• Affidavit@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    I swear dumbarses like this live in a bubble. Who in their right mind would give their identity documents or bank cards to a porn site? If the UK government enacts this silly legislation it just means UK residents will use non-UK sites.

    Some people really need a reality check.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        You giving them far too much credit. They really are that thick.

        Anyway it’s irrelevant, because as with most of their stupid new laws it’ll never come into effect because they won’t be in office by the time it’s supposed to be enacted. It’s just meant to appeal to their voters, so that they get some donations. They know it’ll never actually happen.

        They’re saying next year for this, which I assume that means about a year away, andthe latest the election can be held is January 2025. But realistically it’s probably going to be in 6 months.

        So either this is going to be around for all of 2 months (assuming that it isn’t delayed), or it’s never going to happen, and I’ll put money on it never happening.

  • Th4tGuyII@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    There’s also the risk that any age verification implemented will end up being bypassed by anyone with access to a VPN

    I’d bet there’s already a significant amount of people doing this in places besides the UK.

    Government can’t get enough of seeing what people are doing, including what they’re wanking off too - no privacy for the masses.

  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    There’s also the risk that any age verification implemented will end up being bypassed by anyone with access to a VPN. When I ask, Whitehead admits that there’s no “silver bullet” when it comes to online safety. However, she says the measures are still worthwhile if they can help stop children from accidentally encountering adult content.

    It sounds like they have absolutely no idea how to implement this law in anything approaching an effective manner. I suspected lend up getting scrap like everything else.

    • tankplanker@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They wont have anything but a minimal budget to even research this properly, let alone employ the staff or setup the systems to manage it properly.

      I realise China monitors a lot more than porn and their population is much much larger however they have between 20 and 50k working on it. Even if you cut down the scope you are still looking at thousands of employees to do this properly.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        Too true.

        I actually used to work for a branch of the British government and their philosophy was never spend any money, especially on maintenance.

        So I would not be surprised if you’re right. Also the ICO are completely toothless, I don’t think they’ve ever actually done any legal enforcement. It’s their fault that all the websites have the stupid cookie pop-up warnings. Somebody asked him if that would be acceptable under the law and they said yes, even though it’s clearly ridiculous and clearly violates the law, but that set the precedent. They set a precedent on Twitter. Idiots

        • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          Eh? The cookie popups are because prior to that point websites were just doing whatever the fuck they wanted with no disclosure, as bluntly as the requirements for cookie disclosure have been implemented.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      accidentally encountering adult content.

      The way that works in Germany is that the BPjM has an index of iffy stuff and the big search engines are required to use it as a blacklist. Same general reasoning as it being completely legal to sell porn in a shop but you gotta keep it under the counter, or in a separate 18+ section, and not advertise it publicly.

      The “fine unless by accident” thing is btw backed by developmental psychology roughly speaking if kids are old enough to seek stuff out, they’re old enough to deal with seeing it. The rest is media competency and discussing that porn is not a documentary movie is something for sex ed.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        So the website aren’t actually blocked but they won’t come up in search engines?

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Yep. Though there’s also a difference here between “not suitable for youth” and “right-out illegal”, and with porn sites that latter one can get problematic because those “I promise I’m 18” banners don’t even begin to be enough age auth. OTOH the law only cares about sites actually targeting Germans (as in: They’re in German). Things that you won’t find on google but aren’t illegal as such e.g. include pro-ana forums. Also note that German law makes a difference between erotica and porn, lots of stuff you see on the net would actually be completely fine but the sites don’t bother distinguishing.

          It’s always only DNS blocks, easy to circumvent by setting your dns to 1.1.1.1 (cloudflare) or 8.8.8.8 (google) instead of whatever your ISP configures it to.

          As far as porn is concerned, after years of paper shuffling, they managed to block de.xhamster.com (but not any other subdomain), xhamster reacted pretty much within hours by setting up deu.xhamster.com. I kinda expect them to give up. Maybe instead make sure that xhamster.desi is on that search engine blacklist? IP blocks are not an option because overblocking.

          kinox.to is blocked because piracy, as well as Russian state media because EU sanctions.

          • slumberlust@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Oh man, just so I’m safe what other urls are they trying to block? Be specific, I want to make sure I avoid them all.

  • tiita@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Let’s just waste some more money to appease some bigots who have illegal seed behind close doors, right? Coz normally that’s exactly what happens…

  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    Why don’t they just announce that they’ve done it?

