My networking knowledge may be out of date, but can’t you get around region locked sites with VPNs or Tor?
I was in Turkey in July 2019. Wikipedia was blocked. I had to use Tor to access it. On installation I think I had to tick a special box that said something like “use flux capacitor bridge for blablabla countries like China and Turkey”
Though In that case, Wikipedia didn’t give a fuck if you were accessing it from Tor. The government did.
I know some sites block tor/VPN access for various reasons
You can
But most people will not go to those lengths, esp not kids.
You vastly underestimate the interest young people can have into things, especially into forbidden things, especially when the workaround is trivial and works with a few clics, no tech skills required.
Will this become a new venue for scam? Most likely. But kids motivation vs. a very easy “fix” is not what’s gonna stop them. Adult surveillance would be way better.
Exactly, I’d argue kids are the most likely to go to lengths to circumvent the rules
Doesn’t proton offer a free vpn with limits?
Also, a vpn is pretty cheap. I wouldn’t say that it’s kids that would be using it, it would be adults who don;t want to upload their picture.
Yes however they are literally move all their infrastructure to the UK so they won’t be an option soon.
Windscribe is a thin too, but since they are Canadian and Canada is making stupid political deals with the US lately, it can’t be relied on either.
Yeah it’s pretty good, you just can’t torrent with the free tier and sometimes it’s slow because a lot of people are using it.
But it’s very useful for the short time I use it.
Depends on what you mean by “kids”. Elementary schoolers, no, but some teens are willing to do a surprising amount of work to accomplish something if it’s important enough to them. And then they pass their method along to their friends, or offer to set up anyone in the school for the price of a couple of bags of snack food.
“snack food”
Need the munchies for after puffing whatever they put in their vapes.
I’m not sure whether the readership for this article is primarily British (“crisps”) or primarily North American (“chips”), so I compromised. 🤷
lol I’m just joking that teens in high school would probably trade weed for things rather than snacks. I’m not proud of it, but I got paid in weed junior year of high school for customizing MySpace accounts, which is why I laughed at “snacks” because if they are later age high school students they probably aren’t trading in sour cream and onion.
I admit, my information on what teens use for barter is even more out-of-date than yours (by about a decade, based on when MySpace was popular).
Haha all good, I wasn’t criticizing, snacks just made me laugh. Teens have probably been bartering weed and alcohol in high school since the 70s.
All it takes is one kid to work it out and it’ll be common knowledge in that school within a week.
Perfect response. This gets the message across, “governments of the world, the Internet doesn’t need you, you need the Internet”.
I don’t understand how this is a controversial opinion, but maybe parents should actually parent their children instead of expecting the Internet or the government to decide what their kids should see for them? Maybe talk to your kid about safe and ethical sex, the dangers of porn addiction, and not to take anything away from pornographic content instead? Maybe we shouldn’t be giving children smartphones and tablets with unfettered internet access in the first place instead of spending time with them? Wild concepts I know.
I’ve been saying this a couple places recently, but why not pass legislation requiring every site to provide a content rating. Then parents can choose if they want to restrict content by ratings or not. Yeah, you could have malicious actors, but it makes it easier and simpler for everyone to work than having ID laws.
I imagine it would work about as well as YouTube Kids would.
Which is to say not at all
But that would actually solve the problem and not enable massive government overreach. We can’t have that.
This is a conservative idea if conservatives weren’t evil lmao. And I agree
because these laws aren’t about protecting children they’re about elimination of access to things the government doesn’t like… like queer spaces
And giving them sweeping ability to track everybody via their identity papers, to see what websites and services they’re using, what all their online identities are, etc.
They claim the info isn’t being saved or passed on to the government to form a big surveillance database to one day use against people - sure, it’s legal to, say, be gay or a socialist or of a particular religion today, but societies and regimes change, and the info they collect on you today may become ammunition against you in 10, 20, 40 years time.
But I don’t for a moment believe their obvious lies.
