Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Corporate Internet
There, FTFY
What sucks is that once these laws are in place repealing them will probably never happen. There are far too many people who will benefit financially from this to allow that to happen.
They’re making it so that vigilante justice is the only form of justice the ruling class can receive.
There are far too many people who will benefit financially from this to allow that to happen.
Orly? Can you give me a couple of examples?
I’m opposed to this trend myself, btw. But I just interpreted as a bit of pointless over regulation by a bunch of populist nanny-statists. You’re telling me there’s financial interests involved as well?
There are companies to store and process IDs on behalf on the sites. Also it will give a hell of a lot more information to marketers who will pay tons for it to sell you crap they think you need. They already have far too much information on everyone already, but this will give them even more.
Seems to me, there’s no real way to age verify people. This is pointless.
Want ID? Kids can just upload a fake one.
The app wants access to your phone’s camera, so it can use ai to assess your age? Well I don’t know for certain, but I’m 99.9% there’s probably a way to trick your phone into using a virtual camera, showing images of a middle-aged man.
What ever method of age verification, someone will figure out a way to trick it, and kids will be onto the trick very quickly.
Gotta show me the relevant RFC for BGP first.
No it’s not, maybe for some mainstream websites. Saying the “whole internet” is clickbait hyperbole.
For some people “the whole internet” is like half a dozen websites.
I worked in tech support. For some people Facebook is the internet
It’s the Internet. There are internets, but just one Internet.
They mean most of the internet for most people
Only the vast socially relevant parts of the internetelite nerds who use lemmy will be able to circumvent
if the snobs are fine, why care?
those people kvetching about how the endless September ruined everything will have their wish
Well if they enslave everyone else, we are going to feel it too, no matter what cracks of the system we hide in
Australians will soon be subjected to mandatory age checks across the internet landscape, in what has been described as a huge and unprecedented change.
Search engines are next in line for the same controversial age-assurance technology behind the teen social media ban, and other parts of the internet are likely to follow suit.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-11/age-verification-search-engines/105516256
Yeah, probably not.
What a failure of an idea.
The real goal is to eliminate anonymity from the internet.
It’s about control. They can grant you access or revoke it based on your id.
The powers at be hate that they can’t control the narrative as well as they used to so this is their solution.
It’s fucking ironic that this article is asking me to register just to read it.
Can was please fucking stop needing accounts to exist online? So fucking dumb
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Way Back Machine is your friend. I don’t visit sites directly anymore.
Remember guys, they cared about the kids and their online safety as soon as Israel started a genocide in Gaza and they lost control of the narrative. But they didn’t care at all for the past 20 years when Epstein and his buddies were running rampant.
edit: clarity
I think we need to organise a massive campaign for people to cancel their entire Isp for at least a month, I’m betting all this would get reversed almost overnight.
Anything but that I fear they win and we all end up on the darknet.
I work from home. If I cancel my Internet connection, I can’t work.
Hahaha
Good luck doing that.
People can’t even delay their non-essential shinies to make a statement against price gouging/raising bullshit… You think they’re gonna willingly sacrifice something like internet? for a month?
I mean, wouldn’t lemmy qualify as darknet because it isn’t the top 10 websites? We should be growing the Federation anyways so I’m down for that. At least they won’t ban me for making Trump jokes.
No, Darknet is just a website that’s not listed anywhere. Lemmy is listed in many places.
If it doesnt show up on page 2 it doesnt exist lol
I think thats more the deep web than the dark web 😄
Soon there won’t be pages, just AI summarized slop.
Its already like that on certain websites like google. Do these companies think we are all tech illiterate olds?
Not sure about what the norms are where you live, but most people in the US have to sign 1-year agreements for Internet service, and those who don’t typically either pay more or would pay before because they’re on a cheaper, older rate that is grandfathered in and is no longer offered by the Internet service provider.
I pay for mine in cash, they don’t even know my name.
You can do that in the US as well, but it will cost more because you wouldn’t be agreeing to a fixed term. For example, my ISP charges $25 a month for 200 mb/s if you agree to a one-year term, but it’s $40 a month if you do not agree to a one-year term. And there’s also the added inconvenience of having to go to one of the ISP’s physical stores every month and put cash into their kiosk.
They will ask for your name here when signing up, but nothing prevents you from lying about your name if you’re going to be paying in cash. They ask for an e-mail address as well, but you can say you haven’t got one, and they’ll create one for you using their own e-mail service and assign it to you. You don’t actually have to use it, but it is for receiving their bills and notices.
