Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Excurses
Chord progressions - circle of fifths.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Everyone is entitled to an opinion - others are entitled to question it…

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Everyone should have the right to express an opinion, and others should be free to question it. But as censorship creeps in, often under the banner of safety, we risk quietly shifting the boundary of what can be said or challenged at all. The real danger isn’t people having opinions, but a future where only state or officially approved ones remain and the right to question becomes a privilege selectively granted, not a freedom we all share. I believe this is the fear many people have with the introduction of this bill.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

I would agree with you.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Good old labour financial expertise :D

I live in a town where the labour council has put every man,woman and child in debt. They have spent £1.8 billion on crazy get rich schemes that have all failed. They are now in special measures and the councillors that created the mess are all retiring with a golden handshake and pension before they get sacked.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

What is the point of the online safety bill? When you have a C4 docu about a porn star bedding over a 1000 men in 12 hours. If that's not bad enough, the next day the very documentary was discussed on ITV's Lorraine early morning (during school holidays). Discussing what she did, the amount of money that can be made from porn etc etc. Just doesn't make sense.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Channel 4 should definitely have age verification :Yes:

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Unverified rumour that where some sites detect a VPN is in use, they are asking for age verification to be on the safe side.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Unlikely. Why would any do that ? VPNs are global, not a UK thing.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

I agree I find it very improbable that is happening due to the nature of the connection. Let’s take a user in Hungry who is accessing a porn site with an ip in Hungry, meanwhile a user from in the UK is using a vpn in Hungry with a Hungarian IP how would they know. There are those who believe that the online safety bill will allow the British government to tell other countries what to do. The are wrong in so many ways

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

So websites can detect that a VPN is in use? I thought that the whole point of using them was to circumvent the age verification systems by completely fooling the Internet into believing that the user was in the country that they were pretending to be in?

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

All a VPN does is deflect a connection so that it looks like it's going from somewhere else. It just shows it as connecting through the VPN instead of your usual ISP.


A website or other service will still be able to detect a VPN if they know which IP ranges are used by a VPN service.


They'd just add the VPN service's IP addresses or hostnames to whatever logic is deciding if age verification is required.


You could put a VPN on and try it and test by going to something like whatismyip with the VPN on and off.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Yes, and No.
A VPN simply changes your (apparent) IP to one in another country.
If you look that IP up in the various databases to see who it belongs to, you can (sometimes) tell its a VPN company.
You cannot 100% say its a VPN, only that it belongs to a company known to run them.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

Really have used it for many years the worst / best that happened is some innocent sites won't open . Curry's have lost a lot of my business because of it :D Before some nosey person asks I use two countries as I cannot get on to paid for sites set up when in those countries. France and USA.

Re: Online Safety Bill Etc
 

"All a VPN does is deflect a connection so that it looks like it's going from somewhere else.”

Err, no, no it doesn’t. A VPN sets up an encrypted tunnel between two endpoints. One end is your machine and the other is, well, wherever the other end of the tunnel happens to be. I will agree that if using a VPN then as far as the rest of the internet is concerned, you are where the other end of the tunnel is - but it isn’t all a VPN does.

"A website or other service will still be able to detect a VPN if they know which IP ranges are used by a VPN service.”

Yes true, if they are willing to expend the resources required to do this? Netflix generally does because of licensing issues. It’s all a 'whack-a-mole’ setup, unless you are sufficiently motivated, why bother?

"They'd just add the VPN service's IP addresses or hostnames to whatever logic is deciding if age verification is required.”

Why, why would they? And also they detect that someone is connecting from a known VPN supplier, they can’t tell where the person is connecting from. So what, they cut off everyone?

As per ’Sirius’s example above; imagine I run a site, say ‘filthyPornR-US.com’ based in Hungary, I have no presence, no office in the UK, why on earth would I invest time, effort and money in checking to see if any of my ‘clientele’ are connecting from the UK and go through all the efforts to age check?

Of course I won’t, and what can the UK do about it? Sweet FA really! Maybe get a Court order to instruct all UK ISPs to block access, and we all know just how effective these are (PirateBay, anyone?)