Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told
The children's commissioner for England tells the BBC virtual private networks are a "loophole that needs closing.
Stop ministers using VPNs to watch child porn.
Told!
Yeah, never forget how the people in power routinely gave Epstein a pass because they were participating in raping kids.
All this "for the children" is performative bullshit to take more power away from the average person.
Stop ministers making laws to... why the fuck they even do this bullshit? They are a government, they know everything about everyone even without such primitive control methods.
The people pulling the strings have obviously decided that internet freedom is a threat to them and they're taking (global) action to ensure their supremacy.
We didn’t see this one coming a mile away.
Palantir execs and shareholders are buzzing with anticipation.
Dame Rachel de Souza told BBC Newsnight it was "absolutely a loophole that needs closing" and called for age verification on VPNs.
Saw that coming. Can’t have the populace living their lives without constant, repressive government scrutiny.
But it’s for the kids what kind of psychopath could be against that!!!!???
You ban something, and people will always find a way around it. Always.
Yup, and that's how the US got the Mafia. We banned alcohol, but people wanted to drink, so the Mafia made that happen.
All a ban does is hurt law abiding citizens and businesses.
This is a fairly revisionist history version of the mafia, they were here for decades before prohibition. One might say that they profited greatly from prohibition, but to suggest they began with it is incredibly incorrect. I hate to be the actually guy but I find organized crime fascinating and I can’t let this one go
Not all bans are bad or hurt law abiding citizens. Slavery and gambling come to mind, both still exist illegally (or, in the case of gambling, semi-legally, what with the deluge of sports betting and online casinos HQd in shitty countries), but I would say them being illegal is a net positive for society.
Dead drop USBs for file sharing?
It’s a bit like “my kids will only eat chocolate” and the therapist’s response “where are they getting the chocolate from?”. If the kids are using VPNs then where are they getting the money for the VPN from? Is this parental consent?
Most likely they're using "free" VPNs.
Dame Rachel told BBC Newsnight: "Of course, we need age verification on VPNs - it's absolutely a loophole that needs closing and that's one of my major recommendations."
If this fucker had any idea what VPN even stood for they'd realize how fuckin stupid this statement is...
Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.
Hire a droplet VM, pre-installed with a server OS. Log in with provided credentials. sudo apt install docker Copy/paste a docker compose file that sets up a wg-easy container. Create a peer. Take a picture of the provided QR code. Connect to the server via a wireguard app. Done.
Are they going to ban VMs?
What a VM? What's a server OS? How do I log in? What the fuck does sudo apt mean? What is docker? Now I'm editing files? A peer? What's wireguard?
So many of you are disconnected from regular people because you're chronically online.
If kids have learned to run their own Minecraft private servers, hosting a VPN should be child's play... Pun maybe intended.
what's a VPN? what's a VPN app? how do I log in? what the fuck does a tunnel mean?
kids somehow figured these out. they'll be able to figure out their selfhosted VPN too. at least more of them might find an interest in tech instead of consuming on brainrot platforms.
sunbeam didn't describe it very clearly but it can be described in a way that its just following instructions without even having to understand it. like something like this: "register here. click this to get a free cloud server. log in to the server like this. paste this command and hit enter. install this app on your phone. tap import and scan. point your phone to the qr code on the screen."
You say this as if people are utterly incapable of learning.
Anyone can learn anything of they’re given a good enough reason to want to learn.
There are instructions that are completely "type this" monkey see, monkey do. The majority of people who cannot follow such instructions should be wards of the state.
Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.
Of course they don't. Most of them type with their index fingers and don't even understand what a VPN is.
Are they going to ban VMs?
They will keep banning things until they feel they have absolute control over the internet.
If someone tells them to, they might try until a few business interests remind them that these are also fundamental components of business networks. Once money tells them to stop it, they will.
VPN companies should just hire a lobbyist for a week and this will all go away.
Don't give them ideas!
The VM is associated with your name and payment method. It is about removing privacy so they can remove free speech and other rights. Not about porn. You don't need a VPN to access porn in the UK. Half the porn sites don't verify age anyway.
They'll ban encrypted Internet traffic that they don't have a backdoor to steal inspect the contents.
setting up vps requires money which ideally children do not have access to (not even crypto)
Docker's an unnecessary extra step. Just install wireguard server on the VM.
Myeah sort of agree if you compare wireguard vs wireguard docker.
But wg-easy has a management interface for creating peers and seeing who’s active so it’s somewhat easier to get set up.