Nah the government would love for nobody to have access to the internet lol
The US government created the internet
It is so complicated that you’re both correct and incorrect. US government added to it, yes. I’d argue the fundamental work was independent researchers from multiple countries (UK, USA, France). I’d argue the critical infrastructure was multiple non-profits.
Also the question is “what exactly is the beginning of the internet”. Is it usenet? Telnet? Arpanet?
Didn’t it all start at DARPA?
Nope. The US government Department of Defense literally funded and created the internet. It was initially called Arpanet and was mainly US government sites. This is why few people use the .us domain. Because the initial domains .gov, .mil, .org etc were all USA sites. Usenet is independent and does not require the internet and telnet is simply one program using the internet. Most of the core TCP/IP technology was created and funded by DOD also although it is possible some of it was pre-existing.
No. The internet has so many beginnings that it is impossible to say only one group created it.
The internet, like its design, is a co-operation between many different groups.
It goes back even further than 1777, where the French mechanical telegraph was the first way to send long distance messages. And therefore is considered as one of the beginnings of the of the internet.
Or in 1830 where Brits invented a way to send electronic messages over copper cables.
Or in 1860 where they started laying sea cables to connect landmasses.
It is typical that the US claims to have invented something when it is clearly a collaborative effort.
Or in 1860 where they started laying sea cables to connect landmasses.
I never claimed that other countries do not do valuable things, but these things are not the internet.
I’m talking about something very specific: the Internet. It was created by the US DOD in the 1960’s. Without that happening what would have likely developed are a bunch of private networks like Compuserve, AOL, MSN etc that charge us by the hour.
It is typical that the US claims to have invented something when it is clearly a collaborative effort.
Why is it important to you to revise history on this particular topic? Creating the internet was not even a collaborative effort within the USA. It was done entirely by one single government agency, the Department of Defense. Nobody is saying Europeans never invented anything. Just not the internet.
The internet has so many beginnings
It has exactly one beginning. In 1969. It wasn’t even connected over the Atlantic until 1973.
https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/arpanet-internet
That is an interesting point of view. Very USA exceptional. It’s also dumbed down a lot. ARPANET is a computer network, but it’s not internet, nor it was the first. It kickstarted popularity of computer networks in the USA and provided first FTP and (I think) first remote login.
Popularity of computer networks in USA definitely was a formative quality over the 20 years of international development of the Internet.
But saying ARPANET was the internet is like saying gramophone is Netflix.
First computer network to send packets to another computer was British NPL network. Then US government founded ARPANET, built upon that. Except that DARPA besides having own researchers outsourced to Stanford, BBN and University College of London (“How the Internet Came to Be”, quoting I forgot whom from DARPA).
Then French Cyclades computer network built upon ARPANET and proposed that multiple networks should be able to communicate with each other.
Then USA non-profit IEEE looked at all that proposed TCP/IP for cross-network communication, and that is the thing that (after many iterations over a decade) led to the Internet not being separate networks like AOL or Computerverse or whatever.
Now we’re getting closer to the internet and it’s time for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_data_network
First was Spain with RETD , then France, then USA with Telenet. Then Canada. Then in 1978 we started connecting those separate networks. I think the first properly working project was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Packet_Switched_Service between British post office and USA post office.
On those public data networks the Internet’s physical layer was built.
In USA U.S. National Science Foundation was founding more and more computer networks, including CSNET. That’s still not internet. It’s 1980 and it will take a decade of new inventions (Ethernet, LAN, DNS) and improvements & implementations (like to TCP/IP) before we will get the internet.
Here’s a nifty source for that decade, because I spent 50 minutes writing this post before I noticed I’m arguing with a guy over the internet about the internet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet (there is a nice timeline list there).
Uh huh. People are addicted. I’d bet even the people with petabyte home media systems will go into withdrawal within picoseconds after not being able to get more more more more more more
Better would be to reject sites like reddit. Make them suffer instead.
this is backwards. why can’t publishers mark pages as child-friendly and then browsers and operating systems can have a child-friendly mode that parents (or whoever the authoritarians are) can use. Laws can target people misusing the child-friendly mode.
It’s not about actually protecting children. It’s about data.
They’re using children as human shields while they attack our human rights.
This is the correct answer. Notice that they have no compunction about punishing parents who secure gender-affirming care for their trans kids, but there has been zero discussion of holding parents responsible for their kids’ internet usage.
