and fuck the UK goverment

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    2024·
    13 days ago

    That is, I believe, a British law that they’re following for users that appear to be in the UK. Not like they’re going to just disregard the law.

    kagis

    Yeah, the Online Safety Act 2023.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023

    The Online Safety Act 2023[1][2][3] (c. 50) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate online content. Designed to protect children and adults online, it passed on 26 October 2023 and gives the relevant Secretary of State the power, subject to parliamentary approval, to designate and suppress or record a wide range of online content that is illegal or deemed “harmful” to children.[4][5]

    The act creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be “harmful” to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher. It also empowers Ofcom to block access to particular websites.

    So that’s what they’ll be aiming to do.

    Some websites and apps stated they would introduce age verification for users in response to a 25 July 2025 deadline set by Ofcom.[47] These include pornographic websites,[48] but also the social networks Bluesky and Reddit.[49][50]

    Probably should be mostly irritated with Parliament.

    I expect that using a VPN that terminates in another country will avoid it, though I bet that then you can’t do things like buy Reddit Gold, if that’s still a thing.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1612·
      13 days ago

      I’d add that if you pick Ireland as the VPN exit country, it will have notable benefits:

      • Sites that pick language based on IP will probably do English.

      • It probably won’t add much latency.

      • Ireland isn’t too bonkers and hopefully won’t have any large collection of online laws of their own that become an irritant.

      • Because Ireland has a considerably smaller population than the UK, if people in the UK do this at scale for pornography, it will make the Irish statistically look like absolutely indefatigable horndogs, which I think will be pretty funny on visualizations.

    • lividweasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      13 days ago

      If you don’t mind my hijacking, I’ve seen the term “kagis” used a number of times on Lemmy, possibly only by you but I think also others. Based on the usage, I assumed it was a Latin word to indicate some sort of transition or side-bar, but it seems to just translate to “you are”, which doesn’t make sense in context. Can I ask what it means?

      • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        26·
        12 days ago

        Kagi is a new-ish search engine that is popular among Lemmy users. Those users are trying to get it to catch on, and have started using kagi as a verb, the same way people say “let me google that really quick.”

        It honestly feels a lot like when Microsoft was trying to get Bing and their phone OS to take off, and started slipping product placement into popular TV shows. There was a brief time period in American TV, where characters had the disgusting line of “Bing it!” Usually while showing the Bing home page on a Microsoft Phone. It was just blatant ham-fisted cringey product placement.

        • Evkob (they/them)@lemmy.caEnglish
          153·
          12 days ago

          Yeah I’ve noticed this user basically inserts a “kagis” into like 2/3 of their comments, it always slightly irks me because it makes me feel like I’m getting advertised at. I’ve never felt the need to proclaim which search engine(s) I’ve used to research any particular comment on Lemmy, and I find it odd that the one person who does so regularly is doing it for a paid service.

          Apart from that, their comments are usually pretty good, so I’m not accusing them of shilling or anything, but I find it super peculiar.

      • Maven (famous)@lemmy.zipEnglish
        25·
        13 days ago

        There’s a search engine named Kagi. It’s basically the equivalent of “googles” but for a different search engine.

  • AcidOctopus@lemmy.mlEnglish
    74·
    13 days ago

    Lol yeah I’m not doing that. VPN all the way.

    Today I’m french.

    Tomorrow, who knows?

    The possibilities are endless.

    • sad_detective_man@leminal.spaceEnglish
      38·
      13 days ago

      Too bad VPN server addresses are on-sight to reddit’s IP blocking strategy for years now. For whatever good internet choice you make, reddit reciprocates with an equally bad one

      • njm1314@lemmy.worldEnglish
        24·
        13 days ago

        What’s funny about that is the VPN I use I saw advertised on Reddit. I wonder if these companies know that they ban users for using their products? Well I guess they don’t really don’t care.

        • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.worldEnglish
          17·
          12 days ago

          Other companies: Thank you for buying from our sponsors! Here’s a code for 15% off!

          Reddit: You bought from our sponsors? Lol, you’re banned.

      • athairmor@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        12 days ago

        Mullvad has couple of USA exits that don’t get blocked by Reddit. Texas and D.C., I think.

            • sad_detective_man@leminal.spaceEnglish
              1·
              12 days ago

              can’t argue with that. setting my server to other places makes Google completely unusable because it will localize to whatever your ip address is no matter what you specify it to do in your settings. it’s annoying enough that it got me to stop using Google so I don’t blame anyone for just opting to let the NSA do their thing.

      • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        12 days ago

        Remember when you didn’t even need an email address to sign up for reddit?