They could require age verification or even special licensing to use any sort of internet server infrastructure. That's what I would do if that was my goal.
Ya! Let them watch all that violence on Netflix instead!
I've always been fascinated by the lengths puritans will go to prevent kids from seeing mammary glands, while simultaneously being ok with them watching blood and violence.
I've thought about this at length, and the conclusion I came to is that violence about self-sufficiency, while sex is about cooperation. With violence, you take matters into your own hands and you're in control regardless of what others feel. With sex, it's the exact opposite. You're at their mercy and they have power over you.
It makes sense in our hostile culture to teach kids about self-sufficiency and taking power for themselves. If they give that power up to others, then it opens them up to manipulation and exploitation.
I'm not making a judgement call on what's right or wrong, only what is.
Seriously though. We'll legislate anything to keep them from seeing stuff they might reasonably expect to see and do one day and glorify things nobody should ever see or experience in person.
Yeah, is the next step to ban games like Free Fire, Counter Strike etc.?
If they were really after kids watching porn (or even porn in general) it would be technically somewhat simple to force ISPs to provide filters on their end as a subscription service. I'm pretty sure I've even heard that kind of services in the past. Make it even opt-out if you really want to.
That way ISPs would just ban everything from pornhub and others unless you spesifically want it allowed or even provide a portal where you could block reddit, twitter, tumblr or whatever you wish on your account. That kind of technology already exists and it's used on many corporate setups.
There's obviously ways around that, but there's no technical way to block every possible way to move bits between computers. Even if they would shut down the whole internet there's still ways to build mesh-networks or even buy USB-drives from a shady alley.
But as we all know, it's not about porn and not about children.
You can't block porn completely without blocking VPNs. If you connect to a VPN that's all they can see. They can not see what you use the VPN for.
VPN, Tor (and similar, like I2P), every imaginable P2P network, proxies, all non-http protocols (smtp, ftp, nntp, xmpp and other instant messengers and so on) can all transfer any kind of data, porn included. And a ton of other things. Heck, I'm quite sure there's a minecraft mod where you can assemble JPG-images out of the blocks and view them that way. And then you can use stuff like uuencode where you can use anything that can move plain text to transfer binary data.
There's no way to block all of that unless you shut the whole internet down. And even then you can still trade good old playboy-magazines with your friends. VPN in itself has very little to do with the actual problem, beyond that someone apparently noticed that their current "save-the-children" iteration had pretty large holes in it.
You can't block VPNs without blocking the entire internet. You can block known VPN services, but you can't prevent people from hosting their own.
Some known VPN protocols could be blocked, using introspection tools. However, this would just render corporate VPNs useless. VPN traffic is just bytes, and so is WebSockets. Good luck figuring out whether my HTTPS traffic is legitimate internet traffic, or masked VPN traffic.
Depends on the VPN
Before the Online Saftey Act I believe ISP routers default behaviour was to block adult sites (maybe depending on time of day). From what I can find tho, it wasn't required by law. The OSA now places the responsibility on the websites.
Why are the kids technologically illiterate and undersexed until it comes to matters of government control? I'm not usually into tin foil hats, but this doesn't feel like the kids are the primary concern here.
They aren't.
I don't think it's a conspiracy theory if everybody already knows it.
What you said there, that was just a fact.
I know, it just bothers me how little they're trying to hide it.
But Dame Wontsomeonethinkof-de-Children saw a government report which says 65% of children under 5 have seen explicit videos of kittens being raped to death using power tools! Surely this constitutes an emergency which requires us to abandon online anonimity
Clearly it's a parental problem to determine if the VPN they are buying for their kids is being used to wank off, but apparently this party of 'liberty' has an unhealthy obsession with monitoring our children's genitalia these days.
Unfortunately, neither Labour nor Conservatives are parties of liberty, although there are some individuals within both that see the importance.
Yeah, it's just all these children with their bank accounts paying for their VPN subscriptions doing it all... Do they think we're that stupid? Don't answer that. 😔
It's the free VPNs that are the problem. They are privacy nightmares.
If only there was some way the government could have predicted this would happen and maybe not rushed a poorly thought out law in the first place!
maybe then they would not have:
absolute roasters the lot of them
I think the best way to solve this is to not have kids in the first place.
And deprive capital of all that cheap labor? Have you no heart sir/madam?
How about parent your children?
What about the crappy late night TV channels with the women waving a cordless house phone like it's 1996?
I'm perfectly able to watch porn because I'm 45, but I refuse to interact with any of this prove your age bollocks because I know full well that "we won't store your details" and "we will share your details with 1284 trusted data partners" are the same picture.
