Don’t tell them you can buy a vps and run your own vpn in another country.
Hurrah Brexit!
Shithole country doing shithole things. The UK is acting like a red state, and their standard of living is dropping accordingly.
I’d argue that causation may be the other way around.
It’s recursive
I demand total access to UK official’s private life then.
I see the louis rossmann in that answer
Use tor to tunnel to a more enlightened country
buy vpn anonymously
use vpn
Continue to buy VPNs while using other VPNs. Or use mullvad who apparently even accept cash in the post.
PIA takes bitcoin, i’ve used it myself before. easier, cheaper and less risky than sending cash in the post
You can use cash to buy gift cards, then fuel your account with 3rd party gift cards. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/gift-card-payment (Not the most economical, but a good way to bootstrap into a VPN if more traditional payments are not available)
lemmy and mastodon both have lots of porn. this is a dumb waste of time.
Insert tasteless parody of the “First They Came” poem
I wonder how they figure that’s going to work out.
I couldn’t imagine being this pants-shittingly stupid about how the internet works.
Don’t forget to donate to Tor Project and/or a relay operator if you use it, even $1 covers like several TB of traffic.
We did the year of Linux. Let’s make this the year of Tor.
Real talk though, Tor for porn would be an awful experience and would slow down the entire Tor network. Tor is slow to begin with, and downloading large files (like videos) only slows things down even more for everyone. It should be a last resort, not the first thing people flock to. It’s the same reason people avoid torrenting over Tor; It’s slow and inefficient, so your downloads take fucking forever.
You use Tor to pop out in any other more enlightened country where you use bitcoin or some other crypto to purchase access to a good vpn and download the installer.
Then download TBs of porn through your shiny new vpn subscription rather than bogging down the onion network
Tor project has many retorts but imo, the easiest way to improve it is just use it, even without donating. If literally everyone used it at all costs, websites would be forced to support traffic from it and blacklisting relays would kill the whole internet, e.g. $$$$. Without these issues, it would probably be much easier to host a relay, or even embed relay hosting in the browser by default. ISPs would be forced to open incoming ports, and firewalls would include it. Then it wouldn’t be slow or limited.
Let’s extend our unpopular law to more places! Soon, you’ll have to verify your age to see boobs in real life. Which will be pretty unfortunate for teens trying to get busy in the backseats of cars.
Porn loophole? You can literally Google image search porn.
Yeah, I noticed Google had evaded the ban.
Would have thought they’d be all over the opportunity to gobble up even more data.
I fucking hate the UK, so much.
The MPs and Peers only fucking learnt about VPNs when this bullshit bill was being passed. They’re so fucking clueless about the whole thing. They don’t understand what a VPN exactly is and what it does and the fact their own government (hopefully) uses them, as do Banks (for security), Companies, and indeed, how it works.
This will lead to more bullshit.
Wrote a email to my MP for this exact reason.
The OSA needs repealing. All it’s doing is either teaching people to follow poor digital hygiene practices, or forcing people to follow more risky methods of bypassing the OSA controls.
Whole guise of child safety is laughable when they’ve made zero attempts to educate everyone (not just kids) on being safe online.
Good luck preventing someone from getting a vps in the another country and doing their own tunnel. It can be done in such a way is undetectable at the protocol level. Coming up next age verification for ssh.
That’s how my OpenVPN server works, Digital Ocean droplet overseas.
What they can likely do is the same as with porn sites: require law-abiding, trusted and well-known VPN providers to do age verification, thus pushing people to more obscure and risky providers who don’t care about the law instead.
to more obscure and risky providers who don’t care about the law instead
There’s no need to go that far, there will still be plenty of well-known and trustworthy providers who care about the law but simply operate outside of UK jurisdiction.
There is no amount of blocking the Internet that will safeguard the children effectively. The real solution is this:
If this were actually done to children/teens surely their brains would not form any associations between being restrained and horny, right?
Right?
They would definiyely want to employ that, if this bullshit actually had anything to do with protecting children.
seems like a great way to train for hands free orgasms.
Wet dreams happen no matter what you can do at puberty.
Like Idiocracy has been a manual for the US, V for Vendetta is a manual for the UK.
For fuck sake people, these are movies of worlds we DON’T want to live in.
Quick! Someone make a movie where the population suffers from affordable housing, free and universal healthcare, fair taxation, and a healthy planet!
You mean Star Trek? But where are the suffering people? It’s no fun when there is no suffering. Why would fascists want a world like that. I don’t understand why there are not more people willing to support the 1%ers. We might all be suffering, but their lives matter too you know! The world we live in right now, like in Don’t Look Up, is much more appealing. I mean, fuck poor people, fuck sick people, fuck hungry people. It’s their life choice. They just should have been born more fortunate. It’s their choice to have no life, no future, no opportunity. Might as well lock them up in prison (concentration camps) and use them for forced labor.
How about I get us started? To get the groove going;
AHHH! Look at my Bank Account! I have money left after paying rent! OHHH THE HUMANITY! 😨
Drugs are cheaper than groceries, also delivered within 15 minutes while groceries take 1 to 2 days. Guess what I’ll be consuming tonight instead of dinner!
