and fuck the UK goverment
That is, I believe, a British law that they’re following for users that appear to be in the UK. Not like they’re going to just disregard the law.
kagis
Yeah, the Online Safety Act 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
The Online Safety Act 2023[1][2][3] (c. 50) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate online content. Designed to protect children and adults online, it passed on 26 October 2023 and gives the relevant Secretary of State the power, subject to parliamentary approval, to designate and suppress or record a wide range of online content that is illegal or deemed “harmful” to children.[4][5]
The act creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be “harmful” to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher. It also empowers Ofcom to block access to particular websites.
So that’s what they’ll be aiming to do.
Some websites and apps stated they would introduce age verification for users in response to a 25 July 2025 deadline set by Ofcom.[47] These include pornographic websites,[48] but also the social networks Bluesky and Reddit.[49][50]
Probably should be mostly irritated with Parliament.
I expect that using a VPN that terminates in another country will avoid it, though I bet that then you can’t do things like buy Reddit Gold, if that’s still a thing.
I’d add that if you pick Ireland as the VPN exit country, it will have notable benefits:
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Sites that pick language based on IP will probably do English.
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It probably won’t add much latency.
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Ireland isn’t too bonkers and hopefully won’t have any large collection of online laws of their own that become an irritant.
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Because Ireland has a considerably smaller population than the UK, if people in the UK do this at scale for pornography, it will make the Irish statistically look like absolutely indefatigable horndogs, which I think will be pretty funny on visualizations.
Indefatigable horndogs best band name calling dibs now
Please make the music ska. A band with that name, playing literal horns, creating a fast, upbeat tempo? It would be beautiful.
the Irish statistically look like absolutely indefatigable horndogs
What did you think that “wild rover” they keep singing about was? 😉
Pornhub stats: Irish +28572%
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If you don’t mind my hijacking, I’ve seen the term “kagis” used a number of times on Lemmy, possibly only by you but I think also others. Based on the usage, I assumed it was a Latin word to indicate some sort of transition or side-bar, but it seems to just translate to “you are”, which doesn’t make sense in context. Can I ask what it means?
Kagi is a new-ish search engine that is popular among Lemmy users. Those users are trying to get it to catch on, and have started using kagi as a verb, the same way people say “let me google that really quick.”
It honestly feels a lot like when Microsoft was trying to get Bing and their phone OS to take off, and started slipping product placement into popular TV shows. There was a brief time period in American TV, where characters had the disgusting line of “Bing it!” Usually while showing the Bing home page on a Microsoft Phone. It was just blatant ham-fisted cringey product placement.
Yeah I’ve noticed this user basically inserts a “kagis” into like 2/3 of their comments, it always slightly irks me because it makes me feel like I’m getting advertised at. I’ve never felt the need to proclaim which search engine(s) I’ve used to research any particular comment on Lemmy, and I find it odd that the one person who does so regularly is doing it for a paid service.
Apart from that, their comments are usually pretty good, so I’m not accusing them of shilling or anything, but I find it super peculiar.
It makes me sad when I see the name because Kagi used to be a payments processor for shareware and essentially a predecessor to modern app stores…but before enshittification.
Does “googled” make you feel advertised at?
Not particularly, and while I admit this can seem hypocritical, the verb “to google” has just become a generic trademark.
When someone says band-aid, or kleenex, or jello, I think of bandages, tissues, or gelatin desserts, not of a specific brand of these products. Same goes with “googled”, it just means “searched the web” now rather than specifically using Google.
What about ye olde “googles on ddg”?
There’s a search engine named Kagi. It’s basically the equivalent of “googles” but for a different search engine.
Thanks. The usage now makes sense, albeit superfluous.
Upvote for the verbification of Kagi :)
In this one instance I’ll give Reddit a pass. This is 100% a fuck the UK government moment
Lol yeah I’m not doing that. VPN all the way.
Today I’m french.
Tomorrow, who knows?
The possibilities are endless.
