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Australia will not force adult websites to bring in age verification
- jmull3n 3y agoOur government legally forces companies to create back doors, definitely surprised and impressed to see they made the right decision here
- elitistphoenix 3y agoRemember that was the old gov. (Libs) though
- vermilingua 3y agoI don’t see any Labour MPs planning to repeal those acts; nor did they vote against the bills.
- protocolture 3y agoSupported by 100% of Labor. Who promised to review it and potentially repeal it when they next attained office. Which they have not done.
- torified 3y agohttps://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/assistance-access-bill/ https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/assist... >The draft was open to public comment and 343 submissions were made. >Of these, only one was in favor of the regulations. The rest either demanded revisions, or were completely against the bill. Despite the cascade of disapproval, the final draft of the law was barely subject to any scrutiny. >On the last day of sitting before the Christmas period, a revised version of the bill was presented to the Parliament. It featured 173 amendments, but members were barely given any time to review them. >The official reason was that the laws needed to be rushed through to prevent potential terrorist attacks from happening over the holidays. This was an especially dubious claim, since Australia already has a host of anti-terrorism laws. >If the authorities required the new capabilities to force companies into building backdoors, then this also should be viewed with skepticism. Since the laws were passed on December 6, it is unlikely that any company would have been able to provide the necessary tools ahead of Christmas. >On top of this, ASIO, the Australian spy agency, acknowledged there was no specific threat over the period, and it did not raise its warning level. Absolute bullshit and our spineless "representatives" should be ashamed. What kind of society are they supposedly defending?
- girvo 3y agoLabor passed those bills with the LNP government thoguh.
- zmmmmm 3y agoit's definitely a big change in attitude from previous governments (conservative and otherwise) - i still remember Labour trying to introduce mandatory internet censorship a decade ago.
- torified 3y agoThere is censoring now, but I think only via dns. Try going to thepiratebay.org using your isp dns.
- standardUser 3y agoEncouraging given Australia's reputation as a the Wests's biggest nanny state. It will still be easier for Aussie teens to watch hardcore porn than to play Witcher 2... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_in_...
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoI don't know, Western EU nations seem to be much bigger nanny states than Australia.
- standardUser 3y agoMaybe not the best data, but... Australia is the only county with a link to it's own page on the list of banned games by country... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_by_... And one of two pages with a link to it's own page on the list of banned movies by country, along with China... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_films
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoWell yeah they're big on censorship, but that's not the only form of nannying.
- nerdbert 3y agoWhat else did you have in mind? Onerous rules against charming, delightful Nazi imagery?
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoThere was their attempt at the Great Firewall of Australia, while mostly censorship was not just censorship. But honestly there were so many things, it sounds funny but I can't even think of particular examples right now. Oh, smoking is a good example. Doing their best to push adults out of being able to smoke. You can argue it's as justified as you like, but it's still nannying. There's a lot the country restricts because it thinks it knows what's best for its citizens.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoEh, for now. They'll go back to it eventually, they can't help themselves. And the population will mostly support it.
- drekipus 3y ago[dead]
- glitchc 3y agoMaybe someone senior in the PMO frequented such sites and did not want to be outed.
- Terr_ 3y agoIMO the least-bad way to keep "objectionable material" out of the hands of minors is to focus on positive signals from devices, ex: __________ 1. Parents control what hardware the kids have access to. Perhaps not perfectly, but at least it is something the average person can see in meat-space and interact with without requiring special knowledge. 2. They buy devices for their kids that support a parental-lock feature, which (if enabled) causes the device to always send metadata outwards, such as HTTP headers. This metadata encodes some standard like "I'm a minor in Jurisdiction X" or even "I am currently approximately Y months old in jurisdiction X." 3. Online sites/services can comply simply by recognizing these signals and throwing up "denied" pages, without any kind of authentication and no need to build profiles of users or track activity. __________ Sure, it's not perfect (kid borrows adult device, non-compliant sites, proxy sites that subvert the rstrictions) but it's better than nothing while avoiding massive rating-bureaucracies or forcing shitty backdoors into software. Also, the costs will tend to fall on the same people who want the feature. Some pain-points will remain like whether to support a country where people under 28.75 years are not allowed to see ankle skin, but that's unavoidable complexity from the problem-domain--bad laws as opposed to bad software.
