Finally it seems the end of Reddit is near.
“Reddit has stressed that this system is only to verify users’ age, and it has no interest in your identity. Lee further stated that Persona won’t know what subreddits you visit, and has promised it won’t keep users’ uploaded images more than seven days.”
Press X to doubt.
Time to go to LemmyNSFW
Under the new UK law, lemmynsfw would also need to have some kind of age verification for UK users.
Real talk - or what? If LemmyNSFW isn’t based in the UK, what can they do?
Block it? I’d rather have that than deal with processing users face data.
Even though LemmyNSFW is outside of the UK the admins of any instance will be responsible for verification of UK users because of this law. This is why .zip (Lemmy and PieFed) have geoblocked the UK. It’s a lot of work and responsibility to take on.
Here’s the post from Demigodrick explaining this situation better than I can.
Yeah only if the UK can actually manage to enforce any consequences to site admins outside the UK. I’ll wait and watch.
deleted by creator
Well as a Lemmy admin I’ll see if they seriously enforce this on international sites. If not, I won’t worry about it. If so, the UK gets blocked. 🤷🤷🤷
I doubt they’ll be going after niche sites anyway. Big dogs like reddit, sure. Sites dedicated to porn probably. Everyone else? Doubt it.
Honestly I have no idea. I guess they could just block it if they don’t comply?
I believe if the UK finds a site that doesn’t comply with the law, they will block it from their side of things. I haven’t read anything about websites needing to be proactive to block the UK if they don’t plan to comply.
This. Can’t believe we’re seeing “lol Reddit sucks” when this is a country-wide implementation and has nothing to do with Reddit in particular.
So, the UK sucks.
Something similar is coming to Australia as well.
Beware USA :(((
Supreme Court’s ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online (July 4, 2025)
[commented the same a few days back]
Happy birthday, USA
This is why many adult sites are banning access if your IP is from TN or any of the other american states that love jesus more than freedom.
Explains the sudden advertisement in vpns, but I’m afraid they will have to shell out more proxies eventually
You are correct. But this doesn’t lessen the extent to which reddit sucks.
Just curious, how would this happen in practice? As I understand lemmy instances are defederated across the globe. Who would they send their demands to? Also there is already some nsfw content in lemmy, are those expected to respond now in some way?
Maybe they’ll just make the Fediverse illegal in the UK. Or all non-corporate sites that can’t afford to pay a company like Persona.
Or it can just defederate from UK based instances.
.zip has already been trying to figure out how to handle this law, its also UK based.
Lemmy.zip blocks uk users on its front end but I think its contents is still federated.
.zip blocks users from the UK iirc.
That’s always down when I want to use it :(
It’s always up when I use it … Oh you meant the site, sorry
It’s always down for it :)
Google uses reddit for its AI training. Just saying.
God help us all.
Very careful wording there to switch between Persona and Reddit to conveniently omit one from the justification given by the other.
Why doubt, I mean they promised?
Presses X furiously
Oh the cute little corpo is promising to delete your data, how can we not trust him🥺🥺
It is not just that, I don’t trust Persona security, if a malicious actor installed a silent program that monitors users and sends it to a command and control center they probably won’t know for months or even years. Cyber security is very bad in most companies.
Hm, I’m going to need some software engineers to critique an idea I have that could at least partially solve the fears people have about their personal details being tied to their porn habits.
The system will be called the Adult Content Verification System (or Wank Card if you want to be funny). It’s a physical card, printed by the government with a unique key printed on it. Those cards are then sold by any shop that has an alcohol license (premises or personal). You go in, show your ID to the clerk, buy the card. That card is proof that you’re over 18, but it is not directly tied to you, you just have to be over 18 to buy it. The punishment for selling a Wank Card to someone under the age of 18 is the same as if you sold alcohol to someone under 18.
When you go to the porn site, they check if you’re from the UK, they check if you have a key associated with your account. If not, they ask for one, you provide the key to the site, the site does an API call to
https://wankcard.gov.uk/api/verify
with the site’s API key (freely generated, but you could even make the api public if you want) and the key on the card, gets a response saying “Yep! This is a valid key!” and hey presto, free to wank and nobody knows it’s you! If you don’t have an account, the verification would have to be tied to a cookie or something that disappears after a while for all you anonymous people.As a result, you can both prove that you’re over 18 (because you have the card) and some company over in San Francisco doesn’t get your personal data, because you never actually record it anywhere. All you have is keys, and while yes, the government could record “Oh this key was used to verify on this site”, they’d have to know which shop the key was bought from, who sold it, and who bought it, which is a lot more difficult to do unless the shopkeeper keeps records of everyone he’s ever sold to.
So… Good idea? Bad idea? Better than the current approach anyway, I think.
This would be better than most of the crap being proposed or implemented.
