https://www.geocomply.com/

I'm not even taking a side here and what they are trying to do is obvious.

Definitely doesn't shy away from doing it! But one thing I find most irritating is that it seems reluctant to say it proud and loud.

Look at the situation with 4chan and Kiwifarms. They are basically asking to be blocked from the UK and they refuse to. I can't really say why the onus is put on the websites to enact blocks, but my suspicion is the government doesn't like the idea of displaying an official page stating that you are not allowed to see something because the government doesn't want you to.

Nobody is surprised that Russia resorts to this. They are a potemkin dictatorship. But that the UK is also acting as a dictatorship - now that's interesting.

H.L. Mencken

Browsing with a VPN is a frustrating experience. They are abused by many of their users which leads to circular capture checks and straight blocks.

Alternatively, the center starts trying to attract right-wing voters by adopting right-wing ideas like anti-immigrant views or "well, we can sacrifice the climate a bit more" positions.

Keir Starmer is from a "left" party but his actions has shown him to be a centrist, Ursula von der Leyen is quite right. Then again, these are European positioning, as someone's said years ago, the European right-wing would be liberal in the US. And with the currently openly racist regime of the USA, even more so!

They don't even have to do that, the connection can just be left to time out on the client side. This is what they did (and some ISPs still do) for the Internet Archive...

Yes, archive.org is classed as an adult site in the UK.

It seems like your VPN setup has a leak, or the real location is obtained otherwise through the operating system (locale setting or GPS).

I would be surprised if your locale leaked on GrapheneOS for example.

> Ms Kendall told Nick Ferrari: “I told MPs yesterday I'm going to come back to the House with a statement on the issue of VPNs in July. There are very strong views on both sides of this. For some people, it is about privacy, and it is the ability to use that is really held strongly by people. And for others, they say they should be banned because kids are using them to get around. And so I— the main thing that we've done is we've commissioned additional research on this because I've not been happy with the evidence."

Sounds like they realize there are two sides and no "clear winning argument" in either direction, that's why the additional research is needed. Sounds a bit more nuanced than what I expected based on your snippet.

Perfect is impossible, but if its stigmatised then the network effects stop being so punitive to children who have reasonable parents.

it's the 10-80-10 rule: 10% of kids will still access social media, 10% will never... but 80% can be swayed.

If they ban bog standard VPNs and find out they're still being used, they'll punish the VPN companies.

If the VPN companies create workarounds and avoid the punishment, they'll punish the payment processors.

If the VPN companies start using esoteric workarounds and taking cryptocurrency for payment, then they've mostly won -- most people aren't going to deal with that shit.

All the while, they'll still go after the social media/etc companies for allowing circumvention of age-gating. So the social media companies will crack down on our ability to visit their sites with any sort of privacy.

My point: laws are all imperfect but can still have a huge effect. Pointing out work arounds doesn't change that.

For context, I'm really disturbed by the recent move to punish people seeking privacy instead of the social media companies that are enabling this social media shit. They know who the companies are, since that's who they're going to punish for not age gating. But they'd (I'm talking about US based age-gating pushes as well) rather fuck with our privacy and make our PII more susceptible to data breaches than tell the social media companies to eat shit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#Dismissal

car culture < childhood

This isn't a cynically curated viewpoint. It's some* of what we have and what that cost.

* also trespassing culture & stranger-danger culture. We have ruined roaming and the development it nurtured.

Companies will be exempt (with remote employees having to identify linking their IP and computer's fingerprint with their real identity), and the next step, after using the law to silencing dissent, will be penalisation.

Quite often, people in power don’t want to hear the truth, they want to hear their own words/views parroted back to them.

I've never had this issue (using Private Internet Access on iOS).

It's pathetic how they use sobbing families to push it through, similar tactic like before Iraq invasion.

same players behind the scenes.

We've had time to witness the damage of a dopamine-doomscroll. I personally know children who've posted too much, and children who've been solicited directly by adults, both to try and meet and for nudes. And we've seen the complete lack of positive action from platforms. Roblox is full of paedophiles and Grok was letting you nudify your classmates just a few months ago. These places aren't suitable for kids.

I don't want a ban on VPNs. That isn't being suggested, just making sure they're also age-checked. But some inconvenience is a price worth considering.

Though I think banning it for children is the wrong approach. Ban the addictive and dangerous features for everyone, adults included — no more infinite scroll, and no more feeds showing content from outside social connections.

People from duma (the russian parlament) also publicly stated it would never use it for anything but children protection.

Famously at the exact same time UK was claiming there was no evidence of the medicinal use of the cannabis, the UK was also the biggest exporter of it, and all was then turned into Sativex, a cannabis based medicine, not approved for use in the UK of course (individual import is allowed).