Too bad VPN server addresses are on-sight to reddit’s IP blocking strategy for years now. For whatever good internet choice you make, reddit reciprocates with an equally bad one
What’s funny about that is the VPN I use I saw advertised on Reddit. I wonder if these companies know that they ban users for using their products? Well I guess they don’t really don’t care.
Other companies: Thank you for buying from our sponsors! Here’s a code for 15% off!
Reddit: You bought from our sponsors? Lol, you’re banned.
Remember when you didn’t even need an email address to sign up for reddit?
If I need to look at that site, my LibRedirect extension sends me to a privacy focused mirror
Mullvad has couple of USA exits that don’t get blocked by Reddit. Texas and D.C., I think.
so does nord but to me the point of using a VPN is to get my traffic exit point out of the US and the other eyes countries
I usually use US because I like the localization of websites more that way.
can’t argue with that. setting my server to other places makes Google completely unusable because it will localize to whatever your ip address is no matter what you specify it to do in your settings. it’s annoying enough that it got me to stop using Google so I don’t blame anyone for just opting to let the NSA do their thing.
Blocking VPNs from posting or vviewing content too?
if you’re not logged in and using a VPN server that’s not in the US. If you want to post, it’s not an issue but if you want to browse logged out they block you.
I wonder if they pay per verification. If so, I wonder how hard it would be to set up a script to just keep submitting new requests a few hundred or thousands of times a day with random photos…
Random AI photos. That would be funny in theory, but they’re just using AI to check the ages anyway.
Sure, it’s not about wasting their time; this says they’re using a 3rd party service to verify, so theoretically they’re paying for that service. It’s about wasting their money.
Good point. I just think that if reddit would see an uptick in POC and old people with these random AI photos, it would be a weird and hilarious thing to happen to them. Spez is in awe of a nazi (musk) and old people would send their advertising into a tailspin.
Was using a VPN to watch iPlayer last night and then hopped on reddit and was like “whereintheactualfuck is all the porn‽” Before realizing I had it set to the UK. Blew my mind for a minute
I went “whereisallmyporn?” When reddit banned it from r/all. I think that was the start of its downfall for me.
I deleted my Reddit account but still follow some writers on it and had the same issue. The worst part is it’s anything marked as NSFW – even posts that were tagged as a joke weren’t accessible.
I changed my VPN to another country and Reddit was still asking me to log in and show ID until I cleared my cookies and cache.
Anyone try a McLovin ID?
Fuck most governments
genuinely cannot think of a government that doesn’t suck ass
It’s not all around great but I think New Zealand has a pretty decent government
The alternative is primitive tribal life, I think we can make government work, it’s improved a fuckton in the last several centuries, but it takes a lot more involvement and a lot less apathy than people have been showing about the whole thing lately.
“the alternative is primitive tribal life” is classic Capitalist propaganda.
You’re absolutely right though, we have progressed incredibly far. It’s almost as if we have all the knowledge and tools to build a truly inclusive society that provides a dignified standard of living for all people, yet there are stubborn and powerful groups interested in maintaining economic heirarchies and exploiting biases for political gain…
“the alternative is primitive tribal life” is classic Capitalist propaganda.
We can have a functional society without rampant capitalism controlling everything if we all really wanted it enough. The idea that it’s “capitalism or stone-age tribalism” is a false dichotomy that reactionaries who hate authority push. Mommy can’t hurt you anymore. It will be okay.
I don’t think you realize that I am agreeing with you.
I don’t think you know how to make the twisted voices in your head form a coherent statement on the internet and you’re just using this platform to scream into the void. Go get ChatGTP or something, it makes a much better interactive diary.
But to speak to the condescension: only a lazy, entitled, pathetically obtuse Westerner would have the gall to say everything is okay while your people’s institutions kill the Earth. Hopefully enough of you will die without children and we can rebuild the world without the toxicity of Western Christians.
