Technology

I see the louis rossmann in that answer

Continue to buy VPNs while using other VPNs. Or use mullvad who apparently even accept cash in the post.

Real talk though, Tor for porn would be an awful experience and would slow down the entire Tor network. Tor is slow to begin with, and downloading large files (like videos) only slows things down even more for everyone. It should be a last resort, not the first thing people flock to. It’s the same reason people avoid torrenting over Tor; It’s slow and inefficient, so your downloads take fucking forever.

Wrote a email to my MP for this exact reason.

The OSA needs repealing. All it's doing is either teaching people to follow poor digital hygiene practices, or forcing people to follow more risky methods of bypassing the OSA controls.

Whole guise of child safety is laughable when they've made zero attempts to educate everyone (not just kids) on being safe online.

If this were actually done to children/teens surely their brains would not form any associations between being restrained and horny, right?

They would definiyely want to employ that, if this bullshit actually had anything to do with protecting children.

seems like a great way to train for hands free orgasms.

Yeah, I noticed Google had evaded the ban.

Would have thought they'd be all over the opportunity to gobble up even more data.

Insert tasteless parody of the "First They Came" poem

What they can likely do is the same as with porn sites: require law-abiding, trusted and well-known VPN providers to do age verification, thus pushing people to more obscure and risky providers who don't care about the law instead.

That's how my OpenVPN server works, Digital Ocean droplet overseas.

Quick! Someone make a movie where the population suffers from affordable housing, free and universal healthcare, fair taxation, and a healthy planet!

UK has a massive federal budget problem...

The UK isn't a Federal Country. It's a Unitary state with Devolution. I know it is basically a Federal state in Practice (Holyrood, Cardiff Bay and Stormont all have varying amounts of autonomy) but the distinction is significant.

and they still keep increasing expenditure on surveillance.

This is the fucked up bit though: The OSA doesn't put the burden of Age gates on the State. They put it on The Service Provider (Websites and services). This is why so many non-porn forums, lemmy instances, and mastodon instances have either had to shut down or geoblock the UK, all the responsibility is on them to institute this lest they get sued out the arse. They can't afford to get YOTI or whatever, or don't have the manpower or money to institute their own system, so they shut down.

It's also why overblocking is a thing: because the OSA's official defination of what should be blocked is so vague so the two people who decide what get's blocked are the Service Provider and the Government effectively in that order. This is why Reddit is blocking things that should not be agegated (like support groups), because the law is so fucking vague, and why sites like Twitter are blocking tweets that don't need to be blocked under the "news" exception (yes, there is an exception for the news).

All of this, by the way, is because an investment trust and thinktank (yes, a lovely little conflict of interest) called Carnegie United Kingdom Trust pretty much wrote the OSA for the government. As an investment trust, they invest money in things, but being private, they don't need to tell Joe Public what they invest in, nor to the Investees need to tell us. So basically, they invested in YOTI or some others like it, and are making money from it because so many sites are forced to have it to work in the UK.

And all the other major tech players (Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft) are developing "Digital ID" systems as a "solution" which will not only make it easier to track people for them and the government, but also for advertisers, so they aren't complaining either.

TL;DR, The UK basically put all the pressure on the Websites so their friends can make loads of money.

knowingly leaking everyones medical information, fucking surveillance camerason every corner.. my opinion didn't meaningfully change by these, they are being a hell hole for a longer time

All of a sudden?

This is the country where 1984 was written, where they have more cameras than anywhere else, this sort of social surveillance and quiet, polite fascism is normal for the UK.

Tony Blair thought that the Labour Party would win if it were more like the US Democratic Party. That began an electorally successful period of unprincipled triangulation and petty authoritarianism. Eventually that momentum fizzled out due to the gloomy paranoid leadership of Gordon Brown, corruption of people like Peter Mandelson, and the loathsome hypocrisy of Blair's lies in support of GW Bush's second Gulf War.

Then the Conservatives got in for 14 years and fucked everything up even worse. Now the Blairite authoritarian-centrist faction is again running Labour, and so far has shown none of the political cunning that kept Blair on top. And the media fawns over the smarmy mini-Trump Nigel Farage despite his party having no policies.