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Online Pornography Age Checks To Be Mandatory in UK From 15 July (theguardian.com)
The UK's age verification system for online pornography will become mandatory on 15 July, the government has confirmed. From a report: From that date, commercial providers of online pornography will be required to carry out "robust" age verification checks on users, in order to keep children from accessing adult content. Websites that refuse to implement the checks face being blocked by UK internet service providers or having their access to payment services withdrawn.The digital minister, Margot James, welcomed the introduction of the rules, saying: "Adult content is currently far too easy for children to access online."
She added, "The introduction of mandatory age verification is a world first, and we've taken the time to balance privacy concerns with the need to protect children from inappropriate content. We want the UK to be the safest place in the world to be online, and these new laws will help us achieve this." Will Gardner, the chief executive of Childnet, said: "We hope that the introduction of this age verification will help in protecting children, making it harder for young people to accidentally come across online pornography, as well as bringing in the same protections that we use offline to protect children from age-restricted goods or services."
She added, "The introduction of mandatory age verification is a world first, and we've taken the time to balance privacy concerns with the need to protect children from inappropriate content. We want the UK to be the safest place in the world to be online, and these new laws will help us achieve this." Will Gardner, the chief executive of Childnet, said: "We hope that the introduction of this age verification will help in protecting children, making it harder for young people to accidentally come across online pornography, as well as bringing in the same protections that we use offline to protect children from age-restricted goods or services."
How are they going to implement this? With credit card verification?
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"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Soon, all the kids will use TOR browsers to show that they're anywhere but in the UK. It shouldn't take long for them to beat the system designed by people that don't understand technology beyond using a power button.
all the members of parliament? other government officials? law enforcement? clergy?
they do realize that this essentially becomes pornography user tracking? and it WILL come back to bite someone with a significant position within the government, perhaps someone who is at least partially responsible for this new legal requirement in the first place, right in the ass (and not in a good way)
making it harder for young people to accidentally come across online pornography
Is this really such a common occurrence?
The vast majority of accidental porn I've come across was from folks intentionally posting it to public forums, like the ever-popular goatse on here. Do we now consider that all discourse is pornographic? I'll note there are also a few look-alike domains that are easy to stumble across, but I think those are adequately blocked with client-side filters.
In all, this seems utterly unnecessary.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Teens get their porn via paid subscription. Yeah right! Who are those who think commercial porn websites are the only way to access porn. I imagine they are the same ones who wight click to chose "Copy" and "Paste" from the context menu and type Google in the Google search engine to find Google.
I guess the UK doesn't need the EU. They seem perfectly capable of creating their own internet-destroying regulations.
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The introduction of mandatory age verification is a world first, and we've taken the time to balance privacy concerns with the need to protect children from inappropriate content.
Very good. They thought about balance. Now they just need to think about how it is possible to enforce this on the global internet and how it won't fail hard furthering the UK's position as the laughing stock of the internet. After all they basically banned BDSM online. Look how well that worked. (Spoiler Alert: It didn't)
... the kids will still be free to watch people being murdered, tortured, blown up, stabbed, shot etc etc on various forums and sites. But thats ok. Just so long as they don't get to see any tits or arse then they'll be fine.
Sex - its monstrous! Should be outlawed! Hopefully in the year of our Lord 1819 in which the UK government lives will see the end of these vile online fornicators!
Go to your torrent site of choice. Enter your kink in search box. Free porn, no age checks, just get it and go so to speak.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
The internet is an enabler; it's an incredible amount of information at your finger tips. Almost by definition, it's supposed to be dangerous via providing the means by which people can become critical thinkers.....
Oh, I get it.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
If I have to bet who will win, a bunch of UK Tory and DUP parliamentarians trying to prevent teenagers from getting porn or a bunch of teenagers determined to get their hand so porn, my money is on the kids.
Usually this is the start and then other online activities will follow - time to revolt England fox?
