Age verification is a great success I see. I feel so much safer now with this shit in place so kids can’t watch porn…
The worst was watching porn on spotify…
It has absolutely nothing to do with kids watching porn.
Of course.
*so that the government can say kids won’t watch porn.
Rule 1 of computers that everyone who has taught an ICT class learns - if little Timmy wants titties, he finds a way.
God forbid people teach their kids sex/getting off is a drug and can be abused.
Who taught you sex is a drug? As long as words mean their definitions, it’s categorically not. Plus it’s probably kinda harmful to pile on the stigma already surrounding sex by conflating it with drugs and all the stigma that comes with that.
Hopefully I’m wrong, but it’s kinda giving a nofap pseudoscience red flag to me.
Parents definitely should be teaching their kids about this stuff at the appropriate time, but they should stick to the facts.
Let this be a reminder to never turn away from piracy. It needs to constantly be in the background and if any company gets like they always do, then it comes back out. But if we let the knowledge fade away then it’s impossible to rebuild it.
Or you know you could punish parents for not parenting. Like if kids are watching porn and caught and if it’s actually against some law then go after the parents.
It’s not hard to teach parents how to implement a filtering DNS. But no, countries think they need to be the nanny.
That’s just the pretext they give to justify it. The real reason is surveillance. Now they have a way to confidently tie your accounts to your individual identity. And most of these solutions use third parties which will then sell that data as well, so now anyone can tie your account to you without you ever knowing.
Even if the government is barred from surveilling citizens in these ways, third parties aren’t, and the government can just buy that information, no warrant needed anymore.
And these laws never stop at porn, it’s drugs, LGBTQ information, etc. and they can always easily add additional things later with little fanfare.
This is it. Theyve been going after encrypted messaging apps for a long time, ig they realized theyre not getting anywhere and figured to just hit it head on.
The internet has always circumvented this kind of shit, just look at TPB. The ones who are getting really beaten up by this is the older generations and the ones lacking technical know-how.
Yep. “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
LOL, wrong on that last point! Gen X and Millennials are generally hot shit on tech. It’s the young folks who don’t have a clue if something doesn’t “just work”. Present company excluded of course. :)
It’s not about kids and never has been, it’s about surveillance of the internet and the death of anonymity.
Going against the parents is impopular and would make the parents vote against you in the next elections.
As a parent, that’s my take as well. If my kids break a law, I should be the one to fix it. Don’t do my parenting for me…
I feel like I’m standing between two really stupid positions here.
On the one hand, just let parents teach their kids is basically a state’s rights argument. A lot of parents won’t teach their kids, so… do we care? Does this matter? We should probably mount a stronger effort then.
On the other hand, we don’t need the government to get involved to stop 9 year olds from seeing titties—we just don’t! Websites the world over have implemented 2-factor-authentication more or less by themselves (
and probably because they want to spy on you). And, no one says the word r----- anymore because if you ever do, a bunch of anti-bullying PSAs will be really annoying about it in your replies.Not every social problem needs to be solved by swinging around Thor’s hammer. We do have other means.
is basically a state’s rights argument
No, it’s a privacy and individual rights argument. I don’t want local governments enforcing it any more than I want national arguments enforcing it.
Kids seeing stuff they shouldn’t isn’t itself a problem, but it can lead to problems. For example, kids learning to make bombs itself isn’t an issue, kids making bombs to hurt others is the issue. Hold parents legally accountable for the latter, not the former.
The furthest I’d be willing to go on this is requiring a payment method (which itself requires sufficient age) to be entered before accessing anything “adult oriented,” and even then I’m not completely sold. But this way the burden of verifying age is restricted to things consumers already need to trust, and parents would need to give or allow their kid access to a payment method.
I think you misunderstand. I’m not saying I’m in favor of this law.
By state’s rights, I’m referring to the way republicans pretend they want the freedom of choice where they are actually just looking for excuses to keep doing what they’re doing. In this way, letting parents choose is functionally identical: parents won’t choose, so it is equivalent to doing nothing.
There has to be a cultural shift for anything to change.
Kids seeing stuff they shouldn’t isn’t itself a problem,
If I’m being perfectly honest, I do not give a shit if 9-year-olds can see titties. Like, my other argument against this government overreach is that I don’t know what problem it’s supposedly solving that can’t just be solved with better sex-ed.
“Protecting children” is just the pretext under which governments can sell increased surveillance. The fact that there are more effective ways they could act to protect children, yet governments everywhere continue to push for ID checks and monitoring online activity, shows that the aim isn’t what they say it is.
Don’t threaten, just do it. Enshittification must end.
The only reason we have mainstream paid video streaming now is because early Netflix was genuinely better than dodgy, pop-up riddled mirrors on movie4k.to. The convenience was well worth 8 bucks a month. Same for Spotify.
Fast forward 10 years and Spotify wants me to pay 15 €, scan my face and listen to forced podcast ads AND pay extra for paywalled audiobooks that used to be free? Meet my good old friend youtube-downloader, then.
