@CrypticCoffee
As for me, I will never, ever use any site that demands a drivers license or a face scan to get on. I'd sooner totally disconnect from the open Internet and move all my work to the darknet only.
I don't think so. Porn is very much a mental thing too, not just a visual one. Knowing none of the subjects of the pictures and videos exist will ruin it for a lot of people.
However, Mr Migliano's understanding from VPN providers, was that "this increased demand was driven by adults not comfortable disclosing their real identity while watching adult content."
No, really? There are whole, grown-ass adults that just don't want people to know they're into some weird-ass shit?
Or how about even normal shit? Anyone remember when Australia tried to say that adult women with small breasts are basically child porn? God forbid you're not exclusively into the gigathick mommy milkers, you deviant. Seems you'll be on the watchlist now. No need for warrants ever again when everyone on earth is a suspect for something!
This has less to do with pornography than it does normalizing one more goddamn camera.
@CrypticCoffee Counter to that is obvious: DO NOT USE legal access modes, use Tor instead and access only sites that "block" the UK instead of complying.
Hopefully most porn sites will do exactly that, like Pornhub already did to US states that demand driver's license uploads (including Utah and Arkansa). When they attempted to comply with such a demand from Louisiana, open traffic from there dropped 80% and presumably VPN and Tor access jumped.
This told all porn sites that it's not worth the programmer time to even attempt to service legal traffic from such jurisdictions. Block non-Tor/non-VPN connections and enjoy immunity.
Best of all, it only takes ONE jurisdiction on the whole planet that won't censor porn to make these measures globally ineffective. Crack anywhere, play everywhere. This gives new meaning to saying "fuck you" to the government.
Any attempt by the UK to block Tor will fail: China can't reliably block it, and the Great Firewall of China has far more resources than "Hadrian's Firewall." Trying to jail people for using Tor would be nearly as difficult and would also face the legal obstacle of jury nullification. This will go the way of the failed 21 drinking age and 55 mph speed limits in the US.
As governments try to crack down on porn, on dissent, and on criticism of their Great Leaders, the clearnet will be of declining importance (possibly used only for shopping) and the darknet will become more important. Embrace the power of the darknet...
Tor can be compromised though, you just need someone watching a good portion of the end nodes and hosting the fastest intermediate nodes, then run a viterbi trace back to a source. Tor is also very slow.
I'm looking at IPFS and FreeNet as viable alternatives
@tetris11 Slow yes, but if you download videos rather than stream them, slow is much less of an issue.
Even the US is not capable of watching all Tor exit and guard nodes. The UK sure as hell is not. The Torproject by the way is always looking for and decommissioning malicious Tor nodes, so the risk to any one user is low.
The usual way to attack a Tor user is to get them to connect to Tor to destination site you have compromised with javascript ON, then send a malware installer to the real target's computer. The installer then downloads a rather standard payload that tells the computer to phone home on a non-Tor connection. The widely reported 2013 incident used a Windows-only payload, today they probably add iOS and Android. Stock android that is. If it was reasonably practical for cops to see through Tor they would not put so much effort in seeing around it instead.
Things like the Silk Road takedown were very time consuming and labor-intensive, and required a lot of old fashioned exploits and unskilled admins at the targets. In other words, Tor, Signal, anything else running on an untrusted device also become untrusted. Silk Road was still brutally difficult for the cops, and that was a major, motivated investigation that unlike UK or Utah porn cops wasn't going to run into a stone wall of non-extraditability or lack of jurisidiction on someone with zero local "business presence."
BTW, do not use Google Fiber to connect to Tor to use Google privately, because if you do, Google can see your device directly(being your ISP), and see the one exit node they are talking to, allowing a confirmation attack.
Y'see, back in the day parents were not technically literate because the world was mid-societal shift. "Protect the children" (because parents are unable to) had some justification.
Today, basic computer literacy is a survival skill in the UK. The level of literacy needed to track your own kid is not that high (or expensive to rent).
If you are letting kids use tech you don't understand, and are not willing to invest the time/money to track yourself, that's a you problem. It shouldn't become a me problem.
As for "yeah but what about smart kids", I've got some bad news for you. They will always find a way around ANYTHING you set up.
Exactly. I was 17 teaching my parents about internet shit. I wasn't smart, I still aren't, but I also wasn't. Anyway, the amount ov viruses I had to fix because of them downloading kenny_chesney.exe is.. baffling.
Protect them from what, though? Every single boomer and like half of gen x has the same stale, cherished story of finding their dad's dirty magazine collection or some random magazine in the woods, and only the usual amount of them grew up to become sex offenders.
I really feel very uncomfortable with the notion of tracking the kids anyway. Arming them with knowledge as best as possible, and as usual showing interest in their behaviour to try and look as best as possible for signs of problems but ultimately kids are still people with their own lives even if people in development. Yes you need to protect them, to a certain extent, but ultimately some of this is no business but their own. You can try to educate and forewarn and hope some of it sticks but the tendency from my memory of being a kid is that that tends to be met with an eye-roll, this is probably where the temptation comes from to track children or drastically restrict the choices they're able to make so they can't ignore you but this is hardly a great way for that person in development to ultimately... develop.
