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It still doesn’t have to be this way.
I didn’t need the Internet anyway thanks though
Age-checking is just a backdoor to force everyone on the internet to identify themselves. Nobody cares about the kids, they care about purging the internet of political dissent and opposition.
I am 420 years old.
That’s a respectable age! Personally I’m 69 years old.
See, there are a few ways this could go.
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Age verification is as secure and private as promised, and it’s left at that. I like to call this “the miracle”, and we all know those don’t happen.
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Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a government asks for “access to data to prevent crime” - things degenerate from there. This is the “systemic failure” scenario.
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Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but new scams evolve around it to make it dangerous. This would be the “criminal element” scenario.
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Age verification is not as secure and private as promised, and a leak occurs destroying lives and careers. This is the “system failure” scenario.
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Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a few companies start scraping and selling data, leading to widespread harms. This is the “unethical merchant” scenario, and the most likely outcome.
All in all, there is only one “ok” scenario, and a lot of horrific ones. The math says we’re entirely boned ^_^
I feel like people are downplaying how dangerous even the possibility of #2 is. A lot of nations are already targeting the LGBTQ community on a regular basis and this would massively assist to streamline persecution of “certain” citizens as well as the rapid spread of religious dogma. Both the U.S. and Australia are current testing grounds for these outcomes.
Or all of the above while still not being “as secure and private as promised”.
Nothing is ever as secure and private as promised.
4, as it’s already happening. It’s just to be seen if people will have their lives ruined
We would need politicians to be the victims. Then these fascist laws will suddenly be cancelled.
If they were victims they would go even harder fascist, atleast that’s usually the case.
In theory, it isn’t hard to make it work, give everybody born on the same day a specific UUID and use that to authenticate with a database if it is true or false. Store the ID somewhere where the person has access to (ID/Passport/Digital passport etc) and it should be enough. Get IT persons and accountants to regularly audit it for security and if they keep logs/don’t have UUID’s per person etc.
But that’s not how it seems to work for the UK at this time
Already been seeing bullshit “age verification” scams in replies on mastodon for over a week now. I’m sure they’re all over the commercial platforms.
Five seems to be the most plausible. Although knowing how shit corporate security is, I foresee a mix of three and four being common.
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these laws are all about control and tracking what you do online. they make the internet MORE dangerous, because (as with everything the government restricts or bans) there will be a black market, which is always more dangerous and exposes people to more things than they were looking for in the first place. you think dark web providers are gonna make you upload your id to stay compliant? no, they’re gonna continue anonymously operating through TOR and serve up some very questionably sourced content to those teens that are searching “boobs” and can no longer access pornhub
Fuck it, let’s get back to something like the way it was.
Anonymous, amateur, just slightly hard to access to keep the mouth breathers out.
being able to use obscure internet forums does not preclude you from being a mouth breather
Well now that sounds a little like the fediverse itself!
I really, really dont want to search for porn on the dark net…
That’s what this is going to become. And that’s another point to this. They can just go after people using the dark net claim it was for kiddie porn even if it wasn’t. the masses will just believe them.
There’s like a gazillion porn sites on the clearnet though, I can’t imagine them being able to track then all
I am aware of many, I am just saying looking at the dark web is not a good idea because… well… OK we’re all adults here. That’s where all the CP is and I have no interest in seeing that shit.
That’s a kinda not true tho. There is a fuck ton of cp on the clear web. The only thing I can say, is that Twitter used to have a lot of spam posts with links to cp.
I actively avoid those. I used to go on the chan forums but after seeing people just posting random attachments and someone saying ‘get that kiddie shit out of here’ before it stayed up for a while I turned tail and ran from those and never looked back.
There is so much of it on the internet in general that you can’t really do much about it. On top of the fact it is still all over torrent websites as well.
If a government agency cant find them, they will be very difficult for average users to find as well
This isn’t about being “age-checked”. It’s about IDing everyone on the internet and tracking where they go and what they do.
The world we live in is far far worse than anything from 1984.
Exactly this.
Governments have a rock hard boner for detailed face scans of every person.
I think that’s the tech side windfall, the age checking is entirely to put road blocks infront of boobies. They it will force places to just not service those regions because of the hurdles of convincing enough people to give their ID, some will, and more over time.
And it now gives I people a reason to actually create fake IDs or just more identity theft uses. Raise the value of obtaining people’s ID is the windfall for the data rapers
Sucks, because it’s going global and we can’t seem to stop it. I’m fine with laws to age gate in terms of a button you click. If some kid is willing to say they’re 15… well, let’s make sure people are treating them as a 15 year old. But… making everyone deal with real verification is at best going to further entrench big business, and at worst, destroy the internet we love. And it raises the question: are trans teenagers talking to each other now creating adult content because the UK hates trans people?
how do you know it’s going to be global?