Interesting is that the husband of one of the very prominent Home Secretary and later Prime Minister is a senior executive in the producet.

Of course there's no suggestion of the financial interest of them in keeping a monopoly. See also: https://leftfootforward.org/2021/04/revealed-uk-is-the-world...

You're trying to frame it as an "inconvenience" and not a blatant attack on the fundamental freedom of expression. I get that social media is bad, but sometimes (often) the cure is worse than the illness.

Going the other way around to try and watch British TV I used to find with a normal hosted VPN services could still figure out I wasn't in the country, but now I have a Tailscale exit node at my mum's place in the UK it always works fine.

So I suspect it all comes down to the IP source, probably a residential IP is the best possible case and with commercial VPNs it depends on how hard they work on isolating their IP blocks from known datacentres.

This is happening worldwide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_age_verification_laws_b...

Sure, whatever. Maybe in some ways.

> I personally know children who've posted too much, and children who've been solicited directly by adults, both to try and meet and for nudes.

... but not in that way.

I personally knew children who'd been solicited directly by adults before there was even an Internet. Including me, if you use the definition of "child" that seems to be popular in this sort of debate (and, by the way, it wasn't a big deal).

We did not shut down the world because of it.

If they ban the commercial providers, payment processors will be the first to enforce it. And Google and Apple will throw the 1-Click solutions out of their app store for users from those countries immediately. And with that the topic is effectively dead even for most "geeks". At this point the goal is already pretty much achieved, most people are cutoff and under heavier surveillance. Next comes the group that know what a server is, how to rent one, what OpenVPN or Wireguard are. But many of the most used websites already make your life difficult if your IP is from such a range.

It goes on. At each step you can argue "there is still a way, as long as you got networking with other countries". Absolutely correct, but at each step the group who knows how and is willing to invest the energy shrinks. And the intended goal will likely already be achieved at the mentioned phase 1 above. The fact that some people still find ways isn't really a gotcha in this matter.

And at some point they will criminalize it. Does it matter that they are unlikely to catch you? Is it worth the risk? And if so, what if you catch strays for it from an unrelated matter. Ultimately they will simply target the devs that help build easy solution for the less tech-savy.

One big reason why you want to keep a bunch of nerds tunneling out around anyway is that you keep useful, defusing attitudes like that floating around. Aka "It's not that bad, there are still ways around it, haha, those idiots".

They will when it's law. Their purpose is most likely either snake oil, or bypassing geo restricctions on netflix or sports.

1. Ban something

2. People bypass the ban

3. Ban however they're bypassing the ban

4. Goto 2

this is the first time in more than a decade that its not tories in charge, and to get there, labour also had to become conservatives

The alternatives are even more power-mad, fundamentally illiberal parties (Reform, Conservatives), equally pearl-clutching ones that will likely continue on the same road as Labour (greens) and unreliable figures that will flip-flop as soon as they are in power (libdems).

What's left? Count Binface, I guess.

I'm not in favour of this but I'm acknowledging that if the number of children accessing social media drops significantly because of a VPN ban then they've achieved what they set out to do.

I don't like the salami slice tactics of not including this in previous legislation despite knowing that it would be necessary to enforce the social media ban. There would have been a lot less support if it was presented as a complete package that could be debated in it's whole.

Except this has nothing to do with social media nor with children nor with addiction.

So, kill all news agencies and reporters I guess? or would there be a carve out for incumbents so they can cement their market share? who controls the approval list?

It's exciting to think I'll become a dissident like my parents, just because I don't want a slimy, rightwing, greasy friends of Epstein and other known abusers to ID and surveil me.

To be honest, unfortunately, I'm not really sure about this one.

/j or /s

P.S. by the way, is it possible for them to use Hetzner? Don't they need something like credit card?

Exactly. A little at a time. First it's adult sites, because if you need to show ID to buy alcohol, shouldn't you need ID to buy pornography? Once that's accepted, expand the sphere of control to non-adult sites too by redefining everything as 16+.

I'd be surprised if the law requires much beyond a vague best effort from service providers, but many already block connections from known server hosts and some even VPNs.

An airtight block is not what's required; stopping social media being mainstream for kids is.

You would need to get your sim card out of your phone and use wifi or buy one of them foreign esim

For vpns I actually found that websites that block vpns for some reasons are worse at detecting commercial vpns than when you deploy your own on vps

---

Also I forgot about other things. When my phone for some unknown reason had its region set as GB, I had British ads in YouTube music

I'm trying to discuss this in good faith but that wasn't even an argument. A bland accusation wearing a tin foil hat.

So no, not a ban for all. A ban for minors, and a severe curtailment in general. The parent post might not be 100% accurate, but it's close.

