I don't think you can block mud. it's everywhere

LOL!!

TBH the current political clusterfuck around Brexit is pretty much drowning out everything else, I do know a change that will benefit victims of domestic violence that was meant to happen the other week has been postponed to January at least thanks to posturing and stupidity, I'm really despairing of our political class at the moment.

From having read up some more on the proposals, I gather the initial intention is now to only block reported stuff rather than bringing the shutters down on a vast list, however that may not be much of a respite as there are lots of people out there who hate all things erotic and will regard reporting every adult site they can find as a patriotic duty.

Basically, everyone should ensure they have a work-round access method (i.e. a VPN), or at least have looked into the market and chosen something to use, for use if and when the block finally happens. Though when exactly that will be is currently anyone's guess.

I wearily agree. There is so much that needs sorting out in the UK right now, from big business not paying tax, the rise of zero hours contracts which deny millions stable employment (more profit for the capitalists, you see), crumbling public services after a decade of austerity, the housing crisis, the lack of long-term planning re social care, and a general bottom-line oriented short-termism that is screwing up just about everything it touches.

The Tories said Brexit wouldn't dominate when they "won" last year's Election, but of course it has. They're just a zombie government, clinging on purely for the sake of being in power but with no ideas at all on how to solve any of those problems.

Sections of the media are prone to wring their hands over the likes of Brexit and Trump, but are making no effort to understand why people are so pissed off they'll do anything to stick it to the ruling elite. So you don't like populism, BBC and The Guardian? Tough. Votes like that are going to keep happening in the West until the above issues are dealt with.

I imagine C4S, along with other big operators, will comply anyway, unless their UK traffic is so trivial as not to be missed if its blocked. They have the developers to easily implement Mindgeek's system or create their own, and they may well gain from the people who currently run their own sites instead moving to C4S in order to be on a compliant platform. This of course is why Mindgeek have lobbied so hard for age verification - they expect to make money both from licensing their verification system to large operators, and from people moving to their compliant system.

Think of how large American companies like Amazon and Google comply with EU tax law when selling to EU consumers, even though if they wanted to they could just keep all their servers in the USA and ignore other countries laws - but that would eventually have real-world consequences for an operation that large.

This has now been put back until April. I would expect it to be put back again when the BBFC ask for more money to make it happen.

That's good news.

Found a Torygraph article that confirms delay till at least Easter plus a three month implementation period:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/13/age-restrictions-porn-websites-delayed-government/

Latest info from The Metro:

https://metro.co.uk/2019/01/07/plan-require-id-online-porn-april-go-ahead-8317148/amp/

Ummmm do we need to be worrying about this? I'd rather not have the Tories and the local fucking post office knowing about me habits. A fiver a month for a VPN adds up for me as well cos I dont have any sort of solid income. If this has already been sorted, then soz. Just making sure. https://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/uk-porn-block-comes-force-14091429

I've found a free VPN anyhow, hopefully this whole thing doesn't fuck with the UMD over here fully. But aye, if theres already been some sort of sorting out done here then I may be bitching for no reason.

This appears to be the relevant bit, they've buried this latest delay well:

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.

Given the ongoing clusterfuck that is Brexit it's hard to tell what's going to happen - we could have an entirely new government by the end of the year.

I wouldn't be so sure about that - have you seen how the Brexit votes are going?

I use a web browser called Epic Privacy Browser, which has a proxy built in (not on by default, the user can select from a list of countries, which makes it possible for me to view US media sites that block access from outside the country). I hope this will allow me to circumvent any blocking of sites such as this if it's done in the same way as the adult filter which has existed for a few years on the major ISPs, as this is hilariously easy to get round - you simply need to change your DNS to a public one (a DNS is basically like a giant 'phone book' of IP addresses for every webpage that exists. Your ISP will block adult sites if you try to access them via this list - but a public ISP such as one owned by Google or Cloudflare won't).

For those who want to use public systems, here's a guide

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using

On my own machines, I use

8.8.8.8 Google primary

4.2.2.2 Level3 primary

4.2.2.3 Level3 secondary

8.8.4.4 Google secondary

Note that you actually have to be ON a Level 3 connection to use their resolvers, but since they are a tier-1 backbone provider, that's pretty much everyone as near as I can tell.

Interesting! Just tried a dig for an A record using 4.2.2.2 from both the physical Saturation Hall server, and a main clients' VM (hosted on a hypervisor in a different datacentre) which are on very different networks, and in both cases the correct answer came straight back. Same using nslookup on Windows 10 on a laptop connected via Virgin broadband. I wonder what you have to do not to be on Level 3?

I think North Korea is probably a candidate

I had forgotten about the recent buyout. Level3 was acquired by CenturyLink in 2017 so I guess everyone gets to play now.

LOL re NK!

Another free public DNS service on what has to be one of the coolest possible v4 IP addresses: https://1.1.1.1/ - and also on https://one.one.one.one/

Though if/when the age verification block comes in, I don't expect using alternative DNS resolvers will get past it, it'll be done by packet filtering not DNS hackery, unless the authorities really want it to be trivial to get round (which is entirely possible).

