Effective July 15, British porn consumers will be required entrust their sexual tastes to private companies' badly secured databases

Back when David Cameron was Prime Minister, he took advice from Patrick Rock (later revealed to be a a trafficker in images depicting the abuse of children) on how to stop children from seeing internet pornography.

The solution they arrived at was bananas: every adult service in the UK would have to verify the identity of every user they had, assuring themselves that anyone who tried to look at porn was over 18. As the unworkability of this idea became more obvious, the UK government tried several different tacks: banning porn altogether, deputising newsagents to verify the identities of would-be porn viewers and then doling out official pornography-access cards; etc. Not everyone involved with these proposals was a child pornographer; some of them were merely vicious, technologically illiterate bullies.

Now, with Brexit hanging over the country, food poverty and homelessness at record highs, the pound crashing, and CO2 emissions at crisis levels, HMG has finally found the political will to crack on with their "No sex, please, we're British," plan.

Starting July 15, all websites that offer pornography will have to verify their visitors' age, primarily one operated by the Canada-based pornography monopolist Mindgeek, owners of Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, Brazzers, Digital Playground, Men.com, Reality Kings, and Sean Cody, and much, much more. Mindgeek will use credit-cards to validate users' ages, meaning that it will be producing a database of sexual kompromat, sortable by net worth, on every pornography-consuming person in the United Kingdom.

The British Board of Film Classification -- the national movie censor board -- will decide which sites will need to use "age verification" technology. Read the rest