But, since the keys are presumably reusable, they’ll presumably get borrowed shared by and among minors almost immediately.
There could be some “Netflix account sharing” style work to deter that, of course.
Yeah I did consider that people are going to share keys, but people are going to share accounts too so that’s always going to happen. The best thing you can do is stick some safeguards on the keys where if a key is found online, it can be deactivated and potentially investigated since you can tell which shop sold the key. If there’s a shop out there just giving cards away to minors, well they’re in for a world of trouble.
Under the Licensing Act of 2003, it’s illegal to sell alcohol to an adult if you reasonably suspect that they will be then giving that alcohol to a minor. You can assume the same will apply to people selling Wank Cards.
people are going to share keys,
get ahead of it and sell discounted bukkakeys
you could probably even have a bundle called the “family plan” for the real sickos
I should get into masturbation regulation marketing!
Hungry for Adams Apples? Try our limp biscuits!
How would you solve replay attacks? Like a million people, of age or not, sharing the same key?
Maybe you could limit the number of verifications a key can have in a day? Limit it to say 10 verifications per day. So if you’re on Pornhub and have an account, you can have the key associated with the account, verified, and so you don’t need to re-verify. But if you go on 10 completely different sites and verify for each one, you can’t verify after that 10th one within the same 24hr period?
You could maybe also include guidelines for integration where if a key is associated with an account, that key can’t be used for any other account. You can include that under some requirement that says you have to make ‘best efforts’ to ensure that a key is only ever used by one account at a time. That way, if a million people are sharing the same key, you’d have to trust that all one million of them will never associate that key with their account because if they do, it invalidates that key for every use other than through that account on that site.
I’m a security dev and this is a good idea!
I’m a UK citizen, fuck everything about this law. I’m so sick of the current authoritarian trend amongst some western countries. The UK is one of the worst offenders.
It’s not even about protecting kids. It’s about control and appeasing puritanical elements in society. We’re the 6th richest economy in the world and we can’t even offer some of the poorest kids food security. But at least they can’t see a pair of tits on Reddit.
Meh, just upload a dick pic.
I’ll never forget how he changed users’ text without them knowing it before the 2016 election. Reddit was going downhill before, but that was a turning point.
For those unaware, this isn’t something like replacing a slur with removed, he edited users’ comments, turning them into insults to other users.
I don’t care that those original commenters were (likely) pieces of shit, and the people who he made the comments insult were definitely pieces of shit, putting words into people’s mouths to make them fight each other is unforgivable. Even if you put out a shitty apology.
Yeah, fuck all that.
Guess we’re transitioning into a VPN only future.
We have the opportunity to head into a utopic or dystopic future and we’re absolutely choosing the dystopic one.
They’ll criminalize personal VPN users for non-work purposes, next.
I’ll just use a VPN to hide my VPN use and then they’ll never know.
Work VPN doesn’t look any different to any other VPN to the people tapping the lines.
Once businesses fully implement zero-trust, VPNs are redundant.
I agree, and whilst I don’t personally bother with vpns myself because I prefer other solutions, it’s one of the things that helps prevent insane UK politicians’ bad hottakes on tech becoming law
Edit: an apostrophe
for non-work purposes
Sounds like a loophole to me!
Good luck, I’m behind 7 proxies.
I don’t think we ever really had a choice
Indeed. With our current system it was only a matter of time. As soon as the internet became a default thing which everyone needed to access just to function in their daily lives, it would of course be subjected to the exact same exploitative mechanisms that the non-internet part of our lives have suffered from since the dawn of history.
A VPN future? Haha. Not if they don’t want to. There are many ways to prevent VPN from operating when you’re a government.
You can just plain ban encryption, which sounds really crazy, but yeah, they’re trying to.
You can just say “it’s illegal to use a VPN”. It’ll technically still work, but if there’s a trace of trafic from your house to a known VPN endpoint, you’re it! Great!
They can force custom proprietary spying software on your devices. Sounds equally crazy as the thing above, right? But rest assured they’re ALSO trying to do that. Multiple times, even. And in some places… they did. Of course, nothing forces you to have such software on your device. Especially if your devices are not supported; it also turns into a “you have to buy this or that big name device, everything else’s de-facto illegal! Fuck you, we’re the government!”. And if you get caught for whatever, and your phone, PC, or anything isn’t “compliant”? Bam. Guilty.
Plenty of option. All of them completely stupid and would weaken both privacy, individuals, and governments at large. It never stopped legislation from being pushed forward.
Well, I guess i am going to be regularly updating the metadata on my most recent selfie.
Oh dear. What a dreadful business.
Anyway, this is mine.
Parental controls exist. Use them instead. I fucking hate this.
tale as old as time even since I was a kid and I’m in my 40s. Reminds me of the original videogame rating system that Sega originally implemented in NA when the first Mortal Kombat came out. Parents, to this day, are still unable to manage what their kids consume.
