> may make provision for the provider of a relevant VPN service to apply to any person seeking to access its service in or from the UK age assurance which is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not that person is a child
"The law we made is like super duper good!!"
> Children may also turn to VPNs, which would then undermine the child safety gains of the Online Safety Act
"The law we made is easily circumvented :("
Does that mean that VPN providers now need identification before you can open an account?
If this becomes law, then yes. But then people will turn to VPS providers instead and set up their own VPNs, which will then prompt a law to demand age verification before renting any server. I wonder how far they're willing to go down this rabbit hole.
You're implying pervasive KYC and tying everything to your real-life identity is some unfortunate side-effect rather than a deliberate end. I have contempt for people who pass policies such as these but I do not think them foolish; they are likely aware of what will happen.
All of this would easily be solved by just banning social media. Nothing will convince me they are a net-positive to society.
I don't think social media needs to be banned, but maybe using complex algorithms to drive attention should be. Even Facebook was pretty good back when its feed was a simple, chronological display of all your friends posts and nothing else. It went down the tubes as they moved away from that.
Put together, it’s likely most people’s friends wouldn’t produce enough content to drive engagement, at least in ‘public’ social media like Facebook.
I remember this phenomenon back when Facebook was less algorithmic — some days there’d just be no new content at all. Especially I’m guessing if you limit adding friends to actually just the people you’d be happy to grab lunch with.
At the risk of doing a "you participate in society", would that include HN?
Watching laws like this play out in real time adds some color to the other discussion about software in Europe right now.
Age verification to wake up in the morning, age verification to breathe air, age verification to use the restroom, age verification t...
>If this becomes law, then yes.
Or they just operate outside of UK jurisdiction, in which case they can politely decline. Any executives/directors of said company might be liable to arrest if they decide to vacation in uk, though.
The UK already has ISP's blocking sites. Anyone that ignores the law will be blocked, will be interesting to see what happens if they end up blocking one of the cloud megascalers.
Hilarious that they think they can prevent motivated people from accessing information using technical measures. China has been working on this for decades. It's a lost battle. Shadowsocks, V2Ray, xray; protocols like vmess, vless, trojan, etc.
The British government, for all their effort (London has a higher geographic density of CCTV than Beijing) is wasting their time competing for the gold medal at International Totalitarianism Olympics, even the the world's current undisputed champion is losing the internet censorship battle, and always has.
Central planning doesn't work and it never has. That includes central planning of what your citizens are allowed to see, hear, think, and feel.
Not necessarily - how is a kid paying for a VPS server?
A personal debit card (which requires ID verification anyway, and likely has their parents able to see activity)? A personal credit card (which definitely requires ID + 18+)? Stealing their parents' card (works for like 5 days)? Does the VPS company block VPN ports without verification, similar to how most companies handle email? Do you think VPS services have any interest, at all, in an underage clientele?
The proposed law is plenty effective - saying otherwise is like saying kids can bypass age verification at the knife shop or alcohol store by using eBay. No sane mind says that age verification is therefore useless.
If having a credit card and the ability to make purchases was good enough as an ID system, they could have simply made it the law instead of requiring tech companies to collect those sweet, sweet personal ID document photos.
The UK law doesn't say you have to use ID photos, that's porn companies knowing that charging even £1 a visit would be devastating to the business. Credit card verification is a completely legal method in the UK.
They can check for credit cards without requiring any payment. Are you sure that's sufficient given these vaguely worded laws? If so many HN readers could solve the whole problem by making websites which issued digital signatures of random numbers to anyone who can support a £0.01 debit which is then immediately reversed.
The problem is porn companies know full well nobody, nobody, wants that on their credit card statement. Kinda weird that something supposedly as natural as rain needs such levels of privacy; the hypocrisy is notable (if it's so natural and so many people do it, own it).
They can have whatshisface's digital certificates, Inc. on their statements.
authorizations don't show up on statements, but still allow you to verify the card is valid
Authorizations may not show on statements; but they are full well in financial records which could come up in court or a divorce claim later. Credit card companies are absolutely not allowed to turn a blind eye to any kind of usage.
Single people don't care, and they are becoming the majority of adults and probably more likely consume porn too.
Also VPS services because "SSH -D".
How would this work with a VPN outside of UK that doesn't do it ? Will it be blocked?