I hesitate to post anything that references a theft site, but this is a relevant article

https://avn.com/business/articles/technology/xhamster-survey-few-britons-will-comply-with-age-verification-827690.html

As with much in contemporary culture and politics, it is the gesture that counts. What's actually important here is not 'protecting children' but 'getting approving headlines in tabloids' and preferably timing it to distract from unfolding economic catastrophe. They likely know about VPNs but won't have the funding to enforce loopholes, nor will it matter as long as the public are only dimly aware.

If they were really interested in protecting children, they would give schools the budget they require to actually put the heating on and buy textbooks, ban obsessive testing, ban polluting vehicles around schools and build protected cycleways and walking routes, and adequately fund support services and mental health provision. Don't hold your breath though.

Agree 100%. The modern politician in a nutshell. They pursue easy, short-term goals that make it look like they've done something, instead of trying to achieve the more difficult, long-term ones that would make a genuine difference.

Style beats substance, always. Is it any wonder most people despise politicians?

That seems to be pretty authoritative as she's quoting the Department directly. So looks like April not happening but instead "soon". Probably because a lot of civil servants have been seconded to no-deal Brexit planning (which includes plans to call out the army to put down any unrest).


VPNs are the way round it, though for some people buying a "Pornpass" (they so should have names those "Multipass" ) from a newsagent may be less hassle.

I can see it slowly going ahead though. The UK has a permanent professional civil service which actually runs the country - the ministers may chance but the people in the departments they run are permanent staff and don't change at elections, so once a policy has been set in motion it will be carried out regardless of any changes of government, unless the incoming government actively reverses the policy, which usually only happens if doing that is an actual manifest commitment, like when the Conservatives put scrapping the under-development ID card scheme Labour had started a few years earlier, in the 2010 election manifesto.

Ideally it will eventually get scrapped as "too complex / risky to administer", but I'd not bet on that yet, as the papers that campaigned for it will shred any politician who goes against what they want, unless there is actually a clear public mandate to do so. Some powerful interests stand to make a lot of money out of it, so that's a major incentive to keep going with it.

And it's delayed again:

https://news.sky.com/story/government-delays-controversial-internet-porn-block-law-11678973

It sounds like the delays are caused by concerns about privacy - presumably someone asked the MPs if they'd be happy for their browser histories to be leaked

Very likely. Presentation policies are all very well when they go through their first reading in the commons.

Perhaps with all the delays, someone might realise the best way to stop children from getting easy access to free porn, would be to block porn hub and all the pirate tube sites.
Start protecting our copyrights, keep it behind our own paywalls, where it belongs!!!

No wait, British government

Exactly, so the owners of PornHub are going to be the de-facto age verification service....

Now that really is fantastic news. Hopefully it'll now just keep getting delayed till it eventually gets buried, though I imagine the lobbyists who stand to make money from it won't give up easily. But of privacy concerns are now finally being taken seriously, that really is a huge step forward.

America gets enough crap dumped on it, so I'd just like to point out that we can all thank CANADA for this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek

Also, they now own a number of prominent porn productions companies. There is next to NO regulation on them, and they can kind of do whatever they want.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/age-verification-for-online-pornography-to-begin-in-july

15 July UK. Hope you've all got your AV gates in place.

Seriously. They've released the date with ZERO guidelines on what some who owns a site is meant to do.

In more a more interesting note. An email was sent out to 300 suppliers by The Department for Culture about AV. But! The email got hacked and the 300 email address got stolen. (Whoops!)
This morning. (For real!)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/17/online-pornography-age-checks-to-be-mandatory-in-uk-from-15-july

Now, that hack has happened less than an hour into them telling everyone how great they are. Imagine what could happen to YOUR data. This could end up being one of the biggest cluster **** of all time.

In the meantime every website owner is on their own. Thanks Theresa May!

regards

Andy and the team.

You can read our thoughts on this http://www.everythingmustdie.com/newuklaw.html

Is the most bizarre element the idea that someone will pop along to the post office to buy a 'porn pass'?

Or is it the fact that Twitter, Instgram and Google are exempt on the grounds that less than 1/3 of the content is porn. No actually, it's the fact that if it's a non-commercial site (i.e. you receive no payment in any form including adverts) you don't need AV at all.

So that's protecting the kids how exactly?

Hilarious. I remember growing up in the UK in the days people had to buy a TV licence from the Post Office, and the UK Government had licence detector vans cruising the streets to trace signals coming from houses where there was no licence on record. I guess we will soon see AV detector vans patrolling the streets,


We Producers have all got the wrong business model !!

Google/Youtube get an exemption because they deliver content for free, supposedly, yet they make 3.5 Billion Dollars per month in Ad revenue. We are all dummies who try to sell content, so we are targeted because we sell content. Google laughs all the way to the bank because their business model is not to sell content, but deliver content for free and to sell advertising instead.

Ummmm....maybe I should make a free site that gives away all my content....and sell ad spots to various food and clothing companies instead. Problem is....I doubt that Heinz Baked Beans would want me to advertise their product.

Wouldn't work, a site that provides free content but shows ads still counts as a commercial site.

Meanwhile, the implementation date has finally been confirmed - 15th July.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/porn-block-uk-date-confirmed