Has anyone told them teens would create accounts with foreign VPN services?
UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
91–100 of 213 posts
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#92I'm very interested to see how some VPN providers react to this. For a zero logs VPN provider, if such a thing can really exist, how big of a problem is this? Presumably many customers pay with a debit/credit card already so there's some PII on file? Usage remains the same? Surely savvy people can just use their existing VPN to buy a VPN from outside the UK. Of course, we're sliding quite rapidly down that slippery s…
> Surely savvy people can just use their existing VPN to buy a VPN from outside the UK.
Surely they can simply buy that direct ... at least until the Govt. requires ISP to blacklist.
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#93I'm very interested to see how some VPN providers react to this. For a zero logs VPN provider, if such a thing can really exist, how big of a problem is this? Presumably many customers pay with a debit/credit card already so there's some PII on file? Usage remains the same? Surely savvy people can just use their existing VPN to buy a VPN from outside the UK. Of course, we're sliding quite rapidly down that slippery s…
> Presumably many customers pay with a debit/credit card already so there's some PII on file? Yes. But I think most of the zero logs providers will remove the identifiable payments details after a certain about of time. e.g. Mullvad have a specific policy relating to what is stored and retention time (I am not affiliated with Mullvad, I just use their service). https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy#payme…
> But I think most of the zero logs providers will remove the identifiable payments details after a certain about of time.
No problem there. Once a user is old enough, he stays old enough.
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#94What societal "harm" is the UK actually trying to reduce with this age verification? It almost feels like the amount of effort they're putting into this is out of balance with the actual harm.
Mis- and disinformation will be captured by the Online Safety Act where it is illegal or harmful to children.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act...
Harmful accurate info is allowed, note.
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#95What I find particularly tragic about all of this legislation (the OSA and now this) is that there are obviously technical people in the room that would advise against this clusterfuck of a direction and they are being ignored by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control. This will continue to push people towards providers who operate outside UK jurisdiction or providers that care…
> by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control You seem to believe they're wrong. Since they're the ones who come up with the laws of the land, I think it's important to realize that they can and do aggressively control access to the internet in their country. It sucks, but it's the reality.
> they can and do aggressively control access to the internet
yes but this is like watching someone deal with an ant infestation by stamping on them. They're not solving the issue and unlike the ant analogy, they're making the problem worse.
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#96What I find particularly tragic about all of this legislation (the OSA and now this) is that there are obviously technical people in the room that would advise against this clusterfuck of a direction and they are being ignored by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control. This will continue to push people towards providers who operate outside UK jurisdiction or providers that care…
> Even better, they could have created a non-governmental agency to exchange tokens and urls to prevent the privacy issue of the government knowing which sites people are visiting. The privacy issue would still exist. They can tie your online activity directly to these tokens.
not with a non-governmental agency doing the exchange. All they would see are tokens going out. You would need the non-governmental agency to share the urls with the government agency for the activity to be tied directly which would undermine the entire purpose of that architecture.
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#97They REALLY want people to become more tech-savvy and to learn how to create their own VPNs using cheap VMs instances from __INSERT_CLOUD_PROVIDER_HERE__, don't they?
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#98What societal "harm" is the UK actually trying to reduce with this age verification? It almost feels like the amount of effort they're putting into this is out of balance with the actual harm.
political dissent. Uncomfortable truths. Any speech that does not align with the official narrative. A Labour MP foolish attended a GB News show and when pushed admitted that the Online Safety Act was also about identifying speech by adults [0]. Sorry about the quality of the link, but the video is there (higher quality is available on X) and its not like the paragon of truth that is the BBC reported on this. https:/…
> political dissent. Uncomfortable truths. Any speech that does not align with the official narrative.
No, this age verification is not against that.
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#99I don't get why the device changes the blame logic. If child-services knew a parent was constantly watching/leaving around adult-content near children, that'd be considered the parents fault. If a parent lets a kid watch anything they want on TV and the kid watches adult content, it's the parents fault. But if the parent gives the child a phone, and doesn't manage what apps they use or content they watch, now it's th…
Does big tech help the parents? Can I set the age of the child in the phone user account and then the browser will report the age to the websites and the nice websites will aknowledge it and deny minors to watch adult content? No big tech and browser makers did not put their hurds of developers to handle this and forced the governments to try more retarded solutions. This big OSes should have a super easy activation…
You can block the entire internet and whitelist specific domains. There's multiple ways of doing this, from router parental controls, specific OS tools in iOS/Android, Windows, as well as apps specific to it, and all it takes is for a parent to care enough to make a simple Google or Youtube search and learn if they don't know, and don't even know to know that they should care in the first place.
The failure here is two-sided.
One and the most glaring are the parents who let devices raise their children, this hasn't changed since before home computers were a thing.
Secondly it's a failure of the state for not educating both adults and teenagers on best practices when using online platforms to be safe. If they're interested enough in policing people's web habits, they can spend time and resources on educating the masses. The best time to start doing it was 20 years ago, the second best is now and it could take a decade plus for it to have a meaningful impact.
Also this is important. The UK, like it or not, is a nanny state. They like to use child safety as an excuse to police adult habits, and more important their speech. There's quite a few times they've admitted to this plainly without any ambiguity.
"The Online Safety Act 2023 (the Act) is a new set of laws that protects children and adults online"
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act...
There's also examples of them being asked directly in interviews and they admit to wanting to police adults speech and content they consume online.
Australia is in a similar predicament and honestly most of the world is rolling towards this, just not as fast as the UK.
The UK unfortunately has incarcerated people for simply lifting cardboard signs saying Free Palestine. They've jailed people for innocuous social media posts on Facebook and other platforms.
I'm not proud of the USA for a lot of reasons, especially lately, but one thing that any and all Americans should be proud of is their Freedom of Speech protected by the First Amendment, it's the most American thing and one of the best aspects of America that other countries should aspire to, and I hope that the jabs Freedom of Speech has taken over the past decade doesn't make it crumble away.
Re: UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs
#100I think we need to accept that age verification makes the internet safer. What we cannot accept is age verification's use as a mechanism to pry too far into peoples lives. When we can separate age verification from who am I, most people will be happier. What's tricky is who validates age? Your ISP? Your government? Your OS? A thirty party? Who accredits third-parties, and can you trust them? I'm convinced there's a w…
> I'm convinced there's a way to solve this
Then you will be rich. Because no-one else has found a way to keep your age private whilst disclosing it.