This is fascists using "think of the children" to violate everyone's online privacy and spy on everyone worldwide.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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This has nothing to do with porn or protecting children. It's a backdoor way to attach names and faces to VPN usage so movie and music studios can sue specific people for torrenting. They failed in bringing lawsuits previously because they couldn't pin point the piracy to specific individuals. I would bet money that the ministers leading this charge have ties to groups in the movie and music industry. The UK will be the testbed before the full rollout in the EU and then worldwide.
This is a lot bigger than the entertainment industry now. Creeping fascism and the trillion dollar surveillance capitalism industry are hellish bed buddies.
Ok one question: Why do we have to protect children from porn if they've already gotten exposed to it?
To add to it: Why do we need to protect children that arent ours from things their parents are supposed to protect them from?
Weird way to shift job tasks around.
So they have more time to watch people shooting each other.
Hmmmmm, let me play devils advocate and say that kids should have access to porn.
If you want to actually play devil's advocate, you gotta give an argument. Otherwise, you're just being contrarian.
Let me give you one, kids try to explore topics out of curiosity. They are probably not going to look up someone torturing animals, because they don't want to see that. Kids usually look up and explore things they are ready for. Also "kids" is a pretty diverse group, a 5 year old and a 15 year old kid are very different.
For real young kids parents should monitor online behavior anyway. For teens, how is life this different than looking at a playboy or a porn tape. Teens have been doing that forever, the people creating these laws probably did that when they where kids.
It's probably a lot better to let kids (teens) explore nudity and sex in a safe environment, instead of letting them go unsupervised in places that ignore the law.
It's basically the same argument with drugs, offering legal options vs. going to a dealer and possibly getting much more dangerous drugs mixed in.
If I had to guess, I'd say the government pushback against porn is a result of members of the ruling class catching their offspring with porn.
I'd say it has more to do with pandering to religious conservatives to keep them in their pocket.
My vote is smoke screen, lots of nasty stuff can fly under the radar with all this talk on porn, vpn and privacy rights
If I had to guess, they don't care at all about porn and are using this as a pretext to censor sites that talk about LGBTQIA+ people.
And also to block access to any sex ed content that talks about how to protect yourself from predators.
If I had to guess, they don’t care at all about porn and are using this as a pretext to censor sites that talk about LGBTQIA+ people.
Transgender people are in the crosshairs and have been for a couple of years for now.
Actually it was pushed by some AI corp, to sell AI for verification purposes, alongside other bad faith actors.
I think the best way to solve this is to not have kids in the first place.
And deprive capital of all that cheap labor? Have you no heart sir/madam?
Stop fucking but make children.
Religious fundamentalists famously love being the only source of sexual "education".
The irony is that despite being a confessional state, the UK is 100x more secular than the USA.
Dame Rachel de Souza told BBC Newsnight it was "absolutely a loophole that needs closing" and called for age verification on VPNs.
Saw that coming. Can’t have the populace living their lives without constant, repressive government scrutiny.
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Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.
Hire a droplet VM, pre-installed with a server OS. Log in with provided credentials. sudo apt install docker Copy/paste a docker compose file that sets up a wg-easy container. Create a peer. Take a picture of the provided QR code. Connect to the server via a wireguard app. Done.
Are they going to ban VMs?
What a VM? What's a server OS? How do I log in? What the fuck does sudo apt mean? What is docker? Now I'm editing files? A peer? What's wireguard?
So many of you are disconnected from regular people because you're chronically online.
If kids have learned to run their own Minecraft private servers, hosting a VPN should be child's play... Pun maybe intended.
what's a VPN? what's a VPN app? how do I log in? what the fuck does a tunnel mean?
kids somehow figured these out. they'll be able to figure out their selfhosted VPN too. at least more of them might find an interest in tech instead of consuming on brainrot platforms.
sunbeam didn't describe it very clearly but it can be described in a way that its just following instructions without even having to understand it. like something like this: "register here. click this to get a free cloud server. log in to the server like this. paste this command and hit enter. install this app on your phone. tap import and scan. point your phone to the qr code on the screen."
It's a lot easier to get a VPN working than doing it yourself on a VPS.
Yes plan law makers needs to have a clue on what they are making laws about. Teenagers looking for porn are going to learn.
The same teenagers that don't even use computers with physical keyboards?
I'd wager less than 1% of the minors affected by this will learn how to proxy through a VPS.
So all this does is create a black market for tech. People with the knowledge of how to set up this technology will provide it as a service for those who don't.
It's the same as trying to outright ban drugs. Those who can provide for those who cannot (for a fee).
It makes these kids easy marks for malware.
They just got a motivation.
I just deployed a few VM on my phone, not even a tablet. It's not that hard nowadays with websites being designed primarily for smartphone users
setting up vps requires money which ideally children do not have access to (not even crypto)
If someone tells them to, they might try until a few business interests remind them that these are also fundamental components of business networks. Once money tells them to stop it, they will.
VPN companies should just hire a lobbyist for a week and this will all go away.
Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.
Of course they don't. Most of them type with their index fingers and don't even understand what a VPN is.
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