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I want to go back
If it makes you feel better, this isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.
Because these regulations never do.
I still remember when social networks tried to impose a real name requirement.
It is not age verification.
It is privacy invading, morality policing, de-anonymizing, state surveillance.
Nothing less.
PS. If you want to download a video from a site that doesn’t have a download button, use the Inspect feature (right click on the page, not the video, and click inspect)
Sort by size. Reload page. Find the video. Open the video in new tab. It will be just the video. Right click and save as, or click the download button, or click the 3 dot menu button and select download.
On Firefox you can often bypass this entirely by shift + right click. And should see a save video as option. If not, the inspect feature works the same.
For hls/TS videos (m3u8 streams), if you reallllly want, you can copy the link for the stream and use VLC to convert the stream to a file.
This also often lets you download at higher resolution than they offer to download.
Yes, I porn.
Age-checking is just a backdoor to force everyone on the internet to identify themselves. Nobody cares about the kids, they care about purging the internet of political dissent and opposition.
I legitimately dont understand who supports this. Who are these parents that can’t parent their kids properly? It’s so incredibly easy these days.
So instead of handling shitty parenting we restrict adults and with surveillance. Make it make sense.
Who supports it? Fascists. It’s about controlling access to information and robbing the populace of privacy at the same time. An oppressive, authoritarian police state needs tools to maintain control. These are the tools.
There are SO MANY parents that are not willing to teach and monitor their kids online safety. I would even say most parents don’t take that responsibility themselves.
Totally in agreement. I think a bigger part of the issue is most people are completely tech illiterate. People can’t tell a computer from a monitor anymore and then we expect them to outsmart a kid with nothing better to do than stare at a screen for hours on end who will no doubt figure out ways around things. There has to be some feeling on the parents part of defeat. If only the politicians knew what the fuck they were doing we might get actual regulations for engineers to implement proper controls. The percentage of parents attempting to monitor their children appropriately while also having enough tech knowledge has to be low.
It’s more like who supports this in theory vs. who supports this how it’s written and implemented.
Realistically, no one should love how easy it is for anyone of any age to go to any search engine and search for “boobs” and just get a million images of boobs. I’m not a parent, but I know my parents when I was a teenager would have loved something like this. Kids are sneaky and smart, and this is a blanket thing parents think will once again put porn behind a barrier.
In a perfect world, a system could very easily exist that would 1) allow for a super-secure government owned digital ID system that isn’t a surveillance nightmare, 2) that system use a hash to verify over 18 age anonymously in real time. That’s how it’s supposed to work with digital IDs - only the data you need to verify is displayed to a vendor. Over 18 is a binary yes/no - a full DOB or name isn’t even needed.
The government ID wallet or site would use a no-log system to generate a hash value for you when you ask for one. You ask your ID app or site for an age verification hash. You get one that’s valid for about 2 minutes. Copy, paste as needed. The site uses the hash to only know “is this person over 18 or not?” and nothing else. The ID system shouldn’t keep the logs of which site asked back to confirm “is this hash valid?” This is exactly as secure as going to a liquor store with your passport or ID card and having tape over the name, address, and doc number. It’s even better because your face is not displayed, and your actual DOB should not be displayed either.
However, in our present shitty reality, companies who are trying to get contracts for these systems can’t help but feed their existing, and lucrative, addiction to selling our data and using poor security to store that data. So they want your Google/Apple/Samsung wallets connected to a government system that is actually ran by a 3rd party vendor with questionable security practices, and to provide far more information because no one has set an international standard for neither digital ID checks, nor IDs in general, enough to make it anything less than the surveillance state nightmare that is holding a government ID with all your info, while you move your face around and give them a 3D face scan that the platform doesn’t keep, but the verification company does.
a lot of people. The other day I saw a post on mastodon by some politician or someone in the UK stating that if people find any site that is geoblocking the UK because of the age verification to report it to some link he provided. it was boosted A LOT with a lot of replies in support.
bootlickers.
Age verification has it’s place online, but not for porn. That is just gonna push peopel to worse sites.
For gambling and stock market sites and the like I can understand it, but I would prefer if we wouldn’t need to send our ID to those sites. Heck if Valve would implement it I could actually gamble on steam again cause currently I cannot open a Tf2 crate …
That’s not age verification, that’s KYC (know your customer) which includes age verification. I agree, KYC has its place on the net, but this is definitely not it.
