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VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

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Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#921

Post by NoGravitas »

palmfacehn wrote: post #786
Veliladon wrote: post #765

This is one of the times where law is outrunning technology. Apple and Google are both working on anonymous attestation but they're pulling the trigger before it's ready. But that's not what laws like these are about. In the US at least these laws are driven by Christian Nationalists are setting up a situation where PII of porn users is able to be leaked. That's what they're counting on. They also want to have politi…

I have to disagree with the "Christian Nationalist" characterization. https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2025/07/29/nigel-farage-taki... >"Nigel Farage ‘on the side of predators’ with Online Safety Act criticism, says Labour" Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist? The end goal here is digital ID and censorship. Compare this to the perennial efforts for encryption backdoors. If there is a characterization th…

> Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist?

Honestly? Yeah, pretty much. It's a little hard to think of them that way since they're the leftmost establishment party in the UK, the same as the Democrats in the US, but historically speaking they're pretty right-wing. And theocracy has pretty deep roots in Anglosphere politics, so it's not necessarily that visible from the inside.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#922

Post by bccdee »

orwin wrote: post #914
faxmeyourcode wrote: post #902

Every day preteen boys around the world are destroying their premature brains by watching stuff that should be 18+ by simply clicking a single button that says "I am over 18". They form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button. Many of these kids are never the same after their innocence is stripped. You can blame the parents for allowing them unfettered access…

I mean, ZKP of age seems to be a good enough compromise. Does it add friction? Yes. I used it a week ago to test, it isn't a smooth experience, but honestly, it's good enough. The fact that people need to install vpn to access porn is also a solution. I doubt children younger than 13 could do it.

A 13-year-old is one year away from highschool. You're underestimating the user-friendliness of VPNs and the tech-savviness of, if not the average middle-schooler, than the 85th-percentile middle-schooler at least.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#923

Post by morjom »

bccdee wrote: post #911
faxmeyourcode wrote: post #902

Every day preteen boys around the world are destroying their premature brains by watching stuff that should be 18+ by simply clicking a single button that says "I am over 18". They form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button. Many of these kids are never the same after their innocence is stripped. You can blame the parents for allowing them unfettered access…

Pornography addiction doesn't exist. No major medical body in the world considers it an actual condition. Studies show that self-reported pornography addicts consume the same amount of pornography as non-addicts, but have much higher rates of religiosity and conservative sexual norms. Pornography "addiction" is a moral panic narrative, not a medical reality. I agree that children should not have access to sexually ex…

Can you link the studies?

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#924

Post by TZubiri »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #894
TZubiri wrote: post #862

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only property of the implementation necessary for sextortion to happen is that it will be imperfect, at least once. Which is guaranteed.

It seems to me that your argument is: if the system can make mistakes, it should not exist. However, no systems are fault free. Whether we are talking about computing systems, mechanical systems, or societal ones. Sometimes police can arrest an innocent person before they realize the mistake and release them. Should we stop policing completely? Or maybe the right question to ask is “how do we minimize the chance for…

"It seems to me that your argument is: if the system can make mistakes, it should not exist"

"When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’"

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#925

Post by NoGravitas »

kulahan wrote: post #908
faxmeyourcode wrote: post #902

Every day preteen boys around the world are destroying their premature brains by watching stuff that should be 18+ by simply clicking a single button that says "I am over 18". They form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button. Many of these kids are never the same after their innocence is stripped. You can blame the parents for allowing them unfettered access…

I feel much the same way. This is a real headache of a problem for me because I'm pretty privacy-oriented, but this is a serious, serious problem that needs real intervention. Way too many kids are rotting their brains away either becoming gooners or clout-chasers. I thank God every day I was born too early to have access to this stuff as a kid. I can't imagine what this "you must always be online and also sexy" cult…

Interestingly, the youngs in the US seem to be much less into sex and drugs than previous generations. The stuff we got up to as GenX youth are legitimately shocking to our children.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#926

Post by kulahan »

nativeit wrote: post #889

I guess we’ll do anything to protect children…except teach them to think critically.

