Thinking of the Children
Yes, this is another post about the Online Safety Act (OSA) that the UK Government, in all its benevolent wisdom, has seen fit to lumber upon the internet users of the United Kingdom.
It's a law that requires a website to request age verification from its users if it could be serving up adult content. This verification is more than the traditional "click this box to confirm you're over 18". Websites now require photographic or documentary proof of a user's age. Failure to comply may lead to jail time or ruinous fines.
In principle its motives are fine - protect minors from accidentally finding adult content online. Unfortunately the legislation doesn't just affect places that actively promote unsuitable content like, say, porn websites. The law also affects any place where people will congregate. So social media and forums are also affected by this legislation.
I've seen some forums close down over this; I've also seen some change so that only registered users can access the site. There are also a lot of instances of sites based without the UK geo-blocking the whole country.
The simple solution for UK users is to trick websites into thinking they're not UK based using some kind of Pre-existing Computer Trickery (PCT - to give it its technical term).
Funnily enough, right after the OSA came into full force this week, several scaremongering news articles were immediately published claiming that The Children were already actively bypassing the OSA and accessing Adult Material using PCTs. They stopped short of calling for PCTs to be banned, but the inference was there.
I took to Mastodon and jokingly posted "PCT usage banned in the UK by Christmas?" which immediately garnered a reply with a link to an article where an MP is actually calling for PCTs to be banned. The BBC news website published a piece about how PCT downloads from Apple's app store have increased by 1800% - claiming it's a bad thing because some unsuspecting/ill-informed users will download PCTs that are just bad actors harvesting sensitive data from innocent/ignorant users. These aricles are basically not 'think of the children' but more 'think of the morons'.
(Side note: if you're wondering why I'm using PCT as an acronym for the practice of subverting the geolocation of an internet user, it's because of this passage in a BBC news article:
Ofcom says platforms required to introduce "highly effective" methods to check user age must not host, share or permit content that encourages use of VPNs to get around age checks.
The government has also told the BBC it would be illegal for platforms to do so.
So, basically it feels like it's best not to talk about PCTs online in case it's misconstrued as promoting their use which, apparently, is now almost illegal.)
When I was about 9 years old, my friends and I would spend hours just exploring and messing about. We used to gather under a footbridge that spanned a small stream that one summer had dried to a trickle. One memorable day we gathered there to discover some enterprising soul had rolled up copies of Mayfair and Penthouse magazines and wedged them under part of the bridge. We unrolled them and our tiny prepubescent minds were blown by the sight of pictures of women wearing just their pants and showing off their bare boobs. Later that year we found a magazine called Colour Climax in a hedge which was full-on hardcore pornography. Tiny minds blown further. The "display on top shelf/only sell to over 18s" law did not apply to hedge porn.
I wonder if this current Labour government (or the previous Conservative one that initially kicked off the OSA) were in power many decades ago that hedges, bushes and undergrowth would have been outlawed to protect the children.
Anyway, what this shapeless ramble has been about is a complaint about how shit the OSA is, how badly it's been implemented, how it's handing sensitive ID data to third parties, how it's opening up uneducated users to identity theft by bad actors with dodgy PCTs. Like an astute and less verbose person pointed out on a social media post I didn't have to age verify in order to read; it's like the UK has Brexited from the internet. And we're all the poorer for it.