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Video of Tama
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I miss when everyone on my dash listened to Welcome to Night Vale so there’s be a good chance that on any ole day someone would reblog a quote that would grab me by the throat and forcibly ascend me to a higher plane where I understood myself and the universe better and with more kindness but also a little spook
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OP: These are notes with a strong sense of being "lively and real" that Chinese netizens can come across everywhere.























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Cat and kitten door knocker, Clun, England
This unusual door knocker from Clun, England, features a mother cat carrying her kitten — sculpted in cold, weathered bronze, yet full of tenderness.
Equal parts whimsical, eerie, and adorable, it feels like something out of a forgotten fairytale.
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I think the solution to kids on the Internet is to have specific, kid friendly spaces on the Internet. Kids wouldn't come across "adult content" on YouTube if barbie dot com still had flash games and this is a hill I will die on.
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No fucking words.
And people wonder why the independence movement continues to flourish in Scotland...
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Long before the introduction of color film, a Russian chemist and photographer named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky used an innovative technique. He took three individual black and white photos, each through a colored filter (red, green, and blue), to create fully colored, high-quality pictures. The photo of this woman, taken by him, is around 107 years old!
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A serious (and seemingly obvious) problem with the implementation of the Online Safety Act is that it requires malicious actors to not exist.
Since the UK govenment in any form hates paying for things, especially things required for their goals, the current situation is that websites have to work out to do age verification themselves. There is no government-approved or provided service for this - it's a free-for-all of third-party verification providers.
Now, some people are pointing out that depending on how these companies handle the data given to them to perform verification, it's possible this data could be stolen or leaked. This is a worrying possibility. This danger is primarily one of passive incompetence, although if your driver's licence gets leaked, you won't be happy either way.
But passive incompetence probably isn't going to hurt anyone before active malice does.
Normalising showing your face or identity documents to random websites is an incredibly stupid thing to do. You know who benefits from this? Actual criminals! Phishing attacks continue to be successful because people will put their banking details into websites that are very much not their banks. And while random websites asking for your banking details is suspicious, the OSA makes it so that random websites asking for your driver's license or passport or other such things will now be expected.
Meaning an enterprising criminal can set up a website, stick a fake age verification pop-up on it, and harvest a whole bunch of things that come in useful for committing identity theft. Or blackmail perhaps.
The overall point here is that in this respect, the Online Safety Act is going to make the internet more dangerous, in a way that should be obvious if you actually think about the potential negative consequences.
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hey i was wondering about whether or not the uk's bullshit online age verification thing is a red herring(?) i would like to know about your say on that
Not quite sure what you mean? As in it’s a distraction from something else?
Nah, I think it’s just a very UK policy, surveillance and control under the guise of ‘protect the children’.
Which it won’t do, it’ll just teach kids how to use VPNs and how to circumvent it. Apparently some third party verification websites asking for an ID upload are accepting google images of example UK drivers licenses.
Also worth pointing out that instead of building their own encrypted, anonymous verification service - the UK government have outsourced all the verification to American 3rd party platforms. So UK citizens are technically being forced to provide their sensitive data to foreign entities for a specifically UK law.
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Reading the new checks that might come in due to the Online Safety Act in the UK and this is actually bullshit

[Image Transcript:
And how will I prove my age?
There’s a number of methods a site or app might use to ask you to confirm your age. They might do this check themselves or use another company to do the check. These methods include:
Facial age estimation – you show your face via photo or video, and technology analyses it to estimate your age.
Open banking – you give permission for the age-check service to securely access information from your bank about whether you are over 18. The age-check service then confirms this with the site or app.
Digital identity services – these include digital identity wallets, which can securely store and share information which proves your age in a digital format.
Credit card age checks – you provide your credit card details and a payment processor checks if the card is valid. As you must be over 18 to obtain a credit card this shows you are over 18.
Email-based age estimation – you provide your email address, and technology analyses other online services where it has been used – such as banking or utility providers - to estimate your age.
Mobile network operator age checks – you give your permission for an age-check service to confirm whether or not your mobile phone number has age filters applied to it. If there are no restrictions, this confirms you are over 18.
Photo-ID matching – this is similar to a check when you show a document. For example, you upload an image of a document that shows your face and age, and an image of yourself at the same time – these are compared to confirm if the document is yours.
End Transcript.]
Not only is this such a fucking breach of privacy, but this is going to hurt adults in vulnerable and abusive situations. Some adults don’t have bank accounts or credit cards or even a fucking phone. I’m one of them. I could not give half of this information even if I wanted to. What the fuck is this. Fuck the UK government. This isn’t going to protect kids, this is just going to hurt adults, and I know full well when they say “sites that allow pornography” they’re going to be going after sites that have huge amounts of queer content, like tumblr and Ao3. Queer kids are gonna lose their fucking communities because of this shit. Abuse victims are going to lose online support systems because of this.
I’m genuinely fucked off about this, and worried about whether I’m going to lose every single one of my online friends. Anyone in the UK, please email your MP and sign this petition. It needs to reach 100k signatures to pass through Parliament.
I’m only hoping the backlash will be big enough for them to stop implementing these measures.
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this is not my screenshot
discord has been pushing its new uk online safety act changes early for some users. this screenshot belongs to a 32 year old who used discords built in face scanner to verify their age. the scanner said they were 11 years old, and instantly suspended the account, with no option to try again or appeal, and the suspension will automatically end in 2027, when they’re “old enough” to use discord.
DO NOT SCAN YOUR FACE TO VERIFY YOUR AGE
if you really want to verify your age, use a different option available. don’t trust the face scan.
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Reading the new checks that might come in due to the Online Safety Act in the UK and this is actually bullshit

[Image Transcript:
And how will I prove my age?
There’s a number of methods a site or app might use to ask you to confirm your age. They might do this check themselves or use another company to do the check. These methods include:
Facial age estimation – you show your face via photo or video, and technology analyses it to estimate your age.
Open banking – you give permission for the age-check service to securely access information from your bank about whether you are over 18. The age-check service then confirms this with the site or app.
Digital identity services – these include digital identity wallets, which can securely store and share information which proves your age in a digital format.
Credit card age checks – you provide your credit card details and a payment processor checks if the card is valid. As you must be over 18 to obtain a credit card this shows you are over 18.
Email-based age estimation – you provide your email address, and technology analyses other online services where it has been used – such as banking or utility providers - to estimate your age.
Mobile network operator age checks – you give your permission for an age-check service to confirm whether or not your mobile phone number has age filters applied to it. If there are no restrictions, this confirms you are over 18.
Photo-ID matching – this is similar to a check when you show a document. For example, you upload an image of a document that shows your face and age, and an image of yourself at the same time – these are compared to confirm if the document is yours.
End Transcript.]
Not only is this such a fucking breach of privacy, but this is going to hurt adults in vulnerable and abusive situations. Some adults don’t have bank accounts or credit cards or even a fucking phone. I’m one of them. I could not give half of this information even if I wanted to. What the fuck is this. Fuck the UK government. This isn’t going to protect kids, this is just going to hurt adults, and I know full well when they say “sites that allow pornography” they’re going to be going after sites that have huge amounts of queer content, like tumblr and Ao3. Queer kids are gonna lose their fucking communities because of this shit. Abuse victims are going to lose online support systems because of this.
I’m genuinely fucked off about this, and worried about whether I’m going to lose every single one of my online friends. Anyone in the UK, please email your MP and sign this petition. It needs to reach 100k signatures to pass through Parliament.
I’m only hoping the backlash will be big enough for them to stop implementing these measures.
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