Yeah, we’re all mad, fuck the suits and all that.
But why does the distinction between “real-world adult material” and “creative, non-realistic”, “artistic, animated works” that “do no harm” matter? Last time I checked, realistic adult material can be just as artistic, and the harm done by negligently letting children watch it seems comparable.
Are they in favour of age verification for “uncreative, realistic” pornography, or is the real distinction just between real-life and online?
Yeah, the “it’s just cartoons so it’s not harmful” argument falls flat pretty quickly. There are much better arguments to be made for why the law is dumb.
It’s the same schtick you hear from pedophiles in defense of their child sex dolls and it’s unsurprising to see it coming from rule34 in particular considering they serve up a lot of that content in cartoon form.
I think it’s more about the legal distinction between drawn and ‘real’ porn.
TBH “negligently letting children watch it” seems like a sensless statement to me. The onus should be on parents to filter their kids’ internet environments, not literally every accessible site on the open internet (which are never going to comply with a patchwork of age verification regs).
It’s because some arguments against porn says the actors involved have it bad. Something that can’t happen in a drawing.
I interpreted it as “can’t possibly be doing harm to the people in the video” - eg as much of mainstream porn can do - since there are none if everything is animated fiction
And that is the correct interpretation.
Admittedly, I’m pretty sure UK did this with the underage consumers in mind, not the industry actors, for whom both sorts of porn would have a similiar impact.
Personally though, the constant repeating to me sounded comedic and they were making fun of how seriously we’re taking nude drawings with this, which sounds silly even if it’s justified.
There’s a lot of rule34 comic sites out there, I just found out. Which one is this? Just for research and background.
Ah, that makes sense. The one URL I knew, paheal.net, isn’t blocked but it looks basically identical to the above one
Thats cause they are all boorus they are all based on the same thing.
In the name of science and curiosity, thanks!
Imagine if people could just choose what country they’re browsing from
Imagine if people could choose what country they’re
browsingfrom.Forget tax havens, eventually some countries will probably become content havens and sell server space hosted there. Probably some carribean island
Not a long term solution.
It’s yet another step in seeing the Internet becoming owned by big corporations. Only big corporations can implement these things.
Art, creativity, people doing internet things as a hobby, that is dying more and more everyday.
I miss the 90s internet :(
There was a site I found in highschool around 1998 - the paradigm of pessimism.
Full of dark humor and anti-jokes, in glorious web 1.0 - that site had a huge impact on my humor. I’ve never been able to find it again. Just a random site someone hosted somewhere on the Internet - no scams, no paywalls, just a bunch of weird humor.
Nowadays, if there’s something you like online, remember to plug it into archive.org so it gets added to the wayback machine. You’ll still need to remember the URL to access it, but at least it will be archived somewhere
We also desperately need a non-US archive.
Me too, so much!
A big reason why I’ve come to like Lemmy communities so much is really because they give me some old internet feeling. It’s not super crowded, it’s an app that isn’t design for brain rot, it allows interesting online discussion etc.
I think projects like this can continue to exist, even in a bleak corporate owned internet.
I tried gemini protocol for a bit to see if it did a decent job addressing this, but it doesn’t. We do legit need a ‘smallweb’ non-commercial sort of thing, but I suspect retreating to a BBS model is probably what is required.
I2p and the return of webrings. Done.
Webrings were one of the best ways to spend an evening. I loved getting lost in the Tolkien and Gardening ones.
It took like 2 minutes to download a single photo though.
I’d take that over the bullshit attacks the internet of today is attracting.
I can access it freely, I’m so confused am I excluded or somethimg
Fuck off with your device based verification system. That’s just the same service, but as a more invasive app installed on your phone.
Instead of scanning a face or ID and uploading it to a service, we’re expected to run unverified closed source code on the device we carry everywhere in our pockets?!
To be fair, this already applies to any baseband blob.
