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    VPNs top App Store charts as UK age verification kick in
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    VPNs top App Store charts as UK age verification kick in

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    1. Remarkable_Battle614 on

      >Katie Freeman-Tayler, of children’s safety group Internet Matters, said on Thursday that availability of free and low cost VPN services to children, and their potential use of them, was “concerning”.

      And so it begins…

    2. Varanae on

      Hilarious that the whole vibe of the article is that VPNs are bad and that websites should be discouraging their use

    4. Sonchay on

      The government should have started their own VPN company or set out a special tax on them since they knew what the effect would be. Coulda raised a ton of cash!

    5. _Hello_Hi_Hey_ on

      You dont even need VPN, as they are not blocking sites in other languages, so you just need to turn on translate page. They also didn’t block all xxx sites as there are just too many. They also didn’t block any picture based porn, they just block the main video sites. Apparently someone also passed the age vertification with face of Death Stranding character on computer screen. The whole thing is so badly planned and full of loopholes.

    6. ValuableMajor4815 on

      >”Many of these free VPNs are riddled with issues,” said Daniel Card, a cyber-security expert with the Chartered Institute for IT (BCS).

      >”Some act as traffic brokers for data harvesting firms, others are so poorly built they expose users to attacks.”

      >He told the BBC despite posing a range of potential privacy risks, such apps “end up in the hands of kids trying to watch age-restricted content”, or adults “trying to get round blocks”.

      Oh, so totally not like the US based verification platforms everyone is being told to blindly trust?

    8. douggieball1312 on

      If even innocuous sites like Wikipedia end up being blocked, I’ll be migrating every one of my devices over to a foreign IP address and staying there for good. If they’re going to butcher the internet in this country anyway, I’d rather they just pulled out the plug rather than this stupid death by a thousand cuts method.

    9. phangtom on

      How about we the world just ban Katie Freeman-Taylor’s family and everyone in the Internet Matters group from the internet?

      Honestly we should start writing to all their partners to explain why they’re supporting a group that is calling for an authoritarian government. 

    10. pandaman777x on

      This hamfisted age verification thing could have been done better… why not just do it at an ISP level where by default you can’t access all these websites, and the account owner has to toggle it on?

      Making us send a 3D image of our peckers to some random American company just so we can look at some boobs online seems overkill

    11. GreemBeam on

      This act has nothing to do with protecting children, and everything to do with farming data to train AI models how to detect identification documents.

      And possibly also to add data about what people rub one out to into their datasets they use to profile us all

    12. GiftedGeordie on

      At what point do we just think of ourselves as living in a surveillance state? I really feel like freedom and democracy is dying in the UK and I put the blame on Keir Starmer and Labour for either turning the UK into an authoritarian regime or laying the ground work for someone else to turn it into an authoritarian regime.

      This is the most terrified that I’ve ever been to live in this country.

      Edit: To be crystal clear, there is absolutely a problem with kids watching fucked up shit on the internet and that needs to be addressed, but surely there’s a better way than trying to go full surveillance state? I also know that the Tories were the one who implemented it, but Labour said that it ***”Didn’t go far enough”*** so I can still lay the blame at their feet.

    13. Organic_Armadillo_10 on

      I’m travelling an accidentally left my vpn set to the UK (for getting some series not available where I was). Went on an adult site and got the popup basically saying I’d need to make an account. I didn’t actually read it – I just immediately switched my country on the VPN and it worked again just fine…

      The whole age verification thing is pointless. There will be ways around it. Even if the vpns get blocked they’ll work again after a day or two as they work just as quick to fix access (much like torrent sites etc…).

      Nobody is going to put personal information to access adult content.

    14. WebDevWarrior on

      Let’s be clear here, the children’s safety groups and charities are in no way interested in children’s safety. If they were they would have hired people who understood the technology prior to debating the best possible solution to the problem. I was involved in tech policy for a few years during the drafting of this bill and was privvy to some of the discussions that went on, including the early drafts of the bill. As were many other leading experts non-affiliated with the big tech companies, and every fucking one of them said this would be a bad idea.

