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hey guys hope you're having a good day this is kind of like one of those

ah shit here we go again moments with the recent uh bill pass of the online child safety act

Heavy quotes on there is not only a concern for the rest of the world, but it's also going to be a concern for essentially what I think the future of online media, online accounts, fuck even down to Spotify at this point, which I'm seeing, I don't know if they're real or not or memes, but it was like I've seen people that are like, we need to check your ID.

And I'm going to pull this up, absolutely, absolute semina, another reason to not be British, honestly, another reason to be glad that you weren't born British, but this is something that's been boiling, festering, curating in the back of my brain for the last about a week, maybe two, or whenever this got passed, I don't know.

But I'm starting to see other countries and platforms, key word right there, take this into note and be like, hmm, if a whole country, the UK can do this, well, so can we.

And it kind of ties into the whole theme and the whole perspective of my opinion on digital sovereignty and why you should never put your eggs in one basket, you should never trust these companies won't bend a knee to the government for you or, you know, just other terrible tech privacy practices.

And I'm going to explain this bill in the simplest way possible.

So the UK's Online Safety Act, which became law in 2023, is now being implemented by Ofcom, the UK's communication regulator.

The legislation requires tech companies providing user-to-user services or search engines to take significant steps to protect users, especially children, from illegal content like child sexual abuse material and harmful material.

Under the Act, platforms must conduct risk assessment, implement measures like hash-matching technology to detect and remove any known child sexual abuse material, which I'm okay with, and protect children from harmful content as pornography and online grooming.

Sure, no one's going to say no to that.

They've also established co-practices for illegal harms duties that came into force the 17th of March 2025, which enforce specific actions to increase, essentially, the requirements.

So, pretty much, it's going to require ID verification for some of these applications.

It came into force at the end of July, which requires users to verify their age before accessing content to mean harmful to children, such as pornography material promoting suicide or self-harm, and content related to eating disorders.

The verification process involves submitting photo ID, undergoing a credit card or bank checks, and using facial age estimation, making it significantly more rigorous and simple age declaration.

The law applies to websites operating in the UK that host potentially inappropriate content and platforms to completely face fines up to $18 million or $10% of their global revenue.

The Act mandates secure age verification methods, which that doesn't exist, including photo ID, credit card check, and facial scans to prevent users under 18 from accessing harmful content.

Now, any website that has a significant amount of inappropriate, not-safe-for-work content will be subject to this in the UK.

And this is kind of my thought process on it.

Companies will not go to the extreme extent of very specific policies for one country.

It's going to be more resource-intensive.

So, eventually, quite possibly, these companies will start with just doing, yes, the UK.

But, most importantly, they will eventually just adopt this to everyone.

It's easier.

It's one platform, then.

It's one policy.

We think you're under 18?

Prove it.

Oh, you don't want to?

Can't use our service.

And that's going to be the problem going forward.

It's, this isn't going to just stop with the UK.

This isn't going to, I mean, this isn't going to stop just in one country.

That'd be insane.

Why not do it for everyone?

And the US is not far behind.

So, there's something called the Screen Act.

The Screen Act, S737, United States, H.R.

1-6-2-3 in the House is a proposed U.S. law introduced in February by Senator Mike Lee

and Representative Mike Miller. It aims to protect children from online pornographic

pornography by requiring websites that contain content deemed quote-unquote harmful to minors

to verify the age of their users before allowing access. This would apply to commercial pornographic

websites and potentially other platforms like social media or fan fiction sites like A03 if

they can such content. The law would mandate the use of technology verification measures such as

third-party age verification services to ensure that users are adults. These are services might

require users to submit government ISO ID or biometric scans like facial recognition. The bill

explicitly states that they simply are asking users to

say they're over 18 is not enough which is fucking crazy um the law is designed to prevent

minors from accessing harmful content online and would be enforced by the federal trade commissions

which could impose fines conduct raids or freeze bank accounts for violations the bill's uh

proponents argue that necessary update to the protect the children's safety online

um while critics warn they could lead to mass surveillance create an insecure database of

sensitive personal information which is true like the driver's license and the passports and

enable censorship of legitimate content there is no also no speculation that the broad definition

of harmful to minors could impact content like anime though there is no direct evidence the bill aims to

