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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

#971

Post by wizzwizz4 »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #958
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

“Queer/Disabled techies post porn that I think is good for kids, which is great because otherwise children would have to just use PornHub” is a GREAT ideology to viscerally radicalize the majority of people against you AND the people you’re speaking about.

There's a difference between "good" and "not harmful". I would not encourage children to watch porn (if it came up in conversation, I'd dissuade them or change the subject); however, it's a fact that they do – to the point my peers did not believe me when I told them I didn't. There is such a thing as harm reduction, and there's a point past which "teaching children that their feelings are not harmful nor wrong" is more important than the veneer of propriety.

But, noted. That's excellent feedback.

To steal your wording from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44728577: if some children are going to seek out porn no matter what we do, better for the first thing they find not to be "content that demeans women and distorts their worldview on sex and relationships". If the Online Safety Act effectively prevented children from being exposed to that, then I would be ambivalent about it – but the law clearly won't achieve any of its stated goals. (I suspect bad porn is clearly-defined enough to prohibit directly, with cigarette-style prohibitions on making attractive to children sufficient for the respectful stuff, but I expect many people to call any ban "draconian".)

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

#972

Post by ta1243 »

kulahan wrote: post #955
ta1243 wrote: post #952

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me the IP addresses of every site and I'll blackhole them on my router if I want to. That solves the home problem. I'll also ask why gambling sites, which litter sports broadcasting, aren't included, and indeed why gambling is allowed to be advertised to under 18s at all. Doesn't solve the away problem, which is mainly 5g. I should be able to do that as the account payer.

That's great, but unfortunately most parents don't know how to do that, and as I've read recently, tech literacy is going down in younger generations, not up.

ISPs and phone companies can provide it as a service, opt in (or opt out) on your account management page, job done

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

#973

Post by azalemeth »

immibis wrote: post #733
polski-g wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix was blocking by endpoint IP? That is just a cat and mouse game. They should have been blocking if the MTU was not 1500 bytes.

Lots of real ISPs use tunnels.

And lots of VPN companies explicitly change TTL and packet sizes to avoid these sorts of things

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

#974

Post by Fraaaank »

mtnGoat wrote: post #790
Fraaaank wrote: post #771

What's stopping lawmakers to require VPN providers to verify the age of their users?

Enforcement, one countries laws don’t apply in another. Which is kind of why the age verification thing won’t work… There will always be some jurisdiction that’ll ignore things for profit.

Not entirely true. If I'm incorporated in country A and want to offer a service in country B, I'll have to comply with the local regulations. Furthermore, most VPNs have local presence in the EU as well. NordVPN is incorporated in Panama, but also has an entity in The Netherlands.

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

#975

Post by wizzwizz4 »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #958
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

“Queer/Disabled techies post porn that I think is good for kids, which is great because otherwise children would have to just use PornHub” is a GREAT ideology to viscerally radicalize the majority of people against you AND the people you’re speaking about.

I've changed my mind: this isn't very good feedback, because you had to misrepresent what I wrote in order to criticise it.

I said "if porn sites had the kind of stuff": your paraphrase adds an implication I vehemently disagree with. The impersonal nature of a website (or magazine, or whatever) is important. Children shouldn't be looking at porn on social media sites, because they should have neither social nor parasocial relationships with sex workers qua sex workers (lumping amateurs in with professionals, here): this is a (non-central) special case of "adults should not have sexual relationships with children". We can't ignore the power dynamics.

That's one of the things I think the OSA got right: if you read between the lines, each measure does seem to be motivated by an actual problem, some of which aren't obvious to non-experts like me. I'd love to get access to the NSPCC's recommendations for the OSA, before it got translated to this awful implementation: that'd make it much easier to try to design alternative, more effectual implementations.