You sound legitimately insane and dangerous and weird, I hope you have a healthy, rewarding life because I’m not psychotic, I don’t wish death on anyone, and I’m not insane, I just don’t want you as a neighbor. I won’t see your unhinged reply.
i don’t think we can make a government that works, what we can do is create a broader system of governance that functions.
it’s pretty fucking wild that we just let a tiny fraction of the population decide things on a national scale for years at a time, with little way of interacting with these people and with it just being accepted that most people don’t know what they’re voting for, if they vote at all…
From what i’ve learnt over the years the system that seems most likely to work well is something much much much much more based around local communities and constant actual human interaction, like instead of the most important elections being the national ones they should be the quarterly local elections where you decide who from you actual community represents you, based primarily on actually trusting them as a person you personally know.
You are absolutely right that we are ignoring community to a disastrous degree, our lack of communal spirit is allowing the worst people to gain the most power because we don’t care about who supports those worst people and only focus on spectacle.
But we still need broader systems, if we just have small communities, we end up with medieval feudalism the moment one community needs something their neighbor has.
We can’t get rid of the human need to “get ahead” it’s hardwired in, even in the most equitable system, there will always be someone who says “I want more.” And they will exploit and game the system until they get it. If there aren’t guardrails and laws and systems to enforce those laws, those kinds of people will immediately resort to force and we have, yet again, armed raiders who then become powerful enough after killing and raping enough of their neighboring communities that suddenly everyone sees them as the central power.
Our problem isn’t that we don’t know how to government, our problem is we’re broadly still too dumb to handle the abstraction required to manage such large systems. We haven’t had that “reckoning” yet that will slap our whole species down a peg and say “You need to value intelligence” and I genuinely don’t know what will do it at this point. We had plagues and wars and genocides and it made people cling to ignorance harder.
I might be peaking on my cynicism here but I am not sure we can rise above our limitations as a species. It might take several thousand more years of people building civilizations and having them reduced to ashes again and again before natural selection creates a species that can work together for a common good. But I kind of don’t think we’ll even be humans anymore at that point.
Rising above our limitations as a species is the field of religion. The current mainstream western religious meta is super toxic, but the entire point of dedicating ones life to meta-narratives is to transcend the limitations of our human instincts.
Just like, treat your meta-narrative with a healthy dose of skepticism or you fall right back into human nature. From my experience i feel confident in saying all meta narratives are fictions
Community. This is the overpowered meta that makes our species work and why we have highways and sewage systems and AI and MRI machines and a global logistics network… we did things as a community and it made the impossible happen, far more magic and use than any kind of faith or belief system, but we have a toxic relationship broadly with community. It conflicts with our individuality and we get stuck in emotional states that prioritize the self.
It isn’t wrong, it’s just an obstacle we need to be as aware of same as we’re aware that we crave calories but we need to limit our intake. We need carbohydrates to survive but we also need to balance it.
we gotta take back our parks from the night y’all
In this case I blame the UK government
I’m not sure what you all are doing
I blame all the people with “purity” kinks who took it so far they actually created movements and entire societies based around denying the most natural and harmless feelings we have as a species.
Lol what is this from
Team four stars’ Hellsing abridged. I highly recommend.
Hellsing Abridged from TFS, classic. If you’re gonna watch it you should do it on twitch since they used a copyrighted song for an epic sync that happens in one of the later episodes that got muted on youtube. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/294882536?collection=Y4Lf2g4TSRXQGQ
Oh man I love TFS, I didn’t know they had done anything since DBZ abridged.
They haven’t really unless you count the post-dbza content with the shorts and the streaming. Hellsing ultimate abridged was made along side DBZA timeline wise about the time Twilight was still popular.
If any service requires me to send a photo of myself to use it, I ain’t using it.
EDIT: lol wut, Facebook and YouTube want photo ID now?? I must be old enough to have missed out. My comment stands though, if I wasn’t already a member on either of those I guess I wouldn’t become one!
It’s a UK law, you either comply or get banned. Obviously everybody now has a VPN subscription.
