UK Gov't To Allow Citizens To Head To Nearest Newsstand To Buy Porn... Licenses
from the so-much-progress dept
The UK government's continuing efforts to save the country's children from the evils of internet porn are increasingly ridiculous. Filtering efforts applied by ISPs have managed to seal off access to plenty of non-porn sites while still remaining insanely easy to circumvent. The government -- with a straight face -- suggested there was nothing not normal about internet customers turning over personal information to ISPs in exchange for the permission to view porn. It's as if building a database of the nation's porn aficionados was the government's original intent.
Since nothing about this was working about the way the porn filter's architects (one of whom was arrested on child porn charges) imagined, the UK government decided the same non-functioning tech could be put to work filtering out "terrorist content." Bad ideas have repeatedly been supplanted by worse ones, and now it appears UK citizens may be able to opt out of ISP porn-related data harvesting by [squints at press report] buying a porn license from their local newsjobber.
High street newsagents are to sell so-called “porn passes” that will allow adults to visit over-18 websites anonymously.
The 16-digit cards will allow browsers to avoid giving personal details online when asked to prove their age.
Instead, they would show shopkeepers a passport or driving licence when buying the pass.
Trench coats are coming back! Somewhat of an ironic turn of events, given how much government effort was expended trying to limit the amount of public porn consumption by shutting down theaters and heavily regulating distribution of pornography. Instead of heading to porn shops in shady areas of town, porn consumers will be headed to newspaper kiosks to publicly announce their desire to consume porn in the privacy of their own homes.
I would imagine this will be regulated as well, with the government needing occasional access to porn license buyer lists to verify that newsagents are properly vetting porn license purchasers. Fortunately, the privacy-minded porn fan will now be providing personal info to someone other than their ISP. Unfortunately, they will be providing this to people in their neighborhood, possibly in front of their neighbors.
There is, however, a chance the purchase of a porn license may be treated as no different than a purchase of a pornographic publication: age verification only and no retention of records needed. Given the UK government's incessant push for a sanitized web, it seems unlikely this will be the case. Once you've gotten into the business of controlling access to legal content, the tendency is to continue expansion, rather than treat this as simply as a voluntary exchange between buyer and seller with only very limited government interest.
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Filed Under: filters, for the children, internet, porn, porn license, uk
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Happens all the time. Bring me someone aggressively championing something on "moral" grounds and I'll give you one putrid asshole that does as bad or even worse than he/she preaches.
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The Brexit government
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Re: The Brexit government
But, it's a Tory government. They'll go head first into any hare-brained idea so long as it doesn't accidentally help the poor and vulnerable while helping a small number of rich people out. Dig far enough, I guarantee you'll find some old friend of a cabinet member who stands to make a killing off this idiocy. Even they must know how stupid and ineffective such an idea is, but so long as someone they know profits, they won't care.
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Re: Re: The Brexit government
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Re: Re: Re: The Brexit government
But, the misdirection is noted. As with Trump, nobody can actually defend the Tories' actions, they just try to redirect attention elsewhere.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: The Brexit government
It was Labour who started the austerity - bankrupting NHS in the process, giving brexitters "£350M weekly for NHS" argument on a silver platter. The same austerity, that lowered the living standard of "common people". And when "Vote leave" blamed immigrants for that - what did Labour do? Noting.
Corbyn says that 'voice of the people has to be respected' - sure, but IMO this was voice of misinformed people. Yet - Labour didn't even try to inform them. My guess is - the don't know how any more. They just study sculpture in Saint Martin's College.
So yes, Labour is just as guilty of the manure the UK is in now as Tories.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Brexit government
What did the party *not* in power do when a campaign of misinformation turned out to be successful among the types of people who get their news largely geared toward outright lying to them?
Really, that's what you're going with? Daily Mail readers fell for outright fiction but it's still Labour's fault for not doing anything about it from their position in the shadow cabinet? Talk about partisanship.
Sadly, that's the state of British politics. Idiots tying to make things a 2 team game, and happy to blame the other "team" for the things the party in power are actually doing. You don't mind being lied to, and won't hold the liars accountable for their own words so long as you can score one on the other guys.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Brexit government
Also, New Labour is Tory Lite, not socialist. Corbyn is a socialist — and pro-Brexit.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Brexit government
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Brexit government
I'm 47 this year, and though I'm Irish I also remember the Thatcher years; the "Milk snatcher," the Falklands war, the Spitting Image caricature that seemed so true to life, the Miners' strike and union-busting, the football hooliganism, the riots, Hillsborough, Heysel, "No such thing as society," and much, much more.
