7 days ago
Online Safety Act is a bad joke
The UK now has their Online Safety Act (OSA) and Australia is blindly following in their footsteps. In the UK it didn't take very long for the tech aware under-18s to bypass all the rules and regain access to adult content. Think about it, if China can't completely block everything do you think the UK had any chance? There were some creative solutions but the most common was a simple Virtual Private Network (VPN). In related news, some VPN companies reported a 1,400% increase in sign-ups since the OSA came into force.
- The UK is now looking at a VPN ban. Is this feasible? This would just push VPNs underground and create a black-market economy. Forcing the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to manage this would make them block all encrypted traffic, just in case. This could potentially block cybersecurity and privacy, basically putting industries out of a job. It costs money to try and analyse traffic to detect a VPN with an expensive infrastructure and regular updates. This would push up the price of generic internet access. Some VPN providers include a service to make the traffic look like a regular HTTPS, making detection more difficult if not impossible. Some have suggested that this is all a ploy to ban end-to-end encryption so governments can spy on their population more easily. I'll leave that one for the reader to decide on. Bottom line, it might work in some cases, it won't work in others, regular companies using end-to-end encryption and a VPN would suffer. Australia take note, you are wasting your time. I know of at least one individual who gets his data via three separate streams that combine into one. Try tracking that kind of user.
- A quick follow-up on the Tanggula box. They have not restored access, so it is now equivalent to a cheap Android box. This company appears to have shut down and is being sued by DISH and Sling TV, leaving thousands of customers out in the cold. The company is based in Singapore meaning it doesn't have the protection of a similar company in China.
- Beware the Temu. I recently ordered from Temu and was sucked into the bonus whirlpool. Temu has some good and some dodgy products, but it also has a strong "push to buy more" policy. They give you bonuses, but that first requires additional purchases. I put in one order to meet the requirements but since one of the items was from a "local supplier" it wasn't enough for the overseas shipping products. These and other tricks are designed to get you to buy more goods, often ones you don't really need. Luckily, I woke up before ordering anything else. I'm sticking to my reliable AliExpress from now on. Similar products, similar prices but without all the smoke and mirrors.
- According to the gaming community, Visa and Mastercard are blocking payments for games. Yes, you read that correctly, two service providers that should be neutral have apparently bowed to pressure from an Australia advocacy group, Collective Shout, who decided that they should be the world's bastion of decency. The result is thousands of games and digital artworks were deindexed from without warning late in July. Also caught up in this is the popular platform Steam. So apparently, Collective Shout successfully lobbied payment networks and processors to stop facilitating financial transactions from at least Steam and until games with certain content were removed. This has affected LGBTI content, a teen romantic comedy game and even a 1920s alternative-history art book that has no sexual content.
- Games and other content have ratings for a reason. This allows people to make a choice on purchasing them and sets the rules for those who can theoretically purchase that content. An international finance institution should not be able to decide what kinds of materials is deemed acceptable for others. That is the job for individual nation states. Collective Shout achieved this with about 1,000 calls, but now a segment of the gaming community is flooding Visa and Mastercard with their own campaign. The last time groups went against the gaming community it didn't go well for them.
- A couple of days after I wrote the above, Mastercard issued the following statement on X: "Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations." Some claim this is a cope. I checked on Visa and in their customer service responses state that "it does not make moral judgements on legal purchases and that it processes transactions for legal commerce" and that they implement "compliance with laws and regulations globally, a commitment to protecting legal commerce, and the principle that if a transaction is legal, it will be processed". Gamers and critics have replied that Visa's and Mastercard's stated policies conflict with the observed censorship action. This is not over.
