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.
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.