These were the days of Loadsamoney and in the years that followed Labour lost the plot because they utterly refused to update their ideology to fit the emerging reality. Thus it was that Labour's policies created an expanding bourgeoisie for Socialists to despise. By bashing the aspiration culture as well as the Royal Family they doomed themselves to be forever described as "the loony left" by the right-wing tabloids, which tapped into the hopes of increasing affluence of the entrepreneurial generation.
When New Labour came out the idea was to win the Loadsamone vote, which had been going to the Tories over fears that a Labour government would steal the hard-earned cash out of the plasterers, etc., who were now able to afford to buy their own homes, acquire assets, and go on holiday to exotic locations such as Barcelona... don't laugh; a mere decade before such a trip would have been way beyond the means of the common man. In the Eighties the bucket-and-spade brigade were complaining about foreign food and people not "torking English proper-like" in Spanish resorts. We'd never had it so good... if we were in the right place, at the right time, and could get to our jobs on our bikes. The South's economy took off while the North languished.
Nowadays what the Tories have reaped they are sowing. Getting rid of caps on rent (a Thatcher government policy) forced the cost of living up to the point where the BBC and ITV are now using studios in Salford near where I live. As a result of new media industries moving north, local service industries are taking off. However, we also have a growing homelessness problem because the market's invisible hand is too busy counting the money being made to do anything about it. Also, chuggers. There are so many charity workers stopping people in the street to ask them to subscribe or make donations that I just march past them all. That's in addition to the plague of beggars, many of whom are homeless. We've got Labour running Manchester but they'd rather punish the homeless or play down their numbers than try to help them. Did I mention that Thatcher claimed her greatest achievement is New Labour?
Tony Blair may have been consigned to the Z-list but his faithful followers live on, boldly going where Thatcher went before. Even Corbyn's not immune to this. You see, what people tend to forget is that yer actual flat cap-wearing "Come-the-revolution, mate" socialists tend to be socially conservative. This includes being somewhat xenophobic. So we're caught in an ideological pincer movement: the socially conservative xenophobes on one side and the neoliberal market-trusting copy-cats on the other, and that's just in the Labour party. The Tories are much worse.
I know this and I'm Irish. What's the AC's excuse?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Brexit government
Being neither Irish or British, and looking at Thatcher times through an ultra-Labour official, and deeply distrusting to official narrative personal filter I cannot have unbiased view, sorry.
I do think, however, that even though "Tories are much worse", the Labour should still be held accountable for their actions.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Brexit government
Never said that. Austerity did, however, make it worse, not better.
Labour could have made it better when they were in power. There are a couple of things they could have done - increase tax progression, tax unused flats, increase protections of people renting their accommodation, ... Instead they've introduced austerity and made life of "common people" worse. This made brexit campaign so much easier, and at the same time shown how detached from their voters Labour is.
Being in power is neither here nor there.
I am sorry the misinformation campaign happened to be so successful among less literate; what did the Labour do to educate them before s.h.i.t. has hit the fan? If nothing, then they have ultimately failed in what their role should be - representing the less fortunate and helping them. But even if they did try - would they put their heart in it, when Labour leadership is pro-brexit? Have they thought about the consequences of - for example - lessening employees' protection laws? Or environmental protection laws? Whatever the answer to that is, it is bad for Labour.
Are you telling me Labour had no chance to organise a counter campaign? If they could and still can do nothing, if they cannot be Labour, if they are as useless as you seem to suggest, who needs them? Conversely, if they are just Tories-light, who needs them?
Please, do not try to force me in false dichotomy, that if I do not like what Labour does, I am somehow pro-Tory. They both share the responsibility for Brexit. Which, BTW, I was stating from the start. And as I would expect brexit appealing to Tories - along with protecting upper classes, widening the income gap, selling off NHS, etc. - I would see it as a shot in the foot (or rather a death-kiss) for Labour.
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"New Labour is Tory Lite"
Curious how it goes like that. Here in the states the Democrats are Republicans Lite.
Rather they're both corporatists, but the Democrats through the civil liberties interests a bone once in a while.
They had elections in the Soviet Union as well, and no-one, not even they were calling themselves a democracy.