        If I need to look at that site, my LibRedirect extension sends me to a privacy focused mirror

        • sad_detective_man@leminal.spaceEnglish
          1·
          11 days ago

          if you’re not logged in and using a VPN server that’s not in the US. If you want to post, it’s not an issue but if you want to browse logged out they block you.

  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialEnglish
    551·
    13 days ago

    I wonder if they pay per verification. If so, I wonder how hard it would be to set up a script to just keep submitting new requests a few hundred or thousands of times a day with random photos…

      • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialEnglish
        50·
        13 days ago

        Sure, it’s not about wasting their time; this says they’re using a 3rd party service to verify, so theoretically they’re paying for that service. It’s about wasting their money.

        • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          19·
          13 days ago

          Good point. I just think that if reddit would see an uptick in POC and old people with these random AI photos, it would be a weird and hilarious thing to happen to them. Spez is in awe of a nazi (musk) and old people would send their advertising into a tailspin.

  • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.netEnglish
    52·
    13 days ago

    Was using a VPN to watch iPlayer last night and then hopped on reddit and was like “whereintheactualfuck is all the porn‽” Before realizing I had it set to the UK. Blew my mind for a minute

    • winkerjadams@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      61·
      12 days ago

      I went “whereisallmyporn?” When reddit banned it from r/all. I think that was the start of its downfall for me.

    • oatscoop@midwest.socialEnglish
      1·
      12 days ago

      I deleted my Reddit account but still follow some writers on it and had the same issue. The worst part is it’s anything marked as NSFW – even posts that were tagged as a joke weren’t accessible.

      I changed my VPN to another country and Reddit was still asking me to log in and show ID until I cleared my cookies and cache.

  • 𝚝𝚛𝚔English
    28·
    11 days ago

    If any service requires me to send a photo of myself to use it, I ain’t using it.

    EDIT: lol wut, Facebook and YouTube want photo ID now?? I must be old enough to have missed out. My comment stands though, if I wasn’t already a member on either of those I guess I wouldn’t become one!

    • viking@infosec.pubEnglish
      7·
      11 days ago

      It’s a UK law, you either comply or get banned. Obviously everybody now has a VPN subscription.

      • AlteredEgo@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        11 days ago

        Italy made VPNs practically illegal. The UK might soon follow. And surfing the web with a VPN is a painful torrent of capchas. And email addresses you can get without revealing your phone number to identify yourself are becoming sparse too.

        If you’d want to actually address the issue (insofar unsupervised teenagers watching porn is an issue) you’d need something like a U2F security key that can be used as anonymous age verification and be bought anonymously in a physical shop for cash, just by showing your ID to a clerk (without your details being stored). Keys being stolen or misused could then also be flagged in a public database.

        • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          7·
          11 days ago

          I think it’s better to reject these sites rather than work around it. Especially for major platforms. Make it hurt financially.

          • AlteredEgo@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            11 days ago

            Many have done that for decades, but the tend remains that the internet is getting less and less free.

        • enthusiasm_headquarters@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          11 days ago

          My VPN for about 7-8 years is run by Italian hacktivists (airvpn, it’s a nonprofit, they’re good people), I haven’t heard about this ban. Perhaps it only applies to Italian citizens using VPNs, not to Italians running VPNs. Wait, that doesn’t make sense… I’ll check out their newsfeed.

          • AlteredEgo@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            6 days ago

            Yeah, afaik airvpn basically can’t offer VPN to Italian citizens any more because they’d be forced to keep logs. But they can still get customers from outside Italy. And presumably Italians can still use VPN outside Italy. I think, let me know if I’m wrong.

  • Mothra@mander.xyzEnglish
    251·
    13 days ago

    Does a vpn bypass it?

    Edit: btw yes I totally agree with you, I’m just wondering if that would be a workaround

      • 6nk06@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        161·
        13 days ago

        But Spez will still edit your comments. I don’t know how reddit has still some users left after that and the API train wreck.

        • Rhaedas@fedia.io
          3·
          13 days ago

          Exactly. I get that there are still niches there that haven’t found their place here yet (be the change you want to see), but the only way I use Reddit now is through a search for things that find old information, since it is still a huge database of data (admittedly both good and bad).

    • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      12 days ago

      Reddit blocks VPN users. I’m unable to access it on my home network because of it.

      Which is great! They trained me not to bother going to their site by blocking my attempts. Though I kind of want to punch Snoo now, from having to see his smug face winking at me on the block page every time. Little fucker, you used to be cool. Enjoy the inevitable bot-pocalypse nazi farm you’re building.

    • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      112·
      12 days ago

      They have to comply with local laws. (Fuck them anyway but for entirely different reasons, at least in this case they’re following the law.)

      Who do we throw stones at boo mercilessly? Conservatism broadly, the kink-cult that makes everything about sex and denying sex while having the weirdest, worst sex behind the scenes. Making people scared of anything remotely sexual while also championing violence and hate.

