Cloudflare starts blocking pirate sites for UK users

Shouldn't surprise absolutely nobody, once you become the gatekeeper of the Internet, you're going to gatekeep.

Now it's torrent sites and next it's going to be other things the party in charge doesn't like.

About a decade ago, there were proposals for a "driver's license for the internet."

Nowadays... I actually think it might be a lesser evil. Picture such an ID, if there were a standard for it, enrolled into your computer.

If it were properly built, your computer could provide proof of age, identity, or other verified attributes on approval. The ID could also have micro-transaction support, for allowing convenient pay-as-you-go 10 cents per article instead of paywalls, advertising, and subscriptions everywhere. Websites could just block all non-human traffic; awfully convenient in this era of growing spam, malware, AI slop, revenge porn, etc. Website operators, such as those of small forums, would have far less moderation and abuse prevention overhead.

Theoretically, it would also massively improve cybersecurity, if websites didn't actually need your credit card number and unique identity anymore. Theoretically, if it was tied to your ID, it's like Privacy.com but for every website; much lower transaction friction but much higher security.

I think that's the future at this rate. The only question is who decides how it is implemented.

German national ID has this built-in; you can cryptographically prove that you are currently in possession of an ID (and its PIN) over a certain age, for example, without revealing your date of birth. It's just not in widespread use.

Thank you for sharing this. I have been frustrated about the lack of chip and pin for IDs for years. We have had digital IDs in the form of debit/credit card since the 90s, and yet the governments have been agonizingly slow to adopt this (at least to me) painfully obvious idea. So good job Germany!