This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Complacency has led us to this dystopia. Start Pirating & torrenting. Support Alternative platforms Fund dark-web tech
Guess China was just ahead of the curve.
Is there any way to fight chat control in the EU?
Email your MEPs, push back on the narrative that it protects children. IF it even did protect children it would be at the cost of any semblamce of privacy. Politicians are also exempt despite a pedo politician leading a major world power right now.
I got an immediate response explaining their stance is based almost entirely around the disemination of csam.
It is a noble goal but akin to ending traffic deaths by mandating getting and checking the coast is clear every 10 meters.
If you go to chatcontrol.eu you will find more info about chat control and how to fight against it.
Just read some story about a Digital ID being proposed called the Britcard which everyone has to carry all the time sounds very Black Mirror and concerning.
FWIW, Denmark has had this digital infrastructure in the last 10 years and it’s been the foundation of a huge transformation in terms of how people interact with the government services.
It’s also extremely privacy preserving and while Denmark is actually moving forward with an age proving infrastructure like Britain, it’s designed with zero knowledge proofs so literally no-one knows where you have proved your age.
I don’t have a problem with the infrastructure. I have a problem with how Britain designs and uses the infrastructure.
FWIW, Denmark has had this digital infrastructure in the last 10 years and it’s been the foundation of a huge transformation in terms of how people interact with the government services.
I don't think anyone has a problem with an ID you need to interact with government services. They know your identity anyway, and for obvious security reasons it's necessary that they properly verify that you are who you claim you are.
What people have a problem with, is needing to provide an ID to simply access whole categories of content across the wide internet that are not related to your identity in any way.
I totally understand that. And FWIW, I used to sit squarely in the camp that this wasn’t just foolish, it was nefarious.
But the challenge is really in how the UK has decided to implement this - zero knowledge proofs should have been a legal requirement like it is the the EU infrastructure regulation.
If there really, truly was no way to tie back proving your age to who proved their age, then surely this is a good thing? The slippery slope argument I understand but it is, at heart, at fallacy. “Well, if you start putting people in prison for murder, then pretty soon you’ll start putting people in prison for breathing”.
I’m obviously against having to prove your identity to access some content. But can I not support having to prove your age (in a fully anonymous way) without automatically saying “let’s know exactly who is accessing what and when”?
If there really, truly was no way to tie back proving your age to who proved their age, then surely this is a good thing?
Still nope.
The government shouldn't be putting up mandatory barriers for what adults watch in the privacy of their own home. It's a huge overreach.
Imagine being an adult in your 40s, living alone without a minor anywhere near you, and having to prove you're an adult with a fucking Android app every time you want to open your liquor cabinet. That's how this feels to me, and I find it extremely offensive. Like, get out of my life.
And then this age gating crap doesn't even solve the problem, and has the potential to make things worse, because only the major players like pornhub and reddit will comply. For shits and giggles, I set my VPN to UK the other day, and was able to find non-age gated porn in no time. So this is just driving minors who want to view porn to more sketchy, less moderated sites.
In the UK all pornography has to be sold in a licensed store for which you have to be 18 to enter.
Yes, obviously the internet has made that slightly anachronistic at this point, but age restrictions and having to prove your age is extremely common here.
16 to buy a lottery ticket. 18 to buy a scratch card. 16 to buy an energy drink. 18 to buy tobacco. 16 to drink a low-alcohol drink with a meal and an adult in a licensed establishment. 18 to buy a drink in a licensed established. 18 to buy alcohol to take away (“off licensed”).
Kids have to prove their age ALL THE TIME. My daughter never goes anywhere without a means of proving her age.
Why is online special?
Your analogy is poor, in my humble opinion. The alcohol you have in your home you had to be legal age to buy in the first place. Similarly if you had a porn DVD at home you would have had to prove your age when you bought it (at least here in the UK). Given that online pornography is streamed there is only “now” to prove that you’re of legal age to watch it.
