After the British spilled the beans with the Online Safety Act 2023 (Effective today), I wondered if there were any leaks I could use to prove forced verification is not the way the internet should be built, parents need to be liable for such things children do, not the server room hosted in Vietnam, I may not agree what the servers contain but this is not how you solve a problem.
Turns out a 4Chan user leaked hundreds of photos by finding a “public firebase storage bucket”. It has now been made private and gives an 403 error, but the damage is done, its already in torrents and there is no way to reverse such action.
Someone has already made a location list based on the photos (allegedly, I could not find such metadata in the photos yet).
Just wanted to make an informational post for fun, I cannot show any “illegal numbers” here, sorry.
If you submit your ID to a random app with no history and unknown developers and company, don’t be surprised if it gets leaked. This app is garbage and should be removed immediately. The company most likely used AI.
Tbf, PornHub’s ID verification is better than this. You can trust PornHub more than this random app with your ID, and there’s a reason why. This app just collected your ID for no reason. No wonder they only allow US users!
True, the hub is mostly trusted.
So anyway, I guess its time to illegalize the other thousands of other websites, because they can’t afford to pay age verification.
This is the exact argument PornHub is using against recent age-limit laws. They want a system where they can’t be breached and expose their users. I’d say this adds credibility to their position.
Just having user agent header based attestation would work for most people.
It would be easy to bypass sure, but kids are boomer levels of tech illiterate these days.
Parents should be setting up content restrictions, the government has no place making us submit ask to view porn.
The failure of parents is not my problem.
The laws aren’t about protecting children, though. Only legitimate sites will implement it, and legitimate sites generally aren’t the most problematics sites.
The laws are actually designed to allow for the tracking of adults’ activity and link them to that activity in a way that is provable in court. Anyone who wants to use the sites for nefarious purposes can just impersonate others and frame them for the use. So, there’s no real value in any of it, just a way to get campaign funding. The real solutions would be too expensive to implement and require experts to design who are much more likely to be highly educated and thus unwilling to help a fascist state, so they’ll never happen.
Parents should be responsible for their kids’ internet usage.
Jesus Christ. Selfies with location data as well as IDs.
It would be hilarious if they allowed European users.
I’ve been routing all of my traffic through UK-located VPN servers specifically to avoid shenanigans like this and the UK goes and fucks it up.
I can’t wait to arm wrestle all my accounts into allowing me to use Swiss servers. Mullvad doesn’t have enough Irish servers for me to reliably exit from there, that would be my top choice (English + GDPR). But then again, GDPR means a fraction of American sites don’t work.
I just really don’t like having my government or the governments of the places I travel to looking at my traffic. And now this ID shit is here. Just let me use the Internet goddamn it, I already pay out the ass for it.
pro-tip: find a small-ish VPS provider with decent reviews. prepaid debit card with $100 on it & an alias. easy, lonely wireguard exit.
It’s why I can’t wait to get my hands on a Harmony NextOS phone. Given the choice, I’d just as soon turn my data over to the Chinese as to Google and 5-Eyes.
