Stop ministers from using children.
I know that this is all just theater to just destroy any semblance of free speech and privacy on the internet but if I’m completely honest I also don’t even understand people who freak out about kids looking at porn. Like, I get protecting children obviously from predators (fucking Roblox), but also I saw hardcore porn on the internet super early when I was like 8 and the only trauma I ever felt was the fear of being caught looking at it by my parents, who were otherwise pretty chill about me seeing really violent media.
And before me and the internet, kids were looking at their grampa’s/dad’s porn magazines or finding it in the woods or getting some 18 year old to buy it for them. It was harder but I’m telling you they found it.
I feel like a bigger concern for kids right now is microplastics, lead poisoning, and climate change and you don’t see nearly the same hysteria about that shit in mainstream politics.
Stop ministers using VPNs to watch child porn.
Told!
Yeah, never forget how the people in power routinely gave Epstein a pass because they were participating in raping kids.
All this “for the children” is performative bullshit to take more power away from the average person.
Pidof files aside, them implying they need to watch children watching porn is not much better.
Stop ministers making laws to… why the fuck they even do this bullshit? They are a government, they know everything about everyone even without such primitive control methods.
The people pulling the strings have obviously decided that internet freedom is a threat to them and they’re taking (global) action to ensure their supremacy.
We didn’t see this one coming a mile away.
Palantir execs and shareholders are buzzing with anticipation.
Dame Rachel de Souza told BBC Newsnight it was “absolutely a loophole that needs closing” and called for age verification on VPNs.
Saw that coming. Can’t have the populace living their lives without constant, repressive government scrutiny.
But it’s for the kids what kind of psychopath could be against that???
You ban something, and people will always find a way around it. Always.
Yup, and that’s how the US got the Mafia. We banned alcohol, but people wanted to drink, so the Mafia made that happen.
All a ban does is hurt law abiding citizens and businesses.
This is a fairly revisionist history version of the mafia, they were here for decades before prohibition. One might say that they profited greatly from prohibition, but to suggest they began with it is incredibly incorrect. I hate to be the actually guy but I find organized crime fascinating and I can’t let this one go
Eh, not revisionist, just overly simplified. Prohibition massively increased their power and relevance.
Not all bans are bad or hurt law abiding citizens. Slavery and gambling come to mind, both still exist illegally (or, in the case of gambling, semi-legally, what with the deluge of sports betting and online casinos HQd in shitty countries), but I would say them being illegal is a net positive for society.
Eh, I disagree. Slavery being banned is obviously a good thing, but that’s because it’s immoral to own someone else, so it’s essentially just kidnapping. Gambling, on the other hand, shouldn’t be banned for the simple reason that consenting adults should be able to do it if they choose.
Basically, I believe there are two types of rights:
- negative rights - restricts others from preventing individuals from doing things to you (e.g. freedom from slavery, freedom to gamble, etc)
- positive rights - forces others to provide goods or services to you (e.g. free healthcare, right to counsel, etc)
I believe nobody should gamble because it’s a poor financial decision and very addictive (and I choose to avoid gambling), but I also believe you should be allowed to gamble, and the government should ensure that companies that provide gambling services do so fairly (i.e. advertisements about win-rates and whatnot are accurate).
So yes, if gambling wasn’t allowed, people w/ addictions would be better off, but those who aren’t at risk of gambling addiction would be harmed due to restrictions on their freedom. So the question is, do we want government to protect us from ourselves, or merely provide a safety net for when we screw up? I’m absolutely in the latter camp, and I think we should use taxes to fund recovery programs for addictive behaviors in lieu of banning them. In general, I think a tax is way more rights-respecting than a ban.
Gambling between two people or very small groups is mostly ok and something humans have done since cave times.
Now, because real life has profit seeking corporations in control of gambling that know and abuse all psychological tricks available to maximize profits, I don’t think allowing them to exist is good for anyone except the owners. Casinos are also perfect for money laundering, so that’s another reason to not allow them to function, although with the internet they can just pick and choose a country to exist in.
I agree that gambling is bad and nobody should do it, but that’s different from the government preventing you from doing it.
Something being “bad” doesn’t mean it should be banned, it means it needs closer scrutiny to make sure both sides of the transaction are fully informed of the risks and can meaningfully consent.
money laundering
I don’t like this reasoning because the underlying assumption is that violating people’s privacy is okay if it helps catch criminals.
