9 ms·

UK newsagents to sell ‘porn passes’ to visit X-rated websites

48 points by jamesbowman 8y ago

verroq 8y ago
Can someone explain to me, what exactly is wrong with the UK? Where did it all go so wrong?
- jakeogh 8y ago
  http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/10-11/43/contents http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/10-11/43/contents Free speech and ownership of self and property follows.
  - dopamean 8y ago
    Why is this response being downvoted? I don't actually know very much about the situation so I really don't have the tools to evaluate what is wrong (or right) with this comment.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Because it's an incredibly stupid claim that firearms would somehow improve the situation? I mean, we had a live-fire slow-burn civil war in the UK for decades (1970s-2000). It didn't help.
      - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        Knowing that if you abuse people enough eventually you'll run into someone who shoots back is a massive check on abuse of power. Checking abuse of government's power to enforce its will with violence makes it much more likely to be careful deciding what it's will is. It gives the slippery slope some friction if the will of the government strays too far from that of the people. I don't see it being applicable in the case of the UK where the attitude seems to be to condone or ignore invasive paternalistic government in all cases when it doesn't directly contradict one's personal interests. Edit: I'm not talking about armed resistance here, I'm talking about the fact that it's much harder to normalize the use of government action to just steamroll over groups you disagree with when each misdeed carries a risk of bloodshed and provoking outcry. Recall the recent cattle grazing on federal lands standoff fiasco. While I haven't looked into the merits of either side that kind of standoff would not have happened and the public would never have known of the issue in a country where there is not both freedom of the press (as a byproduct of the 1A) and the right of citizens to bear arms. Even Waco (while tragic and a failure of society to check the power government in a million different ways) is a success story for the 2a and the 1a because the government was not able to mistreat people without public knowledge and scrutiny of their misdeeds.
        ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
        I think in the modern era, a movement to curtail Government power in the United States would be better served by refusing to pay taxes than military action.
        Zungaron 8y ago
        An even simpler and more effective solution would be to just stop voting for authoritarians. I don't think anything has served as a more consistent death knell for an American politician than being branded "soft on crime".
        pjc50 8y ago
        Do you know anything at all of the history of Northern Ireland? It turns out that the government can shoot back too.
        magduf 8y ago
        If you go farther back to before NI existed, the reason the UK finally gave up and let Ireland have independence is because the Irish used violence against the British who were abusing them.
        TallGuyShort 8y ago
        There were recent examples of this in the US: armed confrontations with government in which the civilians were branded as unstable extremists. The stand-off led to a court case in which it turns out that yes, the government had been in the wrong the whole time. I think the gun control debate is interesting for a different reason than guns-preventing-tyranny, though: in the UK you see the police tweeting to brag about finding the kind of knives you eat with and still struggling with very high murder rates. In the US there are politicians who openly admit that their gun control proposal will do nothing and is largely symbolic, but they still think they're justified in simply banning the ownership of certain items with no compensation to their legal owners. Even if that's not getting rid of the means of opposing tyranny... isn't that already tyranny? There's a big difference between a blanket, retro-active ban and licensing / regulating / buying-back but that seems largely lost in the other ideological aspects of the debate.