      In the US, our pedo-in-chief started doing this too and you need to register your ID with the state to get into pornhub and other adult sites in some states. This is a spreading problem that people are too ashamed to push back on.

      • LePoisson@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        12 days ago

        Dude I was recently visiting Florida. I totally forgot the fascist bullshit laws about porn there, was gobsmacked I couldn’t view pornhub. 5 minutes and a free vpn on my phone and I was happily watching my preferred smut.

        It’s so stupid how pointless the laws are, like it’s dumb easy to circumvent them.

        Just some real bullshit waste of time. Plus a waste of money for companies that try to comply with the Florida law. Pornhub just decided if you’re in Florida you can’t even use pornhub because they didn’t want to spend the money and time to comply with the stupid ass backwards law.

        • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          12 days ago

          they didn’t want to spend the money and time to comply with the stupid ass backwards law.

          They didn’t want the liability and connection to a government database that will probably start looking for people who are into like, cuckolding or something, since that seems to be what the right is absolutely obsessed with.

        • ByteOnBikes@discuss.onlineEnglish
          2·
          11 days ago

          Sometimes my VPN kicks me to one of those backwards ass states and I also get surprised by them. Swap states and I’m in.

  • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    201·
    13 days ago

    Damn, the website seems to be “with persona dot com” and holy fucking corpo.

    I say we all stay off the corporate internet and just come to places like this. Usenet is still a thing, but it’s all us binary kids now. Maybe we could go back to how it was in the '90s and actually chat on the platform. There’s IRC instead of Discord, message boards instead of Facebook.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      11·
      13 days ago

      Usenet is still a thing, but it’s all us binary kids now. Maybe we could go back to how it was in the '90s and actually chat on the platform.

      People stopped using Usenet for discussion in large part because of overwhelming spam problems and a lack of infrastructure to mitigate it.

      You could maybe build some sort of system to mitigate that.

      • Maybe automated text classification is good enough to do on a distributed level, on client machines, now. Problem is that automated text generation to try to defeat it has also probably improved, and I’d tend to bet on the spammers having the advantage.

      • Maybe an out-of-band mechanism to generate information about posts would work. Have Usenet clients support pulling a database of scores for current posts in a group. Like, have some server(s) that generates various types of scores (advertising, flameware, etc) text scores for posts. Can incorporate various human moderation in that scoring, maybe let an end user subscribe to one or more “moderators”, which I understand BlueSky does something like.

      Honestly, though, the Threadiverse mostly does what I want as a distributed discussion forum. I’m not sure what large benefits Usenet brings to the table relative to it.

      There’s infrastructure for posting large binaries, which the Threadiverse doesn’t really have short of (relatively small) image posting, but servers propagating the (large) alt.binaries hierarchy plus Usenet’s bandwidth-heavy “broadcast” style of post propagation is also what drove up the cost of running Usenet servers and forced them to generally go commercial. Eternal-september.org is one of the very few remaining free-as-in-gratis Usenet servers, and they don’t propagate alt.binaries. And I’d expect that Parliament would crack down on commercial Usenet operators if the Act doesn’t already do so and Usenet sees a major surge in popularity in the UK for the pornography that this is trying to block; payment processors are necessary for commercial service, and easy for countries to lean on as leverage. If you want the ability to post large binaries in a state-censorship-resistant way, I’d probably…hmm. If a state wants to leverage its control of the network infrastructure to block access, it can make access pretty difficult. Maybe use Hyphanet (previously known as Freenet) for the files, then use magnet-style links on a more latency-friendly forum for discussion.

    • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      12 days ago

      but it’s all us binary kids now.

      It took me a second to realize what you meant. My first thought was, “Wait, like, binary genders? Cis-gendered people?” Then I remembered binary code exists and I laughed at myself.

      • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        12 days ago

        haha, yeah. Like that other poster said spam was running wild but all the old heads were blaming us “binary kids” for “killing usenet” with our large files.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      12 days ago

      I’m pretty sure Gen Z and Gen Alpha are not going to be using Facebook, Message boards or anything else from a previous era.

      Chances are they will find simple and effective ways to bypass censorship.

    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      12 days ago

      Message boards are closing or blocking the UK because of this. We even lost lemmy.zip in the UK. But the way lemmy works means you could access it from other instances. Probably illegal in the UK but as long as people are ok with spinning up instances and telling the UK to get fucked it will probably be fine.

  • archchan@lemmy.mlEnglish
    15·
    11 days ago

    Age verification is insane in it’s entirety and no payment processor, corpo, government, or think-tank has any right to enforce their puritanical views on sex and Orwellian techno-fascist policies on everyone.