big85

Quite right. Around 2 million UK adults don't have photo ID, mostly concentrated among poorer and less educated people, and many of those have difficulty getting credit card for the same reason. The UK is violating their basic ECHR rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assocation, and the peaceful enjoyment of their property, and it's unnecessary because we already have parental controls.

Ah, but there are plenty of folk etymologies which, although they make a lot of logical sense, aren't true.

(For what it's worth, I don't get that sense.)

> On-device nudity detection relies on machine-learning models that lean on the dedicated silicon built into recent phones, and older devices lack the neural processing and memory to run that kind of model without wrecking battery life and speed.

I'm beginning to suspect Apple complied in advance because their new devices have image-recognitions technology, but their competitors don't (particularly old hand-me down devices). Build a safety feature, have it made mandatory, and leverage the government to outlaw your competitors!

I hear the CPU fan spins up when you hit the Start menu now.

We have a solution for that: parental controls. The new feature is that parental controls are enabled by default and cannot be disabled without the phone manufacturer's consent. The upcoming feature is that this also applies to non-adult sites like Facebook and YouTube. It's nothing less than the end of the free, open, and anonymous internet.

> YouTube has angered MPs and peers by bombarding them with adverts that suggest it is up to parents rather than tech companies to restrict teenagers’ screen time.

On a daily basis they've got a new idea to mess with our devices. Will users have to pass ID verification to avoid screen time limits too? Why is everything that used to be Parental Controls being made mandatory?

I have to get off this site before the tech news gives me an aneurysm. Let me give a prediction. To access the internet at all, you will need ID linked to government identity by some kind of token, the goal being to make it impossible post anything that can't be tracked to an individual. A bunch of major services are going to abandon the UK entirely to avoid the paperwork, but it won't matter.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is about this idea. Set during the Cold War, the theory is that no human will choose nuclear retaliation if attacked, since it means mutual annihilation. However, American nuclear doctrine at the time assumes the threat of retaliation is the only thing deterring an attack. They attempt to solve this by building an AI which will retaliate, but are baffled when it too refuses to return fire.

Parental Controls don't bother me. What bothers me is that they should be enabled on my own device against my wishes!

No, it's much worse than you suggest. Quoting the government:

> The government therefore wants Apple and Google to block nudity across the whole device by default, so they can only be deactivated via age assurance.

All smartphones and tablets will be required to detect and block adult content on the device. You can avoid it by showing photo ID, but it's bizarre that the default state should be to assume the user is not an adult until proven otherwise.

Article 1 of the ECHR guarantees that "every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions". "Until they show government ID" isn't in there!

Perhaps I'm jumping the gun to assume this will be used as a precedent to require on-device scanning for illegal content, and further extended from smartphones to desktop PCs. However, I'm not optimistic.

No, not in the UK. XKEYSCORE surveillance tools are used without a warrant signed by a judge (the police grant themselves "warrants" covering unlimited uses for a period pending renewal, which I would have assumed constituted a "general warrant", something prohibited in UK constitutional law... but I am not a UK lawyer).

MI5, MI6, and NCA are immune to Freedom of Information, and you cannot sue in open court; you can take it to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, who will not even let your lawyer see the relevant information to the case.

Surveillance which violates the privacy or other rights of lawful citizens is worse than crime, I argue. The criminal fears the police, but the government obeys nobody.

Security cameras in public areas, I don't have a problem. Government mandated scanning software running on my PC, yeah, I have a problem. It amounts to a warrantless search.

> it is possible to verify your age without disclosing who you are to the site you're visiting, and without disclosing what site you visited to the government.

I can't believe people are really okay with a system where you have to show your real face to access websites. Cameras on phones went from a novelty to a government mandate so you can be observed.

There are various other potential methods to verify one's age, all of which are forbidden by OFCOM. Account age, zero-knowledge proofs, key signing, some kind of OAuth thing, physical tokens that require proof of age to buy, etc. The only permitted ones require your to link your real-life identity. This is a huge boon to the intelligence services and law enforcement.

Even among the few permitted verification methods, there are obstacles. Each site usually provides only one verification method at one verification provider. You may have to trust a company you never heard of before. Sometimes the photo fails (maybe their system thinks you don't look old enough) and they ask for ID too, or the photo fails and you are locked out of verification. Some services only allow credit card verification (e.g. Steam), so if you have poor credit you aren't able to even view the store page despite being of age.

What I say is, we don't need any of this. For thirty or so years we had client-side optional Parental Controls, and it worked fine. Many adult sites voluntarily use a <meta name="rating"> tag to ensure sites are correctly identified. The ability of adults to access adult content was not impeded. Parental Controls work better than verification because 1) many sites will not deploy age verification, and 2) it's trivial to overcome photo-based ID by holding your device up to a picture of an adult on a television set.

Two-factor is one thing. They're mandating client-side scanning in every operating system. This was previously rejected for obvious privacy reasons.

There are already phones with an anti-nudity feature as a parental control option, but the key there is that it's optional. The major pivot with age verification is that all devices treat all users as a child until they identify themselves with a third party. This allows a rhetorical paradox that the controls are only for children, when they apply to adults too by default.

So, in this order:

1. You need a camera on your computer to allow a third party to verify your age before viewing adult content

2. It applies to social media too

3. It applies to your operating system too

4. Unless you age verify, the law demands your computer must be powerful enough to run an AI, or be internet-equipped and send your private photos to a third party, to detect and prohibit nudity. It must be capable of running in real-time, presumably, to work on Facetime calls and such.

Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older devices. Excellent news for Google, Apple, and Microsoft, bad for Linux and alternative operating systems. Remember when schools handed out Raspberry Pis?

Edit: And they are asking for this to be implemented for free in three months, because nobody knows how software engineering works. Great job

Quite. The age verification for social media may actually be worse, because the age requirement is lower, meaning they have to collect personally identifying information on minors. Many young people also don't have ID, particularly in the UK where driving is less common. Actually, many adults don't have ID in general. Every free vBulletin form also just got thirty cents per user more expensive to run.

My point is that if we make adults sites harder for adults to access, many people will turn to the unregulated black market, which is much worse. It's much closer than people think: once VPNs are banned or restricted, the next easiest circumvention solution is Tor. We don't need age verification per-site when we have client-side parental controls, which are widely trusted by parents.

Gambling is a system which inherently requires payment, for which it is easy to request a credit card as proof of age. It's also necessary to create an account to track your winnings. For adult content, the main business model is the free ad-supported system with account registration optional. ID verification systems charge about thirty cents per user, which takes a lot of ad views to recoup, so to avoid verification cost on every visit the user must create an account (which is subject to account sharing anyway, and as the article notes, verified accounts are being sold on the black market). Parental controls client-side make much more sense unless your actual goal is to harm the adult industry and increase government surveillance of citizens.

You're citing Fight the New Drug, a Mormon anti-porn organization whose angle was to define pornography as an addiction to justify laws banning it as a health crisis.

My point is, they operate openly and can be held accountable, as lawsuits demonstrate. The alternative to this sort of site is the Dark Web, where nobody is held accountable and the law is broken with impunity. Pornhub is by far the lesser of two evils in this context.

I think it's rather that they want to de-anonymize internet users by linking all activity to one or more identifiers.

An IP address only links you to a physical address, at best. Account requirements with identity verification link the user's real-world identity via government ID, credit card, or face photo.

If you make law-abiding sites like Pornhub hard to access, consumers will move to black markets like the Dark Web, which hosts illegal content.

As the article mentions, kids are able to bypass the age verification with ease, so it doesn't even fulfil its stated purpose. We didn't even need age verification, because parental controls have been an option the entire time.

Russia's strategy here is to manipulate governments of the west to withdraw from mutual aid to weaken their alliance, seed anti-foreigner and pro-Nazi ideology so you can market the Big War to the Russian people as fighting their former Nazi nemesis, and predict, correctly, that the west will hesitate to go to the war, allowing Russia to capture strategic positions by sea and gain a significant starting advantage.

It seems the deleted entries mainly consisted of Protestant denominations and Pagan groups. They also removed Atheist as a specific religion, and various entries like None Provided and Unknown. Many two-letter codes were changed, which may be confusing if you have groups of soldiers with a mix of old and new dog-tags.

Amiga Workbench could be used mouseless by using key combinations to move the mouse around. It was cumbersome, but just good enough to let you use the system if your mouse was broken, or you had plugged a second joystick into the mouse port and couldn't be bothered swapping them to launch a game. Later there were add-ons like Reqtools and MCP which let you use keys more, e.g. Escape to close a window, or Return (Enter) to hit OK on a dialog box.

> Evidence from a mystery shopping exercise included in the Commission's investigation shows that a very high percentage of the selected chargers failed basic safety tests, while a high percentage of tested baby toys posed safety risks of medium to high severity, as they contain chemicals exceeding legal safety limits or pose suffocation hazards due to detachable parts.

> Under the DSA, designated Very Large Online Platforms are required to diligently assess systemic risks linked to their services and adopt corresponding mitigation measures.

Indeed. The alt-right pipeline preys on fears. Gamers are afraid of losing their culture to "woke" game and anime localization, women in gamer spaces, and character diversity.

As Göring said at his trial at Nuremberg, "the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."

A better question - how do you imagine age verification is going to protect children from being groomed? Age verification will force services to assume everyone is a child until proven otherwise. Now it will be harder to tell adults and children apart online. Next, adult content will be harder for adults to acquire, pushing people into black markets, where illegal content will be easier to find.

I appreciate that people are concerned for their children, but we can't keep signing away basic rights and freedoms just to allay parents' anxiety for another few years.

> I don’t want someone else choosing how I control what my kids do. Give me tools to control it myself

I agree. Parental controls have been the norm for thirty years. The adult who owns the device should have control over it, not Microsoft or California.

According to Wikipedia:

> Most major webmail providers, including Yahoo! Mail, increased their mailbox storage in response. Yahoo! first announced 100 MB of storage for basic accounts and 2 GB of storage for premium users. However, soon Yahoo Mail increased its free storage quota to 1 GB, before eventually allowing unlimited storage from March 27, 2007, until October 8, 2013.

I remember this. They announced it on April 1st, which naturally led everyone to suspect it was an April Fools. The idea that they would offer one gigabyte of storage on a free email service, when competitors offered more like 25 MB, seemed impossible. However, Google had already made their April Fools joke for 2004 about a new operating system being developed for a moon base.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_April_Fools'_Da...>

The video opens on a floppy disk that says Amiga, but the second notch indicates that it's a high density disk, not a double density disk as was common on the Amiga. Boy, I hope somebody got fired for that blunder!

I can attest that MuOS also works well on the RG35XX+, including Amiga, which as I recall the original model RG35XX didn't quite have the power for. The RG40XXV appears to have the advantage of an analog stick, which would be nice for later platforms like PlayStation.