I've been met with that kind of stone walling before too, you know what eventually worked to actually turn the position of a local councilwoman? Going to her office and demand to speak with her, then sitting down, listening and having a conversation with her. Turns out that most of the emails "she" wrote to me was written by an assistant "to save her time" and she weren't aware of the points I was trying to bring up. Granted, this was like one and half decade ago, but if I was met with something similar today I'd try the same thing.

People tend to be a lot more reasonable in person, and also if you listen to them first.

There are lots of replies stating that their MP gave them a cookie cutter response, so it is a waste of time.

I can tell you that isn't entirely true. When they get a lot of messages about the same thing, or better still you meet them in person, they may keep giving you the 'party line response', but they will also be feeding back that there is discontent to the whips.

Same, my MP is clueless. They won’t listen to the experts. This is what he said:

The UK has a strong tradition of safeguarding privacy while ensuring that appropriate action can be taken against criminals, such as child sexual abusers and terrorists. I firmly believe that privacy and security are not mutually exclusive—we can and must have both. The Investigatory Powers Act governs how and when data can be requested by law enforcement and other relevant agencies. It includes robust safeguards and independent oversight to protect privacy, ensuring that data is accessed only in exceptional cases and only when necessary and proportionate. The suggestion that cybersecurity and access to data by law enforcement are at odds is false. It is possible for online platforms to have strong cybersecurity measures whilst also ensuring that criminal activities can be detected.

Same. I have protested over email about the Online Safety Act (amongst other things). I get a generic reply after 6-8 weeks with the same talking points.

Legislation like this does not make children safer, it makes everyone else less safe.

> To stop it now we need a majority of MPs who are willing to take a political risk to reject it.

Which isn't going to happen.

The company should be responsible for providing options to block all or part of the content, and warn users of the content type, depending on their place in the pipeline.

For example, Apple and Google should provide tools for the parents to set up a device appropriately for a child, much like the shop should not sell alcohol to underage customers. Similarly, content producers should specifically need to label content targeted for children or specially 18+, like the producer of alcohol must warn customers on the label and inform the retailers.

Parents and caretakers need information to make an informed decisions before being able to consume the media themselves. They also need some granular tools on the device to avoid banning them entirely. The burden is shared between creator, distributor and consumer.

We already had laws for this and it makes sense for some type of access control to the open internet. The shocking part is the requirement for everyone to verify ID to multiple public and private institutions, more than once per.

An analogy for the UK now would be needing ID to enter the supermarket (access the internet), ID to look at anything aimed at adults and potentially harmful such as alcohol, chemicals, sugary food, medicine etc. (know "potentially harmful" subjects exist), ID to look at anything lawfully 18+ such as alcohol and cigarettes (view the content), then ID again to make the 18+ purchase from an account needing ID to open.

> If my younger self, went into a store to buy a bottle of Vodka, before I came of age at 18 here in Germany, it wasn't my parents fault. It was the shop that did not check my license that was liable.

Except this can only be fair if they carded everyone who buys liquor, not only people who appear young, otherwise it's subjective, and businesses shouldn't be liable if a tall, bearded teen buys vodka, because he looks older than 18.

Of course, in reality, liquor store cashiers are allowed to judge subjectively, but VPN providers won't be allowed to. And they'll probably be asked to share records of registered adults in the future, given the repeated efforts to backdoor encryption in the same UK. This is unlikely to be only about protecting the children.

That's a really fair point. I suppose it's reasonable to point out that adults do have to provide ID quite often to buy things, but it's skipped so often because people can just look at us so we don't "feel" it. I think my problem comes from how I don't believe my cornershop records my ID when they see it, whilst I imagine these services would.

the problem is that devices are meant to be tools. They do not provide access to services, but you use them to access them. Limiting my devices' ability to do what i ask of them is more like geofencing my shoes, because you might use them to walk to the casino.