Are you against age gating on everything? If not, why is age gating on some things fine but age gating on other things wrong?
In the U.K. you can buy alcohol online. When it gets delivered the delivery driver has to check your age before handing it over to you.
Your examples only serve to show what a shithole nanny state the UK has been sliding down towards to, and what a slippery slope all these "omg think of the children! 😱" legislations are.
The alcohol you have in your home you had to be legal age to buy in the first place. Similarly if you had a porn DVD at home you would have had to prove your age when you bought it
I live in a EU country, never in my life have I had to provide an ID to buy alcohol or pornography, neither online nor in person.
Why is online special?
Online, there are risks of privacy and security. It's already difficult enough to maintain a reasonable security and privacy stance that balances between convenience and not being tracked and targeted everywhere, without putting age gates into the mix. Even if you made the perfect age gate app without vulnerabilities (which you can't), that perfect app could still be spoofed to trick people into providing sensitive identifying information to bad actors. It happens with banking apps, it will happen with age gate apps.
In real life the government does not get in the middle. It is a private transaction between a buyer and the seller, and the unspoken assumption is that the buyer is an adult of legal age. Only when there are serious doubts about the buyer's age will the seller scrutinize. Online, the assumption of being bona fide is reversed: the assumption is that everyone is a minor until proven otherwise.
Online is also typically not a one stop transaction. In a single browsing session an adult might want to access many different pieces of content, spread out over several different sites. Adults having to stop and prove their age at every turn online is burdensome, draconian and has a huge chilling effect. Data has shown that sites that introduce an age gate, only retain about 10% of their users. So the other 90% either goes dark or is dissuaded entirely from accessing said materials. Neither of those are good outcomes.
Online is also special in that it doesn't even work. An online age gate doesn't really prevent anything, it just sends traffic elsewhere, making it little more than a nuissance. If a liquor store denies a minor buying liquor, the minor is SOL because there are only so many places they can physically try. Online they can just click the next link, or the next, or the next,... It's simply impossible to age gate all the sites where you can find porn. And yes, it's ridiculously trivial to find non-age gated porn, when I tried it with a UK VPN yesterday it was as simple as typing "porn videos" in DDG, and clicking the first link.
Finally, there is also a huge difference in harmfulness between consuming certain physical substances like alcohol, and viewing adult content. The very idea that it is particularly harmful for teens to view sexual materials is scientifically dubious, making this more an overbearing and disproportional "moral panic" type of reaction than a proportional, well studied and well reasoned measure. It also conveniently ignores and does nothing about much greater harms that young people fall prey to online, like what TikTok is doing to the attention span of kids, or incel/manosphere echo chambers and various other misinformation spheres, or online bullying, or screen addiction, or unrealistic and ultra-materialistic world views promoted by influencers. It aims to be a technological solution to a tiny part of a much larger societal problem, and that never works.
In my opinion, the true intent of this legislation has never been to protect children. Instead it is a power grab by a control obsessed government, and an ideological attack against those who create, distribute and view porn. The children, as usual, are only there to provide emotional blackmail to get people to accept intrusive, draconian measures. And you, my friend, fell for it hook, line and sinker.
A digital ID, by itself, isn't much of an issue and can be very convenient for the user as well. Even better, it can be setup in a more privacy conserving way. For instance, when you have to provide your ID today, you often have to give companies a copy of your ID, which isn't really favorable to the owner of that ID. With digital ID, it's easier to give/revoke access to your ID or mask certain information the other party doesn't need to know. Most ID scans are mainly done to verify the person has a legitimate ID anyways and presented it, making this digital can be an improvement.
Where it does get black mirror-ey is when you have to use that digital identity to basically log in to the internet and all your internet activity is logged to your ID. The shit the government can pull with such information is mindbogglingly bad.
I cant even think of any legit reason to do this. To protect children? The government does not care about children. Its why so many suffer in poverty. Watching tits online is the least of their problems.
The only reasons i can think of is control. Forcing people to give up more information about themselves. Because knowledge is power.
