This makes no sense at all. Were you drunk when you posted this?

My point is that any solution here will be used for tracking, because that's in the interests of both regulators and regulated entities. It's not going to solve the original problem because kids are great at finding workarounds, and it will cause harm to those who follow the rules.

I also could devise a technical solution here that respects users' privacy and is effective, but once it's implemented, it will be changed to violate privacy. That's how these things work.

Beautifully said. I wish people on Internet could behave like you in this comment. Have a virtual hug, you are awesome!

I think I have to specify what I mean by trusted. I do not trust them with my browser history, but I do trust them handling my government-issued identity. I do however not trust a company with that identity because I know they will definitely use it for their own good. What I want is the complete and absolute separation of information. Everyone knows exactly what they need to know, not a byte more. I'm still not convinced we desperately need the possibility to identify us for every fucking service though. Keeping kids from accessing porn should be the task of the parent. Keeping kids out of porn, yes indeed, we all need to tackle that problem.

So basically, yes, I think we have the same solution in mind, but with different wording.

Sadly, I agree with everything you wrote.

I'm not sure if we are doing that fine. The thing about the decades is there wasn't really a web for kids to browse. Nowadays it's different. But still, I agree with you. We should keep responsibility to the parents as long as possible. But I really don't think my friend's daughter should be browsing TikTok at her age.

(Which is my friend's task, not mine or that of some pedo in government)

While I disagree with the teenagers' ability to find my banking passwords regardless of where I hide them, for example because I can make a copy of them that has been altered with a password I can calculate in my head and that takes the location of the password on the table into account in the calculation, the rest is true.

I remember having seen things I really wouldn't want to see even as adult when I was browsing Internet for stuff that wasn't supposed to be available. Shady websites can be shady in so many ways!
It is true that making an age verification system for a basic porn site will probably direct the youth to other sites with content you wouldn't see on PornTube. I hope my children won't ever watch porn, but if they ever do, I hope it's from a source that doesn't allow the worst things to be shown. For example PornHub does remove the worst stuff and is quite commonly used. If that one cannot be accessed, then probably something else will. And it's likely to be worse. Though, PornHub has a lot of really bad abusive things as well. Checked it out now and one of the first videos it showed was something that looked like the woman is really unhappy, even distressed, about the situation she's being filmed in

That's already happening, alas, but I suspect things will get very quiet when people realise something like this would affect the bottom line negatively. Look at what happened (twice) with encryption.

1. Government said they wanna ban encryption.
2. Starts planning the legislation.
3. Someone (a civil servant who's job it is to point out the fucking obvious) points out that Banking and Commerce requires Encryption to function and banning Encryption would crash the Economy.
4. Plans are quietly dropped.

How it will likely go with VPNs.

1. Government says they wanna restrict VPNs.
2. Government Starts planning legistlation (we are here).
3. Someone points out that Banking, Tech Security, The Military, The Foreign Office and others rely on VPNs to function and getting rid of them will fuck the economy and put national security at risk and risk negatively affecting their pay masters corporate donors.
4. Plans are quietly dropped.

One of the main purposes of the OSA is to make money for YOTI and the Data brokers, because you and I both know these are the main corporate sponsors, and the MPs and Lords who passed it likely have investments in said companies. Hoovering up IDs and linking them to web activity doesn't just help the government fuck us, it makes money for MPs, Lords, and their Friends. But here's the thing: It'll bite not just US, but them in the arse. So here's what's (hopefully) going to happen.

1. OSA is installed.
2. Someone important enters their info into a fake age check/Someone important gets age verified for something and the service gets hacked.
3. The hack gets made public and a lot of important people get burnt.
4. The Bill gets quietly modified or abolished.

British Politicians are greedy, self serving authoritarian cunts, but they are also remarkably dim. Like sometimes impressively so. Look up this passage in Hansard to see what I mean. It might cause you to have a fucking crisis.

But yes, they do like control, problem is they don't know what they wish for,

Just ignore the trolls. Apparently I ate his pie or something equally sinister.

I mushed a lot of things together in my post. Copyright and political censorship have very different motives behind them. The point is that, to enforce copyright, you need extensive surveillance of online content and the means to shut down the exchange of information. That requires an extremely expensive technical infrastructure. But once that is in place, you can use it for political censorship without having to fear pushback over the economic cost that would come even from politically sympathetic actors. Conversely, if you introduce political censorship, you might get support by the copyright industry, including the news media, for helping their economic interests.

Where it gets to political censorship, the paradox of tolerance is exactly the lunacy that I'm talking about. In mad defiance of all historical fact, there is belief that liberalism is weak, that political dissidents must be persecuted, information suppressed. Never in history has democracy fallen because of a commitment to tolerance. All too often, they fall because majorities feel their personal comfort threatened by minorities and support the strong leader who will "sweep out with the iron broom" (as a German idiom goes).

Do you notice how that Wikipedia article has nothing to say on history?

And of course, even if they did, tech savvy kids can just self-host an instance on their own computer.

