There's a UK Parliament petition to repeal the Online Safety act. There's no guarantee it'll do anything but might be worth a try for anyone in the UK.

I'd take that over the bullshit attacks the internet of today is attracting.

Me too, so much!

A big reason why I've come to like Lemmy communities so much is really because they give me some old internet feeling. It's not super crowded, it's an app that isn't design for brain rot, it allows interesting online discussion etc.

I think projects like this can continue to exist, even in a bleak corporate owned internet.

I interpreted it as "can't possibly be doing harm to the people in the video" - eg as much of mainstream porn can do - since there are none if everything is animated fiction

The OSA was brought in by the tories. Labour agree with it as well. Both of them are authoritarian bastards.

At this point Dark-web tech needs an upgrade, we might just need a "2nd internet"

Doesn't proton offer a free vpn with limits?

Also, a vpn is pretty cheap. I wouldn't say that it's kids that would be using it, it would be adults who don;t want to upload their picture.

Depends on what you mean by "kids". Elementary schoolers, no, but some teens are willing to do a surprising amount of work to accomplish something if it's important enough to them. And then they pass their method along to their friends, or offer to set up anyone in the school for the price of a couple of bags of snack food.

"snack food"

Nowadays, if there's something you like online, remember to plug it into archive.org so it gets added to the wayback machine. You'll still need to remember the URL to access it, but at least it will be archived somewhere

In the name of science and curiosity, thanks!

You vastly underestimate the interest young people can have into things, especially into forbidden things, especially when the workaround is trivial and works with a few clics, no tech skills required.

Will this become a new venue for scam? Most likely. But kids motivation vs. a very easy "fix" is not what's gonna stop them. Adult surveillance would be way better.

Experience, most proposal for "age and identity verification" being badly implemented mostly closed-source solutions that only works on devices they deem trusty, meaning (seemingly) non-rooted phones with specific OSes.

It's less of a left - right thing (that's mainly economics). It paternalism Vs liberty thing. Labour have always had a very strong "we must protect the populace" theme to their policies. Conservatives have it too, but they want to do it in a different way.

Sadly it's a really difficult thing to stand against. Who wants to be labelled the person enabling paedophiles, when all you want is the right to private communication.

Fuck off with your device based verification system. That's just the same service, but as a more invasive app installed on your phone.

not necessarily. you give a phone to your children. you partly lock it down by setting it up as a child account, with its age. you make sure to install a web browser that supports limiting access to age appropriate content according to the age set in the system, maybe taking a parent allowed whitelist. the website is legally obliged to set an appropriate age limit value in a standard HTTP header.

that way, the website does not know your age. the decision is on the web browser.
the web browser checks the configuration in the system, that only the parent can change. it does not send it anywhere, only does a yes/no decision. if the site is not ok, it'll show a thing like when the connection is not secure or it was put on the safebrowsing list, except that you can't skip it, only option is to request parent permission.
and finally the age is set in the operating system, without verifying its truthiness, but once again requesting lock screen authentication.
oh and app installs need parent approval for kid accounts, like it should almost always be.

this way it's as private as it can get. the only way a website can find out information about you from this, is to log if your browser loaded the html but not any other resources, because that means you were caught in the age filter. but that's it.

there's multiple pieces in this that is not yet implemented, but they should be possible with not too much work.
this is all possible with open source code, if you make sure the kid can't install anything without parent approval. stores like fdroid could have some badge or something if a browser supports this kind of limitation.

All it takes is one kid to work it out and it'll be common knowledge in that school within a week.

Perfect response. This gets the message across, "governments of the world, the Internet doesn't need you, you need the Internet".

To be honest I don’t think much of this is about catching or preventing paedos, and is just straight up authoritarianism.

You're right. It's not, but that's what you're labelled when you stand against it.

This is sadly the way to handle it, users of these places need to learn how to vpn instead of giving their private information for age verification online.