Seems like the thin edge of a thick wedge. First porn, then what next? Video games? Movies? Netflix?
It seems like another data grab. I’ve not seen the technical specification but presumably porn sites will hold on to a verification token of some sort from the government ID database, which could then be used to correlate your viewing habits (at the porn site end) to your age verification request (and thus ID, at the government end).
I imagine this will drive more and more people to use VPNs. I’ve got to assume someone involved in this has considered that. Maybe this is a prelude to banning VPNs in the UK? (“They’re only used by criminals and people trying to circumvent the age verification system”)?
To piggyback on my own comment - another possibility is that every site or application with user generated content will eventually be subject to age verification. Meaning that all semblance of anonymous/pseudonymous participation online will disappear. Every username you have online will be tied back to a request token in the age verification database. Those reddit alts you use for porn, your Pornhub account, your LinkedIn, HackerNews, email.. all tied back to your passport.
All the government backed approaches I have seen to this issue fail the privacy test. There is actually an approach that works without the massive privacy violation:
It is not clear to me from the article whether this is something which will be rolled out only to viewer from the UK, or to all viewers globally.
If it's the latter, I think it will be received very dimly in countries with more-robust internet privacy regulations (or privacy-sensitive public sentiment) than what is currently the norm in the UK.
It's 2018 and people are still using the word "retarded" as if it's not just as derogatory to people with intellectual/mental disabilities as the n-word is to black people.
If you feel like a comment is egregious, please just flag it instead of feeding it. Replies that lead to off-topic flamewars just make the thread even worse.
I mean...man, I recall kids in my high school saying "that's fucking Jewish" when they didn't like something. But that wouldn't have been directly at someone or some group, so it's copacetic, yeah?
Maybe we should just be less awful about the words we use instead of trying to litigate that they're really okay, no, really, I said so.
"Retarded" was actually coined as a neutral replacement for "stupid", which started off neutral but had grown in colloquial use to the point of becoming an insult. And today you are not supposed to use "retarded" as a neutral term of art referring to cognitive development; "intellectual disability", "mentally challenged", "developmental delays", etc. are the new preferred terms.
Getting way off topic, but I wonder if this euphemism treadmill is actually still in operation. It seems like it's been a while since one of these new "neutral" terms became a mainstream insult. But tbf I don't spend as much time in playgrounds as I did when I was younger.
I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me if it continues in some form. The Jewish people have been on a euphemistic treadmill regarding how to refer to their deity for millennia now (and yes, it's still going in some sects; consider how modern Jews often type "G-d" despite no rabbinical prohibition on spelling God's name in English).
I have mixed feelings about this issue. When people say it, they're most often than not not even referring to people (as in this case). I don't immediately get how saying that _something_ is retarded is offensive to _people_. People seem to be getting offended for anything nowadays, even that they're asked if they're male of female because they identify as gender-fluid.
Definitely NOT the same as the N word (weird that you even compare it)! However, to be on the safe side I generally agree with you.
But then, we need to find an equivalent that would fit in cases like this. This isn't stupid, it's not inconvenient, it's just _retarded_.
I agree that the euphemism treadmill is incredibly annoying, and I wish people in general would abstain from making outrage their default response, but... look, something like "idiotic" would have worked just as well in your original comment, and I doubt anyone would have complained. Even if "retarded" doesn't personally offend you (or me, to be honest), it does offend a bunch of people, and even if just for the sake of having a discussion in public about the actual article without having this useless OT digression, why not just use a less controversial word? If you honestly weren't aware that "retarded" is considered offensive now, ok, that's fine, but just accept it and please remember for next time.
To dive more down this rabbit hole, the distinction is that we associate something like "idiot" with an incompetent person who has arrived at their incompetence through their own actions. "Retarded" refers to someone who is developmentally disabled, usually through no fault of their own. So using "retarded" in a derogatory sense -- even when not talking about a person -- is viewed as effectively pushing the idea that developmentally disabled people are to be looked down on. But we, as a culture, are fine with looking down on "idiots", at least for now, so there's no problem using "idiot" in that way.
I'm not looking for an argument here about the merits of all of this. I don't particularly care about the merits or your (or my!) opinion of them. That's just how these words are viewed today by enough people to influence social norms. If you don't care about offending people, that's your prerogative, but for the sake of community discussion here on HN, it's better if we try to avoid these sorts of things. Let's try to keep the SN ratio high.
> I don't immediately get how saying that _something_ is retarded is offensive to _people_.