Italy made VPNs practically illegal. The UK might soon follow. And surfing the web with a VPN is a painful torrent of capchas. And email addresses you can get without revealing your phone number to identify yourself are becoming sparse too.
If you’d want to actually address the issue (insofar unsupervised teenagers watching porn is an issue) you’d need something like a U2F security key that can be used as anonymous age verification and be bought anonymously in a physical shop for cash, just by showing your ID to a clerk (without your details being stored). Keys being stolen or misused could then also be flagged in a public database.
I think it’s better to reject these sites rather than work around it. Especially for major platforms. Make it hurt financially.
Many have done that for decades, but the tend remains that the internet is getting less and less free.
My VPN for about 7-8 years is run by Italian hacktivists (airvpn, it’s a nonprofit, they’re good people), I haven’t heard about this ban. Perhaps it only applies to Italian citizens using VPNs, not to Italians running VPNs. Wait, that doesn’t make sense… I’ll check out their newsfeed.
Yeah, afaik airvpn basically can’t offer VPN to Italian citizens any more because they’d be forced to keep logs. But they can still get customers from outside Italy. And presumably Italians can still use VPN outside Italy. I think, let me know if I’m wrong.
That’s terribly disheartening. I’m sorry, Italy.
Facebook does that,
Youtube does that
Does a vpn bypass it?
Edit: btw yes I totally agree with you, I’m just wondering if that would be a workaround
You can use a VPN to negate this check. For now…
But Spez will still edit your comments. I don’t know how reddit has still some users left after that and the API train wreck.
Exactly. I get that there are still niches there that haven’t found their place here yet (be the change you want to see), but the only way I use Reddit now is through a search for things that find old information, since it is still a huge database of data (admittedly both good and bad).
Reddit blocks VPN users. I’m unable to access it on my home network because of it.
Which is great! They trained me not to bother going to their site by blocking my attempts. Though I kind of want to punch Snoo now, from having to see his smug face winking at me on the block page every time. Little fucker, you used to be cool. Enjoy the inevitable bot-pocalypse nazi farm you’re building.
At one point Reddit had an Onion site
I heard about this but I didn’t really believe it, until now.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
They have to comply with local laws. (Fuck them anyway but for entirely different reasons, at least in this case they’re following the law.)
Who do we throw stones at boo mercilessly? Conservatism broadly, the kink-cult that makes everything about sex and denying sex while having the weirdest, worst sex behind the scenes. Making people scared of anything remotely sexual while also championing violence and hate.
In the US, our pedo-in-chief started doing this too and you need to register your ID with the state to get into pornhub and other adult sites in some states. This is a spreading problem that people are too ashamed to push back on.
Dude I was recently visiting Florida. I totally forgot the fascist bullshit laws about porn there, was gobsmacked I couldn’t view pornhub. 5 minutes and a free vpn on my phone and I was happily watching my preferred smut.
It’s so stupid how pointless the laws are, like it’s dumb easy to circumvent them.
Just some real bullshit waste of time. Plus a waste of money for companies that try to comply with the Florida law. Pornhub just decided if you’re in Florida you can’t even use pornhub because they didn’t want to spend the money and time to comply with the stupid ass backwards law.
they didn’t want to spend the money and time to comply with the stupid ass backwards law.
They didn’t want the liability and connection to a government database that will probably start looking for people who are into like, cuckolding or something, since that seems to be what the right is absolutely obsessed with.
Its funny and pointless until they pressure Visa and the site you are using dies.
Sometimes my VPN kicks me to one of those backwards ass states and I also get surprised by them. Swap states and I’m in.
“Estimate age from selfie”
fake beard sales dramatically increase
Works in real life too. Grew a beard when i was 17, and never got carded for booze again after that.
As someone with long hair and a long beard I haven’t been carded in basically 10+ years.
Last weekend I got carded buying a beer with my parents-in-laws. Of course one of the very few times I didn’t have my ID.
