This is a fairly revisionist history version of the mafia, they were here for decades before prohibition. One might say that they profited greatly from prohibition, but to suggest they began with it is incredibly incorrect. I hate to be the actually guy but I find organized crime fascinating and I can’t let this one go

Not all bans are bad or hurt law abiding citizens. Slavery and gambling come to mind, both still exist illegally (or, in the case of gambling, semi-legally, what with the deluge of sports betting and online casinos HQd in shitty countries), but I would say them being illegal is a net positive for society.

I've thought about this at length, and the conclusion I came to is that violence about self-sufficiency, while sex is about cooperation. With violence, you take matters into your own hands and you're in control regardless of what others feel. With sex, it's the exact opposite. You're at their mercy and they have power over you.

It makes sense in our hostile culture to teach kids about self-sufficiency and taking power for themselves. If they give that power up to others, then it opens them up to manipulation and exploitation.

I'm not making a judgement call on what's right or wrong, only what is.

I know, it just bothers me how little they're trying to hide it.

Kids watching porn is a much smaller problem than data breaches. Those can fucking ruin people.

And nothing will be done about that until it affects the power brokers in charge*.

* - hopefully, I mean we've had a series of ministers embroiled in scandals that would have caused immediate resignations in the past whereas now it's "Fuck off, I'm working here. I'M IMPORTANT!"

You joke but people who live porn still watch porn.

I mostly picked top results for "porn" on duckduckgo, but I do find hqporner.com scientifically interesting ;)

If only there was some way the government could have predicted this would happen and maybe not rushed a poorly thought out law in the first place!

maybe then they would not have:

• forced big tech companies to withdraw service to the uk
• forced uk-based small forums and message boards to close
• given free vpn providers tons more data to sell
• reduced the overall cyber resilience of the country by forcing people to choose between giving photos of their passports to some weird online service or signing up for a free vpn which sells their data, may inject their own unregulated adverts etc
• reduced uk based advertising effectiveness and thus investment and marketing spend
• pissed everyone off while doing it, scoring yet another win for the far right

absolute roasters the lot of them

Which is worse, the free VPNs or the UK government?

And before that, kids were passing dirty magazines they found in a tree.

You can't stop teenagers from being horny. And I rather they watch porn than have sex at that age.

You can't block VPNs without blocking the entire internet. You can block known VPN services, but you can't prevent people from hosting their own.

Some known VPN protocols could be blocked, using introspection tools. However, this would just render corporate VPNs useless. VPN traffic is just bytes, and so is WebSockets. Good luck figuring out whether my HTTPS traffic is legitimate internet traffic, or masked VPN traffic.

VPN, Tor (and similar, like I2P), every imaginable P2P network, proxies, all non-http protocols (smtp, ftp, nntp, xmpp and other instant messengers and so on) can all transfer any kind of data, porn included. And a ton of other things. Heck, I'm quite sure there's a minecraft mod where you can assemble JPG-images out of the blocks and view them that way. And then you can use stuff like uuencode where you can use anything that can move plain text to transfer binary data.

There's no way to block all of that unless you shut the whole internet down. And even then you can still trade good old playboy-magazines with your friends. VPN in itself has very little to do with the actual problem, beyond that someone apparently noticed that their current "save-the-children" iteration had pretty large holes in it.

You can't block porn completely without blocking VPNs. If you connect to a VPN that's all they can see.

This makes it sound like VPNs can ONLY access porn. lol

Depends on the VPN

Every time some new measure is released "for protection", the next day it's being used to sniff out dissidents. That usually means journalists, activists (political, labor, environment, ...) and sympathisants to give them a bit of pressure to straight up arrest them on some pretense.

difficult to argue against.

Well, except for this one.

100% and as always they boil it down to "well even if all that other stuff is true, it's for the safety of children."

Yet we have fucking confirmation that exposing networks of wealthy and powerful pedophiles is not on the agenda. Those people are untouchable. Those people are also the ones that we are handing complete control over to.

So who tf are we really protecting children from by doing this?

That makes sense. And seems like it would have much easier implementation as well.

Which is an anticipated problem too. Because those free VPNs are harvesting all of your traffic to sell; If you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold. Almost as if opponents of the ban said this would happen, and would only work to push kids towards sketchy sites…