This is the real intent
But think of the children!
That it has its own Wikipedia page is a sign of the abuse of this argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
No. This a motion within one house of Parliament and hasn't become law, nor is there any guarantee it will be. It's something to be aware of.
Very shallow, naive approach to child safety. This is like banning children from riding scooters on a highway. They're just going to use a bike instead. Danger still exists.
VPNs are not the only way around this, so if you want to ban the "method of access" you need to be much more broad, and get the parents involved.
But, we do ban children on scooters from roads in the UK, but they can go on bikes? I don't understand your metaphor.. what you are suggesting is what we do and it's sensible.
I don't think they don't mean the same thing you mean by scooters. Difference in the language.
In fairness we essentially ban scooters from practically every public path/road but they're still everywhere
A innefective mandate for the intended purpose, but a very effective mandate to know what adults use VPNs.
Between this and the repeated attempts at encryption backdoors, this is something I would expect from a totalitarian regime that is preparing for civil unrest, not the UK.
> but a very effective mandate to know what adults use VPNs.
How? I suppose if the VPN services all started requiring age verification that might tell you this info. But I very much doubt that'll happen, as it runs completely counter to many legitimate VPN services' missions.
It's like banning children from owning and carrying handguns. They still have knives and ultimately fists. We cannot eliminate harms, therefore we should not attempt to reduce harms.
If parent could be sufficiently involved, there'd be no need for any ban.
> Very shallow, naive approach to child safety.
It's naive of you to think this has anything to do with the child safety.
Did the CEO of Tor announced when age verification features will be implemented?
We will try everything except regulating the algorithmic content feeds themselves.
If algorithmic feed is so bad then why are you on hacker news, a website with an algorithmic feed that is notoriously non-transparent and often accused of being manipulated by bad actors?
"If smoking is so bad then why are you smoking?"
Because I'm addicted like everyone else.
Go to your account page, turn on noprocrast and set minaway to a very large number. You effectively ban your own account once you click confirm. Now set up home firewall / device blocking settings and block the HN domain. The first step towards overcoming addiction is admitting that you have one. I pray for your speedy recovery.
Yo, I'm all for banning all of these companies from my country. That would be ideal.
But then you'll have HN: NOOOO it's not effective, people will just use VPNs nanny state! Oppression! Freedom of speech!
China, Iran, UK. same stuff, different names.
Every HN thread on social media or porn inevitably gets overrun with "but think of the children" comments calling for banning kids from social media, or the internet, or from having a phone at all.
And then every time a country actually tries to ban children from the internet, they cry "but my privacy!!!" As if having to hand your id to the state to use the internet isn't exactly what you asked for. As if the regimes most interested in "protecting the kid" aren't exactly the ones who puts you in jail for a meme too spicy.
You reap what you sow. Congrats on making the internet worse.
UK nanny state makes it an nonviable place to live. It's pervasive from the moment you step off the plane at Heathrow and see the inane safety stickers covering every surface "WARNING: DOOR" "WARNING: WATER FROM HOT TAP IS HOT" as well as the CCTV cameras.
> "WARNING: WATER FROM HOT TAP IS HOT"
LOL are you talking about the US? With their "don't put the cat inside the microwave" stickers and the "coffee is too hot" lawsuits?
> With their "don't put the cat inside the microwave" stickers
not sure what this means, my microwave does not have such a sticker
> "coffee is too hot" lawsuits
I'd encourage you to look into the case you refer to[1] and decide for yourself whether the lawsuit feels frivolous given the facts. My read is that the lawsuit was justified.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
If caring that people might burn themselves with hot water is nanny state, then caring that people might burn themselves with macdonalds coffee is also nanny state.
Stella Liebeck was seriously injured by that McDonald's coffee and it's a myth perpetuated by the McDonald's PR team that it was a frivolous lawsuit. She was in the hospital for eight days and required skin grafts. Do some research.
Every time this comes up I always take the opportunity to suggest that it should've been a ban on _smart_phones. Not dumb phones, not laptops, not even tablets (i.e. those without sim).
Easier to enforce, you don't have to rely on the very same companies that peddle the thing you're trying to ban in the first place. It can disrupt the network effects that could hopefully be enough to let people voluntarily cut it out of their lives. People are primed to get rid of it, but can't because it is so addicting and said network effects.
ah the country of brexit has more "clever ideas"
something I find myself saying often lately watching BBC News every morning
How about Cloudflare Warp? And don't some browsers like Opera have builtin VPN?
