Porn company fined £1M over inadequate age checks (UK)
12 points
47 minutes ago
| 5 comments
| bbc.co.uk
| HN
raesene9
5 minutes ago
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I'd like to believe that technical people at OFCOM actually know the impossibility of what they're being asked to implement but are just going through the motions, so their bosses/politicians can put out pointless press releases like this.

Trying to restrict access to content on the Internet by requiring "robust" age verification was never going to achieve the goals they stated, and has a number of predictable (and already seen) negative side-effects.

Unfortunately governments all over the place seem intent on continuing this type of regulation, I presume so they can be seen to be doing something. Good time to be in the VPN game, I'd guess.

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LandR
4 minutes ago
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Until governments try to ban VPNs...
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raesene9
58 seconds ago
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That is one option, but then you get into the world of Corporate VPNs which are heavily in use and it would seriously cause problems if you banned.

Then you're into "what about all TLS connections" which can be used to send traffic, so you have to do TLS interception at scale, which is a very non-trivial problem to try and solve.

Then you're into non-TLS encrypted protocols, so your only option there is to block anything you can't intercept.....

At that point you've pretty much broken Internet access in your country, might as well just chop the cables :P

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IlikeMadison
18 minutes ago
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They can fine all they want, if the company doesn't have any entity in said territory they can just ignore it. What Ofcom succeeded to achieve though is to deter more and more foreign IT companies to ever expand and create jobs in the UK.
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crimsoneer
15 minutes ago
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I mean, while this might be true, I'm not sure democracies being totally incapable of regulating the internet is a good place to be. I'm not sure a race to the bottom (if you attempt to regulate us in anyway we'll leave/go complain to the US president) is really a great outcome here. "Porn websites should check your age" is not some radical totalitarian demand I think?
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mittensc
2 minutes ago
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> . "Porn websites should check your age" is not some radical totalitarian demand I think?

How would that work? do you want to provide government id to watch porn?

And how is this helping since it's not going to work overall (other sites, torrents, etc)

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brainwad
7 minutes ago
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I think it actually is a radical totalitarian demand, if the only accepted form of age verification is government ID scans or selfie face capture. People should have a right to serve content without having to deal with the SPII of their clients.
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crimsoneer
2 minutes ago
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... but they specifically don't have to, right? You can just use a third party verification company.
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IlikeMadison
5 minutes ago
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Do you really believe Ofcom and the UK establishment in general really care about the children or terrorists when they are pushing for mandatory digital ID and age-verification in every aspect of our digital lives or are you playing naive?
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zettabomb
5 minutes ago
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The alternative to the OSA is not "being totally incapable of regulating the internet". There's a wide, wide gap between complete lack of regulation and what the UK has done.
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Lio
25 minutes ago
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I love the way that the BBC studiously doesn't name any AVS Group Ltd sites in that article.
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sva_
14 minutes ago
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Funnily, ofcom itself provides a list in the opening text

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/i...

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DoctorOW
22 minutes ago
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I'd like to think somewhere in the newsroom somebody read off the list of websites, nobody admitted to visiting, so they had to conclude none of them had name recognition.
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worldsavior
9 minutes ago
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1M is nothing.
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metalman
8 minutes ago
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great news for self employed prostitutes everywhere
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