I actually think you could argue the opposite. Maybe it's forgivable to not keep up with the euphemism treadmill when talking about cognitively disadvantaged _people_, but referring negatively to _something_ by comparing it to cognitively disadvantaged people clearly contains a negative message about cognitively disadvantaged people.
late 15c., "make slow or slower," from French retarder "restrain, hold (someone) back, keep (someone from doing something); come to a stop" (13c.) or directly from Latin retardare "make slow, delay, keep back, hinder" (see retardation). Related: Retarded; retarding.
The noun is recorded from 1788 in the sense "retardation, delay;" from 1970 in offensive meaning "retarded person," originally American English, with accent on first syllable.
It is completely fair to interpret this ID law as retarded in the first sense.
> It is completely fair to interpret this ID law as retarded in the first sense.
Which is in effectively zero cases the phrase being used here. The vernacular usage of the word is shitty and offensive. Instead of well-actuallying about maybe he meant it in the sense of the mechanical device or or or, maybe just be a person about it and recognize that the decent thing to do is to just not get your cape on for it?
This isn't code. People know what you mean when you say something nasty and being cute about it just does not change anything.
Seriously man! And the name "John" is used to describe a toilet, and a user of prostitution. The atrocities of speech and the assault on our dignity in 2018 is truly astounding.
New source of income for spammers: forget about Nigerian scams or fishing emails trying to install malware: just use stolen porn databases and blackmail users directly.
It's incredible that UK government really thought this was a good idea.
I wonder if they have ever heard of fake ID (or spoofed ip addresses)? Boris Johnson is going to be spending a million man hours a day on porn sites...
I'm fairly convinced you just used on online technical jargon generator for 100% of this comment. There are a dozen ways to spoof your IP address for TCP/UDP/SCTP/DCCP/STP/DTP/etc. connection (Even HTTPS - Don
t know why you feel this makes any difference whatsover).
Like the other the comment has suggested VPN's are a very effective way to to such a task...really any proxy system in general, TOR works as well. Hell, just have a friend leave a RaspberryPi in his house would work and tunnel TCP over SSH to it...
I'm going to use too many electrons informing you on the plethora of ways to spoof an IP address.
I think its pretty fair to assume to comment was referring to the process of tricking a website into thinking you are at a different IP address then what is actually assigned by your ISP... :/
In order to connect to a remote machine (in this case, a website) your computer must make a TCP connection to the remote server.
A TCP connection requires a three-way handshake to begin. This requires the sender (you) send a TCP SYN packet. If you "spoof" your IP address, the SYN ACK will never reach your machine, and you will therefore never be able to ACK back (with your "spoofed" IP). Because you never get this SYN ACK back with the servers initial sequence number, you will not be able to ACK back with the correct sequence number to even connect in the first place.
I'm fairly convinced you don't know how basic networking principals work, or at least do not know the difference between spoofing and proxying.
That's not IP spoofing, which actually has a well-defined meaning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address_spoofing). Using a VPN for this purpose is merely proxying your traffic through a third party who has promised not to tell the server on the other end who or where you are.
Well, that's a 'stimulating' site. It seems to be channeling the 1980s UK paper the Sunday Sport[1] (famous for its "World War 2 Bomber Found on the Moon" headline).
My favourite line so far is: "He has been banned from every farm in Britain". I can't imagine what it looks like without an ad blocker.
What a terrible website. I first thought my ad blocker broke because the site was so visually overloaded. Turns out those are links to actual "articles" of this site.
Seems like they are serious when they say "News... but not as you know it".
Waiting for the moment Labour and the Tories proudly announce they unite as the English Socialist Party [1], ban the monarchy and other political parties and rename Britain to Airstrip One [2].
Stupid and pointless because everyone will move to other underground sites and mirrors that flout the rules, better for parents to use parental protection
Uh, I wouldn't know myself, but my friend informs me that tons of pornography is available just through Google Image Search. Does the UK have a plan to block that, or to force Google to?
You could just have stopped there. They (the Government) don't. They're signalling. I'm sure they don't really care at all.
This is just playing to the gallery. Or, at least, a specific segment of the gallery that generally votes Tory but has flirted with the likes of UKIP etc in the recent past.
It's fascinating to watch the British tolerate this bizarre puritanical fascist shift. The forced surveillance laws are not unexpected, that's going on in most of the developed world these days to one degree or another. The laws around porn are the part that I never would have expected. It seems like something the more extreme conservatives in the US would have cooked up.
A society that actually believes it needs these measures is in serious trouble. None of this crap is going to work. And why would it?