I definitely see both sides of this argument but to pretend the answers here are obvious just means people aren’t being serious. Serious harm is being caused to children and just because that’s a known cliche doesn’t make it not a real concern people have.

The law is very bad at dealing with such realities, see also piracy and drugs. The last time I checked TPB is still accessible in the UK with only DoH.

Most UK citizens do have a credit card anyway (though I in fact do not). It's more than three quarters.

It's not even the only way someone offering a service for what is after all a subscription product could achieve adult verification through existing banking-based mechanisms, because there are also bank mechanisms for making payments through a direct debit, which again you have to be an adult to do in the UK, and everyone can.

KYC processes also work though they are annoying and a VPN provider is inherently not going to want to do it.

But they are going to want to take money and there are these two mechanisms that come with adulthood verification attached.

Apple could do more on this with Wallet — they could let you pay with a virtual debit card that can only be in your wallet if you've passed their adult verification. Would need some card industry support. I am not sure why I can't just associate adulthood with my debit card; that would be a good fix.

So when the citizens inevitably start protesting against the oppression, it's easier to subdue them.

Probably how they can best attach a license to VPN use like they're doing with TV.

For decades companies like Facebook have been saying you just have to let us groom children, there's no way to have this tech and not groom children. Now the predictable consequences of that are arriving: the tech industry is being turned off, because it grooms children.

And when I say groom children, I'm talking about actual child predators, not the transphobic nonsense point.

The trade-offs and how many people care and about what specifically.

E.g., you say "Privacy is a human right", so why is it that half the websites I visit ask for permission to share details of how I use those sites with more corporate "trusted partners" than there were students and staff combined in my secondary school? I'm all on board with just banning this kind of analytics, but there's a lot of people who are more angry with the EU for forcing companies to at least ask for permission before they sell your data to all those analytics firms.

Edit because I'm getting limited:

This isn't exactly something old that has been going on for decades in its current form and the usage has increased especially since the lockdowns. Nations have also been copying each other for centuries, you don't need a secret group coordinating for it with a singular ulterior motive.

Most famously in Roblox (that's now fixed on Roblox side first with age banding, now by sharding it into three parts), and then in socials -- but the impact of, say, Instagram where kids are preyed upon because the algorithms are promoting them to preying populace, and where Meta openly runs experiments with their mental health, knowingly pushing them into harms way, is vastly different from, say, Coverstar.

Impact of abuse from Meta is well documented already, yet Meta is not punished. Kids are being radicalised by being fed toxic content, and it's also well known. Elon Musk's X was knowingly producing CSAM and non consensual nude images of real people and it took a tremendous amount of time for _anything_ to happen - and I don't see Musk on the dock yet?

There are ways to automatically block almost all kids on socials. Take away DMs and comments on the posts from all unverified users and kids suddenly will be much safer. All that can be done today.

The greasy friends of Epstein are running this shitshow, they're in the government (most famously PM of the UK knowingly appointed a longtime Epstein friend as the UK ambassador for the US), they've been covering Jimmy Saville abuses in the BBC, Police forces, the past government, which receives financial incentives from some of these companies to push things exactly the way they want.

Most severe harm to children is caused with the tacit approval of the government and media.

Sneaky access to the socials is not this.

Oh, and you know what? Receipts show it's Meta behind this weird, sudden push for age checks. Meta and their $2B.

So you already know something's off, or at least you should.

Clearly they can't. Mullvad uses WireGuard, so you could, in theory, route through a non-Mullvad peer on a self-administered VPS before coming out of a Mullvad server somewhere else (multihop). There is no way to deal with that outside of deep packet inspection, which even then would be difficult to verify because of the way WireGuard obfuscates itself.

The UK hasn't been quick to deal with Epstein's associates and has a long history of either ignoring or losing critical evidence in CSA cases associated with politicians and public figures.

With that background, mandatory ID makes it easier, not harder, for abusers to act with impunity and/or official protection.

The fact that you think there's no such group is simply insane.

I mean, the very agenda of their upcoming conference was on the front page of HackerNews a few days ago...

For example the vast majority of the UK residents is against the ongoing support and complicity of the UK in the genocide of Palestinians, to which the government orchestrated the whole operation to turn the protest into act of terrorism (!).

Etc.

Apparently if countries all put an age limit on tobacco it must mean there is a secret group coordinating for it for ulterior reasons.

Because capitalism itself is the enemy.

And information assymmetry is a potent tool, as is constant and persistent surveillance. All of these enable extracting more money.

You could argue the benefit to children in repealing it.

But sure, all governments suddenly woke up at the exact same time, give or take a few months, and realized that social media should be banned for kids.

https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2024/0119/1217560-section-31-b...