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The British approach to creating a national digital identity scheme is, to say the least, unusual. Sky News recently summarised the situation well by saying “thanks to its ill-conceived porn block, the government has quietly blundered into the creation of a digital passport - then outsourced its development to private firms”. One of these private firms is Mindgeek, who run the world’s biggest porn site, Pornhub. I make no comment on them or any of the other companies that has stepping to provide digital identity and the same time that the government has stopped funding its own digital identity scheme (gov.verify) which was, in any case, not being used for the important and obvious use of age verification for adult services.

But why does Sky called the mandatory age verification for adult services “ill-conceived”? Let’s pop over to the New York Times for a quick lesson in the history of what uncharitable persons call the “Hancock Wall” because it was pushed into law by Matt Hancock when Minister over at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Age verification rule grew from a Conservative party campaign promise in 2015, and came into law via the Digital Economy Act 2017, a "wide-ranging bundle” (ie, random jumble) of internet rules and regulations. As the NYT reported, “among the bill’s consequential but stultifying provisions about telecommunications infrastructure, copyright enforcement and government data sharing, the porn rule [was] hastily rubber-stamped before Britain’s 2017 general election, and questions about how exactly it would be enforced, as well as concerns about user privacy, were set aside to be dealt with later”.

The questions (from, to choose one example, me) about how to create necessary infrastructure were ignored and the government said that people could use credit cards or whatever.

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lmost 800,000 account holders on porn site Brazzers have had their details breached thanks to a vulnerability in the vBulletin forum software, potentially exposing some to online extortion attempts.

Some 790,724 unique email addresses, as well as user names and plain text passwords, were exposed in the data dump

From Brazzers Porn Site Users Caught Out in Data Breach - Infosecurity Magazine.

 

 

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