Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

911–920 of 1001 posts

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

#911

Post by bccdee »

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 explicit material and that it can warp their relationships to sex. I also agree that some people have unhealthy relationships to pornography; there are plenty of psychological and psychiatric factors that lead people to engage in disordered sexual behaviours.

But people NEED to stop bringing medical pseudoscience into these discussions. Statements like "[children] form lifelong addictions that stunt their emotional and developmental growth at the click of one button" are neither true nor useful.

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

#912

Post by donmcronald »

I wonder what the (supposed) anti-censorship people that supported things like eSNI and DoH think about this. They took away our ability to filter our own networks, so now we can't even argue that filtering and monitoring is something that should be done on the client side (per network).

Sometimes I feel like both sides are actually just one side playing the long game. IMO the goal is to get verified digital IDs in use everywhere they can so they can lock down the internet to have absolute control. We'll end up paying inflated subscriptions for everything and watching all the ads.

These are the kinds of regulations that are deigned for incumbents because it becomes impossible for new market entrants to satisfy the requirements. I wouldn't be surprised if big tech companies are silently lobbying for this kind of stuff behind closed doors.

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

#913

Post by delfinom »

ndriscoll wrote: post #865
captainbland wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strictly speaking the law was passed under the conservatives, albeit in collaboration with Labour (it's bi-partisan). But I would agree that the drive is more authoritarian and it just uses moralistic arguments to shame people into siding with it. The law could mandate that retail device OSs ship with a turnkey child safe mode complete with app and extensive site whitelists and run an educational campaign on the subj…

Requiring device side child safe modes would be far further reaching and likely mean your cannot run your own software anymore. Requiring providers of adult content to check id is much more limited in scope.

This is 1000000% where we are going between Google moving away from AOSP and Samsung removing the ability to unlock bootloaders altogether.

There is a conspiracy and it's being rolled out. There was already some country that declared anyone running non-standard OSes on their phones are highly suspect.

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

#914

Post by orwin »

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.

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

#915

Post by ta1243 »

thisisit wrote: post #860

The 2nd order effect is that nearly every creator will be sponsored by NordVPN - as the market expands. As well as not being able to identify legitimate vs illegitimate uses. So, I guess mission achieved!?

Governments already want encryption back doors, this just adds more ammo.

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

#916

Post by benreesman »

swinglock wrote: post #899
benreesman wrote: post #831

This seems like a hard fight to win against determined network engineers without OFAC-level co-encorcement around spending money abroad. I rent servers in Hong Kong, Switzerland, Tokyo, and many other places, and route tunnels among them all, and this is just mundane aboveboard stuff, many of the providers happily accept PayPal and crypto as well as CC and wire. I haven't even tried to design a system for evading thi…

They will block your tunnel. If you attempt to hide it you will be jailed once found out. Working encryption will be illegal.

I understand that arbitrary oppression is possible even with computers, there are regimes that come close today.

My point is that it will cost them a lot of money in lost economic activity to make it happen: we should seek to make that cost as high as possible and make sure that powerful people understand how high it is.

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

#917

Post by kelnos »

kristianc wrote: post #852
b112 wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The elephant in the room, is 'foreign actor'. All of our platforms are inundated by an overwhelming amount of well crafted, targeted (specific per person) campaigns of disinformation by foreign actors. China, Russia, Iran, and others cannot even remotely hope to stand against the West. Yet if you cannot stand against your adversary, you must weaken them. You promote infighting. You take minor issues which can be coop…

> Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater. Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties without the intervention of overbearing Civil Servants, Cabinet Office officials or the guiding hand of the BBC. Radic…

> Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties

That's not working so well in the US at least. That gave us Trump.

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

#918

Post by delfinom »

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…

Before the internet, preteen boys just had stashes upon stashes of Playboy and other forms of porn ;)

Honestly seems more fun if you think about it since you could technically trade the goods around

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

#919

Post by kelnos »

mattmaroon wrote: post #849
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 don’t know, I think not giving 10 year olds unlimited access to porn is a deep enough reason. It is a legitimate societal harm.

Ok, so don't give your kids access to porn. You can figure out a way to do that without requiring age verification for adults on all sorts of sites.

More pearl-clutching "think of the children" nonsense.

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

#920

Post by ta1243 »

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…

These sites implementing this could also implement a DNS TXT record or similar saying they are over 18s only (gambling sites would be included here too, and with a little thought you can categorise the sites).

They could publish their IP addresses so that the traffic can be blackholed at the router by the account holder.

The choice would then be down to the person paying the bill whether to block or not.

It won't apply to shady sites, but those sites won't do age verification anyway.

The problem is nobody wants the account holder to have the power.

Post reply on HN