This is nothing but authoritarian police state monitoring and control. It’s extremely obvious. Yet, who are we to vote for in the next election? Not Labour, thanks to this (and a few other big reasons perhaps), not the Tories because, well, you’ve seen what they’re like.
It’s not impossible for a third party to be elected of course, not as impossible as places like the USA that have a very worryingly solidified two party system, it’s just very unlikely.
Knowing the British people and their seeming apathy and poor judgement at scale these days I wouldn’t be surprised if they elect the racist bigots at Reform - who ironically would be even more authoritarian and evil than what we have now.
As usual, there’s no hope for the future and no possibility of good outcomes.
Humanity is doomed to repeat it’s failures for all of history again and again, and we’re just along for the miserable ride.
The general apathy and disdain for noncomformity (the hatred protestors get is absurd) really does let their government stomp all over them. IIRC BBC goes out of their way to not cover protests in their own back yard, or anything that may be critical of the crown
Not the government per se, but the powerful lobby groups that want a new world order. Usually linked to religion. Looking at you, Collective Shout.
This, right here. It’s like Nixon’s “war on drugs” that went on, and on, and on… The goal was not drugs, per-se, but to use drugs as a pretense to police people of color.
Drugs still won.
And people of color lost.
As is american tradition.
Thanks, drugs!
Don’t give your children unrestricted acces to a smartphone until they’ve proven they can use it wisely. No smartphone before age twelve. Limited use until age 15. And ffs. Ban smartphones at school.
Teach your kids about the internet. It’s part of sexual education.
And don’t leave it up to private companies to identify me and collect sensitive data on me. Fuck that. If you really want age verification. Deliver the framework.
completely agree, if kids want a phone at school they can get a dumbphone
My 5 year old son does have access to an android tablet, but i restrict, selectively, what he can do on it and time limit his usage so it locks down after a few hours. I curate his youtube and frequently spend time watching kids content to decide if i want him watching it. If its good and educational i will share it to his kids youtube account. He cant browse the web, he cant buy things on the play stores. He has to get me to approve any app install and i will always install first and play to ensure it safe.
Its hard work, but its worth it to protect him online. And this has lead to it just being another one of his toys, it doesnt absorb his whole existence. He can take it or leave it. Which i am chuffed about.
When he is older and i can help him understand for himself how to be safe, i will help him however i can. Rather than restric, i will help him understand what the internet is, the good the bad and the ugly.
Good to hear a parent parenting ⭐
I wonder how you’ll deal with a 16yo things get tricky with hormones, sex and rebellion.
I expect i will crumple at that point. But i hope i set him up with the tools he needs to navigate that part of life. And hopefully he feels close enough with me to come to me for help.
That requires effort, which most parents are unwilling to do, and newspapers will still want it banned and governments would still want to ban it so they can ban other things too.
Damn, U.K. is really getting destabilized fast. Law changes, immigration, censoring and now monitoring? Is this what happens when you leave EU and “lose” in the modern war?
The Net is dead. Where’s our R.A.B.I.D.S. when we need them?
There’s a UK Parliament petition to repeal the Online Safety act. There’s no guarantee it’ll do anything but might be worth a try for anyone in the UK.
Don’t forget to write to your MP - being polite but angry helps. Explain the issues, shortcomings and why you feel this should be repealed and a better user-friendly and privacy respecting alternative needs to be found BEFORE implementing stupid asinine knee-jerk legislation like this.
My poor MP is getting it in the jugular because they boasted about working in data security and I’m exploiting the hell out of that statement so they can’t easily weasel their way out of it.
I’m just waiting for the response to be something along the lines of… “According to existing law (see Online Safety Act), websites are required to do age verification… blah blah blah, no changes will be made, thank you for your inquiry”
Most likely, or maybe someone will try to use this to score some easy points with more online conscious voters. Probably not but one can dream.
Imagine if people could just choose what country they’re browsing from
Not a long term solution.
