iqoniq
Prominent Member
Apparently the government are going to have another crack at tackling online porn (funny how they usually talk about this when they're in crisis). Now I freely applaud people trying to stop kids accessing porn, but the problem is when the plan has already been mooted and dropped.
Their ground breaking idea is to make all websites verify a users age if they're from the UK, and if they don't they'll be blocked.
They keep mentioning this time and time again, and they've been told time and time again, a VPN will negate any efforts. I usually run a VPN as standard, and my main reason is to bypass geo-locks on content I can't access because of where I live. It makes the site's server think I'm somewhere else (another country) and let me watch whatever I want to watch. The same thing will happen if I go onto a porn site, and the porn site will think I'm in whatever country I've told my VPN to connect to. The system is broken.
VPNs are becoming widely available, some are free, and some are even baked into browsers. These don't require any age verification checks or anything much in the way of setup, and at one point in Opera merely turning on the Off Road setting would bypass all the blocks the government put in against piracy sites. There's no way to check where traffic from a VPN has actually originated, either.
The government's plans for a "porn pass" was shown to be totally unworkable from the start, and I was surprised how far along in planning it got, before it was quietly dropped shortly before launch (the company that would be running the verification was a porn producer themselves, there was a very strong conflict of interest as they would be able to stifle competitors, and were also heavily implicated during the underage/revenge/rape porn scandal).
What the government could do is target commercial VPNs. Give the VPNs the same terms as the porn sites, but instead of the porn site doing the age verification, requiring that the VPN takes over that part the moment they see a domain on the naughty list. This would work, but you'd also end up with most VPNs refusing to do any business with the UK.
A legitimate function of a VPN is to bypass government placed restrictions on freedom of speech or real news, and as part of this service, VPNs do not store records. At any point the authorities could turn up armed with subpoena's, search warrants and everything and demand that the VPN tells them who was accessing dodgywebsite.com, and the staff will smile politely and say they can't because they don't keep logs. This isn't because they want to help people get access to porn, but because if you're in a country which restricts what you can access online, and the only news is propaganda, would you want the company you use to escape that keeping records that the authorities could access? If a VPN starts asking for some personal details outside of an e-mail address (some don't even require that), then all trust is lost.
You can't even push this onto ISPs. When I use a VPN, all my ISP sees is encrypted traffic heading to a server in Spain. It doesn't know what this data is, and it could be cat pictures or classified plans for a US fighter bomber. The ISP doesn't know where it goes to after that either. All the ISP is doing is acting as a road for the traffic between the VPN and myself.
The government need to realise that trying to block websites will not work. They've tried the same with file sharing and torrent sites, and that hasn't worked out so great. They're just asking the same question on a different day and getting the same answer. They can't just magic up some solution, because that's not how technology works. They have no power whatsoever over any company or server not sitting on UK soil. In short, they need to realise we're nothing but a small country, and when it's a choice of 72 million customers or 7.2 billion, it's obvious who will win.
Maybe education as opposed to censorship might actually be the key here.
Their ground breaking idea is to make all websites verify a users age if they're from the UK, and if they don't they'll be blocked.
They keep mentioning this time and time again, and they've been told time and time again, a VPN will negate any efforts. I usually run a VPN as standard, and my main reason is to bypass geo-locks on content I can't access because of where I live. It makes the site's server think I'm somewhere else (another country) and let me watch whatever I want to watch. The same thing will happen if I go onto a porn site, and the porn site will think I'm in whatever country I've told my VPN to connect to. The system is broken.
VPNs are becoming widely available, some are free, and some are even baked into browsers. These don't require any age verification checks or anything much in the way of setup, and at one point in Opera merely turning on the Off Road setting would bypass all the blocks the government put in against piracy sites. There's no way to check where traffic from a VPN has actually originated, either.
The government's plans for a "porn pass" was shown to be totally unworkable from the start, and I was surprised how far along in planning it got, before it was quietly dropped shortly before launch (the company that would be running the verification was a porn producer themselves, there was a very strong conflict of interest as they would be able to stifle competitors, and were also heavily implicated during the underage/revenge/rape porn scandal).
What the government could do is target commercial VPNs. Give the VPNs the same terms as the porn sites, but instead of the porn site doing the age verification, requiring that the VPN takes over that part the moment they see a domain on the naughty list. This would work, but you'd also end up with most VPNs refusing to do any business with the UK.
A legitimate function of a VPN is to bypass government placed restrictions on freedom of speech or real news, and as part of this service, VPNs do not store records. At any point the authorities could turn up armed with subpoena's, search warrants and everything and demand that the VPN tells them who was accessing dodgywebsite.com, and the staff will smile politely and say they can't because they don't keep logs. This isn't because they want to help people get access to porn, but because if you're in a country which restricts what you can access online, and the only news is propaganda, would you want the company you use to escape that keeping records that the authorities could access? If a VPN starts asking for some personal details outside of an e-mail address (some don't even require that), then all trust is lost.
You can't even push this onto ISPs. When I use a VPN, all my ISP sees is encrypted traffic heading to a server in Spain. It doesn't know what this data is, and it could be cat pictures or classified plans for a US fighter bomber. The ISP doesn't know where it goes to after that either. All the ISP is doing is acting as a road for the traffic between the VPN and myself.
The government need to realise that trying to block websites will not work. They've tried the same with file sharing and torrent sites, and that hasn't worked out so great. They're just asking the same question on a different day and getting the same answer. They can't just magic up some solution, because that's not how technology works. They have no power whatsoever over any company or server not sitting on UK soil. In short, they need to realise we're nothing but a small country, and when it's a choice of 72 million customers or 7.2 billion, it's obvious who will win.
Maybe education as opposed to censorship might actually be the key here.