What about tunnels like Hurricane Electric?
How to enforce?
Same way as they do with porn? Massive fines. Or the threat thereof.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46763548
Papers, please. Glory to Arstotzka!
I foresee a lot of VPN companies starting to offer "secure proxy" services or something like that. "It's not a VPN, it's a secure proxy!"
The law doesn't work like that. First of all, the actual regulation that gets made probably has a definition of VPN and won't rely on a company self-describing as VPN. Secondly law enforcement and courts aren't idiots*
* well, many of them are. But not in the particular way that would be needed for a simple rename to work.
Proxies aren't VPNs though. They didn't mean call proxies VPNS, they meant provide proxies.
After enforcing age verification to prevent children from viewing those pesky Gaza genocide videos that Israel did not want them to see, they gotta ensure that those brats wont be able to get around it and still see the videos.
Its amazing how this censorship was brought on rapidly and precisely after Netanyahu demanded it at the start of last year. No surprise as half of Starmer government was funded by zionists.
I really don't think governments need a kick in the tail from a foreign power to try to grab more power. It's just what they do by nature.
Not sure what you're going on about. I don't think children should be watching any genocide videos. Is that something you watched a lot of as a child?
The thing is, it's not really children who lose access to this sort of content, it's the user who doesn't want to give Reddit or Twitter or whoever else a copy of their driving licence. Without age verification, they don't see the truth of something like Gaza, because it's ages restricted. They can however view the other, sanitised version of the story.
I'm in the UK and I've been involved in advocating for this.
I find it utterly frustrating to read the "think of the children" mockery here on HN.
I argue that this is good.
There's many reasons why children having unfettered access to the internet and different campaigners care about different aspects, so I'm going to talk about the one I care about: addiction, destroyed ability to focus, and dopamine desensitization. In the UK (and elsewhere in the world, I imagine) there's a huge problem with people addicted to phones and children are especially vulnerable. I don't care if adults are vulnerable, they have to make their own decisions. But I care that parents that do everything right in terms of educating their children on how to be healthy with respect of phones (like me and my partner) then have to send their children to schools where they're given ipads. It's not fair to say "banning doesnt work you should just not give your children phones", but then force you to send your children to schools that give them ipads and other distractions.
It's a matter of network effects (something that HN loooves talking about). In addition to the fact that phones are engineered to be addictive, you have the fact that in many schools EVERY child is on social media, and so any family that wants to stay away has to decide between isolating their child from society, or selling themselves into the "engagement industry".
I think that banning is a valid approach. It won't be 100% effective, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that it will introduce friction (another thing that HN looooves talking about) and so will reduce the total number on children that is on social media and therefore reduce the social need for other children to be in.
So, we're adding friction to break or weaken the network effects that keep these cancer companies harming children in schools.
I don’t think people mocking the reasoning behind the law, just its implementation. I’m all for kicking kids off the internet and phones. I’m not British… fyi, but as kids we were not allowed to drink but we still found ways to get beer or whatever else because the regulations were not effective.
It’s better to be more to the point and straight up identity social media platforms as addictive or otherwise harmful and block them altogether or at least kill the algorithm and endless scroll.
The title of the site "Hacker News" should be a dead giveaway why this law is mocked here
Well, we've tried your thing of letting these companies call the shots. Now we'll try my thing for a bit :-)
What's more hacker than experimenting to get the results you want?
> I think that banning is a valid approach
Are we talking about VPNs or phones in general? Because somewhere in this we jumped from VPNs to phones in general, and these things are not equivalent.
A phone ban in general for children, maybe I could agree with you on. But, a VPN ban on those grounds alone is utterly pointless: it's not like there aren't millions of other bits of internet crack children can easily find without a VPN.
Not addressing the actual concerns and instead pointing fingers at a totally different, larger issue reeks of "won't somebody think of the children". All with the convenient downstream effect of revealing which citizens own VPNs.
When I went to school nobody gave me an ipad. We just wrote on paper, the teacher on chalkboard. That was a long time ago, though.
The reason you want this is because the only way to implement it facilitates your tyranny and it still wont achieve what you pretend to desire.