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Reddit users in the UK must now upload selfies to access NSFW subreddits

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  • If the UK is going to require adult verification it should be built into your internet contract. Yeah, I'm an adult. I'm paying my bills, of course I'm a fucking adult. I over pay for this garbage internet.

    Uploading a selfie? The ai is going to determine if you're over 18? Can the ai determine if the selfie is also ai?

    Just send an AI selfie problem solved.

  • I'll never forget how he changed users' text without them knowing it before the 2016 election. Reddit was going downhill before, but that was a turning point.

    For those unaware, this isn't something like replacing a slur with removed, he edited users' comments, turning them into insults to other users.

    I don't care that those original commenters were (likely) pieces of shit, and the people who he made the comments insult were definitely pieces of shit, putting words into people's mouths to make them fight each other is unforgivable. Even if you put out a shitty apology.

  • Problem is, how do we know that the company is reputable, audited, and so on?

    I’ve seen more places requiring verification - and each one of them seems to use a different verification company. How are there so many of these places, and why aren’t they more commonly known? Like Experian for credit, etc.

    Sure it might sound good to keep them separate - but all that is doing is absolving the content host from liabilities for providing the adult content (somewhere) on their platforms and sites. Reddit don’t want to get involved, and I’ll bet they found the cheapest and easiest provider, or the first one in the search list and thought “good enough”.

    I think it's good that Reddit is trying to continue to allow adult content within the legal framework in which it must operate.

    I guess what I'm not clear on it is what the legal framework is for verification services. Absent rules that require robust privacy protections market forces will push a race to the bottom in terms of cost and data security will be the first to take a hit.

    I know this might seem weird but I think this is one of those cases where a blockchain based smart contract might be the best solution. I'm not exactly sure, as any system that allows one to consume content generally also allows one to copy it, but having a system defined in code in a publicly auditable manner that cannot be changed without notice seems to me to have the capacity to grant the most reassurance.

    I mean I assume that all the verification company is doing now is verifying a person's age and then giving a kind of authorization token that's cryptographically secure that basically says "the owner of this cryptographic key is of age".

  • Hm, I'm going to need some software engineers to critique an idea I have that could at least partially solve the fears people have about their personal details being tied to their porn habits.

    The system will be called the Adult Content Verification System (or Wank Card if you want to be funny). It's a physical card, printed by the government with a unique key printed on it. Those cards are then sold by any shop that has an alcohol license (premises or personal). You go in, show your ID to the clerk, buy the card. That card is proof that you're over 18, but it is not directly tied to you, you just have to be over 18 to buy it. The punishment for selling a Wank Card to someone under the age of 18 is the same as if you sold alcohol to someone under 18.

    When you go to the porn site, they check if you're from the UK, they check if you have a key associated with your account. If not, they ask for one, you provide the key to the site, the site does an API call to https://wankcard.gov.uk/api/verify with the site's API key (freely generated, but you could even make the api public if you want) and the key on the card, gets a response saying "Yep! This is a valid key!" and hey presto, free to wank and nobody knows it's you! If you don't have an account, the verification would have to be tied to a cookie or something that disappears after a while for all you anonymous people.

    As a result, you can both prove that you're over 18 (because you have the card) and some company over in San Francisco doesn't get your personal data, because you never actually record it anywhere. All you have is keys, and while yes, the government could record "Oh this key was used to verify on this site", they'd have to know which shop the key was bought from, who sold it, and who bought it, which is a lot more difficult to do unless the shopkeeper keeps records of everyone he's ever sold to.

    So... Good idea? Bad idea? Better than the current approach anyway, I think.

    I'm a security dev and this is a good idea!

  • So, the UK sucks.

    Something similar is coming to Australia as well.

  • Google uses reddit for its AI training. Just saying.

    God help us all.

  • Finally it seems the end of Reddit is near.

    Years later, you will find many then teen’s 80yo grandmas’ photos in the leaked database

  • Yeah I did consider that people are going to share keys, but people are going to share accounts too so that's always going to happen. The best thing you can do is stick some safeguards on the keys where if a key is found online, it can be deactivated and potentially investigated since you can tell which shop sold the key. If there's a shop out there just giving cards away to minors, well they're in for a world of trouble.

    Under the Licensing Act of 2003, it's illegal to sell alcohol to an adult if you reasonably suspect that they will be then giving that alcohol to a minor. You can assume the same will apply to people selling Wank Cards.

    people are going to share keys,

    get ahead of it and sell discounted bukkakeys

    you could probably even have a bundle called the "family plan" for the real sickos

    I should get into masturbation regulation marketing!

    Hungry for Adams Apples?
    Try our limp biscuits!

