Online pornography age checks for UK web users [video]
bbc.com
bbc.com
Yet it gets voted in. Well done UK government.
Edit: Fixed punctuation.
Then and now one focus of socialist policy is to make so that the "Bourgeoisie" cannot ruin the life of those near the bottom of society. In the last many decades the economy, the "workers", the bottom of society all changed a lot.
[1] I read a few sentences of a newspaper suggesting this.
Lacking any form of real opposition withing its organs, it should be reduced in scope to a large degree.
(At least, this is true in an elected democracy, because of the required elements of politicking and bureaucracy that make democracies go. For the same reasons dictatorships can be worse than democracy, they could also—presumably—be better: a benevolent dictator could exactly express the will of a united people with no politicking or bureaucracy fucking things up. Though I don’t think that we’ve ever actually had an historical example of this.)
And yes, my government does fuck up plenty and I really don't need an additional layer with minimal democratic input to add to that.
It is a good vehicle for corporation for european nations. It should get restricted to that. The currency and economic policies for example doen't really convince me. The bulk of many far-right parties we see today, were from parties a lot more moderate 10 years ago.
Those were the people that were proved correct with a lot of their criticism at that time. They were chastised and radicalized by this shit-show we see today.
We really should think about if it is worth salvaging the current union or search for better alternatives.
Sometimes focus groups will indicate that a policy direction might be a non-starter. Or something will be perceived to be so unpalatable to the public that it wouldn't even make the manifesto and be campaigned on. Sometimes, proposed government legislation makes it a bit further and it comes under the scrutiny of the media. Backlashes from the media can amplify blacklashes in the populace, leading to the proposed laws being toned down or abandoned completely. Not always, not even frequently, but enough. In one particular case, the public backlash was enough to depose a PM with a reputation for an iron grip on power (Thatcher and the Poll Tax).
I think this contrasts with legislation proposed by the EU Commission (motivation: unknown, perhaps in a significant part to the 300,000 paid lobbyists in Brussels), which seems at the public level to come out of nowhere and inevitably be approved by an obedient EU Parliament as a formality.
This particular instance might be used as an example of resistance being futile anyway, but I think it's a slightly different case. You're not going to get 500,000 people being photographed marching past Parliament with placards displaying "hands off my filth".
But why has the EU become a government? This scope creep and the enormous bureaucracy it has established has passed ao gradually that few people remember when it really was just a trade community.
The EU should not exist in a form where fuck-ups impact the private lives of individuals.
The point of the EU agreement was essentially to establish a meta-treaty of "if you, as an EU country, want to have a treaty with another EU country, then it has to be with all the other EU countries" (the "if you're going to bring chewing gum you have to bring enough for the class" rule), and then to retroactively apply that to all existing treaties within the Eurozone, either expanding, merging, or discarding those treaty organizations that enforce those treaties to match.
It looks like the EU is a lot of things now, but it's not like those treaty-ratified government departments and organizations didn't exist before the EU. They were just illegible, because they were doing things like "UK-France Treaty of Lausanne Naval collaboration", which wasn't obviously an attempt at protecting the entire continent (because it wasn't run by multilateral agreement, but rather just... oligolateral(?) agreement of a few parties interested in mantaining peace in the area), even though peace for the entire region was the treaty organization's stated goal. Likewise the thousand trade agreements that were flattened down into the Eurozone trade agreement, each of which was—at the time—between all the interested member nations that they could get to the table, but where that membership hadn't since kept up with changing borders.
If you want to hate the EU, you have to hate it for the things the EU itself does, that wouldn't exist if we never made an EU. That's mostly "a rationalization of multilateral treaty membership." Few people really hate that.
I suspect that what people who dislike the EU really dislike, is treaty organizations themselves. The EU "puts a name to a face" for many of those organizations, so to speak, but they've been there pushing governments around (at their own behest, as sovereignty-level precommitment strategies) since at least 1815, when the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Commission_for_Navigat... was founded.
Honestly for me this looks like history repeating itself, i see many parallels to the USSR:
* Unaccountable bureaucrats with names largely unknown to the public are in charge. 99% of EU citizens could not tell you who the presidents of the EU council, commission or parliament are -- or even what the difference between those three entities is. Hell, even many political commentators couldn't tell you.
* Anti-EU fores within the EU are "bullied" out (think about the european constitution referendums in France, Ireland etc.). There is a "make them vote the right way or change the rules" mentality.
* Pumping out a vast number of laws, rules and regulations. Dairy farmers have been subjected, in the last few years alone, to 1,100 separate, specific new laws.
