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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

#171

Post by pseudo0 »

pyman wrote: post #169
piker wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the point was there is precedent for laws affecting American operations when distributing software into a jurisdiction.

Regulators are fed up with billionaires in the US turning a blind eye to porn just to make more money off it, even if kids can get around the restrictions. Look at Elon Musk, one of the first things he did after buying Twitter was open the floodgates, letting anyone upload or search for porn without any proper safeguards. Reddit shows porn to kids too, as long as they tick the "Show mature (18+) content" box. Same wi…

This isn't a uniquely American problem. Age verification is a huge pain to implement and completely tanks user sign up metrics. No tech company will do it unless absolutely forced by a major government, eg. see the recent US state-level laws that require age verification for porn sites. Websites are using IP-geo checks to apply the age verification process to as few users as possible.

Also I'd question putting Roblox in the child-friendly category. Hindenburg Research characterized the platform as a "Pedophile Hellscape". They obviously have a financial angle as a short-seller, but they point out some issues that seem pretty significant, in my opinion.

> We found Roblox to be an X-rated pedophile hellscape, replete with users attempting to groom our avatars, groups openly trading child pornography, widely accessible sex games, violent content and extremely abusive speech—all of which is open to young children and all while Roblox has cut content moderation spending to appease Wall Street and boost earnings.

> We put together a brief video compilation of Roblox moderation failures

https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/

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

#172

Post by pyman »

pseudo0 wrote: post #171
pyman wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulators are fed up with billionaires in the US turning a blind eye to porn just to make more money off it, even if kids can get around the restrictions. Look at Elon Musk, one of the first things he did after buying Twitter was open the floodgates, letting anyone upload or search for porn without any proper safeguards. Reddit shows porn to kids too, as long as they tick the "Show mature (18+) content" box. Same wi…

This isn't a uniquely American problem. Age verification is a huge pain to implement and completely tanks user sign up metrics. No tech company will do it unless absolutely forced by a major government, eg. see the recent US state-level laws that require age verification for porn sites. Websites are using IP-geo checks to apply the age verification process to as few users as possible. Also I'd question putting Roblox…

Oh, I was wrong about Roblox. Some users even encourage 8, 9-yo to install Discord so they can groom them. So I guess there are two different issues here: porn sites showing indecent images and videos to everyone, regardless of age, and sick people grooming kids on social media and in games.

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

#173

Post by bsenftner »

t_a_mm_acq wrote: post #123
bsenftner wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's not really a verification method, it's the use of age estimation models in a computer vision sense. The problem with age estimation models is they are only better in statistically unreliable ways within controlled ethnic demographics. That word salad means that age recovery trained algorithms have a variance of accuracy that is difficult to reduce, and when successful is only successful on narrow classific…

I’m not sure - I think between the NIST tracks for age estimation and the work entities have done to gather large, diverse sample sets shows meaningful progress and perhaps real world usage. Your points above are valid and real concerns, in addition to liveliness. There is work further to be done and improvements to be made. But it seems to me that they are solvable problems. These datasets are getting granular, mono…

The system I worked on had (it's larger now) 100M faces in the training set, and when I was leaving there was a 300M set in the works. We went to lengths to collect and categorize. It's mixed ethnicity that throws a wrench into ethnic categorization. It is ordinary to have people with a half dozen or more racial compositions, and that pretty much wreaks categorization. We (they) also had a a pretty robust liveness detection, and surgical mask detection with a "see through the mask" feature too (available with certain crazy-tech cameras.)

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

#174

Post by bsenftner »

rcxdude wrote: post #72
bsenftner wrote: post #49

Are people still thinking a face image can be used to verify age? That's absurd. Former globally leading facial recognition developer here, and the article lightly mentions using a face image and age verification face analysis - that's not age accurate at all. Ask many ethnicities with experience, "age verification" image analysis is so unreliable it is fraud used in this context.

I think it is convenient for the services and probably the regulators to pretend so.

It allows a class of low quality providers to basically trick people into the industry with products that claim but cannot deliver. Then that customer either abandons, or ponys up the real amount of investment necessary for a real solution, and due to being burned already, they are more diligent in their research. Which the industry wants, because too many knock on tech company doors expecting magic genies to grant wishes.

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

#175

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

pyman wrote: post #168
patates wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of very advanced software one can use to limit access to those sites, as well as control the time spent online. I think many tablets/phones even have built in parental controls. Why do you think the government should be involved?

In theory, yes. In practice, not really. There's always a billionaire in the US happy to turn a blind eye if it means making more money from porn, even if kids can get around the restrictions. Look at Elon Musk, one of the first things he did after buying Twitter was open the floodgates, letting anyone upload or search for porn without any proper safeguards. Reddit shows porn to kids too, as long as they tick the "Sh…

> There's always a billionaire in the US happy to turn a blind eye

What does this have to do with enabling parental controls? You can define an allow list of websites to visit and disallow installing new applications. A billionaire turning a blind eye wouldn’t affect that, except in ways that would be very obvious to the parents like resetting the control settings.

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

#176

Post by vidarh »

gruez wrote: post #126
vidarh wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crimes numbers, including rapes, are through the roof in the UK This is far-right propaganda. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...