For porn and games etc. that should be enough yes, but for online gambling, opening stock market accounts etc we do need actual verification, but there are tons of methods of doing it so that the site only gets a true or false (18 or above) and the government gets obfuscated URL’s so that the government doesn’t know what you visited.
On the internet everyone will know you’re a dog.
Mrreow? 😾
Removed by mod
norman Reedus’ face https://mashable.com/article/discord-uk-age-verification-death-stranding-hack
I will not be participating. I’ll get around any barriers they put in place.
And if I can’t, I’ll just stop using the internet for anything I don’t absolutely have to.
I don’t really need my smartphone. A laptop will do.
You don’t use the internet on a laptop?
absolutely have to
Anything you can do on a smartphone that would require Internet would also require Internet on a laptop no?
I suppose you could download offline installers to a thumb drive at the library or smth
absolutely have to
I’m sure some countries will gladly setup VPNs for accessing this stuff even when all other countries block adult stuff.
Well time to sell thumbdrives to teenagers filled with “tutorials.mp4” and “online class.mp4” lol.
Just give em live distros with tor installed.
I legitimately dont understand who supports this. Who are these parents that can’t parent their kids properly? It’s so incredibly easy these days.
So instead of handling shitty parenting we restrict adults and with surveillance. Make it make sense.
One of the biggest problems with human societies is that parents, by necessity, have their brains broken and, due to modern values/life, are under constant strain. Being a parent means (generally) the kid is priority 1, then there’s everything else. This is a necessary irrationality, but if this means you have to do the occasional genocide or violate someone else’s civil rights to ‘keep our kids safe’ then, by god, those people are just going to have to suck it up and die. Sometimes, if you have the time, you can talk some people around and remind them, one day their kids are going to have to live in society as one of those 'someone else’s and won’t always be their precious little baby, but almost no one has the time and energy for a more nuanced thought than ‘save the babies!’ much less if they also have to work 48 hours, commute 10 hours, and parent their kid(s) for 167 hours each week.
a lot of people. The other day I saw a post on mastodon by some politician or someone in the UK stating that if people find any site that is geoblocking the UK because of the age verification to report it to some link he provided. it was boosted A LOT with a lot of replies in support.
bootlickers.
report, lol. what does that douchebag want to do? fine a foreign website for not serving content to his oh so precious country?
i am sorry, our Nigerian kebab food truck does not deliver to united of kingdom
Report why? They’re entirely within their rights if they want to geoblock them.
There are SO MANY parents that are not willing to teach and monitor their kids online safety. I would even say most parents don’t take that responsibility themselves.
Totally in agreement. I think a bigger part of the issue is most people are completely tech illiterate. People can’t tell a computer from a monitor anymore and then we expect them to outsmart a kid with nothing better to do than stare at a screen for hours on end who will no doubt figure out ways around things. There has to be some feeling on the parents part of defeat. If only the politicians knew what the fuck they were doing we might get actual regulations for engineers to implement proper controls. The percentage of parents attempting to monitor their children appropriately while also having enough tech knowledge has to be low.
With you till the kids. Kids seem less tech literate than before. They can us tech but have no idea how anything works.
You give them too much credit. They don’t care about porn. They want everything on you at all times.
Is it going to get to a point we are better off self hosting and having offline copies that we share instead?
I mean it’s already there for me.
Who supports it? Fascists. It’s about controlling access to information and robbing the populace of privacy at the same time. An oppressive, authoritarian police state needs tools to maintain control. These are the tools.
It’s not “support”, it’s already been done in practice.
What they are finishing right now is the convenient way. To surveil 97% instead of 94%. And to make it official to reduce expenses.
And sorry, but “moderate leftists” are those who made it happen, first dreaming how on big centrally moderated platforms the “bad” speech and people will be censored (how irritating it was that in the free Web those people could write whatever they wanted) and theirs won’t be, and propaganda won’t flourish, and after that dreaming how they can demand loudly enough that the platforms would work for them and not for themselves.
I perfectly remember how people loving Steinbeck and expressing anarchist views would look at me like at an enemy for saying that Facebook, Twitter etc are bad and a trap, and such hierarchical systems can’t be good. That arrogant obnoxious “see, in the real society we collectively press for our rights and the rules are made and obeyed”, yes, I’ve met fools who told me things like that. Where’s your society now, bitch.
