242
[OPINION] Canada’s age-verification bill for porn is a slippery slope to a restrictive internet
(www.theglobeandmail.com)
What's going on Canada?
🍁 Meta
🗺️ Provinces / Territories
🏙️ Cities / Local Communities
Sorted alphabetically by city name.
🏒 Sports
Hockey
Football (NFL): incomplete
Football (CFL): incomplete
Baseball
Basketball
Soccer
💻 Schools / Universities
Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.
💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales
🗣️ Politics
🍁 Social / Culture
Rules
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca
You won't need to. Students find ways around content blocks and share it out themselves. Super sketchy free VPNs in mass use, tethering to phones, using ISP-based free wifi access points piggybacking on home connections from neighbours to the school—or, in one case, the school itself, logging in with guest accounts/incognito mode, running random executables from a (frequently virus-infested) Flash drive (aforementioned VPNs, web browser, or P2P web tunnel/Tor), torrenting, DNS swapping, and also old school "sneaker net" sharing contraband files directly. I've seen it all. The worse part is that they, largely, don't know enough about computers to understand what they're doing, so they end up sharing viruses and spyware with each other. Hell, I've told students to stop using their sketchy janky tools and taught them how to find safe/reputable ones (like ProtonVPN) or just use a different DNS to bypass the school filter entirely. They're doing it anyway; at least teach them how to use a condom.
Kids will find a way past the blocks and share it out. Not to access porn—that'll just be a byproduct—they'll do it to chat with friends and play games.
This is a fool's errand. A massive money pit that will inevitably lead to a massive data breach and resulting scandal. And it won't prevent a single teenager from watching porn.
It's ridiculous that this is still being talked about in 2025, let alone being implemented by clueless Boomer politicians around the world. Ask any computers teacher in Canada if their school has ever successfully blocked students from playing games on school computers—even without web access, lol. It doesn't even take a computer expert to know this will never work.
What a pointless waste.