I dunno, surely it's not beyond the wit of man to develop some sort of age verification device for the internet? Maybe something like those cards that youngsters need to get served in pubs. Users have to enter their details and a code to access certain content.
I genuinely don't think that it should be as easy as it is for kids to access violent porn, animal fucking, snuff shit, and all the other fucked-up crap that exists on the net. If we can't lock up the cunts that make it, I'm all for making it as difficult as possible to access.
The issue isn't age verifcation, it's person verification. With ID cards you have a photo and possibly some other details you can verify that the card belongs to the person who gave it to you. Online I don't see how you could make this work, as it's so easy to go through proxy/VPN/tor to pretend you are someone else (with details from another person's card) or from somewhere that doesn't require age verification. Restrictions that make you do something like this will stop some people but it's more likely to be older people and not teenagers (who may need protecting from it - any adult going looking for violent/animal/etc porn is more likely in need of help/jail than protection). Certainly when I worked in schools a few years ago all the kids in the 3 schools I worked in knew how to find/use proxies to get past the school's blockers and play games.
I certainly don't pretend to have the technical knowledge to discuss this properly but my understanding is that it's basically impossible to stop someone from viewing things on the internet if they want to - the Chinese firewall is probably the best attempt to do so and lots of people get past that all the time without problem.
As someone else said I think it's more important that we educate about porn, in primary school because as soon as they go to secondary school an older kid will show them some grim porn on a phone. I don't think we can stop or control this through restricting the internet and what people can see, not without it being illegal (which animal and snuff porn are I would think) and putting the same kind of effort into it as with child abuse images/video, which means it gets pushed onto the darknet, still accessible but you almost have to know where you are going, you can't just search for it. With drugs, there's directories on reddit to find the darkmarkets. I would guess there is similar things for child abuse stuff (somewhere, reddit has some grimness but I'd hope it doesn't have that on it) as well but I've no idea how easy/hard it would be to find if you wanted to (and obviously I'm not going looking).
As I typed the above, I wondered about a system that would tie a card to an IP address so you could only access a site if you had that card's details and your IP address matched. Would be an issue with dynamic IPs but could be a range of IPs rather than one?
Think this would mean that you would not be able to use proxies/vpn/tor to get round it as entering details wouldn't work because you wouldn't be on the IP address of the card - actually someone could setup a proxy tied to a card but the site would only let one person on at a time from the ID so this wouldn't really work.
You would still be able to access via a vpn/proxy in a country that doesn't require age verification though and that's where this idea fails I think, aside from not preventing people within a house sharing an ID, as long as one person is over 18 they can all use it.
Age restriction works reasonably well (pain in the arse aside) in terms of mobile data, so I suppose they just need to get fixed line ISPs to do the same.
VPNs and so on is missing the point by some margin.
How do you imagine this working in a family household? afaik you'd already have to have someone over 18 to get the line in (as requires a line of credit). The ISP would have no way of distinguishing who in the house is using their fixed line would they?
surely you'd leave it with yer spunk covered laptop
