I just went onto reddit to a intrest subreddit which happens to be NSFW and i got this, fuck reddit im glad i quit it.
and fuck the UK goverment
That is, I believe, a British law that they're following for users that appear to be in the UK. Not like they're going to just disregard the law.
kagis
Yeah, the Online Safety Act 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
The Online Safety Act 2023[1][2][3] (c. 50) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate online content. Designed to protect children and adults online, it passed on 26 October 2023 and gives the relevant Secretary of State the power, subject to parliamentary approval, to designate and suppress or record a wide range of online content that is illegal or deemed "harmful" to children.[4][5]
The act creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be "harmful" to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher. It also empowers Ofcom to block access to particular websites.
So that's what they'll be aiming to do.
Some websites and apps stated they would introduce age verification for users in response to a 25 July 2025 deadline set by Ofcom.[47] These include pornographic websites,[48] but also the social networks Bluesky and Reddit.[49][50]
Probably should be mostly irritated with Parliament.
I expect that using a VPN that terminates in another country will avoid it, though I bet that then you can't do things like buy Reddit Gold, if that's still a thing.
I'd add that if you pick Ireland as the VPN exit country, it will have notable benefits:
If you don’t mind my hijacking, I’ve seen the term “kagis” used a number of times on Lemmy, possibly only by you but I think also others. Based on the usage, I assumed it was a Latin word to indicate some sort of transition or side-bar, but it seems to just translate to “you are”, which doesn’t make sense in context. Can I ask what it means?
Kagi is a new-ish search engine that is popular among Lemmy users. Those users are trying to get it to catch on, and have started using kagi as a verb, the same way people say “let me google that really quick.”
It honestly feels a lot like when Microsoft was trying to get Bing and their phone OS to take off, and started slipping product placement into popular TV shows. There was a brief time period in American TV, where characters had the disgusting line of “Bing it!” Usually while showing the Bing home page on a Microsoft Phone. It was just blatant ham-fisted cringey product placement.
Upvote for the verbification of Kagi :)
In this one instance I'll give Reddit a pass. This is 100% a fuck the UK government moment
Lol yeah I'm not doing that. VPN all the way.
Today I'm french.
Tomorrow, who knows?
The possibilities are endless.
Too bad VPN server addresses are on-sight to reddit's IP blocking strategy for years now. For whatever good internet choice you make, reddit reciprocates with an equally bad one
Remember when you didn't even need an email address to sign up for reddit?
If I need to look at that site, my LibRedirect extension sends me to a privacy focused mirror
I wonder if they pay per verification. If so, I wonder how hard it would be to set up a script to just keep submitting new requests a few hundred or thousands of times a day with random photos...
Random AI photos. That would be funny in theory, but they're just using AI to check the ages anyway.
Was using a VPN to watch iPlayer last night and then hopped on reddit and was like "whereintheactualfuck is all the porn‽" Before realizing I had it set to the UK. Blew my mind for a minute
I went "whereisallmyporn?" When reddit banned it from r/all. I think that was the start of its downfall for me.
I deleted my Reddit account but still follow some writers on it and had the same issue. The worst part is it's anything marked as NSFW -- even posts that were tagged as a joke weren't accessible.
I changed my VPN to another country and Reddit was still asking me to log in and show ID until I cleared my cookies and cache.
Anyone try a McLovin ID?
Fuck most governments
genuinely cannot think of a government that doesn't suck ass
It's not all around great but I think New Zealand has a pretty decent government
If any service requires me to send a photo of myself to use it, I ain't using it.
EDIT: lol wut, Facebook and YouTube want photo ID now?? I must be old enough to have missed out. My comment stands though, if I wasn't already a member on either of those I guess I wouldn't become one!
It's a UK law, you either comply or get banned. Obviously everybody now has a VPN subscription.
