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VPN Demand Statistics: VPN Demand Surges Around the World | UK VPN demand increase: 1,987% Date: Jul 25 – 27 (ongoing)
VPN demand has surged in the UK, following the introduction of age verification requirements on July 25 (by the country’s Online Safety Act) on online material deemed unsuitable for anyone under-age. Demand for VPNs immediately surged by 1,327% in the UK on July 25 compared to the daily average over the previous 28 days. It
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Didn’t Take Long To Reveal The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About | Techdirt
Masnick on fire: A law supposedly designed to protect children now requires victims of sexual assault to submit government IDs to access support communities. People struggling with addiction must undergo facial recognition scans to find help quitting drinking or smoking. The UK government has somehow concluded that access to basic health information and peer support
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Guardian: “Why opponents of the Online Safety Act aren’t ‘on Jimmy Savile’s side’”
Some have suggested that the government could regulate age, instead of outsourcing this regulation to third-party companies. “I think the flip side of that is, do you want the government to have a record of who’s using porn sites … As we know the government is not great with data leaks and breaches. I think
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Video: Dr Kate Lister: “Who is gathering and storing your data for the new Online Safety Act?”
Answer: it’s the porn companies who were lobbying for it in the first place.
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Ofcom *may* be starting to understand that platforms are free to label entire forums as 18+ but that this conflicts with the OSA leading to overblocking
Clarifying press releases such as the above presume that all individual items of content are classified for appropriateness under the Online Safety Act; but for example: * Professional notes on Access Control The above post is written for normal people. If you want to know more about various forms of access control and to nitpick
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The Online Safety Act humiliates us all | New Statesman
Starmer has admirable qualities, but he is also a moralising disciplinarian reflexively becoming more and more himself amid the troubles of a hard first year. Labour struggles, people get locked up for tweets. Labour struggles, people can’t protest for Palestine. Labour struggles, people can’t watch porn. Now, keeping children away from porn is as wise,
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There is a very simple reason why people are turning to VPNs rather than pursuing Age Verification
Question: would you use a single free or cheap VPN app on your phone to circumvent all of the hassle, or would you prefer to jump through the hoops of different age verification processes separately for every single site you visit? Ignoring censorship, ignoring surveillance, ignoring proliferation of personal data, the answer is pretty obvious.
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Everyone has seen the thing about Nvidia apparently age-verifying people before they are allowed to tweak the hardware they have purchased?
For once this is not UK/OSA-related but it seems that once the gates are open, age verification will be used for any amount of customer information grabbing:
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ChatGPT apparently worked out that somebody was typing with their hand shifted-right by one set of keys – see picture – this has security impact because…
Seriously: if you are working on glueware between a web application & an LLM, and you’re expecting to “detect and filter-out bad stuff” using a blocklist, you need to stop right now and re-architect everything to work only on an allowlist basis, plus think really really hard about what you’re trying to achieve and how
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‘There was shock that anyone might dare to question a law designed to “protect children.”’
IEA on Online Censorship: https://insider.iea.org.uk/p/online-censorship
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Britain’s MPs charge VPNs to expenses as minister urges caution | POLITICO
Every time a Member of Parliament uses a VPN, somewhere a child is tortured: https://www.politico.eu/article/britain-mps-charge-vpns-expenses-minister-caution-tech-jonathan-reynolds-data/
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