Pretty much all boys got their hands on porn when I was a kid, and it seemed to have no bearing on how we grew up. There's porn addiction and all that, but there's a lot that goes into what defines an addiction(and alcohol is legal, so...), and some of the boys I knew who watched the most porn grew up to earn six figures or more in prestigious fields.
A child who is viewing porn online is almost definitely seeking it out, and if that's true, they will circumvent almost any of these truly laughable attempts to shield children on the internet.
At best, you might be able to instantiate laws around porn in advertisements. But good luck preventing kids from watching porn. If anything, age walls will make porn more exciting to watch because it makes it forbidden.
The stupidity of adults never fails to astound me. COPPA made me laugh when I was a kid, and still does.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. It's true that GB accepts far more invasive policies, including mass surveillance that exceeds the United States.
Beyond your excellent points, porn is a tremendous means for a person to discover all sorts of aspects of sexuality, both their own and the broader concept. There are so many valuable things to be exposed to sexually, and plenty of it can be difficult to explore safely or emotionally comfortably otherwise. Some will reasonably argue the obvious value to real experiences with other people, I'm not detracting value from that at all, rather I think porn is a critical compliment to sexual discovery.
I was a semi geeky teenager. My introduction to sexuality was in part courtesy of the Web. Playboy was pretty lame by comparison, even then it seemed decades out of fit culturally. The Web was a safe, comfortable way to explore what my preferences were.
Additionally, it is a tremendous help to reduce sexual assault and accidental pregnancy.
A fair portion of teenage guys are frightening enough, but the last thing that we need is a bunch of confused horny teens with no safe outlet to explore sexuality. Sure, there is some strange and downright awful stuff out there, but I can only imagine the increase in assaults and pregnancies this form of online control can cause.
Additionally, it reinforces the idea that bodies are inherently sexual in nature and seeing consenting, nude adults should be viewed as "taboo" or "extraordinary."
> It seems like something the more extreme conservatives in the US would have cooked up.
It sounds more like something the US did cook up back in the 90s; the Communications Decency Act in 1996 and then after the relevant part of that was struck down the Child Online Protection Act in 1998; similar age verification was widely adopted by adult sites in the US to avoid liability under these acts, in the brief time they were in force. Usually, credit card verification was used.
That criticism was noted in a number of media outlets at the time; it probably would have eventually become a legal issue had the laws not been struck down, rendering it moot.
And yet here we are. Hundreds of large porn sites in the US, requiring zero real verification.
Age verification was never adopted by most of the major US porn sites. I was a teenager at the time, I never once had to age verify or provide a CC to use any of the large sites. The only thing most of those sites have ever required - if anything at all - going back to the 1990s, is a click or equivalent indicating you're over 18. Beyond that there were dozens of large US porn forums back then, facilitating downloading, none of which required age verification at any point either.
> And yet here we are. Hundreds of large porn sites in the US, requiring zero real verification.
Because the relevant parts of the CDA and COPA were struck down by the courts. Doesn't change that the US did concoct laws of this type and try to enforce them.
I certainly agree, that is factually spot on. The more puritanical types in the US almost persistently attempt to do things like that, it has been a never-ending battle, only varying in seriousness, since the mid 1990s. They've rarely gotten very far with it though, mostly thanks to the extraordinary protections on speech & expression that the US has. That group's censorship efforts appear to be almost entirely stagnant or dead at present.
CIPA was much weaker than the others on its face, and interpreted to be even weaker than it seemed on its face when it was found to be constitutional at all, it's not great, but it's a far cry from what the earlier attempts tried to do.
I believe the accepted term is "swivel-eyed loons" and we have plenty of them here in the UK.
There's been a fairly strong streak of puritanism in the UK for generations. It wouldn't surprise me if we invented it (we used to be good at that sort of thing).
As to tolerating it. I have no evidence but I'd hazard a guess that only a tiny fraction of people even know. And of those that do, there aren't many groups that would vocally defend our inalienable right to watch porn.
TBH I'd expect that most Brits, if they thought about it, wouldn't expect the Government to be sufficiently competent to actually make this work. It's not a good reason to tolerate it but it wouldn't surprise me if it is one.
It seems like another data grab. I’ve not seen the technical specification but presumably porn sites will hold on to a verification token of some sort from the government ID database, which could then be used to correlate your viewing habits (at the porn site end) to your age verification request (and thus ID, at the government end).
I imagine this will drive more and more people to use VPNs. I’ve got to assume someone involved in this has considered that. Maybe this is a prelude to banning VPNs in the UK? (“They’re only used by criminals and people trying to circumvent the age verification system”)?