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Age Verification Providers’ Association now imagines it’s incumbent for platforms (i.e. everybody) to treat TCP connections which may be inbound from a VPN as “potential children”
Not all VPN connections are enumerated or known or knowable. Also: this is a step up from imagining that all items of content – globally – must now be individually classified & age-gated according to the UK’s Online Safety Act. Via:
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How to outsmart an AI scammer bot | TikTok
It appears that you can also verbally command an AI to give you a cookie recipe?
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Blocking Access to Harmful Content Will Not Protect Children Online, No Matter How Many Times UK Politicians Say So | EFF
No one—no matter their age—should have to hand over their passport or driver’s license just to access legal information and speak freely. As we’ve been saying for many years now, the approach that UK politicians have taken with the Online Safety Act is reckless, short-sighted, and will introduce more harm to the children that it
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Americans, Be Warned: Lessons From Reddit’s Chaotic UK Age Verification Rollout | EFF
The EFF — properly — paints platforms as victims of the Online Safety Act age-verification provisions. The Online Safety Act incorrectly presumes that all content is classified or classifiable, that all users can be meaningfully KYC’ed as minors, and that a matrix permitting the latter to access the former is implementable, let alone enforceable: But even
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Signal boss: ‘disturbing’ laws show the UK doesn’t understand tech | Times
Meredith Whittaker: Whittaker thinks these two pieces of legislation are “deeply incoherent” with the UK’s stated desire to become an “AI champion”. “You get real boosterism on that side, which I think is in many cases ill-conceived.” She adds: “There seem to be two wolves fighting under a blanket. One wants as much tech investment
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Jimmy Wales on Newsnight: “[the online safety act] is a human rights violation”
Nice commentary, watch the whole thing if you can. Starts at 22:45/ish.
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The UK’s Online Safety Act is a licence for censorship – and the rest of the world is following suit | Taylor Lorenz | The Guardian
In order to determine who is a child, all users, no matter who they are, will be forced to turn over vast troves of valuable biometric data and for ever link their offline identity to their online behaviour. The data collected could then be weaponised by the government or bad actors, and put internet users
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Ofcom apparently don’t understand “false-positive rates” nor “base rate”
Take badly drafted and overlarded legislation and then summarise it badly, and you end up with a refined recipe for shadowbanning, blocking & censorship: Our children’s codes for user-to-user services recommend that services … design and operate recommender systems so that content likely to be suicide or self-harm content is excluded from children’s feeds I wonder how many errors
age verification censorship online safety online safety act over blocking shadow banning surveillance VPNFediverse reactions
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Ofcom conveniently listing all of the porn websites which do not adhere to age verification requirements
Update: 4/12/2025: Hello, if you’re reading this because of AVS group, you might like to read this followup posting. If this is your sort of thing: On 30 July 2025, under this expanded enforcement programme, we have opened an investigation into AVS Group Ltd in relation to the adult sites [URLs…] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/investigation-into-avs-group-ltds-compliance-with-the-duty-to-prevent-children-from-encountering-pornographic-content-through-the-use-of-age-assurance
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Marc Andreessen complains to Downing Street about Online Safety Act and UK tech minister
Meanwhile, privacy campaigners argue the legislation has opened a space for unscrupulous companies purporting to provide age assurance services to gather and misuse reams of personal data. “Creating databases to store data used to determine people’s age will act as a honeypot for hackers and malicious actors because they’re compiling valuable information that can be
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Encryption Made for Police and Military Radios May Be Easily Cracked | WIRED
Sounds like one of the manufacturers had a batch of DES chips lying around: at least one implementation of the end-to-end encryption solution endorsed by ETSI has a similar issue that makes it equally vulnerable to eavesdropping. The encryption algorithm used for the device they examined starts with a 128-bit key, but this gets compressed
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