2026-03-06 20:06:01
This Reddit post; it’s the UK that loses out:
“It’s an old-school internet forum from late 1990s, still chugging alone today. I started getting email from Ofcom around November 2025 and now have multiple letters. I’ve repeatedly told them I’m from Canada, I’m not based in the UK. Eventually, I blocked all UK IP addresses in mid-February 2026 and told them I’d blocked the UK and that I was done engaging with them. [But…]”
2026-03-06 18:17:43
Working in Facebook’s Trust & Safety team taught me many things, including: when someone’s at risk of online coercion & extortion (financial, sexual, political) one thing that you DO NOT do, is throw fuel on the fire.
With that in mind, let’s watch this UK Terrorism Police video, circulating on TikTok & Instagram:
Cue an utterly terrified teenager with wailing sirens behind him, whose “mum couldn’t believe it” and “might not be able to go to college”
TO BE CLEAR, THIS IS BULLSHIT. IF THIS REALLY REFLECTS HOW COUNTER-TERRORISM LEGISLATION WORKS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM THEN IT NEEDS TO BE URGENTLY REFORMED:
This is right up there with “AIDS – DON’T DIE OF IGNORANCE!” and with the Twitter Joke Trial.
If you are telling a bunch of teenagers that having “shared a link” their lives are now essentially over, what the hell do you think they are going to do next?
No; the emotional ones are going to harm or even kill themselves, much like the various servicemen killing themselves over sextortion — or, perhaps worse, this campaign will be used as evidence of a “hostile environment” of anti-terrorism policing and used to drag kids into crime, “Oliver Twist” style where they are practically dragged underground into an anti-establishment cult.
This is the most self-defeatingly, tone-deaf, patronising, patrician, misapprehensive and outright stupid anti-social-media campaign that I’ve ever had the horror to witness.
It should be cancelled and utterly reworked, in association with at least SOME civil society organisation which respects kids enough to not try scaring them into “good behaviour”.
They should apologise to the nation’s youth.
2026-03-04 19:56:21
tl;dr: the “project” of open source age verification will inevitably implode — probably messily — and waste everyone’s time whilst also reifying narrative of “support” for an approach to user safety that will not deliver its purported benefits.
Here I explain why it will fail from the perspective of ~40 years of free software and open-source coding.
And it’s not “because the user will switch it off”
If you strew a metaphorical rope in front of a bunch of geeks, they will rapidly group together, split into two or more factions, and engage in tugs of war with each other whilst arguing importantly over architectural and strategic errors that the other team is making.
You can go browse the sorry husk of StackOverflow for evidence, but this has also always been the case; for any given software niche there are mutually-hostile solutions:
Software Development in general and Open Source in particular institutionalises “exit” and “competition”, and it is in the nature of the open-source community for people to become sufficiently angry or otherwise motivated to rage-quit an existing project and attempt to set up “differently” for any number of reasons, from project governance to solution architecture to implementation language to personal/corporate conflict to complete ignorance or hatred of existing approaches.
This does not always happen, but long-term consistency of a project usually is a result of a combination of two or more of:
Basically: AV is not a governed visionary ecosystem, it’s a tickbox compliance requirement.
It’s a free-for-all.
Subsequent to announcement that the State of California will demand AV, any number of junior devs now want to make names for themselves by being “first to ship this important feature” and so they will come up with half-assed solutions that fit within their preferred ecosystem (e.g.: DBus/Ubuntu) and nowhere else.
This is fine. Think of it as your five year old kid at the beach making a sandcastle. That’s what they do. They will demand applause, but it’s still an imaginary thing. And there will be dozens of sandcastles on the beach in short order, and they will all prosecute war amongst themselves.
The thing is: Age Verification is literally a gatekeeping solution. If it is to be effective at all, it must be deployed in situations where gatekeeping makes sense — and general purpose operating systems are not those places.
This is a point we’ve already learned from the likes of Digital Rights Management and different methods of copy-prevention for Floppy Disks, CDs and DVDs. To be effective the scope of the gatekeeping needs to be beyond user control, which is not the case in operating systems. Various workarounds such as Trusted Platform Modules have been proposed in-past, and (surprise!) they don’t work well (often: not at all) in Open Source operating systems where the intent is to exclude the user.
If you want to understand the background some more, go read The Coming War On General Purpose Computing — because we’ve seen this coming for more than a decade.
So: to wrap this up really briefly:
Privacy Wonks will hate it, but Mark Zuckerberg is correct that the proper place for prescriptive Age Verification is in the App Store of a mobile device; yes, that means Google and Apple will “find out more about you” but that can be minimised if they choose to implement a privacy-preserving protocol a-la what happened over COVID tracking.
The reason people are angry about this is that they don’t understand that the App-Store-and-Google/Apple-Account approach to AV is a degenerate form of what we should have been doing all along: age attestation, not age verification.
The user should be signed up with their own preferred provider of private age-attestation services which they can enmesh into whatever transactions they require an age test for; this puts the user in control of provider choice and information protection, and the reliant parties — vendors, porn sites, forums, whatever — should be obliged to accept attestation tokens.
But we don’t do that, probably because (a) it makes less money for the industry and (b) because Governments get more ID tracking metadata with the age verification approach.
2026-03-04 17:14:39
Nothing to do with it being Chinese, then?
“TikTok told the BBC it believed end-to-end encryption prevented police and safety teams from being able to read direct messages if they needed to. It confirmed its approach to the BBC in a briefing about security at its London office – saying it wanted to protect users, especially young people, from harm. It described this stance as a deliberate decision to set itself apart from rivals.”
2026-03-03 19:12:38
https://csa-scientist-open-letter.org/ageverif-Feb2026
Article: https://www.politico.eu/article/age-check-social-media-scientist-warning
Archived at https://archive.ph/EADuL
Via:
2026-03-02 19:01:18
If you forcibly isolate an entire generation from influences that they are bound to encounter later in life, you are doing them harm by preventing them learning early how to cope.
“If we are going to eliminate peanuts, and another child is allergic to hazelnuts, and another child is allergic to milk, and another child to [Instagram] — there’s no end to this,” he says.