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

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  • Finally it seems the end of Reddit is near.

    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.

  • 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.

    Something similar happened In China recently. A female author of homoerotic texts was charged for it.

  • Proton mail has a feature where you can create a new address that ties to your main one, but nobody except proton knows it is you. They end in passmail.net. I'm sure there are other providers that do similar things

    It's actually passinbox.com. The format is ${aliasName}.${randomWord}${random3DigitNumber}@passinbox.com
    Ex: lemmy.spaghetti198@passinbox.com

  • u/spez was the lead moderator of r/jailbait, and when he was caught, he got rid of mod transparency. Ghilisaine Maxwell was likely a l lead moderator of news Reddits as well (u/MaxwellHill). Reddit has always been compromised.

    what's the topic of r/jailbait?

  • Meh, just upload a dick pic.

    Greedy little pigboy.

    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.

  • Didn't they ban NSFW a year ago?

    They’re not banning NSFW, they’re trying to control it. It’s now login-gated (with a cheeky blurred background if you’re not).

  • Finally it seems the end of Reddit is near.

    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.

  • u/spez was the lead moderator of r/jailbait, and when he was caught, he got rid of mod transparency. Ghilisaine Maxwell was likely a l lead moderator of news Reddits as well (u/MaxwellHill). Reddit has always been compromised.

    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.

  • 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.

    This would be better than most of the crap being proposed or implemented.

    But, since the keys are presumably reusable, they'll presumably get borrowed shared by and among minors almost immediately.

    There could be some "Netflix account sharing" style work to deter that, of course.

  • The solution to all of this “think of the children” stuff is that devices owned/used by children should have to be registered as a child’s device, which would enable certain content blockers.

    Forcing adults to verify their identity, rather than simply activating some broad based restrictions on devices being purchased for child use, is a waste of time. Kids will still find workarounds. Adult privacy will be compromised.

    Its also an easily enforceable policy to require registration of children’s devices. You can hold the parents to compliance. You can hold the carriers to compliance. Its truly the simplest way to keep kids from accessing porn without having to mess with adult use of the internet whatsoever

    Your solution is worse.

    As is, it is the responsibility of the content provider to make sure that they are distributing only to people who are legally allowed to have it.

    With age-verification the user has to prove that they are allowed to access the content, then the site can distribute it to them.

    Your approach is to distribute the content by default and only deny it to ChildDevices. In order for this to work at all, you have to mandate that children can only use ChildDevices. This is soooo much worse than simply requiring that adults who want to see certain content have to prove that they can legally access it. If adults have reservations about providing ID for pornography, the loss of such content seems to be much less than denying children Internet access. (Although, I'm sure that Lemmings would disagree for obvious reasons).

  • This would be better than most of the crap being proposed or implemented.

    But, since the keys are presumably reusable, they'll presumably get borrowed shared by and among minors almost immediately.

    There could be some "Netflix account sharing" style work to deter that, of course.

    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.

  • It'll almost certainly be an AI model doing it.

    It'll almost certainly be an AI model backed by 1000s of "trainers" in 3rd world countries doing it, but only until the model is fully trained.

  • 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.

    I'm nowhere near as worried about this for kink stuff as I am about us LGBTQ living in the US.

  • This is what Facebook does to verify accounts, they also autoban if you try to register with a temp email

    yep i remember seeing that, fuck reddit and facebook

  • Finally it seems the end of Reddit is near.

    That said, as someone who has posted stuff like that and had it spread without my consent, screw (very much not literally) consuming that shit without taking the same risks as the people sharing what they get off to.

    I do think its gross to require it for the other NSFW stuff. Drug forums are very important resources for harm reduction.

  • 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.

  • Dutch MPs want citizens to own the copyright to their faces

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    Not enough, we own our identify far more than mere copyright (which should be abolished). The protection and ownership of our biodata should be built on copyright. It should be a standalone protection.
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  • The Wikipedia Test

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    You act like they want us to have access to information they don't have full control over. I'm pretty sure that's a really low priority for most of them.
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  • YouTube might slow down your videos if you block ads

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    [image: 24aa87b2-162d-4296-aaf7-31d42f30ed63.png]
  • How Do I Prepare My Phone for a Protest?

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    So first, even here we see foundation money and big tech, not government. Facebook, Google, etc mostly love net neutrality, tolerate encryption, anf see utility in anonymous internet access, mostly because these things don't interfere with their core advertising businesses, and generally have helped them. I didn't see Comcast and others in the ISP oligopoly on that list, probably because they would not benefit from net neutrality, encryption, and privacy for obvious reasons. The EFF advocates for particular civil libertarian policies, always has. That does attract certain donors, but not others. They have plenty of diverse and grassroots support too. One day they may have to choose between their corpo donors and their values, but I have yet to see them abandon principles.
  • OpenAI plans massive UAE data center project

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    TD Cowen (which is basically the US arm of one of the largest Canadian investment banks) did an extensive report on the state of AI investment. What they found was that despite all their big claims about the future of AI, Microsoft were quietly allowing letters of intent for billions of dollars worth of new compute capacity to expire. Basically, scrapping future plans for expansion, but in a way that's not showy and doesn't require any kind of big announcement. The equivalent of promising to be at the party and then just not showing up. Not long after this reporting came out, it got confirmed by Microsoft, and not long after it came out that Amazon was doing the same thing. Ed Zitron has a really good write up on it; https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/ Amazon isn't the big surprise, they've always been the most cautious of the big players on the whole AI thing. Microsoft on the other hand are very much trying to play things both ways. They know AI is fucked, which is why they're scaling back, but they've also invested a lot of money into their OpenAI partnership so now they have to justify that expenditure which means convincing investors that consumers absolutely love their AI products and are desparate for more. As always, follow the money. Stuff like the three mile island thing is mostly just applying for permits and so on at this point. Relatively small investments. As soon as it comes to big money hitting the table, they're pulling back. That's how you know how they really feel.