Also "Data breach of 500K users IDs discovered on dark web"
Kids watching porn is a much smaller problem than data breaches. Those can fucking ruin people.
This has nothing to do with porn or protecting children. It's a backdoor way to attach names and faces to VPN usage so movie and music studios can sue specific people for torrenting. They failed in bringing lawsuits previously because they couldn't pin point the piracy to specific individuals. I would bet money that the ministers leading this charge have ties to groups in the movie and music industry. The UK will be the testbed before the full rollout in the EU and then worldwide.
This is a lot bigger than the entertainment industry now. Creeping fascism and the trillion dollar surveillance capitalism industry are hellish bed buddies.
Even with an association of an identity to a VPN provider, there is no one-to-one correspondence between a person and an IP address.
True but that at least gives them a start point to try a prosecution that they didn't have before. It also depends on if the VPN provider responds to a subpeona request or national/international jurisdictions.
Everyone’s scared of Reform getting in and yet Reform are the only ones promising to reverse all this. All this is done based off the back of a 2016 survey where parents said they were worried about kids watching porn on the internet, but the survey gave no indication of what a solution would look like and gave no mention to online age verification and banning VPNs.
If I had a nickle for ever time the UK did something pants-on-head stupid or short-sighted from a minor survey or public poll, [counts change jar]... How much are big macs these days?
Unfortunately amongst the unwashed masses of the British public this bill isnt actually particularly unpopular.
I don't think it's particularly popular either, no one seems to even really know about it.
Why are people scared of reform getting in?
Racism, homophobia & sexism mostly, but I’m sure I’m missing a few.
Then again the other mayor parties haven’t been saints on the matter, tldr don’t trust a politician.
Because they are a bunch of idiot racist grifters. And those are their good points.
FYI, with Mullvad VPN set to UK, sites that require age verification:
Sites tha do NOT require age verification:
And xvideos.com is a bit special since it shows you the thumbnails of porn videos but won't let you play them.
But we need to stop VPNs! Think of the whole two children that have VPNs! What if instead of just going to the half of the sites that don't verify age, they figure out how to use a VPN?! Oh the humanity!
Yeah, UK wants to de-anonymize VPN users as the next step in their attack on free speech. It is laughable to think this is about anything else.
Very interesting. I'll have to inspect and research each of these sites, many I never knew about, in very close detail for the sake of science.
Stop fucking but make children.
Religious fundamentalists famously love being the only source of sexual "education".
The irony is that despite being a confessional state, the UK is 100x more secular than the USA.
if the strategy is to tell children to stop circumventing the rules with a workaround, couldn’t the original messaging just have been “talk to your children about not watching porn”
it’s so obvious the identification laws have nothing to do with protecting children from porn and everything to do with Big Brother surveillance
Who cares if kids porn anyways? Like they're going to find a way if they want to. I was cooking into my own around the time the Internet just started hitting households, and therefore wasn't the vehicle for porn it is today. There was a full on underground economy with all the prepubescent boys. Kids are going to do what they want regardless of legality.
Let's say they do. So people start using non UK VPNs. So you need age verification for any Internet access? For any computer or phone that could connect to the Internet?
That's what they're aiming for, yes.
They want to know where everyone is and what every person is doing at every possible moment of every day, be that in public or on the Internet. They are paranoid and know that their entire system is in danger of collapse with the common man gaining control over the rich and powerful.
Thus they resort to extreme control of the commoners to ensure that won't happen.
Child protection and anti-pornography stances are perfect excuses because they're very difficult to argue against.
Every time some new measure is released "for protection", the next day it's being used to sniff out dissidents. That usually means journalists, activists (political, labor, environment, ...) and sympathisants to give them a bit of pressure to straight up arrest them on some pretense.
difficult to argue against.
Well, except for this one.
and here we have the heart of the issue, and their end goal. identification required for Internet access. total control.
100% and as always they boil it down to "well even if all that other stuff is true, it's for the safety of children."
Yet we have fucking confirmation that exposing networks of wealthy and powerful pedophiles is not on the agenda. Those people are untouchable. Those people are also the ones that we are handing complete control over to.
So who tf are we really protecting children from by doing this?
So you need age verification for any Internet access? For any computer or phone that could connect to the Internet?
I mean, experts have said for a while that if you’re going to require age verification, doing it directly on the device would be the most secure way. Allow parents to verify their phones, while creating child accounts for their kids.