      The people who worked at these organisations are technophobes, morons, fucknuts, and alike their governmental partners, are only interested in leveraging the concept of child safety in order to bring about a total dictatorship in which the government has full unmitted control over everything you can access akin to China or Russia. Pretty much every major political party is in favor of going **much** further than where the law currently stands, and they are being egged on by these charities, so giving these organisations more money to lobby with at this point is effectively like funding digital terrorism.

      Save the Children, Barnardos, NSPCC, 5Rights Foundation, Internet Watch Foundation, Marie Collins Foundation, Childnet, PAPYRUS, Samaritans, and Mental Health Foundation have used in excess of over 100m in lawyers fees, marketing, lobbying, and other costs from their public donations rather than spend it better on actually helping people. These efforts have actively (and continue to) fund the destruction of UK small businesses (who cannot afford compliance for this legislation), and the destruction of citizen rights, and if they get what they want (weaker encryption), then an increase in criminality will follow.

      Considering the state of British cybersecurity, and the lack of general education around Internet safety, there are going to be some serious issues somewhere down the line and I gaurantee that the charities will wash their hands of any responsibility.

    15. Afraid_Jelly2891 on

      This is difficult though. There is definitely a need for consideration of what children are readily exposed to online. There is an argument for regulation within the provision of adult entertainment. The bit I cannot support is that, entirely predictably, the age verification that has been brought in does not fulfil the purpose for which it was designed.

      What we are left with is legislation that forced web providers of adult content to farm ID verification of people who wish, legally, to consume that content. By doing this they are presumably creating a list of users of adult content which could easily be mis used. In the mean time there will be a whole host of proxy sites, VPNs, and other methods who circumvent the age verification in a game of whack a mole that the government and ISPs will never win.

      So what we are left with is high risk data collection with ineffective child protection. So what will happen. Well the same lobby will now take aim at VPN and demand less anonymity or privacy online. I don’t in principle have an issue wiuth people being responsible for what they post online but I am significantly concerned that to do this involves government led data collection and could easily be used to silence dissent, criticism, difference of opinion and ultimate significantly threaten critical thought and free speech. In a world of Trump, Erdogan, Putin and others it is not too far fetched to say that the kind of online idenfification we are moving towards could easily be significantly misused by malevolent leaders.

    16. ShambolicPaulThe2nd on

      This will only encourage the government to try and regulate/ban VPN’s. But that does put them in the position where they can no longer argue the Online Safety act is about stopping kids “stumbling” across porn. Cos actively looking for porn and “stumbling” across it are two very different things.

      This whole act is going to be like a Russian nesting doll. With the UK government always trying to catch up and spending ever more money trying to stop kids looking at porn, while the kids just find ever more ingenious ways around it.

    17. Codect on

      Online Safety Act = upload your biometrics and/or ID to whatever shitty identity verification provider each application has decided to partner with, which for a lot of sites will inevitably be the cheapest one they can find.

      The government can get to fuck on this, absolute technoweenies. Of course VPN usage will skyrocket because most people have more sense than that.

      I work as a penetration tester – in simple terms companies pay me to try to hack them and advise how to improve their security posture. With the shit I see on a weekly basis I have absolutely no faith sending my personal details anywhere if it isn’t absolutely required, let alone some shady provider who will happily just sell it on to anyone who comes asking for it.

    18. Crimson__Fox on

      Why can’t 16 year olds watch porn or play Call of Duty if they can consent to sex and join the army?

    21. Bukr123 on

      “That’s the uncomfortable truth: people will take risks to get what they want online,” he said.” Like the government mandated risk to my privacy sending my identification to 3rd parties. The same government who is responsible for the leak of the identities of thousands of afghans who are now in mortal danger due to pure incompetence.

    22. shugthedug3 on

      BBC stuck this shit on the six o clock news which suggests government crackdown on VPNs coming soon.

      Thanks Starmer.

    23. SchoolForSedition on

      BBC sounds was cut off overseas at the same time. Though I suspect porn has an even bigger audience.

    25. kiakri_ttv on

      So I tested this with discord age verification. You can use stock DVLA photos and bypass this. Only tested it for discord so far