So recently this message has popped up and I wonder if anyone else in the UK has similar issues? " please verify your account " Being in the UK and NOT the US We don't have Government ID ( Yet ) and what else do I need! I'm not giving you my bank account details.

Can someone maybe from the admin team give me some feedback - advice?

Not happened to me yet, if it does I guess I will be getting a VPN.

What's a VPN ?

Government ID means a photo of your passport or driving licence, so we already have that, it doesn't relate to the proposed new digital ID.

The US, the EU, and the UK, are all moving to restrict access to adult content to only be accessible to people who've verified that they are over-18, most commonly by providing a photo or scan of an official ID document like a passport.

In the case of UMD, MM has had to take ID details from anyone running a store for years as part of the payment processing rules (the banks call it "Know Your Customer", and its intended to reduce fraud), in those cases we upload the appropriate ID and he then stores them on a machine that isn't connected to the Internet - however clever hackers are, they can't hack a system that can't be reached on-line.

You can expect to see increasing requirements to provide ID to access any adult on-line services that feature nudity from now on.

A VPN is a Virtual Private Network. Your computer connects to it, through an encrypted connection, and your traffic is then routed through an "end-point" in a different location. They're commonly used by businesses to allow remote staff to log in and appear to be "in the office" from an IP-address point of view, so they can access the internal systems as if they were at a desk in the building. They're also commonly used to get round idiotic per-country restrictions on streaming services, so if you want to watch something only available in the US, you select a US endpoint as the exit from your VPN and so Netflix or whoever thinks you're in Seattle. And now they'll increadingly be used by people who hope to bypass per-country age verification, by making your endpoint appear to be in somewhere that has very strong privacy laws and no censorship. At one point Finland was popular for this, back in the days of Usenet 30 years ago.

Needless to say, with a VPN you get what you pay for, the free ones will either be massively oversubscribed and slow as a slow thing on a slow day in slowtown, or well financed and fast, but run by hackers who'll steall all your data in return for the service. Paid-for ones will tend to be more secure, more reliable, and faster, but it still all depends on how many people are using the service at the same time. And of course as the idea of age-verification spreads, they may only buy limited time, at least one UK politician has said they want it made law that only someone who's verified their age can access a VPN, though that isn't official policy by anyone yet.

The current UMD requirement for verification is that only verified users can post explicit content (anything where the model(s) were nude when phortographed, anything involving sexual touching (includng clothed), sex acts, or close-ups of breasts, groin, or bum - images clearly intended to be sexual). This isn't to restrict access to such content, as verified users can post anything legal all the way to hardcore porn, but rather to prevent anonymous users posting content they have no rights to, unwitting models, revenge porn, pirate content, etc. But the legal landscape is shifting so tighter rules are inevitable, the world outside is changing and sites like this one need to change with it.

That last bit kind of interests me. Are they talking about using a VPN client, or being connected over a site to site tunnel? Both of them are VPN's LOL. Unless they are willing to go the firewall route that China has gone, they really cannot stop someone from using a VPN unless they force ISP's to restrict port 500. Even then it is just a port, if the server changes the port that the software uses to communicate and that is bypassed. Non technical people should not be making laws concerning tech.