Thanks for fighting the good fight

At least we can still use VPNs

'Starmer is about as popular as herpes in a brothel' had me laughing out loud. No chance I will provide personal details to any variation app, never mind for use for an adult site. 3 or 4 weeks left then after many many years, between 2 and 3 decades, under different guises, a huge shame.

Surely you must realize I'm not 10!!!!! And my parents basement is cold and unfinished...I sleep upstairs in my own bedroom in a big bed like a big boy...with little fire engines and ice cream truck border...and my rare movie posters including epics like Bridge on the River Kwai and Jame Bond films!

Ok...dumb it down for a Canuckle Hoser! I'm from Canada does this apply to me? If yes and I don't do the age verification then what? I can't post? I can't view anything here?

And now you own a luxury motorboat yacht! Have you ever motorboat a woman on your motorboat? I figured at that age you were wankering to Mrs Slocombe!!!

Not sure if this is allowed, but I have a proton VPN referral link if anyone wants to use a free 2 week trial once these changes go into affect. I'm not sponsored, just have genuinely been satisfied with their VPN and email service. Have been using them for 4 years now.

https:// pr.tn/ref/9YAT49FS

The current FAQ and countries/states to require verification are (to quote the UMD):

"We only block access if laws in your area require it. To determine your general location when you visit, we use MaxMind's GeoIP2 database. It's hosted locally on our servers and not referenced from an external service, so your visitation habits stay private. This process assesses your general area but does not identify your precise address or exact location.

This is a list of locales that currently require partial or full blocking. Countries: Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, South Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Singapore. US states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. UK regions: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Whether the required blocking is granular of full-page depends on laws in that location. This list will be updated as laws evolve."

Will what we get banned from viewing (on here) in the UK be the same as it is in the strictest territory in the world, or will it be based on UK laws?

Not that I know what UK definitions for adult content are? Minge, yes. Cock, yes. Lovespuds, yes.

But what about boobs and bumcheeks? Seeing as we can legally access both in daily newspapers, surely we should be able to view them on the internet, too?

I'm afraid that I'm another who isn't comfortable with sharing this sort of information with government contractors. My credit card company, fair enough, but if credit card verification isn't sufficient then, well, that seems to be it.

The reality is that unless you live in a hole deep in the woods with no electricity, no car and no internet the Government knows where you are, and if (Big if) they want to know more about you, you can not stop them. My job before I retired was a Corporate Hacker, I worked for one of those faceless huge corporations for 30+ years and they are better at getting your private info than the Government! I mean for Gods sake Gmail is free for a very good reason! How do you think Google got rich? Do you believe your email is private? This is the world today, there is nothing you can do! I am 97% sure someone knows what you wank off to somewhere! The important thing is that they don't care! Unless your an international terrorist why would they care? In this connected world nothing is private, so take your smart phone of of the chips packet, shrug your shoulders are they to remember the good ole days before the internet LOL

Phil

Hate to say I told you all so. This is where the legalistic, overly-moralizing, scared-of-their-own-shadow nature of the way this site is run was inevitably heading. Complying with fascist, homophobic, transphobic, censorious laws because you're too brainwashed to just host the site on Russian or Seychelles servers or whatever. They care more about queen and crown than the actual users of the site they run and refuse to hand over to anyone else who actually respects privacy.

This is the inevitable result of all the other anti-freedom admin decisons on this site: the ban on "kid's" shows, the absolute flood of x-rated, low-quality OF slop that barely counts as wam, and the "producers first" ethos of this site.

All of this will ultimately backfire on the "producers first" people too. Piracy is coming back in a big way, across media. People are tired of doing things "the right way" when that makes the quality of everything worse and worse and worse. At least it feels freeing to finally feel like I have permission to put up everything I've downloaded over the years onto a torrent LOL.

Guy who spent his life helping to destroy privacy and build the panopticon we live in: you should trust the system, if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide

You are absolutely right Phil. Why would the government care?

Also, governments all around the world are too incompetent to provide the basics for the people they are working for (and who pay their wages), let alone being organised enough to collect and use inconsequential personal data for pernicious results...

I do think the people who won't go through this process need to get a little bit of perspective. No official wants or is organised enough to do anything untoward with your data...

So what about those of us who have no need for a passport?

Driving licence. Provisional or full.

Why would hosting this on a Russian server make it more trustworthy or less likely to become inaccessible?


You want to look at kids shows? Why's that? It's bloody obvious why this adult site doesn't want to link to them.


What's wrong with people getting paid for the videos they make? How do you think this site is paid for? And how does ID verification justify piracy?

Get some perspective. If you don't want to get your ID verified, then don't. No one asked for this. But don't act like it's some great big fascist conspiracy to get everyone's ID to... do something... bad... I don't know, what is the government going to do with your ID that it issued you in the first place? If they cared to look they could already tell that you're looking at this site.

I'm not sure how I'll feel about this until I see what the site looks like when my state is blocked. But I can always look up my pie and slime porn on YouTube, I suppose.