  • Hm, I'm going to need some software engineers to critique an idea I have that could at least partially solve the fears people have about their personal details being tied to their porn habits.

    The system will be called the Adult Content Verification System (or Wank Card if you want to be funny). It's a physical card, printed by the government with a unique key printed on it. Those cards are then sold by any shop that has an alcohol license (premises or personal). You go in, show your ID to the clerk, buy the card. That card is proof that you're over 18, but it is not directly tied to you, you just have to be over 18 to buy it. The punishment for selling a Wank Card to someone under the age of 18 is the same as if you sold alcohol to someone under 18.

    When you go to the porn site, they check if you're from the UK, they check if you have a key associated with your account. If not, they ask for one, you provide the key to the site, the site does an API call to https://wankcard.gov.uk/api/verify with the site's API key (freely generated, but you could even make the api public if you want) and the key on the card, gets a response saying "Yep! This is a valid key!" and hey presto, free to wank and nobody knows it's you! If you don't have an account, the verification would have to be tied to a cookie or something that disappears after a while for all you anonymous people.

    As a result, you can both prove that you're over 18 (because you have the card) and some company over in San Francisco doesn't get your personal data, because you never actually record it anywhere. All you have is keys, and while yes, the government could record "Oh this key was used to verify on this site", they'd have to know which shop the key was bought from, who sold it, and who bought it, which is a lot more difficult to do unless the shopkeeper keeps records of everyone he's ever sold to.

    So... Good idea? Bad idea? Better than the current approach anyway, I think.

    How would you solve replay attacks? Like a million people, of age or not, sharing the same key?

  • I keep thinking about some of RPs I've done in my life. Hot, vile, smutty text based RPs. I think about them and wonder if there will ever be a time when those words would be considered illegal and I would be arrested for posting them. This doesn't just protect minors. It tags deviance. Some of you may know the darker corners of Reddit. Imagine if an AI flagged your subs. The delete-rebuild cycle doesn't work anymore. Reddit will always know. If the law asks for suspects for newly illegal thought crime, Reddit will be able to point to all the users on those dark corners. We are moving into a future where privacy doesn't matter and I fear what that means for the kinky among us.

    That's a subject many never talk about: it assumes we (1) have morality all figured out and (2) it's the same for everyone, everywhere.

  • How would you solve replay attacks? Like a million people, of age or not, sharing the same key?

    Maybe you could limit the number of verifications a key can have in a day? Limit it to say 10 verifications per day. So if you're on Pornhub and have an account, you can have the key associated with the account, verified, and so you don't need to re-verify. But if you go on 10 completely different sites and verify for each one, you can't verify after that 10th one within the same 24hr period?

    You could maybe also include guidelines for integration where if a key is associated with an account, that key can't be used for any other account. You can include that under some requirement that says you have to make 'best efforts' to ensure that a key is only ever used by one account at a time. That way, if a million people are sharing the same key, you'd have to trust that all one million of them will never associate that key with their account because if they do, it invalidates that key for every use other than through that account on that site.

  • For those unaware, this isn't something like replacing a slur with removed, he edited users' comments, turning them into insults to other users.

    I don't care that those original commenters were (likely) pieces of shit, and the people who he made the comments insult were definitely pieces of shit, putting words into people's mouths to make them fight each other is unforgivable. Even if you put out a shitty apology.

    Not only was the apology horrible, but for any user on that platform for YEARS: obviously puts the thought in their head that spez could be changing their words by directly editing the db, and getting them put on a list for wrong-speak. Sure, that's possible with any DB, but he proved it was actually something being done on that site. Given his role, a major red flag, as this type of action would normally result in someone being fired.

    Reddit has since IPOd and is going to probably do well as a stock because of all the information it harvests from users.

  • A VPN future? Haha. Not if they don't want to. There are many ways to prevent VPN from operating when you're a government.

    You can just plain ban encryption, which sounds really crazy, but yeah, they're trying to.

    You can just say "it's illegal to use a VPN". It'll technically still work, but if there's a trace of trafic from your house to a known VPN endpoint, you're it! Great!

    They can force custom proprietary spying software on your devices. Sounds equally crazy as the thing above, right? But rest assured they're ALSO trying to do that. Multiple times, even. And in some places… they did. Of course, nothing forces you to have such software on your device. Especially if your devices are not supported; it also turns into a "you have to buy this or that big name device, everything else's de-facto illegal! Fuck you, we're the government!". And if you get caught for whatever, and your phone, PC, or anything isn't "compliant"? Bam. Guilty.

    Plenty of option. All of them completely stupid and would weaken both privacy, individuals, and governments at large. It never stopped legislation from being pushed forward.

    They can force custom proprietary spying software on your devices.