Fuck off with your device based verification system. That’s just the same service, but as a more invasive app installed on your phone.
not necessarily. you give a phone to your children. you partly lock it down by setting it up as a child account, with its age. you make sure to install a web browser that supports limiting access to age appropriate content according to the age set in the system, maybe taking a parent allowed whitelist. the website is legally obliged to set an appropriate age limit value in a standard HTTP header.
that way, the website does not know your age. the decision is on the web browser.
the web browser checks the configuration in the system, that only the parent can change. it does not send it anywhere, only does a yes/no decision. if the site is not ok, it’ll show a thing like when the connection is not secure or it was put on the safebrowsing list, except that you can’t skip it, only option is to request parent permission.
and finally the age is set in the operating system, without verifying its truthiness, but once again requesting lock screen authentication.
oh and app installs need parent approval for kid accounts, like it should almost always be.this way it’s as private as it can get. the only way a website can find out information about you from this, is to log if your browser loaded the html but not any other resources, because that means you were caught in the age filter. but that’s it.
there’s multiple pieces in this that is not yet implemented, but they should be possible with not too much work.
this is all possible with open source code, if you make sure the kid can’t install anything without parent approval. stores like fdroid could have some badge or something if a browser supports this kind of limitation.All of this is precluded by you using a browser that is authorised and approved by the government.
This is kinda genius
All’s well until other countries try to implement this and you will very quickly see how nearly none of them agree with each other on which age limit goes where. In my opinion, the best way to ensure that children don’t go to certain places on the internet is to either not give them access to the internet at all or to only let them use whitelisted websites that you review yourself before adding.
Ah, I had been thinking that the parent would decide. But of course, how naive of me lol
Doesn’t need to be by age tbh- you could have content tags and filter by content instead of age (I.e. No graphic violence). That would ignore country discrepancies and then give more flexibility
how nearly none of them agree with each other on which age limit goes where.
that’s the task of the website to figure out, the device does not have to be aware of the laws. but I think is still much easier to manage than id verification.
I habe an other idea. don’t make the websites send agelimit http headers, because as you said that can easily vary by country. instead send http headers that tell what kind of content is available there. only the categories that could be questionable. that way the device (actually the browser) would decide if with the kid account’s age that kind of content is accessible.
that way the browsers need to know the age limits, and maybe it’s easier to handle it this way.In my opinion, the best way to ensure that children don’t go to certain places on the internet is to either not give them access to the internet at all or to only let them use whitelisted websites that you review yourself before adding.
ok, and I agree, but only very few parents will do that unfortunately. especially considering that their kids could be discriminated against by their
limitedclasates who don’t have their access so broadly limited.and then, you still need such a whitelisting capability, which I think does not really exist today in firefox and such browsers. addons cant solve this because they can be removed.
categories that could be questionable
That still could vary greatly by country and culture, as one man’s pornography could very well be another man’s art. You would either need a great deal of near-duplicate categories or just label something as explicit the moment a single country pipes up about a woman not concealing her hair or something else that doesn’t bother you one bit.
ok, and I agree, but only very few parents will do that unfortunately. especially considering that their kids could be discriminated against by their limited clasates who don’t have their access so broadly limited.
I suppose that we could at least be able to convince the parents that letting their children go unsupervised on the internet is like letting them go unsupervised in the big city. Totally fine if they’re old enough to know what they’re doing and don’t stray too far from where they’re meant to be going, but unacceptable if they’re not so wise yet and aren’t at least somewhat regularly checked up on. Children will always want the forbidden fruit, but their parents should restrain them until they understand why it was forbidden to them in the first place, and how to safely interact with it.
and then, you still need such a whitelisting capability, which I think does not really exist today in firefox and such browsers. addons cant solve this because they can be removed.
I’m not too well versed in this kind of software either, but I just looked up some parental controls services and they seem to offer device-level blocking of unwanted websites/apps/downloads/etc. Web browsers don’t need to do the blocking, as the parental controls probably refuse the connections to the web domains.
I didn’t even mention all of this being completely bypassed if you used another website as a kind of proxy: go to proxywebsite.com -> it has a search bar -> use it to go to explicitwebsite.com -> proxywebsite.com returns the html, css, js etc of explicitwebsite.com without you ever visiting it -> profit.
