https://www.politico.eu/article/the-great-british-porn-block-is-back/
New ID checks kick in next year amid a fierce global debate between child protection groups and privacy warriors.
I hope this encourages children to learn an important life skill that will help them in numerous ways: Piracy.
It's honestly stupid. They just go to less moderated sites, or if you're lucky, learn how to use a VPN and bypass all this nonsense anyway.
It is life changing really. I don't recall ever paying for digital content. I still go to the theatres for an exceptional movie but that's it. It has made me learn more about computers, be a bit savvy in tech. I can't count how many times that has helped me get through my job. It really is an important life skill
I was looking at porn by 11ish, so sure. Imagine making people wait until 18 or 21.
Do you also have issue with them watching action movies with people dying?
I watched Apocalypto for a school paper at age 15 (from a list of options given to me), and honestly I think some softcore porn would have been better. Some rated R stuff is fine for a kid to watch, Apocalypto definitely wasn't.
Also that same year I researched and did presentations on Chinese history (was a prehistorical to maybe a couple hundred years ago timeline) and at least in my research I covered things like the foot tying thing (to make feet smaller) and that didn't prepare me for the scene in Marco Polo (I think on Netflix) where that happened (and I didn't finish the episode or continue the series because it's just too fucked up).
Porn can be fucked up, some porn is definitely NSFL, but there are a lot of things that are so much worse than the average porn site.
I wish they actually tried to "protect the children" but the politicians are very clearly not.
I was beating my meat like a boxer with a speedbag to the Playboy magazines I found when I was 11. And that was well before the internet was available. Kids are gonna find something to whack/flick it to, get over it.
Remember those mail-order catalogues? Specifically the women's underwear section. Horny teenagers are going to find something. And they have a vivid imagination.
Oh the humanity. They might get deeply inaccurate ideas about the perks of pizza delivery.
One should be vastly more worried about people who when they think of children think of porn, or vice-versa.
Normal people might think of children and think of playground safety or maybe how SUVs should be banned because they're so much more dangerous for children on streets than normal cars.
People whose top concern when it comes to "children" is "porn" are emotionally invested in a certain kind of association that normal people don't usually have in their minds in such strong terms.
I watched porn as a teen. Look, maybe in America you're all puritans or whatever, but I started looking at magazines when I was 13 and then later found online porn (and hell I was LATE to the game according to my classmates). This is a reality y'all have to come to terms with. Teens watch porn.
As a quote in the article states, porn is the canary in the coal mine - with some MPs apparently advocating for blocking VPNs to prevent work arounds.
Tell me the MPs don't understand VPN technology without telling me the MPs don't understand VPN technology.
Block ports associated with popular protocols is one method.
In terms of blocking VPNs reliably? Not much you can do afaik, you can even do VPN over websockets.
I mean, the government could tackle homelessness, or end child hunger, many appropriate subjects. But instead they want to regulate jerk-off material. Sad.
its always nice that they want your official id associated with your porn. i just want to see what happens when that database gets hacked.
This might be a big nitpick, but "Child Protection Groups", vs "Privacy Warriors", sounds sleazy.
As positive connotations as possible on one side, vaguely negative on the other.
To conservatives, children don't have rights. You protect them like you would protect property, by putting it under lock and key.
Yes, they see them as property to be used.
But even in that stupid, dehumanizing framework it still ought to be one of the issues of "parents rights" they love so much. Your child's privacy being violated is a violation of your property rights. YOU didn't consent to that child's privacy being compromised, and they are a thing that belongs to you and can only exist according to your beliefs and rules, so that was an attack on you.
So the real truth is that to conservatives, there is no coherent ethical framework they can turn to to reliably make judgements. It is the politics of being a cruel and obstinate asshole.
I agree that their logic isn't consistent, but in this case I would say their solution isn't to improve the privacy of their childrens' porn access, their solution is to lock down their childrens' behaviour so they cannot ever see porn. They're not imagining their children as complex beings in this instance, they are objects.
The suggestion that online privacy when accessing porn is something that will affect their children would sound like an admission that you want to show their children porn. If you point out that their kids are going to find porn on their own because that's just how the world works, they won't investigate that. They'll just fall back on their overdeveloped disgust reflex and attack you for it.
In case anybody needs a reminder, the UK Government's response to the Snowden Revelations that showed even more widespread surveillance of civil society in the UK than in the US was, unlike in the latter country, to pass laws that retroactivelly made the whole thing legal.
Pretty positive this is going to end up being a DNS level block that will be as simple as setting a dns server outside of the UK to bypass.
Because anything else would create an unbelievable amount of administrative overhead.
