Oh cool. Phishing and identity theft committed by minors to see nudity.
Maybe the UK should stop making themselves such a desirable place to headquarters a porn company. They’ve been a hub for shell companies to do strange things and circumvent taxes and regulations for many years. Ever notice how many xxx sites have UK addresses in the footer and 2257 pages? There’s a reason.
I don’t see this working very well, considering all you need is an ID card number, lots of places to get those, or just learn to phish your own.
There is a bit of confusion, because this law was effectively dropped in 2019 but then resurrected and passed in 2023.
Enforcement is due to start in 2025, with Ofcom currently exploring feedback from industry and users.
People will be supposed to authenticate with official ID (passport, driving license, etc) when connecting to porn sites from the UK. Obviously the VPN market is already on the case - the question really is whether the porn industry will fight VPNs, which is unlikely. The biggest sites will likely just go for token efforts to show goodwill.
The end result is likely to be a growth in VPNs (which will also affect the other big internet-censorship tool from the UK government: silent DNS blocking) and more traffic getting diverted from highly-visible and highly-moderated sites (e.g. Pornhub) to smaller, rogue sites where everything goes. So an own goal, in practice; but pearl-clutchers won't be happy until the whole web resembles a sanitized Disneyland park, so expect even worse laws.
Ironic considering the UK does not have any requirement to have an ID. Passports and Driving Licences (sic) are not mandatory. The effort to create ID cards was abandoned ~20 years ago.
Will people really be expected to get a non-driving Driving Licence to access porn?
It seems governments everywhere are abdicating their primary responsibility as a single point of personal identification, then outsourcing solutions to the financial sector (banks, crypto exchanges, etc.) and dodgy 3rd party age-checking agencies.
It's already a requirement to vote. Really it's a "you don't need it but actually you do". Makes the whole anti ID card thing seem extra silly in retrospect.
Some other countries, such as Ireland, have photo ID cards that only exist to prove that you are a certain age. (almost exclusively 18, to purchase alcohol) They have no other requirements to get, beyond proof of identity.
IIRC, it's so limited because of a similar backlash against creating a national ID scheme.
Or social networks becoming even more common for hosting/access. Reddit has a board for every category you'd want. Twitter is also full of content. I can't see any one of them requesting approval per-url.
That's covered by the Online Safety Act 2023, which effectively places responsibility on social media for the content they carry. It's very likely that we'll soon see calls to ban the whole of Reddit, for example. Predictions in this field are somewhat difficult because the UK government is likely to change at some point in the next 8 months - but the Act had bipartisan support, so it's possible that these policies will continue to be pursued and enacted in the same way as before.
I know someone will try to address this. But I believe it's futile. I can't see a future where Reddit uses country specific access rules per board and monitors all posts to ensure all boards comply.
"Websites and services are blocked using a combination of data feeds from private content-control technology companies, government agencies, NGOs, court orders in conjunction with the service administrators who may or may not have the power to unblock, additionally block, appeal or recategorise blocked content."
"The technical measures used to block sites include DNS hijacking, DNS blocking, IP address blocking, and Deep packet inspection, making consistent verification problematic. One known method is ISP scraping DNS of domains subject to blocking orders to produce a list of IPs to block."
"There is a private agreement in principle between leading ISPs and rights holders, made with encouragement from government, to quickly restrict access to websites when presented with court orders. The court orders are not made public and "overblocking" is sometimes reported"
"In 2019 an in-depth investigation into overblocking by the Open Rights Group and digital privacy site Top10VPN.com found that thousands of websites were being incorrectly blocked. These included relatively harmless example from industries such as wedding planning and photography, to more damaging and dangerous mistakes like official websites for charities, schools and mental health support."
"Cleanfeed originally targeted only alleged child sexual abuse content identified by the Internet Watch Foundation. However, no safeguards exist to stop the secret list of blocked sites being extended to include sites unrelated to child pornography. This had led to criticism of Cleanfeed's lack of transparency which gives it considerable potential for broad censorship. Further, Cleanfeed has been used to block access to copyright-infringing websites after a court order in 2011 required BT to block access to NewzBin2.[30] This has led some to describe Cleanfeed as the most perfectly invisible censorship mechanism ever invented and to liken its powers of censorship to those employed currently by China."
"The Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU), which was set up in 2010 by the Association of Chief Police Officers and run by the Metropolitan Police Service, maintains a list of sites and content that in their opinion incites or glorifies terrorist acts under Section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2006. This list is passed to the public estate institutions so that access to the sites can be blocked. ISPs BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media incorporate the CTIRU block list into their filters. The CTIRU also issues removal requests if the Internet content is hosted in the UK. The UK is the only country in the world with such a unit."
"In response to the increasing number of file sharing related blocks, a number of proxy aggregator sites, e.g. torrentproxies.com, have become popular. In addition to the following, proxy sites designed to circumvent blocks have been secretly blocked by ISPs, driving users to proxy comparison sites. [...] On 5 August 2014, City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit arrested a 20-year-old man in Nottingham on suspicion of operating a proxy server that allowed internet users to bypass blocks on many popular sites."
Anyone wants to build out an id checking system to satisfy these silly things, I might be interested in building / promoting / running one that actually has privacy things in place.
Exactly why I want something akin to proton meets signal with a dose of blockchain and hashing, and creative ways to finance without the need to slay people's privacy for the ad dollars, and auto-deleting everything regularly.
I vaguely recall a thread on HN way back that said someone has a copyright or something on online-ID-chcking and need to license (a portion?) of the process? not sure the details or dates.. but this can be profitable and privacy, and fluid to help with other id check systems.
Even though I strongly hope the supreme court throws these kinds of laws and rules, looks like Euro or parts of it may keep these, and there are other use cases so it wouldn't be a total waste.
As a side note "see my other comment" is a UX disaster on hn platform. Which one? Where? Now I need to hunt for something to figure out what you're trying to communicate? No....
Maybe the UK should stop making themselves such a desirable place to headquarters a porn company. They’ve been a hub for shell companies to do strange things and circumvent taxes and regulations for many years. Ever notice how many xxx sites have UK addresses in the footer and 2257 pages? There’s a reason.
I don’t see this working very well, considering all you need is an ID card number, lots of places to get those, or just learn to phish your own.