When the site needs to verify their age, it simply asks the device directly if the user account is age-verified. It all happens in the background, so the adults never even need to bother with it once it’s set up.
That makes sense. And seems like it would have much easier implementation as well.
Don't parental controls exist for a reason? Can't you just block VPN use on individual devices like an additional parental control rather than making everyone that uses a VPN prove they're not a child?
Streisand effect: the BBC is telling every last kid that VPN is exactly the way to circumvent the prohibition.
Because the goal is to outlaw VPNs. To do that they need enough children to use VPNs to make it credible enough.
As if something being credible has ever stopped a politician from acting.
This is fascists using "think of the children" to violate everyone's online privacy and spy on everyone worldwide.
Moronic bit is atlast asking parents to be responsible
I remember when my step-son was a teenager. I didn't care that he watched porn. I cared that he infected the family PC with viruses and malware trying to watch porn.
When they effectively make the internet a dangerous place, Usenet will rise from the darkness. P2P will also always exist and these politicians dont understand computer math, so a lot of what they're trying to accomplish is bound to fail.
As someone who just read the Wikipedia article on Usenet and doesn't know anything else about it: Would this be pretty much the equivalent of the internet before search engines? Because if so I'm really intrigued
Ok one question: Why do we have to protect children from porn if they've already gotten exposed to it?
To add to it: Why do we need to protect children that arent ours from things their parents are supposed to protect them from?
Weird way to shift job tasks around.
It's preying on the tech illiteracy of idiots. There are several pieces of software that can be used to locally censor the internet for minors, and they're very affordable, and I bet free versions (open source?) probably also exist.
When I was a wee lad, there were "internet safety guides" being shown to kids and parents including :
But then, facebook asked for people's fucking IDs and real names, and people just fucking forked it over. GOOD JOB DICKHEADS.
So they have more time to watch people shooting each other.
Why do we have to protect children from porn if they’ve already gotten exposed to it?
... did you know that in maternity wards, more children are born every year?
I hate what is fucking going on, but you know, logic.
Banning Pornhub makes them use the VPNs in the first place.
Hmmmmm, let me play devils advocate and say that kids should have access to porn.
If you want to actually play devil's advocate, you gotta give an argument. Otherwise, you're just being contrarian.
Let me give you one, kids try to explore topics out of curiosity. They are probably not going to look up someone torturing animals, because they don't want to see that. Kids usually look up and explore things they are ready for. Also "kids" is a pretty diverse group, a 5 year old and a 15 year old kid are very different.
For real young kids parents should monitor online behavior anyway. For teens, how is life this different than looking at a playboy or a porn tape. Teens have been doing that forever, the people creating these laws probably did that when they where kids.
It's probably a lot better to let kids (teens) explore nudity and sex in a safe environment, instead of letting them go unsupervised in places that ignore the law.
It's basically the same argument with drugs, offering legal options vs. going to a dealer and possibly getting much more dangerous drugs mixed in.
Would you rather your teenage son :
Almost like you didn't think this fucker through.
If I had to guess, I'd say the government pushback against porn is a result of members of the ruling class catching their offspring with porn.
If I had to guess, they don't care at all about porn and are using this as a pretext to censor sites that talk about LGBTQIA+ people.
And also to block access to any sex ed content that talks about how to protect yourself from predators.
If I had to guess, they don’t care at all about porn and are using this as a pretext to censor sites that talk about LGBTQIA+ people.
Transgender people are in the crosshairs and have been for a couple of years for now.
Children aren't using VPNs. Also I am going to say this: it doesn't matter that fucking much. I watched porn before I was 18. It didn't really do much to me. It did not give me unrealistic expectations of women. What did affect me were entirely unrelated stuff. Which is why I do need therapy and sexual therapy, but it wasnt the porn. It was people like that fucker.
It's funny how all the bigwigs are suddenly interested in "child safety" now that ol Eppie is gone, funny that. Also at least kids are learning how stick it to those old sacks for trying to take away their freedom.
Are these children in the room with him?
Ministers, stop watching them watch porn....
Watch them get Halloween masks to make them look like grammar just so they can automatically get recognized into the good stuff... BDSM burrito spiroasting. When I was a kid I kept a matchbox that I found on the streets. It was this awesome woman with the best looking naturally inspired gigantic breasts from Dick's last resort. Who ever dropped those, thanks man, you made my member at least 1/4" taller. At least. I don't know what the effects are to be honest.
I initially read that as "stop using VPNs to watch child porn, ministers told" and was expecting a very different article.
we could have arrived at this argument before this whole data stealing conundrum