ban anime specifically the bill is currently in the early stages of legislative process awaiting uh

committee review i do see some notion that it would not most likely get passed it's not getting a lot

of traction probably not a lot of support hopefully not a lot of support and if you if your

representatives do support this go they can go

themselves um there's two problems with this on the surface level the wording which pornographic

can apply to anything and the other big issue is to uh hypothetically screen people

for stuff that they're viewing that they have i feel like they have a right to

we can go back and forth and argue all day and say like oh kids shouldn't have access to porn

sure whatever that's a parent thing though your parents should be parents get involved with your

children there's tons of resources online you don't have to get them a fucking smartphone they

don't need a smartphone to exist in society this whole like guilt tripping bullshit they're like

oh he'll get bullied and made fun of who fucking cares kids are gonna bully you over anything this

is something that i'm gonna i'm gonna shove deep down into people's thoughts is you do not need

to give a minor but

kid a fucking smartphone they can survive without it like get them a flip phone if your your your

primary goal is to eliminate the idea of um them having access to them first have a conversation

just have a conversation with them be like hey um probably shouldn't go on porn sites and that's it

uh it's not good for you at this uh this growing stage of your age and that's it i mean whatever

now we're going to get into the technical part everyone has a brother hey bro let me borrow your

id or hey sis let me borrow your id i want a goon or i want to i just want to use instagram or discord

or anything anything that this law even touches i mean there's literally other countries

where they're just going to use a vpn and then if they find out that you're using a vpn and they

require you to upload id just open your brother's id upload roblox characters or gary's mod or

there's going to be people that are going to run into issues that look quote unquote younger

than 18. I mean, this, this exists. You can't determine, it's very hard. The idea that you

can determine someone's age just by looking at them is insane and weird. I don't assume

people's age. I asked for it like a normal adult. I don't assume people look grown or

older or look younger than they really do. That's just, I don't know. I think people

do that. Like, it's weird to me, but whatever. Side rant, I guess. The other underlying

technical issue is this has got to be stored somewhere. It's got, it's going to be stored

somewhere. It's not even a question. It's not if, when this database will now be a target

and then get compromised. And now you can't, you got all your shit fucking leaked out there

in the fucking world. Like, knows where you live. And then you can then find a treasure

trove of information for that. I mean, like, it's not even that crazy. Another problem with

this.

in in context is people that have access to this kind of like this kind of information like

because they want to explore their their sexuality etc uh are going to want to do it anyways they

don't probably have maybe the resources this isn't crazy but like they don't have maybe the

resources to talk to a therapist or friends or family about things that they're trying to figure

out that's i don't think it's inherently harmful to access an online forum for people that have

questions uh about stuff like this this isn't like but if this forum is depicted too quote-unquote

inappropriate then what what do you do you show your id and now you're exposed in some you're

throwing your shit in some fucking database that's inevitably going to be dumped but i digress um

no the other uh underlying issues besides the fact that people are just going to

fraudulently use other people's ids that are of age to do this um it's just gonna it's

Just another layer of tracking.

A massive layer of tracking.

And it's unneeded.

It's not welcomed.

I shouldn't have to worry about uploading my ID to do stuff on the fucking internet.

It's crazy.

And retarded.

But, rant aside, what do you do?

Because I'm just some guy yelling into the mic.

At the end of the day.

What you do is.

You go to protocols.

You go to protocols that don't require.

Or are never going to require this.

That are going to fight against it.

Now, Odyssey.

I don't know how they're going to handle it.

They say that.

I don't think they're going to have to.

Because they're technically decentralized.

I would like to see how they're going to handle it.

But, I know of one platform.

That you're not going to have to worry about.

It's called Noster.

Pick protocols over platform.

Now, Blue Sky says that they have to enable this in the UK government, but if they find out your account registered under the UK and you don't, they just limit your app, but they don't completely ban it.

Now, is that kind of lame? Sure. But whatever. I mean, they're a company. They're not going to kneel for one country. No company is.

Email. Think of email. It's a protocol. It's very, very difficult to censor stuff that is based on protocols.

So I'm going to go over Nostar for a little bit. If you want to skip this, skip it. If this bores you, exit. No harm, no foul.

