Internet Porn Site Regulation

I love a good bit of context... Saw this article linked on an early piece from the first days of Cameron's crackdown discussing the then proposed porn regs. Some five years later, now that the law is about to be implemented can anyone say they've seen a peep out of the government on the subject CEOP budgets since? Why, if this Bill is really about protecting kids, was the funding for this sort of thing cut? And not just cut once but by 10% over three years. Surely they should be doing everything they could/can to run alongside these reg changes?

This is not a niche or particularly difficult thing to be consistent about is it. The cuts the article discusses are few million quid, chicken feed to a government putting all its eggs into this current lame basket. So why so little effort going into actually educating the young yet again? Is it always better to just demonize and scapegoat?

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Then, more up to date, a survey on the possible AV take up made the news the other day. Since the government seem to put such great store on the survey of opinions from the likes of the NSPCC, let's see them take note of this one from the people they are equally supposed to represent: 67% of survey respondents saying they would be unhappy or don’t know if they would share their details with a random porn firm.

Mindgeek is of course not the only one touting AV gateways. Another, AVSecure was at the expo mentioned above. Ever wondered how they reckon they can keep your data secure this time after numerous failures in the past? Their rep expounded on the company's use of blockchain technology in securing punters' data.

reason.com Wrote:"People generally are fearful of entering in any personal data to access adult content," Steve Winyard, of the blockchain payment platform AVSecure, told a "State of the Industry" panel. That's why platforms like his are built on a blockchain, so individual data is kept private.

"AVSecure's blockchain solution acts as a repository of encrypted tokens that represent age-verified consumers," explains AVN.

In any event, platforms would not be wise to ignore it, suggested Harmik Gharapetian, vice president of sales and marketing at payment-solutions company Epoch. "You are going to lose your traffic from the UK if you don't have a solution."

(Source: http://reason.com/blog/2018/02/01/whats-...h-for-2018 )

Here's another earlier article that explains blockchain ID-ing in simple terms and how public blockchains can be combine with cryptographic hashing to provide decentralized repositories of the relevant data.

This, the tech behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is most secure way yet of doing these things according to these companies.

like i say the only way to fight this now is not to sign up at all
use a vpn, tor or a privacy enhanced browser...
oh and dont go fooling yourself into thinking this is protecting the kids. its not.
its censorship via the back door and unless this fails censorship will only get worse.

oh you must give up your privacy so we can protect you from terrorists.... (maybe stop selling them wepons you cunt)
oh you must give up your privacy so we can protect your children.... (isnt there already a block at the isp level in place for under 18's)
oh you must give up your privacy because GOVERNMENT!... FUCK NO!. (48 government departments can already correlate and quantify your browsing history and now they will have a name and address to compare it to... oh good luck getting a job on your local council or getting voted into parliament or even organizing a protest in future.)

Gizmodo on what Mindgeek plan to do with your data: http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2018/02/stupid-...-mean-porn hub-will-start-demanding-your-name-and-address-from-april/

UPDATE: Argh! Seems the usual problem occurs even in this kind of url! Just remove the space between 'porn' and 'hub' in the url to make it work. (Ironic really as one of the things this Bill is being critised for is the almost inevitable overcensorship of general sex related sites it'll bring about.)

http://bit.ly/2Ed3DeK to the article shandy is talking about

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43212056

^ The whole thing seems like a gigantic clusterfuck waiting to happen.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43292457

Quote:However, the tool will be effective only for those who go directly to porn sites rather than use search engines or follow social media hashtags that include pornographic content.

Although the BBC article circles linked to doesn't highlight it very well, Mindgeek's AgeID is now the defacto Age Verification system for porn in this country: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style...42476.html

I didn't realise the government obviously nicked the idea from Germany. God they can't even come up with their own bad tech legislation!

Although the free use of AgeID available to independent UK producers is welcome, there's still issues around this:

Engadet Wrote:If there isn't a major viable alternative, one porn distributor may effectively determine how everyone else checks ages. And it's not clear what constitutes an "independent" studio. Is there a fixed metric, or will Mindgeek use subjective criteria? While there's no immediate indication that it intends to abuse its first-mover advantage (it could have charged everyone), there's a lingering concern that it may have the power to decide which porn sites succeed -- and that the government may have trusted too much of its regulatory power to a private firm.

It also wont work with incognito mode and is, of course, dodgy on a shared computer: http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/pornh...rs-3415551

Checking over the general history of the Bill, I did find some things that maybe of clarification to some (as they were to me)...

Here's a fascinating piece on how Mindgeek changed their tune around this as soon as they saw a financial opportunity: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/23/17043...w-mindgeek

Then, as I remembered it part of this Bill was to have all online porn available in this country conform to UK DVD standards. Turns out this idea was dropped last year - it was obviously unworkable. (R18 forbids such routine internet staples as incest themes and female ejaculation amongst others.) Here's an interesting blog on that part of the Bill's last passage through the Lords in spring 2017: http://pandorablake.com/blog/2017/4/digi...amendments

The latter really is worth reading in full just to see how messy this stuff is but here's bullet points of the other main bits from it if you'd rather not:
"Extreme" porn is still prohibited (a site could be blocked from having a licence if uploads contravene) but this amendment has a much smaller list of defining criteria.
The government defending weakness on data security is so poor it almost looks like they were trading off to get companies to provide AV gateways! Never, surely.
At the time it was thought that another regulator would be needed (to work alongside the BBFC) to do the fining of non-compliant sites. (Fines being the last resort before blocking.) But as it's thought most foreign sites wouldn't pay up this may be being kicked into the long grass; leaving blocking as a rather easy out instead of the last resort it should be. Anyone heard anything on this one since?

Finally, check out the comments and responses beneath the blog. This for instance...

Pandora Blake Wrote:Several times during the debates people said things like "It's high time porn producers, who profit from making adult material available, start taking responsibility for keeping children safe". It seems to me that the fact it will cost us money is very much part of the point - punishing us for distributing naughty content in the first place.

And, perhaps most intriguingly of all, this possible answer to something I've mused about on this forum before:

Alan Wrote:Could you explain a bit more about what you mean by "I can't keep my site open in the UK", Pandora? Does "open in the UK" mean operating in this country or available to UK customers?

Pandora Blake Wrote:The latter - in order to distribute content that is 18, R18 or higher to UK customers, I'll need to install age verification software, and at the moment there isn't a solution which I can afford (and which I trust to not misuse the data of my site visitors). So my plan is to put up a worksafe version of the site explaining what's happened, and redirect UK visitors to that. Of course if you were using a VPN, no-one would be able to tell which country you were visiting from.

Isn't she saying here that UK sites only need comply for UK visitors?! aka they can be left non-AVed to anyone using a VPN.

No panic boys and girls, it seems the age verification thing is on hold at least until 'later this year'

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/25m-f...l-strategy

Relevant section :

Quote:The Strategy also reflects the Government’s ambition to make the internet safer for children by requiring age verification for access to commercial pornographic websites in the UK. In February, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) was formally designated as the age verification regulator.

Our priority is to make the internet safer for children and we believe this is best achieved by taking time to get the implementation of the policy right. We will therefore allow time for the BBFC as regulator to undertake a public consultation on its draft guidance which will be launched later this month.

For the public and the industry to prepare for and comply with age verification, the Government will also ensure a period of up to three months after the BBFC guidance has been cleared by Parliament before the law comes into force. It is anticipated age verification will be enforceable by the end of the year.