As someone who was involved in the original guerilla digital activism that spawned the third-person URL format for independent UK government-watching websites (ie "Write to Them", "They Work for You"), I applaud your on-topic brand extension, Tim :)
Alas the ntkmart domain is being squatted by someone and I presume the shop was inactive long before that. I loved the Elite-style shirt but mine left this mortal plane long ago.
I'm not sure what this recent vote is about. The original Online Safety Act was introduced and passed by the Tories in 2023 (although it's only coming into effect now, obviously.)
So the Tories, who created this awful bill in the first place, are now voting against it? Clown country.
That happens all over the place, conservatives pass a time bomb bill, they lose control of congress/house, time bomb is about to become effective, they now fight to overturn it and place the blame on the current ruling folks.
Except this bill was first introduced in March 2022, when the Tories hadn't imploded and there was no strong reason to expect they'd lose the next election.
It wasn't a "time bomb". They introduced this legislation because they wanted it.
This isn’t one of those cases. It was a well intentioned Bill that passed with Labour’s support but was very badly planned and written. Hell, it wouldn’t even have helped counter the misinformation being spread last summer and this summer to try and instigate more race riots!
If that were true, why do laws get amended when politicians see impacts they don't like? A famous example that college students are taught at A-Level Law is the law on bigamy where it stated "a married person who gets married again." This isn't possible (in the UK, you can only get married to one person at a time), so the court had to rewrite the legislation on the fly to get the intended effect.
In the UK on this specific topic, "both sides" is as true as ever. This is very obvious when looking at the bigger picture instead of just a single vote. I wish it wasn't, if only it was indeed just one side.
In america there is 0 corelation between middle class voting preferences and what their elected officials voted for. There is a closer aligment with upper class voters and lobby groups. It is arguable america is not a democracy based on those facts despite nominally voting every few years
Basically if 0% of americans want a law it has 30% chance of passing, and if 100% of american want a law it has 32% chance of passing. For lobby groups it goes from 0% = 0% to 100% = 65% chance. Much closer to preference based lawmaking.
> I think it's fun when the elected government doesn't do what the people who elected them want.
I can't think of a country that does have people largely in agreement with the governments actions, lately.
Or perhaps, for any given country, one can find a collection of loud voices detailing how 'the people' disagree with what's happening. But whether they meaningfully do is hard to establish.
I imagine a lot of Brits agree with the incoming rules, whether they are effective or not. You find that here in Aus too - a lot of Australians vehemently agree with the protectionist laws, because the intent of them is to protect children. And to many of them it doesn't matter what the real outcome is, because you want to protect children don't you? And this law is to protect children, QED.
when the prime minister and the monarch agree that the PM takes all the credit for murdering lots of kids, the prime minister gets a knighthood. (tony blair) - chasing the peerages.
When they disagree, they get a big dose of massive character assassination (Gordon Brown, Jeremy Corbin)
Or just dead (David Kelly).
Discussed in detail during the non public weekly meetings between the PM and head of state.
I mean, the last 15 years were mostly Tories and the public kept voting them in. I’m glad I’m not a politician because I have no sympathy for Brexit voters who voted Tory in 2019, claim “I know what a voted for,” and now complain about how much poorer and full of immigrants the country now is. It was all there in the 2019 Conservative manifesto they voted for!
Wtf are you talking about? The Conservatives promised to reduce immigration in 2019. Instead they increased it to its highest ever levels by far, hence why they got thrown out of office.
Have you ever met or spoken to a Conservative voter in your entire life?
> They promised 2 things that are guaranteed to increase immigration
> A points-based system, you can find articles talking about how this increases immigration
Firstly, I don't think they actually introduced one of those, did they?
And secondly, how is that guaranteed to increase immigration?
The UK media and some of politicians at the time were all talking about an Australian-style points system. As someone pretty intimately acquainted with the Australian system, people (including ex-PM Teresa May) didn't seem to understand that under the Australian system -
- The government sets a minimum number of points under which you won't even be considered.
- The government set a maximum number of visas they will grant under the scheme each year
- The people with the best points are invited to apply for those visas
So with this setup the 'paper' minimum might be 65 points, but the effective threshhold is often 95 points to actually be invited to apply.
Yet in the UK the picture was painted as if you set a points threshhold and that's it, anyone with more than that gets a visa and you can't possibly control the numbers. It seemed like a total misunderstanding of the scheme.
They also said things like "And Australia has proportionally even higher migration than the UK under that scheme!", which is true, but again that's because the government has decided to set the amounts of visas at that level and sets them higher or lower, or adjusts which skills get more points, according to perceived need for skilled people. Aus has higher migration under their points scheme as a choice. The UK could have chosen to limit skilled visas under a similar program to a much lower level.
As far as I could tell, all of the articles and talking points at the time entirely ignored this.
> Firstly, I don't think they actually introduced one of those, did they?
Boris introduced 2 million (legal) immigrants in the first (unaffected) year we "took back control" of the borders under the new system rolled out in 2020
Perhaps in all the talk of making the system like the Australian one, they missed the crucial part of it - that you also apply limits to the visas you issue.
In fact it looks like that's exactly what happened, they introduced a Skilled Worker visa with no quota.
> Firstly, I don't think they actually introduced one of those, did they?
The fact they didn't introduce it doesn't change the fact that adding 50,000 nurses required an increase in immigration. I went back and re-read the article, they also promised more childcare places. Guess what? That also requires more immigration.
In fact, I just read the manifesto itself and they also added a "fast-track NHS visa," so we have a clear "let's increase immigration" policy right in your face! Page 22, hilariously right next to where they promise "numbers will come down."
> They also said things like "And Australia has proportionally even higher migration than the UK under that scheme!", which is true, but again that's because the government has decided to set the amounts of visas at that level and sets them higher or lower
You're correct, the government can choose to give out less visas, and they hinted that they would in the manifest (page 22). But if you read the rest of the manifesto, you realise quickly that the two goals can't be achieved at the same time. It's like promising to cure cancer by shooting the patient.
Look, we can argue about this until the cows come home but, if you voted Tory because you thought they would bring immigration numbers down, then you should have read their manifesto. The fact that they were never able to do this was right there!
Going back to "I voted for Brexit," then complaining about Brexit. Well, that's also something that there's no excuse for. In December 2019, the deal that was to be agreed was known. If you didn't like what it said about fishing or whatever, well, tough shit. You agreed to it when you put your tick in the box for Conservative.
I think we're talking at cross-purposes here - I'm not really taking a position one way or another on whether the Tories would/could have reduced immigration, and they certainly didn't deliver on that.
I was just pretty flabbergasted at the time by the blanket misunderstandings of the system that was being talked about, seemingly from all sides.
I think it's important to understand the context, which is where my initial reply was aimed at:
> Wtf are you talking about? The Conservatives promised to reduce immigration in 2019.
Taken with that context, it's important to understand the manifesto to realise they didn't really "promise" to reduce immigration.
> I was just pretty flabbergasted at the time by the blanket misunderstandings of the system
A lot of blame belongs with our media. Frankly, it's piss-poor, barely goes beyond surface level reading of things and attempts to get soundbites out of politicians. I get more out of random YouTubers and podcasters, which has its own problems because how do you know which ones know what they're talking about?
Just to clarify on this point, I didn't mean "you" as in literally "you," I intended this in the informal "you" that's used in British English to indirectly refer to a group of people.
There were also the matters of Johnson throwing a Covid party, Truss tanking the economy within a few weeks of taking office, and Sunak being useless and generally taking the hit for a flacid economy.
> Reform, whilst all over the news for being against it, voted for it.
Just as a slight correction – the only "Reform MP" that voted for it is James McMurdock, but he's no longer a Reform MP and I'm not sure why he is still listed as one here.
There's an excellent (volunteer-run) [website](https://www.partijgedrag.nl/index.php) about Dutch politics that will ask your opinion on a bunch of historic chamber proposals (for/against/skip) and use that to show your alignment to different parties by comparing your answers with actual party votes. It has definitely swayed my vote a few times.
I suppose such a tool might not work in a first-past-the-post voting system, but in my case it certainly has certainly helped to see what politicians actually vote like rather than just trusting the promises. If you live in a country with easily accessible digital records of votes/bills/proposals, I imagine you could throw something similar together and help quite a few people.
Well aware of these tools. I've always said this but party politics is the stupidest idea ever. We should be voting on policies not people and parties. There isn't a single party which is ideologically aligned with me on enough of the significant issues. That leads to be having to pick the least bad one, and that's still bad.
Wahl-o-Mat is *not* the same, it’s stated politics. One of the criticisms of it is that actual voting might (lol) differ. There was an alternative one, [0] Real-o-Mat that checked actual voting behavior. Though that has its own set of issues.
Just for the benefit of those unfamiliar with UK politics: "most" is a bit misleading here, even though it's technically true. Reform has 4 MPs (out of 650).
Wow, so they've lost 40% of the original lot which were elected last year. But for some reason the press seems to think they're the official opposition.
They have the same number of MPs as the Green party, fewer than the DUP, half the SNP, and about 1/20th of the Lib Dems.
I note 75% of them didn't bother turning up to work, I'm shocked one did.
Both "conservatism" and "freedoms" mean a lot of different things even within anglophone countries, not to mention the obvious fact that political actors of any color never strictly follow their foundational ideology. This makes me believe that speaking for the whole world is a bit too daring, and your statement is purely emotional.
this is still absolutely true, but there have been some rumblings of change in recent years. "left wing" values have partially shifted from trying to provide equal freedoms for everyone, to trying to provide freedoms for perceived-as marginalised groups, often at the expense of freedoms for lesser marginalised groups. if you're part of a lesser marginalised group and you don't subscribe to that particular ideology, this is going to feel very much the same as having your freedoms clamped down upon, and conservatives have pounced upon that as a stick to beat their enemies with, and to be fair, have come some way themselves wrt to gay rights and perhaps drug prohibition and some other things. taking a step back though, conservatives, particularly in the UK, are by no means libertarians, and in the UK essentially sired the "left wing" values that they hate so much. when did the revolution start? 2010-15ish?
However they did also specifically reference the Labour government’s policy, so it’s reasonable to assume they were speaking in a UK context and simply forgot to capitalise it.
> Clamping down on freedoms is not conservative policy.
Perhaps you can explain why the conservative party keep writing bills that clamp down on freedoms, introducing them, whipping their party to vote for them and signing them into law?
Conservatism isn't libertarianism. Conservative parties across the world, including in the anglosphere, often advocate for laws that limit freedom but accomplish ulterior conservative goals.
freedom isn't just freedom. it's freedom for. conservatives tend to favour freedom for businesses. freedom for the establishment. freedom for the rich. you would hope that progressives favour freedom for everyone, but nowadays the louder voices on the left have sometimes been over-invested in freedom for culturally marginalised groups and under-invested in freedom for economically marginalised groups
> nowadays the louder voices on the left have sometimes been over-invested in freedom for culturally marginalised groups and under-invested in freedom for economically marginalised groups
That's just marketing from the right to discourage people with average income to vote left ("they want to give all your money to the immigrants!"). The only people the left doesn't want freedom for is those who are actively trying to take it away.
The bigger issue is that the left hasn't really existed in most countries for a long time, like the UK. "new labour" betrayed their heritage and adopted conservative points of view. Leaders who are trying to bring it back like Corbyn are ridiculed and marginalised.
>That's just marketing from the right to discourage people with average income to vote left ("they want to give all your money to the immigrants!"). The only people the left doesn't want freedom for is those who are actively trying to take it away.
this is misreading what I said. what I said is that the left isn't redistributing enough money
> The only people the left doesn't want freedom for is those who are actively trying to take it away.
My experience is that most progressive causes want to redistribute income from high earners to low earners. Policies such as government supported housing, daycare, support this.
These policies actively restrict freedoms by removing the freedom of choice from consumers. They introduce deadweight loss and moral hazard.
> My experience is that most progressive causes want to redistribute income from high earners to low earners. Policies such as government supported housing, daycare, support this.
Oh absolutely. This is the way to make a more fair and balanced society.
If the US doesn't want that, fine but it is of course also the reason for the no-go areas/ghettos, the amount of violent crime etc. Because people who are in the lowest class and have no upward mobility will tend to spiral away in crime, because that does pay.
> These policies actively restrict freedoms by removing the freedom of choice from consumers. They introduce deadweight loss and moral hazard.
We don't believe in unrestricted free-market capitalism anyway.
> Oh absolutely. This is the way to make a more fair and balanced society.
I understand its purpose, but it does restrict freedom. Personally I am much more a fan of charity because its voluntary nature preserves freedom, but I accept the duality of freedom is the potential for lousy initial conditions in life.
> We don't believe in unrestricted free-market capitalism anyway.
I think we should strive to push society to freer markets. Neither leading party seems to have interest, however.
As a socialist I don't think all markets should be free. Only the ones that aren't necessary for living. Energy, healthcare, public transport, even telecoms should be in government hands (as they all were in Holland in the 80s)
> My experience is that most progressive causes want to redistribute income from high earners to low earners.
> These policies actively restrict freedoms by removing the freedom of choice from consumers.