So Nostar is an apolitical communication commons, a simple standard that defines a scalable architecture of clients and servers that can be used to spread information freely.

No controlled by any corporation or not controlled by any corporation or government.

Anyone can build on Nostar. Anyone can use it. Simple.

It's not free speech. Any political affiliation.

nothing it just is a protocol to help be censorship resistance in the sense of

banning anyone can use it doesn't matter you don't like someone unfollow them block them

simple let me give an example i was using um i was using uh twitter i said something

i got banned for seven days that's not going to happen on noster it can't my account's forever

now we're going to go over the technical part again if you want to split this but that's fine

i'm on the noster.com i don't know if it's

official i think it is like the internet it's internet itself it's open and chaotic

in europe it's pretty much cryptographically signed notes it uses smart clients as user

agents and relays as distribution centers these are the servers that that notes are published

to and read from they cannot change the content of the notes that would invalidate the signature

but they can decide what to store and for how long

The protocol is ownerless, relays are not.

Noster doesn't subscribe to political ideas of free speech.

It simply recognizes that different people have different morals and presence on each server.

Being privately owned can follow their own criteria for rejecting content as they please.

And users are free to choose what they read and where from.

Freedom of association, your own piece of a Noster.

If you are a programmer and know how to run servers, it is trivial to run your own Relay with your own rules.

You can run your own Noster Relay.

It's very simple.

You can do it on Umbral.

You can set it up where it's super private.

And you can host it over Tor.

It's pretty awesome in that sense.

And Noster can be used for tons of stuff.

You can find other people that have you like-minded and follow them.

There's groups.

Noster is an idea with a lot of open source software around the enlarging.

user base but not finished it isn't they pretty much have micro blogging and relay base groups

there's an even an app store where you can explore there's nostr social joint join your peers pin

star like pinterest but on nostr with zaps now this is very heavily before i uh get too deep

into it this is heavily based on bitcoin not based but like it's a lot of bitcoin people are around it

people like you can zap people it uses it's lightning lightning's involved like the lightning

protocol it's a little bit it's very crypto um ask like lots of crypto people are on there especially

like their bitcoin bitcoin maxis pretty much but you can run your own relay you do not have to

participate in the bitcoin ideology you can just ignore those people and again you can run your

own relay so you can kind of choose where

where are you going to go there is monero people out there

now there's nostril social freeform um different types of apps photos you can do photos you can

upload photos uh via blossom it's kind of like blobs it's like where the media is stored

some are paid some are free you can do paid relays you can do free relays

um direct message you can send messages you can uh do videos you can do live streaming file sharing

it's it's literally a protocol so it's very awesome there's some marketplaces people even

released their music released their music on uh nostril it's called wave i think

and it's pretty awesome now

how do you how do you uh get a nostril you essentially

got to create a public private key if you want to join just go to nostril

dot com join it'll generate account for you these are cryptographically signed you have a secret key

and you have a public key the public key is your user id this is like you can share it with anyone

anyone can find you through this now there's a private key the private key is what you keep

private you hence the name secret you should never share this you can store it and you know

store it some places use and then i would say get an android signer an android signer is a dedicated

signer and bunker that provides and stores all your nsec and can sign other android and web apps

so this kind of like bunkers your secret key this is where you put your secret key there's something

called amber amber is essentially the this a secure way it's it can work offline it uses nip 46 to make

nip 46 i mean that

your your private key should never be exposed

and the goal of amber is to have your smartphone act as a nip 46 signing device without any need

for servers or additional hardware private key should never be exposed should be exposed to a

few system as possible each system adds a attack surface as a rational said nip states in addition

native apps amber aims to support all current web applications it's great it's great i use it

um there's certain events that i sign that i give a little bit more access to

and then there's ones that i give no access to i i just it's just like read only i mean it's

that's what's cool about it and nostril is a huge huge huge community now what makes this

protocol great just like email censorship or resistant so how does it

entirely work i mean you could go over pretty much the user chooses their outbox relays

they write their notes and they send their notes uh through the relays and those relays relay them

if someone

you

follows you like when uh when somebody when somebody reads your notes you you pretty much

you look up their account and you you like follow them just like anything else

uh there's ways you can read um what do you call it

like you can do rss feeds to nostr you can do like there's so many there's so many different

