and fuck the UK goverment

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    3 months ago

    That is, I believe, a British law that they’re following for users that appear to be in the UK. Not like they’re going to just disregard the law.

    kagis

    Yeah, the Online Safety Act 2023.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023

    The Online Safety Act 2023[1][2][3] (c. 50) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate online content. Designed to protect children and adults online, it passed on 26 October 2023 and gives the relevant Secretary of State the power, subject to parliamentary approval, to designate and suppress or record a wide range of online content that is illegal or deemed “harmful” to children.[4][5]

    The act creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be “harmful” to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher. It also empowers Ofcom to block access to particular websites.

    So that’s what they’ll be aiming to do.

    Some websites and apps stated they would introduce age verification for users in response to a 25 July 2025 deadline set by Ofcom.[47] These include pornographic websites,[48] but also the social networks Bluesky and Reddit.[49][50]

    Probably should be mostly irritated with Parliament.

    I expect that using a VPN that terminates in another country will avoid it, though I bet that then you can’t do things like buy Reddit Gold, if that’s still a thing.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      I’d add that if you pick Ireland as the VPN exit country, it will have notable benefits:

      • Sites that pick language based on IP will probably do English.

      • It probably won’t add much latency.

      • Ireland isn’t too bonkers and hopefully won’t have any large collection of online laws of their own that become an irritant.

      • Because Ireland has a considerably smaller population than the UK, if people in the UK do this at scale for pornography, it will make the Irish statistically look like absolutely indefatigable horndogs, which I think will be pretty funny on visualizations.

    • lividweasel@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      If you don’t mind my hijacking, I’ve seen the term “kagis” used a number of times on Lemmy, possibly only by you but I think also others. Based on the usage, I assumed it was a Latin word to indicate some sort of transition or side-bar, but it seems to just translate to “you are”, which doesn’t make sense in context. Can I ask what it means?

      • Maven (famous)@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        There’s a search engine named Kagi. It’s basically the equivalent of “googles” but for a different search engine.

      • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        Kagi is a new-ish search engine that is popular among Lemmy users. Those users are trying to get it to catch on, and have started using kagi as a verb, the same way people say “let me google that really quick.”

        It honestly feels a lot like when Microsoft was trying to get Bing and their phone OS to take off, and started slipping product placement into popular TV shows. There was a brief time period in American TV, where characters had the disgusting line of “Bing it!” Usually while showing the Bing home page on a Microsoft Phone. It was just blatant ham-fisted cringey product placement.

        • Evkob (they/them)@lemmy.ca
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          Yeah I’ve noticed this user basically inserts a “kagis” into like 2/3 of their comments, it always slightly irks me because it makes me feel like I’m getting advertised at. I’ve never felt the need to proclaim which search engine(s) I’ve used to research any particular comment on Lemmy, and I find it odd that the one person who does so regularly is doing it for a paid service.

          Apart from that, their comments are usually pretty good, so I’m not accusing them of shilling or anything, but I find it super peculiar.

  • AcidOctopus@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    Lol yeah I’m not doing that. VPN all the way.

    Today I’m french.

    Tomorrow, who knows?

    The possibilities are endless.

  • Mothra@mander.xyz
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    Does a vpn bypass it?

    Edit: btw yes I totally agree with you, I’m just wondering if that would be a workaround

      • 6nk06@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        But Spez will still edit your comments. I don’t know how reddit has still some users left after that and the API train wreck.

        • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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          Exactly. I get that there are still niches there that haven’t found their place here yet (be the change you want to see), but the only way I use Reddit now is through a search for things that find old information, since it is still a huge database of data (admittedly both good and bad).

    • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Reddit blocks VPN users. I’m unable to access it on my home network because of it.

      Which is great! They trained me not to bother going to their site by blocking my attempts. Though I kind of want to punch Snoo now, from having to see his smug face winking at me on the block page every time. Little fucker, you used to be cool. Enjoy the inevitable bot-pocalypse nazi farm you’re building.

  • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works
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    Damn, the website seems to be “with persona dot com” and holy fucking corpo.

    I say we all stay off the corporate internet and just come to places like this. Usenet is still a thing, but it’s all us binary kids now. Maybe we could go back to how it was in the '90s and actually chat on the platform. There’s IRC instead of Discord, message boards instead of Facebook.

    • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      but it’s all us binary kids now.

      It took me a second to realize what you meant. My first thought was, “Wait, like, binary genders? Cis-gendered people?” Then I remembered binary code exists and I laughed at myself.

      • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        haha, yeah. Like that other poster said spam was running wild but all the old heads were blaming us “binary kids” for “killing usenet” with our large files.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      Usenet is still a thing, but it’s all us binary kids now. Maybe we could go back to how it was in the '90s and actually chat on the platform.