Far-right groups in the US have been crying “Big Brother” about everything for years because their whole plan has been to create a surveillance state where to gather information about dissenters. Every accusation is a confession with these people.
The purpose is to protect the mainstream media.
Get your coat, we’re leaving.
The ruling class is eager to make it so the only way to fight back against them is with bullets.
They don’t know what they’re in for.
This is why the Dark-web exists.
- Tor
- I2P
- Yggdrasil
- LokiNet
- FreeNet
- ZeroNet
- GNUnet (In the distant future)
Did I miss anything ?
Freenet is now hyphanet, fyi.
If it comes to Lemmy, I quit. I’ll go touch grass all day, I don’t mind.
I don’t see how anybody could come for lemmy. I feel this just attacks centralized services
If they threaten server admins with legal action based on the global user count of lemmy rather than their local server user count I’m sure plenty of owners will fold.
Lemmy is probably not complying with UK law already. But if hosted outside the UK you can just ignore them.
Some instances have blocked the UK but you can also just ignore it because wtf are they going to do
Lemmy is still very centralized, sure there are many servers and that takes care of the /u/spez problem but very little else, most topic generally have one big community and it’s on the one big server
You can go elsewhere, if you like speaking into the void and nobody even hearing you.
one big community and it’s on the one big server
Which you can follow from another server, what’s your point?
Hell no. Just use decentralized apps, fediverse etc. It’s not about “protecting” children. It’s about full control and power. So don’t give up.
All it takes is one snapshot of legislator’s IDs put online to poke a hole into this balloon.
Back when the govt here started incentivizing people to ask for receipts the Prime Minister’s fiscal ID was made public and the fucker starting having a lot of receipts in his name.
It’s about the information vacuum. Now every service will get your ID or photo, giving them both age and a whole sort of other metrics to build a profile on you. And yes, Lemmy.ca doesn’t know that about me.
every service will get your ID or photo
To be fair, that’s not how it will work. The site and the identity verifier will be two different things, the verifier only attests that you are not underage and the site doesn’t get your identity.
Still harmful though, because you can be sure that there will be scamsites redirecting people to fake but real looking verifiers for blackmail and identity theft purposes.
I for one will never put my ID or photo into any age verifier ever.
I gotta be honest I thought I’d never be able to quit Reddit. But it was a lot easier when I just did it. If this shit becomes the norm, I’ll back out of a site first time they try that shit and block the site. Maybe I’ll just have to stop using the internet. Wouldn’t that be a net positive on my life. You made me do this, capitalism.
You made me do this, capitalism.
This is a problem with Government not an economic system. It’s about control, not dollars, pounds, or yuan.
But this scene was set by capitalism. The family friendly, market friendly internet is the basis for this entire issue. Yeah, government is the one finally pulling the trigger on sanctioned, total control, but we’ve been surveilled and profiled and censored for decades at this point by countless corporations for ad dollars. We’ve gone through the cycles of outrage and acquiescence and outrage and acquiescence as things have gotten worse and worse—same goes for the quality of politician, all bought and paid for by telecom companies neutering everything we can do to make the market and internet more favorable while the politicians got worse and worse and we began accepting it and just laughing it off.
And here we are. Don’t be fooled, this is 100% at the feet of capitalism.
Yeah “family friendly” = advertisable.
Capitalism runs on top of government. Governments create and enforce the notion that a human, or a fictional human with fractional ownership (corporation), can in turn own arbitrarily large and important objects.
This is often done at the behest of said arbitrarily-large-and-important-thing-owners, who also come up with other similarly terrible ideas to have the government do.
Yeah so what could possibly go wrong when every site you want to use has your ID and passport etc.
Sure but it would be trivial for a company to build profiles on people using public apps like Lemmy.
But not necessarily link it to your other accounts or real identity, which is the point.
Unless you are one of the extreme privacy people, like deep into freakaziod territory, the folks who build tracking / id systems would maybe need an afternoon to go from your Lemmy username to your home address and underwear size.
For my account sure. I use the same username most places. But it’s also reasonable to have a fairly decent Lemmy account that’s decoupled from all your other online accounts. Use a temp email provider, VPN, and proper browser and you’re most of the way there.
There is a lot of information in the way you type and the topics you choose to discuss. More than we suspect.
If it was so trivial why would they even bother making everyone show their IDs?