Moreover despite all the constant pearl clutching about "systemic imbalances in resources between whites and People of Color" from the progressive left, you will find that most of these policies actually transfer wealth from the middle and upper-middle class ethnic minority demographics to rich white nepotists in the government.
If progressives were actually serious about correcting racial wealth disparities, we would implement a taxation scheme that taxes whites more heavily, and ethnic minorities less so, based on some metric of the overall injustices visited upon them.
Instead, the instant an ethnic minority gets a leg up on the system all the crabs in the progressive bucket demand that he get pulled back down. The words and slogans about "equity" are just hymnal responses that the white progressive uses to absolve themselves of all responsibility and accountability, since after accepting the Code of Conduct and the DEI statement they've already been "born again" out of the original sins of implicit bias and racism.
Ehh at the left we don't really think in terms of 'original sin'. Most of us are not religious, these things are simply meaningless to us.
And DEI is something that is not about quotas at all. It's about having race and ethniticy not influencing the hiring process at all. Being "colorblind", which is ironically enough what Trump says how he wants things to be (but in reality he is very racist).
> Ehh at the left we don't really think in terms of 'original sin'. Most of us are not religious, these things are simply meaningless to us.
You are under the core progressive delusion that choosing not to identify or label yourself as a thing, means you are in fact not that thing. In truth, the labeling of a thing is completely orthogonal to its ontological status.
Concrete example: most of the left believes in a "gender identity," which is an immaterial, non-objective, unobservable, unscientific, metaphysical phenomenon that is somehow "more you" than the material reality of the physical body. If you strip away the gender theory jargon, you end up with a concept equivalent to "the soul", which is in contemporary discourse usually regarded as a religious, not a scientific, concept.
You may have called it something else - a gender identity - but despite the difference in nomenclature you are still describing and referring to the same thing the religious devotees referred to when they talked about "the soul."
> It's about having race and ethniticy not influencing the hiring process at all. Being "colorblind"
Again more progressive fanfiction and creative wordsmithing with no relationship to reality. The Supreme Court struck down DEI policies (rebranded affirmative action) on the basis that they were, quoting Justice Clarence Thomas, "rudderless, race-based preferences" [0] [1]. This is literally the opposite of being "colorblind."
I stand very firm in my position that everything progressives say is a direct negation of reality.
> Concrete example: most of the left believes in a "gender identity," which is an immaterial, non-objective, unobservable, unscientific, metaphysical phenomenon that is somehow "more you" than the material reality of the physical body.
It's about feeling. Someone with a different gender feels uncomfortable in their body (and that's putting it mildly). If you declare that unscientific you can throw out the entire psychological/psychiatric sciences.
> You may have called it something else - a gender identity - but despite the difference in nomenclature you are still describing and referring to the same thing the religious devotees referred to when they talked about "the soul."
Of course, religion was invented to help people make sense of the world (and of course as a means of control). Gender identity has always existed. It makes sense that religion invented some terms to explain it away. Because as a means of control and no IVF options etc this was contrary to religions' survival. After all, religion gets passed on through upbringing. If you approach a person as an adult with this kind of stuff most of them will reject it, but as kids they are impressionable and can be indoctrinated. If people have no kids, there's no new religious minions being produced and thus the religion's survival probability is a bit affected. This is why conservative people are so obsessed about birthrates.
> Again more progressive fanfiction and creative wordsmithing with no relationship to reality. The Supreme Court struck down DEI policies (rebranded affirmative action) on the basis that they were, quoting Justice Clarence Thomas, "rudderless, race-based preferences" [0] [1]. This is literally the opposite of being "colorblind."
But DEI is not affirmative action. I work in this field myself for a big multinational. We don't do that. There are no quotas. We do measure our effectiveness with it (If you're in a country with 90% latino people and hire 80% caucasians obviously something is wrong) but we don't have hiring quotas. Instead what we do is management/HR training to recognise and avoid bias. And materials to improve understanding of minority needs, like LGBTIQ+ (which is the area I do some work in).
A lot of managers wouldn't even have known what nonbinary is for example, they would just see someone appear for an interview and dismiss them as 'weird'. They also wouldn't understand the specific issues they could encounter in the workplace. This is what we're working against.
Affirmative action is something that companies do that don't actually care about DEI but just want their "numbers" to look good. Quotas is the easiest way to solve "the numbers" but not actually do the hard work of removing bias. Meaning minority people will get hired but for the wrong reasons, and they will still have issues in the workplace resulting from lack of understanding. This is not the way to approach it, only when you're a lazy company.
> If you declare that unscientific you can throw out the entire psychological/psychiatric sciences.
May as well, given the catastrophe that is the replication crisis [2]. Besides, psychology has grown divorced from its roots, which are found in religion as a proto-psychology of mind (which is the modern term for what would have classically been known as "the soul"). You can further investigate the correspondences between religion, mysticism, and psychology in Jung's "Psychology and Alchemy."
> Gender identity has always existed.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far there is no evidentiary basis for the "gender identity" in the body; some would even say that there cannot be a biological basis of gender, for this "holds the societal acceptance of transgenderism hostage to a biological account of sex-gender." [0]
Absent any biological or physical evidence I can only surmise that "gender identities" either do not exist, or are metaphysical; and to the scientifically-minded, these two statements are functionally equivalent.
In fact, I could even just as easily say "souls have always existed."
The paper [0] even continues on to state, essentially, that gender is an "intersubjectival" reality, which, ironically, is defined in an Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion:
Rejecting the notion that knowledge is purely
empirical and cumulative, Gergen has argued
that “truth” is always value laden and, therefore
(drawing from critical theory), “reality” is not
immutable, but always is understood via interpre-
tation [3].
A rejection of empiricism is tantamount to a rejection of science, which is based on the former; so perhaps it's not surprising after all that the philosophical basis for gender is actually a psychological/religious concept.
> as kids they are impressionable and can be indoctrinated. If people have no kids, there's no new religious minions being produced and thus the religion's survival probability is a bit affected.
Much of the LGBTQ+, almost by definition, cannot reproduce biologically and thus cannot have kids. Would you also claim that LGBTQ+'s survival probability, as a neo-religion complete with rebranded souls, is also affected? How does such an ideology reproduce, if not through indoctrination of children?
> But DEI is not affirmative action
At a layman's first glance this would appear to be the case from the SCOTUS syllabus:
More broadly, it is becoming increasingly clear that
discrimination on the basis of race—often packaged as “af-
firmative action” or “equity” programs—are based on the
benighted notion “that it is possible to tell when discrimi-
nation helps, rather than hurts, racial minorities.” Fisher
I, 570 U. S., at 328 (THOMAS, J., concurring). [1]
Feelings are important because they affect us. They can hurt just as much as the physical. It's a condition of the mind, not the 'soul'. That doesn't make it any less real for the person experiencing those feelings. The concept of a soul was invented, as some entity that survives after death. So that even people with nothing to lose in life could be forced to conform using the many threats religion makes to their 'afterlife'.
And LGBTIQ+ is not an ideology. People don't choose who they are attracted to. That's a conservative myth invented to make it seem like people are 'converted' to being gay or trans and that thus this could be prevented or reverted. There is no ideology nor agenda and it just is. We don't convert people. That's again a projection of something that religions do. They have agendas and conversion.
And I don't care about what the SCOTUS says. They are completely irrelevant where I live (and they should be in the US too as they are heavily politicised by the appointment process by the president).
As stated in my previous post these are classically synonyms that refer to the exact same entity. This use of language goes back to at least Descartes (translation by E. Haldane):
to speak accurately I am not more than a thing which thinks,
that is to say a mind or a soul, or an understanding, or a
reason, which are terms whose significance was formerly
unknown to me [0].
This use of the term "soul" even goes back to Plato and Socrates, who used the Greek term psyche to refer to this concept [1] [4]. I leave the remainder of the inference to you.
> LGBTIQ+ is not an ideology.
Why not?
> We don't convert people.
No, the LGBTQ+ just bifurcate the world into "allies" and "enemies". They mandate the use of neopronouns and neodemonyms, using letters not even in the alphabets of other languages, and try to correct perceived "gendered language" in languages that have no concept of gender in their grammar to begin with. People who refuse to prostrate themselves before your linguistic imperialism get cancelled and/or fired because they are obviously deplorable bigots.
Just look at how the LGBTQ+ was pushing "Filipinx" on people they have nothing to do with, an entire fucking ocean away, despite Tagalog already being ungendered and not having a letter X in its alphabet. [3]
There were a bunch of whites who came to the Philippines and then installed not one, but two (Spanish, English) languages in the populace, to the point where time is still told in Spanish to this day, and native Filipinos cannot even speak pure Tagalog any more, resorting now to a hybrid of Tagalog and English. [2]
Call them by any other name but those all look like instances of cultural imperialism and proselytization to me. Will whites ever learn? Or are they so blinded by their self-professed virtue and ~crosses~ pride flags that they think, certainly, that they are in the right, and all the homophobes and transphobes from all those other Conservative countries need to be enlightened to 21st century morals (those godless heathens)?
> And I don't care about what the SCOTUS says.
I'm running past my point of caring too, since all you do is write falsehood without citation.
Conservatism is the ideology that some people are protected by the law but not bound by it, while others are bound by the law but not protected by it.
Obviously if you are in the first group that sounds like the best kind of freedom, meanwhile everyone else is unprotected and punished, which makes sense why they would not want that kind of goverment structure.
I don’t know about this law specifically, but every other law attacking the internet or encryption has attempted to exempt people in government.
That defeats the point of the legislation since it creates a gaping wide backdoor to exploit official people, who are now the most valuable targets because of that exemption.
Never mind the matter of providing a rule for the people and making the people who made the rule immune to it.
It's a matter of time before the online safety act leads to horrendous data breaches. Once it's normalized to have to show your id to visit sites, any website will be able to pretend it's using a third party verification service but just save your id and sell the data on what you were doing.
I like the spirit but wouldn't this run afoul of one or two laws? Identity fraud or some such?
I'm not in the UK, so I don't have any idea about their laws, but I'd be shocked to find this was above board. Your FAQ claims it's a parody site and claims "The ID number isn't valid and you can't use the card for anything real." but you've just confirmed here it can indeed be used for real things (discord, reddit).
Your domain registration is UK-based, so, be careful!
Law often focus on intent. I am not sure if identity fraud can be applied if the person are not gaining anything (assuming they are of the right age). Service providers might be of fault if their verification practices are not compliant with regulations, but I don't know if the law puts any requirements on users to verify their identity.
To me this seems more similar to a people participating in a masquerade or comedian who dress themselves in the likeness of a politician. They are using the identity of the politician, but not in the way that identity fraud is intended to prevent.
Domain registration is an interesting example. To my knowledge, falsifying domain registration data is not a crime. Domain registrars have regulations to verify the identity of customers, including the recourse to suspend a domain if the data is incorrect. I could see a case if a person impersonate a politician in order to falsely attribute content of a website, under a registered domain name, as belonging/sanctioned by that politician, but that would likely fall under defamation laws. The crime could also be identity fraud, but the intent would be defamation.
>Service providers might be of fault if their verification practices are not compliant with regulations, but I don't know if the law puts any requirements on users to verify their identity.
As I mentioned in another comment, I've heard no compelling argument that differentiates between this scenario (e.g. kid uses this site to access a nsfw subreddit) and an underage kid buying smokes with a fake ID.
In that scenario, the police don't just pick 1 entity to punish. The kid gets in trouble, the store (most likely) gets in trouble, and (if found) the fake ID supplier gets in trouble.
In the end, I hope that the owner of the website never has to find out exactly where and how the laws shake out, and that "it's a satirical website" is a strong enough defense. But from my armchair, I would suspect that the UK police/legislators would not look favorably on the "it's satire" defense. Especially because of this post which advertises that the fake ID works for some services, and there are under-18s on HN.
>Law often focus on intent.
I would expect that advertising that the IDs work on real services undermines any defense of "my intent was satire".
In the case of the underage kid, they are actually gaining something by using a fake ID to buy smokes for which they otherwise would not be able to buy. The situation that the website is promoting would be if the kid used an ID of an other underage kid, for which they would be equally denied to buy smokes with. The outcome (and intent) need to be one where the user do not gain anything practical.
I work at a domain registrar and I have yet to here anyone talking about criminal punishment for false registration data. I have also never heard about any one being charged for filling in the wrong phone or email address when signing up for a service or membership.
Looking at my local laws here in Sweden, the law text for identity fraud explicitly requires that the use of something else identity must result in some for of direct harm to the person. UK law could be different, but I have yet to hear something to indicate this.
>In the case of the underage kid, they are actually gaining something by using a fake ID to buy smokes for which they otherwise would not be able to buy.
The scenario I was comparing is an underage kid visiting this website, generating an ID, and accessing content that would otherwise be illegal for them to access by using the fake ID. In this scenario, everyone (potentially) would be in trouble, not just the website verifying the ID, just like an underage kid buying smokes with a fake ID.
The reason I mentioned domain registration was not because it is illegal to register a domain or anything of that sort. I mentioned it because it suggests the website owner is based in the UK, which is easy pickings for the UK government to pursue (if they choose to). If the website owner was based in Malaysia, it would be significantly harder for the UK to pursue any legal recourse against them (if they choose to).
