Get ready for mandatory porn site age checks, Brits. You read that right The UK government is to lay its digital bill before Parliament today, which, among other things, is intended to create a legal right for every household to access 10Mbps broadband. Age verification will also be required for people browsing pornographic websites, supposedly for the protection of children from online porn. The …
It does baffle me.
10Mbps over 100m has been available since... well, 10BaseT. And there have been WAN technologies available to do such things for decades, over even the flakiest of copper.
The core problems lies not with the end mile, surely, but with providing provision to the exchanges. And, let's be honest, are you really not going to need to upgrade every exchange at some point anyway? Surely it's now inevitable.
I don't think it's the exchanges, I think it's the last mile or indeed miles. I live in a 500 house village near Sheffield and Rotherham and if it wasn't for a privately run business-standard village-wide wifi service we'd still be on 1 Mbps because our nearest exchange is approx 4 miles away. (And of course people who aren't signing up for this company and it's rates are still stuck at 1 Mbps.)
Well maybe if this law passes you'll have the "right" to 10Mbps in your village but there's nothing about cost still. So what does that mean? They're forced to offer it but can charge you thousands for a dedicated line? They're not allowed to offer packages less than 10Mbps? Those seem to be the only viable interpretations of this law and neither really makes much sense. Maybe if you're an ISP you're required to offer 10Mbps to anyone who wants it. Which is a great way to keep out new competition as only BT, TalkTalk, et al. could absorb such costs. Again, as a law this makes no sense?
And what the Hell does this have to do with mandatory age checks, too? Another way of putting that is anyone visiting such sites legally must supply personally identifying information. Yes, that's exactly what you should not be putting into a porn site. Nor should the government be snooping on it.
"Right to 10Mbps" means it will be written into the "universal service obligation". That is in order to get a license the operator (e.g. BT) has to agree to provide a minimum service to anybody who requests it for the same price. Exactly the same as the obligation to provide everybody with a phone line.
So the condition is to offer it for the same price, the obligation also only applies to large national operators allowing smaller firms a chance to compete (probably by piggyback on BT Openreach anyway)
This is interesting. Bog-standard broadband has traditionally been 'up to 8Mbps' (YMMV). Since I complained about some problems and got the last 200m of my line replaced I've been getting about 7.5Mb, from an exchange about 1.5 miles away.
We're still waiting for FTTP (yep, FTTP, not FTTC - they've promised), which has been promised for many months - but it looks as if it's very, very close now. The exchange was enabled last year, now we're just waiting for our cabinet to get sorted.
Mysteriously though, a month or two back, I happened to check my connection speed on the hub, and it had gone up to 17.5Mbps down, and 1.25 Mb up (was 400k). No notice, no trumpeting of the change. Is this a side effect of enabling the exchange for fibre? Either way, it means that it looks like a fairly easy job to hit the 10Mbps target without much extra work. Having said that, other users on our cabinet are still only getting about 5Mbps or less.
This is a switch to ADSL2+ which supports speeds up to 24Mbps. I'd imagine that openreach are no longer offering products based on ADSL. As you live quite close to your exchange you get a decent boost on speed. For people further from the exchange the benefit of ADSL2+ is very small and won't take people over the magical 10Mbps boundary.
Are common household data rates really that low over on the other side of the pond?
Here in Canada we've been getting 50 megabits download and 35 megabits upload for at least 10 years now and our local comms provider Telus, have had their 150 megabits synchronous comms with the same upload and download speed package at a very reasonable $80 CAN per month with 600 Gigabytes of data allowed per month for almost two years now!
In the downtown core flats that are all fibre optic connected, their Gigabit Ethernet package which is actually cheaper at only $65 per month is almost spot on synchronous with One Gigabit download and 0.8 Gigabits upload for superfast gaming and 4K video Netflix options. How hard can it be to wire up a country? My cousins in Munich, Germany have had inexpensive Three Gigabit IPV6 Video, Voice and Data for at least three years now and you can pay extra to get the full 10 Gigabit package although that price package is definitely much more expensive. If Germany and Canada can give the public high speed Internet, why can't the UK do it too?
A certain conservative member comes to mind... only the orange wasn't in his christmas stocking.
Ah! I see now! They're trying to save the children from perverted politicians!!! It all makes sense now.
Joking aside, I don't use El Reg to promote my resources, even if they are free ;-)
Oh goody
The politician's favourite propaganda prorogation site "twatter" will have to ban everyone who isn't prepared / able to hand over a credit card number as proof of ID. While "twatter" might host lying stealing conniving cheating bastards like those penned up in parliament it is also used by many hard working ladies and gentlemen (and no doubt not so gentle if you pay enough) of negotiable affection. Plus more user generated content than you could ever shake your own stick at.
The Digital Economy Bill was first announced in the Queen's Speech earlier this year. It has the lofty aim of "mak[ing] the United Kingdom a world leader in the digital economy" via legislation.
Coming up next: legislation to enforce better wether. Britain needs to become world leader in beach resorts too!
Perhaps, but unfortunately Tor is very easy to profile. (This is why they haven't simply blocked it - it's so very useful!)
So High Chancellor Theresa May will have a nice handy list of all paedos/terrorists/dissidents in her country. It doesn't even matter what you were DOING with Tor, the fact you are using it makes you a threat, and you can expect a knock on the door (or at least a fingering) from the NCA i.e. May's SS.
You won't even be able to claim that your Human Rights have been violated, because by the time we sign Article 50, you won't have any.
Plus, as other people have said, this mandatory age-verification will presumably involve an ID check, i.e. scanning a biometric, swiping your government-issued ID card, or some other form of ID which can be linked to a central government pervs database.
Not too long ago, Theresa May (or was it Jacqui Smith?) wanted ISPs to force people to opt-in to porn. Those who did are on the pervs database.
But really it's not about porn, it's about controlling anonymity online in general. The only reason it's about porn right now is because people are more likely to accept a pervs database than a complete citizen/dissident database. Many shillspeople are now calling for mandatory ID checks on people using social networks and forums, ostensibly to make it easier for the plod to cuff anyone who says something naughty or otherwise offends somebody on The Internet.
Shortly it will be illegal to try to post anything or even view anything anonymously on the Internet (or otherwise attempt to subvert citizen/dissident profiling). And using Tor will be a one-way ticket to the rehabilitation centre.
Anon, while it's still legal!
"Not too long ago, Theresa May (or was it Jacqui Smith?) wanted ISPs to force people to opt-in to porn. Those who did are on the pervs database."
And they sort of did. They managed to get all the major ISPs to make new customers choose on sign-up whether they wanted restricted or unrestricted access to the 'net - presumably they would just need to get existing customers to make an active choice. Given fixed line broadband (I think) needs to have an 18+ account holder, job's a good 'un.
Of course, all this is ignoring the fact that the filters are terrible. My mobile blocker is still in place (vpn for most things on the road anyway as it gets rid of traffic shaping and the terrible DNS servers in the mobile world) and recently blocked my access to a video games forum as "adult content".
And then how would the sites operate with connections from outside the UK?
Why would they care? All this age verification crap is coming from that patrician twerp Cameron, aided and abetted by Sturmbahnfuhrer May.
May has a degree in geography, Cameron in philosophy, politics and economics. So between them they know the sum of f*** all in all matters of business, science or technology, and if they managed to mess up the UK's internet they would simply not understand why that mattered.
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