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The UK’s new age-gating rules are easy to bypass

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Re: The UK’s new age-gating rules are easy to bypass

#91

Post by JetSetIlly »

cdrini wrote: post #87
JetSetIlly wrote: post #48

According to the article, Ofcom are encouraging "parents to block or control VPN usage by their children to keep them from dodging the age checkers." This might be stupidest advice I've ever heard. If parents aren't willing to block or control access to porn sites, there's even less chance of them blocking or controlling VPN usage. But if nothing else, it does show up this law for the nonsense that it is.

Controlling VPN seems much easier, no? Since you have to pay for a VPN service, and I imagine most kids don't have a credit card to make arbitrary purchases independently, so it would have to bubble up to a parent.

That's assuming the child is smart enough to only use a paid-for VPN. I can foresee a lot of children being suckered into using a dodgy VPN.

Re: The UK’s new age-gating rules are easy to bypass

#92

Post by louthy »

pigeonhole123 wrote: post #90
louthy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what statista.com is, but it’s not the Office for National Statistics, here’s violent crime: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand... There’s a note: “Trends in police recorded violence with and without injury should be interpreted with caution, as improvements to recording practices have had a substantial impact on the recording of violent crime over the last 10 years. For further inf…

The Statista graph is based on this ONS data, table A5a in the spreadsheet: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...

Fair enough, then this caveat should still apply: “Trends in police recorded violence with and without injury should be interpreted with caution, as improvements to recording practices have had a substantial impact on the recording of violent crime over the last 10 years. For further information, see Section 19: Data sources and quality”

The ONS states that crime is generally down. That’s all I claimed. The OP has been editing away to make his point seem less racist are more pertinent to these follow up replies, which is utterly tedious.

This whole forum seems to have had a lurch into extremism over the past year or so. Either that or these people have been lurking in threads I wasn’t looking at before. I find it crazy that people are downvoting my response which cited facts and pushed back against blatant misinformation and veiled racism. We live in a crazy world where people think this rhetoric is reasonable and ok.

Re: The UK’s new age-gating rules are easy to bypass

#93

Post by zahllos »

SXX wrote: post #31
michaelt wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it all depends if the politicians actually care if this works. You see, this bill was passed in 2023, under a Conservative government; then a Labour government was elected in 2024, before the bill came into force. A nice little time bomb, set by the outgoing government - impractical and illiberal, but labelled all over with 'children' and 'cyber-bullying' and 'violent pornography' So if the Labour government ke…

I really hope you are right. I'm not UK resident now, but I lived enough there, have family there and know enough about local politics to understand that when it's comes to privacy and freedoms there is very little difference between Conservative and Labour.

I'd say more like none at all.

The last Labour government (1997-2010) passed the counter terrorism act and had multiple public arguments about how long suspects could be detained without being charged or released in their future legislative attempts - see "prolonged detention" in this: https://www.jrrt.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Rules_of_.... They similarly passed the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which amongst other things includes compelled key disclosure (or compelled decrypt). They also had the national identity register planned as part of ID cards.

For fairness/balance, the tory government passed multiple acts. Online Safety Act was one, but the Investigatory Powers Act another - this did some relatively mundane things like call security service hacking "equipment interference" and say they were legally allowed to do it, but it was the act used on Apple to mandate technical capability to access iCloud e2e (act written by Tories, but TCN probably by Labour home office I would guess based on timing).

Re: The UK’s new age-gating rules are easy to bypass

#94

Post by nottorp »

jayceedenton wrote: post #14

Age limits on buying cigarettes are easily thwarted by finding a corner shop that needs the sale and will sell to kids. Height restrictions on fairground rides are easily thwarted by putting bits of wood in your shoes. None of this matters. The point is that this kind of control will drastically reduce under 18s consuming content that they shouldn't. We don't need the all of society's controls to be flawless.

Oh, if these rules would teach the under 18s to not be 'content consumers' as you seem to consider yourself, that would be great.

But I'm afraid they're only there to satisfy the puritans. The average shitty content that you 'consume' will still be fine.

Re: The UK’s new age-gating rules are easy to bypass

#95

Post by nottorp »

zarzavat wrote: post #30
gennarro wrote: post #4

Except paying the vpn requires a credit card that does the same verification check so it’s not thwarting the rule at all.

I had a debit card when I was 11 years old.

Debit cards for kids are a god send. It was extremely annoying to have to keep cash just to give the daughter pocket money when she was going out.

Got her a debit card as soon as they were available for minors.

Re: The UK’s new age-gating rules are easy to bypass

#99

Post by OJFord »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #64
zigzag312 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same token for multiple people would improve anonymity for sure. But someone could share this token publicly and then everyone could have it.

> But someone could share this token publicly and then everyone could have it. How is this any different than using any other way of doing it? It's always the case that someone can provide their ID and let someone else use it.

In the solution you described as 'far more complicated than it needs to be', this is significantly mitigated by the inclusion of a valid_until timestamp.

Re: The UK’s new age-gating rules are easy to bypass

#100

Post by vidarh »

michaelt wrote: post #27
SXX wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They know what they doing exactly. But they now have a reason to require age and ID checks to buy VPN. Then ban payments to VPNs that don't follow said regulation. You'll see.

Well, it all depends if the politicians actually care if this works. You see, this bill was passed in 2023, under a Conservative government; then a Labour government was elected in 2024, before the bill came into force. A nice little time bomb, set by the outgoing government - impractical and illiberal, but labelled all over with 'children' and 'cyber-bullying' and 'violent pornography' So if the Labour government ke…

Labour, if anything, mainly had issue with the Online Safety Act not being strict enough, and Labour has already gotten itself massively unpopular with a range of LGBT groups and do not seem to care.
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