Italy made VPNs practically illegal. The UK might soon follow. And surfing the web with a VPN is a painful torrent of capchas. And email addresses you can get without revealing your phone number to identify yourself are becoming sparse too.
If you'd want to actually address the issue (insofar unsupervised teenagers watching porn is an issue) you'd need something like a U2F security key that can be used as anonymous age verification and be bought anonymously in a physical shop for cash, just by showing your ID to a clerk (without your details being stored). Keys being stolen or misused could then also be flagged in a public database.
Facebook does that,
Youtube does that
Does a vpn bypass it?
Edit: btw yes I totally agree with you, I'm just wondering if that would be a workaround
Reddit blocks VPN users. I'm unable to access it on my home network because of it.
Which is great! They trained me not to bother going to their site by blocking my attempts. Though I kind of want to punch Snoo now, from having to see his smug face winking at me on the block page every time. Little fucker, you used to be cool. Enjoy the inevitable bot-pocalypse nazi farm you're building.
At one point Reddit had an Onion site
"Estimate age from selfie"
fake beard sales dramatically increase
Works in real life too. Grew a beard when i was 17, and never got carded for booze again after that.
As someone with long hair and a long beard I haven't been carded in basically 10+ years.
Last weekend I got carded buying a beer with my parents-in-laws. Of course one of the very few times I didn't have my ID.
Two 65+ people order a beer and then like, oh we'll get your beer on our tab to make things easier. Bartender "I'll need to see his ID"
We all couldn't believe it. I wasn't upset or anything, it was just kind of absurd feeling. I've been drinking for almost 20 years.
It's one of those situations where common sense should be allowed to be used.
Yeah how tf is that supposed work??
I heard about this but I didn't really believe it, until now.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
They have to comply with local laws. (Fuck them anyway but for entirely different reasons, at least in this case they're following the law.)
Who do we throw stones at boo mercilessly? Conservatism broadly, the kink-cult that makes everything about sex and denying sex while having the weirdest, worst sex behind the scenes. Making people scared of anything remotely sexual while also championing violence and hate.
In the US, our pedo-in-chief started doing this too and you need to register your ID with the state to get into pornhub and other adult sites in some states. This is a spreading problem that people are too ashamed to push back on.
Dude I was recently visiting Florida. I totally forgot the fascist bullshit laws about porn there, was gobsmacked I couldn't view pornhub. 5 minutes and a free vpn on my phone and I was happily watching my preferred smut.
It's so stupid how pointless the laws are, like it's dumb easy to circumvent them.
Just some real bullshit waste of time. Plus a waste of money for companies that try to comply with the Florida law. Pornhub just decided if you're in Florida you can't even use pornhub because they didn't want to spend the money and time to comply with the stupid ass backwards law.
Damn, the website seems to be "with persona dot com" and holy fucking corpo.
I say we all stay off the corporate internet and just come to places like this. Usenet is still a thing, but it's all us binary kids now. Maybe we could go back to how it was in the '90s and actually chat on the platform. There's IRC instead of Discord, message boards instead of Facebook.
Usenet is still a thing, but it's all us binary kids now. Maybe we could go back to how it was in the '90s and actually chat on the platform.
People stopped using Usenet for discussion in large part because of overwhelming spam problems and a lack of infrastructure to mitigate it.
You could maybe build some sort of system to mitigate that.
Honestly, though, the Threadiverse mostly does what I want as a distributed discussion forum. I'm not sure what large benefits Usenet brings to the table relative to it.