1 grocery bag with food for 2 day: 75 euros.
Or:
5 grams of ketamine: 25 euros.
5 xtc pills: 10 euros.
3 grams amphetamine: 15 euros.
I just saved 25 euros expenses, with enough for 5 days! Yay!
Just get a Fent-a.
The only soft drink with the extra kick of terrible addiction!
I have nyl wishes getting addicted to that shit. I’m more of an upper guy. Gotta stay positive! The world is already full of downies, like diaper Donny the taco in chief.
You can get 5 grams of k for €25 ($29 usd)? Wtf!? 5 g’s would be like $400 in the us
I actually paid 1,30 per gram but only when I bought a larger quantity. But with my home dealer it’s 15 per gram, 5 for friends. Tested 86% pure needles. Perks of living in The Netherlands, cheap top quality dope with fast home delivery. Can be tested in every city. Yet there are only few homeless people and no dope crisis. The hard junky drugs like crack, crystal meth, opioids like oxycontin, fentanyl and heroin aren’t popular here. Mostly regular party dope and weird Chinese designer drugs for younger people like 3MMA and 4FMP.
I think we are living in the Star Trek universe, but we’re just getting to the Bell Riots shown in DS9. No word on if we get much past it.
V for Vendetta is a manual for the UK.
Add some 1984 to the mix.
Well both books were written to describe what british authoritarianism would look like.
Tap for spoiler
How long before we have a leak of the PM masturbating to state violence? Ugh V for Vandetta was so sexual in such an intentionally uncomfortable way
Honestly, the us is going full vendetta too. Our president is really reminiscent of Adam Susan
The US would be better off with president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
UK has a massive budget problem and they still keep increasing expenditure on surveillance. That social value is negative at this point as its taking money away from critical services. Well done to the Government continuing the worsen debt, health, and wellbeing of the population. A terrorist will kill 5-10 people, failure to protect the health & well being of population (who needs a roof over their head) it just pales in comparison.
UK has a massive federal budget problem…
The UK isn’t a Federal Country. It’s a Unitary state with Devolution. I know it is basically a Federal state in Practice (Holyrood, Cardiff Bay and Stormont all have varying amounts of autonomy) but the distinction is significant.
and they still keep increasing expenditure on surveillance.
This is the fucked up bit though: The OSA doesn’t put the burden of Age gates on the State. They put it on The Service Provider (Websites and services). This is why so many non-porn forums, lemmy instances, and mastodon instances have either had to shut down or geoblock the UK, all the responsibility is on them to institute this lest they get sued out the arse. They can’t afford to get YOTI or whatever, or don’t have the manpower or money to institute their own system, so they shut down.
It’s also why overblocking is a thing: because the OSA’s official defination of what should be blocked is so vague so the two people who decide what get’s blocked are the Service Provider and the Government effectively in that order. This is why Reddit is blocking things that should not be agegated (like support groups), because the law is so fucking vague, and why sites like Twitter are blocking tweets that don’t need to be blocked under the “news” exception (yes, there is an exception for the news).
All of this, by the way, is because an investment trust and thinktank (yes, a lovely little conflict of interest) called Carnegie United Kingdom Trust pretty much wrote the OSA for the government. As an investment trust, they invest money in things, but being private, they don’t need to tell Joe Public what they invest in, nor to the Investees need to tell us. So basically, they invested in YOTI or some others like it, and are making money from it because so many sites are forced to have it to work in the UK.
And all the other major tech players (Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft) are developing “Digital ID” systems as a “solution” which will not only make it easier to track people for them and the government, but also for advertisers, so they aren’t complaining either.
TL;DR, The UK basically put all the pressure on the Websites so their friends can make loads of money.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this shit starts pushing Scotland to want to be its own country again.
Oh my sweet summer child:
- Pretty much everything that’s happened since 2014 (Brexit, the erosion of Scotland’s autonomy, the nixing of the GRA, The Covid Response, Liz Truss) has pushed Scotland toward Independence. This isn’t even that big a push for us.
- The investment firm/think tank who basically wrote this bill, Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, IS HEAD-QUARTERED IN FUCKIN’ DUNFERMLINE.
Thanks for the info. Now I know.
How these taxes are applied either reimbursed, taxed directly, or passed on: its still is a tax burden increasing the cost of living. This and previous Government’s have only further worsened the problem. The police state reduces life expectancy.
The Online Safety Act doesn’t apply any new taxes on anyone. It forces service providers (IE: Private Companies) to institute age checks through either AI Face checks or ID either through an in house solution or buying services from a third party (YOTI or similar). It imposes a cost on a business where they have to either spend money setting up an age verification solution or acquire one from a private company. The government doesn’t impose any new taxes on people on businesses with this bill, but instead makes companies who run services give money to other companies to comply with the law.
In short, the censorship isn’t being done directly by the state, it’s being done by private companies under pain of massive fines by the state. Other than suing websites or dealing with court challenges (which is done in house), all the actual legwork is being done by private companies, some of whom, like YOTI, are making handsome amounts of cash.