Forget tax havens, eventually some countries will probably become content havens and sell server space hosted there. Probably some carribean island
Imagine if people could choose what country they’re
browsingfrom.just MOOOOOOOOOVE
It’s yet another step in seeing the Internet becoming owned by big corporations. Only big corporations can implement these things.
Art, creativity, people doing internet things as a hobby, that is dying more and more everyday.
I miss the 90s internet :(
It took like 2 minutes to download a single photo though.
I’d take that over the bullshit attacks the internet of today is attracting.
I tried gemini protocol for a bit to see if it did a decent job addressing this, but it doesn’t. We do legit need a ‘smallweb’ non-commercial sort of thing, but I suspect retreating to a BBS model is probably what is required.
I2p and the return of webrings. Done.
Webrings were one of the best ways to spend an evening. I loved getting lost in the Tolkien and Gardening ones.
There was a site I found in highschool around 1998 - the paradigm of pessimism.
Full of dark humor and anti-jokes, in glorious web 1.0 - that site had a huge impact on my humor. I’ve never been able to find it again. Just a random site someone hosted somewhere on the Internet - no scams, no paywalls, just a bunch of weird humor.
Nowadays, if there’s something you like online, remember to plug it into archive.org so it gets added to the wayback machine. You’ll still need to remember the URL to access it, but at least it will be archived somewhere
We also desperately need a non-US archive.
Me too, so much!
A big reason why I’ve come to like Lemmy communities so much is really because they give me some old internet feeling. It’s not super crowded, it’s an app that isn’t design for brain rot, it allows interesting online discussion etc.
I think projects like this can continue to exist, even in a bleak corporate owned internet.
Yeah, we’re all mad, fuck the suits and all that.
But why does the distinction between “real-world adult material” and “creative, non-realistic”, “artistic, animated works” that “do no harm” matter? Last time I checked, realistic adult material can be just as artistic, and the harm done by negligently letting children watch it seems comparable.
Are they in favour of age verification for “uncreative, realistic” pornography, or is the real distinction just between real-life and online?
I interpreted it as “can’t possibly be doing harm to the people in the video” - eg as much of mainstream porn can do - since there are none if everything is animated fiction
Admittedly, I’m pretty sure UK did this with the underage consumers in mind, not the industry actors, for whom both sorts of porn would have a similiar impact. (I’d assume)
Personally though, the constant repeating to me sounded comedic and they were making fun of how seriously we’re taking nude drawings with this, which sounds silly even if it’s justified.
And that is the correct interpretation.
It’s because some arguments against porn says the actors involved have it bad. Something that can’t happen in a drawing.
I think it’s more about the legal distinction between drawn and ‘real’ porn.
TBH “negligently letting children watch it” seems like a sensless statement to me. The onus should be on parents to filter their kids’ internet environments, not literally every accessible site on the open internet (which are never going to comply with a patchwork of age verification regs).
It’s the same schtick you hear from pedophiles in defense of their child sex dolls and it’s unsurprising to see it coming from rule34 in particular considering they serve up a lot of that content in cartoon form.
Yeah, the “it’s just cartoons so it’s not harmful” argument falls flat pretty quickly. There are much better arguments to be made for why the law is dumb.
This is sadly the way to handle it, users of these places need to learn how to vpn instead of giving their private information for age verification online.
VPNs aren’t going to be a practical solution going forward. You are creating dependancies that governments can target, spying on traffic and enforcing censorship for these relays is something any country can and likely will implement at some point. The clearnet is dying because the evangelicals are killing it.
So of all the fucking things to restrict, why this? Facebook is a hundred times more dangerous than any porn. Ban that shit instead.
because Facebook is an abstract danger, porn is (relatively) well defined
Because it’s something where the current government can claim they’re “doing something” or “addressing a real problem” but it also doesn’t threaten the rich and powerful.
Going after Facebook would threaten the rich and powerful, for who it is an important tool for manipulating people, who think they can use it to mold culture to what they want it to be my breaking the minds of children.
The current UK government is desperate to say to the public that they’re governing and fixing problems, but they also really don’t want to piss off the rich and powerful.
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fuck the UK
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