This makes the tech companies the decision makers over what is suitable content for children. But this has many problems. A big example is that some people are more open about sex than others. I'm reminded of a scene in an anime of a father in a bath with his daughters, normal in many cultures, deemed perverted by many (particularly christian US residents). Also here in the the Netherlands, a pretty open society when it comes to these things, we have parents complaining about books that show genitals to kids, even though they'll see them when they look down.

This is a hard problem, from about 0 to 18, kids go from being, well, kids, to being expected to be full adults and are expected to be able to deal with every liberty, every temptation that comes with it. There is no single best path to achieve this.

I want to educate my kids about sex, about alcohol, gambling, drugs, I want to teach them that the internet is a source of many good things, and many bad things. I'll make arrangements, determine the suitability of online materials, and will set boundaries together with my partner, thank you.

You can block the entire internet and whitelist specific domains. There's multiple ways of doing this, from router parental controls, specific OS tools in iOS/Android, Windows, as well as apps specific to it, and all it takes is for a parent to care enough to make a simple Google or Youtube search and learn if they don't know, and don't even know to know that they should care in the first place.

The failure here is two-sided.

One and the most glaring are the parents who let devices raise their children, this hasn't changed since before home computers were a thing.

Secondly it's a failure of the state for not educating both adults and teenagers on best practices when using online platforms to be safe. If they're interested enough in policing people's web habits, they can spend time and resources on educating the masses. The best time to start doing it was 20 years ago, the second best is now and it could take a decade plus for it to have a meaningful impact.

Also this is important. The UK, like it or not, is a nanny state. They like to use child safety as an excuse to police adult habits, and more important their speech. There's quite a few times they've admitted to this plainly without any ambiguity.

"The Online Safety Act 2023 (the Act) is a new set of laws that protects children and adults online"

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act...

There's also examples of them being asked directly in interviews and they admit to wanting to police adults speech and content they consume online.

Australia is in a similar predicament and honestly most of the world is rolling towards this, just not as fast as the UK.

The UK unfortunately has incarcerated people for simply lifting cardboard signs saying Free Palestine. They've jailed people for innocuous social media posts on Facebook and other platforms.

I'm not proud of the USA for a lot of reasons, especially lately, but one thing that any and all Americans should be proud of is their Freedom of Speech protected by the First Amendment, it's the most American thing and one of the best aspects of America that other countries should aspire to, and I hope that the jabs Freedom of Speech has taken over the past decade doesn't make it crumble away.

> arrest parents if they are found allowing their children to use a computer with an internet connection at home. Remove the internet from schools.

Schools, yes 100%. Likewise mobile data plans.

Home internet? Could work, but I don't know how much time would be needed to transition any "do this on your computer" homework tasks. (Are there any?)

As one extra twist, the UK age-gates a lot of stuff at 16 rather than 18 in a way that is relevant here: back when I was at school myself, an era when writing letters to the editor of a newspaper was the closest most people had to a comments section, I noted the oddity that I was allowed to perform sexual acts at age 16 but wasn't allowed to photograph myself doing those things and couldn't buy videos of those things.

And between 16 and 18, the education choices in the UK are either A-levels, apprenticeships, or volunteering; I think mobile internet could reasonably be considered mandatory by that point in life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_England#Post-16_e...

Those websites aren't easy to update. I have a website of my own too, and even though I've set it up to be as painless as possible, it's always going to be easier for me to open a social media app and post.

Now imagine that the local government has a website that can only be changed by contacting a web developer, who takes 1-2 business days to reply. It might not be as bad as that, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the ballpark.

How? Parents would give smartphones to their kids.

> they can and do aggressively control access to the internet

yes but this is like watching someone deal with an ant infestation by stamping on them. They're not solving the issue and unlike the ant analogy, they're making the problem worse.

not with a non-governmental agency doing the exchange. All they would see are tokens going out. You would need the non-governmental agency to share the urls with the government agency for the activity to be tied directly which would undermine the entire purpose of that architecture.