There's infrastructure for posting large binaries, which the Threadiverse doesn't really have short of (relatively small) image posting, but servers propagating the (large) alt.binaries hierarchy plus Usenet's bandwidth-heavy "broadcast" style of post propagation is also what drove up the cost of running Usenet servers and forced them to generally go commercial. Eternal-september.org is one of the very few remaining free-as-in-gratis Usenet servers, and they don't propagate alt.binaries. And I'd expect that Parliament would crack down on commercial Usenet operators if the Act doesn't already do so and Usenet sees a major surge in popularity in the UK for the pornography that this is trying to block; payment processors are necessary for commercial service, and easy for countries to lean on as leverage. If you want the ability to post large binaries in a state-censorship-resistant way, I'd probably...hmm. If a state wants to leverage its control of the network infrastructure to block access, it can make access pretty difficult. Maybe use Hyphanet (previously known as Freenet) for the files, then use magnet-style links on a more latency-friendly forum for discussion.
but it’s all us binary kids now.
It took me a second to realize what you meant. My first thought was, "Wait, like, binary genders? Cis-gendered people?" Then I remembered binary code exists and I laughed at myself.
haha, yeah. Like that other poster said spam was running wild but all the old heads were blaming us "binary kids" for "killing usenet" with our large files.
I'm pretty sure Gen Z and Gen Alpha are not going to be using Facebook, Message boards or anything else from a previous era.
Chances are they will find simple and effective ways to bypass censorship.
Message boards are closing or blocking the UK because of this. We even lost lemmy.zip in the UK. But the way lemmy works means you could access it from other instances. Probably illegal in the UK but as long as people are ok with spinning up instances and telling the UK to get fucked it will probably be fine.
Age verification is insane in it's entirety and no payment processor, corpo, government, or think-tank has any right to enforce their puritanical views on sex and Orwellian techno-fascist policies on everyone.
Reads like more material for the Palantir machine.
Try using old.reddit.com. Literally just replace www with old, or add old in front of reddit.com. This should take you to a version of reddit's interface which isn't complete trash and it usually also allows you to bypass the need to login for NSFW content.
I use rdx.overdevs.com for anything I need on reddit these days, it's a read only interface that isn't affiliated with the site and doesn't track you or advertise anything.
Or use Stealth if you're on Android.
Once they figure that out they will no doubt get rid of old.reddit.com.
Here's an interesting point. I just went to an nsfw sub to see if I'd get that prompt, and it gives me two ways to verify - selfie or photo ID. The photo ID has to be "government issued", and maybe I don't have one of those. The selfie is a link for a phone, using a QR code and I don't have a phone that can scan QR codes.
This means that in order to access said sub, I'd need to buy a new phone or wait 30 days or whatever to buy some kind of ID. Even with all the other reasons this sucks, that seems discriminatory.
I don't have a phone that can scan QR codes.
QR codes are a plain text encoding scheme. If you can screenshot it, you have access to FOSS software that can decode it, and you can paste that URL into your browser.
What I don't understand is that there are ways to prevent kids from looking at porn that don't rely on crazy shit like this, even if they do involve some government action. Having to send a picture of your face to a porn provider to view porn is the dumbest possible way to fix this. I suspect the real reason for all of this is people want to effectively ban porn altogether and dumb fucks are letting them.
Having to upload your ID anywhere is already sketchy as-is, let alone a porn site. What ever happened to the days of "never use your real name on the internet"? Computer class teachers would drill that into students' heads all the way through K-12.
When Facebook came along, I thought people were insane for posting things under their full name with their photo attached to it. I thought MySpace was asking for too much personal info as-is! Fast forward ~20 years, and not only are you expected to provide your real identity on several websites, some American states even require it now!
Honestly blows my mind how willingly we gave up our online anonymity without even the slightest bit of pushback. We all just accept it as normal now.
FB has a very aggressive data mining verification for making an account, they don't even let you use some obscure emails to registet
@markovsgun @Abraxas Kids are being banned from all social media here in Australia soon. Including, it seems, YouTube lol.
Expensive and completely unworkable. Reminds me I must spin up that Mastodon instance for my kids and their mates :mastodondance:
It's absolutely not about making sure everyone signs up to DigitalID.
It's going to be interesting to see if, after Britons become accustomed to letting websites take pictures of their identity documents, whether there will be interesting fraud attempts made on the British public from other websites who claim that they are conforming to British law.
