“unexpected”
LOL
Could you please put a short summary of the article in the post body?
Something like:
Porn sites that ignore age-check laws are getting a flood of traffic - The Washington Post
The age-verification laws rapidly expanding across the United States and United Kingdom are bringing with them some surprising downsides, including bursts of traffic to seedy parts of the web. August 31, 2025 at 7:05 a.m. EDT
Sothat users don’t have to click the article to get a quick overview of what it’s about. Saves you 5 clicks - open article, figure out it’s behind a paywall, go to archive.is, paste the article link, read article.
Got you: https://archive.is/HKOfK
almost as if scan your face laws only exist to obtain massive amounts of recognition data for the surveillance state.
Except they’re only cataloguing dumbasses
We need to start following politicians with cameras, parabolic microphones, and what-not like gargoyles in Snow Crash. Stream video while out in public, posts of their locations when their not.
Remember when someone posted Musk’s (public) flight data? When Musk said anything could be public?
And then Musk removed the flight data.
Rules for thee but not for me. They’re bloody hypocrites.
He threatened to sue that guy.
Here’s one of the Elon jet trackers on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElonJetTracker/
The goal seems to be to control the internet like they’ve been controlling television and news.
But tech and privacy experts have warned that the laws bring with them some unavoidable downsides, including potentially driving people to seedier corners of the web.
Hmm, if only there was something in history (cough Prohibition cough drug bans cough piracy cough) that could’ve predicted this. It’s almost like people will do the easier thing when the legal thing is harder to do.
Especially when the legal thing is stupid and intrusive.
You don’t have to go back that far, just look at digital music. People were trading files on Napster, and the music industry was having a fit. Steve Jobs opened the iTunes Music Store and started selling all files for .99, people started gobbling them up, and piracy went down. Then along came Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, etc., and most people are happy to pay. Why, because it’s so much easier and convenient than trying to pirate it and get it on your phone/player.
Don’t get me wrong, people still pirate, but the percentage is low compared to what it was before these easy legal options. People will always take the easiest route, legal or illegal.
Netflix appeared, piracy dropped. And when the movie streaming market fragmented, piracy shot up. Like they say, it’s a service problem.
YES! Exactly my point. Thank you!
When the United Kingdom began requiring thousands of websites to verify their users’ ages last month, one group saw an enormous burst of traffic: pornography sites ignoring the law.
What save person would want to get photographed or provide an ID before viewing porn?
If they truly cared about kids they would introduce mechanism where sites could declare their target audience and provide a way to punish if a company does lie.
Parents could then use parental controls.
This mechanism is more about censorship. They are aware that people are trusting less and less MSM so want to make sure they control Internet too.
If, God forfend, Farage gets into power, do you want him or his idiot flunkies having access to any information that could be used to blackmail or harass you?
Then why make a law mandating its colection?
I think the current bunch and their idiot flunkies are already the kind of people one would not want to have access to any information that could be used to blackmail or harass a person.
People who have old ladies arrested for demonstrating against mass murder of children due to their ethnicity, are NOT morally upright people who when in power would never abuse information about who watches what porn.
Ironically Farage is the only politician I’ve heard publically oppose it (probably have been a few others but they won’t have gotten the same media attention). I’m sure if he does get elected he’ll follow through with repealing it, just like we got that extra £350 million for the NHS he promised after Brexit…
Totally expected but just ignored by those in power.
who could’ve predicted this? 🙄
Nerds. But not the elderly who are in charge of this country.
Not me. Nobody asked me.
that’s it, the UK government needs to write more strongly worded letters to let those sites know how unacceptable it is for them not to think of the children!
This website redirects to Russian porn for me now.
UPDATE: Apparently I’m not the only one: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1n4z754/firefox_redirecting_archivetoday_to_russian_porn/
Sort your DNS, your machine (and possibly your life) out.
I’ll check out some possibilities. I’m using NextDNS so I’m quite surprised by this.
Yeah that is bizarre, maybe malware or a malicious browser addon?
using Firefox on my phone with DNS over HTTPS. I’ll keep triaging.
paywalled