      People stopped using Usenet for discussion in large part because of overwhelming spam problems and a lack of infrastructure to mitigate it.

      You could maybe build some sort of system to mitigate that.

      • Maybe automated text classification is good enough to do on a distributed level, on client machines, now. Problem is that automated text generation to try to defeat it has also probably improved, and I’d tend to bet on the spammers having the advantage.

      • Maybe an out-of-band mechanism to generate information about posts would work. Have Usenet clients support pulling a database of scores for current posts in a group. Like, have some server(s) that generates various types of scores (advertising, flameware, etc) text scores for posts. Can incorporate various human moderation in that scoring, maybe let an end user subscribe to one or more “moderators”, which I understand BlueSky does something like.

      Honestly, though, the Threadiverse mostly does what I want as a distributed discussion forum. I’m not sure what large benefits Usenet brings to the table relative to it.

      There’s infrastructure for posting large binaries, which the Threadiverse doesn’t really have short of (relatively small) image posting, but servers propagating the (large) alt.binaries hierarchy plus Usenet’s bandwidth-heavy “broadcast” style of post propagation is also what drove up the cost of running Usenet servers and forced them to generally go commercial. Eternal-september.org is one of the very few remaining free-as-in-gratis Usenet servers, and they don’t propagate alt.binaries. And I’d expect that Parliament would crack down on commercial Usenet operators if the Act doesn’t already do so and Usenet sees a major surge in popularity in the UK for the pornography that this is trying to block; payment processors are necessary for commercial service, and easy for countries to lean on as leverage. If you want the ability to post large binaries in a state-censorship-resistant way, I’d probably…hmm. If a state wants to leverage its control of the network infrastructure to block access, it can make access pretty difficult. Maybe use Hyphanet (previously known as Freenet) for the files, then use magnet-style links on a more latency-friendly forum for discussion.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      I’m pretty sure Gen Z and Gen Alpha are not going to be using Facebook, Message boards or anything else from a previous era.

      Chances are they will find simple and effective ways to bypass censorship.

    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz
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      3 months ago

      Message boards are closing or blocking the UK because of this. We even lost lemmy.zip in the UK. But the way lemmy works means you could access it from other instances. Probably illegal in the UK but as long as people are ok with spinning up instances and telling the UK to get fucked it will probably be fine.

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      They have to comply with local laws. (Fuck them anyway but for entirely different reasons, at least in this case they’re following the law.)

      Who do we throw stones at boo mercilessly? Conservatism broadly, the kink-cult that makes everything about sex and denying sex while having the weirdest, worst sex behind the scenes. Making people scared of anything remotely sexual while also championing violence and hate.

      In the US, our pedo-in-chief started doing this too and you need to register your ID with the state to get into pornhub and other adult sites in some states. This is a spreading problem that people are too ashamed to push back on.

      • LePoisson@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Dude I was recently visiting Florida. I totally forgot the fascist bullshit laws about porn there, was gobsmacked I couldn’t view pornhub. 5 minutes and a free vpn on my phone and I was happily watching my preferred smut.

        It’s so stupid how pointless the laws are, like it’s dumb easy to circumvent them.

        Just some real bullshit waste of time. Plus a waste of money for companies that try to comply with the Florida law. Pornhub just decided if you’re in Florida you can’t even use pornhub because they didn’t want to spend the money and time to comply with the stupid ass backwards law.

        • ameancow@lemmy.world
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          they didn’t want to spend the money and time to comply with the stupid ass backwards law.

          They didn’t want the liability and connection to a government database that will probably start looking for people who are into like, cuckolding or something, since that seems to be what the right is absolutely obsessed with.

        • ByteOnBikes@discuss.online
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          Sometimes my VPN kicks me to one of those backwards ass states and I also get surprised by them. Swap states and I’m in.

  • archchan@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    Age verification is insane in it’s entirety and no payment processor, corpo, government, or think-tank has any right to enforce their puritanical views on sex and Orwellian techno-fascist policies on everyone.

  • markovs_gun@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    What I don’t understand is that there are ways to prevent kids from looking at porn that don’t rely on crazy shit like this, even if they do involve some government action. Having to send a picture of your face to a porn provider to view porn is the dumbest possible way to fix this. I suspect the real reason for all of this is people want to effectively ban porn altogether and dumb fucks are letting them.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      3 months ago

      It’s going to be interesting to see if, after Britons become accustomed to letting websites take pictures of their identity documents, whether there will be interesting fraud attempts made on the British public from other websites who claim that they are conforming to British law.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      3 months ago

      It’s weird how they voted against it as opposition, but as soon as they took power just let it in.

      Almost as if that’s what they wanted all along.

      • iridebikes@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        UK politicians are among the worst. The US certainly has some trash but holy shit are there some real creatures in Parliament.