you might have to soon move away to something much better. Let me know if you find it.

Great “counter” argument 👍

I find it rather disturbing that all these governments are trying to sneak this kind of legislation through in the calm between election cycles, without public debate whatsoever. There is almost no reporting about it in mainstream news, until it is a “fait accompli”, and it is completely absent from the various parties’ programs upon which they got elected. It’s almost as if they fear public opinion.

Your examples only serve to show what a shithole nanny state the UK has been sliding down towards to, and what a slippery slope all these “omg think of the children! 😱” legislations are.

The alcohol you have in your home you had to be legal age to buy in the first place. Similarly if you had a porn DVD at home you would have had to prove your age when you bought it

I live in a EU country, never in my life have I had to provide an ID to buy alcohol or pornography, neither online nor in person.

Why is online special?

Online, there are risks of privacy and security. It’s already difficult enough to maintain a reasonable security and privacy stance that balances between convenience and not being tracked and targeted everywhere, without putting age gates into the mix. Even if you made the perfect age gate app without vulnerabilities (which you can’t), that perfect app could still be spoofed to trick people into providing sensitive identifying information to bad actors. It happens with banking apps, it will happen with age gate apps.

In real life the government does not get in the middle. It is a private transaction between a buyer and the seller, and the unspoken assumption is that the buyer is an adult of legal age. Only when there are serious doubts about the buyer’s age will the seller scrutinize. Online, the assumption of being bona fide is reversed: the assumption is that everyone is a minor until proven otherwise.

Online is also typically not a one stop transaction. In a single browsing session an adult might want to access many different pieces of content, spread out over several different sites. Adults having to stop and prove their age at every turn online is burdensome, draconian and has a huge chilling effect. Data has shown that sites that introduce an age gate, only retain about 10% of their users. So the other 90% either goes dark or is dissuaded entirely from accessing said materials. Neither of those are good outcomes.

Online is also special in that it doesn’t even work. An online age gate doesn’t really prevent anything, it just sends traffic elsewhere, making it little more than a nuissance. If a liquor store denies a minor buying liquor, the minor is SOL because there are only so many places they can physically try. Online they can just click the next link, or the next, or the next,… It’s simply impossible to age gate all the sites where you can find porn. And yes, it’s ridiculously trivial to find non-age gated porn, when I tried it with a UK VPN yesterday it was as simple as typing “porn videos” in DDG, and clicking the first link.

Finally, there is also a huge difference in harmfulness between consuming certain physical substances like alcohol, and viewing adult content. The very idea that it is particularly harmful for teens to view sexual materials is scientifically dubious, making this more an overbearing and disproportional “moral panic” type of reaction than a proportional, well studied and well reasoned measure. It also conveniently ignores and does nothing about much greater harms that young people fall prey to online, like what TikTok is doing to the attention span of kids, or incel/manosphere echo chambers and various other misinformation spheres, or online bullying, or screen addiction, or unrealistic and ultra-materialistic world views promoted by influencers. It aims to be a technological solution to a tiny part of a much larger societal problem, and that never works.

In my opinion, the true intent of this legislation has never been to protect children. Instead it is a power grab by a control obsessed government, and an ideological attack against those who create, distribute and view porn. The children, as usual, are only there to provide emotional blackmail to get people to accept intrusive, draconian measures. And you, my friend, fell for it hook, line and sinker.

If there really, truly was no way to tie back proving your age to who proved their age, then surely this is a good thing?

Still nope.

The government shouldn’t be putting up mandatory barriers for what adults watch in the privacy of their own home. It’s a huge overreach.

Imagine being an adult in your 40s, living alone without a minor anywhere near you, and having to prove you’re an adult with a fucking Android app every time you want to open your liquor cabinet. That’s how this feels to me, and I find it extremely offensive. Like, get out of my life.

And then this age gating crap doesn’t even solve the problem, and has the potential to make things worse, because only the major players like pornhub and reddit will comply. For shits and giggles, I set my VPN to UK the other day, and was able to find non-age gated porn in no time. So this is just driving minors who want to view porn to more sketchy, less moderated sites.

the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest

Where were all the protests to this: https://techinformed.com/france-enforces-age-verification-law-adult-sites/ ?

This is what you get at the moment when you access pornhub from a French IP:

FWIW, Denmark has had this digital infrastructure in the last 10 years and it’s been the foundation of a huge transformation in terms of how people interact with the government services.

I don’t think anyone has a problem with an ID you need to interact with government services. They know your identity anyway, and for obvious security reasons it’s necessary that they properly verify that you are who you claim you are.

What people have a problem with, is needing to provide an ID to simply access whole categories of content across the wide internet that are not related to your identity in any way.

You can use the wildcard domain

Yeah the problem was more that this machine is running on a network where I don’t really control the DNS. That is to say, there’s a shitty ISP router with DHCP and automatic dynamic DNS baked in, but no way to add additional manual entries for vhosts.

I thought about screwing with the /etc/hosts file to get around it but what I ended up doing instead is installing a pihole docker for DNS (something I had been contemplating anyway), pointing it to the router’s DNS, so every local DNS name still resolves, and then added manual entries for the vhosts.

Another issue I didn’t really want to deal with was regenerating the TLS certificate for the nginx server to make it valid for every vhost, but I just bit through that bullet.