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Re: "New Labour is Tory Lite"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-party-is-over-how-republicans-went-crazy -democrats-became-useless-and-the-middle-class-got-shafted-by-mike-lofgren/2012/09/14/92e5d004-f386- 11e1-adc6-87dfa8eff430_story.html
It explains how this came about. Basically, both camps have vast supplies of neoliberal Kool-aid and they can't get enough of it.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: The Brexit government
Nope, labour do not care about the people any more than the other shitstains in govt. We need to get rid of ALL the career politicians and have term limits for the new ones.
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Re: The Brexit government
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Baits the question
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Re:
Gotta love revisionist history. The "Internet" is basically a renaming of Arpanet, an endpoint-to-endpoint addressing packeted net architecture intended to route around damage in a military network operated by the U.S. military.
Adopted by universities, it has eventually morphed into a global phenomenon. Most certainly not "how it was intended". It has also become pretty bad at being decentralized as a net architecture and routing around damage.
Win some, lose some, I guess.
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Re: Re:
To be fair, since Arpanet was intended to route around damage to ensure that communications got where they were intended to, blocking communications from getting where they are intended to go is actually against the original intention.
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new business model....
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Idiocy
1. Kids will get hold of them - for example they will steal them when preparing their paper rounds in the shop on a morning
2. There will be black markets in schools selling them
3. The 16 digit numbers will be posted online
4. Somebody will crack the code and release a keygen
5. Use a VPN and its a non issue anyway!
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Re: Idiocy
Will they? Why would they be so focused on getting access to British porn sites, rather than the millions of other sites available? (Related to your point 5: there's no way the parents and ISPs are going to outsmart the kids on this. Kids have a time-honoured tradition of working around parental restrictions, digital or otherwise, and they have all the time in the world to do it.)
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Squeezing a middleman into the porn industry?
...Can you imagine the MAFIAA over in America lobbying for a similar law? "The only way we'll stop piracy is if all sites that host music/movie material are censored and only available to those who have purchased a license!"
Nevermind the independent artists who want their stuff free and available to everyone.
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Morality theater
16 digits? Is this the return of the software CD key which did such a wonderful job of preventing people from copying things 20 years ago?
In all probability this system has already been cracked.
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Technical WTF
Do they do blocking at the ISP level and then the ISP sees the 'porn pass' code? Well, that kind of circumvents the whole "you don't need to tell your ISP that you are looking at porn" argument
Do they get a browser extension that auto-negotiates this? Sounds like another easy-to-track issue. Not to mention if it exists, you are announcing it to the entire ad community you are looking at porn...
I'm just so confused at how this is supposed to ACTUALLY work... more bureaucrats trying to limit speech in the most comically stupid way possible.
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Re: Technical WTF
The facts that this is both a horrendously massive task and pretty much impossible seem to bypass them, as does the fact that the BBFC are already struggling with funding and staffing to keep up with their existing mandate (being Tories, they won't actually raise funding, just complain at people for not doing their jobs with no money).
"I'm just so confused at how this is supposed to ACTUALLY work"
To repeat what I've said elsewhere, this is meant to work in the following ways:
- "like the Royal Wedding, to distract attention away from the way we're fucking up the idiotic scheme that is Brexit"
- "making it look we're 'doing something' about children (while ignoring the massive ways they're letting them down in important ways)
- "I can get censorship power that Mary Whitehouse and Stalin could only dream of" and
- "my mate owns a company that would make lots of money and I need a kickback".
In no way is it actually supposed to work in the sense of "stopping children from accessing porn".
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Happens all the time. Bring me someone aggressively championing something on "moral" grounds and I'll give you one putrid asshole that does as bad or even worse than he/she preaches.
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Re:
There is no point in changing the rules of the world if it would not make a difference to you.
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With A Little Help From My Friends
People in the UK need to use 16 digits when viewing porn? How are they supposed to do this?
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Re: With A Little Help From My Friends
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Newspapers
/s
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Re: Newspapers
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Re: Re: Newspapers
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Mere nudity
I thought that was figure drawing class.
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Re: Re: Newspapers
Anyway, they'll probably get an "out" somehow. Probably in the same way the right-wing press can get away with making an outcry about children being exposed to sex while having a "look at these barely clothed pictures of a barely legal celebrity" over the page.
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Re: Re: Re: Newspapers
Though the English have escaped lowest rank in that category in the following observation thanks to their culinary expertise:
In heaven, police is English, cooks are French, engineers are German and lovers Italian.
In hell, police is French, cooks are English, engineers are Italian and lovers German.
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Trench coats are coming back!
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It's not for porn.
I need the 16-digit code from the newsstand so that my kids can get Disney.