Brit here, I say fuck the UK government
Fucking Red Tories
The world and the internet are so low on trust, I kind of wish there was some entity we trusted.
Some website where you could upload a photo, and people would actually know for sure that all the site is going to do is compare the photo to an ID, verify you're over a certain age, and send a simple boolean "Yes" to the website that wanted to know if you were over-age. Or, to somehow know that your account is human and not a duplicate.
We could do a lot with that, but as it stands, no person or entity can ever really be trusted with that kind of data; I think most wouldn't even trust the same governments that issue those IDs.
It's simple, librarians or even gas station clerks look at your license and they give you a code that you can use idk 10 times for account signups.
No scanning or tracking of who is requesting. Just make it an ID check like buying cigarettes
The government already knows who you are! No need for a third party
Just give you a fucking oauth login and have websites use that for age checks.
some entity we trusted.
We can trust each other, just takes a little chemical and/or psychological manipulation.
It'd still be a joke to fool anyways
Yeah I hate this. Glad I’m not using it much anymore anyway but damnnnn. I’m convinced they’re rolling this out under the guise of child safety but with the profit motive of data harvesting for their donors
Basically what FB does, and you already know they use it to sell your data and train their AI
Yeah abandoned that platform long before
Wear King Charles mask and take a selfie.
What happens if everyone just uploads the same 1 photo/ID?
just use one of the libreddits like safereddit.com or something, never go to actual reddit.
Rdx is my jam
It is fucking mental that an industry plagued by data harvesting is being asked to harvest more data.
Anyway, I'm now in Belgium according to my VPN.
Does this get enforces with old.reddit.com?
Probably, if not the UK could sue them for tens of dollars.
FUCK THAT NOISE WTFFFFF give me 2015 back
Lucky we're on Lemmy, where it's basically 2015 😁
I’m going to do the Harlem shake at a David Bowie concert!
try redlib
I hadn't heard of this before, so I tried a few public instances listed on their GitHub repo. They're all throwing a json error. Do you have a link that works for you?
https://redlib.perennialte.ch/ this seems to be working.
I'd say reddit changed something and broke it.
Hosting is so easy I even run it on Termux 24/7
Stealth also works
So I don't have a horse in the race, but I am curious if you follow the link to estimate age from selfie, and claimed some random picture of a politician is your selfie, would that work?
From what I have heard it's absolute bare minimum level of checks so it will probably work
Idk but it probably forces use of ur camera and uses faceid features. can’t just upload a random photo
As those policies are enforced client side, an industrious person could probably see how it works and do whatever. I can't seem to trigger any age verification to see, but if it works in a web browser, you can pretty much rewrite everything about it and make it upload whatever you like.
Sy far the only ones I've seen are scenarios where I have to upload photo to match my appearance when I show up in person to something, so it's not useful in that context, but I'm suspecting this scenario is similar.
The counter argument could be that if a person has that ability, they are probably close enough to being an adult and/or have earned their technically illegal access to porn, and the site operator made a good earnest attempt that stands up to casual lying.
Yeah I already left Reddit because (one of the reasons) they wouldnt let you open NSFW content without downloading their app on mobile. Having to submit ID is just way too ridiculous.
I was forced out of reddit, as are many through their schemes of removing accounts that doesn't adhere to propaganda standards
They permabanned me claiming that I had posted the Alligator Auschwitz video and called it Bullying ( violating rule 1). Their evidence when I appealed? A screenshot of the video with "deleted" as the poster. Thing is, the only subs I ever posted to were niche hobby subs. I would comment in politics subs and news subs, but not post. I can't even lie, it hurts to lose access to some of those subs since Lemmy simply doesn't fill the void yet.
Discord is the same now. Wish more communities used something else
people will not let this become the norm (aka persona hq bombings, im predicting that)
They will. People tolerate shitloads. They doubly tolerate it if you tell them to think of the children and point out the only reason they could possibly be offended by this is if they were some kind of pedophile.