* In the former USSR the citizens of individual countries were told that they should forget about their former national identities. They should, they were told, consider themselves members of the USSR rather than citizens of Ukraine or Estonia. Exactly the same thing is happening in the EU superstate.
The UK can mend existing laws by voting in a new parliament who pledge to carry it out in their election manifestos - unless of course, they are lying sods like they current government who are betraying people by doing the opposite to what they pledged.
EU citizens have only one option: To beg. They do not have an avenue for repealing laws because the people who make the laws are not accountable to them. They are not elected, and they can't be voted out. The people elected by EU citizens are merely a defense mechanism who can reject bad laws that the unelected might propose, however, bribes can certainly solve that problem. What the commission wants, the commission gets.
In the EU, new legislation are only put forward by the commission - who are not elected by the citizens. The MEPs who are elected merely vote on the proposals put forward by the commission. They have no power to contest or put forward legislation which could repeal existing laws.
The only remedy for bad laws is that 1 million citizens can petition the commission to consider a change in legislation, which they have no obligation to carry forward for the elected representatives to vote on.
For the UK, if the genocides, empire building etc isn't enough, this won't matter either.
Because you are in a specific industry. But in other industries (food, banking, insurance, trading, agriculture, electricity, transportation, etc), counter-productive laws have been voted for years.
Absolutely insane that they have passed this purely due to "think of the children" style hand-wringing when it doesn't even address the primary issues.
I suspect that the real reason is much simpler. They want to begin a formal process to tie identities to specific computers. By implementing this to "protect children" they are going to begin normalising the idea and we will see it spread to become ubiquitous for many internet services that can potentially be used in a manner that the state does not approve of.
Maybe I'm being a bit tin-foil hat but I think it is unlikely that blocking pornography is the primary reason for this. Especially as it will probably be largely ineffective, I don't think they are stupid enough for this to go unnoticed.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Given the U.K. government’s recent behaviour I don’t see any evidence that they are organised enough to be putting this through with any hidden motives.
They are talking about doing the same for social media too, I expect that will either be framed in terms of cyberbullying, fighting the far-right, or perhaps copyright. I see a consistent agenda that lines up perfectly with Theresa May's authoritarian approach to matters.
Either they are stupid or they are pursuing a consistent agenda under different guises. I think the simplest answer is likely the latter.
Also there is plenty of deliberate deception and malice in the Conservative party policies at the moment, I don't see why this would be the exception to the rule.
Also, how the hell do they think that they're going to be able to enforce this? They do seem to be doing this for the right reasons, but I have no clue how in the world they think that they're going to be able to A) enforce it, and B) do so without breaking into user's privacy.
> Mindgeek lobbied hard for this. They (owners of Pornhub etc) are the government's approved age verifiers, so are in theory now in charge of access to all the other porn sites.
By pushing people into clandestinity, surveillance against serious stuff will become even more complicated.
But while I agree that the average porn is not how children should get sexual education ... I doubt this is the way to change that.
I don't mean talking about how the penis works and how to wrap a condom on a cucumber, because I think the UK does that already.
I mean actually talking about how to have great sex, what works, how to please a partner, etc. Feel free to have a final where students have to review some porn and point out the parts that doesn't work in reality.
Of course that would horrify parents and teachers, but the reality in 2019 is that you can no longer _not_ talk about the subject, you can only leave the discussion up to the porn producers and mind geeks search engines or get into the fray yourself.
You mean like in Monthy Pythons the Meaning of Life?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7lRGIkLEYoA&has_verified=1
Seriously, please don't.
This is akin to banning underage consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. Very hard to enforce in practice, but overall the right thing to do, and probably useful even if not 100% effective.
I agree that the implementation is a bit weird. (A fee for every device? Vouchers?)
(there's an argument that "ensure sufficient motivation is required to do so" is the actual rationale for this and many other behavioural regulations anyway)
If everyone breaks the law then the prosecutor has the ability to arbitrarily imprison anyone.
The latter isn't exactly without the potential for dubious consequences (the BBFC has theoretical grounds to ask my ISP to block Reddit) but "selective prosecution of undesirables" isn't one of them (and the BBFC is probably no more likely to use its power to make Reddit "adults only" than it is to do the same for Disney films with a bit of gore)
No it doesn't, that's a bizarre interpretation of English and Welsh law and of police powers to search computers.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encry...
And the UK government lost in the European Courts (that kind of countercheck is going to disappear after Brexit):
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45510662
But all they will do is make it more secret and deny everything.
Whatever this is about, it's blatantly nothing to do with age checks.
(Obviously, for that you'd certify the person, not the device. People do share computers!)
"Computer == identity" is simply broken.
