It’s a product. You can buy it or not. If you don’t think it’s worth it, stay away, or stay on the free tier. You’re acting as if you’ve got some kind of right to use a service that’s provided by a commercial entity.

It’s too expensive agreed. However YouTube has a lot of discounted memberships through other services. I wouldn’t pay full price for it, but through my mobile phone company I get more than 50% off and that’s a bloody great deal.

Same here. I’ve cancelled Netflix, never got Disney plus, never use prime (though I think I have access to something through prime shipping).

YouTube however; I watch this every single day, use it for learning, relaxation, documentaries etc.

It’s a fantastic platform and well worth the subscription AFAICS.

If you pay, the platform remains great. I get a discounted YouTube premium membership through my mobile phone company. I think YouTube is great, I never see ads, lots of features.

Just to offer an alternative view.

You have to trust someone.

And I can’t speak for all the implementations around the world. But I can speak for the Danish one. Or at least what the design is intended to be right now.

The Danish verification tokens are single use. Yes they get checked against a database, centrally, but that database doesn’t hold any information about who the token was issued to, just whether it’s a valid token that hasn’t been used before.

So your digital wallet holds a set of single use tokens. You have to log in using MitID (central government system for proving your identify online), then your wallet is issued age proofing tokens which you then hand over to the website to prove your age.

So there are a million ways that COULD be abused, just like there are a million ways your bank could abuse the information it holds about you. In both cases, laws require that neither abuse their privilege.

You have to trust someone. Or live a hermit.

In the EU the legal framework requires a ZKP implantation. Laws would be broken if traceability was introduced.

Sort of the same system they’re building in Denmark.

You will log into MitID (myID), authenticate with the MitID app, then be issued a bunch of ZKP tokens which you’ll burn off against age verification services. No trace, fully authenticated, fully trusted, damn near impossible to fool.

Ok. I get the concept that pornography doesn’t harm children. We can debate that.

But by that reckoning should we also allow children to buy guns online and have them delivered at home? Is there nothing we want to restrict online, on account that whoever is buying it might be too young?

I’m am 100% any form of checks that identify you.

But for what it is worth the European Union’s proposed framework for this legally mandates zero knowledge proofs.

The UK’s implantation sucks. Big hairy monkey balls.

If you buy alcohol at a farmer’s market, the seller has a responsibility to ensure they’re not supplying it to a child. At least in most countries.

So you would also support a child buying alcohol online on account of being given money and access to the internet?

Eh, Denmark is. They are building exactly a ZKP system.

Britain has chosen to not make this a legal requirement so it is possible to tie back age verification with who verified. That makes it a lot more suspect.

I too have been screaming about private online since the 90s. I have an intuitive reaction that sort of mirrors yours.

But can I ask you a question?

And it’s one that I’m asking because I genuinely wish to learn from others.

Because I can’t quite see the difference and maybe there’s something I’m missing.

Why is it not government overreach to ensure pornography isn’t sold to minors in an adult video store, but government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers?

I would love your enlightened view on this so I can learn from it. Because I can’t quite see the difference.

I understand that many adults go into an adult video store and need not prove their age, because they clearly look like adults.

And so the difference here is that everyone have to prove their age online, even people that are clearly adults by how they look.

But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice. In that world I would also expect the clerk to check every purchase as they would have no other means of assessing the buyer’s age.

Or maybe you think that adult videos should be sold to everyone and it’s the very concept that pornography is restricted to minors that you disagree with. I don’t personally hold that view but then I can least understand why you would also reject online age verification.

Or maybe you think it is ineffective and won’t make a difference. That argument I most definitely agree with, but how we choose to implement a law, and whether it’s effective, is two different discussions I would posit.

Edit: I love that I’m getting downvoted for expressing a POV respectfully.

Yes despite my downvotes I’ll stick my neck out to agree with you.

If a US company wanted to sell liquor online in the UK, they’d have to follow U.K. laws for alcohol licensing and age-verified delivery.

I don’t know why age verification is any different. That’s the UK law (which I disagree with for what it’s worth, certainly in its current implementation) and if you want to operate in the UK (and for a website that means be accessible to U.K. audiences) you follow U.K. laws while here.

I don’t really get this.

Whether I like the UK’s act, they are free to set the laws of their land. So if foreign websites don’t want to comply, the UK is also free to order its ISPs to block the site.

Which kids will then circumvent with VPN.

And so on …

I know! The joke doesn’t really work when you know how to pronounce it.

The polite version of lmgtfy

Myeah sort of agree if you compare wireguard vs wireguard docker.

But wg-easy has a management interface for creating peers and seeing who’s active so it’s somewhat easier to get set up.

You must be great fun a parties.

I’ve got four kids. I work 50-60 hour weeks. I travel for work. I’ve got a lawn. Yes I’ve got a fucking robot mower. One of the best buys I ever did. Anything that buys me 1.5hrs a week is worth its weight in gold.

Maybe you’re just not the target market for robot mowers.

Also, a hedgehog shredder?!

We’ve got a garden full of hedgehogs. See one at least twice a week. I run the mower during the day, twice a week. If it bumps into the smallest thing it stops. I’ve literally never ever seen a hedgehog come to harm. Do you know how these contraptions actually work?

A kid in our high school went on national news and said he could procure weed in the school in less than 3 minutes. He then proved it. Made national headlines and became a big topic in parliament.

Of course they went looking for the stoner, found him, and then asked him to source the source of what made him stoned. Kinda self-explanatory but the news didn’t seem to think so.

Oh, and in primary school, I think I was “the incident”. I hacked the schools computer network and made all PCs boot into a message that read “Teachers are dumb”. It really wasn’t very sophisticated, at all, but shut the computers down for a week while they had “experts” in to clean them up.

When I told the expert that having the PCs optionally boot from floppy and this allowed me full access to all the PCs, including the control server through which they distributed autoexec.bat updates to them all … well he sold me like I was some kind of sophisticated wiz-kid that needed containment. I got a life time ban from the computer labs. The kid that squeeled on was ostracised by everyone else (I had made up with him quite quickly, I knew I shouldn’t have told him and sort of blamed myself).