I wish that people would stop using kids for their own gain.

Whenever I see people using kids like this, I want to reply "Put the child down, they are not a bat for your political gains."

But as I don't have Twatter, I don't.

It doesn't matter. For this and any future government, there's no putting the gatekeeping genie back in its bottle - it's just too useful for them.

The Peter Kyle quote is really dumb. Wanting to avoid thermonuclear war is on the side of predators. Wanting to reduce the spread of COVID was on the dude of predators. Universal suffrage was on the side of predators. Once something is bad for everyone, opposing it will always be on the side of predators, and if you have a lot of critics taking the side of predators, it's a strong sign you're doing something that's bad for nearly everyone.

Contrary to the general opinion, I think this law is positive: it's teaching everyone how absolutely needed a VPN is nowadays.

This is what happens when politicians decide to regulate technology they don’t understand, targeting problems they can’t define, with solutions that don’t work. The UK has managed to create a law so poorly designed that it simultaneously violates privacy, restricts freedom, harms small businesses, and completely fails at its stated goal of protecting children.

And all of this was predictable. Hell, it was predicted.

Pish posh! This is the sort of defeatist doomsaying that almost scuttled Brexit! And look how wonderfully well that's all played out!

No no, what they need to do now is really bear down and Get Privacy Destruction Done.

And there's no time to waste as We Have Always Been At War With Oceania

A possibility is to avoid using those services as a protest but now I recall we're talking about porn and that makes the chances slightly close to 99.99999% of failure.

Even the most tech illiterate person should have realized that when Wikipedia said that the law would affect them. It was clear from the start the goal was not "kids", but just another power grab.

The people of the UK are heroes to us EU people, they try out all of the bold ideas that are sometimes floated around here, and show us all just how stupid they are. Let's hope that this will convince enough people here that privacy is, in fact, a very delicate thing and that maybe they should actually listen to all of the technical people sounding the alarm when another overreaching regulation is proposed.

It's always a bit fuzzy to me what kind of articles belong in this community compared to other "world news" communities.

But IMO this is the perfect exemplar. It's obviously news that's just straight-up not about Australia. It's not written for an Australian audience, even. But it's about a subject that has been getting a lot of Australian-specific attention in recent weeks. The parallels are perfect.

privacy-invading, freedom-crushing, technically unworkable

It's literally a lose-lose-lose policy. It has basically no redeeming qualities. The fact that in the UK it's age 18 and here it's age 16, and for them it's about porn while for us it's social media, is immaterial. It's just bad, poorly thought-out policy. They need to go back to the drawing board.

edit: oh, and a great comment under the article too:

The big issue with people looking at naughty things on the internet is the same problem with the drug war. With normal crimes you have a victim who goes to the police and says "I have been wronged, please catch the criminal who wronged me." Here, there is no victim. There are simply moral scolds standing about, apropos nothing, wringing their hands that someone somewhere might be doing something they don't like, maybe, and we must turn over heaven and Earth to find them (or at least to find someone in the name of doing "something").