Also imagine the spike in identity theft this is going to cause.
I'm an advocate of VPN but this is not the situation to recommend them but to chastise regulators and lawmakers for even allowing this. This is eroding our freedom of speech. I can see politicians expanding this and censoring terrorist speech and speech of certain political ideologies. It is the erosion our civil liberties we need to worry about.
Smut is speech. Frankly, smut is the highest form of speech. You should not need to show your papers to speak or to listen
If you want to start talking to lawmakers about wanting to watch porn without having to show ID, you would be dismissed if you're going to cite free speech being the right it is infringing upon. Privacy would be a better starting point, for example.
That’s your personal interpretation. I think you’re full of shite and so does Larry Flint.
Big shame people are unaware of a century’s worth of obscenity law… how in western democracy the high courts literally found that laws like these violated free speech protections over “local prurient interests” and hence struck down those laws.
Porn perusers will soon have to prove their age by uploading an identity document like a passport, registering a credit card, [...]
Ah, mandatory account creation with linked credit card being the most widely available and likely easiest option?
No wonder the porn sites aren't fighting this too hard!
(...or are they?)
My guess is that some companies will greatly benefit from this regulation because they can somewhat monopolize the market. I also wouldn't be surprised if those were the ones who lobbied for this.
Discounting VPNs for a moment..
What if one person made an account with ID and then the entirety of the country just happened to know the login?
Usr: admin Pass: admin
So the latest the UK can call an election and get Labor in charge is January 2025, the same month this goes into effect. Wonder if they will rush a repeal or get blamed for it starting?
Easy. Everything bad that happens before January 2025 is Gordon Brown's fault, and everything after it's Kier Starmer's. You know it's true because it says so in the Daily Mail.
Whilst I appreciate the satire of the Tories' one and only politican strategy, as the Snowden Revelations showed back then, New Labour wasn't any better in their "keeping a watchful eye on the plebes" ways.
Looking down on the rest as riff-raff that needs to be kept in place is a feature of both Tories and New Labour.
The Snooper's Charter (which made all the things Snowden revealed actually legal) and the thing where it became illegal to film facesitting in the UK both happened under the Cameron administration after being pushed for when Theresa May was home secretary. New Labour didn't pass anything comparable.
It might well be the case that GCHQ started their mass surveillance of UK citizens under orders from Blair, but given that five independent inquiries have found that the security services lied to the cabinet about WMDs in Iraq, it's pretty plausible that they did it of their own volition despite it being illegal.
I think the theory that New Labour knew perfectly well what was going on and are no different from the Tories in this makes a lot more sense, especially since the veritable explosion in the use of surveillance cameras dates back to their time as do cases of abusive police surveillance such as the Met infiltration of Ecologist groups (know because at least one of the women in one such group ended up pregnant from one such undercover cop).
Or are you saying that the New Labour leadership were such complete total incompetent numpties that they could not see any of this for their whole decade in power?!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Porn perusers will soon have to prove their age by uploading an identity document like a passport, registering a credit card, presenting their face to AI-powered scanning technology, or using a handful of other methods outlined in draft guidance from the regime’s regulator, Ofcom.
Although initially missing from the U.K.’s next attempt at internet regulation, pressure from children’s charities, age verification providers and vocal parliamentarians persuaded the government to revamp the defunct regime through the Online Safety Act.
Many videos depict graphic and degrading abuse of women, sickening acts of rape and incest, and many underage participants,” Tory MP Miriam Cates, a strong advocate for the legislation, told the House of Commons in September.
Research indicates younger kids who stumble across porn accidentally can find it shocking and disturbing — although the majority of young people surveyed in a 2020 British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) report said this didn’t impact them in the long term.
But the issue is complicated: the BBFC report found that older teens said they watched porn for educational purposes, due to a lack of information about sex in schools, or for gratification, while half of the LGBTQ+ respondents said it had helped them understand and explore their sexual identity.
“The squeamishness associated with pornography has made it nearly impossible to have a mature discussion about the technical feasibility, trade-offs, and effectiveness of age verification mandates,” says Matthew Lesh, director of public policy and communications at the free-market think tank.
The original article contains 2,313 words, the summary contains 245 words. Saved 89%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Although initially missing from the U.K.’s next attempt at internet regulation, pressure from children’s charities, age verification providers and vocal parliamentarians persuaded the government to revamp the defunct regime through the Online Safety Act.
Ah, good ol' "think of the children," once again doing the heavy lifting for the morality police and state surveillance.
pressure from [...] age verification providers
I think this is the tell that it's much stupider than any of that. It's just another corrupt Tory handout to their mates.