It's certainly illegal to make fake IDs, but I don't know if that applies to just generating an image rather than fully forging a physical copy. And anyway these images look nothing like the real IDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_...
Hmm, yeah. It’s almost as if they deliberately made them look less like the real ID’s, because I have little doubt that openai would be perfectly capable of generating that image.
Another thing to think about is that this is just passthrough from an AI model. If it's illegal to make a website that spits out fake IDs, then OpenAI is illegal until they filter them.
I'm not sure that argument would hold up legally. You could use an image editing site to create IDs and counterfeit currency as well, but such sites are legal.
This is only for images of money with a specific digital watermark; it doesn't detect the EURion constellation, so you can take your own and work with it just fine.
True but the wording of the act actually places the onus on the service provider to verify the identities, not on the user to give them. It would be Discord in this case having to make the legal defence.
>It would be Discord in this case having to make the legal defence.
There's no rule that only 1 entity can get in trouble.
If I use a fake ID to by smokes while underage, I will definitely get in trouble for that and the store that sold me the smokes may also get in trouble (depending on how realistic the ID is, etc.). If the provider of my fake ID is found, they also get in trouble.
I haven't yet heard a compelling argument why this website (who, in the analogous scenario above, would be the fake ID provider) would not be subject to the same logic.
I hope that the defense of "this is a satirical website" is strong enough (or preferably, it never even has to be put to the test), however given what I've gathered about the general attitude UK legislators have regarding the internet, I think it is more likely that they would do anything in their power to try and punish someone operating a site like this.
> I like the spirit but wouldn't this run afoul of one or two laws? Identity fraud or some such?
I would say not, but then again I'm no lawyer.
There's plausible deniability in that there's a big "this is satire" watermark on top of the licence. The DOB in part 3 is wrong, and the driver number in part 5 is modified to include the 5 letters of the surname, but is otherwise incorrect. The DOB encoded in the licence number doesn't even match the wrong DOB in part 3 either.
If anything accepts this as valid ID, then it just shows how farcical the system is.
What does the online safety act actually say about this? It's only supposed to be age verification, and if you are actually old enough does it matter how you proved it?
Many of the age verification services explicitly promise not to retain photos!
As I understand it, Wikipedia are seeking judicial review of OFCOM's placing them in category 1, which requires the most stringent checks including identity.
The generated addresses aren't real. It gave a London address for my MP; I know where he lives and it isn't London.
Most MPs' home addresses are actually quite easy to find. Mine's was printed below his name on the ballot paper last election – a nice reminder of how we used to have a high-trust society. I doubt this practice will be continued for much longer.
>The only way you'd ever get found out is if the affected MP was lying to the public and the identity documents do indeed get retained...
I'm more talking about the developer of the site rather than the users. And the developer could potentially be found out if they posted it on a popular hacking website and used a known alias and registered the domain in the UK.
But, if they're comfortable, all the more power to them. As I said, I do really like the spirit of the site.
If I was that developer, I'd blacklist embedding of all British MPs and councilors to avoid fraud. This would also block the entire UK political class from accessing adult materials (I got blocked by a wine forum), which would be a very effective protest...
I agree, the UK Police wouldn't typically let you get away with "it's just a joke". This would constitute a mixture of identity theft, fake ID and misuse of computers.
It's literally just sticking the MPs name into an AI and asking for it to generate a mock ID for them. None of their real data is being used (e.g. their face, their DoB, the address) and the mock IDs wouldn't fool anyone for a second. I'd love if someone who understands the law would weigh in though
We hold that LLMs are incapable of generating copyrighted images, so it's not just a tool - if it was just a tool then the author would be able to copyright the images. The courts recognise that an LLM is capable of generating things in its own right (which is why they're not copyrightable - copyrights only protect human works).
So it follows that an LLM must be able to create images itself, separate from the human prompter.
Whether that's enough to absolve the human of the crime, though - IANAL, and I suspect it would take the House of Lords to rule on it definitively.
You're overthinking it. You're building on your own definition of what a tool is, but courts are likely to find that a person who used an AI with a specific type of prompt were using it as a tool and are responsible for the clearly stated intent behind their use.
Whether that's actually legal in this case I don't know, but I'm pretty sure courts won't conclude "welp, it was the AI, not the user" in a case like this.
Yeah, probably you're right. Though it is an interesting thing to overthink - we have decided that LLMs are not tools for copyright but are tools for accountability. At some point they'll get smart enough to be accountable, and what happens then?
the law is pretty fickle that way. It's illegal to rob a bank no matter how badly you bungle it. Saying afterwards "but my gun was clearly made of plastic" probably won't get you completely off the hook if you actually threatened someone with it and asked for money (this site is literally titled Use Your Local MP's ID - it's expressing an intent).
Does the AI has access to newspapers? If John Doe is a MP, then he is probably the most famous Joe Doe in the last 5 years and the AI may grab his photo from a newspaper. I don't know about the national ID in UK, but here in Argentina the national ID number is public. A lot of public documents include "John Doe (DNI 23.456.789)", and the are sites where you can search it (the DB has problems with almost coalitions, so you may get a number 23.456.789 from one "John X. Doe" that is a 50yo in Buenos Aires and another "John Y. Doe" with number 59.876.653 that is a 3yo in Ushuaia, so in many cases it's easy to guess)
I wasn’t jesting. I was (too) obliquely saying that when we all hasten to accede to the autocrats before they even ask, we become complicit in huge social evils.
I’m not suggesting that everyone most do self-immolation, but if it were me, I would draw the line at being afraid of being “caught” for an obvious prank using no PII. Screw that, come arrest me if things have really gotten that bad.
This is not true. A) personal ID numbers are not publicly available (you could certainly get your hands on some, but I doubt a lot would know Xi's ID), and B) more importantly, nowadays ID verification in China uses more sophisticated methods, e.g. in order to not be restricted when playing games, users need to prove they are over 18. The user would permit the game to verify through a payment provider such as Alipay (I don't think one would even need to give their ID to the game, as it is handled by Alipay which has done KYC already).
Although I suspect such ... "innovations" ... would soon get to the western world including UK.
Burner sims have been a thing of the past in China for quite some time. The official rationale I believe is to curb telecom fraud, which in turn left China and started doing their business in southeast Asia.
It's very easy to get. As a visitor, I got one in the airport for $20. "ID verification" is stretching it, but like so many things in China it requires the vendor to take a photo of your ID, and unusually also to take a photo of you and submit it to the telecom website.
No, but some features are locked until you do. For example, you can join voice chat rooms on Xiaohongshu, but can’t turn on your camera until you verify ID. You can join others’ broadcasts but you can’t create your own, etc
You can have "read" access anonymously (with a big asterisk, see the end), but as soon as you need "write" access, the service provider (the website etc) is legally required to verify your ID. It's why there's no pseudo-anonymous discussion forum in China, at least legally.
> Cybersecurity Law of the People's Republic of China, Article 24: When network operators provide users with network access, domain name registration services, fixed-line and mobile phone network access procedures, or provide users with information publishing, instant messaging and other services, they shall require users to provide real identity information when signing an agreement with the user or confirming the provision of services. If the user does not provide real identity information, the network operator shall not provide the relevant services to the user.
The big asterisk: there's no anonymous internet service in China, you have to ID yourself to get access to the internet (article 24), and the service provider are required to keep record of you (IP and everything) (article 21), and they are also required to cooperate with the authority (no surprise here) (article 28). And using VPN or Tor is likely illegal (article 27).
Roaming is VPN. And if you want fast one outside firewall you can grab HK esim like soSIM. And this one only needs any passport photo w/o face verification.
lol on a much lighter note, for many years I used to use 111-111-1111 as a general phone number for CVS card discounts. It stopped working several years ago though.
As a Canadian I was lost and confused when visiting the States (in the before time) and a gas pump asked for my zip code. So I put in the one and only zip code I know. I bet you can guess.
I used to use that one too, but you're supposed to put the 3 numerical digits of your postal code followed by 00. (I have no idea how you're supposed to know that though.)
Really? Or does that just work because it's numbers? I can't imagine how that's useful because without the letters the same 12300 could be in Vancouver or Montreal couldn't it?
I don't know much about credit card validation, but I have the impression that the zipcode is just one more correlation that tells them you're more likely to be the real owner of the card.
If the 3 numbers I type match the 3 digits of the owner's postal code, it's probably a reasonable signal that I'm the owner (even without the letters).
It probably did. I was in the us this summer and was similarly confused that the pump wanted a us zip code for a foreign card. I input the zip for the address i was staying at and it worked...
Huh. I'd always assumed the zip code was validated against the card's billing address but maybe it's actually for some kind of market research. I'll have to try myself.
This reminds me: I've noticed that Starbucks now requires a few pieces of information to use their WiFi network. One is email and they are doing some sort of validation which will reject emails like whoopsileanedonxxxxxxxx@aol.com but will accept other, legit AOL emails. How are they deciding what is/not a valid email? Are they using a compiled list of emails that have been seen in the wild? What if it's a brand new address, though? Presumably AOL isn't exposing a service for them to use in realtime. I haven't tested this extensively or with other providers.
It's obvious that they care (to some extent) that they're getting valid emails, so why not use a basic regex on the FE and an OTP which gets sent to the provided address?
You're looking for the SMTP VRFY and EXPN commands. However implementation is very hit-or-miss. In the good ole' days of the internet, VRFY was widely implemented. Then spammers realized they could connect to a mailserver and do a form of a VRFY dictionary attack to find valid addresses, so it stopped being supported.
Some wifi networks give you a limited number of minutes online during which you need to click a verification link they've emailed you in order to not get cut off.
In Australia we have a show called "Utopia" that does fill this gap reasonably well. Australian politics are close enough to the UK that it'd probably translate well enough to be enjoyable.
I've heard many government workers say that it's funny but they can't watch it, as it's so accurate it's depressing.
Well having worked for the government in an ancillary security role about 20 years ago on contract, I don't think they could produce a parody notably worse than reality to use as a contrast. Today, I suspect it is worse.
Hire an expert they said. From the pool of experts they had heard about through contacts in the civil service. None of whom have any industry or real world experience. At best, someone was on an industry eating and drinking with the right people panel. I was there for 3 months and crawled back to my previous job cap in hand, bruised and educated.
It was long enough ago that I can away with rounding errors of months on my CV thank goodness...
It is worthy of note that most of the incidents in Yes, Minister were based on things that really happened. At some level it was more curation than invention.
Not really. I was a civil servant and gave advice on this.
Civil servants aren't there to say whether a policy is good, sensible, or a vote-winner. The CS policy profeasion is there, in part, to advise on risks. Ministers decide whether to accept those risks.
There were plenty of people (like me) who would have pointed out the various risks and problems. Some of which caused policy to change, and some were accepted.
I don't think I've ever seen in recent years the CS be blamed for something like this.
> I don't think anyone is going to be seriously fooled by this.
Do you think porn sites are more interested in a) correctly preventing unauthorized people from accessing their site, or b) selling as many subscriptions as they can while nominally complying with the law?
I’m not from the UK, so I’m not familiar with what their IDs are supposed to look like.
I was suspicious, though—the hands holding the ID cards looked kind of “crispy.” But at the same time, I thought, “woah, where did the website owner even get these photos?”
It wasn’t until I read the Hacker News post that I realized they were all AI-generated (and now cached).
And here’s the thing: I’m an engineer at Apple with decades of experience in the tech industry—I’m not exactly new to this stuff. If I got fooled even for a couple of seconds, imagine how easy it would be to trick someone who isn’t technical.
The text is slightly misaligned and weird-looking; it screams "AI". The hand holding the ID looks like CGI. And the photos don't look anything like the actual MP, at least for the ones that I tried.
There's also some obvious tells if you know what UK driving licenses look like: the layout is wrong, the background is too plain, and all the anti-forgery features are missing. Real licenses have much more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_...
I'd say they're obviously AI fakes, just trying a few: B249AL (it made her bald), SA487AB (different shape, hair color and hair), TN248DF (it grew his hair back), HA26ND (bald, again) and NG166QE (I don't even need to explain)...
It looks like the code was/is going to be published?
From the FAQ:
> How did you do this?
> This site uses React for the frontend and Node.js for the backend. The MP data is fetched from the UK government public API, and the AI-generated images use the latest model from open AI. The images are stored on a Cloudflare R2 bucket. The code is open source, so you can check it out on GitHub. It was done in a hurry.
This is great. Weaponising the stupidity of the idea, compromising it entirely until it's so obviously ineffectual it's unenforceable, then going after the politicians who pushed it for the waste of money and effort.
This is the sort of thing that brought me into tech in the first place, before it became the villain it had started off fighting: humorous, effective pushback against stodgy power structures. More please!
Name: Mike Wood
Party: Conservative
Constituency: Stafford
Err, Stafford has been Labour since the last election, and before that it was a Conservative, but it was Theodora Clarke. Mike Wood is MP for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire.
Surely the way you build something like this is a postcode -> constituency table (I assume available free), a constituency -> mp table, and mp -> image generation (with caching or generate multiple versions)
Even if the lookup data mis-selected the constituency (I think some postcodes can straddle constituencies), surely the Constituency/Name/Party would be consistent.
