How about parent your children?
What about the crappy late night TV channels with the women waving a cordless house phone like it’s 1996?
I’m perfectly able to watch porn because I’m 45, but I refuse to interact with any of this prove your age bollocks because I know full well that “we won’t store your details” and “we will share your details with 1284 trusted data partners” are the same picture.
I remember when my step-son was a teenager. I didn’t care that he watched porn. I cared that he infected the family PC with viruses and malware trying to watch porn.
FYI, with Mullvad VPN set to UK, sites that require age verification:
Sites tha do NOT require age verification:
- hqporner.com
- xhamster.com
- youjizz.com
- alohatube.com
- qqqporn.com
- xnxx.com
- xcafe.com
- helloporn.co
- go.porn
- cartoonporn.pro
And xvideos.com is a bit special since it shows you the thumbnails of porn videos but won’t let you play them.
But we need to stop VPNs! Think of the whole two children that have VPNs! What if instead of just going to the half of the sites that don’t verify age, they figure out how to use a VPN?! Oh the humanity!
Yeah, UK wants to de-anonymize VPN users as the next step in their attack on free speech. It is laughable to think this is about anything else.
Streisand effect: the BBC is telling every last kid that VPN is exactly the way to circumvent the prohibition.
Because the goal is to outlaw VPNs. To do that they need enough children to use VPNs to make it credible enough.
if the strategy is to tell children to stop circumventing the rules with a workaround, couldn’t the original messaging just have been “talk to your children about not watching porn”
it’s so obvious the identification laws have nothing to do with protecting children from porn and everything to do with Big Brother surveillance
This has nothing to do with porn or protecting children. It’s a backdoor way to attach names and faces to VPN usage so movie and music studios can sue specific people for torrenting. They failed in bringing lawsuits previously because they couldn’t pin point the piracy to specific individuals. I would bet money that the ministers leading this charge have ties to groups in the movie and music industry. The UK will be the testbed before the full rollout in the EU and then worldwide.
Even with an association of an identity to a VPN provider, there is no one-to-one correspondence between a person and an IP address.
This is a lot bigger than the entertainment industry now. Creeping fascism and the trillion dollar surveillance capitalism industry are hellish bed buddies.
This is fascists using “think of the children” to violate everyone’s online privacy and spy on everyone worldwide.
It’s funny how all the bigwigs are suddenly interested in “child safety” now that ol Eppie is gone, funny that. Also at least kids are learning how stick it to those old sacks for trying to take away their freedom.
Ok one question: Why do we have to protect children from porn if they’ve already gotten exposed to it?
Why do we have to protect children from porn if they’ve already gotten exposed to it?
… did you know that in maternity wards, more children are born every year?
I hate what is fucking going on, but you know, logic.
To add to it: Why do we need to protect children that arent ours from things their parents are supposed to protect them from?
Weird way to shift job tasks around.
It’s praying on the tech illiteracy of idiots. There are several pieces of software that can be used to locally censor the internet for minors, and they’re very affordable, and I bet free versions (open source?) probably also exist.
When I was a wee lad, there were “internet safety guides” being shown to kids and parents including :
- Don’t post personal information online
- Do not use your real name on the internet
- Do not give images of your ID to anyone online
But then, facebook asked for people’s fucking IDs and real names, and people just fucking forked it over. GOOD JOB DICKHEADS.
So they have more time to watch people shooting each other.
Hmmmmm, let me play devils advocate and say that kids should have access to porn.
If you want to actually play devil’s advocate, you gotta give an argument. Otherwise, you’re just being contrarian.
Would you rather your teenage son :
- Break his fucking head intruding on some poor adult woman’s privacy to see a naked woman
- See hardcore violent BDSM from questionable sources as his example of what sex is meant to be like
- Access tame softcore porn or naked ladies to fulfill his natural curioscity/blossoming adolescence
Let me give you one, kids try to explore topics out of curiosity. They are probably not going to look up someone torturing animals, because they don’t want to see that. Kids usually look up and explore things they are ready for. Also “kids” is a pretty diverse group, a 5 year old and a 15 year old kid are very different.
For real young kids parents should monitor online behavior anyway. For teens, how is life this different than looking at a playboy or a porn tape. Teens have been doing that forever, the people creating these laws probably did that when they where kids.
It’s probably a lot better to let kids (teens) explore nudity and sex in a safe environment, instead of letting them go unsupervised in places that ignore the law.
It’s basically the same argument with drugs, offering legal options vs. going to a dealer and possibly getting much more dangerous drugs mixed in.
If I had to guess, I’d say the government pushback against porn is a result of members of the ruling class catching their offspring with porn.
I’d say it has more to do with pandering to religious conservatives to keep them in their pocket.