That still could vary greatly by country and culture, as one man’s pornography could very well be another man’s art. You would either need a great deal of near-duplicate categories or just label something as explicit the moment a single country pipes up about a woman not concealing her hair or something else that doesn’t bother you one bit.
that’s right. but I don’t think this system would be manageable for website owners if they wanted to comply with any and all countries laws. what if a country just bans any pictures about women? or something insensible like that.
since this system is only for child protection, and wont be able to barr adults from accessing sites, I think it makes sense if a website owner only wants to be compatible with countries that have sensible laws for this purpose. like banning child access to any kind of porn, gambling, and such. I think the PEGI rating system could be used for this, it’s been around for ages. but if a country has banned pictures that depict women in any way, they would just outright block that country, both because it would be very hard to deal with them anyways and because this is not supposed to be a censoring tool.I suppose that we could at least be able to convince the parents that letting their children go unsupervised on the internet is like letting them go unsupervised in the big city. Totally fine if they’re old enough to know what they’re doing and don’t stray too far from where they’re meant to be going, but unacceptable if they’re not so wise yet and aren’t at least somewhat regularly checked up on. Children will always want the forbidden fruit, but their parents should restrain them until they understand why it was forbidden to them in the first place, and how to safely interact with it.
that sounds good, and things like this should go in place of TV and youtube ads, but it’s very hard to reach so many parents without some kind of mandatory thing. and then, where I live I often enough see parents who have a baby stroller with a built-in fucking smart phone holder!! and guess what it is being used, the brainrot is flooding from them all the time. I guess that’s their approach to parenting even at home. it would be especially hard to convince these parents that this is bad.
Who said the device based service has to be closed source?
It doesn’t have to be, but the businesses making it claim it needs to be.
Experience, most proposal for “age and identity verification” being badly implemented mostly closed-source solutions that only works on devices they deem trusty, meaning (seemingly) non-rooted phones with specific OSes.
This is the second time in my life that Labour have gained power after a long Conservative tenure, only to dive straight into enacting policies that were more right-wing than their predecessors.
Don’t get me wrong, but why are matters of governmental surveillance and control inherently “right-wing” rather than a totalitarian policy not otherwise directly connected to wing politics? Extremists on both sides have a history of creating totalitarian, Big Brother states (which the UK is certainly headed towards).
It’s not so much the control aspect as the anti-porn stance. It also comes in at the same time as a series of anti-trans moves from them.
Big Brother states (which the UK is certainly headed towards)
When the Snowden Revelations came out, the UK had even more civil society surveillance than the US.
As a consequence of those revelations, in the US some of the surveillance was walked back, whilst in the UK the Government just passed a law that retroactively made the whole thing legal, issued a bunch of D-Notices (the UK system of Press Censorship) to shut up the Press, got the Editor of the newspaper that brought it out in the UK (The Guardian) kicked out, and the Press there never talked about it again.
Also, let’s not forget the UK has the biggest number of surveillance cameras per-capita in the World.
Oh, and they have a special and separate Surveillance Tribunal (the Investigatory Powers Tribunal) were the lawyers for the side other than the State are not allowed to be present in certain sessions, see certain evidence or even get informed of the final judgement unless their side wins.
They easily have the most extreme regime of Civil Society Surveillance in Europe, and in the World are probably second only to the likes of North Korea and China.
Britain is well beyond merely “headed towards” Big Brother and has been for at least a decade.
Last i read, cameras in london outnumbered those in Beijing, so im not sure id even put them second place
In the case of Labour, the party’s politics these days are over to the right on any measure. Under Starmer they seem to have abandoned their left-wing roots.
It’s less of a left - right thing (that’s mainly economics). It paternalism Vs liberty thing. Labour have always had a very strong “we must protect the populace” theme to their policies. Conservatives have it too, but they want to do it in a different way.
Sadly it’s a really difficult thing to stand against. Who wants to be labelled the person accused of enabling paedophiles, when all you want is the right to private communication.
To be honest I don’t think much of this is about catching or preventing paedos, and is just straight up authoritarianism.
You’re right. It’s not, but that’s what you’re labelled when you stand against it.
It’s important to continue standing against it nonetheless, and not be intimidated out of action.
Meme photo of two astronauts in space, one holding a gun to back of the other’s head. It is overlayed with the text “Always has been.”
Paternalism vs liberty. Tell me more. I haven’t heard of this comparison before.
The full spectrum is really more like “authoritarian vs libertarian”. Political policy should really be split into two different spectrums. On one spectrum, you have financial policy. On the other, you have social policy. The two normally get lumped together because politicians campaign on both simultaneously. But in reality, they’re two separate policies. So the political spectrum should look less like a single left/right line, and more like an X/Y graph with individual points for each person’s ideology. Something more like this:
On this graph, as you go farther left, the government has more ownership and provides more, (and individuals own less because the government provides more for their needs). As you go farther up the chart, social policy gets more authoritarian. So for example, something on the far right bottom corner would be the Cyberpunk 2077/The Outer Worlds end-stage capitalist where megacorps inevitably own everything and have their own private laws.