This is dicey though, not least because as yet another random person on the internet offering their unsolicited opinion, I don't even have kids, and if you follow my logic to extremis, you basically have, "let the kids just figure it out on their own they'll be fine" which definitely won't apply to everything and can have disastrous consequences in some contexts. But nevertheless I think this concept of tracking, either covertly, or overtly with the intention of making a kind of panopticon effect for the kids, is likely ineffective but even if effective, is indicative of something going wrong with the intent of the surveillance.
It's a tricky one because of the nature of the net. Let's say we have three kids: Timmy, Jimmy and Harry.
Timmy starts looking up "tits", because Timmy loves titties. He's curious, and you probably want to have a talk about acting and how porn isn't reality.
Jimmy, well, Jimmy saw a videogame character tied up and it made him feel good, so he starts looking for that online. He's about to explore the BDSM scene. He's going to need the "safe sane consensual" talk, otherwise his explorations might get him, or someone else, hurt. He'll need more of a talk than Timmy!
Harry loves hentai; he found some when looking for pictures of his favourite cartoon character. Harry is going to need a long talk about fantasy Vs reality, otherwise he's going to disappoint a lot of women! Wait a moment, most of the things he's looking at involve animals and women... Might be time to get some therapy!
In all three of these cases a different style and level of parental intervention was required. You watch your kids because they're kids, and kids are experts at getting themselves (and others) hurt. Parents need to watch their kids because it's their job to intervene, and to decide the method of intervention.
However, we've not gone over the case of Lizzy, a girl cursed with religious fundamentalist parents. When they find out she's more interested in girls than boys, she'll be subjected to inhumane treatment to "fix" her. So there is a grey area here - not all parents should be parents.
They would just exempt themselves from it as they did with both reporting on people accessing porn using the HoP network and with the investigatory powers bill.
Young adults involved in sex education told the BBC they believed having these kinds of protections in place would help prevent children being exposed to pornography.
Jack Liepa, director of the charity Sexpression, which sends university students into schools to run workshops about sex and relationships, said the Online Safety Act was a positive step, but not a complete solution.
"Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy", it said.
Simon Migliano, head of research at VPN comparison site Top10VPN.com said "In Louisiana demand for VPNs more than tripled while in Utah it surged by 847% the day after the new age checks came into effect.
"The potential consequences of data being leaked are catastrophic and could include blackmail, fraud, relationship damage, and the outing of people's sexual preferences in very vulnerable circumstances," she said.
Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes, talking to Women's Hour on BBC Radio 4, said operators of explicit sites would need to "balance getting the verification highly effective with preserving data privacy, which is a legal requirement."
The original article contains 891 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
That's your worst-case scenario, right? Minors with ready access to vanilla photographs of naked people, on above-board commercial websites? So what. Tell me this abusive horseshit is the only way to stop that and I'll still reject this abusive horseshit.
The pearl-clutching horrors imagined by conservative dullards are a mundane experience for millions of people, and relatively few of them become dog-fuckers or axe-murderers. Almost like a healthy libido is normal and 18 isn't the day you take the shrink-wrap off your genitals.
Teenagers masturbating is a non-event. It's as unremarkable and unpreventable as atomic decay. It will happen. Do you want it to happen to whatever quasi-erotica passes through the filter? Bugs Bunny in drag, beach volleyball, that one episode of their favorite show where everybody shrinks? Shoddy AOL filters probably made more furries than Disney ever did. AI's gonna twist kids right up. Tell me with a straight face that's better than real photos of fake tits.
By all means, keep actual smut off broadcast TV. Expect websites to put the weird stuff behind warnings. Don't sell porn to minors. But if your website doesn't take a credit card to visit, hey guess what, anyone can see it, and anyone will. Oh well. People who think that's the end of the world are lunatics who mean it literally.
The first "porn" I saw was in middle school. It was a single bootable floppy disk with a pitiful menu of crude -- almost repulsive -- animations on an Apple II, basically no better than stick figures. The lesson I took away from it? How to program animations on an Apple II. And also that using one-voice beeps and honks over a bitbang speaker to suggest the buildup to an orgasm is hilarious.
The headline is very misleading. Porn companies are considering facial recognition as an option for validating age. Governments are putting more pressure on porn websites to keep minors away from the content, but it's very hard to thoroughly prove your identity online. A government issued photo ID is useless if you have nothing to compare it to visually. That's why many websites use bank/credit card info as opposed to an ID.
It is definitely a privacy concern if you worry about it being known that you watch porn, but I don't think it's right to fault the company.
That is not what they were asking. They were suggesting you use someone else's ID (say, your parent's) and a picture or video of the person the ID belongs to.
Spending money on giving kids school meals, hell no way. Spending millions on data collection under the pretext of protecting kids. hell yeah!
These shithouses do not give a damn about the people of the country. How long do you think it is going to be before someone gets blackmailed for voting for the wrong party and being a porn watcher.