Comment on Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws

abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• plyth@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  but with something like Mastodon, it doesn’t really work. Like this bill was written and passed by people who don’t know shit about fuck about tech. Several Lemmy and Mastodon instances have shut down/Geoblocked the UK because of this

  So they knew what they were doing. Age verification is about removing all sources that can’t be controlled.

  source

  • abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    and yet they’re doing a fucking terrible job at it (source, I’m using a VPN, something people in the Lords didn’t even know was a thing until it was too late). It would be funny if it wasn’t my reality.

    source

    • dude@lemmings.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You know you can just switch to some small instance that’s not blocked and you’re gonna be good? Even in China the small Lemmy instances work while the big ones are obviously blocked

      source

      • abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yeah sure, until they find a way to block that too.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
    • plyth@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The control isn’t complete until VPNs are controlled. Everybody evading the ban will help to make the case that VPNs have to be regulated, too.

      source

      • abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        That’s already happening, alas, but I suspect things will get very quiet when people realise something like this would affect the bottom line negatively. Look at what happened (twice) with encryption.

        1. Government said they wanna ban encryption.
        2. Starts planning the legislation.
        3. Someone (a civil servant who’s job it is to point out the fucking obvious) points out that Banking and Commerce requires Encryption to function and banning Encryption would crash the Economy.
        4. Plans are quietly dropped.

        How it will likely go with VPNs.

        1. Government says they wanna restrict VPNs.
        2. Government Starts planning legistlation (we are here).
        3. Someone points out that Banking, Tech Security, The Military, The Foreign Office and others rely on VPNs to function and getting rid of them will fuck the economy and put national security at risk and risk negatively affecting their pay masters corporate donors.
        4. Plans are quietly dropped.

        One of the main purposes of the OSA is to make money for YOTI and the Data brokers, because you and I both know these are the main corporate sponsors, and the MPs and Lords who passed it likely have investments in said companies. Hoovering up IDs and linking them to web activity doesn’t just help the government fuck us, it makes money for MPs, Lords, and their Friends. But here’s the thing: It’ll bite not just US, but them in the arse. So here’s what’s (hopefully) going to happen.

        1. OSA is installed.
        2. Someone important enters their info into a fake age check/Someone important gets age verified for something and the service gets hacked.
        3. The hack gets made public and a lot of important people get burnt.
        4. The Bill gets quietly modified or abolished.

        British Politicians are greedy, self serving authoritarian cunts, but they are also remarkably dim. Like sometimes impressively so. Look up this passage in Hansard to see what I mean. It might cause you to have a fucking crisis.

        But yes, they do like control, problem is they don’t know what they wish for,

        source

        • -> View More Comments
• SethTaylor@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s almost like this law was made to preserve the Meta monopoly.

  source

  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They consulted with MindGeek, who own Pornhub etc… They’re one of the few companies big enough to comply. It was designed to preserve their monopoly, not Meta’s. The politicians voting on it didn’t necessarily understand that, but the law had been approved by children’s charities and (a single representative of) the industry, so there’d be no reason (if you didn’t understand how technology works) to question it.

    source
• General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What gets me is how many people in this very community have the same level of ignorance. And on top of that, they don’t understand that these laws also apply to the very service they are using.

  source