    • That would block Linux from their borders, which means goodbye Steam Deck in the UK among other things.
  • They can force custom proprietary spying software on your devices.

    • That would block Linux from their borders, which means goodbye Steam Deck in the UK among other things.

    Yeah, and? We're not talking logic and rational decisions here, unfortunately.

  • This is why many adult sites are banning access if your IP is from TN or any of the other american states that love jesus more than freedom.

    But americans don't love Jesus, they shit all over his teachings and would deport him if he came to their doorstep.

  • I’m not defending Spez, I think he’s a piece of shit and he did edit other users’ comments that were critical of him, which is fucked up, but I don’t think he was actually involved with that sub. It was possible to appoint mods without their knowledge or consent, and he’s a huge target, someone must have done it as a joke.

    I don't agree but I can understand that it is possible, however as someone that used to post adult content professionally on Reddit, I'm going to let you know that there is some WEIRD SHIT going on with their porn subs that seemingly Spez orchestrates at a site level. It is not like posting on Twitter (at the time, now I don't use Reddit or Twitter at all ofc), Lemmy, OnlyFans, TikTok, or any other site, adult or otherwise.

    Posting OC porn on Reddit is made to be deliberately difficult, you have to submit custom doxxing pictures to mods privately on any bigger sub, the little subs get very little traffic unless it's like a niche kink. They often but not always have rules like no professionals or SWers, OC only, but then allow Amaranth posts from a fan as if she isn't a sex worker like anyone else lol. Crossposting or even posting the same picture more than once across 2 forums can earn removal or bans, eg a see through top + wet panties in one pic qualifies for 2 diff subs, but I can only post that pic to 1 of them or risk permaban. And there's more actually in how difficult they make it to post but it's kinda boring in terms of details.

    Will say, I made my own subreddit - that got removed, no notice or warnings, even though it was active and no site violations and was doing well for at least 6 months.

    The girls who are popular on Reddit are not organically so. The posts that are popular are not organically so. They are being promoted by Reddit and the mods themselves. They act as their pimps and stop others from taking any attention or money away from their girls. I am not joking. He is part of the Maxwell stuff.

  • Google Using Generic & Undocumented Google Crawler

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    Can we get rid of the current model where websites are financed by ads and have instead these AI companies pay the websites they crawl? I could really do with less ads if they are going to crawl the web anyway.
  • Uganda cracks down on Google over data protection breach

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    Good, this bullshit has never made a compelling argument In its defence, Google argued that since it was not based in Uganda and had no physical presence in the country, it was not obliged to register with the PDPO, and the rules on cross-border transfers of personal data did not apply to it. However, the regulator rejected this argument, determining that Google is a local data controller since it collects data from users in Uganda and decides how that data is processed.
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    Vote for a genocider, get genocided.
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    No, re-read. It is about technology.
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    Realistically, you don't need security, NAT alone is enough since the packets have nowhere to go without port forwarding. But IF you really want to build front end security here is my plan. ISP bridge -> WAN port of openwrt capable router with DSA supported switch (that is almost all of them) Set all ports of the switch to VLAN mirroring mode bridge WAN and LAN sides Fail2Ban IP block list in the bridge LAN PORT 1 toward -> OpenWRT running inside Proxmox LXC (NAT lives here) -> top of rack switch LAN PORT 2 toward -> Snort IDS LAN PORT 3 toward -> combined honeypot and traffic analyzer Port 2&3 detect malicious internet hosts and add them to the block list (and then multiple other openwrt LXCs running many many VPN ports as alternative gateways, I switch LAN host's internet address by changing their default gateway) I run no internal VLAN, all one LAN because convenience is more important than security in my case.
  • MCP 101: An Introduction to the MCP Standard

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    Really? [image: 60a7b1c3-946c-4def-92dd-c04169f01892.gif]
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    Arcing causes more fires, because over current caused all the fires until we tightened standards and dual-mode circuit breakers. Now fires are caused by loose connections arcing, and damaged wires arcing to flammable material. Breakers are specifically designed for a sustained current, but arcing is dangerous because it tends to cascade, light arcing damages contacts, leading to more arcing in a cycle. The real danger of arcing is that it can happen outside of view, and start fires that aren't caught till everything burns down.
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    We have to do this ourselves in the government for every decommissioned server/appliance/end user device. We have to fill out paperwork for every single storage drive we destroy, and we can only destroy them using approved destruction tools (e.g. specific degaussers, drive shredders/crushers, etc). Appliances can be kind of a pain, though. It can be tricky sometimes finding all the writable memory in things like switches and routers. But, nothing is worse than storage arrays... destroying hundreds of drives is incredibly tedious.