That, and then the dedicated stick out like sore thumb.

I guess my point here is that the user experience of doing this "DIY" will improve as more people want to do it!

Then they will simply advocate for state-wide DPI.

> But I think most of the zero logs providers will remove the identifiable payments details after a certain about of time.

No problem there. Once a user is old enough, he stays old enough.

> For example https://obscura.net

Obscura ....

"Terms and the relationship between you and Obscura shall be governed by the laws of the State of New York"

Yeah, erm.

Now more than ever, trusting a US jurisdiction VPN provider ? No thanks !

Sadly if you look at how the law is drafted its setup to catch companies that have a significant UK base not just those that advertise here. It is highly likely for compliance reasons (as we saw with imgur and others) that they will simply block the UK themselves.

it also said to have "different ages for different services" so the fact you have a debit/credit card to pay is more than enough to prove you at least 16.

this will be interesting to watch i just wish i weren't caught in the net.

But if openvpn clients want to connect to those servers?

surely openvpn being pre-installed on most routers means it's provided to an significant portion?

[dead]

It takes just a few seconds to see that it's a random backbencher who is not in the government. We have a whole range of MPs, and some of them sometimes talk about things they have no idea about. The website you're citing is little more than propaganda, since it explicitly makes it seem like the MP has any connection to the government.

> political dissent. Uncomfortable truths. Any speech that does not align with the official narrative.

No, this age verification is not against that.

Of course Rusform UK promise to repeal it - they want Russian trolls to have as much unfettered access to the British public as possible

>Central African Republic higher then Serbia

>Ukraine higher then Cyprus

LOL

Non-anonymous free speech is a bit of a red herring. If you say something publicly, especially in this era of mass data, you are perpetually liable to be punished for it at some point in the future. If not by the current government, potentially another. Virtually every country in the world has experienced authoritarianism at one point or another, and there is never a guarantee that it won't again. Saying something publicly tied to your identity is signing up to be imprisoned when an authoritarian who doesn't like what you said seizes power. We have many historical examples of dictators rounding up and executing wide classes of people, so we know this threat model is more than just a hypothetical but rather something that can and does realistically happen at various times and places.

Therefore, in practice, anonymity is the only way to safely express oneself in public. Privacy is the true bastion of the freedom of ideas. This is naturally lost when the means to communicate privately are stripped from us, when every word we've ever said is recorded and tied to our identity. Age verification could possibly theoretically be implemented in a way that does not immediately infringe upon privacy, but you surely know that there is no world in which it will ever be implemented in such a way.

If your ID is tied to your anonymous identity this creates a chilling effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

Yes and no - you need to check whether each individual politician, not just party, is taking money from said global corporates, because they have a lot of money and UK politicians are cheap.

Not to mention the opaque mess that's Reform UK financing.

Many of these governments are directly funded and directed by said corporate fascists. The opposition is hardly much better. There’s no good guys at the state level here.

The "coordinated corporate fascists" (your words not mine) are providing a platform where I can challenge the the state and be seen by potentially millions of people.

Just use Tor. And if they try to block that, use Snowflake bridges or v2ray like people in other censorious hellholes.

Make them shut it all down like Iran and show who they really are.

Probably about the same, there is a lot of VPS providers out there, and not a small amount accepts basically an email + cryptocurrencies without any further verification than that. And that's just on the clearweb, going beyond that you start having even more options.

Untrue. F.O.C. is.not excempt. See https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3909/stages/20215/amendmen...

then you are not using any vpn service marketed or provided in the UK[0]. if you were to sell access to your VPS to others then you would have to do age verifications on them maybe.

[0] maybe it is still illegal, IDK, bu likely due to other laws (eg a generic "it is illegal to use workaround for X")

> then you are not using any vpn service marketed or provided in the UK.