      - jakeogh 8y ago
        Ban carrying knives next? And 3D printers; gonna need a license and a pile of DRM phoning home to make sure you didn't make a banned object.
- fleitz 8y ago
  1776.
- zeth___ 8y ago
  Imagine you elected Hilary Clinton to carry out Donald Trumps policies. That's what Theresa May is. Oh and Bernie Sanders is even more left wing and will probably win the next election.
- sithadmin 8y ago
  >Where did it all go so wrong? Centuries of public consensus that a paternalistic government is tolerable, or even good.
- pjc50 8y ago
  The UK has always been this bad. It's Mary Whitehouse or the Lady Chatterly trial all over again. Public discourse is a hypocrisy-ridden disaster. The Daily Mail has been a big driver for this, while they profit from an endless stream of prurient bikini pictures. The few million middle-class voters in marginal constituencies whose votes actually matter are easily convinced by the papers that the Internet is out to corrupt their children (and frankly they have a point), and therefore go along with bureaucratic-authoritarian "solutions" for it.
  - hippich 8y ago
    I am really curious about "frankly they have a point". Could you expand more on it?
- johannes1234321 8y ago
  England never saw any serious revolution or uprising since the Kingdom of England was founded about 1000 years ago (Scotts and Irish are different)
  - pmyteh 8y ago
    Oliver Cromwell would like a word: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War (There have been plenty of other revolutions and uprisings, though most were either elite coups or unsuccessful).
    - pjc50 8y ago
      He's half-right; Cromwell was not a popular uprising, and was so unpopular during his rule that the UK returned to monarchy afterwards. I think the crucial thing is that since the eras of Rights of Man and Human Rights we've not had enough of a catastrophe to completely ground-up rebuild the principles of government.
      - pmyteh 8y ago
        Not primarily a popular uprising, but definitively a revolution and not a mere palace coup. The wars went on for many years, large numbers fought on both sides and there were significant social and political changes as a result. And yes, Cromwell as Lord Protector was not popular at the end. But then, neither was Charles I. We definitely avoided a ground -up rebuilding after the enlightenment, but I'm not entirely sure one is necessary, if you are willing to move incrementally rather than to try to enforce an ancien regime. In almost all senses Britain is an ordinary modern democracy, even if a new liberal order has been built on the back of the old.
- djhworld 8y ago
  Policies like these always get argued through the lens of "won't someone think of the children?" It's hard to make a rebuttal to that in the UK without being pilloried
Digit-Al 8y ago
So do we now look forward to teenagers hanging around newsagents asking people to get them a porn pass along with the beer and fags?
- Digit-Al 8y ago
  Oh, and wasn't the verification supposed to be free? So now are we supposed to either risk our credentials being stolen or pay to view free website content?
- noir_lord 8y ago
  Hah. If you want to raise a generation of people capable of hiding their online activity more effectively trying to get between a teenager and smut is basically the way to do it. I'm pretty sure that VPN's and Tor will explode in popularity if they ever manage to enforce this in any way beyond the most silly methods. Also hello escalating arms race.
  - andrei_says_ 8y ago
    Maybe someone could also turn them onto voting.
    - Digit-Al 8y ago
      Free porn if you vote?
    - WiseWeasel 8y ago
      And thus the porn star party came to rule Britain for the next hundred years.
  - zeth___ 8y ago
    >I'm pretty sure that VPN's and Tor will explode in popularity if they ever manage to enforce this in any way beyond the most silly methods. VPNs do next to nothing and require a credit card. Tor will definitely benefit from this however.