Two 65+ people order a beer and then like, oh we’ll get your beer on our tab to make things easier. Bartender “I’ll need to see his ID”
We all couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t upset or anything, it was just kind of absurd feeling. I’ve been drinking for almost 20 years.
It’s one of those situations where common sense should be allowed to be used.
Yeah how tf is that supposed work??
Are there any women here today?
The stuffed bra has deferred many an ID check.
Don’t be sexist. Gray is gray.
It was a Life of Brian reference.
Are there any women here today?
My deepest apologies sire, I know I lack familiarity with the greatest comedies. I know it is my duty to know them, especially when I listen to them out of my mind on laughing gas.
When you’re chewing on life’s gristle don’t grumble, give a whistle. And this’ll help things turn out for the best.
Oh shit, hopefully god can’t see through my tin roof.
Damn, the website seems to be “with persona dot com” and holy fucking corpo.
I say we all stay off the corporate internet and just come to places like this. Usenet is still a thing, but it’s all us binary kids now. Maybe we could go back to how it was in the '90s and actually chat on the platform. There’s IRC instead of Discord, message boards instead of Facebook.
Usenet is still a thing, but it’s all us binary kids now. Maybe we could go back to how it was in the '90s and actually chat on the platform.
People stopped using Usenet for discussion in large part because of overwhelming spam problems and a lack of infrastructure to mitigate it.
You could maybe build some sort of system to mitigate that.
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Maybe automated text classification is good enough to do on a distributed level, on client machines, now. Problem is that automated text generation to try to defeat it has also probably improved, and I’d tend to bet on the spammers having the advantage.
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Maybe an out-of-band mechanism to generate information about posts would work. Have Usenet clients support pulling a database of scores for current posts in a group. Like, have some server(s) that generates various types of scores (advertising, flameware, etc) text scores for posts. Can incorporate various human moderation in that scoring, maybe let an end user subscribe to one or more “moderators”, which I understand BlueSky does something like.
Honestly, though, the Threadiverse mostly does what I want as a distributed discussion forum. I’m not sure what large benefits Usenet brings to the table relative to it.
There’s infrastructure for posting large binaries, which the Threadiverse doesn’t really have short of (relatively small) image posting, but servers propagating the (large)
alt.binarieshierarchy plus Usenet’s bandwidth-heavy “broadcast” style of post propagation is also what drove up the cost of running Usenet servers and forced them to generally go commercial. Eternal-september.org is one of the very few remaining free-as-in-gratis Usenet servers, and they don’t propagatealt.binaries. And I’d expect that Parliament would crack down on commercial Usenet operators if the Act doesn’t already do so and Usenet sees a major surge in popularity in the UK for the pornography that this is trying to block; payment processors are necessary for commercial service, and easy for countries to lean on as leverage. If you want the ability to post large binaries in a state-censorship-resistant way, I’d probably…hmm. If a state wants to leverage its control of the network infrastructure to block access, it can make access pretty difficult. Maybe use Hyphanet (previously known as Freenet) for the files, then use magnet-style links on a more latency-friendly forum for discussion.-
but it’s all us binary kids now.
It took me a second to realize what you meant. My first thought was, “Wait, like, binary genders? Cis-gendered people?” Then I remembered binary code exists and I laughed at myself.
haha, yeah. Like that other poster said spam was running wild but all the old heads were blaming us “binary kids” for “killing usenet” with our large files.
I’m pretty sure Gen Z and Gen Alpha are not going to be using Facebook, Message boards or anything else from a previous era.
Chances are they will find simple and effective ways to bypass censorship.
Message boards are closing or blocking the UK because of this. We even lost lemmy.zip in the UK. But the way lemmy works means you could access it from other instances. Probably illegal in the UK but as long as people are ok with spinning up instances and telling the UK to get fucked it will probably be fine.
Age verification is insane in it’s entirety and no payment processor, corpo, government, or think-tank has any right to enforce their puritanical views on sex and Orwellian techno-fascist policies on everyone.
