Finally it seems the end of Reddit is near.

  • RedFrank24@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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.

  • StarryPhoenix97@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • octobob@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      I’m nowhere near as worried about this for kink stuff as I am about us LGBTQ living in the US.

    • catty@lemmy.worldBanned
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      2 days ago

      Something similar happened In China recently. A female author of homoerotic texts was charged for it.

  • ageek@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Next in the news: “500k Usernames, Passwords and biometric data leaked in the latest hack”

  • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      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.

  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    This is a combination of terrible legislation in the UK meets awful social media site.

    The Online Safety Act is an abomination, compromising the privacy and freedom of the vast majority of the UK in the name of “protecting children”.

    I’m of the view parents are responsible for protecting their children. I know it’s hard but the Online Safety Act is not a solution.

    All it will.do is compromise the privacy and security of law abiding adults while kids will still access porn and all the other really bad stuff on the Internet will actually be unaffected. The dark illegal shit on the Internet is not happening on Pornhub or Reddit.

    The UK is gradually sliding further and further into censorship, and authoritarianism and all the in the name of do gooders. It’s scary to watch.

    • CalipherJones@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      If a politician says it’s to help the children, it’s almost safe to assume they themselves rape children, at least in America.

  • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • Krompus@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

  • minkymunkey_7_7@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    We thought the same thing about Netflix with the sharing password bans. Yet they retained more profit than ever the next year.

    Who’s to say if this is what will make Reddit end, or did they actually just got more successful after the end of 3rd party apps compared to the declaration of so many users back then?

    Digital personal verification is just going to become a fact of life in the future for everyone born after about 2012. They will use online ID cards, biometrics, location metadata that is constantly uploaded by our devices, maybe even implanted RFID encrypted chips for account verification. Passwords are becoming outdated and outmoded for security as we speak here. 2FA is the minimum security for online today but that may soon become outmoded as well.

    • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 days ago

      LOL. No “we” didn’t. A few idiots did.

      These large tech companies have e focus groups and can do extensive research on how their markets will react to these changes.

      Any analysis on social media just doesn’t have access to that data.

    • ZeroOne@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      That’s because Netfilx is basically a media powerhouse & kind of a monopoly.

      & your average person doesn’t know how to effectively pirate

      • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        That brings up an interesting thought. What if people uploaded AI generated selfies?

      • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        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.

      • jjmoldy@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        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.

    • HereIAm@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

  • appropriateghost@lemmy.ml
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    3 days ago

    so those scam popups that scare people by saying their webcam was hacked and took pictures of them while looking at porn is getting state sanction!