If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear. Now submit to increasing orwellian surveillance.
VPN, friend
Unfortunately they require "proof of liveness", you have to open your mouth or tilt your head or whatever. There are ways around it but I too have nuked my Reddit account and returned to Lemmy today.
Gross
They're compromised.
I worked for an early AI project for [large tech giant]. While there, Alexis Ohanian came into the office and talked to my boss about using reddit's content (your posts and probably private correspondence, too, we got it from every other social network) as corpora for the AI/bot, it wasn't quite "training data" yet, it was early still in the game, but most likely it has become such.
So yeah, add that to reasons to hate reddit. I have never understood the appeal of what is essentially a for-profit USENET/BBS system, except that you can decorate yourself with flare or whatever it's called. Why'd people start using it? Why do we give away our collectively-owned technology to these dipshits?
Why dont they just offer some government id api service that Reddit can use? Giving away ur id and shit for everything is insane
Every country has their own, and they usually have pretty strict guidelines with who can access it.
its much easier to outsource this process to llms (or, much more likely, people manually checking it somewhere in Philippines)
Britain is the one to enforce this, so Britain should provide a way to do it imo, fair if the government has a partnership with a private actor to do it. But the government should absolutely have a stake and do oversight.
That's an odd way of spelling incest. /s
How old is your account? I wonder if this happens for 10+ years redditors too
I'm scared
Does old.reddit.com still work? It used to not even require a login for NSFW.
I don't know about local requirements in the UK but testing now in the US, yes old.reddit.com allows access to NSFW subs without a login
The UK recently passed a law requiring submitting a photo ID to access adult content. It's also super unclear on very important specifics
Works for all subreddit with pics, I use it to watch whatcouldgowrong, instant_regret, etc. boobies.
I'm sure there are a dozen others also.
Or use old.reddit.com and the redirect plugin for Firefox.
I'm sorry to say, but as stupid as it is, just blinking and moving away is not gonna stop the proliferation of this everywhere, lemmy included.
I got perma banned from reddit after pissing off a few of their nazi mods. Pro tip, if you wanna keep your account then don't call out blatant far left nazis.
I'm as progressive as the next but reddit has a serious issue with "extreme left ideology "
The downvotes allude to the far left nonsense already being on lemmy. It was fun while it lasted
yup, this world is full of spermlube farting toddlers, shitlube droolin, shitsteam sneezing total removed saturn cock riding nazis. i have proof. PLS queue this planet and system for total annihilation. it's worthless, unless of course youre a flying floppy dildo, on a mission to monkey fuck mars
They ID at the liquor store too.
Go ahead and give a better solution. I'm up for it.
Except you're not at the risk of the liquor store owners storing a copy of your ID when they quickly review it
Government should provide a way to anonymously verify that you have reached a certain age (not your exact age). If your id is a smart card, the proof could even be generated offline.
Yeah I agree to more anonymous it could be, the better.
Not sure how possible that is though.
-EDIT.
... at least without losing anonymity.
A solution presumes there is a problem in the first place.
You don't say?
Unpopular opinion: this is a good thing - there should be more barriers to porn. I know some teens will find a way around it, but it has been proven to affect the developing brain negatively and normalizes some really harmful behaviour.
Respect for sharing your opinions and backing it up.
That said, it's not a question about whether porn is bad; it's a question of whether we should normalize providing your ID online. I don't think the risks involved with deanonymization and ID fraud are worth it.
This is the most convincing argument for me, as I know many governments have not been putting their citizen’s interests first.
Despite the risks, I know these sorts of anonymous confirmation systems already exist, and can be implemented effectively with transparency.
Most VPN services tout “zero logs”, and many back it up with audits. We can demand the same from our government.
I’m sure drivers licenses and social security numbers made people uncomfortable too when they were rolled out, but they certainly improved our lives.