applications that you can connect to nostr because it's again it's a protocol and that's

what's good about it another protocol um is blue sky blue sky is a protocol technically

not as cheap uh to run and the at protocol is maybe a little bit less um

um i think because it makes it a little bit more difficult to uh set up it is a little

bit harder to set up um i believe that makes it a little bit more kind of f kind of

l but it's still a protocol and they're not in for they can't enforce the id because

you can run your own relay um technically uh and then nastro you can boom you know run your

own okay so there's another so i'm gonna give some uh some advice uh on where you should start

on the uh pretty much the decentralized part of it you know and how to avoid this altogether first

off not only don't put your eggs in one basket but most importantly

you want to most importantly you want to um spread your information now in the terms of

blogging if you have a blog blog through nostr there's actually something called you it might

be a little bit harder to get the traction in the beginning but you know you got to start somewhere

and there's so much you can discover so blogging wise if you have a blog

you can get something called habla a long form content for nostr you can do obsidian nostr writer

where you can use obsidian it's a plugin directly publish your articles from obsidian to nostr with

a couple of clicks you can accept zaps as forms of payment so you're kind of like decentralizing

the you are fundamentally decentralizing the payment process whether you agree with bitcoin

or not you can actually use feeder you can get a rss feeder to work with nostr it's kind of cool

there's group chats blah blah blah like i said earlier and same thing with you can your music

you can um release it on nostr uh there's just so many endless possibilities so i'm thinking about

in in perspective what are the apps that most people use i mean there has been the meme of

there's only four app we only use four apps and they all share each other they're they're all like

connected each other so in the term

you

of protocols and being as censorship resistant as possible i think of like just the average

user the average user probably cares about storage like where they put their haha funny photos

um their social media app where they put their haha funny posts

and share i mean what i mean texting i guess now average user switch to noster

safe harbor your private key like a password share your public key with everyone else step one step two

i've talked about this before private dot storage it's built on a decentralized technology called

tahoe l-a-f-s the least authoritarian file storage or tahoe left left left is a free software

decentralized encrypted storage system these are great their pricing is cheap

and it being this

it being very inexpensive for six dollars and fifty cents you can store 30 gigs 30 gigs months

of data for example you could store about 30 gigs for one month 10 gigs for three months

or three gigs for 10 months so not bad how is storage time anonymous they detach the users

on activity from an account or specific payments you know etc so if you have like say six gigs

worth of um photos just back it up they have an about us a blog they've been around since 2013

yeah they've been around for a long time so they're not going anywhere

and the last update was 2024 of october so about a year ago

they have an android app don't know about ios but you can just use probably like a

progressive web app and they have pretty good features i mean it's encrypted client client on

the client side accountless authorization distribute

and redundant recoverable storage time so more free bang there also is

ipfs but you know

you have to remember that that is distributed across many networks and it's resilient

peer-to-peer ips storage and manager data on ipfs which you can do

and uh there's apps some apps that support ipfs um which is pretty good uh they got some browser

integration super awesome love ipfs but private storage is probably gonna be user most user-friendly

then there's besides the apps besides that and texting texting i would do

probably like sim simple x simple x is probably going to be the most decentralized you can use

flux servers you can host your own

relays making it more decentralized um flux servers flux ai is kind of interesting

i'll just pull it up you're gonna get a lot of um

a lot of crypto when you go around but and the word flux is used in crypto for so much

uh pretty much

the flux where the fuck is it god too many things use the word fucking flux

there we go run on flood run on flux.com is the website if you want to check it out run on run

on flux.com if you have like services that you want to like host and build and not have to worry

about centralized services like amazon like aws they're huge it's kind of like storage js

storage js is another one you will

run across the fucking crypto part but they said they wanted they're more than the crypto but

mine run nodes and execute sections with zelcor ssp and eco wallet

they are a blockchain technology they they were in a i heard a set for privacy had had them on

um you can pretty much deploy a node if you want

uh 1 000 10 000 i don't like the requirement i just don't like the idea of locking your shit up

in crypto for a fucking shit but you can do word plus word word word put word press on flux flux

marketplace like other places that uh pretty much put their other stuff on there you can sell in flux

flux cloud is what you really want to look at create launch and scale apps on flux will they

