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
Comment on Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days agoand 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.
dude@lemmings.world 3 days ago
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Yeah sure, until they find a way to block that too.
dude@lemmings.world 3 days ago
I doubt UK could surpass China and Russia in terms of internet censorship any time soon
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
You’d think that, but we’re in a political culture right now that puts kneejerk reactionism before reason, logic, and evidence. “It’s Just Common Sense™” is used to shut down anyone who might have any good points to make from history or reason. There used to be a point where a politician in the ruling government would spitball something in public, and then a civil servant who knew what they were talking about would sit them down and explain to them why their idea was bollocks. The OSA has shown to us that said thing is bollocks, and efforts from groups like Collective Shout have shown otherwise.
We have major politicians here saying shit like We should Pay Taxpayers money to the Taliban to take people they wanna kill anyway. We have a whole section of the population banned from using gendered toilets and government policy written by far right activist groups. We have books being banned from libraries in certain council areas for being “woke” and we have the ever looming shadow of fascism over us from Russia and America.
Payment processors are telling us what we can and cannot buy because a reactionary group pressured them into it and the most widely used OSes on our phones and computers are ready made to basically fuck all of us if it’s profitable.
Russia can flip a switch tomorrow and cut off all access to the outside world under their “Sovereign internet” plan. Shit’ll get worse before it gets better.
plyth@feddit.org 3 days 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.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days 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.
How it will likely go with VPNs.
pay masterscorporate donors.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.
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,
plyth@feddit.org 3 days ago
Do you think those debates are for real and not a show that ends with whatever has been decided elsewhere?
The houses don’t need to know because they don’t do the planning.
Since the EU does the same thing at the same time, after it was not a problem for years, the origin for these laws must lie elsewhere.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
If that was the case, then the Lords wouldn’t have blocked the 2016 Disability Bill. You remember the one. I don’t think that was theatre, I think people in the Lords looked at that and went “lol fuck no.” They also wouldn’t have done a lot of shit if it was all planned behind the scenes and some shadowy cabal actually just called the shots.
Here’s the thing: “It’s all planned” is the cornerstone of most conspiracies, from 9/11 to “Covid is a bioweapon” or “Covid isn’t real” to literally every major conspiracy theory. But wanna know something? All of that is a weighted comfort blanket to sooth people, it is soothing to believe that there is someone or something in control and it’s just a case of getting rid of them, and it’s an ego boost to believe that You are part of a club that figured it out. They used to call it being “woke” until the far right took that term as an Alias for “Degenerate” as the Nazis used it.
But the truth is this: There is no man behind the curtain, there is no shadowy cabal who actually control everything. It’s call Capitalism, Sociopaths, and Morons who either want to make money or think they’re doing good.
I have lived through two governments (a Labour one and a Conservative one) that have floated the idea of banning encryption publicly. Both times they quietly dropped the idea when they were told that doing something like that would crash the economy. My parents are both former Civil Servants. My dad watched the Scottish Secretary at the time nearly type “Thatcher is a Bitch” into a Teletype machine that sent out press releases to every major newspaper.
I watched my own MSP (and Leader of the Scottish Lib Dems) address a crowd of mostly transgender mostly leftist people and ask them to applaud Tories who voted for the Gender Recognition Act.
There is shit in Hansard that looks like it came from a bad sitcom. There are people who are in parliament right now who I wouldn’t trust with a fucking Self Scan Checkout, let alone a seat in either of the houses.
Are there scheming bastards, genuinely Machiavellianism Motherfucks in parliament? Yes! Politics attract people who score high in the Dark Triad. Starmer, Streeting, and Farage are all genuinely horrible people. Starmer and Streeting openly want to harm transgender people, Farage wants to fund the fucking Taliban, and if we wanna talk about non-MPs, Boris Johnson stated he’s rather have mass death than another Lockdown and the last government used Covid as a way to Launder Money.
But alongside that, a good chunk of the people in our parliaments are simply fucking morons. They might be good at a collection of specific things, but they are also impressively Moronic on a level that would make the Thick of It and Yes Minister look fucking optimistic. Indeed, some of the more bastardous people I have listed and not listed here are also, weirdly, fucking morons. Look at Trump’s first term for example.
And if you wanna cling to “there’s a puppet master behind all this”, be it Satan or the Illuminati, to save you from the genuinely terrifying thought that the people at the Helm of the ship of state are Francesco Schettino, Yiannis Avranas and Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, fair, but personally, I’m a realist and the only conspiracy I hold is that the “Phillip Killed Diana” conspiracy was invented by the British Press so they wouldn’t face a shitstorm when people realised what the paps did when they got to the crash scene.
If you wanna know what is actually happening here it is:
A Dunfermline based investment firm, charitable trust and think tank (yes you heard) by the name of Carnegie United Kingdom Trust invested money in data collection firms and age verification firms like YOTI, so they lobbied the government and even basically wrote the Online Safety Act. The government sometimes lets outside groups write legislation for them because Corruption, they have other shit to do, and they don’t often know shit about the fucking shite they’re voting for.
Some of those MPs also likely had investments in YOTI and VPNs. When this was presented to the government, some poor sod of a Civil Servant had to sit down the PM/Minister responsible and try convince them that it’s a bad idea, clearly they failed. So, utilising the moral panic around Porn, Extremist Material, Pro-Ana content and the like, they passed this bill, even when a good number of these fucking numbskulls don’t even know what a VPN is, just “we need to do something” and “it’s just common sense™”.
Now not only do they (and future governments, God help us if Reform get in and use this against “woke” content like they’re doing in Kent Libraries) have the ability to age gate literally anything, but the companies they have invested in have got a GOLDMINE of very sensitive Data they can sell to people, be them from the Private, Public or “underground” sectors. Line goes up for the Investment firms, MPs with shares in YOTI and the rest. When it comes down to it, it comes down to Money, Moronity, and Kneejerk reactionism.