A slippery slope is a logical fallacy - we can impose just enough oversight to be helpful AND curtail overreach. We can build and verify a good system.
Also, thank you for being kind.
There is no meaningful barrier to porn without changing what makes the internet the internet. There are only old tech illiterate law makers virtue signaling about their children while those children run circles around arbitrary shit like this
What is worse is that the politicians have totally forgotten the typical behavior of youth. The are going to end up making porn seem really cool and rebellious which will increase porn addiction.
We can change anything, and if it makes society a better place then we actually have a moral obligation to try.
I’m also not asking for perfectly monitored total surveillance. Just some barriers for surface level use.
A kid can camp outside a liquor store, offering strangers money to buy them alcohol. But this is difficult, and has a chance of having them turned in.
In the same way an ID pop-up can be circumvented with savvy use of VPNs etc., but it will easily block many of the youngest and most vulnerable. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be effective.
The law doesn’t exist to raise your kids to do the right thing. This is a massive privacy violation.
Advertisers have already been mining porn habits on Reddit to sell to third parties. Browser fingerprinting and the Reddit app identify you. If you were concerned about privacy you would not be using Reddit.
But a lot of children and teens do use Reddit, and we should do our best to limit their access to pornography, especially when this data is indiscriminately collected about them too.
Then the parent(s) need to be parent(s) by monitoring their childrens online activity if they feel theyll have access to content they shouldnt. They should also explain what porn is, why they shouldnt view it, and what about it is harmful to prepare them for when they will, not might, but will encounter it so they have the tools and understanding necessary to handle and process what they are seeing. Porn exist. Its not going anywhere anytime soon. Making it harder to access for everyone isnt going to make it go away, stop witty teens from finding it, or stop content that slips through the moderation cracks in spaces that dont allow pornagraphic content.
Im not advocating for more porn or easier access to porn, but rather recognition that the parent(s) are responsible for their childrens wellbeing, education, and preparedness for adulthood where they will absolutely encounter adult content, online and off, regardless of if they voluntarily sought it out. Hiding it, pretending it doesnt exist, or avoiding the topic with them doesn't prepare them for reality in adulthood where they are expected to be able to handle uncensored life.
Not to mention, as it was pointed out several times in the comments, an ID mandate for a website is extremely easy to circumvent with a vpn, something that is incredible easy to obtain and set up. The only way, in my opinion at least, to effectively stop children from accessing porn is for the parent(s) to monitor their online activity and educate them on what and why this content is not okay for them to view as a child.
The problem is that porn and self pleasure are taboo topics. Parents seem to want to make their kids stay kids when in reality they need guidance on how to be an adult.
Parents should monitor their children’s behaviour AND society should also impose barriers. The “everything is on parents” is the same personal responsibility myth that conservatives use to justify removing government assistance and cutting things such as healthcare and schooling.
On their way home from school children cannot enter a bar and be served alcohol - or at least this is exceedingly difficult. This has undoubtedly saved people from substance abuse. The same can be said here.
Of course parents should discuss porn and its problems, just as they would with alcohol and other vices.
Also, I have taught young people technology. VPNs are not as intuitive for the mobile generation. Many will not bother, or when they figure it out they will be much closer to a reasonable age.
The barriers do not have to be perfect, but they will help.
the law isn't about access to porn it's about stopping access to lgbtq spaces (and anything else the government doesn't like)
If this is true, then this censorship is a terrible tragedy. I still would like government imposed ID age verification for porn though.
Edit: Judging by the spike in downvotes on this comment I can see assumptions are being made about my intentions.
You can limit pornography and not limit access to sex education services, or LGBT communities as they are not pornographic.
But if there was an LGBT forum posting LGBT pornography, then yes, it too should have age verification.
Fuck off. Like, all the way off.
I seriously doubt this will do anything
The youth tend to be pretty good at pushing though boundaries and restrictions