Once you separate the two policies into a graph (instead of just a left/right line) it becomes clear why “small government” doesn’t necessarily correspond to “fewer laws” when dealing with politicians.
That’s a political compass, and it’s still missing several political axes.
I guess one potential axis would be ‘stagnation’, in the sense that social mobility between classes stops changing. That could be anything like straight up caste systems, or informal stratification from wealth getting locked up by the 1%. I hypothesize, that such an axis would be a measurement of how ‘elderly’ a society is becoming. When politics become too locked in due to unchanging political critters, the ability for a society to recognize and properly act in a situation becomes compromised.
My parent, they lost mental acuity and flexibility with the years, alongside their bodily agency, and have become quarrelsome. IMO, such dementia is what we are seeing in a aging America and the UK.
Realistically one can come up with any number of axes and still be wrong, because the domain of politics isn’t a metric space.
I assume “Republican” on this diagram is not used in the contemporary American sense. Otherwise it would be somewhere up in that little grey cloud.
In any case, official US politics takes place entirely within the top right quadrant, and UK politics seems to have retreated there too. Canada is in danger of getting up there as well. And we don’t have any mechanism to vote our way out of that box, so change will have to come from action outside of electoral politics.
The precise location of individual points really depends on personal biases, but I agree that the “Republican” point is wrong on this chart; Pretty much all of America’s political discussion takes place on the right side of the graph.
Around our local voting season there’s actually a online test to check which parties are more aligned with the person values and it puts things into a graph like this. It’s very useful
How did neo-liberalism make it to the left?
I didn’t bother actually checking the individual points, because I was simply using it for illustrative purposes. The actual location of the points is largely up to interpretation, based on personal biases and viewpoints. For instance, plenty of .ml posters would likely object to calling Leninism highly authoritarian, or lumping it in with Maoism. But this particular compass does both of those.
Part of that is allowing labels to be so powerful. Someone doesn’t have to watch kiddie porn or molest children to be branded a pedophile, but when you have that label for someone, it’s implied that’s what they did. We saw this same shit during the Bush years with the “terrorism” label. We’re actually seeing it again with Luigi Mangione and people protesting at Tesla dealerships. People don’t care about reality if there’s simple branding that wipes critical thinking away.
To correct one thing, the left-right political spectrum is based on authority. It goes back to the French Revolution, in which the nobility - favoring top-down power hierarchies - literally occupied the right side of the assembly hall while the revolutionaries - favoring true equality and egality - sat on the left.
This cannot be separated into distinct domains since power is wealth and wealth is power. The political compass fallacy is, and always was, nothing more than rightist propaganda to muddy language and ideology in an effort to hold on to their wealth and power.
if i had a nickel for everytime a labour government came into power after a prolonged tory government and immediately started governing further right id have two nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s weird it happened twice in a row
Illusion of choice.
The OSA was brought in by the tories. Labour agree with it as well. Both of them are authoritarian bastards.
My networking knowledge may be out of date, but can’t you get around region locked sites with VPNs or Tor?
I was in Turkey in July 2019. Wikipedia was blocked. I had to use Tor to access it. On installation I think I had to tick a special box that said something like “use flux capacitor bridge for blablabla countries like China and Turkey”
Though In that case, Wikipedia didn’t give a fuck if you were accessing it from Tor. The government did.
I know some sites block tor/VPN access for various reasons
You can
But most people will not go to those lengths, esp not kids.
You vastly underestimate the interest young people can have into things, especially into forbidden things, especially when the workaround is trivial and works with a few clics, no tech skills required.
Will this become a new venue for scam? Most likely. But kids motivation vs. a very easy “fix” is not what’s gonna stop them. Adult surveillance would be way better.
Exactly, I’d argue kids are the most likely to go to lengths to circumvent the rules
Depends on what you mean by “kids”. Elementary schoolers, no, but some teens are willing to do a surprising amount of work to accomplish something if it’s important enough to them. And then they pass their method along to their friends, or offer to set up anyone in the school for the price of a couple of bags of snack food.