Parental controls for internet use have been around since the 90s. There are even some vintage porn sites that have been running since then that have ads for them. I know this. I saw them back in 1999 and 2000… when I was an underage guy looking at porn online.
Faacists do
It plays quite well with the “I think about things for two seconds, and mostly think with my lower intestine” crowd.
They hear “kids shouldn’t be able to access porn” and they think yeah what’s wrong with that. Then they hear “Democrats want your kids to get porn” and they hit share.
Age verification has it’s place online, but not for porn. That is just gonna push peopel to worse sites.
For gambling and stock market sites and the like I can understand it, but I would prefer if we wouldn’t need to send our ID to those sites. Heck if Valve would implement it I could actually gamble on steam again cause currently I cannot open a Tf2 crate …
That’s not age verification, that’s KYC (know your customer) which includes age verification. I agree, KYC has its place on the net, but this is definitely not it.
Well yeah fair, we are mostly interested in other stuff than the birthdate, but payment providers and gambling sites do it as well to verify your age.
For a lot of people it is hard and over walking because they don’t understand.
It’s the parents that wont face the fact that it’s them paying for their kids internet access.
Parents intentionally and deliberately pay for their kids to access this shit. But none of them want to accept that when it can all be someone elses fault.
I don’t see why they need to force it on the rest of us though.
Most parents are way less literate than their kids. Most censorship/site restriction, can be circumvented easily.
We’re at or reaching a tipping point where I’m not sure that’s true anymore.
Most people with kids now are (roughly) in their 20s-40s. At the older end of that range, you have some gen-xers who might have missed the boat on computer literacy, but by and large we’re talking about millennials and older gen-z at this point. Kids who grew up with the internet, probably very clearly remember their family getting their first computer if they didn’t already have one when they were born, had computer classes in school, etc.
And we’re running into an issue where younger Gen z and alpha in many cases are less computer literate in many ways. A lot of them aren’t really learning to use a computer so much as they are smartphones and tablets, and I’m not knocking how useful those devices can be, I do damn-near everything I need to do on my phone, but they are limited compared to a PC and don’t really offer as much of an opportunity to learn how computers work.
There’s a ton of exceptions to that of course, some of my millennial friends are still clueless about how to do basic things on a computer, and some children today are of course learning how to do anything and everything on a computer or even on a phone.
But overall, I don’t think there’s as much disparity in technological literacy between the children and parents of today as there was in previous generations, and in some ways that trend may have even reversed.
Unfortunately there is truth in what you are saying.
I don’t think so. It’s like cars everyone has a car and can drive it but very few can fix them. Tech has become that.
It’s more like who supports this in theory vs. who supports this how it’s written and implemented.
Realistically, no one should love how easy it is for anyone of any age to go to any search engine and search for (Edit) “sex” and just get a million images of genitals and porn. I’m not a parent, but I know my parents when I was a teenager would have loved something like this. Kids are sneaky and smart, and this is a blanket thing parents think will once again put porn behind a barrier.
In a perfect world, a system could very easily exist that would 1) allow for a super-secure government owned digital ID system that isn’t a surveillance nightmare, 2) that system use a hash to verify over 18 age anonymously in real time. That’s how it’s supposed to work with digital IDs - only the data you need to verify is displayed to a vendor. Over 18 is a binary yes/no - a full DOB or name isn’t even needed.
The government ID wallet or site would use a no-log system to generate a hash value for you when you ask for one. You ask your ID app or site for an age verification hash. You get one that’s valid for about 2 minutes. Copy, paste as needed. The site uses the hash to only know “is this person over 18 or not?” and nothing else. The ID system shouldn’t keep the logs of which site asked back to confirm “is this hash valid?” This is exactly as secure as going to a liquor store with your passport or ID card and having tape over the name, address, and doc number. It’s even better because your face is not displayed, and your actual DOB should not be displayed either.
However, in our present shitty reality, companies who are trying to get contracts for these systems can’t help but feed their existing, and lucrative, addiction to selling our data and using poor security to store that data. So they want your Google/Apple/Samsung wallets connected to a government system that is actually ran by a 3rd party vendor with questionable security practices, and to provide far more information because no one has set an international standard for neither digital ID checks, nor IDs in general, enough to make it anything less than the surveillance state nightmare that is holding a government ID with all your info, while you move your face around and give them a 3D face scan that the platform doesn’t keep, but the verification company does.
Hard disagree with your initial premise that seeing boobs in google images is somehow a bad thing. What is it supposed to achieve? Hide the existence of breasts from kids until they turn 18? Thats absurdly repressive.
SMH
Fine, changed the search term to “sex.” Fewer letters in fact. I was trying to just provide a subtle example, I didn’t expect people to need to be hit over the head with it.