I'm guessing you're using chat-gpt for the entire program?
returns three constituencies, all of which look fine to me, but the "Stafford" one is the middle, and you're using the data from the first returned constituency
How does this new policy not end with promising upstart political careers being torpedoed when the party in power “accidentally” leaks their porn history? There is no way the intelligence community doesn’t have a back door to this. Vote how we want on this bill or your embarrassing history just gets found
it's a bit buried in the FAQ - if you're a non-UK user like I am and just want to see what the output looks like, Keir Starmer's postcode is WC2B6NH so inputting that will give you an already-generated example of the output.
This is so good. Not only does it get you past the verification screen, it infects the next generation of AI models with AI slop, and it adds MPs to a list of suspicious names that are likely fraud. That means that it ruins the Internet for MPs, which is just wonderful. Like, I legitimately think that Starmer might have extra trouble signing up for things now.
All in all, one of those ideas that sounds good on the surface, but the more you think about it the better it gets.
They're definitely not perfect. I wouldn't want them to be perfect, then they might be used for something nefarious. The mock IDs use fake details and fake faces, and don't even attempt to get the watermarks and machine readable parts right.
Are you just using ChatGPT api to make the images? I’m surprised it would let you make driving licenses.
If so it’d be kinda crazy to go after you if anyone can just make an image like this in ChatGPT anyway.
It get all sorts of complaints from it and then it eventually says it’ll make one but only someone similar and only similar to a uk licensed and then makes something pretty close to reality - but not as recognisable as yours.
Yup, that's what happens.
If you request a postcode that leads to an MP that's not been seen before, it starts generating that MP and saves the ongoing promise, and gives that promise to everyone else to asks for that MP.
Had to make sure to implement this so that I didn't end up generating duplicates.
Make hay while the sun shines. ~$120 upfront would make this an order of magnitude more expensive than a vanity domain name already, but if you had precomputed and cached them you’d be capitalizing on the viral momentum.
Won’t the government force these websites to do some kind of stronger identity verification in the future? I worry that it’ll even come with broader support when the EU or whoever implements ID verification for protecting children or banning misinformation or whatever.
No, they ll require you to put a camera in your home to watch you while you verify your identity online.
This way they will know for sure that it was you who upload your id. Then they will need someone else to watch the camera in case it gets tampered with.
>It's a small, silly protest at the stupidity of the Online Safety Act that just came into force. The IDs actually work (for Reddit, Discord etc.) which highlights how terrible this implementation is.
Could you give a short TL;DR of how ids are constructed so we can all laugh here in comments?
it's literally just the MPs name. It's a fake DoB (because their DoB's aren't public knowledge anymore) all the numbers and such are nonsense, the images wouldn't fool a human for one second.
The AI tools don't let you generate an ID for any real human being (because that sounds like all sorts of fraud) so you can't upload a picture of the MP or anything like that - so I just let the model fill in whatever face it thinks is appropriate for the given name.
Even if they weren't, most MPs will be old enough that their top level Birth Records are available, so if they don't have a common name or you know enough biographical details you can find them anyway. If they've got a weird name like Elon Musk you just go name -> DOB in one step, if they're a Sarah Black maybe you need to know approximate age, birth name, rough part of the country where they were born. For super common names like John Smith you will need to know the mother's name, year and specific location of birth at which point yeah you're closer to just knowing their DoB anyway.
I'm a bit out of the loop and not familiar with the whole thing. Do you just submit a plausibly real name and any DOB that is older than 18 and a picture? Does the thing crosscheck the name + dob with a demographic database (does UK has any)?
The Online Safety Act is completely stupid - it just requires "age verification". Various sites have outsourced this to various providers, most of which are American. The age verifiers in turn just look at the image, generally algorithmically without human intervention, and go "seems legit". There is no single national UK ID database that could be used for this purpose - everything is either partial, doesn't include photos (e.g. electoral roll), or isn't public (passport DB).
It's all just random third party shit with zero government oversight. There's no national ID in the UK because even the mildest mention of a voluntary national ID scheme leads to gnashing of teeth and wailing about how it's fascist and a violation of our civil liberties and everyone is happy pissing about with driving licenses or passports or utility bills to prove who you are.
OP's comment is only slightly misleading. Per the myth detector [1]:
".... similar comparisons, stating that 3,300 people were arrested in the UK while only 400 in Russia, have circulated on social media for years. The original source of this claim is Konstantin Kisin, a Russia-born, half-British comedian, writer, and podcast co-host. His interview, where he makes this comparison [at 26:26], was recorded in 2019, based on data from 2016-2017.
For years, social media users have relied on Kisin’s statements to compare Russia and the UK. Many refer to data from the human rights group Agora, which reported that 411 people faced prosecution in Russia in 2017 for social media activity. In the majority of cases, media users were accused of [....] what authorities consider provocative content. On the other hand, UK comparisons are often based on a 2017 article in The Times, which cited 2016 data showing that over 3,300 people were arrested or questioned under Section 127 of the Communications Act. However, the same article notes that in half of these cases, investigations were dropped before prosecution. Additionally, Section 127 is not limited to social media, and it also applies to emails and other forms of electronic communication. Moreover, the Russian figure represents prosecutions, while the UK figure represents arrests, making the comparison inappropriate for many reasons. For example, the content of the clauses differs: in the UK, they are applied to a broader range of cases, while the data from Russia reflects arrests for the activity on social media. Additionally, the analysis of cases shows the difference between the two countries in the application of the laws. In Russia, many citizens and journalists have been arrested for expressing critical opinions or posting government-opposed views on social media. It is also worth noting that in the UK, cases brought under Section 127 that result in citizens being subjected to community service or fines are often debated."
The article I've cited mainly discusses a comparison by Guri Sultanishvili which is harder to justify, but Konstantin Kisin's comments have been more widely referenced in the public debate.
As someone who was involved in the original guerilla digital activism that spawned the third-person URL format for independent UK government-watching websites (ie "Write to Them", "They Work for You"), I applaud your on-topic brand extension, Tim :)
Thanks for your activism Danny - by coincidence I'm wearing an ancient NTK tshirt today, from a simpler era of the internet.
Alas the ntkmart domain is being squatted by someone and I presume the shop was inactive long before that. I loved the Elite-style shirt but mine left this mortal plane long ago.
Thanks Danny - it was indeed following 'They Work For You' - I'm a big fan of that site.
I'm proud to say that the "They Work For You" was actually one of mine (or my recollection is both vain, and broke) :)
Let's not forget that Matthew Somerville did (and still does!) most of the actual work tho.
Do please take a moment to consider which MPs carry the burden here. It's mainly a single flavour. Mention it on the doorstep next time.
https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/commons/division/1926
I'm not sure what this recent vote is about. The original Online Safety Act was introduced and passed by the Tories in 2023 (although it's only coming into effect now, obviously.)
So the Tories, who created this awful bill in the first place, are now voting against it? Clown country.
That happens all over the place, conservatives pass a time bomb bill, they lose control of congress/house, time bomb is about to become effective, they now fight to overturn it and place the blame on the current ruling folks.
Except this bill was first introduced in March 2022, when the Tories hadn't imploded and there was no strong reason to expect they'd lose the next election.
It wasn't a "time bomb". They introduced this legislation because they wanted it.
> March 2022, when the Tories hadn't imploded and there was no strong reason to expect they'd lose the next election.
Under Boris Johnson?
Well, I suppose we have the benefit of hindsight.
Eh, I mean, the polls were looking fairly dire for them by that point.
Not nearly as dire as they were a year later.
If it’s really a time bomb, I’d expect the supposedly responsible party to defuse it. So why haven’t they?
This isn’t one of those cases. It was a well intentioned Bill that passed with Labour’s support but was very badly planned and written. Hell, it wouldn’t even have helped counter the misinformation being spread last summer and this summer to try and instigate more race riots!
“Well intentioned” hahahaha yeah right, good one.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
If that were true, why do laws get amended when politicians see impacts they don't like? A famous example that college students are taught at A-Level Law is the law on bigamy where it stated "a married person who gets married again." This isn't possible (in the UK, you can only get married to one person at a time), so the court had to rewrite the legislation on the fly to get the intended effect.
Labour thought Tory version was not going far enough.
Labour appear to be talking about wanting to repeal the OSA judging by this morning's news: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/jul/29/uk-pol...
Nigel Farage isn't part of Labour.
You're right, I misread. I'm terrible in the mornings - apologies.
Many such cases
In the UK on this specific topic, "both sides" is as true as ever. This is very obvious when looking at the bigger picture instead of just a single vote. I wish it wasn't, if only it was indeed just one side.
Government parties are whipped
What's really interesting is those that voted "Aye" who aren't Labour/ex Labour
DUP and Reform. Well the one reform MP that bothered to turn up. How surprising.
What a fucking mess.
Labour voted in conservative policy. Conservatives voted against it. Reform, whilst all over the news for being against it, voted for it.
I think it's fun when the elected government doesn't do what the people who elected them want. Like a middle finger to democracy.
In america there is 0 corelation between middle class voting preferences and what their elected officials voted for. There is a closer aligment with upper class voters and lobby groups. It is arguable america is not a democracy based on those facts despite nominally voting every few years
https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/the-...
Basically if 0% of americans want a law it has 30% chance of passing, and if 100% of american want a law it has 32% chance of passing. For lobby groups it goes from 0% = 0% to 100% = 65% chance. Much closer to preference based lawmaking.
> I think it's fun when the elected government doesn't do what the people who elected them want.
I can't think of a country that does have people largely in agreement with the governments actions, lately.
Or perhaps, for any given country, one can find a collection of loud voices detailing how 'the people' disagree with what's happening. But whether they meaningfully do is hard to establish.
I imagine a lot of Brits agree with the incoming rules, whether they are effective or not. You find that here in Aus too - a lot of Australians vehemently agree with the protectionist laws, because the intent of them is to protect children. And to many of them it doesn't matter what the real outcome is, because you want to protect children don't you? And this law is to protect children, QED.
UK is a monarchy. More so now than ever before. They all just chasing their peerages.
I think the whole of the 1800s would disagree with you.
> they
I'm not sure you understand what the word "monarchy" means.
It means the Brits get to elect who will agree to do and say exactly what the King and his mafioso family tells them to do and say.
That's clearly bullshit.
When the House of Commons and the King disagree the Commons is supreme.
When that was last tested, in 1688, the reigning monarch was removed from power and replaced.
It was enshrined in the Bill of Rights 1689 and has not needed to be tested since.
when the prime minister and the monarch agree that the PM takes all the credit for murdering lots of kids, the prime minister gets a knighthood. (tony blair) - chasing the peerages.
When they disagree, they get a big dose of massive character assassination (Gordon Brown, Jeremy Corbin)
Or just dead (David Kelly).
Discussed in detail during the non public weekly meetings between the PM and head of state.
"Alexa, summarise the last 15+ years of UK politics in two sentences."
s/UK//
I mean, the last 15 years were mostly Tories and the public kept voting them in. I’m glad I’m not a politician because I have no sympathy for Brexit voters who voted Tory in 2019, claim “I know what a voted for,” and now complain about how much poorer and full of immigrants the country now is. It was all there in the 2019 Conservative manifesto they voted for!
Wtf are you talking about? The Conservatives promised to reduce immigration in 2019. Instead they increased it to its highest ever levels by far, hence why they got thrown out of office.
Have you ever met or spoken to a Conservative voter in your entire life?
They promised a policy (Brexit) in a form that would replace immigration from European countries with immigration from non-white countries.
In fact, the Tories did NOT promise to reduce immigration. They promised 2 things that are guaranteed to increase immigration:
- 50,000 extra nurses (including foreign recruitment)
- A points-based system, you can find articles talking about how this increases immigration
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50524262
> They promised 2 things that are guaranteed to increase immigration
> A points-based system, you can find articles talking about how this increases immigration
Firstly, I don't think they actually introduced one of those, did they? And secondly, how is that guaranteed to increase immigration?
The UK media and some of politicians at the time were all talking about an Australian-style points system. As someone pretty intimately acquainted with the Australian system, people (including ex-PM Teresa May) didn't seem to understand that under the Australian system -
- The government sets a minimum number of points under which you won't even be considered.
- The government set a maximum number of visas they will grant under the scheme each year
- The people with the best points are invited to apply for those visas
So with this setup the 'paper' minimum might be 65 points, but the effective threshhold is often 95 points to actually be invited to apply.
Yet in the UK the picture was painted as if you set a points threshhold and that's it, anyone with more than that gets a visa and you can't possibly control the numbers. It seemed like a total misunderstanding of the scheme.
They also said things like "And Australia has proportionally even higher migration than the UK under that scheme!", which is true, but again that's because the government has decided to set the amounts of visas at that level and sets them higher or lower, or adjusts which skills get more points, according to perceived need for skilled people. Aus has higher migration under their points scheme as a choice. The UK could have chosen to limit skilled visas under a similar program to a much lower level.
As far as I could tell, all of the articles and talking points at the time entirely ignored this.
> Firstly, I don't think they actually introduced one of those, did they?
Boris introduced 2 million (legal) immigrants in the first (unaffected) year we "took back control" of the borders under the new system rolled out in 2020
The UK's new points-based immigration system - https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...
