Finally it seems the end of Reddit is near.

  • @RedFrank24@lemmy.world
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    10 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.

    • @pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
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      710 days ago

      This would be better than most of the crap being proposed or implemented.

      But, since the keys are presumably reusable, they’ll presumably get borrowed shared by and among minors almost immediately.

      There could be some “Netflix account sharing” style work to deter that, of course.

      • @RedFrank24@lemmy.world
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        510 days ago

        Yeah I did consider that people are going to share keys, but people are going to share accounts too so that’s always going to happen. The best thing you can do is stick some safeguards on the keys where if a key is found online, it can be deactivated and potentially investigated since you can tell which shop sold the key. If there’s a shop out there just giving cards away to minors, well they’re in for a world of trouble.

        Under the Licensing Act of 2003, it’s illegal to sell alcohol to an adult if you reasonably suspect that they will be then giving that alcohol to a minor. You can assume the same will apply to people selling Wank Cards.

        • @tym@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          people are going to share keys,

          get ahead of it and sell discounted bukkakeys

          you could probably even have a bundle called the “family plan” for the real sickos

          I should get into masturbation regulation marketing!

          Hungry for Adams Apples? Try our limp biscuits!

    • @iii@mander.xyz
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      19 days ago

      How would you solve replay attacks? Like a million people, of age or not, sharing the same key?

      • @RedFrank24@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        Maybe you could limit the number of verifications a key can have in a day? Limit it to say 10 verifications per day. So if you’re on Pornhub and have an account, you can have the key associated with the account, verified, and so you don’t need to re-verify. But if you go on 10 completely different sites and verify for each one, you can’t verify after that 10th one within the same 24hr period?

        You could maybe also include guidelines for integration where if a key is associated with an account, that key can’t be used for any other account. You can include that under some requirement that says you have to make ‘best efforts’ to ensure that a key is only ever used by one account at a time. That way, if a million people are sharing the same key, you’d have to trust that all one million of them will never associate that key with their account because if they do, it invalidates that key for every use other than through that account on that site.

    • @Mrkawfee@lemmy.world
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      611 days ago

      UK is full blown authoritarian now. They have been arresting journalists who are covering the genocide in Gaza and designated a direct action protest group as a terrorist organisation.

    • @survirtual@lemmy.world
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      -111 days ago

      These assholes are all pedophiles and they use it to control the planet. To get to high levels of government, you must enter the shadow contract of pedophilia. It is easy to control people and trust people with that kind of shadow on them, so it is required.

      Then they turn around and use pedophilia to control everyone else. Any tech that threatens their power, they can immediately shutdown by pedo-bombing it. The counter to pedobombing is authoritarian moderation. Once you have that, it is over. The government they control now can control the mods, and that means they control the narrative. THAT is one of the core enemies to fight. An alternative to Reddit or any other system is not enough.

      Because pedophilia is such a taboo / social death sentence, it is among the most powerful shadow contracts.

        • @survirtual@lemmy.world
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          -111 days ago

          Those that have entered into the shadow contract. A shadow contract is one of few mechanisms to enter large-scale consensus (it isn’t THAT large when compared to a solar or galactic scale, but large enough for planetary control, and with some clever management, can scale larger).

          Consensus requires untrusted sovereigns agreeing to collective action. It is a very difficult mechanism to operate. One way is by having a crime so heinous, the mass population block would eviscerate you if it came to light.

          Pedophilia is king among these shadow cornerstones. It illustrates a total lack of empathy, no protective nature towards the innocent, no concern for the perceptions of society, high intellect / manipulation abilities, and a willingness to do anything. You can say it is the “panther” among the shadows.

          So most leadership is among that tribe, which is why they are the way they are. It is only logical.

          There are other tribes as well. Use your imagination and the answers will follow.

          Funny thing, Reddit did that “circle” event many years ago. How big did anyone’s circle get? That is an example of what I am explaining. It is nearly game theoretically impossible to have large scale consensus without some mechanism to make sure people are on the same page.

  • @minkymunkey_7_7@lemmy.world
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    1010 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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      510 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.

    • @boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      310 days ago

      I literally haven’t had a Netflix sub since that year and I sometimes miss the convenience of it even. Haven’t been very frequent on reddit in 2 years. Neither company is going to miss me though.