So you love the idea of young children seeing porn? Because studies and surveys routinely find that kids as young as 7 are seeing porn online, and many under age 12. Really? You think that’s perfectly fine for a 12, 10, or 7 year old with granma’s iPad doing an image search and getting even accidental porn?
And hey, I spent my teen years scouring the earth for playboys and staying up until 3 am to catch boobs in R rated movies. I get it. I’m not saying that any system or method will prevent anyome from seeing all adult content their whole life short of being Amish. But as a tender 13 year old, did I need to see all the porn in the universe? Probably not. Adding friction (pun not intended) to general access, without violating privacy, is all I’m saying might be a good idea.
Nah 7 year olds should not be using any internet without parental controls either way so the protection is absolutely moot here. Also your “sex” example returns absolutely zero sexual content on google, Bing or duckduckgo images while boob does.
Also tbh I’m not particularly convinced that seeing porn is all that damaging. Doing quick research it seems that there are no proven damages or development impacts and real actual danger of porn is teaching teens and young adults distorted views of sex and gender roles. Seems like kids in your example aren’t even capable of such frameworks to begin with.
So despite how nasty it sounds there’s no convincing evidence that its even a real danger. In fact, it seems like exposure to violent images like gore and freak accidents thats having real damage.
If you have some oposing evidence I’d gladly take a look but I’m really unconvinced here that googling boob could be in any way detrimental.
OK… So, the initial question was “how could anyone support this?” right?
I’m simply explaining how some people see the argument. I never said I see it like this.
So I’m by no means defending any of this other than it being technically possible, and at that, this falls far short of anything resembling acceptable in my book.
Parents who vote and would support this would do so based on limited technical knowledge and a total ideological investment in “preventing” any exposure. Which, we agree, is idiotic.
Y’all really need to chill out with your pitchforks.
Realistically, no one should love how easy it is for anyone of any age to go to any search engine and search for “boobs” and just get a million images of boobs.
First. let’s not pretend the idea of a kid seeing “boobs” is in any way shape or form actually harmful. Pushing that taboo is why there is any issue in the first place.
Second: This is always a slippery slope. Even if we gave the benefit of the doubt that these things are done in with honest intentions, someone will abuse the system eventually. At least in the US the fascists have already laid out intention to classify LGBTQ people as “porn” in an effort to both silence us online and ban us in public. And what of the countless queer kids in an abusive home?
And even without someone explicitly exploiting it, there had already been instances where kids who were being actively sexually abused by the adults in their life were blocked from resources that could get them help because of content blocking like this.
Thirdly: People can take responsibility for their crotch spawn and be a fucking parent.
Saying “boobs” was trying to be subtle about it - any child of any age is at all times, unless their parents filter their device, 3 clicks and 3 letters (autocomplete could even oopsie that for them) away from seeing very explicit images. It’s absurd to think that it’s “puritanical” to have nothing in between 10 years olds (or younger) being able to so easily access pull on porn. This isn’t about what you personally want or care about, this is also about the fact that every country in the world has this same issue. Taboos are cultural, but you don’t set the culture of Honduras, or Gabon, or France, or India. So each cultural context needs to be respected, not only your personal cultural context.
It shouldn’t need to be a slippery slope is the thing. In technical terms, this isn’t even a heavy lift. To my original point, it’s the in theory part of this I support because, in a perfect world, giving everyone the tools to effectively accomplish this isn’t hard. But it’s a lot of work that is actually fairly technical or fairly terrible from a privacy standpoint to place adult content filters on a child’s devices. Not every parent has the skills to do this, and so when a blanket option is available that is sold as a solution like this, of course they’ll go for it. But, as I said before, in our current shitty reality, we only have the worst of all worlds - a system that exists to exploit trying to limit a system that exists to exploit, all baked into a system that exists to exploit, and kids still able to see porn online easily.
I’m very much a staunch privacy advocate, and I won’t fucking touch a digital ID system because it’s nothing but a surveillance state level at this point to persecute specifically trans people and brown people - for now. I see the writing on the wall with this, and it’s terrifying. And no one is going to force this into the working system category, so it’s just going to be the shitpile system designed to victimize added to the systems of exploitation.
It is not age verification.
It is privacy invading, morality policing, de-anonymizing, state surveillance.
Nothing less.
PS. If you want to download a video from a site that doesn’t have a download button, use the Inspect feature (right click on the page, not the video, and click inspect)
*On the Network tab - Sort by size. Reload page. Find the video. Open the video in new tab. It will be just the video. Right click and save as, or click the download button, or click the 3 dot menu button and select download.