Oh they did introduce a system, OK, wasn't aware.
Perhaps in all the talk of making the system like the Australian one, they missed the crucial part of it - that you also apply limits to the visas you issue.
In fact it looks like that's exactly what happened, they introduced a Skilled Worker visa with no quota.
The solution to all the problems was delivered. Promises made, promises delivered, will of the people.
> Firstly, I don't think they actually introduced one of those, did they?
The fact they didn't introduce it doesn't change the fact that adding 50,000 nurses required an increase in immigration. I went back and re-read the article, they also promised more childcare places. Guess what? That also requires more immigration.
In fact, I just read the manifesto itself and they also added a "fast-track NHS visa," so we have a clear "let's increase immigration" policy right in your face! Page 22, hilariously right next to where they promise "numbers will come down."
> They also said things like "And Australia has proportionally even higher migration than the UK under that scheme!", which is true, but again that's because the government has decided to set the amounts of visas at that level and sets them higher or lower
You're correct, the government can choose to give out less visas, and they hinted that they would in the manifest (page 22). But if you read the rest of the manifesto, you realise quickly that the two goals can't be achieved at the same time. It's like promising to cure cancer by shooting the patient.
Look, we can argue about this until the cows come home but, if you voted Tory because you thought they would bring immigration numbers down, then you should have read their manifesto. The fact that they were never able to do this was right there!
Going back to "I voted for Brexit," then complaining about Brexit. Well, that's also something that there's no excuse for. In December 2019, the deal that was to be agreed was known. If you didn't like what it said about fishing or whatever, well, tough shit. You agreed to it when you put your tick in the box for Conservative.
---
Manifesto: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5da42e2cae7ebd3f8bde353c/...
I think we're talking at cross-purposes here - I'm not really taking a position one way or another on whether the Tories would/could have reduced immigration, and they certainly didn't deliver on that.
I was just pretty flabbergasted at the time by the blanket misunderstandings of the system that was being talked about, seemingly from all sides.
I didn't vote for them either way :shrug:
I think it's important to understand the context, which is where my initial reply was aimed at:
> Wtf are you talking about? The Conservatives promised to reduce immigration in 2019.
Taken with that context, it's important to understand the manifesto to realise they didn't really "promise" to reduce immigration.
> I was just pretty flabbergasted at the time by the blanket misunderstandings of the system
A lot of blame belongs with our media. Frankly, it's piss-poor, barely goes beyond surface level reading of things and attempts to get soundbites out of politicians. I get more out of random YouTubers and podcasters, which has its own problems because how do you know which ones know what they're talking about?
> I didn't vote for them either way :shrug:
Just to clarify on this point, I didn't mean "you" as in literally "you," I intended this in the informal "you" that's used in British English to indirectly refer to a group of people.
I know, just wanted to be sure I wasn’t coming across as a frustrated Tory voter!
> In fact, the Tories did NOT promise to reduce immigration.
In fact they did. They promised to reduce immigration. They did the opposite of what you just said.
Their 2019 manifesto said "There will be fewer lower-skilled migrants and overall numbers will come down."
Source: PDF linked on https://conservativehome.com/2019/12/06/read-the-conservativ...
I already answered this, using the manifesto itself here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44720675
There were also the matters of Johnson throwing a Covid party, Truss tanking the economy within a few weeks of taking office, and Sunak being useless and generally taking the hit for a flacid economy.
All of those are true but I promise you that the median conservative voter can forgive all of those far sooner than they’ll forgive the Boriswave.
:%s/normal/retarded/g
> Reform, whilst all over the news for being against it, voted for it.
Just as a slight correction – the only "Reform MP" that voted for it is James McMurdock, but he's no longer a Reform MP and I'm not sure why he is still listed as one here.
There's an excellent (volunteer-run) [website](https://www.partijgedrag.nl/index.php) about Dutch politics that will ask your opinion on a bunch of historic chamber proposals (for/against/skip) and use that to show your alignment to different parties by comparing your answers with actual party votes. It has definitely swayed my vote a few times.
I suppose such a tool might not work in a first-past-the-post voting system, but in my case it certainly has certainly helped to see what politicians actually vote like rather than just trusting the promises. If you live in a country with easily accessible digital records of votes/bills/proposals, I imagine you could throw something similar together and help quite a few people.
Well aware of these tools. I've always said this but party politics is the stupidest idea ever. We should be voting on policies not people and parties. There isn't a single party which is ideologically aligned with me on enough of the significant issues. That leads to be having to pick the least bad one, and that's still bad.
There's Wahl-o-Mat in Germany, that does the same thing. There's one for each major election, from regional votes to EU representative votes.
https://www.wahl-o-mat.de/
> comparing your answers with actual party votes
Wahl-o-Mat is *not* the same, it’s stated politics. One of the criticisms of it is that actual voting might (lol) differ. There was an alternative one, [0] Real-o-Mat that checked actual voting behavior. Though that has its own set of issues.
[0]: https://real-o-mat.de/
It's Daily Mail policy, and they're the permanent government. With the help of the Home Office, who keep writing anti-encryption bills.
This is misleading. Labour's only objection was that the policy was not going far enough!
Most Reform MPs did not vote at all!
Neither did a lot of conservatives and labour, interestingly.
Greens and Lib Dems voted no, which raises my opinion of them.
Agreed its a mess.
Any abstention is at best in the same column as the ayes here. Arguably worse.
Just for the benefit of those unfamiliar with UK politics: "most" is a bit misleading here, even though it's technically true. Reform has 4 MPs (out of 650).
Wow, so they've lost 40% of the original lot which were elected last year. But for some reason the press seems to think they're the official opposition.
They have the same number of MPs as the Green party, fewer than the DUP, half the SNP, and about 1/20th of the Lib Dems.
I note 75% of them didn't bother turning up to work, I'm shocked one did.
Clamping down on freedoms is not conservative policy.
Crap like Communications Act 2003 and Ofcom has been Labour policy for decades.
Clamping down on freedoms has been the raison d'être of "conservative" parties across the world my entire life
Both "conservatism" and "freedoms" mean a lot of different things even within anglophone countries, not to mention the obvious fact that political actors of any color never strictly follow their foundational ideology. This makes me believe that speaking for the whole world is a bit too daring, and your statement is purely emotional.
this is still absolutely true, but there have been some rumblings of change in recent years. "left wing" values have partially shifted from trying to provide equal freedoms for everyone, to trying to provide freedoms for perceived-as marginalised groups, often at the expense of freedoms for lesser marginalised groups. if you're part of a lesser marginalised group and you don't subscribe to that particular ideology, this is going to feel very much the same as having your freedoms clamped down upon, and conservatives have pounced upon that as a stick to beat their enemies with, and to be fair, have come some way themselves wrt to gay rights and perhaps drug prohibition and some other things. taking a step back though, conservatives, particularly in the UK, are by no means libertarians, and in the UK essentially sired the "left wing" values that they hate so much. when did the revolution start? 2010-15ish?
Conservatives clamping down on freedoms is only half of the story. They proclaim to be the strongest defender of freedom while they're at it.
Here's the Conservative policy for the Online Safety Act 2023, during the Sunak government:
* https://legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/notes/division/3/in...
Here's the Conservative white paper on Online Harms from 2019, during the May government:
* https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/online-harms-whi...
Lets not forget the "Snoopers Charter" the party was so proud of.
To be fair, u/jojobas wrote "conservative" (little-c), not "Conservative".
However they did also specifically reference the Labour government’s policy, so it’s reasonable to assume they were speaking in a UK context and simply forgot to capitalise it.
> Clamping down on freedoms is not conservative policy.
Perhaps you can explain why the conservative party keep writing bills that clamp down on freedoms, introducing them, whipping their party to vote for them and signing them into law?
I would read the 2019 Conservative manifesto, then. Crushing democracy and judicial oversight was very much Tory policy.
Laughable. Allow me to introduce you to the anti protest legislation brought into law by Suella Braverman.
Conservatism isn't libertarianism. Conservative parties across the world, including in the anglosphere, often advocate for laws that limit freedom but accomplish ulterior conservative goals.
freedom isn't just freedom. it's freedom for. conservatives tend to favour freedom for businesses. freedom for the establishment. freedom for the rich. you would hope that progressives favour freedom for everyone, but nowadays the louder voices on the left have sometimes been over-invested in freedom for culturally marginalised groups and under-invested in freedom for economically marginalised groups
> nowadays the louder voices on the left have sometimes been over-invested in freedom for culturally marginalised groups and under-invested in freedom for economically marginalised groups
That's just marketing from the right to discourage people with average income to vote left ("they want to give all your money to the immigrants!"). The only people the left doesn't want freedom for is those who are actively trying to take it away.
The bigger issue is that the left hasn't really existed in most countries for a long time, like the UK. "new labour" betrayed their heritage and adopted conservative points of view. Leaders who are trying to bring it back like Corbyn are ridiculed and marginalised.
>That's just marketing from the right to discourage people with average income to vote left ("they want to give all your money to the immigrants!"). The only people the left doesn't want freedom for is those who are actively trying to take it away.
this is misreading what I said. what I said is that the left isn't redistributing enough money
> The only people the left doesn't want freedom for is those who are actively trying to take it away.
My experience is that most progressive causes want to redistribute income from high earners to low earners. Policies such as government supported housing, daycare, support this.
These policies actively restrict freedoms by removing the freedom of choice from consumers. They introduce deadweight loss and moral hazard.
Imo this is the folly of the left.
>These policies actively restrict freedoms by removing the freedom of choice from consumers. They introduce deadweight loss and moral hazard.
relate every part of this sentence to the previous sentence
> My experience is that most progressive causes want to redistribute income from high earners to low earners. Policies such as government supported housing, daycare, support this.
Oh absolutely. This is the way to make a more fair and balanced society.
If the US doesn't want that, fine but it is of course also the reason for the no-go areas/ghettos, the amount of violent crime etc. Because people who are in the lowest class and have no upward mobility will tend to spiral away in crime, because that does pay.
> These policies actively restrict freedoms by removing the freedom of choice from consumers. They introduce deadweight loss and moral hazard.
We don't believe in unrestricted free-market capitalism anyway.
> Oh absolutely. This is the way to make a more fair and balanced society.
I understand its purpose, but it does restrict freedom. Personally I am much more a fan of charity because its voluntary nature preserves freedom, but I accept the duality of freedom is the potential for lousy initial conditions in life.
> We don't believe in unrestricted free-market capitalism anyway.
I think we should strive to push society to freer markets. Neither leading party seems to have interest, however.
As a socialist I don't think all markets should be free. Only the ones that aren't necessary for living. Energy, healthcare, public transport, even telecoms should be in government hands (as they all were in Holland in the 80s)
> My experience is that most progressive causes want to redistribute income from high earners to low earners.
> These policies actively restrict freedoms by removing the freedom of choice from consumers.
Moreover despite all the constant pearl clutching about "systemic imbalances in resources between whites and People of Color" from the progressive left, you will find that most of these policies actually transfer wealth from the middle and upper-middle class ethnic minority demographics to rich white nepotists in the government.
If progressives were actually serious about correcting racial wealth disparities, we would implement a taxation scheme that taxes whites more heavily, and ethnic minorities less so, based on some metric of the overall injustices visited upon them.
Instead, the instant an ethnic minority gets a leg up on the system all the crabs in the progressive bucket demand that he get pulled back down. The words and slogans about "equity" are just hymnal responses that the white progressive uses to absolve themselves of all responsibility and accountability, since after accepting the Code of Conduct and the DEI statement they've already been "born again" out of the original sins of implicit bias and racism.
Ehh at the left we don't really think in terms of 'original sin'. Most of us are not religious, these things are simply meaningless to us.
And DEI is something that is not about quotas at all. It's about having race and ethniticy not influencing the hiring process at all. Being "colorblind", which is ironically enough what Trump says how he wants things to be (but in reality he is very racist).
> Ehh at the left we don't really think in terms of 'original sin'. Most of us are not religious, these things are simply meaningless to us.
You are under the core progressive delusion that choosing not to identify or label yourself as a thing, means you are in fact not that thing. In truth, the labeling of a thing is completely orthogonal to its ontological status.
Concrete example: most of the left believes in a "gender identity," which is an immaterial, non-objective, unobservable, unscientific, metaphysical phenomenon that is somehow "more you" than the material reality of the physical body. If you strip away the gender theory jargon, you end up with a concept equivalent to "the soul", which is in contemporary discourse usually regarded as a religious, not a scientific, concept.
You may have called it something else - a gender identity - but despite the difference in nomenclature you are still describing and referring to the same thing the religious devotees referred to when they talked about "the soul."
> It's about having race and ethniticy not influencing the hiring process at all. Being "colorblind"
Again more progressive fanfiction and creative wordsmithing with no relationship to reality. The Supreme Court struck down DEI policies (rebranded affirmative action) on the basis that they were, quoting Justice Clarence Thomas, "rudderless, race-based preferences" [0] [1]. This is literally the opposite of being "colorblind."
I stand very firm in my position that everything progressives say is a direct negation of reality.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/06/29/1181138066/affirmative-action...
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/supreme-courts-conserv...
