The change is due to new age verification laws in the UK.

Finally it seems the end of Reddit is near.

  • RedFrank24@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 hours ago

    Hm, I’m going to need some software engineers to critique an idea I have that could at least partially solve the fears people have about their personal details being tied to their porn habits.

    The system will be called the Adult Content Verification System (or Wank Card if you want to be funny). It’s a physical card, printed by the government with a unique key printed on it. Those cards are then sold by any shop that has an alcohol license (premises or personal). You go in, show your ID to the clerk, buy the card. That card is proof that you’re over 18, but it is not directly tied to you, you just have to be over 18 to buy it. The punishment for selling a Wank Card to someone under the age of 18 is the same as if you sold alcohol to someone under 18.

    When you go to the porn site, they check if you’re from the UK, they check if you have a key associated with your account. If not, they ask for one, you provide the key to the site, the site does an API call to https://wankcard.gov.uk/api/verify with the site’s API key (freely generated, but you could even make the api public if you want) and the key on the card, gets a response saying “Yep! This is a valid key!” and hey presto, free to wank and nobody knows it’s you! If you don’t have an account, the verification would have to be tied to a cookie or something that disappears after a while for all you anonymous people.

    As a result, you can both prove that you’re over 18 (because you have the card) and some company over in San Francisco doesn’t get your personal data, because you never actually record it anywhere. All you have is keys, and while yes, the government could record “Oh this key was used to verify on this site”, they’d have to know which shop the key was bought from, who sold it, and who bought it, which is a lot more difficult to do unless the shopkeeper keeps records of everyone he’s ever sold to.

    So… Good idea? Bad idea? Better than the current approach anyway, I think.

    • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      1 hour ago

      This would be better than most of the crap being proposed or implemented.

      But, since the keys are presumably reusable, they’ll presumably get borrowed shared by and among minors almost immediately.

      There could be some “Netflix account sharing” style work to deter that, of course.

      • RedFrank24@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

        Yeah I did consider that people are going to share keys, but people are going to share accounts too so that’s always going to happen. The best thing you can do is stick some safeguards on the keys where if a key is found online, it can be deactivated and potentially investigated since you can tell which shop sold the key. If there’s a shop out there just giving cards away to minors, well they’re in for a world of trouble.

        Under the Licensing Act of 2003, it’s illegal to sell alcohol to an adult if you reasonably suspect that they will be then giving that alcohol to a minor. You can assume the same will apply to people selling Wank Cards.

  • StarryPhoenix97@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    3 hours ago

    I keep thinking about some of RPs I’ve done in my life. Hot, vile, smutty text based RPs. I think about them and wonder if there will ever be a time when those words would be considered illegal and I would be arrested for posting them. This doesn’t just protect minors. It tags deviance. Some of you may know the darker corners of Reddit. Imagine if an AI flagged your subs. The delete-rebuild cycle doesn’t work anymore. Reddit will always know. If the law asks for suspects for newly illegal thought crime, Reddit will be able to point to all the users on those dark corners. We are moving into a future where privacy doesn’t matter and I fear what that means for the kinky among us.

    • forkDestroyer@infosec.pubEnglish
      5·
      2 hours ago

      I’ll never forget how he changed users’ text without them knowing it before the 2016 election. Reddit was going downhill before, but that was a turning point.

  • ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.comEnglish
    22·
    8 hours ago

    I’m a UK citizen, fuck everything about this law. I’m so sick of the current authoritarian trend amongst some western countries. The UK is one of the worst offenders.

    It’s not even about protecting kids. It’s about control and appeasing puritanical elements in society. We’re the 6th richest economy in the world and we can’t even offer some of the poorest kids food security. But at least they can’t see a pair of tits on Reddit.

    • rozodru@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      7 hours ago

      tale as old as time even since I was a kid and I’m in my 40s. Reminds me of the original videogame rating system that Sega originally implemented in NA when the first Mortal Kombat came out. Parents, to this day, are still unable to manage what their kids consume.

      I mean my parents never had an issue with this. Like when they’d rent movies, I wasn’t allowed to watch Terminator 2 until I was like 13 and it was my Dads favourite movie. He put it on “ok, you have to leave the room now we’re watching a movie” and I did.

  • deathbird@mander.xyzEnglish
    231·
    15 hours ago

    Keeping the age verifier seperate from the content host is good. Destroying the files used for verification is good. On paper it’s not too a bad system for age verification, but it really hinges on if you can trust them. Given the track record of basically almost every company and government ever…

    • tarknassus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      7 hours ago

      Problem is, how do we know that the company is reputable, audited, and so on?