plouffy 8y ago
"Some 56 per cent of British adults admitted to watching pornography in a 2014 study carried out by The Observer." Looks like 44% of British adults are liars.
- ytwySXpMbS 8y ago
  I know you're joking, but you raise an interesting point. I honestly think porn is potentially harmful, and having stopped watching it myself, understand why 44% would too. It's brutally extreme depiction of sex almost desensitises the brain to the actual experience, at least in my experience. Especially with the endorphins reinforcing the behaviour, it can get close to an addiction.
wetpaws 8y ago
Obligatory 4chan greentext joke
trothamel 8y ago
I'm really wondering why anyone thinks that this will do anything more than disadvantaging local business while sending traffic elsewhere.
spuz 8y ago
How long will the 16 digit code last for? How truly anonymous are those codes? If my code is leaked will it be possible to view all of my porn viewing activity? Why is reporting on this so terrible? I actually don't have a problem with requiring age restrictions on certain content online I just have no confidence that it will be implemented securely and anonymously when there are no competent journalists to hold politicians to a high standard.
hex12648430 8y ago
Who decides what is or isn't an X-rated website? Are the authorities going to block tumblr or twitter because of all the porn on there? If not then what is the purpose of this law? How are websites going to get blocked? DNS filtering? Asking the sites operators to block all traffic from the UK by default?
- Spearchucker 8y ago
  Interesting point. Issuu.com do online magazines, mostly the usual fashion/motoring/sport/and so on, but there is some stuff on Issuu that stretches racy a little thin.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > Are the authorities going to block tumblr or twitter because of all the porn on there? If not then what is the purpose of this law? No. This is a Brexit-style law, the point is to send a message, through the newspapers. Not to be bothered with any details about how it might actually work.
- bitL 8y ago
  I can write a scalable webservice that is able to detect such content with 90%-95% accuracy including locations of offending areas; based on some very recent (2 months old) Deep Learning research. I presume they can do that as well and take 5-10% failure rate as acceptable. If I were running my own social network and wanted to keep it clean, I'd use it without any hesitation. But those are technical means, this is a political issue.
  - lainga 8y ago
    Does it handle literotica? (Could the UK under the new law?)
    - bitL 8y ago
      No, just images. But it might be doable as well - look at a recent post from fast.ai for text classification.
rdxm 8y ago
This is an Onion piece right?!?!? I mean, come on....(pun most def. intended....)
peterkelly 8y ago
MPs have only voted in favour of this due to extensive lobbying and under-the-table payments from the major VPN providers.
crtasm 8y ago
https://www.blocked.org.uk/ https://www.blocked.org.uk/ lists blocked sites and can test URLs of your choice on most(all?) of the major ISPs.
mseebach 8y ago
It's a good thing that this scheme is 100% secure against someone reselling these online for bitcoin.
zimbatm 8y ago
Nicely done. Next step, remove cash to trace all the porn pass purchases. Although I suspect most people don't even care and will use their debit card already.
codedokode 8y ago
Is not it better to block access to porn sites by parents' request? So that people without children don't have to bother. Also there are many things that affect children much worse than online porn. For example, if a single woman is raising a child there is high probability that every weekend she comes home drunk with some unfamiliar poorly educated low cultured drunk man. The child has to listen to their drunk talking. This kid will probably soon become alcohol or drug addict or even a criminal. Porn obviously won't do so much harm. So my suggestion is to ban drinking and inviting men home for single mothers before you ban porn. Or maybe ban alcohol for everyone who has children.

