Looks like UK is going the same way as a few states. Spare a thought for us. So messed up this increasing surveillance state.

  • @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…

    https://torproject.org

    • 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.

  • Good, might stop the creepy fuckers watching it in parliament…
    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/neil-parish-banged-up-tractor-porn-b2439583.html (I also remember and was going to link an earlier and unrelated report that was done about MPs watching porn in parliament, but that one story has drowned out all other results and it’s too early for me to dig deeper)

    In all seriousness, this is obviously a terrible idea for many reasons.

  •  ugh   ( @ugh@lemm.ee ) 
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    1110 months ago

    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.

    • Company? It’s the UK communications regulator, Ofcom.

      They found that many on low incomes don’t have photocard ID when they rolled out voter ID despite opposition.

      Considering no one seems capable of withholding data from motivated hackers, this could be quite horrific.

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:


    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!

  • This from the country that single handedly created the fetish around corporal punishment.

    Trying to clean retroactively?

    Are the public phone booths still plastered with escort service stickers?

  •  Syldon   ( @Syldon@feddit.uk ) 
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    210 months ago

    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.