I have an idea. Just put a credit card verification in and all those pesky teens that wanted to pay for their porn can't get it anymore.
Case closed. Let's get back to bashing each other's head in in an attempt to find out how to get out of the EU without leaving it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is just another example of how you can implement tyrannical rule, in a nominally "democratic" system. Make nearly everything illegal, and everything prosecutable, to the point it is nearly impossible to go through a day without breaking some law, somehow.
Then - decide which ones to enforce, and which ones to not enforce, based on "prosecutorial discretion". Voila' - now individuals in power hold a Sword of Damocles and can mold the system to favor or discourage any sort of behavior they choose.
As a kid and a teenager it seemed like things were progressing. I expected that by this time we'd have rolled back our puritan attitudes and be more like Europe. Now Europe is apparently more of a puritan state than the US was and the US is worse than ever.
Why does pornography bother people so much? When you hit puberty it's only natural to be interested. The world would be a better place by banning all advertising. Porn and sexuality is an individuals choice and shouldn't be controlled or stigmatized.
AC's look upon this bill and despair! It will become a framework for verifying your ID in other sectors as well. I don't know that this law will actually protect kids from seeing the pr0n they so desparately want to surf but maybe a good solution will come out of it and we can free the world of bot accounts and anonymous cowards
to live in a country so free of economic and social problems that your politicians can focus on pointless stuff like this.
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The UK think they can ban every "Chan" on the internet?
RIGHT.........
One can find this content easily by disabling Safe Search in Google search. Or opening Incognito tab in Chrome. So will this option be Enabled by default and require a person to prove they are an adult before turning it off?
Or is Google restricted from indexing this content in the UK?
This is but one of the consequences of demographic changes in the UK, where a vocal and militant minority has disproportionate effect on policies and social climate. The massive curtailing of free speech is another sad consequences. And to think this is the country that gave us some of the greatest advances in civics and science, and the most fertile ground of free discourse. It is almost unbelievable that less than half a century ago this country gave use Monty Python and movies such as Life of Brian.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Time to go all in. Just region lock ... everything.
People from RegionX, can only see content from RegionX.
Forever cementing the most powerful companies and organisations, in each RegionX.
No share space. No common Internet. Small, walled, guard-towered, soulless gardens.
For Safety. And think of the Children.
This is the future ... balkanization of ... Everything.
Does anyone believe that this is the end of Regulation?
All traffic tracked.
All users identified.
READING Content and downloading "bad words" criminalised.
All copyright of "authorised" (sanctioned) media protected harshly.
No free speech.
No allowance to create or use your own comment solution (Dissenter).
Wonderful? Well, they are not finished.
"Internet Tax". "Internet Privilege Suspension". "Lifelong Block".
Oh! What a brave new world!
(R)ule in Hell or (S)erve in Heaven [R]?
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Sharia law for the UK, fuck the queen and her inbred kids
Usually this is the start and then other online activities will follow - time to revolt England fox?
Yanks shouldn't go around giving lessons on freedom since with all your second amendment love you have been fucked front and back by the TSA for the last decade and more. And have done nothing about it.
So you're nothing but hot air balloons. You talk the talk but don't walk the walk even with hundreds of milions of firearms freely available.
My answer to any proponent of "hate speech" legislation or "free" healthcare is to go to Europe where there are fewer freedoms and more free things which you are obgligated to pay for in the socialist caste prisons of many of those European states. Feudalism was never entirely extinguished there.
1) You pay more per capita into the health care system compared to Europeans with taxes alone. Then you pay privately on top of that.
2) You probably mean something else than feudalism because the main characteristic of feudalism is that you have an upper class that acquires more wealth from land ownership and a lower class that have no other option than to rent. That is exactly the way the US is going right now.
Stick to the "hate speech" answer and leave the other things out of it.
Except, most European nations doesn't have English as a primary language and "hate speech" doesn't translate very well. More often the laws are along the lines of "you aren't allowed to instigate murder against groups of people". (AKA anti-terrorist laws.)