48 points by jamesbowman 8y ago

verroq 8y ago

Can someone explain to me, what exactly is wrong with the UK? Where did it all go so wrong?

jakeogh 8y ago
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/10-11/43/contents http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/10-11/43/contents Free speech and ownership of self and property follows.
- dopamean 8y ago
  Why is this response being downvoted? I don't actually know very much about the situation so I really don't have the tools to evaluate what is wrong (or right) with this comment.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Because it's an incredibly stupid claim that firearms would somehow improve the situation? I mean, we had a live-fire slow-burn civil war in the UK for decades (1970s-2000). It didn't help.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      Knowing that if you abuse people enough eventually you'll run into someone who shoots back is a massive check on abuse of power. Checking abuse of government's power to enforce its will with violence makes it much more likely to be careful deciding what it's will is. It gives the slippery slope some friction if the will of the government strays too far from that of the people. I don't see it being applicable in the case of the UK where the attitude seems to be to condone or ignore invasive paternalistic government in all cases when it doesn't directly contradict one's personal interests. Edit: I'm not talking about armed resistance here, I'm talking about the fact that it's much harder to normalize the use of government action to just steamroll over groups you disagree with when each misdeed carries a risk of bloodshed and provoking outcry. Recall the recent cattle grazing on federal lands standoff fiasco. While I haven't looked into the merits of either side that kind of standoff would not have happened and the public would never have known of the issue in a country where there is not both freedom of the press (as a byproduct of the 1A) and the right of citizens to bear arms. Even Waco (while tragic and a failure of society to check the power government in a million different ways) is a success story for the 2a and the 1a because the government was not able to mistreat people without public knowledge and scrutiny of their misdeeds.
      - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
        I think in the modern era, a movement to curtail Government power in the United States would be better served by refusing to pay taxes than military action.
        Zungaron 8y ago
        An even simpler and more effective solution would be to just stop voting for authoritarians. I don't think anything has served as a more consistent death knell for an American politician than being branded "soft on crime".
      - pjc50 8y ago
        Do you know anything at all of the history of Northern Ireland? It turns out that the government can shoot back too.
        magduf 8y ago
        If you go farther back to before NI existed, the reason the UK finally gave up and let Ireland have independence is because the Irish used violence against the British who were abusing them.
      - TallGuyShort 8y ago
        There were recent examples of this in the US: armed confrontations with government in which the civilians were branded as unstable extremists. The stand-off led to a court case in which it turns out that yes, the government had been in the wrong the whole time. I think the gun control debate is interesting for a different reason than guns-preventing-tyranny, though: in the UK you see the police tweeting to brag about finding the kind of knives you eat with and still struggling with very high murder rates. In the US there are politicians who openly admit that their gun control proposal will do nothing and is largely symbolic, but they still think they're justified in simply banning the ownership of certain items with no compensation to their legal owners. Even if that's not getting rid of the means of opposing tyranny... isn't that already tyranny? There's a big difference between a blanket, retro-active ban and licensing / regulating / buying-back but that seems largely lost in the other ideological aspects of the debate.
    - jakeogh 8y ago
      Ban carrying knives next? And 3D printers; gonna need a license and a pile of DRM phoning home to make sure you didn't make a banned object.
fleitz 8y ago
1776.
zeth___ 8y ago
Imagine you elected Hilary Clinton to carry out Donald Trumps policies. That's what Theresa May is. Oh and Bernie Sanders is even more left wing and will probably win the next election.
sithadmin 8y ago
>Where did it all go so wrong? Centuries of public consensus that a paternalistic government is tolerable, or even good.
pjc50 8y ago
The UK has always been this bad. It's Mary Whitehouse or the Lady Chatterly trial all over again. Public discourse is a hypocrisy-ridden disaster. The Daily Mail has been a big driver for this, while they profit from an endless stream of prurient bikini pictures. The few million middle-class voters in marginal constituencies whose votes actually matter are easily convinced by the papers that the Internet is out to corrupt their children (and frankly they have a point), and therefore go along with bureaucratic-authoritarian "solutions" for it.
- hippich 8y ago
  I am really curious about "frankly they have a point". Could you expand more on it?
johannes1234321 8y ago
England never saw any serious revolution or uprising since the Kingdom of England was founded about 1000 years ago (Scotts and Irish are different)
- pmyteh 8y ago
  Oliver Cromwell would like a word: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War (There have been plenty of other revolutions and uprisings, though most were either elite coups or unsuccessful).
  - pjc50 8y ago
    He's half-right; Cromwell was not a popular uprising, and was so unpopular during his rule that the UK returned to monarchy afterwards. I think the crucial thing is that since the eras of Rights of Man and Human Rights we've not had enough of a catastrophe to completely ground-up rebuild the principles of government.
    - pmyteh 8y ago
      Not primarily a popular uprising, but definitively a revolution and not a mere palace coup. The wars went on for many years, large numbers fought on both sides and there were significant social and political changes as a result. And yes, Cromwell as Lord Protector was not popular at the end. But then, neither was Charles I. We definitely avoided a ground -up rebuilding after the enlightenment, but I'm not entirely sure one is necessary, if you are willing to move incrementally rather than to try to enforce an ancien regime. In almost all senses Britain is an ordinary modern democracy, even if a new liberal order has been built on the back of the old.
djhworld 8y ago
Policies like these always get argued through the lens of "won't someone think of the children?" It's hard to make a rebuttal to that in the UK without being pilloried

Digit-Al 8y ago

So do we now look forward to teenagers hanging around newsagents asking people to get them a porn pass along with the beer and fags?