That said, there are typically rules that limit this. In most areas, casinos have to ID you and report any transaction over a certain amount (usually $10k or so per day, many casinos have a lower threshold) to tax authorities specifically to combat money laundering, just like banks do. That seems to limit money laundering for larger players, but obviously doesn’t do much for smaller players. To do better, we either need much lower limits, or much higher surveillance, and both would violate innocent people’s privacy.
Instead of that, we should take a hard look at policy and policing. For example, a lot of money laundering is by drug dealers, and they exist due to drug bans. Maybe we should consider legalizing and regulating more drugs, which would give people safer options, reduce incarceration rates, and reduce laundering from illegal drugs since more people would go for the safer options. On the policing side, we can improve training, reallocate people from ticketing to investigative work, and build community trust to improve quality of reports.
At the end of the day, I think personal liberty and privacy is more important than preventing harm or catching criminals. I also think we can do both, but we need to start from the perspective of maximising liberty and privacy.
When you think about it, most of the work of catching criminals (or gathering evidence) involves invasion of privacy, I guess it becomes a question of how much we’re willing to part with
I disagree. The only time the police should invade your privacy is with a valid warrant, and only to the extent of the warrant.
The police shouldn’t be able to monitor transactions at large for illegal activity, nor should they be to attain a broad warrant to check for illegal transactions if you’re merely suspected of an unrelated crime.
If that means more criminals go free, I’m okay with that. But it should also mean we train our police better to account for the higher difficulty of police work given the protection of our rights.
Dead drop USBs for file sharing?
It’s a bit like “my kids will only eat chocolate” and the therapist’s response “where are they getting the chocolate from?”. If the kids are using VPNs then where are they getting the money for the VPN from? Is this parental consent?
Most likely they’re using “free” VPNs.
Which is an anticipated problem too. Because those free VPNs are harvesting all of your traffic to sell; If you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold. Almost as if opponents of the ban said this would happen, and would only work to push kids towards sketchy sites…
Removed by mod
This shouldn’t have been censored.
a rare exception. but most have a different business model
Crazy how I got censored for posting that. Looks like there’s some kind of concerted effort to suppress information of reliable free VPNs.
Everyone check the modlogs to see what these people are trying to keep from you.
well that was interesting. what is your justification @technopagan@lemmy.world because that is obviously not “spam”. I’m almost sure you’ll just delete my comment too instead of an explanation.
https://photon.lemmy.world/modlog?user=17022223
It’s also interesting you got 3 downvotes. too bad we can’t check their owners anymore.
Mods are humans and make errors. No reason to suspect a conspiracy or be a dick about it
Dame Rachel told BBC Newsnight: “Of course, we need age verification on VPNs - it’s absolutely a loophole that needs closing and that’s one of my major recommendations.”
If this fucker had any idea what VPN even stood for they’d realize how fuckin stupid this statement is…
Ya! Let them watch all that violence on Netflix instead!
I’ve always been fascinated by the lengths puritans will go to prevent kids from seeing mammary glands, while simultaneously being ok with them watching blood and violence.
I’ve thought about this at length, and the conclusion I came to is that violence about self-sufficiency, while sex is about cooperation. With violence, you take matters into your own hands and you’re in control regardless of what others feel. With sex, it’s the exact opposite. You’re at their mercy and they have power over you.
It makes sense in our hostile culture to teach kids about self-sufficiency and taking power for themselves. If they give that power up to others, then it opens them up to manipulation and exploitation.
I’m not making a judgement call on what’s right or wrong, only what is.
Seriously though. We’ll legislate anything to keep them from seeing stuff they might reasonably expect to see and do one day and glorify things nobody should ever see or experience in person.
Yeah, is the next step to ban games like Free Fire, Counter Strike etc.?
Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.
Hire a droplet VM, pre-installed with a server OS. Log in with provided credentials. sudo apt install docker Copy/paste a docker compose file that sets up a wg-easy container. Create a peer. Take a picture of the provided QR code. Connect to the server via a wireguard app. Done.
Are they going to ban VMs?
What a VM? What’s a server OS? How do I log in? What the fuck does sudo apt mean? What is docker? Now I’m editing files? A peer? What’s wireguard?
So many of you are disconnected from regular people because you’re chronically online.
If kids have learned to run their own Minecraft private servers, hosting a VPN should be child’s play… Pun maybe intended.
what’s a VPN? what’s a VPN app? how do I log in? what the fuck does a tunnel mean?
kids somehow figured these out. they’ll be able to figure out their selfhosted VPN too. at least more of them might find an interest in tech instead of consuming on brainrot platforms.
sunbeam didn’t describe it very clearly but it can be described in a way that its just following instructions without even having to understand it. like something like this: “register here. click this to get a free cloud server. log in to the server like this. paste this command and hit enter. install this app on your phone. tap import and scan. point your phone to the qr code on the screen.”