Hate speech as such is more of an anglophile notion.
It gives young people an unhealthy and unreasonable idea of how fast a plumber will come to your house.
Have gnu, will travel.
With a VPN,
Oh, you mean how the gov't would implement it. Does anyone really care?
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"We want the UK to be the safest place in the world to be online"
Says a lot when they consider information something the public needs to be kept "safe" from.
And forget scams and computer viruses. No, it's genitals (and pugs) that are the real danger!
Nevermind all those kids who grew up around livestock for the thousands of years that humans have been farming, fully exposed to sights of the reproductive cycle. They have all proven to be serious threat to humanity!
In other news, UK kids suddenly became very tech-savvy regarding VPNs, torrent (as if they didn't already) and how to spell "pornography" in various foreign language slang.
Everyone knows masturbation makes you blind.
That escalated quickly.
Hey, UK: You do know this will only stop the most casual and unintelligent of underage kids from seeing porn, right?
They'll use TOR, or a VPN, or a proxy, or get access to someone else's 'porn license', and that'll just cover the actual out-and-out porn sites, it won't cover all the other sites that can have porn on them, or Torrenting porn, and so on, and so on.
Meanwhile, where are UK parents, whose job it really is supposed to be to monitor their kids' accessing of the Internet in the first place?
Let's just be frank about this, UK legislators: what you're really doing here, is trying to legislate morality. Your 'age verification' requirement is really just a 'shame factor', to discourage people from accessing pornography entirely, regardless of age, by requiring them to reveal themselves in a public setting. You're just hiding this effort behind the age-old 'think of the children!' tactic.
Then, of course, there's the age-old problem of defining what is and is not 'pornography': basically, you can't. It's literally in the eye of the beholder. So then your 'protect the children from pornography' law will be used for censorship of any number of things on the Internet that you Torries find 'objectionable'. Wonder how long it'll be, before that turns into censoring any and all criticism of the Government?
But I digress. Enjoy your wasted Taxpayer money and wasted effort. Things like this flavor of censorship have been tried before, and they never work.
The wild world of middle school boys in the 90s. I remember my buddy got a old pc from some single guy his mom knew, I helped him pick it up and he said something about "cleaning it up" before he gave it away.
We immediately scoured the machine for deleted files upon booting it up. SCORE!!! A whole bunch of grainy GIFs of playboy scans!! And BOOM! there it was. Leisure suit larry! The holy grail of forbidden games.
We usually traded for stuff like this but I told him I should get it all for free for helping him recover the data. Big drama over this move.
He got over it when I cracked the age verification questions out of the game. We must have given our cracked version to a dozen other kids and who knows how many they gave it to. We didn't have our own modems yet so we were still swapping floppies but I'm sure it made it's way onto an ELiTE BBS well before we did.
Makes me wonder if I can still find it out there on the net somewhere. Almost certainly if any of my early creations exist today they're in the form of modded games.
Funny, I can be naked in public parks and drink beer in the streets here in Germany. Can you do that in USA?
On top of that, Internet providers are not colluded, and I have multiple decent options. The same with cellphone providers, cheap and good.
Of course, other things are more expensive, but when I broke my collar bone biking, I didn't have to pay anything for the surgery nor the physiotherapy, so you get what you pay for.
.. unforeseen consequences ...
Another unforeseen consequences is that high school kids will find that the easiest way to get porn will be to have their classmates send sexting selfies to each other through facebook and snapchat.
Probably not what the lawmakers hoped.
That doesn't mean he is wrong.
Or, you know, reddit, twitter, instagram, underwear catalogue.
This is the country of the Page 3 girl and the "fun" version of GQ. How are they supposed to distinguish between topless and porn?
You can drink beer basically _anywhere_, you just have to pour it into a plastic cup.
The problem with naked people in public is the people that choose to do so. (Argh, my eyes.) True on both sides of the pond.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Not if you have good aim.