Read my post, you really didn’t read it.
I’ll spell it out.
State created the law. That creates a cost to be recovered. How that cost is recovered is irrelevant, it’s s state mandated cost aka tax.
State created the law. That creates a cost to be recovered. How that cost is recovered is irrelevant, it’s s state mandated cost aka tax.
Just because it’s a state mandated cost doesn’t mean it’s a tax. Tax implies the money goes to the government to pay for goods and services. It’s actually worse than that: it’s a levy.
A levy doesn’t go to the government. A levy goes to whatever person provides the good or service. For example: if I tax alcohol based on alcohol content, the amount of money added to the tax goes to the government. If I place a levy based on alcohol content, the amount of money that is added goes to the person/company selling the booze. An example of a levy is the plastic bag levy, which was put in place to reduce plastic pollution. That money you spend on a bag doesn’t go to the government, it goes to the people you got the bag from, and they can do whatever they want with it, keep it, give it to charity, use it to buy Heroin on the deep web, you name it!
What this law has effectively done has made service providers (not just companies, but whoever runs the site) a choice: They can either develop their own age verification system or pay a company (like YOTI) to do it for them. Most service providers do the latter because they do not have the resources to do the latter.
Does the money go to the government? No (except maybe under the table nudge nudge wink wink), it goes straight to the company. What the government has done is force entities to give a private company money.
It’s a tax in the way, let’s say, a hypothetical Right-Libertarian government might tax you, or even an American Homeowners Association might “tax” you: making you give a private company money.
Levy, lol.
Call it what it is: a tax.
A burden on the population. No amount of dirty politics changes the fact. Taxes do not all get directly paid to gavernment. Like sales taxes, service tips ect.
Edit wrote another post, more depth.
It’s not a tax burden because it’s not any kind of tax. It’s a cost of doing business, like the cost of keeping and filing accounts. Imposing an additional cost on services which are by-and-large ad-funded/freemium does not have nearly the same effects as funding something out of the treasury.
It very much is.
Doesn’t matter who or how its recovered. Its still a state mandated cost, aka indirect tax.
Every single piece of legislation costs the population. They all add a million cuts to the costs of living. In times of economic crisis these costs need to come down not up.
Edit: addressing the ad revenue stream. Again irrelevant. The ad revenue stream is reduced, some platforms are talking about charging UK users the outcome is the same. Maybe some pull out of the UK or force more ads into the freemium services costing time.
The requirement to file accounts is not a tax. Call things what they are, not whatever you’ve decided they’re similar to in your mind. To do is either confusing or dishonest, depending on whether people ultimately see through what you’re doing or not.
Opposition to this on the basis of finances requires you to actually have some idea of the fiscal outcome. If the number of British children who end up bypassing the rules and viewing genuinely harmful material is small then it will result in lower costs from children traumatised, mentally ill or killing themselves.
I oppose the act because of incalculable costs to privacy, not because it might mean Facebook has to display 10 more ads to someone to maintain their profit margins.
Call things what they are, not a tax.
You should practice it.
Levy is a Tax.
opposition requires
Doesn’t require anything. It only requires personal opinion. Parliament runs on it.
Of course the privacy impact is huge. privacy just does not matter to the average working voting person trying to put groceries on the table.
MPs wont change the stance here because people want to be protected by anonymity. Frankly they won’t change stance at all. Its a certainty at this point.
But it will increase the cost of business which will be passed on and definitely exploited.
“Wont somebody think of the children”
Plenty of children starving in the UK because Government services cant raise revenue to maintain existing levels of public services.
I look to the UK and see the future of western economies. Boned badly, society highly controlled with a large overall tax burden, years of immigration to keep the budget balaced on paper increasing the impact all to delay the fallout. And yes while this will most likely not register a blip to the CPI, its still yet another cut in the wrong direction.
All of this, by the way, is because an investment trust and thinktank (yes, a lovely little conflict of interest) called Carnegie United Kingdom Trust pretty much wrote the OSA for the government. As an investment trust, they invest money in things, but being private, they don’t need to tell Joe Public what they invest in, nor to the Investees need to tell us. So basically, they invested in YOTI or some others like it, and are making money from it because so many sites are forced to have it to work in the UK.
Can you link more information about this conflict of interest? I can’t find anything about it.
Just a fun fact about “think tanks”, “institutes”, “foundations” and most of those little groups is that when they appear in the news there’s a solid chance that they’re being propped up by corpo money. Every time they appear you need to go double check their bias and you’ll often find that it will be they themselves saying they’re “a conservative think tank” and, if not that, there will likely be a Wikipedia article and a bunch of other sources confirming it. I’m sure there are good ones, but it’s largely just oil companies and banks and big tech funding some corrupt as hell “academics” in order to buy some credibility.
I loved when I got into with one person over climate change and all they could do was send me articles that use oil-backed think tanks and which quoted a climate scientist who’s such a huge liar that whole webpages exist to organize and debunk all his paid-for bullshit.
Economy and climate change is getting worse and they need to protect their rich, so more control of us low lives are needed. They laying the groundwork.