    It’s only bigoted “religious” nosey busy body hand ringing type idiots that care, and presumably they won’t ever try and access pornography themselves anyway so how are they going to find out? Right?

    Unless of course they do, but that would then require them to admit that they attempted to access it.

    Problem solved.

    • dangblingus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Hyper religious conservatives that seek to control others’ access to regular pornography are projecting. They are into the super fucked up porn, and going on the offensive about age verification policies is 1000% guilty mind mentality.

    • EatYouWell@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I remember in college someone was doing some study on the difference between men who do and don’t watch porn.

      They had to cancel the study because they couldn’t find any men who hadn’t.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has laid out how porn sites could verify users’ ages under the newly passed Online Safety Act.

    The regulator is consulting on these guidelines starting today and hopes to finalize its official guidance in roughly a year’s time.

    The measures have the potential to be contentious and come a little over four years after the UK government scrapped its last attempt to mandate age verification for pornography.

    “The majority of those are coming across it accidentally and stumbling across it on the web.” Ofcom’s press release cites research that suggests nearly eight in 10 children have seen “violent pornography depicting coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sex acts” before turning 18.

    Once the duties come into force, pornography sites will be able to choose from Ofcom’s approaches or implement their own age verification measures so long as they’re deemed to hit the “highly effective” bar demanded by the Online Safety Act.

    “Age verification technologies for pornography risk sensitive personal data being breached, collected, shared, or sold.


    The original article contains 975 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • credit crazy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m torn on what to think about the uks stance on technology. Like one one hand they’ve been forcing apple to be normal. But on the other hand they love trying to restrict porn in the most ridiculous ways.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The current UK government are basically Posh Fascists (Notice the anti-demonstration legislation, sending people asking the UK for asylum to Rwanda and sending surveillance planes to help Israel with what the UN has deemed a Genocide in Gaza) so this is hardly surprising.

    The Conservative wing of the Tory party has been well and trully buried by the UKIPers that invaded the party back in the Brexit Campaign days and all that’s left leading that party are people with a Fascist outlook on the world and the learned posh manners that you get from the very expensive private education institutions (curiously and with no irony called “Public Schools”) in that country.

    • Damdy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They’re called public schools because anyone could attend them as long as they paid the cost. They were the alternative to private schools which were for nobles or religious training etc that you couldn’t buy in to. Comprehensive schools, free schools for anyone, came a lot later.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Same kind of “public” as the The Ritz: anybody can spend a night there as long as they have the 400 quid a night to pay for it.

        • uranibaba@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Not sure what The Ritz is but that sounds public to me. The access is not restricted by any other mean than paying for the service.

          • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            The Ritz is a luxury hotel in London and that sentence I wrote is often used as an illustration of what “public” means in the sense with which it’s used in “public school” in the UK (no other nation whose language I know uses it like that and I can actually speak a number of them).

            It’s also a great illustration about how de jure can be the opposite of de facto and of how one can mislead without outright lying by picking a rarelly used meaning of a word of a commonly used expression and thus produce an expression with an alternative meaning which is still naturally understood by others as meaning its most common meaning - thus allowing the making of claims which are strictly speaking true, whilst most people will semantically understand them differently. This is probably the main verbal deceit technique used by the English upper classes.

            That said, in the UK “public school” has been so long used to mean what in other countries would be called “private school”, that all Brits nowadays understand it as meaning a “privatelly run and managed school with paid tuition were access is open to anybody who can pay (theoretically as some have subtle filters beyond mere cost)”, but all non-Brits need to be expained that in a British context this combination of words means something else than what it does in the rest of the World, which is why I point this out.

            • uranibaba@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Thanks for explaining. I can see how it can be considered public (by my own argument) while still not being public in the sense everyone else (myself included) would understand it.

    • wootz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      No, not it’s not. And not even just for the lulz of having access to porn.

      You wanna know why? For the same reasons that decriminalisation of drugs is has potential upsides, and for the same reasons why repression breeds kinks.

      People are going to try to get porn anyway. If you force young people (or people who can’t provide ID) to resort viewing porn illegally, then it is infinitely easier for them to go browsing for porn in places that will let them find really illegal porn.

      In other words, would you rather have your kids watching main stream porn, or would you like them to potentially end up on the dark web?