Digit-Al 8y ago
Oh, and wasn't the verification supposed to be free? So now are we supposed to either risk our credentials being stolen or pay to view free website content?
noir_lord 8y ago
Hah. If you want to raise a generation of people capable of hiding their online activity more effectively trying to get between a teenager and smut is basically the way to do it. I'm pretty sure that VPN's and Tor will explode in popularity if they ever manage to enforce this in any way beyond the most silly methods. Also hello escalating arms race.
- andrei_says_ 8y ago
  Maybe someone could also turn them onto voting.
  - Digit-Al 8y ago
    Free porn if you vote?
  - WiseWeasel 8y ago
    And thus the porn star party came to rule Britain for the next hundred years.
- zeth___ 8y ago
  >I'm pretty sure that VPN's and Tor will explode in popularity if they ever manage to enforce this in any way beyond the most silly methods. VPNs do next to nothing and require a credit card. Tor will definitely benefit from this however.

plouffy 8y ago

"Some 56 per cent of British adults admitted to watching pornography in a 2014 study carried out by The Observer." Looks like 44% of British adults are liars.

ytwySXpMbS 8y ago
I know you're joking, but you raise an interesting point. I honestly think porn is potentially harmful, and having stopped watching it myself, understand why 44% would too. It's brutally extreme depiction of sex almost desensitises the brain to the actual experience, at least in my experience. Especially with the endorphins reinforcing the behaviour, it can get close to an addiction.

wetpaws 8y ago

Obligatory 4chan greentext joke

trothamel 8y ago

I'm really wondering why anyone thinks that this will do anything more than disadvantaging local business while sending traffic elsewhere.

spuz 8y ago

How long will the 16 digit code last for? How truly anonymous are those codes? If my code is leaked will it be possible to view all of my porn viewing activity? Why is reporting on this so terrible? I actually don't have a problem with requiring age restrictions on certain content online I just have no confidence that it will be implemented securely and anonymously when there are no competent journalists to hold politicians to a high standard.

hex12648430 8y ago

Who decides what is or isn't an X-rated website? Are the authorities going to block tumblr or twitter because of all the porn on there? If not then what is the purpose of this law? How are websites going to get blocked? DNS filtering? Asking the sites operators to block all traffic from the UK by default?

Spearchucker 8y ago
Interesting point. Issuu.com do online magazines, mostly the usual fashion/motoring/sport/and so on, but there is some stuff on Issuu that stretches racy a little thin.
pjc50 8y ago
> Are the authorities going to block tumblr or twitter because of all the porn on there? If not then what is the purpose of this law? No. This is a Brexit-style law, the point is to send a message, through the newspapers. Not to be bothered with any details about how it might actually work.
bitL 8y ago
I can write a scalable webservice that is able to detect such content with 90%-95% accuracy including locations of offending areas; based on some very recent (2 months old) Deep Learning research. I presume they can do that as well and take 5-10% failure rate as acceptable. If I were running my own social network and wanted to keep it clean, I'd use it without any hesitation. But those are technical means, this is a political issue.
- lainga 8y ago
  Does it handle literotica? (Could the UK under the new law?)
  - bitL 8y ago
    No, just images. But it might be doable as well - look at a recent post from fast.ai for text classification.

rdxm 8y ago

This is an Onion piece right?!?!? I mean, come on....(pun most def. intended....)

peterkelly 8y ago

MPs have only voted in favour of this due to extensive lobbying and under-the-table payments from the major VPN providers.

crtasm 8y ago

https://www.blocked.org.uk/ https://www.blocked.org.uk/ lists blocked sites and can test URLs of your choice on most(all?) of the major ISPs.

mseebach 8y ago

It's a good thing that this scheme is 100% secure against someone reselling these online for bitcoin.

zimbatm 8y ago

Nicely done. Next step, remove cash to trace all the porn pass purchases. Although I suspect most people don't even care and will use their debit card already.

codedokode 8y ago

Is not it better to block access to porn sites by parents' request? So that people without children don't have to bother. Also there are many things that affect children much worse than online porn. For example, if a single woman is raising a child there is high probability that every weekend she comes home drunk with some unfamiliar poorly educated low cultured drunk man. The child has to listen to their drunk talking. This kid will probably soon become alcohol or drug addict or even a criminal. Porn obviously won't do so much harm. So my suggestion is to ban drinking and inviting men home for single mothers before you ban porn. Or maybe ban alcohol for everyone who has children.