UK porn watchers could have faces scanned
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Why is it their business in any way, shape or form?
I'm not talking about excluded topics like CP. They are illegal and rightly so. This isn't that. This is monitoring who watches what, regardless of how this is written, and lied about to get passed.
Or their morals? Or their property? Or their family matters? Best of the philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists had thought about that but failed to produce any comprehensible answer. It's a mystery completely out of the man's reach, apparently.
On a serious note: of course they're interested in that because that's one of the most basic and fundamental parts of human society and it has always been regulated, in one way or another, in all of the societies for millennia.
First, I'm not referring to 623 BC. I'm referring to the past decade or so, where there has been a huge spike in the government snooping on people's sex lives.
The tech today, never existed before, so while I don't doubt there was maybe some sort of monitoring, historically, you can add all of it up and it still won't equate to the data gathering of today's tech.
The usual for this type of control is Religion, not specifically chasing someone down who rubbed one out, to a pic of a furry.
You're looking at it too narrowly.
Anything anyone can "take away" from you has power over you. It's a dominance play.
Government controls how you engage in sex.
Telcos control who you talk to.
Media controls what you see and hear.
Automakers control how you move.
Banks control how you trade.
I'm sure there are more examples (look how difficult it is to homestead anywhere), but the point is that in gatekeeping functions critical to our existence, we're always beholden to someone. Capturing two of these forms the basis of a cult. No surprise the Church used to worm its way into as much of this stack as possible; these days it's Big Tech doing the same.
The only reason you don’t think “oh that’s just China” is that the idea is just being floated in the news atm and hasn’t just been implemented. :-p
Same goes for fixed line broadband.
Edit: oh and that doesn't include bypassing the network lockouts via using your own DNS, Using Apples IP address protection (basically a VPN), or any other 3rd party VPN..
Wouldn't this be trivially defeated by software which presents as a webcam and provides...any image you choose? Or is this also assuming a privileged, out of control of the user, remotely accessible camera?
Also the "big brother is watching" ad campaign for vpn providers is pretty much writing itself.
I suspect that will be an unintended side effect of this authoritarianism.
The Conservative Party was previously the more libertarian option in the U.K. (effectively) two-party system.
I’m not sure how we push back against authoritarianism?
The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist, the greatest trick the conservatives ever played was convincing the world that they were conservative.
This is one of the reasons why the 2nd Amendment is a good thing. However in the UK they lost track of why a population needs to be able to defend itself when a tyrannical regime tries to take over…
"The entire Bill of Rights was created to protect rights the original citizens believed were naturally theirs."
We've just gotten used to calling it the first 10, because the other one took a long time to ratify.
People owned warships, cannons, etc privately at that time it was written. If people shouldn't have arms such as nukes or f-15 and 'scaled up weapons' the 2A should be amended to exclude some arms.
>>...2A...
> But small arms in the context of modern government technological authoritarianism amounts to little more than a security blanket ...
The point is that focusing on weapons is futile when society is no longer ordered by overt force but rather economic/pragmatic attractors. In the western world the battle based on physical force has essentially been fought and won permanently - the result is democracy which is a similar dynamic without most of the violence. If a critical mass of people come together and want to change things, then that happens. The system has responded by dividing people into tribes and diverting them such that a critical mass opposed to the system itself doesn't actually happen.
The KillDozer is an appropriate example. I cheered for that guy, along with many others. Some of the corrupt town officials got their comeuppance. But what did it really accomplish systematically?
The issue is that those toys have workarounds, especially for locals. The soviets ran into these problems several times. Sending tanks piloted by locals to put down locals often ended in a stalemate or worse (The locals cant tell whose piloting the tank, the tankers can identify their neighbors however)
If you want to narrow things down to guns keeping local politics straight, there was that recent business with the hardware store shotgun vs Shinzo Abe. The shotgun gentleman seems to have gotten every single demand met.
But that is not the point I'm making. Like sure, I agree that a militia wielding small arms can resist an invading army, say in the case that the US military was defeated or didn't respond to an area because it wasn't considered strategic enough.
The point I am making is that it's fallacious to think that weapons can do anything to push back against homegrown democratically approved bureaucratic tyranny. As I said in another comment - how can a gun, explosives, or even a tank alleviate the problems you will face from not getting a building permit?
If there aren't enough people for that, then it's not actually a secession but rather just a few rebellious people the bureaucracy will eventually grind down. And the hyper-individualist suitcase nuke idea from Snow Crash is quite compelling, but so far seemingly untenable.
And neither one does anything about the extra-governmental system of control when you go to sell your house and the bank cartel sets the price much lower due to all the "unpermitted" work.
As far as resisting "government" in a democracy, it is much more likely that one side of an ideological divide wants to subdue the other (or both want to subdue each other using force). More like Republicans vs. Democrats and not really the people vs. the US military. One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
And/or just AI generate the faces to prove their age.
A dedicated chip that slaps Margaret Thatcher's face on all generated output.
But e.g. the EU settlement scheme offered two options for me to scan my passport: Use a phone with NFC, or go to a government center to have it scanned there.
There's nothing fundamentally preventing them from offering a similar set of options for this nonsense where the fallback for anyone who hasn't got a smartphone would be to go to a government center and tell some government official that they want to be authorized to watch porn (though given the current government, more likely it'd be outsourced without proper tender to a company run by the friends of a government minister).
I'm going to predict that 1) a contract will be negotiated with someone with political connections, 2) the scheme will be silently scrapped after significant cost overruns and failing to produce a viable solution.