trump isnt so bad
pornography does not harm children.
That is an incredibly neive view which has been proven wrong many times over.
Exposure to pornography early on in life dramatically increases the chance that person will be affected by things like sexual addiction, or gravitate towards extreme views in the same vein like incels.
Testosterone is a very powerful drug, and young brains need protecting from explicit content if we want to bring up mentally healthy males in our societies.
Every male on earth looked at pornography as a child. Any problem it creates is literally as bad as it can possibly be.
You also don't have a control group, and social media is a much better guess for whats wrong with men anyway.
Basically all of the hyper masculine bullshit aimed at children advises them to not consume pornography.
This is just fear-mongering.
We all know how people in position of power, governments like kids. Trump also likes kids. They do it for kids, sure.
If not for kids, then why they introduce data-gathering solutions? I wonder why...
Is this just people who REALLY need their porn, or a backlash like when people buy lots of guns because they think they will get banned?
Or maybe they just want to access X content which is now censored from the UK, like migrants put in hotels ?
The first thing. Governments let it fester uncontrolled for decades, it's going to be a huge shitshow to try and control it now.
I must be honest with you, as far as I am pro net-neutrality, I can observe people using internet irresponsibly. As the internet stood up to allow sharing of science publications, now mostly shared is the pornographic type of content. When Tim Berners-Lee was thinking about people sending themselves a book he probably (we still may ask him) haven't predicted people sending boob/dick pics. As the content technical level lowers, amount of people sharing their stupidity increases. Meanwhile other irresponsible people give phones to their children (I am amongst them) hoping the children won't go into the bad places and trusting in freedom.
Currently my kids got already out of my hand, and I really wonder how could I filter the content that goes to them. Internet became something else, so maybe I won't install a VPN to their phones and they won't be able to see the most horrible things anymore.
> now mostly shared is the pornographic type of content
What is your source? I believe you are incredibly biased. Netflix is one of the biggest user of bandwidth worldwide, and if we're talking about the percentage of "pornographic" IP packets, I think it's even less than the former.
> and I really wonder how could I filter the content that goes to them
Parental control on device and DNS-level blocker (think AdGuard, PiHole, ...). Hosts file could also work as long as they're not admin on their PC. If they're skilled enough to circumvent all of that, then I think your kids will be fine.
I must admit the amount of pornography in different forms is now apparently everywhere on social media. Including social media I thought was "safe":
I see videos that I think are overtly sexual in nature on YouTube, even if the video is something supposedly "innocent". If you click through to their profiles there is an inevitable link to 18+ content most of the time. I am subscribed to only tech/film/gaming channels on youtube and this content is now always put into my feed. I probably have cursed myself by checking these people's profiles after the fact.
You are right though that by bandwidth, streaming services including Netflix make up the majority of data over the Internet and it is not pornographic/dangerous for children at all.
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You can just configure their DNS to use 1.1.1.3. No need for the government to step in and manage your child's internet access.
You obviously have no experience with trying to block a modern teenager from the web. That will stop them for seconds, maybe minutes.
Im not for this bill at all, but I agree with what the government are saying about parents being unable to protect their children because the children know more about the systems than the parents do.
>When Tim Berners-Lee was thinking about people sending themselves a book he probably (we still may ask him) haven't predicted people sending boob/dick pics.
You are asking tech to solve people problems. That is a recipe for disaster.
We require people to verify their age in person to access pornography, it doesn't seem like that far a stretch to require it online. You can't even by a ticket to an R-rated movie without age verification. That seems reasonable to me. I see I'm in the minority here. I understand the slippery slope argument but if we succumb to that then nothing could be done anywhere ever. I understand this could be abused, but it's up to us to make sure it isn't. I think that's why people don't like it, it requires diligence and effort to keep things sane. Much easier to just allow children to view content they absolutely shouldn't then be politically active and make sure our laws are sensible and our representatives are held accountable.
I understand this could be abused, but it's up to us to make sure it isn't
Exactly, by protesting and fighting laws like this.
What exactly do you want people to "make sure of" with the law in place? If someone is concerned about this law, what specific action should they be taking in the name of "diligence"?
Having a law saying children shouldn't view pornography isn't abuse. It's common sense. Just like saying a 12 year old can't legally buy weed. Is that a slippery slope? Should 12 year olds be able to buy weed? If not, why is that not a slippery slope and this is?
What needs to be kept in check is the scope. Let's say they try to age restrict sites that are subversive, but not obscene. That's what I'm talking about.
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It's up to the people who WANT age verification to ensure that it can't be abused rather than up to US to prevent it from being abused after the fact.
Invoking the "slippery slope" fallacy when the country with the greatest military in the world is abusing public records to grab people off the street and out of court rooms is an interesting choice.
I don't follow the argument. Why isn't it up to the people who want strict privacy to ensure that it can't be abused by porn providers?
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With in-person access it’s easy to do two things:
1. Verify the ID without storing it in your system. Someone just looks at it.
2. Visually confirm that the photo on the ID matches the person entering the building.
Neither of these apply online.
Has everyone forgotten how kids operate? They’re not clueless. They’re going to realize that they don’t need to submit their ID. They just need to submit someone’s ID.