> Concrete example: most of the left believes in a "gender identity," which is an immaterial, non-objective, unobservable, unscientific, metaphysical phenomenon that is somehow "more you" than the material reality of the physical body.
It's about feeling. Someone with a different gender feels uncomfortable in their body (and that's putting it mildly). If you declare that unscientific you can throw out the entire psychological/psychiatric sciences.
> You may have called it something else - a gender identity - but despite the difference in nomenclature you are still describing and referring to the same thing the religious devotees referred to when they talked about "the soul."
Of course, religion was invented to help people make sense of the world (and of course as a means of control). Gender identity has always existed. It makes sense that religion invented some terms to explain it away. Because as a means of control and no IVF options etc this was contrary to religions' survival. After all, religion gets passed on through upbringing. If you approach a person as an adult with this kind of stuff most of them will reject it, but as kids they are impressionable and can be indoctrinated. If people have no kids, there's no new religious minions being produced and thus the religion's survival probability is a bit affected. This is why conservative people are so obsessed about birthrates.
> Again more progressive fanfiction and creative wordsmithing with no relationship to reality. The Supreme Court struck down DEI policies (rebranded affirmative action) on the basis that they were, quoting Justice Clarence Thomas, "rudderless, race-based preferences" [0] [1]. This is literally the opposite of being "colorblind."
But DEI is not affirmative action. I work in this field myself for a big multinational. We don't do that. There are no quotas. We do measure our effectiveness with it (If you're in a country with 90% latino people and hire 80% caucasians obviously something is wrong) but we don't have hiring quotas. Instead what we do is management/HR training to recognise and avoid bias. And materials to improve understanding of minority needs, like LGBTIQ+ (which is the area I do some work in).
A lot of managers wouldn't even have known what nonbinary is for example, they would just see someone appear for an interview and dismiss them as 'weird'. They also wouldn't understand the specific issues they could encounter in the workplace. This is what we're working against.
Affirmative action is something that companies do that don't actually care about DEI but just want their "numbers" to look good. Quotas is the easiest way to solve "the numbers" but not actually do the hard work of removing bias. Meaning minority people will get hired but for the wrong reasons, and they will still have issues in the workplace resulting from lack of understanding. This is not the way to approach it, only when you're a lazy company.
> It's about feeling.
This is equally unscientific.
> If you declare that unscientific you can throw out the entire psychological/psychiatric sciences.
May as well, given the catastrophe that is the replication crisis [2]. Besides, psychology has grown divorced from its roots, which are found in religion as a proto-psychology of mind (which is the modern term for what would have classically been known as "the soul"). You can further investigate the correspondences between religion, mysticism, and psychology in Jung's "Psychology and Alchemy."
> Gender identity has always existed.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far there is no evidentiary basis for the "gender identity" in the body; some would even say that there cannot be a biological basis of gender, for this "holds the societal acceptance of transgenderism hostage to a biological account of sex-gender." [0]
Absent any biological or physical evidence I can only surmise that "gender identities" either do not exist, or are metaphysical; and to the scientifically-minded, these two statements are functionally equivalent.
In fact, I could even just as easily say "souls have always existed."
The paper [0] even continues on to state, essentially, that gender is an "intersubjectival" reality, which, ironically, is defined in an Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion:
A rejection of empiricism is tantamount to a rejection of science, which is based on the former; so perhaps it's not surprising after all that the philosophical basis for gender is actually a psychological/religious concept.> as kids they are impressionable and can be indoctrinated. If people have no kids, there's no new religious minions being produced and thus the religion's survival probability is a bit affected.
Much of the LGBTQ+, almost by definition, cannot reproduce biologically and thus cannot have kids. Would you also claim that LGBTQ+'s survival probability, as a neo-religion complete with rebranded souls, is also affected? How does such an ideology reproduce, if not through indoctrination of children?
> But DEI is not affirmative action
At a layman's first glance this would appear to be the case from the SCOTUS syllabus:
[0] https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/hypa.12327[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
[3] https://sci-hub.se/https://link.springer.com/referenceworken...
Feelings are important because they affect us. They can hurt just as much as the physical. It's a condition of the mind, not the 'soul'. That doesn't make it any less real for the person experiencing those feelings. The concept of a soul was invented, as some entity that survives after death. So that even people with nothing to lose in life could be forced to conform using the many threats religion makes to their 'afterlife'.
And LGBTIQ+ is not an ideology. People don't choose who they are attracted to. That's a conservative myth invented to make it seem like people are 'converted' to being gay or trans and that thus this could be prevented or reverted. There is no ideology nor agenda and it just is. We don't convert people. That's again a projection of something that religions do. They have agendas and conversion.
And I don't care about what the SCOTUS says. They are completely irrelevant where I live (and they should be in the US too as they are heavily politicised by the appointment process by the president).
> It's a condition of the mind, not the 'soul'.
As stated in my previous post these are classically synonyms that refer to the exact same entity. This use of language goes back to at least Descartes (translation by E. Haldane):
This use of the term "soul" even goes back to Plato and Socrates, who used the Greek term psyche to refer to this concept [1] [4]. I leave the remainder of the inference to you.> LGBTIQ+ is not an ideology.
Why not?
> We don't convert people.
No, the LGBTQ+ just bifurcate the world into "allies" and "enemies". They mandate the use of neopronouns and neodemonyms, using letters not even in the alphabets of other languages, and try to correct perceived "gendered language" in languages that have no concept of gender in their grammar to begin with. People who refuse to prostrate themselves before your linguistic imperialism get cancelled and/or fired because they are obviously deplorable bigots.
Just look at how the LGBTQ+ was pushing "Filipinx" on people they have nothing to do with, an entire fucking ocean away, despite Tagalog already being ungendered and not having a letter X in its alphabet. [3]
There were a bunch of whites who came to the Philippines and then installed not one, but two (Spanish, English) languages in the populace, to the point where time is still told in Spanish to this day, and native Filipinos cannot even speak pure Tagalog any more, resorting now to a hybrid of Tagalog and English. [2]
Call them by any other name but those all look like instances of cultural imperialism and proselytization to me. Will whites ever learn? Or are they so blinded by their self-professed virtue and ~crosses~ pride flags that they think, certainly, that they are in the right, and all the homophobes and transphobes from all those other Conservative countries need to be enlightened to 21st century morals (those godless heathens)?
> And I don't care about what the SCOTUS says.
I'm running past my point of caring too, since all you do is write falsehood without citation.
[0] https://yale.learningu.org/download/041e9642-df02-4eed-a895-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(psychology)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLFoUTJuGU
[3] https://opinion.inquirer.net/133571/filipino-or-filipinx
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_theory_of_soul
> Conservatism isn't libertarianism.
Conservatism is the ideology that some people are protected by the law but not bound by it, while others are bound by the law but not protected by it.
Obviously if you are in the first group that sounds like the best kind of freedom, meanwhile everyone else is unprotected and punished, which makes sense why they would not want that kind of goverment structure.
The Conservatives aren't a conservative party.
Both Conservatives and Labour serve the same corporate interests. Divide et impera.
Wow this shows labour has too many MPs and the impacts of voting for labour
The alternative (4 more years of Tories) was still worse.
Yes, I know. still much worse
Unintended side effect, UK MPs can now watch as much porn as they want with plausible deniability.
I don’t know about this law specifically, but every other law attacking the internet or encryption has attempted to exempt people in government.
That defeats the point of the legislation since it creates a gaping wide backdoor to exploit official people, who are now the most valuable targets because of that exemption.
Never mind the matter of providing a rule for the people and making the people who made the rule immune to it.
Have they researched how many of these "age check" companies are actually run by Russian intelligence services?
Even having a single employee linked to the Russian intelligence services would be sufficient.
Unless they're being filmed while watching it because they watched it in parliament: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/neil-parish-b...
Didn't something similar also happen recently in the US (I think on a state level)?
That was Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/07/28/oklahoma-superintende...
It's a matter of time before the online safety act leads to horrendous data breaches. Once it's normalized to have to show your id to visit sites, any website will be able to pretend it's using a third party verification service but just save your id and sell the data on what you were doing.
The blackmail trade will be incredibly lucrative.
I like the spirit but wouldn't this run afoul of one or two laws? Identity fraud or some such?
I'm not in the UK, so I don't have any idea about their laws, but I'd be shocked to find this was above board. Your FAQ claims it's a parody site and claims "The ID number isn't valid and you can't use the card for anything real." but you've just confirmed here it can indeed be used for real things (discord, reddit).
Your domain registration is UK-based, so, be careful!
Law often focus on intent. I am not sure if identity fraud can be applied if the person are not gaining anything (assuming they are of the right age). Service providers might be of fault if their verification practices are not compliant with regulations, but I don't know if the law puts any requirements on users to verify their identity.
To me this seems more similar to a people participating in a masquerade or comedian who dress themselves in the likeness of a politician. They are using the identity of the politician, but not in the way that identity fraud is intended to prevent.
Domain registration is an interesting example. To my knowledge, falsifying domain registration data is not a crime. Domain registrars have regulations to verify the identity of customers, including the recourse to suspend a domain if the data is incorrect. I could see a case if a person impersonate a politician in order to falsely attribute content of a website, under a registered domain name, as belonging/sanctioned by that politician, but that would likely fall under defamation laws. The crime could also be identity fraud, but the intent would be defamation.
>Service providers might be of fault if their verification practices are not compliant with regulations, but I don't know if the law puts any requirements on users to verify their identity.
As I mentioned in another comment, I've heard no compelling argument that differentiates between this scenario (e.g. kid uses this site to access a nsfw subreddit) and an underage kid buying smokes with a fake ID.
In that scenario, the police don't just pick 1 entity to punish. The kid gets in trouble, the store (most likely) gets in trouble, and (if found) the fake ID supplier gets in trouble.
In the end, I hope that the owner of the website never has to find out exactly where and how the laws shake out, and that "it's a satirical website" is a strong enough defense. But from my armchair, I would suspect that the UK police/legislators would not look favorably on the "it's satire" defense. Especially because of this post which advertises that the fake ID works for some services, and there are under-18s on HN.
>Law often focus on intent.
I would expect that advertising that the IDs work on real services undermines any defense of "my intent was satire".
In the case of the underage kid, they are actually gaining something by using a fake ID to buy smokes for which they otherwise would not be able to buy. The situation that the website is promoting would be if the kid used an ID of an other underage kid, for which they would be equally denied to buy smokes with. The outcome (and intent) need to be one where the user do not gain anything practical.
I work at a domain registrar and I have yet to here anyone talking about criminal punishment for false registration data. I have also never heard about any one being charged for filling in the wrong phone or email address when signing up for a service or membership.
Looking at my local laws here in Sweden, the law text for identity fraud explicitly requires that the use of something else identity must result in some for of direct harm to the person. UK law could be different, but I have yet to hear something to indicate this.
>In the case of the underage kid, they are actually gaining something by using a fake ID to buy smokes for which they otherwise would not be able to buy.
The scenario I was comparing is an underage kid visiting this website, generating an ID, and accessing content that would otherwise be illegal for them to access by using the fake ID. In this scenario, everyone (potentially) would be in trouble, not just the website verifying the ID, just like an underage kid buying smokes with a fake ID.
The reason I mentioned domain registration was not because it is illegal to register a domain or anything of that sort. I mentioned it because it suggests the website owner is based in the UK, which is easy pickings for the UK government to pursue (if they choose to). If the website owner was based in Malaysia, it would be significantly harder for the UK to pursue any legal recourse against them (if they choose to).
If you can fool discords implementation with a video game character they can't actually be checking very well?
I certainly agree!
However, I doubt that's a strong legal argument.
What law is being broken here exactly?
It's certainly illegal to make fake IDs, but I don't know if that applies to just generating an image rather than fully forging a physical copy. And anyway these images look nothing like the real IDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_...
Hmm, yeah. It’s almost as if they deliberately made them look less like the real ID’s, because I have little doubt that openai would be perfectly capable of generating that image.
Another thing to think about is that this is just passthrough from an AI model. If it's illegal to make a website that spits out fake IDs, then OpenAI is illegal until they filter them.
I'm not sure that argument would hold up legally. You could use an image editing site to create IDs and counterfeit currency as well, but such sites are legal.
Photoshop does not allow you to edit currency images.
https://go.photoshelter.com/brands/blog/photographers/blog/t...
This is only for images of money with a specific digital watermark; it doesn't detect the EURion constellation, so you can take your own and work with it just fine.
Your link is a 404 for me.
https://go.photoshelter.com/photographers/blog/this-is-what-...
Thank you!
Things like intent matter. You can go into your local library and photocopy an ID but it doesn't make the library culpable for providing fake IDs.
True but the wording of the act actually places the onus on the service provider to verify the identities, not on the user to give them. It would be Discord in this case having to make the legal defence.
>It would be Discord in this case having to make the legal defence.
There's no rule that only 1 entity can get in trouble.
If I use a fake ID to by smokes while underage, I will definitely get in trouble for that and the store that sold me the smokes may also get in trouble (depending on how realistic the ID is, etc.). If the provider of my fake ID is found, they also get in trouble.
I haven't yet heard a compelling argument why this website (who, in the analogous scenario above, would be the fake ID provider) would not be subject to the same logic.