Comply or be defederated !

You know you can just switch to some small instance that's not blocked and you're gonna be good? Even in China the small Lemmy instances work while the big ones are obviously blocked

Only the big names will remain.

As intended. Obvious regulatory capture

Do you think those debates are for real and not a show that ends with whatever has been decided elsewhere?

The houses don't need to know because they don't do the planning.

Since the EU does the same thing at the same time, after it was not a problem for years, the origin for these laws must lie elsewhere.

The website generates a random value, your government signs a cert for that value. That's what makes it single use and zero trust.

Do you think those debates are for real and not a show that ends with whatever has been decided elsewhere?

If that was the case, then the Lords wouldn't have blocked the 2016 Disability Bill. You remember the one. I don't think that was theatre, I think people in the Lords looked at that and went "lol fuck no." They also wouldn't have done a lot of shit if it was all planned behind the scenes and some shadowy cabal actually just called the shots.

Here's the thing: "It's all planned" is the cornerstone of most conspiracies, from 9/11 to "Covid is a bioweapon" or "Covid isn't real" to literally every major conspiracy theory. But wanna know something? All of that is a weighted comfort blanket to sooth people, it is soothing to believe that there is someone or something in control and it's just a case of getting rid of them, and it's an ego boost to believe that You are part of a club that figured it out. They used to call it being "woke" until the far right took that term as an Alias for "Degenerate" as the Nazis used it.

But the truth is this: There is no man behind the curtain, there is no shadowy cabal who actually control everything. It's call Capitalism, Sociopaths, and Morons who either want to make money or think they're doing good.

I have lived through two governments (a Labour one and a Conservative one) that have floated the idea of banning encryption publicly. Both times they quietly dropped the idea when they were told that doing something like that would crash the economy. My parents are both former Civil Servants. My dad watched the Scottish Secretary at the time nearly type "Thatcher is a Bitch" into a Teletype machine that sent out press releases to every major newspaper.

I watched my own MSP (and Leader of the Scottish Lib Dems) address a crowd of mostly transgender mostly leftist people and ask them to applaud Tories who voted for the Gender Recognition Act.

There is shit in Hansard that looks like it came from a bad sitcom. There are people who are in parliament right now who I wouldn't trust with a fucking Self Scan Checkout, let alone a seat in either of the houses.

Are there scheming bastards, genuinely Machiavellianism Motherfucks in parliament? Yes! Politics attract people who score high in the Dark Triad. Starmer, Streeting, and Farage are all genuinely horrible people. Starmer and Streeting openly want to harm transgender people, Farage wants to fund the fucking Taliban, and if we wanna talk about non-MPs, Boris Johnson stated he's rather have mass death than another Lockdown and the last government used Covid as a way to Launder Money.

But alongside that, a good chunk of the people in our parliaments are simply fucking morons. They might be good at a collection of specific things, but they are also impressively Moronic on a level that would make the Thick of It and Yes Minister look fucking optimistic. Indeed, some of the more bastardous people I have listed and not listed here are also, weirdly, fucking morons. Look at Trump's first term for example.

And if you wanna cling to "there's a puppet master behind all this", be it Satan or the Illuminati, to save you from the genuinely terrifying thought that the people at the Helm of the ship of state are Francesco Schettino, Yiannis Avranas and Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, fair, but personally, I'm a realist and the only conspiracy I hold is that the "Phillip Killed Diana" conspiracy was invented by the British Press so they wouldn't face a shitstorm when people realised what the paps did when they got to the crash scene.

If you wanna know what is actually happening here it is:

A Dunfermline based investment firm, charitable trust and think tank (yes you heard) by the name of Carnegie United Kingdom Trust invested money in data collection firms and age verification firms like YOTI, so they lobbied the government and even basically wrote the Online Safety Act. The government sometimes lets outside groups write legislation for them because Corruption, they have other shit to do, and they don't often know shit about the fucking shite they're voting for.

Some of those MPs also likely had investments in YOTI and VPNs. When this was presented to the government, some poor sod of a Civil Servant had to sit down the PM/Minister responsible and try convince them that it's a bad idea, clearly they failed. So, utilising the moral panic around Porn, Extremist Material, Pro-Ana content and the like, they passed this bill, even when a good number of these fucking numbskulls don't even know what a VPN is, just "we need to do something" and "it's just common sense".

Now not only do they (and future governments, God help us if Reform get in and use this against "woke" content like they're doing in Kent Libraries) have the ability to age gate literally anything, but the companies they have invested in have got a GOLDMINE of very sensitive Data they can sell to people, be them from the Private, Public or "underground" sectors. Line goes up for the Investment firms, MPs with shares in YOTI and the rest. When it comes down to it, it comes down to Money, Moronity, and Kneejerk reactionism.

Yeah sure, until they find a way to block that too.

I doubt UK could surpass China and Russia in terms of internet censorship any time soon

"Move or I'll kill you"

Ah yes, the one that's being said to is at fault