UK.gov snaps on rubber gloves, prepares for mandatory porn checks The government is poised to usher in mandatory porn checks this week, with reports it will require users to provide details from a credit card to prove they are over 18. The legislation was introduced in the Digital Economy Act in April, and will require websites serving up adult content to verify users' ages or be blocked by …
They are basically too busy circling the fresh corpse of the maybot at the mo to worry about running the country. With the exception of a few horse shit token pieces of legislation, they are pretending they are back in roman times, 'et tu Boris' etc. Fact of the matter is, that they fucking love it at times like these. The smug bastard who's the chair of the 1922 pretending he's the kingmaker, cabinet ministers briefing against each other, back benchers betting their careers on picking the right person to fellate. Tories, back doing what they do best. Infighting.
So, the UK government wants to do the following:
• Encourage people to hand over credit card details to porn site operators
• Force people to provide socially embarrassing information to untrusted parties.
• Increase overlap between mild non-standard porn and more serious things such as underage porn and snuff porn by making the mild non-standard porn only available from the same illegal sources as others. Much the same way less harmful drugs can be gateways to more harmful drugs because you have to go to the same people due to criminalisation of the former.
• Declare for other people what is and isn't sexual morality for them.
• Make larger and more legitimate porn sites less desirable than smaller and dodgier ones who can flout the laws.
• Perform extensive and intrusive online surveillance to enforce this. (Ostensibly).
N.b. a couple of the above tie into specific implementations. Namely that May's government is very puritan and believes porn itself is morally wrong.
To those simply saying "VPN", they are correct that it will be trivial to avoid this measure but there are a few further things to keep in mind:
• This is one more move in the chess game. That it doesn't mean check does not mean that it isn't an advance by your opponent that has consequences.
• For a police state, everybody must be guilty so that anybody can be charged at any time. Criminalising common behaviour achieves this and as using a VPN to avoid such checks will undoubtedly be illegal, vast swathes of people will suddenly become "guilty" and thus subject to targetting should there be a reason to find something on them later.
• This will later be used as a justification for outlawing / backdooring VPNs because the very obvious next step is to show that VPNs are being used to access "illegal porn". Why is it illegal? Because the government made it so. That is what we are seeing today.
• The government can still go after the porn companies themselves if they do not implement this. Most would to prevent them losing chunks of a large market like the UK. So will those of other countries. Customers using VPNs will only mitigate this somewhat, not prevent it.
"This will later be used as a justification for outlawing / backdooring VPNs "
For all the noises that May has repeatedly made in this direction, I rather doubt it will ever happen. The Tories are run for the benefit of the business community. Business is not interested in having VPNs outlawed or made less secure.
"This will later be used as a justification for outlawing / backdooring VPNs because the very obvious next step is to show that VPNs are being used to access "illegal porn". Why is it illegal? Because the government made it so. That is what we are seeing today."
That's certainly how it looks to me, at least for personal use, because as the user above says it would greatly damage business. That said, the current "Europe Thing" we're having proves that the interests of business or the economy can come second to a politician's personal gains.
>>"Business is not interested in having VPNs outlawed or made less secure."
VPNs will have to have a justifiable purpose. I.e. if you're a business register your VPN connection and why. If you're a domestic home user, you'll need to justify it and furthermore, given that such laws as this will typically be used retroactively to catch people you want to catch rather than be the reason you catch them, showing that you've used it for illegal purposes will be a crime of itself.
Furthermore, a VPN isn't inherently anonymous. It's just often used for that purpose. A business could have a VPN to some other office. It doesn't mean that you can definitely have a VPN to a popular and legal VPN service. Easy enough to declare VPNs for the purpose of anonymising domestic use illegal and leave business needs untouched. Hard to enforce of course, but then that's not the point, is it? The point is that if the eye of Sauron turns in your direction, it has something to pin on you.
EDIT: Can we have an Eye of Sauron icon for state surveillance? Poor Orwell is looking a bit passé these days given by how far we have actually surpassed what he imagined with his concealed telescreens.
I can make a VPN completely out of software in ANY web browser and there is NOTHING they could do about it! I'm in America and UK can take a long hike up a short hill with the porn rules! They can't touch me here! I can put my plugins into any browser with 8192 bit encryption or Quantum Computing resistant algorithms to protect my data! I can do BETTER than TOR or other Onion-like routing!
So I'm assuming Experian / Equifax will have an added field to my credit profile to show whether I'm opted into / out of Porn usage with my Credit Cards?
Given my credit profile can be accessed by anyone with money via Solicitors etc, how does this affect things like Black mail?
Rudd / May + others haven't a clue.
No. The proles were allowed all manor of low-brow distractions because of their political unimportance. So much so, they weren't even subject to surveillance, because Orwell didn't foresee that computers and databases would make marginal surveillance essentially free.
We have a unique Protestant cyberpunk dystopia of our own making.
"We have a unique Protestant cyberpunk dystopia of our own making."
We have a unique Protestant religious cyberpunk dystopia of our own making.
FTFY
I doubt if any organised UK Abrahamic religious body would not try to influence its MPs to the same end. Even the Hindus in India are now trying to eradicate their own religious erotic stories and temple statues.
Only the Quakers might be more tolerant of human foibles - given their history of a more balanced approach to social "morality".
"A picture of Theresa May smiling beautifically."
We have a few of them in the office. One colleague decided to get a collection of Theresa May photos as a present for another colleague (who was overly enthusiastic about her when she became PM).
These now have large amounts of very crude graffiti all over them since the GE (even the previously enthusiastic TM supporter joined in) - how the mighty* have fallen!
* Not that she was mighty in the first place.
"You are not suggesting an image with thigh length vinyl boots and a cat o nine tails are you"
I'll think you'll find S&M sites are illegal in the UK, even between consenting adults.
Still so long as the MP's husbands husbands can get their porn on expenses, who cares?
The uh, 'big guns' of the industry (PornHub, RedTube etc.) will have no choice but to comply - not through fear of being fined but because they won't want to fall foul of the Great Firewall of the UK.
The smaller porn aggregators will likely slip through the net since clearly UK.gov has no clue how many porn sites there are out there.
Even Paris can see that this whole thing is just (ironically) political masturbation.
Britain has a what now?
Ah, the proud era of the classic british porn industry - steam powered - all coming out of the ears of the classic British conservative prude (the steam - not the porn - but stranger things).
All I can think of per example is Razzle and it's sometimes more tasteful ilk.
IIRC the best parody of the British sex film industry was the 1975 Eskimo Nell.
That should be the one where the finale is a mix-up in the film cans for the cinema premiere. The X rated version gets shown to an audience of people like "Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford" - who had backed a pitch for a wholesome family film variant.
The British Porn Industry has been around for some time, they make a virtue (not sure if that is the right way to describe it) of saying "Banned in Britain" as that implies a harder (pun intended) edge to the Grumbleflicks.
At least thats what my friends in the Home Office told me...
Rob
They want to use the ownership of a CC as a way to validate age. Okay.
But they want free sites to take CCs.
Using someone else's card with intent to defraud is a crime.
BUT if someone got a legit CC from overseas with zero credit limit, and used it on a free site, they could then pass the card details around thousands of people, who wouldn't be able to charge anything to the card anyway, even if they wanted to.
Can we get a card in the names of T May and A Rudd and pass the details around? No intent to defraud after all...
How do you fine companies not based in the UK or EC? Who gets to play the endless game of whack-a-mole as companies endless change their domains? Will the credit card companies balk at the idea of their systems being used as a pseudo age verification process? Are the people who come up with these schemes really as thick as mince?
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