(It's also broken the other way - there's absolutely no reason to charge per-device merely to authenticate age.)
But.. I think the problem is more a social one. Is Google going to comply with a single country's law when it requires quite an elaborate technological solution? The UK is not at the scale of China, and I suspect such companies will generally ignore the law (it's common in the UK to have laws which are broadly ignored, they're on the books for selective enforcement at a convenient time) or block the UK entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...
edit: Thinking about it, I've found one reason: porn tend to be misogynistic hence makes a poor education. But then, blocking porn doesn't solve the root of the problem. Also, we all know what prohibition do when it comes to kids: makes it even more desirable.
Would you stop your child from watching another species have sex in say a zoo? What reason would you give if so? I think we could separate observation of the act from participation in the minds of our youth, probably not in my lifetime but I think it could be done.
1. As cinema became more overtly sexual in the 70's, films would occasionally make it onto TV with a minor amount of censorship; repeat showings would then 'correct' this by censoring more heavily.
2. As VCRs arrived in the 80's, porn and video nasties accompanied them. But again, there was a clampdown on these as the technology became widely adopted.
3. It is trivial to access pornography on the internet, and has become increasingly so in the last few years. This initiative is just the latest reaction.
It is a tough one: like most people, I abhor any form of censorship or government interference into its citizens' private doings. OTOH the availability of internet porn to minors, and its current nature, has to be a concern: there are studies showing the desensitizing and distorting effect it has on those too young to apply their own experience and filters. Nor is asserting that it's the parents' responsibility to monitor or control access particularly useful unless there is the technology to support that in an accessibly low-tech form. But we do have the makings of a less intrusive and privacy-violating mechanism - ISPs could block certain websites unless you as a customer specifically allow access to them: BT do this, for example (although bizarrely various porn sites seem to be unaffected, whereas oglaf.com needs to be whitelisted!). The fact that such routes have not been pursued make me suspicious of the whole enterprise.
It may not be tomorrow but it will be here nonetheless.
Afaik China drops encrypted traffic intermittently to subvert this approach. And you need to rent out some server elsewhere outside the jurisdiction. One could totally dry out the revenue stream for the hoster.
They know you can't stop all encryption. One time pads will always work when used correctly.
That doesn't matter because they aren't targetting criminals, black-hats, or terrorists. They aren't targetting people that actually have to hide.
They are targetting the technologically unaware.
I always tell people that this isn't aimed at stopping people that really want to hide, it is about monitoring the majority of the population.
I would ask the politicians and the supporters of this law to define "porn". Who gets to decide what is considered porn? Will that take into account religious beliefs? Will it consider regional norms? Which religion? Which region?
Pornnis material designed to sexually titillate. This is why you can still buy American Beauty in England, even though it contains an image of a semi-naked underage actress in it.
Your comments about religion at ebaffling and I have no idea what point you're trying to make. If you're suggesting that religious minorities who dislike ankles could somehow get websites showing ankles to be put behind an age wall, well, no that's not going to happen.
To me, it would make a lot more sense to require any site that could contain adult material (porn, anonymous file upload, file sharing, etc) to add the RTA header [1] to all pages and then put the responsibility on parents to use parental control software to check for the header.
It is trivial to add the header to all modern web servers and load balancers.
In Apache, it looks like this:
Header always set rating "RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA"
http-response set-header rating "RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA"
<meta name="RATING" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" />
These kind of things are always ineffective and end up being a way for government to insert itself into your life and charge for the privilege.
These sites could instead use re-capchas featuring trivia from the past which only adults would get - select famous personalities etc.
Or ISPs and telcos could offer 'family' filters built into some of their plans, etc.
So many ways to tackle this issue without the heavy-handed involvement of government.
> Or ISPs and telcos could offer 'family' filters built into some of their plans, etc.
The 'trivia quiz' approach reminds me of the classic game Leisure Suit Larry, you could crack it just by randomly trying different answers :)
If you watch the video you have to enter your passport or government ID number into porn websites that will verify your age. If you don't want to enter your passport or id number in random porn websites then you will need to go to a store and buy a "voucher", and you can enter the porn voucher number in the website to access it.
This is going to be a phisher's paradise.
I'm a Brit and assumed this was just an early April Fools Day joke - especially as a few articles said it was due to be implemented on 1st April 2018, but was delayed until 1st April 2019.
What a bizarre policy.
There's reasonably good evidence that this has changed sexual habits in young people. There's also reasonably good evidence that people are reporting worse experiences of first sexual encounters than in the past, because of the expectations that porn creates in young people.
The industry has had years, over a decade, to self regulate and they chose not to do so, so it's not surprising a right-wing government is implementing an age-wall.