I hope that the defense of "this is a satirical website" is strong enough (or preferably, it never even has to be put to the test), however given what I've gathered about the general attitude UK legislators have regarding the internet, I think it is more likely that they would do anything in their power to try and punish someone operating a site like this.
Which actually does not refute GPs query. Breaking a Masterlock or Abus is the same in the eye of the law.
> I like the spirit but wouldn't this run afoul of one or two laws? Identity fraud or some such?
I would say not, but then again I'm no lawyer.
There's plausible deniability in that there's a big "this is satire" watermark on top of the licence. The DOB in part 3 is wrong, and the driver number in part 5 is modified to include the 5 letters of the surname, but is otherwise incorrect. The DOB encoded in the licence number doesn't even match the wrong DOB in part 3 either.
If anything accepts this as valid ID, then it just shows how farcical the system is.
What does the online safety act actually say about this? It's only supposed to be age verification, and if you are actually old enough does it matter how you proved it?
Many of the age verification services explicitly promise not to retain photos!
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/part/4/chapter/...
It talks explicitly about verifying your identity, not your age, so no loopholes today I'm afraid
.. for Category 1 services. I've already noted that several age verification services explicitly promise _not_ to retain your identity.
I'm having trouble working out what's category 1. Schedule 1 defines exemptions https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/schedule/1/part... ; otherwise this refers OFCOM to "critera" which I can't find.
As I understand it, Wikipedia are seeking judicial review of OFCOM's placing them in category 1, which requires the most stringent checks including identity.
I made no mention of identity retention.
The only way you'd ever get found out is if the affected MP was lying to the public and the identity documents do indeed get retained...
The generated addresses aren't real. It gave a London address for my MP; I know where he lives and it isn't London.
Most MPs' home addresses are actually quite easy to find. Mine's was printed below his name on the ballot paper last election – a nice reminder of how we used to have a high-trust society. I doubt this practice will be continued for much longer.
Yeah the address on all the IDs is for parliament. I assume one could find em there
>The only way you'd ever get found out is if the affected MP was lying to the public and the identity documents do indeed get retained...
I'm more talking about the developer of the site rather than the users. And the developer could potentially be found out if they posted it on a popular hacking website and used a known alias and registered the domain in the UK.
But, if they're comfortable, all the more power to them. As I said, I do really like the spirit of the site.
If I was that developer, I'd blacklist embedding of all British MPs and councilors to avoid fraud. This would also block the entire UK political class from accessing adult materials (I got blocked by a wine forum), which would be a very effective protest...
I agree, the UK Police wouldn't typically let you get away with "it's just a joke". This would constitute a mixture of identity theft, fake ID and misuse of computers.
It's literally just sticking the MPs name into an AI and asking for it to generate a mock ID for them. None of their real data is being used (e.g. their face, their DoB, the address) and the mock IDs wouldn't fool anyone for a second. I'd love if someone who understands the law would weigh in though
I don't think "It was actually ChatGPT that committed the crime, not me" would fly in a British court.
That's an interesting question, though.
We hold that LLMs are incapable of generating copyrighted images, so it's not just a tool - if it was just a tool then the author would be able to copyright the images. The courts recognise that an LLM is capable of generating things in its own right (which is why they're not copyrightable - copyrights only protect human works).
So it follows that an LLM must be able to create images itself, separate from the human prompter.
Whether that's enough to absolve the human of the crime, though - IANAL, and I suspect it would take the House of Lords to rule on it definitively.
You're overthinking it. You're building on your own definition of what a tool is, but courts are likely to find that a person who used an AI with a specific type of prompt were using it as a tool and are responsible for the clearly stated intent behind their use.
Whether that's actually legal in this case I don't know, but I'm pretty sure courts won't conclude "welp, it was the AI, not the user" in a case like this.
Yeah, probably you're right. Though it is an interesting thing to overthink - we have decided that LLMs are not tools for copyright but are tools for accountability. At some point they'll get smart enough to be accountable, and what happens then?
the law is pretty fickle that way. It's illegal to rob a bank no matter how badly you bungle it. Saying afterwards "but my gun was clearly made of plastic" probably won't get you completely off the hook if you actually threatened someone with it and asked for money (this site is literally titled Use Your Local MP's ID - it's expressing an intent).
Does the AI has access to newspapers? If John Doe is a MP, then he is probably the most famous Joe Doe in the last 5 years and the AI may grab his photo from a newspaper. I don't know about the national ID in UK, but here in Argentina the national ID number is public. A lot of public documents include "John Doe (DNI 23.456.789)", and the are sites where you can search it (the DB has problems with almost coalitions, so you may get a number 23.456.789 from one "John X. Doe" that is a 50yo in Buenos Aires and another "John Y. Doe" with number 59.876.653 that is a 3yo in Ushuaia, so in many cases it's easy to guess)
> I don't know about the national ID in UK
There isn't one.
^coalitions^collisions
It does use their face
It's better to be safe than sorry. For your own best interest, I would shut down the site and delete this post.
Comply in advance. It's the #1 way to make illegal laws work!
“Don’t upset the autocrats!”
You jest, but a barrister was threatened with arrest while holding a blank piece of paper on the protest: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/barrister-threatened-...
I wasn’t jesting. I was (too) obliquely saying that when we all hasten to accede to the autocrats before they even ask, we become complicit in huge social evils.
I’m not suggesting that everyone most do self-immolation, but if it were me, I would draw the line at being afraid of being “caught” for an obvious prank using no PII. Screw that, come arrest me if things have really gotten that bad.
Thank you, I didn't get it previously. I completely agree.
You kid, but that's very good advice in most human societies at most points in history.
It's not just a joke, it's parody and political commentary right?
I've scribbled 'this is satire' across each and every generated ID, so they can't realistically be used for anything.
You could go with misuse of computers, but unless the ID’s are actually used by yourself it’s not identity theft right?
Chinese Netizens are very familiar with Xi Jinping's national ID number precisely for this reason :-)
ID verification is enforced on all Chinese websites. People figured out they can just use Xi's ID number.
This is not true. A) personal ID numbers are not publicly available (you could certainly get your hands on some, but I doubt a lot would know Xi's ID), and B) more importantly, nowadays ID verification in China uses more sophisticated methods, e.g. in order to not be restricted when playing games, users need to prove they are over 18. The user would permit the game to verify through a payment provider such as Alipay (I don't think one would even need to give their ID to the game, as it is handled by Alipay which has done KYC already).
Although I suspect such ... "innovations" ... would soon get to the western world including UK.
> ID verification is enforced on all Chinese websites.
Is that really true? So search engines? News sites? Pseudo-anonymous discussion forums?
Don't listen to the sibling commenter who doesn't know what they're talking about.
No, you don't need ID verification to use search engine or read news in China.
However, sites that depend on user-generated content (like forums) would ask for at least your phone number.
How easily can a burner be used?
Are sim cards easily swapped?
> Are sim cards easily swapped?
Very easily. Apple even specifically introduced dual-sim iPhone for China.
> How easily can a burner be used?
You need to bring your ID to a telecom to get a phone number legally. But I don't know if there is a black market for burner sims.
(Last time I've been there was a few years ago so take it with a grain of salt.)
Burner sims have been a thing of the past in China for quite some time. The official rationale I believe is to curb telecom fraud, which in turn left China and started doing their business in southeast Asia.
> Very easily. Apple even specifically introduced dual-sim iPhone for China.
Because they don't support eSIMs there.
There is no such thing as "burner". Phone number is very hard to get and requires ID verification and sorts
It's very easy to get. As a visitor, I got one in the airport for $20. "ID verification" is stretching it, but like so many things in China it requires the vendor to take a photo of your ID, and unusually also to take a photo of you and submit it to the telecom website.
Have you tried to use it to register for any website? It likely won't work.
Not sure about now. It was before the covid. Keep in mind everything is done via weechat anyway now days.
Anyone from behind the great wall care to comment? Is HN event reachable from behind the great wall with out Tor?
No, but some features are locked until you do. For example, you can join voice chat rooms on Xiaohongshu, but can’t turn on your camera until you verify ID. You can join others’ broadcasts but you can’t create your own, etc
You can have "read" access anonymously (with a big asterisk, see the end), but as soon as you need "write" access, the service provider (the website etc) is legally required to verify your ID. It's why there's no pseudo-anonymous discussion forum in China, at least legally.
Source: https://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2016-11/07/content_5129723.htm
> Cybersecurity Law of the People's Republic of China, Article 24: When network operators provide users with network access, domain name registration services, fixed-line and mobile phone network access procedures, or provide users with information publishing, instant messaging and other services, they shall require users to provide real identity information when signing an agreement with the user or confirming the provision of services. If the user does not provide real identity information, the network operator shall not provide the relevant services to the user.
The big asterisk: there's no anonymous internet service in China, you have to ID yourself to get access to the internet (article 24), and the service provider are required to keep record of you (IP and everything) (article 21), and they are also required to cooperate with the authority (no surprise here) (article 28). And using VPN or Tor is likely illegal (article 27).
Yes. You need an ID to use the internet.
What about visitors?
You don't need an ID just to use the internet in China...
Roaming is VPN. And if you want fast one outside firewall you can grab HK esim like soSIM. And this one only needs any passport photo w/o face verification.
Stop talking nonsense.
lol on a much lighter note, for many years I used to use 111-111-1111 as a general phone number for CVS card discounts. It stopped working several years ago though.
As a Canadian I was lost and confused when visiting the States (in the before time) and a gas pump asked for my zip code. So I put in the one and only zip code I know. I bet you can guess.
Glad you could come visit from Beverly Hills ;)
EDIT: actually, depending on your age and what you watched on TV, maybe you were visiting from Boston?
I used to use that one too, but you're supposed to put the 3 numerical digits of your postal code followed by 00. (I have no idea how you're supposed to know that though.)
Really? Or does that just work because it's numbers? I can't imagine how that's useful because without the letters the same 12300 could be in Vancouver or Montreal couldn't it?
I don't know much about credit card validation, but I have the impression that the zipcode is just one more correlation that tells them you're more likely to be the real owner of the card.
If the 3 numbers I type match the 3 digits of the owner's postal code, it's probably a reasonable signal that I'm the owner (even without the letters).
Ubow Tubu Wobun Thrube Fubor?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHjMEwZt5OE
Close!
https://youtu.be/XanjZw5hPvE?si=Og-5iyLzjxebT6EF
I was inputting for ages.
Did it work?
It probably did. I was in the us this summer and was similarly confused that the pump wanted a us zip code for a foreign card. I input the zip for the address i was staying at and it worked...
Huh. I'd always assumed the zip code was validated against the card's billing address but maybe it's actually for some kind of market research. I'll have to try myself.
Yeah. Random numbers wouldn’t but it did. I assumed it had to be a valid zip code.
This reminds me: I've noticed that Starbucks now requires a few pieces of information to use their WiFi network. One is email and they are doing some sort of validation which will reject emails like whoopsileanedonxxxxxxxx@aol.com but will accept other, legit AOL emails. How are they deciding what is/not a valid email? Are they using a compiled list of emails that have been seen in the wild? What if it's a brand new address, though? Presumably AOL isn't exposing a service for them to use in realtime. I haven't tested this extensively or with other providers.
It's obvious that they care (to some extent) that they're getting valid emails, so why not use a basic regex on the FE and an OTP which gets sent to the provided address?
They can connect to a mail server and pretend that they are going to send a message and the server would reject the invalid recipient email.
I had no idea this was possible. This sounds almost like an HTTP OPTION request. I'd love to find an example of client code which does this.
You're looking for the SMTP VRFY and EXPN commands. However implementation is very hit-or-miss. In the good ole' days of the internet, VRFY was widely implemented. Then spammers realized they could connect to a mailserver and do a form of a VRFY dictionary attack to find valid addresses, so it stopped being supported.
> why not use a basic regex on the FE and an OTP which gets sent to the provided address?
I can't prove I control an email in order to use your wifi, if I can't use your wifi.
Some wifi networks give you a limited number of minutes online during which you need to click a verification link they've emailed you in order to not get cut off.
That's a great point. I guess I'm so conditioned to various 2FA methods that I take some amount of access (i.e. mobile) for granted.
Use *@example.com, it usually works.
XXX-867-5309 still works everywhere I try it, where "XXX" is the local area code.
I have also used XXX-555-1212, and it has worked everywhere.
I used 888-888-8888 at Target yesterday. Shhh.
Lookup the stores phone number of maps. That usually works.
If you really want to piss off the UK government, add a comment section.
I think this is a fun project, but I'm not sure I'd leave this up for much longer.
MPs can be litigious. Especially if this is seen to be enabling things like ID fraud.
Also, there are only 650 constituencies. I would pre-populate the list so when entering a new postcode, it doesn't stall waiting for AI.
MPs will be immediately trying to hang the civil service for telling them this was a good idea. Don't expect legal action. Do expect buck passing.
I wish there was a modern day version of "Yes, [Prime] Minister" for this kind of stuff. It's like the episodes could write themselves by the week.
In Australia we have a show called "Utopia" that does fill this gap reasonably well. Australian politics are close enough to the UK that it'd probably translate well enough to be enjoyable.
I've heard many government workers say that it's funny but they can't watch it, as it's so accurate it's depressing.