be able to do kubernetes though that's the real question flux cloud starts off at two dollars

in like 30 cents for eight gigs of memory two c two

you

two vcpus and 100 gigs of storage that's a pretty good price

not bad their highest tier for eight cpus 32 gigs of memory

and 100 gigs of storage is like seven bucks that's fucking crazy

that's pretty redonkulous if you ask me

and they got a calculator like everyone else i mean

how many instances are we running three

wow that is they looks like they for

wow for a hundred

a hundred and uh 25 gigs of ram oh storage

wow that's crazy and you could run a monera

note on this probably um let's see let's do for just the growth of monero 300 gigs

of storage

you

Is 50 cents a month, that's crazy.

Wow, that's really good.

100 gigs is 5 bucks a month.

And you can do a customization.

That's kind of awesome.

Like, not bad for the drive.

And, I mean, you're not really going to beat that.

So, decentralized computing is always going to be better because it's going to drive competition.

And the more people that get involved, the better it is.

I mean, storage A is, I could, if I wanted to back up my NAS to storage J, I could.

And it's a fraction of the cost.

My worry is that that shit might not last.

I use Backblaze because it's, they've been around forever.

But once this becomes very doable, then I would probably look at something like this or maybe like storage.

J with the mixture of back plays for super super super redundancy but you know who's counting

but the thing is as long as flux maintains their interoperability their uptime their

interoperability to hold their values of being staying private um stay censorship resistant

same thing with ipfs same thing with nostr your worries of being canceled on the internet is is

it goes away it's almost like leaks now there are some cons which i'll get into

and you have to take these within a you have to take these into account

and we'll explain i'll explain why because i was not really aware of it or i didn't really think

about it until until then we all know the internet is permanent and what you say on the internet

is there forever that's not a crazy take that's not that's not a uh an an idea

that i came up with is just the reality with the blockchain it's more permanent and more public

it's immutable so if you say some shit if you say some shit it's it's over for you

so you have to be more cautious and i think it does it should create more cautious you have to

be more cautious what you say but it's not like you can get banned so it's like a double-edged sword

but

if you sit and think about it people remember stuff people's attention span is pretty bad today but

like people remember things maybe they'll remember stuff for like a couple months move on with this

they can just pull up the blockchain the receipts

so something to keep in mind um and then with nostr the major side effect you have to think

about is you have to trust the relays i mean you have to trust facebook

and instagram too but you have to trust the relays they could potentially um you could be

de-anonymized i don't i think your ip address is somewhere stored in the notes as well uh so you

got to trust these uh relay operators to have the same values as you how you mitigate that trust and

eliminate it use a vpn a and you'll you won't get fucking caps you won't get sent into capture hell

by the way just throwing that out there you will not get sent into capture hell if you sign with a vpn

into nostr you just won't it's great that's the first great part about it um second you will

also need to understand that not uh relays could be malicious so you by running your own relay this

mitigates all of it run your relay it's very easy to set up it takes care of all the actions

stores all the media it's kind of like a think of it as like a backup and it being private means

means you control the keys not your you know not your keys not your crypto not your nostor

relay not your data to a certain degree so run your own relay it's very simple to set up just

get an umbral you can run that in your own monero node umbral makes it super easy to start harvesting

your own data you can run nextcloud on it you can run monero on it you can run uptime kuma on it

you just got to be very very careful on what you run because well you got to pick which one which

uh which pi the newer pies are way better so like pi 5 and up five and if you know you're listening

to this in the future that's that's there like ipfs my podcast is on ipfs i uh i host it on there and

it relays all my information which is good so like i'm permanently on the internet i use fountain

uh for some stuff like it's i have a fountain account that's like a way to distribute my

podcast but i mainly use yellow ball yellow ball is my

you

hosting provider but the distribution management is amazing i have tons of options i can go on

pretty much i'm pretty much on all the platforms because of because of that like i'm on fountain

which is kind of good and then i'm on some other distribution podcast too i'm on podcast 2.0

and i've been in nostril for quite quite a while now uh in mastodon which is a little bit more

decentralized not there yet still a platform you can get your account banned same thing with

i think blue sky 2 so you have to keep that into you have to keep that in your uh in the back of

your head um there's matrix matrix is a protocol very censorship resistant there's some concerns