Critical thinking is quite literally the most difficult thing for children to do. It's one of the very last skills we develop. So yes, the idea is to teach them, but while they're still young and dumb and physically incapable of the critical thinking required here, we need guardrails for them.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#927

Post by kulahan »

NoGravitas wrote: post #925
kulahan wrote: post #908

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel much the same way. This is a real headache of a problem for me because I'm pretty privacy-oriented, but this is a serious, serious problem that needs real intervention. Way too many kids are rotting their brains away either becoming gooners or clout-chasers. I thank God every day I was born too early to have access to this stuff as a kid. I can't imagine what this "you must always be online and also sexy" cult…

Interestingly, the youngs in the US seem to be much less into sex and drugs than previous generations. The stuff we got up to as GenX youth are legitimately shocking to our children.

I've seen nothing to state that sexual activity is down. Unplanned pregnancies maybe, but that's not the same thing. Do you have a source for this? I could be convinced pretty easily, it just sounds wrong to me.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#928

Post by BeFlatXIII »

faxmeyourcode wrote: post #902

Every day preteen boys around the world are destroying their premature brains by watching stuff that should be 18+ by simply clicking a single button that says "I am over 18". They form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button. Many of these kids are never the same after their innocence is stripped. You can blame the parents for allowing them unfettered access…

> This doesn't even include the softer stuff that gets _recommended_ to them every day on tiktok and instagram reels

This is what needs regulated, not pushing “papers, please” Statsi nonsense on the adults.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#929

Post by NoGravitas »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #815
lemoncookiechip wrote: post #752

I've posted this before: We shouldn't need Age Verification checks for adults in the first place. Create a better, standardized, open-source parental control tool that is installed by default on all types of device that can connect to the web. The internet aspect of the parental control should be a "Per Whitelist" system rather than Blacklisting. The parents should be the ones to decide which domains are Whitelisted…

> Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography. I'm against: pornography, as found in search results, is generally quite bad. Sexism, racial stereotyping, misrepresentations of queer issues: and that's just the titles . Page 3 has nothing on porn sites. Maybe I'm judging a book by its SEO spammers here, but I've not read anything that'd disabuse me of this notion: indeed, people raise co…

There is certainly good and bad porn - in terms of quality, messaging, and ethics of production. The most successful and widespread porn falls on the bad side of all of these - partly because the industry is just historically broken, partly because good porn is more expensive to produce, but subject to all the same restrictions and costs as bad porn.

Re: VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

#930

Post by bccdee »

morjom wrote: post #923
bccdee wrote: post #911

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pornography addiction doesn't exist. No major medical body in the world considers it an actual condition. Studies show that self-reported pornography addicts consume the same amount of pornography as non-addicts, but have much higher rates of religiosity and conservative sexual norms. Pornography "addiction" is a moral panic narrative, not a medical reality. I agree that children should not have access to sexually ex…

Can you link the studies?

Here's a systematic review of the research as of 2022: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11930-022-00329-8. It's paywalled, but you can probably find the full text on sci-hub.

> [T]he last 5 years of pornography research is marked by increased attention to the impact of context and individual differences when assessing pornography use effects. Particularly, researchers have provided compelling evidence that differences in religious and moral values regarding sexual behavior can impact estimates of pornography use and perceptions regarding the problematic or addictive nature of pornography. Considering recent findings, a systematic review of recent research (within the past 5 years) on how religion and morality shape pornography use effects was conducted, with a particular focus on findings regarding pornography problems due to moral incongruence.

> Fifty-one articles were included in the present review. Findings demonstrate religiousness, moral disapproval, and moral incongruence as robust, strong predictors of various problems regarding pornography (e.g., psychological distress, relational problems, perceived addiction).

Like they say above, it's hot-button issue and this sort of result is fairly easy to replicate, so a lot of papers have been published along these lines in recent years.

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