and fuck the UK goverment
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.
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.
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It probably won’t add much latency.
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Ireland isn’t too bonkers and hopefully won’t have any large collection of online laws of their own that become an irritant.
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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.
Indefatigable horndogs best band name calling dibs now
Please make the music ska. A band with that name, playing literal horns, creating a fast, upbeat tempo? It would be beautiful.
the Irish statistically look like absolutely indefatigable horndogs
What did you think that “wild rover” they keep singing about was? 😉
Pornhub stats: Irish +28572%
-
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?
There’s a search engine named Kagi. It’s basically the equivalent of “googles” but for a different search engine.
Thanks. The usage now makes sense, albeit superfluous.
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.
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.
It makes me sad when I see the name because Kagi used to be a payments processor for shareware and essentially a predecessor to modern app stores…but before enshittification.
Does “googled” make you feel advertised at?
Not particularly, and while I admit this can seem hypocritical, the verb “to google” has just become a generic trademark.
When someone says band-aid, or kleenex, or jello, I think of bandages, tissues, or gelatin desserts, not of a specific brand of these products. Same goes with “googled”, it just means “searched the web” now rather than specifically using Google.
What about ye olde “googles on ddg”?
Upvote for the verbification of Kagi :)
Does a vpn bypass it?
Edit: btw yes I totally agree with you, I’m just wondering if that would be a workaround
You can use a VPN to negate this check. For now…
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.
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).
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.
At one point Reddit had an Onion site
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…
Random AI photos. That would be funny in theory, but they’re just using AI to check the ages anyway.
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.
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.
I heard about this but I didn’t really believe it, until now.
The world and the internet are so low on trust, I kind of wish there was some entity we trusted.
Some website where you could upload a photo, and people would actually know for sure that all the site is going to do is compare the photo to an ID, verify you’re over a certain age, and send a simple boolean “Yes” to the website that wanted to know if you were over-age. Or, to somehow know that your account is human and not a duplicate.
We could do a lot with that, but as it stands, no person or entity can ever really be trusted with that kind of data; I think most wouldn’t even trust the same governments that issue those IDs.
It’s simple, librarians or even gas station clerks look at your license and they give you a code that you can use idk 10 times for account signups.
No scanning or tracking of who is requesting. Just make it an ID check like buying cigarettes
deleted by creator
This is why we can’t have nice things.
deleted by creator
some entity we trusted.
We can trust each other, just takes a little chemical and/or psychological manipulation.
It’d still be a joke to fool anyways
The government already knows who you are! No need for a third party
Just give you a fucking oauth login and have websites use that for age checks.
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.
just use one of the libreddits like safereddit.com or something, never go to actual reddit.
Rdx is my jam
Here’s an interesting point. I just went to an nsfw sub to see if I’d get that prompt, and it gives me two ways to verify - selfie or photo ID. The photo ID has to be “government issued”, and maybe I don’t have one of those. The selfie is a link for a phone, using a QR code and I don’t have a phone that can scan QR codes.
This means that in order to access said sub, I’d need to buy a new phone or wait 30 days or whatever to buy some kind of ID. Even with all the other reasons this sucks, that seems discriminatory.
I don’t have a phone that can scan QR codes.
QR codes are a plain text encoding scheme. If you can screenshot it, you have access to FOSS software that can decode it, and you can paste that URL into your browser.
I know this, but it’s a barrier for anyone who doesn’t.
Who’s in the middle of this Venn Diagram between “uses some kind of custom OS on their phone to where their camera app doesn’t automatically read QR codes” and “doesn’t know how to install or use software that can read QR codes”?
My phone is Android from 2016, and it doesn’t have a QR scanner built-in. I know I can download something to do it, but someone like my mother for instance wouldn’t know that. Why do I have such an old phone? It still lasts for days on a charge and does everything I need.
Sure, but the point is, they also could’ve posted a simple link, instead of expecting users like the above, to go thru hoops.
Damn. Did you find something else to jerk to my friend ? ( Shit no I don’t want you to jerk to my friend )
Can’t even get porn models from civitai in a few hours it’s about to be blocked in the UK too.
Really? Lmao. Stock up.
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.
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.
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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.
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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 propagatealt.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.-
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Estimate age from selfie”
fake beard sales dramatically increase
Works in real life too. Grew a beard when i was 17, and never got carded for booze again after that.
As someone with long hair and a long beard I haven’t been carded in basically 10+ years.
Last weekend I got carded buying a beer with my parents-in-laws. Of course one of the very few times I didn’t have my ID.
Two 65+ people order a beer and then like, oh we’ll get your beer on our tab to make things easier. Bartender “I’ll need to see his ID”
We all couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t upset or anything, it was just kind of absurd feeling. I’ve been drinking for almost 20 years.
It’s one of those situations where common sense should be allowed to be used.
Are there any women here today?
Don’t be sexist. Gray is gray.
It was a Life of Brian reference.
Are there any women here today?
My deepest apologies sire, I know I lack familiarity with the greatest comedies. I know it is my duty to know them, especially when I listen to them out of my mind on laughing gas.
When you’re chewing on life’s gristle don’t grumble, give a whistle. And this’ll help things turn out for the best.
Oh shit, hopefully god can’t see through my tin roof.
The stuffed bra has deferred many an ID check.
Yeah how tf is that supposed work??
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.
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.
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.
FB has a very aggressive data mining verification for making an account, they don’t even let you use some obscure emails to registet
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.
@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.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
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.
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.
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.
Its funny and pointless until they pressure Visa and the site you are using dies.
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.
Try using old.reddit.com. Literally just replace
www
withold
, or addold
in front ofreddit.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.Once they figure that out they will no doubt get rid of old.reddit.com.
And once they do that, this place will get some new users. Guaranteed.
I mean Lemmy has been growing. Think of it as anarchist reddit- no CEO, no ads, no data collected.
I’m only back on reddit because I like to be evangelical from time to time, and I used to mod r/mapporncirclejerk so I like to pop by and say hi.
Edit: I forgot I was on Lemmy lol
I use it for local subreddits. There’s not enough people here for local communities.
It’s over the threshold for a few. Some examples:
[email protected] for the San Francisco Bay Area.
Those are large populations, though. Gonna be hard to get enough people for Podunk, Iowa.
Subscribers is one thing, but the. Bay area community has 2 posts in the last week. That’s not a lot of activity
And then you’ll need to use a VPN if you’re in the UK, which is recommended anyway.
I use rdx.overdevs.com for anything I need on reddit these days, it’s a read only interface that isn’t affiliated with the site and doesn’t track you or advertise anything.
Or use Stealth if you’re on Android.
rdx is already an android app
True, but it’s only available through the Play Store if I’m not mistaken.
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!
Facebook does that,
Youtube does that
It’s a UK law, you either comply or get banned. Obviously everybody now has a VPN subscription.
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.
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.
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.
That’s terribly disheartening. I’m sorry, Italy.
I think it’s better to reject these sites rather than work around it. Especially for major platforms. Make it hurt financially.
Many have done that for decades, but the tend remains that the internet is getting less and less free.