I mean my parents never had an issue with this. Like when they’d rent movies, I wasn’t allowed to watch Terminator 2 until I was like 13 and it was my Dads favourite movie. He put it on “ok, you have to leave the room now we’re watching a movie” and I did.
u/spez was the lead moderator of r/jailbait, and when he was caught, he got rid of mod transparency. Ghilisaine Maxwell was likely a l lead moderator of news Reddits as well (u/MaxwellHill). Reddit has always been compromised.
I’m not defending Spez, I think he’s a piece of shit and he did edit other users’ comments that were critical of him, which is fucked up, but I don’t think he was actually involved with that sub. It was possible to appoint mods without their knowledge or consent, and he’s a huge target, someone must have done it as a joke.
The speed they banned r/pizzagate was illuminating.
what’s the topic of r/jailbait?
Next in the news: “500k Usernames, Passwords and biometric data leaked in the latest hack”
Remember those are just the ones you hear about. Plenty happen and are never talked about by either side for obvious reasons.
So…coming soon: an app that can match up images of friends or colleagues with a summary of their pornography preferences.
This could at least liven up some boring meetings or dull parties…
Who is not “Rick Rolling” this with a selfie of a stock photo (or a frame from “Never Gonna Give you Up”?)
Lmao when the “anonymous” online forum requires de-anonymizing, I want to hope everyone leaves
Some people will leave, the rest will ride it out as Reddit continues to transform itself into Facebook
To your point, it’s insane how much data reddit collects about you.
To be clear, this is a UK law now applied to any website that serves UK citizens. Anything that hosts adult content requires UK citizens to provide some form of age verification. Like a photo (for AI age estimation), credit card, utility bills, and so on. The government is dumb, and I guess it’s time to just sit on VPNs 24/7 now.
The “won’t somebody please think of the children” rhetorical tactic is always just a pretext for authoritarianism, mass surveillance and data privacy intrusion. Always. It’s the perfect motte-and-bailey: when you attack the actual motives, the motte becomes, “So you don’t care about children?”
UK is full blown authoritarian now. They have been arresting journalists who are covering the genocide in Gaza and designated a direct action protest group as a terrorist organisation.
These assholes are all pedophiles and they use it to control the planet. To get to high levels of government, you must enter the shadow contract of pedophilia. It is easy to control people and trust people with that kind of shadow on them, so it is required.
Then they turn around and use pedophilia to control everyone else. Any tech that threatens their power, they can immediately shutdown by pedo-bombing it. The counter to pedobombing is authoritarian moderation. Once you have that, it is over. The government they control now can control the mods, and that means they control the narrative. THAT is one of the core enemies to fight. An alternative to Reddit or any other system is not enough.
Because pedophilia is such a taboo / social death sentence, it is among the most powerful shadow contracts.
“They” who?
Those that have entered into the shadow contract. A shadow contract is one of few mechanisms to enter large-scale consensus (it isn’t THAT large when compared to a solar or galactic scale, but large enough for planetary control, and with some clever management, can scale larger).
Consensus requires untrusted sovereigns agreeing to collective action. It is a very difficult mechanism to operate. One way is by having a crime so heinous, the mass population block would eviscerate you if it came to light.
Pedophilia is king among these shadow cornerstones. It illustrates a total lack of empathy, no protective nature towards the innocent, no concern for the perceptions of society, high intellect / manipulation abilities, and a willingness to do anything. You can say it is the “panther” among the shadows.
So most leadership is among that tribe, which is why they are the way they are. It is only logical.
There are other tribes as well. Use your imagination and the answers will follow.
Funny thing, Reddit did that “circle” event many years ago. How big did anyone’s circle get? That is an example of what I am explaining. It is nearly game theoretically impossible to have large scale consensus without some mechanism to make sure people are on the same page.
A shadow contract is one of few mechanisms to enter large-scale consensus (it isn’t THAT large when compared to a solar or galactic scale, but large enough for planetary control, and with some clever management, can scale larger).
You don’t know that, I’ve seen shadow contracts that apply to intergalactic scales. I would wager they can be used for interdimensional organisations
Was leaded gas common when you grew up? Just curious
POV: You’re the intern tasked with reviewing the selfies.
It’ll almost certainly be an AI model doing it.
Yeah, this is showing up at roughly the same time we can get (almost) free 5 second video generation from some services, and fast still picture generation on consumer grade hardware. It’s the perfect combination of useless, stupid, and obsolete, all in one very pricey and very dangerous precedent-filled package.
That brings up an interesting thought. What if people uploaded AI generated selfies?
So long as its generated by the same (or a better model) it shouldn’t be able to tell.
