Hmmmmm, let me play devils advocate and say that kids should have access to porn.
If I had to guess, I’d say the government pushback against porn is a result of members of the ruling class catching their offspring with porn.
If I had to guess, they don’t care at all about porn and are using this as a pretext to censor sites that talk about LGBTQIA+ people.
And also to block access to any sex ed content that talks about how to protect yourself from predators.
Actually it was pushed by some AI corp, to sell AI for verification purposes, alongside other bad faith actors.
I think the best way to solve this is to not have kids in the first place.
And deprive capital of all that cheap labor? Have you no heart sir/madam?
Stop fucking but make children.
Dame Rachel de Souza told BBC Newsnight it was “absolutely a loophole that needs closing” and called for age verification on VPNs.
Saw that coming. Can’t have the populace living their lives without constant, repressive government scrutiny.
But it’s for the kids what kind of psychopath could be against that???
Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.
Hire a droplet VM, pre-installed with a server OS. Log in with provided credentials. sudo apt install docker Copy/paste a docker compose file that sets up a wg-easy container. Create a peer. Take a picture of the provided QR code. Connect to the server via a wireguard app. Done.
Are they going to ban VMs?
What a VM? What’s a server OS? How do I log in? What the fuck does sudo apt mean? What is docker? Now I’m editing files? A peer? What’s wireguard?
So many of you are disconnected from regular people because you’re chronically online.
If kids have learned to run their own Minecraft private servers, hosting a VPN should be child’s play… Pun maybe intended.
Yes plan law makers needs to have a clue on what they are making laws about. Teenagers looking for porn are going to learn.
The same teenagers that don’t even use computers with physical keyboards?
I’d wager less than 1% of the minors affected by this will learn how to proxy through a VPS.
They just got a motivation.
I just deployed a few VM on my phone, not even a tablet. It’s not that hard nowadays with websites being designed primarily for smartphone users
what’s a VPN? what’s a VPN app? how do I log in? what the fuck does a tunnel mean?
kids somehow figured these out. they’ll be able to figure out their selfhosted VPN too. at least more of them might find an interest in tech instead of consuming on brainrot platforms.
sunbeam didn’t describe it very clearly but it can be described in a way that its just following instructions without even having to understand it. like something like this: “register here. click this to get a free cloud server. log in to the server like this. paste this command and hit enter. install this app on your phone. tap import and scan. point your phone to the qr code on the screen.”
It’s a lot easier to get a VPN working than doing it yourself on a VPS.
setting up vps requires money which ideally children do not have access to (not even crypto)
If someone tells them to, they might try until a few business interests remind them that these are also fundamental components of business networks. Once money tells them to stop it, they will.
VPN companies should just hire a lobbyist for a week and this will all go away.
Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.
Of course they don’t. Most of them type with their index fingers and don’t even understand what a VPN is.
Exactly this. There’s maybe 8 politicians in the whole world that understand what a VPN is. They’re told by a lobbyist and donor that it’s a thing that is bad, now they’re out to figure out how to make it go away.
I’m sure the VPN industry will bring a lot of money to bear to ensure this doesn’t happen. They like the online safety act itself, because it brings them customers, but if it also causes them to face issues they’re going to be less keen on it.
Are they going to ban VMs?
They will keep banning things until they feel they have absolute control over the internet.
They’ll ban encrypted Internet traffic that they don’t have a backdoor to
stealinspect the contents.
Moronic bit is atlast asking parents to be responsible
How much you wanna bet the ministers use VPN to watch porn as well?
Who needs to watch it when you can live it
You joke but people who live porn still watch porn.
Market research?
If they were really after kids watching porn (or even porn in general) it would be technically somewhat simple to force ISPs to provide filters on their end as a subscription service. I’m pretty sure I’ve even heard that kind of services in the past. Make it even opt-out if you really want to.
That way ISPs would just ban everything from pornhub and others unless you spesifically want it allowed or even provide a portal where you could block reddit, twitter, tumblr or whatever you wish on your account. That kind of technology already exists and it’s used on many corporate setups.
There’s obviously ways around that, but there’s no technical way to block every possible way to move bits between computers. Even if they would shut down the whole internet there’s still ways to build mesh-networks or even buy USB-drives from a shady alley.