about security so take that with a grain of

all i would just say opt for a simple x simple x it's the literally the best it has groups

has rooms you can do video call you can do regular call if you don't trust it run your

arm relay the more options these come these companies uh give you to run your relay the more

the more you should ensure that this is a good idea and i mean just you can once you start going

down the decentralized um rabbit hole you're like oh my god there's so much out there that i

just have never even heard of so it exists it definitely exists

and i would definitely recommend people to check it out but start with nostr it's kind of like

it's kind of like it's kind of like crack or something it's your first hit start with nostr

just inject it a little bit smoke a little bit whatever however you want to look at it

and fucking just go from there learn to get away from these centralized platforms

that do not care about your privacy they do not care about you and they do not care about their

vision of connecting people all they care about is kneeling to the government which is you know

whatever they're going to and they're set in place to just mine your data that's it once

these government agencies figured it out they're like oh there's only four apps and everyone's

using them and it's hard to leave and all their data's there think about it didn't really fucking

um didn't really take much thinking to to get beyond that it's social media is now just a giant

uh sheep in a wolf in sheep's clothing it's like it's it's masking itself is to protect this protect

the children bullshit is a huge mask um a huge wolf in sheep's clothing like literally i mean i'm

it's kind of cringe i'm using that but easiest way to explain they do these politicians these

companies do not fucking

care i mean that's like plain and simple they're using all these insane uh laws and regulations

to do it to pretty much quote-unquote protect the children like how we did a war on terror with

uh the patriot act that was supposed to stop terrorism and money laundering that didn't

fucking work da war on drugs that didn't fucking work i mean the list goes on it's and and the

thing is sucked is when you fight against this people look at you like you're crazy like you

don't care about children um being exposed to some of these awful awful uh industries that do exploit

them uh i mean the it's just a different conversation you got to have with people

and it's about kind of like how you present it don't have your kids have a social media account

don't upload your children's face to social media it's that simple don't have to get on a smartphone

just give them a fucking just give them a fucking flip phone you are downgrading the security by not

allowing them to use signal sure but if your kid's just calling in

texting you and only you then i don't really have an issue with that and when they become an adult

then switch them to better encrypted end-to-end encrypted communications or if you're going to

get them a smartphone just type of parent account i'm ironically google and apple have very good

parental controls and then you can use something like next dns uh because they're not going to

fucking know you change it in their dns settings uh lock it down so they can't change it and then

boom you you can now block all these sites on the dns level no matter where they're at the winter

in the world no matter what website they're on wi-fi they're on they're not doing at least uh and

you're doing the best you can doing is better than and trying is better than not doing it and just

letting your children run free on unsupervised on the fucking internet like tiktok and roblox

and all these other fucking awful places that probably exist but again i digress youtube

youtube is rolling out age verification too this is the last segment in the last part before

i digress

but um it is youtube has been testing a new ai pirate arabic age of verification system in the

united states starting on august 13th the system uses artificial intelligence to estimate a user's

age based on their viewing habits such as types of videos watch and the categories of content

consumed rather than relying solely on the birthday provided account creation this is

fucking insane by the way and there is no um act like the child online safety act in the uk this is

just youtube deciding to do this and spotify and all these other countries are jumping on board

it will begin using ai for age verification uh the neck pretty much this this weekend going forward

it's insane there's nothing you can do about it um if youtube forces me to do it uh

uh i'll i'll abandon it i'll abandon youtube in a heartbeat unfortunately as much as i uh love

all the people that have subscribed to me and watch my videos and give me their time i will not hand youtube

that kind of information especially when i do it for free um i'm not being paid by them

i am not monetized and i still am if this changes in the future i'll just be transparent

i am not going to uh be monetized i don't plan on it i thought i will maybe find a different

way to monetize but that will be in the future if you like uh my content and you got it to the end

uh and you want to you can donate monero to me um i'll just use it to not maybe to increase the

a the monero uh circular economy and be like pay for like hosting stuff like pretty much this

podcast it'll just go back into the production of this and my time and i will leave all the

resources in the show notes this time uh and where you can find me on all my socials and i appreciate

everyone listening this has been pretty much a good time thank you have a wonderful day

share the podcast with all your friends and stay safe