The news can’t easily report on users actually returning to piracy; who would admit to it? And how would you get data on it? Much easier to truthfully report on users who talk about returning to piracy.
I don’t mind giving my date of birth to all the services I already pay for with credit card but face scanning? That’s just creepy. Fuck off.
Even using a credit card for something like Spotify is already giving out more information than is needed.
It is 1970-01-01 like me, no?
April 20th, 1969? Anyone?
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fair point but given the direction US and UK are headed, something legal you do online can be illegal in a couple years with a face attached to that activity. What you mention is also bad (your face being in a face recognition database) but not as bad as that being attached to tons of behavioural data collected about you.
There’s a wide gap between “travelling to another country” and “listening to music.”
I’m not trying to go on holiday to Spotify
what are “spotify fans”? Spotify paid 150k $ for Trump’s inauguration party, f them. They do not deserve my money
I left Spotify for many reasons including this. They’ve only proven that they do not care about artists at all. I remember before I left, many of the tracks that came up “based on my playlist” were just random AI generated crap.
what’s even the point of age gating “explicit” music?
“oh no! “Speak To Me” by Pink Floyd has the fuck word in it! can’t let my kids hear it!”
Just get me the kid bop version
If I am paying for my account personally, with a card in my name, what more do they need?
I jerked it to the Hanson mmbop video back in the nineties.
Found out later the girl was a boy.
You can judge all you want, but the general thing is that horny teenagers will jerk it to almost anything.
…genuinely trying to figure out how this relates to the topic at hand.
That a porn ban does not work and people will find a way around it.
When I was a kid there weren’t all this free porn sites and most of them were paid.
So you would go to some shady site where people shared passwords. This might make a comeback
This.
But also this
Shit, those sites are a core memory for me. sexypasswords was my goto and the thrill of finding a working one. Ah good times.
Yeah I used iseekpasswords my older cousin told me about it
It moreso relates to what’s in hand
The age control of pointless when it comes to protecting the children.
But also this
Thank you for letting us know. I’ll be sure to use this information to my best.
The internet is based on this underlying trust. You are a true custodian!
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I mean, fuck Spotify and all that, but this one is really the UK government’s doing.
And soon, this shit will come to every country. They’re all drafting laws to mandate real age verification for adult content. The UK is just the first to implement it.
I mean, fuck it. At this point we might as well put our passport numbers in the HTTP headers.
Coming to a pop up near you. If they even bother to ask any more.
I think there are going to be a whole lot of phishing and blackmail scams in the future, preying on the stupid computer illiterate masses putting in their personal information into fake “age verifiers” to access porn or other adult content.
It’s a good thing it’s so easy to tell them from the “trustworthy” ones…
A VPN is a must if you wanna go down this route
Soulseek (and I recommend the Nicotine+ client over the official one) is a fantastic source for all music in all formats, and particularly obscure off-label shit you won’t get anywhere else. You’ll even have some success finding audiobooks there, although this is very hit-and-miss. I wish audiobook pirates would use it more heavily. It’s P2P, like Napster used to be. You’ll have to share something or you’ll get auto-ignored by most users.
RuTracker is a great non-private/non-ratio-monitoring torrent site for music (does require a free account though). I’ve never had a single torrent from there that wasn’t seemingly seeded by a Godzilla’s dick. Obviously it’s in Russian, but there’s really no difficulty navigating around. The only thing you might struggle with is signing up for an account, but just have your favourite translation tool open in another tab 👍
If you don’t mind slow download speeds (from the likes of RapidGator), I enjoy Exystence. It’s a blog that shares link to the latest albums and offers both lossy and lossless versions. Nice RSS subscription to have.
If you do find yourself using RapidGator a lot, don’t waste money buying a sub directly from them, it’s insanely pricey. Instead, get a reseller like Real Debrid, which costs like 10% as much and also covers you for about two-dozen other file hosters. I highly recommend putting as much distance between your credit card and the company as possible, just for safety reasons. Using PaySafeCard is fine, as Real Debrid will never see your details in that case. I don’t have any specific reason to be weary of them, I just don’t trust random/small/hitherto unheard of companies as a rule.
I’ve been using RuTracker for years and it usually has all the music I need. And it has more than music, great site.
All good advice. I used to find a lot of stuff by entering “site:rutracker.org” behind my query in my favorite search engine - don’t know if that still works but I never needed an account there…
Never stopped. Get your own mp3s kids.
I mean, the Spotify CEO invests in AI weaponry being used to murder kids in Gaza so the morally correct thing to do would be to leave Spotify over that.
Source for this?
Not the one who mentioned it but I was curious about this as well and found this;
DO WHAT YOU WANT CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE! YOU ARE A PIRATE!
I often see here and reddit people justifying piracy with various reason.
I do it because I can, because i’m a tight cunt and I like free stuff.
The streaming services are run by shithead C-suites who think last quarter is the way it’s always been. They forget the only reason most of us use their services is someone more visionary than them made it more convenient than piracy half a generation ago. Let’s remind them there’s an alternative.
I have like 5 alternates I would use before Spotify.
Well bully for you