Not going to get drawn into debate, those who's minds are made up are unlikely to change them, but to raise a point of order:

There are no government contractors or government agencies involved in any of this.

The ID Verification outfits, Yoti etc, are private companies, not government contractors or agencies. And they don't care, or even know, what URLs or pics or videos you are looking at. Their sole role is to prove that people being shown restricted content are over 18, and have proven themselves as such.

The entire reason for all of this (and personally I hate it as much as the libertarians do and think it'll be about as effective as a chocolate fireguard) is a sustained campaign against the enrtire adult industry by right-wing media. Their latest ploy is just yet another "won't anyone think of the children!" moral panic that underage kids are seeing lots and lots of porn on the Internet and so "something must be done."

Complying with the laws means that ISPs in areas where the laws apply can continue to allow their users to access the site. Not complying would result in those ISPs being forced to block access to the site completely. I don't know what the US version of that is (probably different in each state) but in the UK the regulator can order ISPs to block access to specific sites, enforced by potentially enormous fines and/or jail time for directors, for anyone who doesn't comply. Ok, those of us who are tech-savvy and have access to the kind of connections that bypass consumer-level ISPs can get round such blocks but that's a tiny minority of users, for everyone else the banned site would just cease to exist, attempting to access it would get a "this site is not available here" message, like the one mobile users who haven't opted in to adult content already get.

So no hosting it in Russia and ignoring the laws wouldn't solve the problem, the site would still get blocked and/or the states with blocks would come after MM legally and financially.

I've been on-line since 1995. I remember when the Internet was the wild west and then some, beyond the reach of laws, most law enforcement didn't even know it existed much less how to do anything about it. But that was 30 years ago. Times change, laws change. Sites and operators have to evolve.

And this is global. Look at the list of countries and places already with such laws - half the US, Canada, big chunks of Europe - and many more will follow. "Vote for us and we'll protect your kids from evil Internet porn" is a vote-winner anywhere, for the left and the right. So this will only spread.

I want to give credit to MM at this site for balancing compliance with the law against keeping as much of this site's experience available. Kudos. And thanks for the weeks' worth of notice instead of just springing this on everyone.

I'm not wearing a tin foil hat here, to be clear. But, does anybody remember the Ashley Madison controversy? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison) You can argue that at the government isn't interested in this information, but the same thing could have been said about that. Lives were ruined when information that was supposed to be secret came out to the public. All it would take is a skilled enough hacker who wants to publish a "list of local perverts".

It sounds like it's back to my good old imagination.

That is a false statement for people in America. We do not have to wonder all the terrible things that the government is using some of the data gathered by DOGE for. We are seeing it first hand. Some of that data is being used by ICE to target who to kidnap and send to prison camps in other countries without due process. They don't care if you are a citizen or not.

Exactly how are they going to prove that the person accessing the site is over the age of 18? This is not possible with the way they are rolling things out. If you want to know how to really do this, look at how China handles internet time for minors. They did this first years ago and found it did not work. Now they require every internet device to have a webcam to verify the user of the device is of age. What they are doing here is not going to do what they promise. This is not preventing a minor from accessing this site. This is all a bunch of bullshit.

I remember that, and yep, lives were ruined and there was I think more than one suicide.

However I think this is slightly different. As I understand it:

UMD requests Verification Service (VS) to check that the current user is over 18.
User verifies themselves with the VS. UMD does not see any of that data.
All UMD gets back is a gold-standard yes/no proof that user is over 18.
If the user is a logged in UMD user then that "over18" flag gets added to their account, permanently.

But at no point does the info submitted to the VS get passed to UMD, and the UMD username doesn't get passed to the VS (MM will be able to confirm this but I'd expect it to be done via hashed codes, so no way for anyone to work out the user involved).

As there's no requirement to provide any ID info to sign up to UMD (unless you're a producer), anonymity is preserved - here, you're still just "MasterSplosher23", the only difference is the 3rd party site has confirmed that the user behind that username is over 18. But the VS doesn't know your UMD username and UMD doesn't get your ID details.

Yes if someone hacks the VS then they could see who has verified, and possibly what site they came from, but as I gather Yoti is "verify once, you can use it anywhere" that doesn't actually prove much. And I imagine the VSs will be quite secure, precisely because of the Ashley Madison precedent.

What we'll end up with are effectively multiple classes of membership:

Casual Browsers with no account. Can see all PG content and PG threads in the forums. Everyhing R or X rated blocked if they access from somewhere affected by the new laws.
Anonymous users with an account but neither ID nor Age verified. Can see all PG content and PG threads in the forums. Everyhing R or X rated blocked if they access from somewhere affected by the new laws.
Anonymous users who are age verified: Can see all content including R and X. Can't post any R or X material, but can see, buy, and download it.
ID Verified users with green tick accounts, but not age-verified. Can post R and X content. But can only view R or X content if also age-verified.
ID and Age verified accounts: Can see everything, post everything, no restrictions.

