UK newsagents to sell ‘porn passes’ to visit X-rated websites
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
How are websites going to get blocked? DNS filtering? Asking the sites operators to block all traffic from the UK by default?
No. This is a Brexit-style law, the point is to send a message, through the newspapers. Not to be bothered with any details about how it might actually work.
If you want to raise a generation of people capable of hiding their online activity more effectively trying to get between a teenager and smut is basically the way to do it.
I'm pretty sure that VPN's and Tor will explode in popularity if they ever manage to enforce this in any way beyond the most silly methods.
Also hello escalating arms race.
VPNs do next to nothing and require a credit card.
Tor will definitely benefit from this however.
If they sidestep your ISP's block list that's hardly nothing?
I can hardly see say, SwissVPN adapting the block list for customers whose traffic originates in the UK.
The upside of this whole debacle is that the UK government have finally created a strong incentive for the UK population to educate themselves on online privacy and censorship evasion; the EFF should send Theresa May a (snarky!) thank you-note.
Maybe we could look forward to teenagers coding their own keygen or hammering the portals attempting to brute-force them with random numbers ... ;-)
That's what Theresa May is.
Oh and Bernie Sanders is even more left wing and will probably win the next election.
Centuries of public consensus that a paternalistic government is tolerable, or even good.
The few million middle-class voters in marginal constituencies whose votes actually matter are easily convinced by the papers that the Internet is out to corrupt their children (and frankly they have a point), and therefore go along with bureaucratic-authoritarian "solutions" for it.
(There have been plenty of other revolutions and uprisings, though most were either elite coups or unsuccessful).
I think the crucial thing is that since the eras of Rights of Man and Human Rights we've not had enough of a catastrophe to completely ground-up rebuild the principles of government.
And yes, Cromwell as Lord Protector was not popular at the end. But then, neither was Charles I.
We definitely avoided a ground -up rebuilding after the enlightenment, but I'm not entirely sure one is necessary, if you are willing to move incrementally rather than to try to enforce an ancien regime. In almost all senses Britain is an ordinary modern democracy, even if a new liberal order has been built on the back of the old.
It's hard to make a rebuttal to that in the UK without being pilloried
Why is reporting on this so terrible? I actually don't have a problem with requiring age restrictions on certain content online I just have no confidence that it will be implemented securely and anonymously when there are no competent journalists to hold politicians to a high standard.
Also there are many things that affect children much worse than online porn. For example, if a single woman is raising a child there is high probability that every weekend she comes home drunk with some unfamiliar poorly educated low cultured drunk man. The child has to listen to their drunk talking. This kid will probably soon become alcohol or drug addict or even a criminal. Porn obviously won't do so much harm.
So my suggestion is to ban drinking and inviting men home for single mothers before you ban porn. Or maybe ban alcohol for everyone who has children.