- solraph 3y ago> 2. Buy devices for kids that support a parental-lock feature, which when enabled causes the device to always send metadata outwards, such as HTTP headers. These would encode "I'm a minor in Jurisdiction X" or even "I am approximately Y months old in jurisdiction X." I like the concept, but I can see bad actors abusing the heck out of these headers in so many ways.
- Terr_ 3y ago> I can see bad actors abusing the heck out of these headers I disagree: Whatever evil they're already committing, a signal of "client device has parental lock enabled" would only make them very slightly more effective at committing it. Those kinds of bad actors are already filtering for minors based on much more impactful means, like how/where the site is advertised and what it purports to offer. In exaggerated contrast, I can't imagine some would-be-molester making a baroque plan to set up a Tax Advice Forum with a hidden code-path for parental-locked devices, one that metaphorically tells the user they've won a free giveaway to candy in a white truck.
- decremental 3y ago[dead]
- anigbrowl 3y agoGood. I'm so burnt out on both brick-and-mortar and digital businesses (and governments) demanding ID for every little thing.
- takinola 3y agoI wonder if this is a problem that can be solved with zero-knowledge proofs. The website needs to verify that I am a part of a certain group (over a certain age, particular gender, have a certain net worth, whatever) but I don't want to connect that information to my identity on the site. Is it possible to set it up so that the organization performing the validation is also unaware of the type of validation that I am performing and with whom? For example, to validate my age (or net-worth or gender) with a site, I generate a one-time key which the site can send to the validation authority and receive back a Yes/No response for the request? In this example, the site would not have any information about my identity but the type and target of validation would be leaked to the validating authority. Is it possible to design a system that would let both sides perform this operation completely blind to each other?
- xmprt 3y agoThis isn't really a zero knowledge proof and could technically be de-anonymized and requires a third party service but you could easily set up a trusted verifier that generates one direction hashes which validates whatever claim you're trying to make. And if you trust the verifier to not leak back your personal details and the adult website trusts the verifier's verification, then all you need to do is send the hash to the adult website and they can validate that the hash is valid by checking against the verifier.
- takinola 3y agoHow about this scenario - There is a site A that wants me to prove my age. Site A generates a one-time key for this request. This key is completely random and does not include any information about the identity of A or myself. The key does include the type of request being made (ie age/gender/income/etc verification) I take this key to a trusted verifier, B, that has my age information. This trusted verifier uses the key from A to generate another response key. I enter the response key into site A which decrypts it using the public key of site B. In this model, 1. Site A has performed the verification (as long as it trusts Verifier B) 2. Site A does not have any additional information about me 3. Verifier B does not know the origin of the request Of course, in an area, where only certain websites perform particular verifications (eg adult websites performing age verifications), there is some information leakage to Verifier B about my behavior
- darkclouds 3y agoConsidering the UK National Air Traffic Systems (NATS) cant even prevent an extra dot or two from crashing their airspace, messing up most of the airlines in the world, not to mention countless passengers, pilots, aircrew and their families, I think Australia is wise to stand back from this challenge. Personally I think state sex education should explain, the emotional side to sex, instead of just the mechanical properties, but sticking to the mechanics is easy for the cash strapped teachers to explain. They should also explain how people will use sex to blackmail and manipulate others in a variety of ways. Spooky hackers are big into kink shaming. There is a lot of cross boarding data sharing, it is after all a global business. They should also explain how easily life long diseases are spread and the state makes no effort in helping protect people from those infected who choose to lie about the state of their health to others, and women might pass this onto their kids. Condoms do break. That porn can be a relief which minimises exposure to disease risks, but some forms of porn portrayed can involve participants out of their face on drugs, and the content uploaded will be from people who have not been drug tested. Some porn is documenting self harm and some porn is people who have been trafficked and sometimes drugged against their will. Social media platforms with unpaid moderators, like Reddit and porn sites where users can upload content can be slow to remove illegal sexual content from the front page of their site, or most popular content web pages, and that this can spark curiosity in people who want to know more about it. I kind of suspect none of the above will happen though, and I'm sure plenty of people will still be arguing over what algorithms to use in order to safe guard identities.