and fuck the UK goverment

  • 𝚝𝚛𝚔@aussie.zoneEnglish
    28·
    3 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·
      3 days ago

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

      • AlteredEgo@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        3 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
          6·
          3 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·
            3 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
          2·
          3 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.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    2024·
    5 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
      1622·
      5 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·
      5 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·
        5 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·
          5 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·
        5 days ago

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

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    8·
    3 days ago

    It is fucking mental that an industry plagued by data harvesting is being asked to harvest more data.

    Anyway, I’m now in Belgium according to my VPN.

  • archchan@lemmy.mlEnglish
    15·
    4 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.

  • LSNLDN@slrpnk.netEnglish
    10·
    4 days ago

    Yeah I hate this. Glad I’m not using it much anymore anyway but damnnnn. I’m convinced they’re rolling this out under the guise of child safety but with the profit motive of data harvesting for their donors

  • markovs_gun@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    4 days ago

    What I don’t understand is that there are ways to prevent kids from looking at porn that don’t rely on crazy shit like this, even if they do involve some government action. Having to send a picture of your face to a porn provider to view porn is the dumbest possible way to fix this. I suspect the real reason for all of this is people want to effectively ban porn altogether and dumb fucks are letting them.

    • Psythik@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      15·
      4 days ago

      Having to upload your ID anywhere is already sketchy as-is, let alone a porn site. What ever happened to the days of “never use your real name on the internet”? Computer class teachers would drill that into students’ heads all the way through K-12.

      When Facebook came along, I thought people were insane for posting things under their full name with their photo attached to it. I thought MySpace was asking for too much personal info as-is! Fast forward ~20 years, and not only are you expected to provide your real identity on several websites, some American states even require it now!

      Honestly blows my mind how willingly we gave up our online anonymity without even the slightest bit of pushback. We all just accept it as normal now.

      • Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        FB has a very aggressive data mining verification for making an account, they don’t even let you use some obscure emails to registet

    • Quokka@mastodon.au
      4·
      4 days ago

      @markovs_gun @Abraxas Kids are being banned from all social media here in Australia soon. Including, it seems, YouTube lol.
      Expensive and completely unworkable. Reminds me I must spin up that Mastodon instance for my kids and their mates :mastodondance:
      It’s absolutely not about making sure everyone signs up to DigitalID.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      3·
      4 days ago

      It’s going to be interesting to see if, after Britons become accustomed to letting websites take pictures of their identity documents, whether there will be interesting fraud attempts made on the British public from other websites who claim that they are conforming to British law.

  • AcidOctopus@lemmy.mlEnglish
    73·
    5 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·
      5 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·
        5 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
          16·
          5 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.

      • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        4 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·
          3 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.

      • athairmor@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 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·
              4 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.

    • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      112·
      4 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·
        4 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·
          4 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·
          4 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.

  • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.netEnglish
    51·
    5 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·
      4 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·
      4 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.

      • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
        48·
        4 days ago

        The alternative is primitive tribal life, I think we can make government work, it’s improved a fuckton in the last several centuries, but it takes a lot more involvement and a lot less apathy than people have been showing about the whole thing lately.

        • fantoozie@midwest.socialEnglish
          10·
          4 days ago

          “the alternative is primitive tribal life” is classic Capitalist propaganda.

          You’re absolutely right though, we have progressed incredibly far. It’s almost as if we have all the knowledge and tools to build a truly inclusive society that provides a dignified standard of living for all people, yet there are stubborn and powerful groups interested in maintaining economic heirarchies and exploiting biases for political gain…

          • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
            32·
            4 days ago

            “the alternative is primitive tribal life” is classic Capitalist propaganda.

            We can have a functional society without rampant capitalism controlling everything if we all really wanted it enough. The idea that it’s “capitalism or stone-age tribalism” is a false dichotomy that reactionaries who hate authority push. Mommy can’t hurt you anymore. It will be okay.