Just seconding a vote for Utopia (2014), and also its (better!) predecessor The Hollowmen (2008).
Well having worked for the government in an ancillary security role about 20 years ago on contract, I don't think they could produce a parody notably worse than reality to use as a contrast. Today, I suspect it is worse.
Hire an expert they said. From the pool of experts they had heard about through contacts in the civil service. None of whom have any industry or real world experience. At best, someone was on an industry eating and drinking with the right people panel. I was there for 3 months and crawled back to my previous job cap in hand, bruised and educated.
It was long enough ago that I can away with rounding errors of months on my CV thank goodness...
It is worthy of note that most of the incidents in Yes, Minister were based on things that really happened. At some level it was more curation than invention.
"The Thick Of It", but even that's quite old now.
Political satire is kind of dead in an age of unironic stupidity.
Not really. I was a civil servant and gave advice on this.
Civil servants aren't there to say whether a policy is good, sensible, or a vote-winner. The CS policy profeasion is there, in part, to advise on risks. Ministers decide whether to accept those risks.
There were plenty of people (like me) who would have pointed out the various risks and problems. Some of which caused policy to change, and some were accepted.
I don't think I've ever seen in recent years the CS be blamed for something like this.
The generated images are very obviously AI fakes. I don't think anyone is going to be seriously fooled by this.
> I would pre-populate the list so when entering a new postcode, it doesn't stall waiting for AI.
It looks like it already works like this? It was slow the first time I searched for my postcode, subsequent times have been very fast.
> I don't think anyone is going to be seriously fooled by this.
Do you think porn sites are more interested in a) correctly preventing unauthorized people from accessing their site, or b) selling as many subscriptions as they can while nominally complying with the law?
The AI should generate nude photos festooned in kink accessories, brown noses, pearl necklaces, and dripping facials.
I wouldn't say they’re “obviously” AI fakes.
I’m not from the UK, so I’m not familiar with what their IDs are supposed to look like.
I was suspicious, though—the hands holding the ID cards looked kind of “crispy.” But at the same time, I thought, “woah, where did the website owner even get these photos?” It wasn’t until I read the Hacker News post that I realized they were all AI-generated (and now cached).
And here’s the thing: I’m an engineer at Apple with decades of experience in the tech industry—I’m not exactly new to this stuff. If I got fooled even for a couple of seconds, imagine how easy it would be to trick someone who isn’t technical.
The text is slightly misaligned and weird-looking; it screams "AI". The hand holding the ID looks like CGI. And the photos don't look anything like the actual MP, at least for the ones that I tried.
There's also some obvious tells if you know what UK driving licenses look like: the layout is wrong, the background is too plain, and all the anti-forgery features are missing. Real licenses have much more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_...
> I wouldn't say they’re “obviously” AI fakes.
I'd say they're obviously AI fakes, just trying a few: B249AL (it made her bald), SA487AB (different shape, hair color and hair), TN248DF (it grew his hair back), HA26ND (bald, again) and NG166QE (I don't even need to explain)...
You want a different photo each time to avoid easy filter lists.
Sure, if you offer to pay the bill for the Image generation, I'm sure they would love to implement this feature
A little random crop, tilt/pan, defocus, noise, etc, would be free-ish.
It looks like the code was/is going to be published?
From the FAQ:
> How did you do this?
> This site uses React for the frontend and Node.js for the backend. The MP data is fetched from the UK government public API, and the AI-generated images use the latest model from open AI. The images are stored on a Cloudflare R2 bucket. The code is open source, so you can check it out on GitHub. It was done in a hurry.
The git repo linked from that FAQ shows a 404: https://github.com/timje/use-my-mps-id
This is great. Weaponising the stupidity of the idea, compromising it entirely until it's so obviously ineffectual it's unenforceable, then going after the politicians who pushed it for the waste of money and effort.
Create a scandal. Bad PR is the only way out now.
This is the sort of thing that brought me into tech in the first place, before it became the villain it had started off fighting: humorous, effective pushback against stodgy power structures. More please!
Your MP
Err, Stafford has been Labour since the last election, and before that it was a Conservative, but it was Theodora Clarke. Mike Wood is MP for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire.Surely the way you build something like this is a postcode -> constituency table (I assume available free), a constituency -> mp table, and mp -> image generation (with caching or generate multiple versions)
Even if the lookup data mis-selected the constituency (I think some postcodes can straddle constituencies), surely the Constituency/Name/Party would be consistent.
I'm guessing you're using chat-gpt for the entire program?
Nope! Office of national statistics published a CSV for postcode -> constituency name [ https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/datasets/6f2f35a9a0b94e7... ], and then the official gov.uk parliament API for a constituency name -> MP lookup [ https://members-api.parliament.uk/index.html ]. So all of the data is the officially available data. I humbly posit that this is a publicly owned bug.
I would guess you're taking the constituency name and doing something like this:
https://members-api.parliament.uk/api/Location/Constituency/...
returns three constituencies, all of which look fine to me, but the "Stafford" one is the middle, and you're using the data from the first returned constituency
How does this new policy not end with promising upstart political careers being torpedoed when the party in power “accidentally” leaks their porn history? There is no way the intelligence community doesn’t have a back door to this. Vote how we want on this bill or your embarrassing history just gets found
If you are just looking to get pass the age check: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU9K1LsgX7c
will do it.
it's a bit buried in the FAQ - if you're a non-UK user like I am and just want to see what the output looks like, Keir Starmer's postcode is WC2B6NH so inputting that will give you an already-generated example of the output.
> Keir Starmer's postcode is WC2B6NH
It's actually the postcode of a WeWork in Holborn (which happens to be in Starmer's constituency.)
Keir Starmer's postcode is SW1A 2AA.
This is so good. Not only does it get you past the verification screen, it infects the next generation of AI models with AI slop, and it adds MPs to a list of suspicious names that are likely fraud. That means that it ruins the Internet for MPs, which is just wonderful. Like, I legitimately think that Starmer might have extra trouble signing up for things now.
All in all, one of those ideas that sounds good on the surface, but the more you think about it the better it gets.
This sounds funny but it probably gets you sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in the King's coal mine or something similarly draconian.
The government has a monopoly on violence and I believe they will use their violence here.
I am not a layer but identity theft is a first thing that comes to mind
Always tells me that the MP wasn't found for my selected area.
Just like any other interaction with your local MP…
Hey now, mine's pretty responsive. Just the response is about as useful as letting a chimp at a typewriter.
Ah, you must be a Clacton resident then
what's the postcode?
When I tried it with the Walthamstow constituency the ID used a , as a date separator instead of a .
Seems odd, but probably wouldn't be noticed by an automated validator anyway.
They're definitely not perfect. I wouldn't want them to be perfect, then they might be used for something nefarious. The mock IDs use fake details and fake faces, and don't even attempt to get the watermarks and machine readable parts right.
Are you just using ChatGPT api to make the images? I’m surprised it would let you make driving licenses.
If so it’d be kinda crazy to go after you if anyone can just make an image like this in ChatGPT anyway.
It get all sorts of complaints from it and then it eventually says it’ll make one but only someone similar and only similar to a uk licensed and then makes something pretty close to reality - but not as recognisable as yours.
Are the generated images supposed to look like the MP? they look nothing like it as far as I can see.
I think so, Keir Starmer and several others show plausible faces.
On the otherhand Ashfield (NG178DA) fails spectacularly.
> On the otherhand Ashfield (NG178DA) fails spectacularly.
Like its MP
I'd be interested to know which if any of the ID verification services were fooled by this.
The UK has been a police state for decades, why are people surprised by this?
Compared to where?
Always tells me an MP can't be found despite multiple attempts.
Seems like open AI is rate limiting me for a minute, I didn't expect to get top of HN this quickly. Use Starmer's for now - WC2B6NH
Why didn't you just create the images for all 650 MPs ahead of time?
Because that's expensive as hell and I didn't know if anyone would visit the site..
Ideally you would save them as they were generated, and deliver the saved version the second time?
Yup, that's what happens. If you request a postcode that leads to an MP that's not been seen before, it starts generating that MP and saves the ongoing promise, and gives that promise to everyone else to asks for that MP.
Had to make sure to implement this so that I didn't end up generating duplicates.
Really? Does it really cost that much to generate a single image like this?
yeah to generate a photo of reasonable quality it costs like $.18, so multiply that by 650ish MPs and you have a pretty expensive lil parody site...
Make hay while the sun shines. ~$120 upfront would make this an order of magnitude more expensive than a vanity domain name already, but if you had precomputed and cached them you’d be capitalizing on the viral momentum.
Are you putting in a valid UK postcode?
Won’t the government force these websites to do some kind of stronger identity verification in the future? I worry that it’ll even come with broader support when the EU or whoever implements ID verification for protecting children or banning misinformation or whatever.
>Won’t the government force these websites to do some kind of stronger identity verification in the future?
These heckin' kids needs more protection. I suggest banning all VPNs too, only this way kids are truly protected like they are in China and Iran.
No, they ll require you to put a camera in your home to watch you while you verify your identity online.
This way they will know for sure that it was you who upload your id. Then they will need someone else to watch the camera in case it gets tampered with.
This is hilarious. Very well done.
>It's a small, silly protest at the stupidity of the Online Safety Act that just came into force. The IDs actually work (for Reddit, Discord etc.) which highlights how terrible this implementation is.
Could you give a short TL;DR of how ids are constructed so we can all laugh here in comments?
it's literally just the MPs name. It's a fake DoB (because their DoB's aren't public knowledge anymore) all the numbers and such are nonsense, the images wouldn't fool a human for one second. The AI tools don't let you generate an ID for any real human being (because that sounds like all sorts of fraud) so you can't upload a picture of the MP or anything like that - so I just let the model fill in whatever face it thinks is appropriate for the given name.
> because their DoB's aren't public knowledge anymore
Most are on Wikipedia, no?
Even if they weren't, most MPs will be old enough that their top level Birth Records are available, so if they don't have a common name or you know enough biographical details you can find them anyway. If they've got a weird name like Elon Musk you just go name -> DOB in one step, if they're a Sarah Black maybe you need to know approximate age, birth name, rough part of the country where they were born. For super common names like John Smith you will need to know the mother's name, year and specific location of birth at which point yeah you're closer to just knowing their DoB anyway.
where are these public birth records?
https://www.freebmd.org.uk/
I'm a bit out of the loop and not familiar with the whole thing. Do you just submit a plausibly real name and any DOB that is older than 18 and a picture? Does the thing crosscheck the name + dob with a demographic database (does UK has any)?
The Online Safety Act is completely stupid - it just requires "age verification". Various sites have outsourced this to various providers, most of which are American. The age verifiers in turn just look at the image, generally algorithmically without human intervention, and go "seems legit". There is no single national UK ID database that could be used for this purpose - everything is either partial, doesn't include photos (e.g. electoral roll), or isn't public (passport DB).
It's all just random third party shit with zero government oversight. There's no national ID in the UK because even the mildest mention of a voluntary national ID scheme leads to gnashing of teeth and wailing about how it's fascist and a violation of our civil liberties and everyone is happy pissing about with driving licenses or passports or utility bills to prove who you are.
love this, nice work
'MP not found for that postcode.'
Meta: typo in title, says "Dd" instead of "Id".
My bad, fixed now.
uk ain't playin' these days, i would take it down if you are under their jurisdiction
World belongs to the brave.
In UK you get arrested for a mere tweet if it hurts anyone's feelings and it's called democracy. Unbelievable.
Btw UK surpassed Russia in these kinda arrests
OP's comment is only slightly misleading. Per the myth detector [1]:
".... similar comparisons, stating that 3,300 people were arrested in the UK while only 400 in Russia, have circulated on social media for years. The original source of this claim is Konstantin Kisin, a Russia-born, half-British comedian, writer, and podcast co-host. His interview, where he makes this comparison [at 26:26], was recorded in 2019, based on data from 2016-2017.
For years, social media users have relied on Kisin’s statements to compare Russia and the UK. Many refer to data from the human rights group Agora, which reported that 411 people faced prosecution in Russia in 2017 for social media activity. In the majority of cases, media users were accused of [....] what authorities consider provocative content. On the other hand, UK comparisons are often based on a 2017 article in The Times, which cited 2016 data showing that over 3,300 people were arrested or questioned under Section 127 of the Communications Act. However, the same article notes that in half of these cases, investigations were dropped before prosecution. Additionally, Section 127 is not limited to social media, and it also applies to emails and other forms of electronic communication. Moreover, the Russian figure represents prosecutions, while the UK figure represents arrests, making the comparison inappropriate for many reasons. For example, the content of the clauses differs: in the UK, they are applied to a broader range of cases, while the data from Russia reflects arrests for the activity on social media. Additionally, the analysis of cases shows the difference between the two countries in the application of the laws. In Russia, many citizens and journalists have been arrested for expressing critical opinions or posting government-opposed views on social media. It is also worth noting that in the UK, cases brought under Section 127 that result in citizens being subjected to community service or fines are often debated."
The article I've cited mainly discusses a comparison by Guri Sultanishvili which is harder to justify, but Konstantin Kisin's comments have been more widely referenced in the public debate.
[1] https://mythdetector.com/en/free-expression-on-the-internet/