Note also, the queer/disabled techies I mentioned? They take pains to ensure that minors do not interact with them in a sexual context: some of them explain why, and others make blanket prohibitions without explanation. It is generally understood that consent and boundaries are respected. And, from what I can tell looking at public social graphs, this works: nobody I know to be a child is interacting with nudes, risqué posts, erotica, or accounts dedicated to that purpose, even if they're otherwise quite close in the social graph. (Maybe I should do a study? But analysing people's social graphs without their consent doesn't feel ethical. Perhaps interviews would be a better approach.)

There is the occasional post from a child (youngest I've observed was 16) complaining about these policies, because they think they don't need protection. That they're complaining, rather than just bypassing the technical barriers (as everybody in my school knew how to do), is perhaps another indication that this approach works.

(I'm a degree separated from the communities that post sexy stuff online, so my observations may not be representative of what actually happens. I'm also seeing the situation after moderation, a few minutes delayed due to federation latency: I know that "remove the consequences of a child's foolishness from the public sphere as quickly as possible" is a priority in online moderation, so this selection bias might be quite heavy. Further research is needed.)

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

#976

Post by thinkingtoilet »

Goronmon wrote: post #941
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a law saying children shouldn't view pornography isn't abuse. It's common sense. Just like saying a 12 year old can't legally buy weed. Is that a slippery slope? Should 12 year olds be able to buy weed? If not, why is that not a slippery slope and this is? What needs to be kept in check is the scope. Let's say they try to age restrict sites that are subversive, but not obscene. That's what I'm talking about.

Having a law saying children shouldn't view pornography isn't abuse. "Children shouldn't view pornography" is fine as an overall goal. A law that suggest the content providers track the faces and passport details of all users is a ridiculous way to fail to prevent that however. It is however a great way to have an readily accessible log of exactly which citizens are viewing content the government finds questionable.

With ISP data, the government already knows all the porn we're watching in great detail. Which brings up a better point, if you're worried about tracking, chop down the tree, don't pick off a leaf.

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

#977

Post by degenoah »

h3half wrote: post #315
ricardobeat wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale with sufficient bandwidth for anything other than simple browsing of text websites. As shown by the very effective Netflix strategy of blocking VPN addresses, it’s been very hard to slip through for a good four or five years now.

As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy , are BS? Which sounds like a silly question ("of course the marketing is BS") but why even bother marketing if the core value proposition of your billed-monthly service doesn't work? Seems like a waste of money since you'll at most…

considering PIA also still has their sponsors spill the usual "don't connect to a public wifi without a VPN! or else hackers can see everything!!" (SSL/TLS solved this problem a long time ago) yeah I would take anything they and many others claim in ads.

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

#978

Post by kanonade »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #794
digitalsushi wrote: post #760

Our ability to filter and modify the content of the web constantly improves, and itchy trigger fingers might hover over many nation's "Great Walls", ready at the next galvanizing event to overnight change our relationship with this interchange we exist upon. My current guess is that if things really went to hell with censorship and disjointedness, that we'd re-establish an ancient pattern - magazines. I recall as a c…

I'm under the assumption that the global, unfilitered Internet is on an irreversible course to lockdown and won't exist at all in its current form in 10 years or less. It's sad, and defeatist, but the forces on the lockdown side are too strong and will get what they want eventually, so I can either hit my head against a brick wall or do something productive for myself. I've decided to deal with it by reevaluating the…

Well giving up is certainly an approach

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

#980

Post by mathgradthrow »

alt227 wrote: post #746
mathgradthrow wrote: post #256

pornography does not harm children.

That is an incredibly neive view which has been proven wrong many times over. Exposure to pornography early on in life dramatically increases the chance that person will be affected by things like sexual addiction, or gravitate towards extreme views in the same vein like incels. Testosterone is a very powerful drug, and young brains need protecting from explicit content if we want to bring up mentally healthy males i…

Every male on earth looked at pornography as a child. Any problem it creates is literally as bad as it can possibly be.

You also don't have a control group, and social media is a much better guess for whats wrong with men anyway.

Basically all of the hyper masculine bullshit aimed at children advises them to not consume pornography.

This is just fear-mongering.

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