It’s a lot easier to get a VPN working than doing it yourself on a VPS.
the instructions can cover the server setup too. the instructions can also be to just download and run a script with double click, because it’s really just following simple instructions that can be codified
Yes plan law makers needs to have a clue on what they are making laws about. Teenagers looking for porn are going to learn.
The same teenagers that don’t even use computers with physical keyboards?
I’d wager less than 1% of the minors affected by this will learn how to proxy through a VPS.
So all this does is create a black market for tech. People with the knowledge of how to set up this technology will provide it as a service for those who don’t.
It’s the same as trying to outright ban drugs. Those who can provide for those who cannot (for a fee).
It makes these kids easy marks for malware.
They just got a motivation.
I just deployed a few VM on my phone, not even a tablet. It’s not that hard nowadays with websites being designed primarily for smartphone users
You say this as if people are utterly incapable of learning.
Anyone can learn anything of they’re given a good enough reason to want to learn.
Sure, but if they need to learn, it isn’t a 5 minute operation.
I too can go to space in 10 minutes, if I already did all the training and get a space shuttle from NASA.
It is a 5 minute operation to learn how to use a VPN.
Many are, quite literally, just install and hit connect. Something an online tutorial can teach you in about a minute or two.
Maybe a bit longer to learn the other things. But I can assure you from experience that this is something that anyone can learn about in a short amount of time.
Bit of a far cry from the years of education and training needed to enter space.
There are instructions that are completely “type this” monkey see, monkey do. The majority of people who cannot follow such instructions should be wards of the state.
Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.
Of course they don’t. Most of them type with their index fingers and don’t even understand what a VPN is.
Exactly this. There’s maybe 8 politicians in the whole world that understand what a VPN is. They’re told by a lobbyist and donor that it’s a thing that is bad, now they’re out to figure out how to make it go away.
I’m sure the VPN industry will bring a lot of money to bear to ensure this doesn’t happen. They like the online safety act itself, because it brings them customers, but if it also causes them to face issues they’re going to be less keen on it.
Are they going to ban VMs?
They will keep banning things until they feel they have absolute control over the internet.
If someone tells them to, they might try until a few business interests remind them that these are also fundamental components of business networks. Once money tells them to stop it, they will.
VPN companies should just hire a lobbyist for a week and this will all go away.
Don’t give them ideas!
The VM is associated with your name and payment method. It is about removing privacy so they can remove free speech and other rights. Not about porn. You don’t need a VPN to access porn in the UK. Half the porn sites don’t verify age anyway.
They’ll ban encrypted Internet traffic that they don’t have a backdoor to
stealinspect the contents.Docker’s an unnecessary extra step. Just install wireguard server on the VM.
Myeah sort of agree if you compare wireguard vs wireguard docker.
But wg-easy has a management interface for creating peers and seeing who’s active so it’s somewhat easier to get set up.
setting up vps requires money which ideally children do not have access to (not even crypto)
They could require age verification or even special licensing to use any sort of internet server infrastructure. That’s what I would do if that was my goal.
If they were really after kids watching porn (or even porn in general) it would be technically somewhat simple to force ISPs to provide filters on their end as a subscription service. I’m pretty sure I’ve even heard that kind of services in the past. Make it even opt-out if you really want to.
That way ISPs would just ban everything from pornhub and others unless you spesifically want it allowed or even provide a portal where you could block reddit, twitter, tumblr or whatever you wish on your account. That kind of technology already exists and it’s used on many corporate setups.
There’s obviously ways around that, but there’s no technical way to block every possible way to move bits between computers. Even if they would shut down the whole internet there’s still ways to build mesh-networks or even buy USB-drives from a shady alley.
But as we all know, it’s not about porn and not about children.
You can’t block porn completely without blocking VPNs. If you connect to a VPN that’s all they can see. They can not see what you use the VPN for.
VPN, Tor (and similar, like I2P), every imaginable P2P network, proxies, all non-http protocols (smtp, ftp, nntp, xmpp and other instant messengers and so on) can all transfer any kind of data, porn included. And a ton of other things. Heck, I’m quite sure there’s a minecraft mod where you can assemble JPG-images out of the blocks and view them that way. And then you can use stuff like uuencode where you can use anything that can move plain text to transfer binary data.
There’s no way to block all of that unless you shut the whole internet down. And even then you can still trade good old playboy-magazines with your friends. VPN in itself has very little to do with the actual problem, beyond that someone apparently noticed that their current “save-the-children” iteration had pretty large holes in it.