It’ll almost certainly be an AI model backed by 1000s of “trainers” in 3rd world countries doing it, but only until the model is fully trained.
thats not what pov means, upload a selfie as punishment
POV = point of view. The intern’s point of view. They’re looking at the selfies submitted by gooners. The picture is a gooner. Idk what you’re talking about.
That could very well be the POV of the intern having to approve career gooners
Like father, like son, I guess.
I keep thinking about some of RPs I’ve done in my life. Hot, vile, smutty text based RPs. I think about them and wonder if there will ever be a time when those words would be considered illegal and I would be arrested for posting them. This doesn’t just protect minors. It tags deviance. Some of you may know the darker corners of Reddit. Imagine if an AI flagged your subs. The delete-rebuild cycle doesn’t work anymore. Reddit will always know. If the law asks for suspects for newly illegal thought crime, Reddit will be able to point to all the users on those dark corners. We are moving into a future where privacy doesn’t matter and I fear what that means for the kinky among us.
I’m nowhere near as worried about this for kink stuff as I am about us LGBTQ living in the US.
Something similar happened In China recently. A female author of homoerotic texts was charged for it.
amongus
That’s a subject many never talk about: it assumes we (1) have morality all figured out and (2) it’s the same for everyone, everywhere.
If the UK is going to require adult verification it should be built into your internet contract. Yeah, I’m an adult. I’m paying my bills, of course I’m a fucking adult. I over pay for this garbage internet.
Uploading a selfie? The ai is going to determine if you’re over 18? Can the ai determine if the selfie is also ai?
What if I’m actually a set of traffic lights and the AI can’t work out what I am from my selfie?
I identify as a zebra crossing.
Yeah, it’s some serious BS. They are forcing you to hand over and trust Reddit with your personal information, yet I wouldn’t trust them if my life depended on it.
At the very least, someone in charge of this legisltion should learn OAuth2 and force the sites they want to comply by only let those OAuth2 accounts access their adult content. If I was in the UK, I’d just pay for a VPN over giving my photo to Reddit. That site is a lobby brigade hellhole whose “we know your dark secrets, we know everything” owner is also probably trading your account details on the side.
Can the AI determine if I’m just uploading photos of Kier Starmer as my ID?
The current answer is that it is very difficult to determine if something was AI generated at scale, and if someone puts some effort in its effectively impossible currently.
Just send an AI selfie problem solved.
it should be built into your internet contract
This works fine with personal contracts like your mobile. (EE has a porn filter that you can disable in your account.)
But it doesn’t quite work for contracts that usually have multiple users. Like your home Internet. Because a child could connect to your WiFi and access that shmutz.
Parental controls exist. Why should single adults be forced to jump through hoops because most parents are lazy fucks who don’t take responsibility for their kids?
Because it’s always a few fuckwits ruining it for the rest.
because most parents are lazy fucks who don’t take responsibility for their kids
These laws aren’t a response to a real problem. The kids are fine. The parents are usually fine. These laws are posturing at best.
Then have the ISPs provide an interface to set which devices can access porn. No ID required.
Or even simples. Just like you have a guest WiFi, have a kids WiFi and an adult wifi
Which has been possible for decades now. People are just so dumb and lazy they rather accept a deep invasion of everyone’s privacy.
Yes. But honestly one of the main complains I’ve seen is not that this is wrong, but that they passed the law without having planned how they should do it while keeping the users safe and private.
Having a WiFi for kids and WiFi for adults could achieve the desired result without really compromising privacy (I think, but I’m not sure), or even enhancing it, since using Facebook on a kids WiFi would mean that Facebook thinks that you are a kids and KONWS they can’t legally track you
Also we could change some dumb rules on other like no posting nudity, since now if a user is using an adult WiFi, they should be treaded as adults. Want to post nudes on twitter? Sure, tag it as such and only adults will see them
In 5minutes on Lemmy we have come up with better ideas than the current law. They didn’t think about this nor heard the critics that have been saying this is a bad idea for years
But then again. What can we expect from people that trus t electronic voting
Edit: forgot this was about the UK. iDK if they have electronic voting
Your ISP doesn’t see which device accesses the Internet. They only see their router.
OTOH, most routers already have features to block websites for specific client devices. But good luck putting the onus on the parents to configure that properly.
They can see and manage the router remotely no reason why they couldn’t do it. Mine let’s me turn off the router lights, change the WiFi password or turn of the WiFi all together.
How do you think this will go down? Parents calling the ISP with “please unblock porn sites for me”? I see various things why this won’t work. From ISPs not wanting to increase the number of service calls over Apple’s Private WiFi MAC addresses to these kind of customers not even knowing how their devices appear on the router. Nah, completely unfeasible.
Yeah. I like the idea of separare WiFi. INE forma adults and another for kids