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Proper Previous Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
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Always upset by effort to control piracy, prostitution, or porn!
That's Techdirt. Pretends it's on leading edge of tech, actually just almost literally pimping ancient ways of stealing and being stupid.
WHERE is your positive message, Techdirt? All you have here is usual childish complaint that SOME slight limit and disparaging is put in place.
What GOOD do you see in porn that want NO limits, don't want civil society to downplay it?
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"That's Techdirt."
That's the point at which you got my flag. Next time try ad homineming less.
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Re: pimping ancient ways of stealing
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Re: Always upset by effort to control piracy, prostitution, or porn!
This is not so much about the children, but rather about the legacy publishers getting their nose under the tent.
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Re:
What GOOD do you see in porn that want NO limits, don't want civil society to downplay it?
Well, pornographic content is protected by copyright, and is not something people in general like owning up to watching and enjoying. This means that if anyone is accused of downloading porn, they're more likely to pay settlement fees rather than argue it out in court. This would create an increasingly upward trend where less people, and judges, question allegations of -
Oh, wait. That's the good that your side sees. The corporate, copyright, pornographic side.
It's fun watching the idiots bite the hands that feed them.
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Re: Re:
In those cases I blame those who settle these cases. It's their fault for being so ashamed of something that's perfectly normal.
There is no reason to be ashamed of being a person who masturbates to porn in the current year. It's NORMAL. If you still think it's shameful, then just stop looking at porn because someone will find out and use it against you.
This is like sluts who go out banging random guys every day of the week but then get all suicidal when someone posts a video of it.
Why can't people just stand up, square out their shoulders and admit they like to participate in victimless activities that make them feel good despite what everyone else's opinion is of it? The only reason to remain in a closet is if you'll be killed or imprisoned for stepping out of it. Any other reasons and you're just hurting your own people.
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Re: Re: Re:
Granted, with the way Prenda and Malibu Media have botched things, it's no wonder the MPAA hasn't openly come out in support of the initiative.
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As much as I agree...
Not all places in the US are California. And people commonly lose jobs for admitting to having a libido or a sexual interest.
Curiously, they sometimes lose spouses, though in that case, maybe they have the wrong spouse?
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Re: As much as I agree...
I'm neither American nor Californian. I live about 3,000 of your "miles" away from that place and I still don't feel ashamed of my lifestyle.
"And people commonly lose jobs for admitting to having a libido or a sexual interest."
Which they surprisingly never sue over. Isn't that wrongful dismissal, especially if said admission happened outside the workplace?
"Curiously, they sometimes lose spouses, though in that case, maybe they have the wrong spouse?"
100% agreed on that. I never understood why people get married to people with such overactive jealousy problems, where the definition of cheating extends to pornography in their minds.
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Outside of America
In Europe it seems they've figured out that human sexuality is a part of life, rather than a necessary evil.
American movies overstate violence and understate sex. In European movies (those I've watched) the reverse seems true.
So yeah, here in the US we're a whole lot hung up about sex.
For one thing, companies and institutions that are associated with a religion can dismiss people for moral grounds, such as a parochial school dismissing gays or women with pro-abortion-access opinions. That stuff occasionally makes news.
That sort of thing creeps into closely affiliated companies like Chick-Fil-A or Hobby Lobby, thanks to SCOTUS favoring corporate rights over human rights. But people don't otherwise sue often because a) they can't afford it, and would go up against a team of high-paid corporate lawyers. and b) they get blackballed as not a team player and a troublemaker and can never work in the same field again.
So that's to say yes, the US has reverted to the middle ages.
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Re: Outside of America
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Re:
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Re: Re:
And then there are the free VPNs that fly under government radar. When I had my online radio station, and ran a free VPN to allow people on workplaces to bypass workplace filters, I did see a lot of traffic coming Iran and China, when those countries began cracking down on VPNs.
My VPN server, in Sacramento, Ca, was only subject to American laws.
So if Britain has started to restrict VPNs a few years ago, I would not have been subject to prosecution in Britain, if anyone in Britain had connected to my VPN. When I ran my free VPN, it was only subject to United States laws. I was not subject to prosecution in Iran, China, Britain, or anywhere else.
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That'll be £15 for the "man on woman missionary only" pass sir.
I want man-in-dog-suit-on-woman-on-fridge-with-butter-as-lube.
That'll be £59.99 sir.
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Re:
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Oi mate!
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>Same man gets arrested for kiddie porn
Sounds like an airtight system; sign me up!
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