The UK's Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law

Re:The UK's Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law by ko27 on Saturday October 28, 2023 @10:24AM (#38050041)

All the responses you are getting are very US centric. Just to give an example how you could do this in the EU, today. Every country is now issuing (or planning to issue soon) electronic ID cards with digital signatures that can be scanned with your smartphone. The plan is to allow users to attest they are over or under 18 without revealing any other personal information. They will release an official EU app (like they did for Covid) or Google/Apple will add the appropriate secure API.

I don't necessarily agree we need this, but to claim it's impossible to do this in a secure way is ridiculous.

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Re:The UK's Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law by mdp2021 on Saturday October 28, 2023 @10:48AM (#38050223)

Practically, I am not sure about the feasibility.

You request a one-time-certificate with a smartphone, then copy it on a laptop (already this is not automatic): once per website or page? That is a lot of certification requests. And that would be to access the content in the www? It creates a dependency stronger than DNS. And there should be full warranty that the issuer and the receiver cannot cross information (of the issued and the received - that would identify the user).

Plus, not everybody has a smartphone. Not everyone accepts Android or iOS at their current implementations. Do those people remain without access to the www?

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Re:The UK's Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law by ko27 on Saturday October 28, 2023 @11:14AM (#38050421)

> Practically, I am not sure about the feasibility.

Last week I logged into my e-gov website by confirming a push notification on my authenticator app that's tied to my e-ID card to download my birth certificate. No copy pasting needed. Random websites now even support logging in without passwords by using your smartphone passkeys.

I am sure they can make it work for a simple yes/no (over 18) challenge-request scenario.

> Plus, not everybody has a smartphone. Not everyone accepts Android or iOS at their current implementations. Do those people remain without access to the www?

We are talking about adult content. The alternative is having that content banned. Many democratic countries have already done that, like South Korea. I don't prefer this scenario.

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Re:The UK's Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law by dvdkon on Saturday October 28, 2023 @02:40PM (#38052295)

The bigger alternative is the status quo: A big button saying "I am at least 18 years old" and some web-filtering technologies that parent could use but probably don't. Nobody's dying over this, so I'd be wary of arguments along the lines of "we have do do something anyway".

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Re:The UK's Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law by lost_tourist on Saturday October 28, 2023 @06:41PM (#38054088)

the alternative is to force parents to do their jobs. We don't need the government protecting us from everything. What do they want to protect us from next? Car accidents (stop allowing private car ownership). Being fat (monthly weigh ins with fines if you don't get down to your target weight?). Where does it stop?

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Re:The UK's Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law by lost_tourist on Saturday October 28, 2023 @06:39PM (#38054063)

I don't think it's -technically- impossible, I just think it's intellectually impossible for governments to allow such valuable information to actually be anonymous and would provide backdoors to aggregate the data and associate it with citizenry.

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Re:The UK's Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law by ko27 on Saturday October 28, 2023 @07:31PM (#38054472)

You think the government doesn't know the stuff that's already on your ID? Or are you implying governments want to add backdoors for other companies to harvest data?

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