My vote is smoke screen, lots of nasty stuff can fly under the radar with all this talk on porn, vpn and privacy rights
This pattern is so predictable, The Outlast Trials (2024) was based around it; your character is given trials based around fascist manipulation following this (“protect the children”) among many other patterns.
You are the shepherd, who would save the poor little lambs from Mother. Deliver them to the warm embrace of the Church, and we will let you out.
If I had to guess, they don’t care at all about porn and are using this as a pretext to censor sites that talk about LGBTQIA+ people.
And also to block access to any sex ed content that talks about how to protect yourself from predators.
Actually it was pushed by some AI corp, to sell AI for verification purposes, alongside other bad faith actors.
Or by some other fly-by-night identity-verifcation company.
If I had to guess, they don’t care at all about porn and are using this as a pretext to censor sites that talk about LGBTQIA+ people.
Transgender people are in the crosshairs and have been for a couple of years for now.
I think the best way to solve this is to not have kids in the first place.
And deprive capital of all that cheap labor? Have you no heart sir/madam?
Stop fucking but make children.
Religious fundamentalists famously love being the only source of sexual “education”.
The irony is that despite being a confessional state, the UK is 100x more secular than the USA.
Dame Rachel de Souza told BBC Newsnight it was “absolutely a loophole that needs closing” and called for age verification on VPNs.
Saw that coming. Can’t have the populace living their lives without constant, repressive government scrutiny.
But it’s for the kids what kind of psychopath could be against that???
Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.
Hire a droplet VM, pre-installed with a server OS. Log in with provided credentials. sudo apt install docker Copy/paste a docker compose file that sets up a wg-easy container. Create a peer. Take a picture of the provided QR code. Connect to the server via a wireguard app. Done.
Are they going to ban VMs?
Docker’s an unnecessary extra step. Just install wireguard server on the VM.
Myeah sort of agree if you compare wireguard vs wireguard docker.
But wg-easy has a management interface for creating peers and seeing who’s active so it’s somewhat easier to get set up.
Don’t give them ideas!
They could require age verification or even special licensing to use any sort of internet server architecture. That’s what I would do if that was my goal.
What a VM? What’s a server OS? How do I log in? What the fuck does sudo apt mean? What is docker? Now I’m editing files? A peer? What’s wireguard?
So many of you are disconnected from regular people because you’re chronically online.
You say this as if people are utterly incapable of learning.
Anyone can learn anything of they’re given a good enough reason to want to learn.
There are instructions that are completely “type this” monkey see, monkey do. The majority of people who cannot follow such instructions should be wards of the state.
If kids have learned to run their own Minecraft private servers, hosting a VPN should be child’s play… Pun maybe intended.
what’s a VPN? what’s a VPN app? how do I log in? what the fuck does a tunnel mean?
kids somehow figured these out. they’ll be able to figure out their selfhosted VPN too. at least more of them might find an interest in tech instead of consuming on brainrot platforms.
sunbeam didn’t describe it very clearly but it can be described in a way that its just following instructions without even having to understand it. like something like this: “register here. click this to get a free cloud server. log in to the server like this. paste this command and hit enter. install this app on your phone. tap import and scan. point your phone to the qr code on the screen.”
It’s a lot easier to get a VPN working than doing it yourself on a VPS.
Yes plan law makers needs to have a clue on what they are making laws about. Teenagers looking for porn are going to learn.
The same teenagers that don’t even use computers with physical keyboards?
I’d wager less than 1% of the minors affected by this will learn how to proxy through a VPS.
So all this does is create a black market for tech. People with the knowledge of how to set up this technology will provide it as a service for those who don’t.
It’s the same as trying to outright ban drugs. Those who can provide for those who cannot (for a fee).
It makes these kids easy marks for malware.
They just got a motivation.
I just deployed a few VM on my phone, not even a tablet. It’s not that hard nowadays with websites being designed primarily for smartphone users
setting up vps requires money which ideally children do not have access to (not even crypto)
Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.
Of course they don’t. Most of them type with their index fingers and don’t even understand what a VPN is.
Exactly this. There’s maybe 8 politicians in the whole world that understand what a VPN is. They’re told by a lobbyist and donor that it’s a thing that is bad, now they’re out to figure out how to make it go away.
I’m sure the VPN industry will bring a lot of money to bear to ensure this doesn’t happen. They like the online safety act itself, because it brings them customers, but if it also causes them to face issues they’re going to be less keen on it.
If someone tells them to, they might try until a few business interests remind them that these are also fundamental components of business networks. Once money tells them to stop it, they will.
VPN companies should just hire a lobbyist for a week and this will all go away.
Are they going to ban VMs?
They will keep banning things until they feel they have absolute control over the internet.
They’ll ban encrypted Internet traffic that they don’t have a backdoor to
stealinspect the contents.
