Ask HN: What should we do about state ID legislation?
On July 25th the UK government will start enforcing ID checks to access porn sites. Any site which allows UK residents to connect to is forced to comply, or face major fines. Ofcom, the regulator, has ordered both large (like Reddit which no longer allows anonymous access to NSFW subreddits in the UK) and niche sites (Certain dating apps, grindr, etc) to comply. Somewhat interestingly this law only effects "user-to-user" content instead of all porn sites. Additionally US courts now uphold state ID laws https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397799 and the EU is planning to roll out ID verification infrastructure aswell.
Even if you could not care less, or hate porn, you can clearly see the direction the first world is going in. The aforementioned US ruling already includes anything sexual, even text, naturally including LGBT topics and sex education. Is there anything we can do to combat this and hold out the open internet a little longer?
The best I can think of is a neocities but for tor, making it easy to transition some useful content to somewhere with less prying eyes. I am also dismayed about the lack of coverage on this issue, a few years ago when states started rolling out ID verification it was news worthy, even in other countries. Now not even a blip on the radar, its somewhat surreal.
These are politics problems. Tech will never win over politics, politics has the monopoly on force (although tech can be a tactical solution at times against poor politics until you can get purchase on the politics rock face). Get involved politically or someone worse will represent you and your interests. If you're sophisticated, do your best to become ungovernable and/or readily mobile.
This will just force things underground.
This is both a political and technical issue. Change the laws to allow server operators to just send an RTA header [1] and leave the verification to parental controls on the client side. It's not a server operators job to be everyone's parent. It's not perfect, it will be bypassed by teens but it's better than what we have today and does not leak identities.
- Add header to anything that may contain adult content or user-provided content.
- Change law to allow RTA headers as an alternative means of adult verification.
- Set a time requirement in the law for all major browsers and all web clients used by small children to implement or utilize existing parental controls. When enabled check for header and prompt for authentication unless the site was already approved by the parent in parental controls. That is where parental controls belong.
- Remind politicians that the 3rd party verification sites will ultimately leak all their data and their family members data just like what was used to reverse engineer trips to Epstein island. [2] All of the politicians kinks will be exposed using such sites and/or they will be at risk of being blackmailed. Whatever lobbying or kickbacks they are getting for approving the 3rd party sites will not be worth it.
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
[2] - https://www.wired.com/video/watch/we-tracked-every-visitor-t...
I honestly think that the internet proper has become unsavable with regards to these sorts of things, and the only way forward is to have private, invite-only networks instead.
VPNs
Extract value while you can
>like Reddit which no longer allows anonymous access to NSFW subreddits in the UK
I haven't heard of this. Is Reddit enforcing ID verification or are you meaning UK residents simply need to be logged into Reddit to access this content?
>Is there anything we can do to combat this and hold out the open internet a little longer?
The internet is on its deathbed anyway. Generative AI is administering the fatal injection. This experiment has nearly reached its conclusion.
>I haven't heard of this. Is Reddit enforcing ID verification
just double checked, thyre enforcing you to validate a date of birth with an external camera based system
>Generative AI is administering the fatal injection. This experiment has nearly reached its conclusion.
i was hoping to avoid draw a defitionist conclusion for this. it seems like thats whats the world is doing. theres literally no pushback to this IRL, most of the public seem to be in favor of these IDs system