But as we all know, it’s not about porn and not about children.
You can’t block porn completely without blocking VPNs. If you connect to a VPN that’s all they can see. They can not see what you use the VPN for.
You can’t block VPNs without blocking the entire internet. You can block known VPN services, but you can’t prevent people from hosting their own.
Some known VPN protocols could be blocked, using introspection tools. However, this would just render corporate VPNs useless. VPN traffic is just bytes, and so is WebSockets. Good luck figuring out whether my HTTPS traffic is legitimate internet traffic, or masked VPN traffic.
Good news, we closed that pesky loophole by banning encryption without backdoors.
If they can’t decode it, you better be ready to explain exactly what those bytes were!
Check out my cool new protocol that looks just like I am loading a webpage about cat facts, which is actually a hidden VPN that I use to secretly look at webpages about cat facts.
There is actually a technique called steganography, that does exactly that. It is used to hide arbitrary binary info inside images, while still fooling your eyes into thinking there is nothing sketchy there.
I know! Nothing about all this is new.
The only new thing is that the UK government is about to learn about those things.
You get me. You’re my kind of person! ᓚᘏᗢ
Even if they go that route, and frankly I think they would get lynched before we got to that point, they can’t monitor every single connection. That just way too much traffic.
That’s why China has a firewall, because that’s the best option they can come up with because monitoring every Chinese persons data is an impossible task. Their only option would be to go North Korea route, and just close the internet but that would basically end their economy.
VPN, Tor (and similar, like I2P), every imaginable P2P network, proxies, all non-http protocols (smtp, ftp, nntp, xmpp and other instant messengers and so on) can all transfer any kind of data, porn included. And a ton of other things. Heck, I’m quite sure there’s a minecraft mod where you can assemble JPG-images out of the blocks and view them that way. And then you can use stuff like uuencode where you can use anything that can move plain text to transfer binary data.
There’s no way to block all of that unless you shut the whole internet down. And even then you can still trade good old playboy-magazines with your friends. VPN in itself has very little to do with the actual problem, beyond that someone apparently noticed that their current “save-the-children” iteration had pretty large holes in it.
Ban paper.
Kids could draw boobies on it.
Depends on the VPN
You can’t block porn completely without blocking VPNs. If you connect to a VPN that’s all they can see.
This makes it sound like VPNs can ONLY access porn. lol
They can also access Excel spreadsheets from what I’ve heard. Hopefully the children aren’t aware of the fact.
he he he
Why are the kids technologically illiterate and undersexed until it comes to matters of government control? I’m not usually into tin foil hats, but this doesn’t feel like the kids are the primary concern here.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory if everybody already knows it.
What you said there, that was just a fact.
They aren’t.
Stop ministers using VPNs to watch child porn.
Told!
Yeah, never forget how the people in power routinely gave Epstein a pass because they were participating in raping kids.
All this “for the children” is performative bullshit to take more power away from the average person.
You ban something, and people will always find a way around it. Always.
Yup, and that’s how the US got the Mafia. We banned alcohol, but people wanted to drink, so the Mafia made that happen.
All a ban does is hurt law abiding citizens and businesses.
This is a fairly revisionist history version of the mafia, they were here for decades before prohibition. One might say that they profited greatly from prohibition, but to suggest they began with it is incredibly incorrect. I hate to be the actually guy but I find organized crime fascinating and I can’t let this one go
Eh, not revisionist, just overly simplified. Prohibition massively increased their power and relevance.
Dead drop USBs for file sharing?
We didn’t see this one coming a mile away.
Palantir execs and shareholders are buzzing with anticipation.
Clearly it’s a parental problem to determine if the VPN they are buying for their kids is being used to wank off, but apparently this party of ‘liberty’ has an unhealthy obsession with monitoring our children’s genitalia these days.
Unfortunately, neither Labour nor Conservatives are parties of liberty, although there are some individuals within both that see the importance.
Stop ministers making laws to… why the fuck they even do this bullshit? They are a government, they know everything about everyone even without such primitive control methods.
The people pulling the strings have obviously decided that internet freedom is a threat to them and they’re taking (global) action to ensure their supremacy.
