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UK is a joke, what is going on over there
How is the uk even a real country at this point
They could literally just put resources into modern parental controls and better parenting. But this is about anonymity and data collection databases for their AI partners.
Age verification laws are just an excuse to kill anonymity on the internet.
Is this actually possible to enforce? To stay with the example of Mullvad, you could still send an envelope full of cash over to Sweden to add time to your account (or create a new one).
they also accept crypto I believe
When do we just start killing politicians?
46 years ago. Start with Reagan.
maybe if hinckley wasn’t a complete failure
Jesus Christ, what the fuck is going on in the UK and the rest of Europe right now with this age verification nanny state shit?
If I ran a website that would be subject to these new regulations, do you know what I would do? I’d fucking IP ban all of the United Kingdom, not comply in advance with this fascist horseshit.
If there’s one silver lining about this digital insanity going on right now, it’s that governments and corporations are essentially forcing users underground, and the dark web (unindexed websites) has the potential to grow and thrive as a result. We might have an opportunity to take the internet back from those who are trying to tighten their grip around the free and unfettered flow of information.
newspapers owned by foreign billionaires and shitty childrens authors that give epstein tickets to her play for children
Did not know that latter bit! Not like she’s enjoyed any positive sentiment from me for a long ass time, but damn! Gross!
Would Mullvad even legally need to comply with UK laws if they don’t have a server in the UK? Maybe they could allow UK user but just not operate out of UK?
The deepstate is real. Its Right here cumming for your porn.
To get a little more serious about it look into Who is buying our media outlets and who is buying our financial outlets (visa/mastercard).
This is almost always being pushed by a rightwing cult. Sorry “thinktank”.
They have to fast track the mandatory ID laws now because the Epstein files is rapidly making people realize what their true intentions are
A lot of websites have already done that. A lot of image hosting sites. If I forget to turn the VPN on my feed looks about 30% like this
Unless you’re based in or have some kind of presence in those countries there’s no reason to even ban them. Banning by geolocation isn’t exactly trivial or reliable. Let them figure out a way to ban you instead.
Hm well Britain did try to fine 4chan. Amusing conceptually but it does mean they’re not above picking on website owners for not complying with their rules, regardless of where they are based.
There will always be ways, we always find ways
This was always the logic next step to these campaigns. Sighhhh
That’s going to be a crazy policy to try and enforce. Reminds me of the US attempt to ban sports gambling online but only domestically. That just prompted people to make accounts overseas.
As usual, the governmental response is to increase the surveillance state and punish the end users, without addressing the incentive to create or distribute illicit content. They’re just feeding a sprawling black market which… may be the intent. Black markets are notoriously unregulated and far easier to manipulate/gouge/swindle people over.
I wonder if in the future we’ll get to know exactly who pressed the digital freedoms crackdown button on the summer of 2025. Things were going backwards already before then but the sudden acceleration is curious and concerning to me.
It’s to move to a risk management based society. Look at the sociology behind all of this and you would see a counter example. this was already being accelerated the first step was facial recognition years ago. Surveillance states are defaults in risk management societies. In a nutshell if we treat everyone like a criminal then its only a matter of time before we catch someone is their consciousness going forward.
Guilty until proven innocent.
It’s not just age verification: the identity-verifying document’s image is kept on servers for future use. Theoretically by governments verifying, practically so that everyone’s identity can be highjacked in a leak.
Adult verification is simply determining a single bit: is this person an adult or not? We have had zero-knowledge proof for ages: if the government really wanted to determine this single bit, it could do so without jeopardizing everyone’s privacy and online security.
Even if an ID was verified without storing any data, how would they know if people were reusing the same ID or if someone else was accessing the account? ID verification isn’t the solution. But punishing negligent parents will incentivize them to do their job and watch what their kids do online
There’s plenty of ways age checking could be decoupled from identity checking, and I find it extremely suspicious that the proponents of these laws aren’t promoting them.
Any examples?
There’s lots of cryptographic type approaches where the entity validating you is air-gapped from the entity certifying your age.
But if you don’t trust them it’s not hard to figure out a scratchcard system where for, say, £1 cash your local newsagent checks your ID and lets you pick a card that you scratch off to get a code that you can then use to obtain a cryptographic token online signed by a recognized CA. Neither the newsagent nor the card issuer have any way of tying you to that code, and if you don’t like the idea of using the same token on multiple sites you can always buy more. Of course you’d also have the option of obtaining codes online, but there’s something I think people would find reassuring about the existence of a visible physical gap.
In my country if you want to buy booze online, you verify your age by logging into this id check service the banks have set up. The bank will only send if the buyer is 18+ or not to the store. So no identification data is send to the store not even the actual age.
You’d have to rely on your country’s banks not relaying all info anyway, pinky promise, but it’s an interesting model.
Banks know your age anyways, so it stops the system from sucking more than it already does
Not necessarily the best approach but a widely and officially recognized one:
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-verification
People are using VPNs to circumvent identity verification, so this solves nothing.
Yeah thats why theyre now pushing tmfor verification to allow use of VPNs. Im not techy enough to know how this could actually be enforced, but if they pull it off using a VPN to gain access to a VPN sounds tricky.
What does that have to do with this discussion? If you can bypass this EU system, you can also bypass the less private British one. No reason to push the less private one unless age verification is not your true goal.
I could ask you the same question.
You want to ask what does the existence of a widely accepted privacy-preserving solution, while the government is pushing a privacy-destroying one, have to do with the original comment of “the people pushing it being suspicious”? Now you are just trolling.
Jesus fuck, I’m so tired of this “everyone who disagrees with me or I don’t understand is ‘trolling’” nonsense. I can’t even be bothered to discuss anything further. Goodbye.
You could do it with an offline AI model and Python. You download, firewall it, it checks your image and shits out signed text message of your approximate age range and the time.
Guess the number of tor users in the UK is about to explode