Your source is only for all crime statistics. If you look at the detailed breakdown rape has increased[1]. More worrying is the fact that charge rates have fallen[2], which makes the claim that crime was "down" doubtful. [1] https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250726_EPC... [2] https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250726_BRC...

Now consider the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which shows that despite minor uptick in recent years, the rate of rapes are below past peaks even in the 2000's[1] (see e.g. figure 2), including for rapes. These are based on asking people, and so capture far more crime than police reports and are not affected by charging rates.

What you will see, however, is that the reports have dramatically increased. See figure 3. Combined with relatively static reported rates of rapes, this is good - it means a large proportion now do get reported.

But given the number of reports have drastically increased relative to the rate of crimes as reported in the crime survey, it is not surprising that charge rates have fallen, as it's at least plausible that a number of incidents that are now reported that wouldn't have been before are those incidents with insufficent evidence. (That doesn't mean it's not problematic that the charge rates have dropped, of course)

What is clear, is that there is no evidence for the contention in the comment I replied to. It's a common far-right talking point used to sow fear. I'm not suggesting that commenter who posted it are intentionally pushing far-right talking points - I know plenty of people on the left who have been tricked into repeating this as well. But they are unambiguously talking points that are being abused by the UK far-right to push a narrative of a collapsing society that does not match reality.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...

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

#177

Post by rcxdude »

bsenftner wrote: post #174
rcxdude wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is convenient for the services and probably the regulators to pretend so.

It allows a class of low quality providers to basically trick people into the industry with products that claim but cannot deliver. Then that customer either abandons, or ponys up the real amount of investment necessary for a real solution, and due to being burned already, they are more diligent in their research. Which the industry wants, because too many knock on tech company doors expecting magic genies to grant w…

That assumes that the customer actually wants the problem solved, as opposed to doing the bare minimum to be able to say 'we tried' to the regulators. And that works doubly well if the regulators also just want to do the bare minimum so they can say 'we tried' to the politicians, press, and segment of the public that thinks this is a good idea.

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

#178

Post by pyman »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #175
pyman wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, yes. In practice, not really. There's always a billionaire in the US happy to turn a blind eye if it means making more money from porn, even if kids can get around the restrictions. Look at Elon Musk, one of the first things he did after buying Twitter was open the floodgates, letting anyone upload or search for porn without any proper safeguards. Reddit shows porn to kids too, as long as they tick the "Sh…

> There's always a billionaire in the US happy to turn a blind eye What does this have to do with enabling parental controls? You can define an allow list of websites to visit and disallow installing new applications. A billionaire turning a blind eye wouldn’t affect that, except in ways that would be very obvious to the parents like resetting the control settings.

> What does this have to do with enabling parental controls?

You're shifting responsibility to parents instead of asking billionaires to check kids' ages before letting them access porn sites, just like other businesses ask for ID when someone tries to buy alcohol or tobacco.

Telling parents to fix the problem isn't the answer, that's what governments are for: to regulate billionaires and hold them accountable.

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

#179

Post by Quarrel »

pyman wrote: post #170
Quarrel wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt porn addiction is somewhat harmful to some people (I doubt it is nearly up there with alcohol, which afaik is easily in a class of its own). I've also had a kid in a London school for the last 9 years, so I'm in the parent whatsapp groups etc, and talk to parents about what should be done. For a politician, getting parents to agree to "Should we protect kids from harmful material on the internet?" is an…

I'm a teacher in a private high school which allows students to have smartphones. Kids have unlimited access to porn and they circulate it during school hours, and there's not much we can do about it. AFAIK, the UK forced the big porn tech giants to hide explicit images and videos from the public unless users verify their age. Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, Reddit and other companies failed to do that. These US busines…

> AFAIK, the UK forced the big porn tech giants to hide explicit images and videos from the public unless users verify their age. Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, Reddit and other companies failed to do that. These US businesses turned a blind eye to porn just to make more money.

Until just now, no, they had not forced them. They had repeatedly delayed and denied, just trying to win electoral points.

I think you underestimate how easy these regulations will be to get around. I was once a teenage boy with some tech-nous. This would have been a walk in the park then, and kids these days know a lot more than I did back then, not to mention all the bad-actors that will happily help them. It isn't as simple as "oh no, so IDs will be leaked".

Also, if you think you can understand the depth of the people behind the porn sites, you're in for a new awakening. Of course, you can't trust them- but if you could, then there would be new porn sites the next day that you could not. Which sites will implement these changes? Which ones will not? The answer to this is half the battle being faced ..

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

#180

Post by alphager »

andrewpolidori wrote: post #157
louthy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst I appreciate your point, I'm not sure the analogy works. Your 'book' (website) is being deployed from your warehouse (web server) and you could chose to not deliver to the customer (the client web browser) based on their location, because of local (to the customer) laws that ban the book. I think it'd be difficult to argue against that unless someone else was a proxy middleman during the delivery of the book (…

Your analogy falls flat because they have to connect to the website, not the other way around. You can't argue that someone requesting access to a page is the same as delivering a book into their borders. They can choose to block access but the website doesn't operate there or owe them anything. They choose to be apart of the connected network, no one forces them.

This is the same thing as suing a NY newspaper in Florida because their website is accessible from Florida.
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