On Firefox you can often bypass this entirely by shift + right click. And should see a save video as option. If not, the inspect feature works the same.
For hls/TS videos (m3u8 streams), if you reallllly want, you can copy the link for the stream and use VLC to convert the stream to a file.
This also often lets you download at higher resolution than they offer to download.
Yes, I porn.
*forgot Network tab
And thanks for all the suggestions. I’d rather not install browser plugins if I can do it without. CLI tools are cool though. The less I need to install the better.
to convert from hls (m3u8 streams) to mp4, you can also use ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i https://y.com/path/to/stream.m3u8 -c copy output.mp4-i <input>specifies the input file-c copyspecifies that the contents should not be re-encoded (which would take a lot of time and computing power)output.mp4is the output file
Now this I can use.
Vlc can be a bit… Tedious.
Thanks.
Shout out to yt-dlp, the absolute unit of software beneath lots of media scraping tools.
You can also use MPV Video player, should be able to play many URLs you throw at it.
yt-dlp is also insanely good for this - just install it, point it at the URL and it’ll usually figrue out how to grab the video without any fuss.
Its easier to just sail the torrential high seas and get that 4k h265 quality shit that sites keep for paying members only. Once you know the models name its easy to get their entire collection.
I professionally pron too.
ARRRR!
Nowadays I’m also worried about acquiring a stealerlog collection as well.
A what?
Or just Video Downloadhelper.
I really wish I could upvote this more than once. This is awesome.
How would one do this on a mobile browser?
If you’re on Android you can use yt-dlp in Termux. A little inconvenient but it works.
Chromium based browsers have an option that lets you view the source code by putting “view-source:” before the URL to see embedded videos
So
becomes
view-source:https://www.website.com/pagewithvideo
I never knew this. Thank you!
No worries! In a lot of sites you’ll find the embeded video or picture in a link in the source code. However, I haven’t figured tried to get this to work on YouTube in mobile browsers so that might not work
I’d imagine you’d need a browser that has developer tools, which is far less common on mobile. A simpler solution would be to use a separate app that just takes the page URL and downloads the video for you, such as this one: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.junkfood.seal/
Kiwi Browser has developer tools
Note: this isn’t free but I use 1DM+. It has it’s own browser that filters out the videos for download. It won’t work with YouTube and a bunch of other websites because Google acts like a little bitch to the developer.
That is fucking amazing. Thank you!
All the big adult sites will probably just die or at least shrivel in popularity. Most Europeans simply will not use whatever “tell Brussels or London where or what what you are watching” option is. In the place of the big sites there will be a billion shady and likely virus-lottery proxy sites whose only selling point is that they do not do age checking or require registration. Those then get occasionally smacked down by Brussels, just to be replaced with 10 more clones the by the next week. On the side piracy and vpns will thrive. Kids will not be protected nor will people’s privacy, quality will be worse.
I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix that will get through through the cracks since massive established sites had to actually fear shutdown and losing all revenue unless they had robust gatekeeping mechanisms. If Brussels wants your 2 month life-expectancy site dead anyway, because of it’s only selling point of having to show id, then why really bother with the quality control of the material. Especially if site holder has no personal qualms about that stuff.
I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix
Oh, count on it. I remember the early days of the internet and file sharing. There was no validation or accountability and you really could stumble on some of the most terrible stuff without meaning to.
Yeah, even though I hate the whole thing, I can’t deny it brings me joy to hear about “VPN use surge”, centralized sites dying in favor of shady clones, etc. I’d take total wild west any day over somewhat-free-but-very-polite-mild-and-centralized status quo of yesterday’s internet. The only problem is that there’s no guarantee people actually go that wild. They already did with VPNs, but regarding big site alternatives - I’m not so sure.
I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix that will get through through the cracks since massive established sites had to actually fear shutdown and losing all revenue unless they had robust gatekeeping mechanisms.
There are technical solutions for p2p sharing with moderation. Not to prevent bad people from sharing their stuff, but to keep spaces clean for those who don’t want to see it.
This is also true for communication, which is why Fediverse is not good enough. Hosted servers should be an optional part of the infrastructure, and the data (users, communities, posts …) shouldn’t be connected to them. Like with torrents you can host a torrent tracker, and you can host a BTDHT node, and you can automatically download and seed rare torrents, and none of this is connected to whatever people hosting major trackers decide.
NOSTR gets that part right, but the user experience its authors imagine is not for me.
EDIT: Forgot my main point - my main point is that you might find yourself in a whitelisted Internet where such decentralized solutions won’t be available. They’ll be detected, they’ll be illegal and punishable by fines.
