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The UK tries, once again, to age-gate pornography (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 21 points 2 years ago (3 children)

There’s also the risk that any age verification implemented will end up being bypassed by anyone with access to a VPN. When I ask, Whitehead admits that there’s no “silver bullet” when it comes to online safety. However, she says the measures are still worthwhile if they can help stop children from accidentally encountering adult content.

It sounds like they have absolutely no idea how to implement this law in anything approaching an effective manner. I suspected lend up getting scrap like everything else.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    They wont have anything but a minimal budget to even research this properly, let alone employ the staff or setup the systems to manage it properly.

    I realise China monitors a lot more than porn and their population is much much larger however they have between 20 and 50k working on it. Even if you cut down the scope you are still looking at thousands of employees to do this properly.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Too true.

    I actually used to work for a branch of the British government and their philosophy was never spend any money, especially on maintenance.

    So I would not be surprised if you're right. Also the ICO are completely toothless, I don't think they've ever actually done any legal enforcement. It's their fault that all the websites have the stupid cookie pop-up warnings. Somebody asked him if that would be acceptable under the law and they said yes, even though it's clearly ridiculous and clearly violates the law, but that set the precedent. They set a precedent on Twitter. Idiots

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    Eh? The cookie popups are because prior to that point websites were just doing whatever the fuck they wanted with no disclosure, as bluntly as the requirements for cookie disclosure have been implemented.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    accidentally encountering adult content.

    The way that works in Germany is that the BPjM has an index of iffy stuff and the big search engines are required to use it as a blacklist. Same general reasoning as it being completely legal to sell porn in a shop but you gotta keep it under the counter, or in a separate 18+ section, and not advertise it publicly.

    The "fine unless by accident" thing is btw backed by developmental psychology roughly speaking if kids are old enough to seek stuff out, they're old enough to deal with seeing it. The rest is media competency and discussing that porn is not a documentary movie is something for sex ed.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    So the website aren't actually blocked but they won't come up in search engines?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yep. Though there's also a difference here between "not suitable for youth" and "right-out illegal", and with porn sites that latter one can get problematic because those "I promise I'm 18" banners don't even begin to be enough age auth. OTOH the law only cares about sites actually targeting Germans (as in: They're in German). Things that you won't find on google but aren't illegal as such e.g. include pro-ana forums. Also note that German law makes a difference between erotica and porn, lots of stuff you see on the net would actually be completely fine but the sites don't bother distinguishing.

    It's always only DNS blocks, easy to circumvent by setting your dns to 1.1.1.1 (cloudflare) or 8.8.8.8 (google) instead of whatever your ISP configures it to.

    As far as porn is concerned, after years of paper shuffling, they managed to block de.xhamster.com (but not any other subdomain), xhamster reacted pretty much within hours by setting up deu.xhamster.com. I kinda expect them to give up. Maybe instead make sure that xhamster.desi is on that search engine blacklist? IP blocks are not an option because overblocking.

    kinox.to is blocked because piracy, as well as Russian state media because EU sanctions.

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