The reason is that we all live in capitalist dictatorships masquerading as "democracy", and are rapidly approaching a time when climate change, wealth inequality, and automation will see widespread revolt of the proles, so the ruling class is tightening its grip, and going all in on fascism.
If a government says they’re doing something “for the children” or “to fight terrorism”, it’s neither of those things - it’s for control. Those are just the got-to reasons they use to push them through because they can push the narrative that anyone against it supports terrorism/child abuse.
It's really simple.
The western democracies want to create a universal digital ID wallet and have that be required to access any site.
There are a lot of reasons they could want this. For example, there are probably tens of millions of fake accounts controlled by adversarial nations which are used to sow extremism and disinformation online. It is impossible for counterintelligence to detect these at scale. We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.
This is also why there is a big push to limit children from accessing social media. They're often the targets for these campaigns because they're easily manipulated and have a lot of free time to spread the misinformation once they're indoctrinated.
I don't think a digital ID is the way to solve this problem. But, we're not being asked or informed about why it is happening. They're, instead, trying to ram these measures through using moral panic about children so anybody opposing them is easily dismissed as "not caring about The Children" or "supporting sex trafficking/pedophiles/predators".
I understand the situation, but they're trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.
In the EU similar stuff is promoted by companies wanting to profit from supplying the various required software.
the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest. it's been nearly a month and i haven't heard of even a measly car being set on fire, just one petition that got a reply akin to "lol, nah". the french would've set a car on fire for less is all i'm saying
the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest.
You mean like how the french aren't protesting their country's support of Chat Control? At least I can't find any information on them doing so.
@Pamasich @themachinestops @shneancy usually #france protests against anything
#french #farmer spray #public buildings with #cow #shit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp22VgNiiWc
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/france-farmer-protest-manure-toulouse/ https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1844254/french-farmers-protest-macron-high-tax
the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest
Where were all the protests to this: https://techinformed.com/france-enforces-age-verification-law-adult-sites/ ?
This is what you get at the moment when you access pornhub from a French IP:
We used to know, even in the face of state atrocities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984%E2%80%931985_United_Kingdom_miners%2527_strike
Sadly, Thatcher broke the miners and we’ve never been right since.
With regards to this most people are just ignoring the law. VPN use has gone through the roof.
There has been a petition. And it has received the aforementioned "lol no" response. The thing is though after the French set the capital on fire the age of retirement still went up, nothing changed.
Anyway, all we have to do is use a VPN to get around it and wait for the inevitable data leak, then the whole thing will collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.
It’s cute you think VPNs will survive this.
This is all theatre. They know they have no legitimate reason to ban VPNs. Their justification for all of this is protect the children if they start banning VPNs they're going to start getting asked some incredibly awkward questions about how that's going to work.
Yup they just want more control, they know they can't have total control. So why ban VPNs, only a fraction of people uses them.
Most of the people who use VPNs use them for work as well. It would be an impossible task to craft a law in such a way that didn't ban VPNs for business use, but did for private use, other than to just come out and say that.
and that this thing will collapse
They also get arrested for peaceful protests and stay silent: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/11/nx-s1-5498378/uk-police-say-more-than-500-people-arrested-in-pro-palestinian-events-over-weekend
We need to build a decentralised internet quickly using I2P or something similar and scale and decentralise quickly. VPN’s will be the first to go then TOR after they attempt to control the exit nodes .
We need to show the governments that we are allowed to use encryption and Wikipedia and not be treated as criminals for wanting privacy .
I've been running i2p for years. It works well and if there was demand it would be fairly trivial to make Lemmy compatible.
So what did you change about your behavior after writing this message?
Scotland might finally leave the UK because of this. It has been close before, but this must do it by now.
England isn't the problem, it's London that's the problem.
London needs to become its own independent city state and then they can do what the hell they want with it and then we'll be governed by someone from Leeds or Manchester or someplace like that, by someone who actually has a grip
I doubt enough people care