“snack food”
I’m not sure whether the readership for this article is primarily British (“crisps”) because it’s about the UK, or primarily North American (“chips”) because of what I perceive as the general population demographics of Lemmy, so I compromised. 🤷
lol I’m just joking that teens in high school would probably trade weed for things rather than snacks. I’m not proud of it, but I got paid in weed junior year of high school for customizing MySpace accounts, which is why I laughed at “snacks” because if they are later age high school students they probably aren’t trading in sour cream and onion.
I admit, my information on what teens use for barter is even more out-of-date than yours (by about a decade, based on when MySpace was popular).
Haha all good, I wasn’t criticizing, snacks just made me laugh. Teens have probably been bartering weed and alcohol in high school since the 70s.
Need the munchies for after puffing whatever they put in their vapes.
All it takes is one kid to work it out and it’ll be common knowledge in that school within a week.
Doesn’t proton offer a free vpn with limits?
Also, a vpn is pretty cheap. I wouldn’t say that it’s kids that would be using it, it would be adults who don;t want to upload their picture.
Yeah it’s pretty good, you just can’t torrent with the free tier and sometimes it’s slow because a lot of people are using it.
But it’s very useful for the short time I use it.
Yes however they are literally move all their infrastructure to the UK so they won’t be an option soon.
Windscribe is a thin too, but since they are Canadian and Canada is making stupid political deals with the US lately, it can’t be relied on either.
So of all the fucking things to restrict, why this? Facebook is a hundred times more dangerous than any porn. Ban that shit instead.
Because it’s something where the current government can claim they’re “doing something” or “addressing a real problem” but it also doesn’t threaten the rich and powerful.
Going after Facebook would threaten the rich and powerful, for who it is an important tool for manipulating people, who think they can use it to mold culture to what they want it to be my breaking the minds of children.
The current UK government is desperate to say to the public that they’re governing and fixing problems, but they also really don’t want to piss off the rich and powerful.
because Facebook is an abstract danger, porn is (relatively) well defined
There’s a UK Parliament petition to repeal the Online Safety act. There’s no guarantee it’ll do anything but might be worth a try for anyone in the UK.
I’m just waiting for the response to be something along the lines of… “According to existing law (see Online Safety Act), websites are required to do age verification… blah blah blah, no changes will be made, thank you for your inquiry”
Most likely, or maybe someone will try to use this to score some easy points with more online conscious voters. Probably not but one can dream.
Don’t forget to write to your MP - being polite but angry helps. Explain the issues, shortcomings and why you feel this should be repealed and a better user-friendly and privacy respecting alternative needs to be found BEFORE implementing stupid asinine knee-jerk legislation like this.
My poor MP is getting it in the jugular because they boasted about working in data security and I’m exploiting the hell out of that statement so they can’t easily weasel their way out of it.
At this point Dark-web tech needs an upgrade, we need a 2nd internet
Social/Political problems need social/political solutions, not technical solutions.
Hiding from the people oppressing you is pretty political
How about Gemini? https://geminiprotocol.net/
Gemini is a group of technologies similar to the ones that lie behind your familiar web browser. Using Gemini, you can explore an online collection of written documents which can link to other written documents. The main difference is that Gemini approaches this task with a strong philosophy of “keep it simple” and “less is enough”. This allows Gemini to simply sidestep, rather than try and probably fail to solve, many of the problems plaguing the modern web, which just seem to get worse and worse no matter how many browser add-ons or well meaning regulations get thrown at them.
How it applies to geolocation and server hosting in light of the OSA I really have no clue. But it’s an interesting underground hacker/tinker type alternative.
did this or the google ai thing came first?
This says it started in 2019, Google Gemini was 2023. It seems like these big companies pick a name first and then figure out who they’ll have to sue after.
i2p
That moment when you decide to use i2p because its more sustainable for every user to be a node just for your server’s location to get leaked in a vulnerability. This is why most deep web migration to i2p ended
Have any links or extra info on that?
Perfect response. This gets the message across, “governments of the world, the Internet doesn’t need you, you need the Internet”.
fuck the UK
This is sadly the way to handle it, users of these places need to learn how to vpn instead of giving their private information for age verification online.
VPNs aren’t going to be a practical solution going forward. You are creating dependancies that governments can target, spying on traffic and enforcing censorship for these relays is something any country can and likely will implement at some point. The clearnet is dying because the evangelicals are killing it.