Hmm. Ofcom (the UK regulator for communications) has announced initial investigations on a handful of companies and their sites that are not obeying new ID requirements for porn as part of the Online Safety Act:

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/investigation-into-8579-llcs-compliance-with-the-duty-to-prevent-children-from-encountering-pornographic-content-through-the-use-of-age-assurance

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/investigation-into-avs-group-ltds-compliance-with-the-duty-to-prevent-children-from-encountering-pornographic-content-through-the-use-of-age-assurance

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/investigation-into-trendio-ltds-compliance-with-the-duty-to-prevent-children-from-encountering-pornographic-content-through-the-use-of-age-assurance

But amusingly by doing this, they are naming a bunch of web sites that do not verify their users ID in order to view porn, how convenient!

I'm not quite sure how they're planning to prosecutor some of these especially given that one of them ( Trendio Ltd ) is a dissolved company in the UK register, and the only known director is based in Morocco.

I guess this is a prelude to court ordered blockings...

@benjojo but if you were to allegedly visit www.shemale.pub there's an age barrier right there!

I would go seeking "tranny porn" (in the title of shemale.pub) but thankfully can shortcut this by looking in the mirror.

@dee Oh! Facinating, when I went to some of those earlier (I promise to just double check ofcom's claim :P) it was not showing those banners, I guess that has happened within the last ~30 mins!

@benjojo yeah, these will probably be test cases as a preliminary to ISP-level blocking

@WiteWulf @benjojo

how is this block done? is it IP or DNS based?

@John @benjojo the ones I saw when I was on Vermin media were IP based, and would redirect to a page saying access to the site was suspended. Not seen any of that since we moved to Zen, though.

@WiteWulf @benjojo

A large number of ISPs seemingly are not bothering to host their own DNS anymore youfibre my ISP gives out 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 as the default DNS servers.

@John @WiteWulf That's interesting, Are you sure you have not manually configured that? I see a bunch of youfiber CPE's using revolvers 185.154.147.10 / 185.154.147.12 - aka from their ASN

@benjojo @WiteWulf it was what I was told to do when I setup it, It's a business line with a static if that changes anything

@John @WiteWulf oh yes, that definitely changes things! It's a lot more common for business lines to be configured with public DNS resolvers rather than the ISP ones!

@WiteWulf @John @benjojo Fun fact: Virgin Media's DPI parses HTTP headers case-sensitively. "Host: sci-hub.wf" (for example) will get blocked, while "hOsT: sci-hub.wf" won't. Unfortunately this is quite useless as most websites use HTTPS and this doesn't work there (presumably they use SNI, at least for websites behind cloudflare and similar things, so ECH should solve this)