Not a static target. What we consider a profile today is vastly more comprehensive than what was deemed sufficient a few decades ago. Ad networks today would put intelligence agencies back then to shame. They can always get more info. Adding biometric face data is useful to them. In a few more decades people might be talking about if Google and governments should be allowed to read your thoughts. The tech making this possible is already being developed and further along than many might expect.
decentralized apps, fediverse
Those apps and / or the fediverse itself would get sued into the ground and shut down one app or server at a time. There’s nothing stopping any Governments authorities from going after servers inside their borders and there’s nothing stopping them from “harmonizing” identity verification restrictions among other countries. They’ve already done it once with Intellectual Property law.
This push to de-anonymize the Internet isn’t new either. Microsoft started this back in the oughts with their Passport / Digital-ID program. Google and Meta, along with others, long ago launched their own versions and it’s why you can sign into so many websites with a Google or Facebook account.
It’s generally referred to as IdP and now that the Internet has been fully corporatized, with minor holdouts, you can bet your bippy that the days of anonymous access are ending.
Those apps and / or the fediverse itself would get sued into the ground and shut down one app or server at a time.
Time to self-host your own instances. Sites like yunohost try to make it easy.
If only there was a non-commercial, decentralized way of doing the same thing we are already doing. Perhaps make it free too. Hmmm
You’d need to decentralize the Internet itself. Good luck with that one…
What do you mean by that? Most of the infrastructure that makes up the internet is owned by like 6 companies.
infrastructure that makes up the internet is owned by like 6 companies.
GAFAM holds a large chunk of social media HTTP/S traffic, plus cloud crap. That’s all application layer.
Do they own main trunk IP routers too?They do wade into the IP / transport territory a bit but those are not the 6 companies I was referring to. I was thinking of Verizon / AT&T / Lumen / Zayo / etc.
Those for sure… in the US.
Which international ties to they have? I know Vodafone is present in a lot of countries (the brand, it’s a different company altogether in each country) but don’t know many more… nor do i know of any that has a global monopoly of network nodes.Lumen and Verizon both have subsea cable connections to Europe. EXA Infrastructure is in the process of acquiring Aqua Comms, both of which own subsea cables. Google, MS, and Meta have all invested in subsea infrastructure to varying degrees as well. These are not monopolies in the classic sense of the word but they’re not exactly owned by benevolent interests either.
That said, the point is that a malicious government with sufficient pull, for example the current Trump administration, wouldn’t have to bully very many people to severely limit the flow of information between North America and Europe. So much of the internet depends on US infrastructure that this wouldn’t be terribly far off from censoring the entire internet. In that scenario there isn’t much that can be done about it. Europe can control their own information flow to Asia and Africa but at minimum this would be a severe disruption for a significant amount of time. Other entities might take such an opportunity to impose their own restrictions and make the situation even worse.
I2p exists
So do a million different forms of encryption. That doesn’t make the infrastructure any less centralized. If the people who own the fiber decide to only allow pre-approved types of traffic to cross their networks then it doesn’t make any difference what sort of protocols exist. Building free cross-country or subsea fiber routes is not economically viable and the internet doesn’t exist without them.
Please look into how i2p works. It’s not just some form of encryption.
Please explain how you can bypass carrier enforced traffic shaping policy.
From geti2p.net:
I2P’s protocols are efficient on most platforms, including cell phones, and secure for most threat models. However, there are several areas which require further improvement to meet the needs of those facing powerful state-sponsored adversaries, and to meet the threats of continued cryptographic advances and ever-increasing computing power.
The people involved in the project you’re referring to acknowledge that governments can, by influencing carrier policy, disrupt and subvert the project’s intended function. Why then are you implying they are incorrect?
Last time I checked, the p!rate bay still exists. In fact there are many of them. Because the website itself is open source. The same could be done with any other site. If one gets taken down, two more pop up in it’s place.
While true, most sites do not have the fame of the pirate bay and will not see anywhere near the same number of fans hosting remakes, even if the source is available.
Also apps that don’t need servers. Switched to this for staying in touch with family p2p, works surprisingly well https://keet.io/
Got this response from one of the developers:
Looks like a routing issue, it works when navigated to from the index page without a full reload.
Its a server configuration issue. If you have a SPA even server side frameworks that uses native paths you need to configure the server to send all requests to the main application. You’ll find documentation of how to do this in the setup for every framework I’ve run into.
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Do they publish their protocol or how it works anywhere? Their site didn’t seem to have much technical info at first glance