Ban paper.
Kids could draw boobies on it.
You can’t block VPNs without blocking the entire internet. You can block known VPN services, but you can’t prevent people from hosting their own.
Some known VPN protocols could be blocked, using introspection tools. However, this would just render corporate VPNs useless. VPN traffic is just bytes, and so is WebSockets. Good luck figuring out whether my HTTPS traffic is legitimate internet traffic, or masked VPN traffic.
Good news, we closed that pesky loophole by banning encryption without backdoors.
If they can’t decode it, you better be ready to explain exactly what those bytes were!
Check out my cool new protocol that looks just like I am loading a webpage about cat facts, which is actually a hidden VPN that I use to secretly look at webpages about cat facts.
You get me. You’re my kind of person! ᓚᘏᗢ
There is actually a technique called steganography, that does exactly that. It is used to hide arbitrary binary info inside images, while still fooling your eyes into thinking there is nothing sketchy there.
I know! Nothing about all this is new.
The only new thing is that the UK government is about to learn about those things.
Can’t it be detected? I imagine ML could be used to automate to some extent.
I didn’t say that it can’t be detected. I said it fools your eyes.
Besides that, stop using ML for everything. My guess is that you need insane amounts of processing power for ML to detect hidden messages inside terabytes of live internet traffic.
In fact, the algorithm for steganography is standard. It’s probably trivial to detect it, unless you add encryption and padding to the mix.
Even if they go that route, and frankly I think they would get lynched before we got to that point, they can’t monitor every single connection. That just way too much traffic.
That’s why China has a firewall, because that’s the best option they can come up with because monitoring every Chinese persons data is an impossible task. Their only option would be to go North Korea route, and just close the internet but that would basically end their economy.
Why do you think the telecoms got away with stalling upgrades and fiber roll outs for so long?
In China? I’ve read that sentence like six times I’m not quite sure what you’re alluding to, but China’s had fiber for about 10 years now. The reason they allowed it is because increasing everyone’s bandwidth doesn’t really make the job of monitoring them any harder. It’s still the same number of connections. Plus it allows businesses to be competitive on the global market.
Also they kind of assume their firewall would work. Initially it did work, at least for the majority of people, but over time that more and more have learnt to use a VPN and now the whole thing’s a bit of a pointless exercise. There is a massive disconnect in China between the younger generation who use VPNs and the older generation who just consume state media.
You can’t block porn completely without blocking VPNs. If you connect to a VPN that’s all they can see.
This makes it sound like VPNs can ONLY access porn. lol
he he he
They can also access Excel spreadsheets from what I’ve heard. Hopefully the children aren’t aware of the fact.
Depends on the VPN
Before the Online Saftey Act I believe ISP routers default behaviour was to block adult sites (maybe depending on time of day). From what I can find tho, it wasn’t required by law. The OSA now places the responsibility on the websites.
Why are the kids technologically illiterate and undersexed until it comes to matters of government control? I’m not usually into tin foil hats, but this doesn’t feel like the kids are the primary concern here.
They aren’t.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory if everybody already knows it.
What you said there, that was just a fact.
I know, it just bothers me how little they’re trying to hide it.
But Dame Wontsomeonethinkof-de-Children saw a government report which says 65% of children under 5 have seen explicit videos of kittens being raped to death using power tools! Surely this constitutes an emergency which requires us to abandon online anonymity
How about parent your children?
What about the crappy late night TV channels with the women waving a cordless house phone like it’s 1996?
I’m perfectly able to watch porn because I’m 45, but I refuse to interact with any of this prove your age bollocks because I know full well that “we won’t store your details” and “we will share your details with 1284 trusted data partners” are the same picture.
Also “Data breach of 500K users IDs discovered on dark web”
Kids watching porn is a much smaller problem than data breaches. Those can fucking ruin people.
And nothing will be done about that until it affects the power brokers in charge*.
* - hopefully, I mean we’ve had a series of ministers embroiled in scandals that would have caused immediate resignations in the past whereas now it’s “Fuck off, I’m working here. I’M IMPORTANT!”
The last data breach I can think of that was widely known was Ashley Madison. I think if the Porn ID data got leaked it would have a similar spread (giggity), due to a similar scandalous nature.
Clearly it’s a parental problem to determine if the VPN they are buying for their kids is being used to wank off, but apparently this party of ‘liberty’ has an unhealthy obsession with monitoring our children’s genitalia these days.
Unfortunately, neither Labour nor Conservatives are parties of liberty, although there are some individuals within both that see the importance.