For all anyone knows, age verification is automatically deemed "not robust enough" as soon as even *one* underage person can access the content, regardless of the measures they employ.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
A couple of other things...
Nobody but your employer and government agencies have any business knowing that number, so there's plenty of people who are of age that wouldn't want to give that information out.
Two, I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but here in Canada, minors usually also have such numbers, and you aren't going to be able to correlate a such a number to anything resembling an exact enough age to know if they are a minor or not.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And if the VPN doesn't block the "unsuitable" content from being accessed by minors, then the UK will in turn block payments to the VPN if they refuse to institute age-check measures, regardless of the otherwise legal use case for VPN's.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What about a boot password and physical case lock?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You've never seen what happens when you lock some king-sized candy bars in a gun safe, and give kids a toolbox, have you?
What did the Yemenis do to you to trigger the slow fuse that is resulting in so many dead civilians? And then there's all the over countries where you've killed people since you started killing natives to steal their land though it really took off after setting Spain up for war.
Even Japan, you showed up with war ships and forced them to open up trade when they just wanted to be left alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
That's not really getting around technology as much as just plowing right through it.
Also, depending on the style of case and lock, breaking the lock could end up damaging the computer to the point of being unusable, and even if that wasn't the case there'd at least be evidence of the tampering so it's not like a kid would be getting away with doing this without being caught.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It will be fun when the browsing habits of of top UK politicians are released. Or do they somehow think that there will be no possible way to trace them from anonymized data.....in which case they will learn something very important.
As long as there are things that are legal but very embarrassing, tracking people is extremely dangerous.
In France the relevant laws are called "incitation à la haine" which is pretty close to a literal translation if hate speech.
It's not an anglophile thing at all.
Sounds like all this does is kill the commercial pronography industry in the UK. Amature poronography, sites like pornhub that have tonnes of free content sound like they are exempt. And of course, commercial poronography in the rest of the entire world won't be affected. Its a quick plane ride to many other countries where the UK porn companies could easily set up shop.
I cannot imagine this would work in real life. Do they not know how much porongraphy is out there? And what a DNS block? a firewall block? some sort of mandatory proxy? who the heck could possibly maintain a list of all the pornography on the internet. Most likely it will be just targeting registered in the UK porn houses and decimate their own local industry.
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The purpose of the American second amendment is to ensure that Rich White Men can always have private armies to keep the poor rabble in their place. History shows that a well trained professional army can reliably crush a much larger armed mob. The American war of independence was faught over Corporate Taxes.
Saudi Arabia views itself as the leader of the Muslim World. They are systematically taking down every country that doesn't bow to their leadership. This isn't the first time the President of the USA has been hired to do a job.
What the fuck else to say... WE aint nothin but mammals... :P
[($)]
When I was young 'un of about 11 me and my mates used find porn by looking for discarded mags under bushes in the park! Well I can see kids from now on doing the equivalent online, looking for "scraps" of online porn in discard file dumps, PasteBin links and open Google Drives. There'll be links texted around schools about where you can get small snippets of free porn. If you want something you'll find a way to get it without getting caught 'cos that why we've risen to the top of the food chain. If history teaches kids nothing else, it's that human beings know how to get one over on the authority figures in charge of us when we want stuff!
Ooh, I don't know. I guess it depends how you interpret
Websites that refuse to implement the checks face being blocked by UK internet service providers
How are you going to display an image to someone you've banned from your sites?
I mean, shit, if you're going to troll at least show a modicum of intelligence about it.
i 'accidently' stumbled upon this porn is the most use excuse, nothing accidently about it.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
You forgot the DEA.
And NSA
And FBI
And CIA
And Dept. of Labor
In fact, no agency of U.S. Government is NOT involved in surreptitious personally identifying data collection
Yeah, yeah, bullshit, bullshit,bullshit. Ft Sumpter
Takes Americans about 1 hour to start violence...WHEN THE VICTIM CAN'T SHOOT BACK