Bear in mind the different restristrictions come from different places. The rules on what someone can **post** are from the billing providers and are intended to prevent non-consensual or unwitting models, revenge porn, copyright infringement, and other forms of model abuse. This was a pan-industry change in the wake of the cases where large tube sites allowed the endless re-upload of child rape videos and did nothing to stop it until MasterCard pulled the financial plug on them.

The rules on what someone can **view** on the other hand come from these new laws intended to prevent underage kids seeing pornography.

Realistically, this means only producers, or people who really want to share R or X amateur content, need to green tick verify. But anyone who wants to browse or buy R or X content, needs to be age-verified - but their account here can stay anonymous.

And finally, even if someone's green tick verified, no-one other than MM can see that ID data, it's not stored in the UMD DB, just a flag saying "id-verified". So even those accounts are effectively still anonymous.

MM's doing what he needs to do to be able to operate where I live. And he seems to have done it in a decent way. That's all. No one wanted or asked for age verification, but I want to view UMD enough that it's one of a grand total of two sites that I've verified for.

A child could stumble on this site, and be prevented from seeing R or X rated material because they haven't had their age verified. The content is filtered. Maybe they could create an account and then fool the verification service, but i think that probably they couldn't. But if they did, that's a problem for the verification service, not a problem for MM.

Maybe an adult could leave themselves logged in to UMD, then leave their laptop open in front of a child who could then look at it. But that's some pretty fucking bad parenting, not a problem for MM.

Ultimately, it's have age verification or close down for a large number of jurisdictions. I don't really care whether it "works" or not, I just want to view explicit material on UMD. It's Hobson's Choice, but moaning about it won't help. There is no debating this away.

So the fact that the service does not do what is advertised doesn't matter. I have yet to have anyone answer for me how the age of the current user of the site is verified. How you know that the person behind the keyboard and the person that went through the verification are the same person. Until that can be answered there is no point in any of this.

If the username is never known by the verification company, how does MM know that the person that verified my username, for example was the person that created the account and has been using the account for over a decade?

The person logs into their UMD account. Then they click the link to get verified and that takes them to a unique referral link to a verification service. The verification service takes a photo of the ID and a video of the person's face and confirms that they are over 18. It then returns its response to UMD. Assuming that the verification service works correctly, the person who logged into the account and did the verification is confirmed over 18.

Now, if someone then hands the account over to a child, or completes the verification on behalf of a child, which I think is what you are suggesting, then that someone is an idiot and a sex offender.

But why are you worried about this? Why is it bothering you now, when children have been able to log in and view the UMD without any verification for all of the last 27 years. If you're bothered about children viewing this site, then an imperfect solution is better than no solution.

The point to me is not who they are trying to restrict from accessing this site. If the age verification is enough for video game manufacturers to make sure kids are not viewing violent content by a simple drop down then it is good enough here. My issue is that a bunch of people are attacking the porn industry in the name of protecting the children while they support entities that protect pedophiles. A lot of the people who run around crying protect the children, sit in religious services where those religious organizations have harbored pedophiles, but their strong convictions only go so far. This has nothing to do with protecting children. If it was about protecting children people would have been fighting for mandatory reporting of child abuse period, no exceptions. But people didn't do that because they don't really care. People don't think every organization that knows about child abuse should report it. So let's stop framing this as "protecting the children".

Note, I wasn't involved with the coding on UMD but I know how these kinds of things work, so here's the outline:

Suppose you'rte MasterSplosher23.
You click the Yoti link.
UMD generates a unique random code for you, temporarily links it to your account, and calls Yoti with that code. No username, no other data, just the unique random string (which is most likely a hash).
Yoti gets the request and does its thing. When it's complete, it redirects you back to UMD and passes the "over18confirmed" flag and the random code.
UMD receives the data, uses the code to know which account you were from. Sets the "user age verified" flag on your account. And deletes the temporary code.

So, now UMD knows that MasterSplosher23 has been age verified as over 18 by Yoti. But has had no sight at all of any of the ID data Yoti used. And Yoti only knows that a random string was passed from UMD and sent back to it.

Now there are variations on that but it's the basics of how any system like this would work - you use temporary anonymous codes to link things between the sites, then ditch them once the proof has been acquired.

I too have been here for years and really don't want to share personal details / photos with third parties, As I have purchased numerous videos using my credit card, is this not proof enough, that I am over eighteen?

I understand why it has to be done, but age verification is not for me.

The influence of America's conservative prudes is spreading around the world.

I will probably have to say goodbye to the remaining visible bits of this website when the time comes, just like I have had to bid farewell to the large number of UK media websites who try to monetise cookie rejection and adblocking.

Feel sorry for people like Rev who rely on video sales to put food on the table. Even if he only loses 5 to 10% of his customers, it's going to hit him hard.

Here's to the final few weeks of access to everything on the site.