At first they’ll just use fake ID generators and submit those photos.
If that loophole gets closed somehow, a market will appear for buying ID verified accounts for trivial prices. People will create ID verified accounts and sell them cheap for side money. The only way around this is to start storing ID information for every account to make sure IDs aren’t used multiple times.
It’s one giant slippery slope of consequences for the adults forced to submit IDs, while the people who want to work around it do so trivially.
Right. Just like kids would hang out outside a 7-11 and ask someone older to buy them a Playboy. Or pay a homeless person to buy them beer. Should we remove the age limit on alcohol purchases because kids aren't clueless? That's not a rhetorical question. Should we remove all laws that can be abused? Your argument falls apart very quickly.
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These laws aren't just about porn sites though. They affect sites like Wikipedia. [1]
You don't need to verify your age to enter a bookstore or a library.
And if you really want to control who can access porn then the only way to do that is with a whitelist filter on the device being used. These laws are onerous without being effective.
I do think a standardized requirement for commercial websites to have content rating meta tags (like the existing content=adult and content=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA) would be a good thing though, just to make more lenient filtering easier.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65388255
For age verification for a R rated movie, the movie theater does not copy your passport and match it with your IP address.
At minimum they should have tried for a digital attestation and not "send pictures of your official identity documents to every site" approach.
Well, they didn't take that approach.
Read the actual guidance. They in no way require "send pictures of your official identity documents to every site".
There are a bunch of ways (some advisable, some not) where an existing entity that knows you are an adult can extend just that -- we know they are an adult.
Credit card providers know all their customers are adults, for example -- because you have to be an adult to enter into a credit agreement. And credit cards are insured.
Mobile phone companies in the UK block adult content by default and have done for some time; you have to unblock it by telling them you are an adult. But once you've done that, adult content can be verified quite trivially with an SMS.
And there are other methods still. For example a site with longstanding members is allowed to estimate the age of members based on how long they have used the same email address!
It's not a porn filter. It's a set of rules for companies to follow to identify adult users.
Is it the best law? No. But it's not the Texas law, that's for sure, and that law has survived a US Supreme Court challenge.
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Worth noting that most UK ISP's already require age verification from the bill payer to turn off the adult content filter.
So this is a new filter on top of the old.
I don't see a world where this won't be abused.
Maybe by the authorities, furthering policies already in place to deal with people who don't toe a certain line of thought.
Probably by people outside the law, who now have a fantastic system to relentlessly attack. A place to source identity information that can be used for almost any part of a criminal enterprise, from buying credit cards to selling new names to carry.
And when security of government systems fail, in a way where damage is irreversible like this case, it is... Rare... To see fair outcomes.
I know all the other comments are massively disagreeing, but I'm relieved to find I'm not completely alone.
It's not even that I think this is a good idea, but it does seem a fairly standard extension of existing laws. Potentially I'm missing something? Everyone else seems to be enraged by this.
I'm pretty sure you're not alone: studies show that a median of 31% of the worlds population support authoritarianism(1)
(1) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/28/who-likes...
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I think the biggest difference compared to in-person ID checks is that I've never had to take a picture of my ID or face for an in-person check. Some bouncer or other person takes a quick look at my face and my ID, and that's the end of it. I don't have to wonder if there's a picture floating around forever of my face and ID, because none got taken. For such physical interactions, I'm thus less worried that all that information is getting stored in some database that's inevitably going up be leaked.
Honestly, if the way this worked was that you could head over to the Pornhub office and get unlocked access from the bouncer at the door, that would probably be preferable.
> Potentially I'm missing something?
The problem is the surveillance and tracking, not the age verification itself.
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Why don't we just require kids to price they're an adult before accessing the Internet then? The issue with these laws isn't the goal, but the implementation is fatally flawed. Do you think websites like Worldstar are going to implement age verification? Of course not, no foreign site will. Then the next step for a law like this must be censuring all of those sites across the country.
Who defines what should be censored? The law certainly doesn't; it's purposefully vague to give the most latitude possible to the implementers. There's already been cases with the new UK law where peaceful arrests were censored by the law due to "violence."
VPNs exist, proxy websites are easy to setup, and frankly parents need to take some ownership.
Two alternative laws that'd have been much better: a) Require ISPs to provide a child friendly Internet gateway that would blacklist large weather if the Internet without a login. And b) legally require websites to accurately describe the content on their page and it's age appropriateness in headers sent back to the user, so the ISP or end device can decide whether to age gate a website.
These are much better solutions, the burden on websites isn't so onerous (many small sites have already had to shutdown due to the burden of the UK law). Implementation is distributed, preventing a single state actor from having full control of a censorship machine. Parents are empowered to decide what content is okay for their children. And you don't have to upload your fucking ID to use the Internet.
People who support this crap need to stop believing politicians every time they say "think of the children!"
> and frankly parents need to take some ownership.
This. None of this is the state's job, it's 100% on the parents to educate themselves, their children, and be the responsible party for determining and controlling what their kids can or can't do with technology and the internet.
If the state feels like they need to do something, they would be better served providing education and tools to parents. Hell, for the really tech illiterate the state could just offer a managed MDM service that they could enroll their kids devices into if they really can't figure out parental controls themselves.