Well yeah fair, we are mostly interested in other stuff than the birthdate, but payment providers and gambling sites do it as well to verify your age.
I am 420 years old.
That’s a respectable age! Personally I’m 69 years old.
I didn’t need the Internet anyway thanks though
Since the earliest days of the internet, governments have been scheming to gain control over the dissemination of content - to have authority over what people can and cannot see.
Autocracies like Russia, China and North Korea simply established censorships regimes, but the best that western governments have generally been able to do is ban content that is illegal in and of itself, like child porn. Their goal, all along, has been to establish systems by which to censor content that is not in and of itself illegal.
This is the most success they’ve had yet.
If that’s been their goal for decades then there would be something written down to that effect. Policy statements, press releases, meeting minutes… Got anything?
This isn’t about being “age-checked”. It’s about IDing everyone on the internet and tracking where they go and what they do.
The world we live in is far far worse than anything from 1984.
See, there are a few ways this could go.
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Age verification is as secure and private as promised, and it’s left at that. I like to call this “the miracle”, and we all know those don’t happen.
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Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a government asks for “access to data to prevent crime” - things degenerate from there. This is the “systemic failure” scenario.
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Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but new scams evolve around it to make it dangerous. This would be the “criminal element” scenario.
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Age verification is not as secure and private as promised, and a leak occurs destroying lives and careers. This is the “system failure” scenario.
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Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a few companies start scraping and selling data, leading to widespread harms. This is the “unethical merchant” scenario, and the most likely outcome.
All in all, there is only one “ok” scenario, and a lot of horrific ones. The math says we’re entirely boned ^_^
I feel like people are downplaying how dangerous even the possibility of #2 is. A lot of nations are already targeting the LGBTQ community on a regular basis and this would massively assist to streamline persecution of “certain” citizens as well as the rapid spread of religious dogma. Both the U.S. and Australia are current testing grounds for these outcomes.
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All the big adult sites will probably just die or at least shrivel in popularity. Most Europeans simply will not use whatever “tell Brussels or London where or what what you are watching” option is. In the place of the big sites there will be a billion shady and likely virus-lottery proxy sites whose only selling point is that they do not do age checking or require registration. Those then get occasionally smacked down by Brussels, just to be replaced with 10 more clones the by the next week. On the side piracy and vpns will thrive. Kids will not be protected nor will people’s privacy, quality will be worse.
I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix that will get through through the cracks since massive established sites had to actually fear shutdown and losing all revenue unless they had robust gatekeeping mechanisms. If Brussels wants your 2 month life-expectancy site dead anyway, because of it’s only selling point of having to show id, then why really bother with the quality control of the material. Especially if site holder has no personal qualms about that stuff.
I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix that will get through through the cracks since massive established sites had to actually fear shutdown and losing all revenue unless they had robust gatekeeping mechanisms.
There are technical solutions for p2p sharing with moderation. Not to prevent bad people from sharing their stuff, but to keep spaces clean for those who don’t want to see it.
This is also true for communication, which is why Fediverse is not good enough. Hosted servers should be an optional part of the infrastructure, and the data (users, communities, posts …) shouldn’t be connected to them. Like with torrents you can host a torrent tracker, and you can host a BTDHT node, and you can automatically download and seed rare torrents, and none of this is connected to whatever people hosting major trackers decide.
NOSTR gets that part right, but the user experience its authors imagine is not for me.
EDIT: Forgot my main point - my main point is that you might find yourself in a whitelisted Internet where such decentralized solutions won’t be available. They’ll be detected, they’ll be illegal and punishable by fines.
I will not be participating. I’ll get around any barriers they put in place.
I’m sure some countries will gladly setup VPNs for accessing this stuff even when all other countries block adult stuff.
these laws are all about control and tracking what you do online. they make the internet MORE dangerous, because (as with everything the government restricts or bans) there will be a black market, which is always more dangerous and exposes people to more things than they were looking for in the first place. you think dark web providers are gonna make you upload your id to stay compliant? no, they’re gonna continue anonymously operating through TOR and serve up some very questionably sourced content to those teens that are searching “boobs” and can no longer access pornhub
I really, really dont want to search for porn on the dark net…
It still doesn’t have to be this way.