Irrelevent. See:

must apply the child VPN prohibition to the provider of any relevant VPN service which is, or is likely to be—

(i) offered or marketed to *persons in the* United Kingdom;

(ii) provided to a significant number of persons

> The answer is to leave this shit to parents.

See Australia. Many parents helped their children evade the ban.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/04/social-media-ban-parent...

While great on paper, zero-knowledge-proof based systems unfortunately have a fatal flaw. Due to the fully anonymous nature of verification tokens, implementations must have safeguards in place to prevent users from intercepting them and passing them onto someone else; in practice, this will likely be accomplished by making both the authenticator and the target service mobile apps that rely on device integrity APIs. This would ultimately result in the same accessibility issues that currently plague the banking industry, where it is no longer possible to own a bank account in most countries without an unmodified, up-to-date phone and an Apple or Google account that did not get banned for redeeming a gift card.

Furthermore, if implementers are going to be required to verify users per-session rather than only once during signup, such a measure would end up killing desktop Linux (if not desktop PCs as a whole) by making it impossible for any non-locked-down platform to access the vast majority of the web.

> if you are asked to prove you are over 18, you could provide a simple yes or no response and avoid sharing any other personal details

I can't imagine how that would operate, esp. given we're told this ID will not be a digital ID card you can "show".

The major problem is that no one trusts government not to abuse it and use it to track everything people do. There will be some proportion of people who trust the current government, but will be paranoid that a future government will abuse it, and there will be a proportion of people that don't trust the current government to not abuse it.

You might be able to get more trust by the government assigning a third party to audit the systems to make sure they are working as advertised, and not being abused, but you would still get people being paranoid that either the third party could be corrupted to pretend that things are okay, or that a future government would just fire them and have the system changed to track everyone anyway.

No matter what you do, you will never convince a subset of people that a system that can potentially be used to track everyone won't be abused in that way. Unfortunately, those people are most likely correct. This is why we can't have nice things :(

For the record, I thing it would be great to be able to have a trusted government issued digital ID for some purposes. I especially think it would be great to have an officially issued digital ID that could be used to sign electronic documents. My partner and I moved home recently, and it was not easy signing and exchanging legal documents electronically.

> As far as the "dystopian" state of the UK goes. Even if the UK was a "distopia" the internet won't save you, even though people of a certain age like to think they can stop an authoritarian government from their keyboard. Take the US as a recent example, the bastion of free speech, but US citizens are being murdered by a government organisation. Posting memes from your VPN won't help.

I understand what you mean but still, one has to realize that all the grievances happening in US (esp with Greenland) feels like something trying to distract from the Epstein files (Me and my cousin literally talked about this yesterday and these were almost his words not mine)

Epstein files pressure got dialed up to 11 because of internet, was it not.

If however the internet keyboard warriors weren't there or just the people who were aware from the internet (I mean I can't attest for you but I was reaware of epstein files from internet)

Also yeah, Take the example of Nepal whose almost authoritarian esque govt. was literally toppled by internet protestors to get an anti corrupt person in power.

Internet & anonymity still has power and to just give it up to a govt. would still have massive massive consequences man.

If this law passes, anonymity & privacy is fundamentally ended in UK.

> If you want to roll your own VPN go ahead.

If my VPN would have an IP be arranged via a VPS they will just come knocking to my VPS

Russians actually use a Russia VPS to connect to VPN but they are getting locked down. (Source: I saw some russian person in a forum doing exactly this)

if we are comparing UK to Russia on a reasonable amount, then that would speak mountains too and we can move our conversation from there.

Edit: perhaps I feel like I was also overthinking it a year back when I was worried about VPN's block (I have written it in Hackernews you can go read) and I figured that with something like UK, the tech wouldn't be enough to be uncensorable and we are still off to govt laws and I was worried about exactly this happening.

I didn't want to be right then and I don't want to be right now but I am just telling what I have a reasonable enough suspicion of something happening in future.