      I’ve seen more places requiring verification - and each one of them seems to use a different verification company. How are there so many of these places, and why aren’t they more commonly known? Like Experian for credit, etc.

      Sure it might sound good to keep them separate - but all that is doing is absolving the content host from liabilities for providing the adult content (somewhere) on their platforms and sites. Reddit don’t want to get involved, and I’ll bet they found the cheapest and easiest provider, or the first one in the search list and thought “good enough”.

  • appropriateghost@lemmy.mlEnglish
    14·
    17 hours ago

    so those scam popups that scare people by saying their webcam was hacked and took pictures of them while looking at porn is getting state sanction!

  • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    42·
    11 hours ago

    Is it just a selfie? I can still access NSFW reddit content without even logging in though.

    Is it only a selfie? AI gen go brrr?

  • minkymunkey_7_7@lemmy.worldEnglish
    262·
    21 hours ago

    We thought the same thing about Netflix with the sharing password bans. Yet they retained more profit than ever the next year.

    Who’s to say if this is what will make Reddit end, or did they actually just got more successful after the end of 3rd party apps compared to the declaration of so many users back then?

    Digital personal verification is just going to become a fact of life in the future for everyone born after about 2012. They will use online ID cards, biometrics, location metadata that is constantly uploaded by our devices, maybe even implanted RFID encrypted chips for account verification. Passwords are becoming outdated and outmoded for security as we speak here. 2FA is the minimum security for online today but that may soon become outmoded as well.

    • ZeroOne@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      11 hours ago

      That’s because Netfilx is basically a media powerhouse & kind of a monopoly.

      & your average person doesn’t know how to effectively pirate

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      8·
      18 hours ago

      I literally haven’t had a Netflix sub since that year and I sometimes miss the convenience of it even. Haven’t been very frequent on reddit in 2 years. Neither company is going to miss me though.

      Soon it’ll just be piracy and the fediverse for me, and maybe I’ll be able to show my daughter how to download movies and shows, but I’m sure within within her lifetime, piracy will just become so unpopular that all the good sources of content die out. I do hope the fediverse will stay around though. It has a similar problem to piracy: It’s not that it’s hard, it’s more that the people making everything work get tired and it’s hard to convert people.

    • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      71·
      17 hours ago

      LOL. No “we” didn’t. A few idiots did.

      These large tech companies have e focus groups and can do extensive research on how their markets will react to these changes.

      Any analysis on social media just doesn’t have access to that data.

  • DarkFuture@lemmy.worldEnglish
    68·
    1 day ago

    Yeah, fuck all that.

    Guess we’re transitioning into a VPN only future.

    We have the opportunity to head into a utopic or dystopic future and we’re absolutely choosing the dystopic one.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
      191·
      24 hours ago

      A VPN future? Haha. Not if they don’t want to. There are many ways to prevent VPN from operating when you’re a government.

      You can just plain ban encryption, which sounds really crazy, but yeah, they’re trying to.

      You can just say “it’s illegal to use a VPN”. It’ll technically still work, but if there’s a trace of trafic from your house to a known VPN endpoint, you’re it! Great!

      They can force custom proprietary spying software on your devices. Sounds equally crazy as the thing above, right? But rest assured they’re ALSO trying to do that. Multiple times, even. And in some places… they did. Of course, nothing forces you to have such software on your device. Especially if your devices are not supported; it also turns into a “you have to buy this or that big name device, everything else’s de-facto illegal! Fuck you, we’re the government!”. And if you get caught for whatever, and your phone, PC, or anything isn’t “compliant”? Bam. Guilty.

      Plenty of option. All of them completely stupid and would weaken both privacy, individuals, and governments at large. It never stopped legislation from being pushed forward.

      • breecher@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        22·
        1 day ago

        Indeed. With our current system it was only a matter of time. As soon as the internet became a default thing which everyone needed to access just to function in their daily lives, it would of course be subjected to the exact same exploitative mechanisms that the non-internet part of our lives have suffered from since the dawn of history.

  • LustyArgonian@lemmy.worldEnglish
    464·
    1 day ago

    u/spez was the lead moderator of r/jailbait, and when he was caught, he got rid of mod transparency. Ghilisaine Maxwell was likely a l lead moderator of news Reddits as well (u/MaxwellHill). Reddit has always been compromised.

    • Krompus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 hours ago

      I’m not defending Spez, I think he’s a piece of shit and he did edit other users’ comments that were critical of him, which is fucked up, but I don’t think he was actually involved with that sub. It was possible to appoint mods without their knowledge or consent, and he’s a huge target, someone must have done it as a joke.