Remember in 2012 how everyone was horrified when an authoritarian government like China forced everyone to disclose their identities to get online so they could track and censor them?
Now the authoritarians are here.
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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The joke of the China comparison was that we had a bunch of libertarians screaming "We can't have social services! The government will weaponize them against us and track everything we say and do!!! Public healthcare, public transit, public education, public utilities - they're all a slippery slope to the Police State, just like in China!"
And now we get all the same mass surveillance via privatized channels, while libertarians seem to have fully clammed up (when they aren't quietly cheering on psychopaths like RFK Jr). But we get none of the public amenities. Yay... love my Freedom(TM)
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Yeah, that's not making lists of dissenters... /s
Nah no problems here. Move along but before you do please leave a copy of your government id.
Sounds like it's time for those subreddits to find new homes on non-UK instances of Lemmy.
All kinds of governments are rushing to implement something similar. The Fediverse solves some problems, but not the problem of a site being hosted in a single geographical location (and thus a single government's jurisdiction). To help with this there are tools like i2p that can obscure a site's hosting location, and there's also work on distributed web hosting, but the latter still seems to be in its early stages. One day maybe we'll have distributed websites that can be resilient against censorship.
That wouldn't solve anything
Whaddaya mean? A non-UK instance doesn't have to comply with UK law if it doesn't operate as an entity in the UK and so it won't require the face ID for UK visitors. So long as the instance is okay with hosting this content, it would let UK visitors view it. For example, I don't think the UK has authority or mechanism to ask a Brazil-based instance to do this.
Then it just gets blocked in the uk and you're back to having to use a vpn.
Sure but that means they have to have a mechanism, legal and material to execute this. There must be an gov't institution that looks for and designates sites to be blocked. Then they have to have legal power to compel UK ISPs to block those lists. Are these things part of this law? I haven't read enough.
As I understand it if a site doesn't comply and fineing them isn't an option Ofcom can apply for a court order to, indeed, compell ISPs to block them.
Okay. Yeah that makes sense and in that case hosting on the Fediverse out of the UK would probably unblock it for a long time. If the blocking is not trivial - like one person adding a URL to a list - then they'd have to prioritize and they'd likely be going over bigger fish like international porn sites and such for a long time before they reach communities on the Fediverse that may or may not be self-designated NSFW. If they're on Reddit on the other hand, they get voluntarily blocked by the platform itself in the UK almost certainly without direction from Ofcom.
We're gonna be sending AI generated photos to AI powered age verifiers to read AI generated articles about the latest developments in AI.
Call your reps if you don't want that shit in the US.
https://time.com/7288539/kids-online-safety-act-status-what-to-know/
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casually slides IP address across English Channel to France
Sounds like they should use this
I heard that some of the checks require video of the person performing particular movements. So a little harder to fake with AI.
There are video deepfake systems that can animate these fictional faces. We need a catalogue of the kinds of facial positions these systems ask for
One of them that is hard is waving your hand in front of your face. It trips up almost every deepfake system I’ve seen. That’s a common test we’ve had to start using with interviewees because they’d try to game the system.
interviewees? what? where are you using this?
A little, but it will only get easier.
If the kids can't see the horrors of war [crimes], they're more likely to be convinced of being participants.
It's crazy that we have website that are just outlets for war gore to begin with. The "solution" to the social rot that is monetization of war pornography appears to be adding a bunch of faces to a big database marked "Adult", I guess?
Who does this even benefit, other than data warehousing and aggregation companies?
Fascists governments that want a list of who oppose something probably
I wouldn't call it outlets for war gore. It is also about providing information that mainstream media refuses to give or intentionally distort to fit its narrative.
How do they verify the selfie is actually the user?
They don’t, people have been using death stranding 2 photo mode to get around it
Some people, certainly. Others aren't so tech savvy, so they're stuck making due.
You send another selfie of what you actually look like, so they can compare.
It's selfies all the way down.
Hey, we wouldn't want young people to know that they're being propagandized by the state of Israel to ignore a genocide, would we? Let's block them from informing themselves under the guise of "protecting" them from porn, which they'll still be able to get to from shadier websites that bombard them with malware. Yeah, that's the solution.
Politicians are so out of touch. Also, all zionists can rot in hell.
Yes, politicians are way out of touch. On every level.
For Zionists... well, that just sounds like genocide with extra steps.... You'd think the Jewish diaspora would be against genocide, but here we are.
You’d think the Jewish diaspora would be against genocide, but here we are.
They're like the parents who abuses their kids because that's how they were raised.
Oh, so this is what VPNs are used for?
Reddit blocks you plain and simple if you use a vpn, and has done so for a while. Also I don't see how VPN relates to them gatekeeping 2 subs behind a mandatory doxxing of yourself.
If you use a vpn you appear as a non-uk user, you don't have to show the ID. If you don't have an existing account, the only reliable source of geolocation for websites is your ip address, so a vpn can effectively circumvent that.
Oh, right. I didn't thought of that at all, I never went beyond "well, they don't let you use VPNs anyway. Man I need to sleep. And thanks for explaining.
Reddit blocks you plain and simple if you use a vpn
Not really true. Some VPN IPs are blocked, so you'd have to select a new VPN endpoint and try again.
Source: have done this multiple times when switching VPN endpoints.
Huh, just went and managed to get the frontpage after 5 tries with mullvad. To be fair haven't really tried too hard to go back on Reddit the last two years, and just assumed the blocking of IPs was stricker. Still, thanks for correcting me
Just visited with my personal VPN, which I'd advocate anyone with technical chops to spin up. Digital Ocean droplet, been in use for years with zero maintenance, $6/mo., and no one gets my logs.
https://social-rise.com/blog/list-of-nsfw-subreddits says there are 10476 NSFW subreddits so is this the first of a 5238 long list of articles that all say "UK Users need to post selfie or photo id to view ... and ..."?
Lol no.
They tried that crap already with the black-identifying subs, and surprise surprise they don't actually approve your posts once you follow all the stipulations. They make note of your race and keep you in a "list", reasoning that you didn't meet several "off the book" regulations (gee... why does that sound familiar to any POC applying for a job or an apartment...).
Don't give them any information. You still won't get access, and now they have your personal data.
I wonder if this will affect RSS feeds