            • fantoozie@midwest.socialEnglish
              1·
              1 day ago

              But to speak to the condescension: only a lazy, entitled, pathetically obtuse Westerner would have the gall to say everything is okay while your people’s institutions kill the Earth. Hopefully enough of you will die without children and we can rebuild the world without the toxicity of Western Christians.

              • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                52 minutes ago

                You sound legitimately insane and dangerous and weird, I hope you have a healthy, rewarding life because I’m not psychotic, I don’t wish death on anyone, and I’m not insane, I just don’t want you as a neighbor. I won’t see your unhinged reply.

              • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                51 minutes ago

                I don’t think you know how to make the twisted voices in your head form a coherent statement on the internet and you’re just using this platform to scream into the void. Go get ChatGTP or something, it makes a much better interactive diary.

        • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          6·
          4 days ago

          i don’t think we can make a government that works, what we can do is create a broader system of governance that functions.

          it’s pretty fucking wild that we just let a tiny fraction of the population decide things on a national scale for years at a time, with little way of interacting with these people and with it just being accepted that most people don’t know what they’re voting for, if they vote at all…

          From what i’ve learnt over the years the system that seems most likely to work well is something much much much much more based around local communities and constant actual human interaction, like instead of the most important elections being the national ones they should be the quarterly local elections where you decide who from you actual community represents you, based primarily on actually trusting them as a person you personally know.

          • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
            41·
            4 days ago

            You are absolutely right that we are ignoring community to a disastrous degree, our lack of communal spirit is allowing the worst people to gain the most power because we don’t care about who supports those worst people and only focus on spectacle.

            But we still need broader systems, if we just have small communities, we end up with medieval feudalism the moment one community needs something their neighbor has.

            We can’t get rid of the human need to “get ahead” it’s hardwired in, even in the most equitable system, there will always be someone who says “I want more.” And they will exploit and game the system until they get it. If there aren’t guardrails and laws and systems to enforce those laws, those kinds of people will immediately resort to force and we have, yet again, armed raiders who then become powerful enough after killing and raping enough of their neighboring communities that suddenly everyone sees them as the central power.

            Our problem isn’t that we don’t know how to government, our problem is we’re broadly still too dumb to handle the abstraction required to manage such large systems. We haven’t had that “reckoning” yet that will slap our whole species down a peg and say “You need to value intelligence” and I genuinely don’t know what will do it at this point. We had plagues and wars and genocides and it made people cling to ignorance harder.

            I might be peaking on my cynicism here but I am not sure we can rise above our limitations as a species. It might take several thousand more years of people building civilizations and having them reduced to ashes again and again before natural selection creates a species that can work together for a common good. But I kind of don’t think we’ll even be humans anymore at that point.

            • HoopyFrood@lemmy.zipEnglish
              2·
              4 days ago

              Rising above our limitations as a species is the field of religion. The current mainstream western religious meta is super toxic, but the entire point of dedicating ones life to meta-narratives is to transcend the limitations of our human instincts.

              Just like, treat your meta-narrative with a healthy dose of skepticism or you fall right back into human nature. From my experience i feel confident in saying all meta narratives are fictions

              • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                3 days ago

                Community. This is the overpowered meta that makes our species work and why we have highways and sewage systems and AI and MRI machines and a global logistics network… we did things as a community and it made the impossible happen, far more magic and use than any kind of faith or belief system, but we have a toxic relationship broadly with community. It conflicts with our individuality and we get stuck in emotional states that prioritize the self.

                It isn’t wrong, it’s just an obstacle we need to be as aware of same as we’re aware that we crave calories but we need to limit our intake. We need carbohydrates to survive but we also need to balance it.

  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialEnglish
    561·
    5 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·
        5 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·
          5 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.

  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    141·
    4 days ago

    Try using old.reddit.com. Literally just replace www with old, or add old in front of reddit.com. This should take you to a version of reddit’s interface which isn’t complete trash and it usually also allows you to bypass the need to login for NSFW content.