      Soon it’ll just be piracy and the fediverse for me, and maybe I’ll be able to show my daughter how to download movies and shows, but I’m sure within within her lifetime, piracy will just become so unpopular that all the good sources of content die out. I do hope the fediverse will stay around though. It has a similar problem to piracy: It’s not that it’s hard, it’s more that the people making everything work get tired and it’s hard to convert people.

  • LustyArgonian
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    1011 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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      210 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.

  • @ageek@lemmy.world
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    911 days ago

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

    • @pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
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      511 days ago

      So…coming soon: an app that can match up images of friends or colleagues with a summary of their pornography preferences.

      This could at least liven up some boring meetings or dull parties…

    • @MangoCats@feddit.it
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      211 days ago

      Who is not “Rick Rolling” this with a selfie of a stock photo (or a frame from “Never Gonna Give you Up”?)

    • @tempest@lemmy.ca
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      111 days ago

      Remember those are just the ones you hear about. Plenty happen and are never talked about by either side for obvious reasons.

  • @deathbird@mander.xyz
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    910 days ago

    Keeping the age verifier seperate from the content host is good. Destroying the files used for verification is good. On paper it’s not too a bad system for age verification, but it really hinges on if you can trust them. Given the track record of basically almost every company and government ever…

    • tarknassus
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      210 days ago

      Problem is, how do we know that the company is reputable, audited, and so on?

      I’ve seen more places requiring verification - and each one of them seems to use a different verification company. How are there so many of these places, and why aren’t they more commonly known? Like Experian for credit, etc.

      Sure it might sound good to keep them separate - but all that is doing is absolving the content host from liabilities for providing the adult content (somewhere) on their platforms and sites. Reddit don’t want to get involved, and I’ll bet they found the cheapest and easiest provider, or the first one in the search list and thought “good enough”.

      • @deathbird@mander.xyz
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        -19 days ago

        I think it’s good that Reddit is trying to continue to allow adult content within the legal framework in which it must operate.

        I guess what I’m not clear on it is what the legal framework is for verification services. Absent rules that require robust privacy protections market forces will push a race to the bottom in terms of cost and data security will be the first to take a hit.

        I know this might seem weird but I think this is one of those cases where a blockchain based smart contract might be the best solution. I’m not exactly sure, as any system that allows one to consume content generally also allows one to copy it, but having a system defined in code in a publicly auditable manner that cannot be changed without notice seems to me to have the capacity to grant the most reassurance.

        I mean I assume that all the verification company is doing now is verifying a person’s age and then giving a kind of authorization token that’s cryptographically secure that basically says “the owner of this cryptographic key is of age”.

  • @appropriateghost@lemmy.ml
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    10 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!

  • @DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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    811 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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      510 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.

    • plz1
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      511 days ago

      They’ll criminalize personal VPN users for non-work purposes, next.

      • @breecher@sh.itjust.works
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        311 days ago

        Indeed. With our current system it was only a matter of time. As soon as the internet became a default thing which everyone needed to access just to function in their daily lives, it would of course be subjected to the exact same exploitative mechanisms that the non-internet part of our lives have suffered from since the dawn of history.

  • @ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com
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    710 days ago

    I’m a UK citizen, fuck everything about this law. I’m so sick of the current authoritarian trend amongst some western countries. The UK is one of the worst offenders.

    It’s not even about protecting kids. It’s about control and appeasing puritanical elements in society. We’re the 6th richest economy in the world and we can’t even offer some of the poorest kids food security. But at least they can’t see a pair of tits on Reddit.

  • JackbyDev
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    510 days ago

    Parental controls exist. Use them instead. I fucking hate this.

    • @rozodru@lemmy.world
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      110 days ago

      tale as old as time even since I was a kid and I’m in my 40s. Reminds me of the original videogame rating system that Sega originally implemented in NA when the first Mortal Kombat came out. Parents, to this day, are still unable to manage what their kids consume.

      I mean my parents never had an issue with this. Like when they’d rent movies, I wasn’t allowed to watch Terminator 2 until I was like 13 and it was my Dads favourite movie. He put it on “ok, you have to leave the room now we’re watching a movie” and I did.

  • Bot R1
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    49 days ago

    Years later, you will find many then teen’s 80yo grandmas’ photos in the leaked database