With the impending age verification requirements in a lot of jurisdictions,
I expect that running a BBS is going to get a lot more difficult in general. While there may be exemptions for smaller services, the question really
becomes how long that will last before they start tightening the screws.

The next few years are going to be Interesting in the ancient Chinese
proverb sort of way...

Re: Mandated age checking and
By: Firehawke to All on Mon Jun 29 2026 04:21 am

With the impending age verification requirements in a lot of jurisdictions,
I expect that running a BBS is going to get a lot more difficult in general. While there may be exemptions for smaller services, the question really becomes how long that will last before they start tightening the screws.

The next few years are going to be Interesting in the ancient Chinese
proverb sort of way...

Nothing will happen at all. There is nothing to be concerned about.

--
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looking after some of the richest clients in the world...Now we do!"


President of BBS Sysop's Union +++ https://bbses.info/union
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With the impending age verification requirements in a lot of jurisdictions, I expect that running a BBS is going to get a lot more difficult in general. While there may be exemptions for smaller services, the question really becomes how long that will last before they start tightening the screws.

The next few years are going to be Interesting in the ancient Chinese proverb sort of way...

All Americans across party lines need to call their US Senators to
reject the KIDS act, tightened internet is a threat to civil liberties
to all of us.

***wcTaglines: My reality check just bounced.
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Re: Mandated age checking and
By: Matthew Munson to FIREHAWKE on Mon Jun 29 2026 19:53:00

All Americans across party lines need to call their US Senators to
reject the KIDS act, tightened internet is a threat to civil liberties
to all of us.

With the first link, the chain is forged.
The first thought forbidden
The first speech censored
Chains us all irrevocably.
Judge Aaron Satie

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þ Synchronet þ End Of The Line BBS - endofthelinebbs.com

Re: Mandated age checking and
By: Mortar to All on Tue Jun 30 2026 09:56 am

With the first link, the chain is forged. The first thought forbidden The first speech censored Chains us all irrevocably. Judge Aaron Satie

Nice quote from Star Trek: The Next Generation. :)

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þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com

Re: Mandated age checking and
By: Mortar to All on Tue Jun 30 2026 09:56:35

Re: Mandated age checking and
By: Matthew Munson to FIREHAWKE on Mon Jun 29 2026 19:53:00

All Americans across party lines need to call their US Senators to reject
the KIDS act, tightened internet is a threat to civil liberties to all of
us.

With the first link, the chain is forged. The first thought forbidden The first speech censored Chains us all irrevocably. Judge Aaron Satie

or as The Doctor would say (in StarFleetAcademy):
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, us all irrevocably" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG2nWXLmL8g

=)

Mindsurfer

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Re: Mandated age checking and
By: Firehawke to All on Mon Jun 29 2026 04:21 am

I expect that running a BBS is going to get a lot more difficult in general.

Pretty sure the gubment forgot all about BBSes.

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Re: Mandated age checking and
By: Firehawke to All on Mon Jun 29 2026 04:21 am

With the impending age verification requirements in a lot of jurisdictions, I expect that running a BBS is going to get a lot more difficult in general. While there may be exemptions for smaller services, the question really becomes how long that will last before they start tightening the screws.

The next few years are going to be Interesting in the ancient Chinese proverb sort of way...

We've already seen this with Ofcom harassing small services. Many old forums just closed up shop in anticipation of being harassed.

But it's also true that maanaging such a bureaucracy costs money and time. They can use AI to detect and automate contact (threat letters), but pulling every possible small time operator into the system would be prohibvitively expensive.

So I think BBS's aren't going to be b.. targeted by this any time soon. Maybe in 10 years once the machinery has been polished and all the bigger and medium sized scalps have been taken.

Ofr course, VPNs are next on the choipping block in the UK. So anything is possible.

Buckle up.

-Hx

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Re: Mandated age checking and
By: Hebrix to Firehawke on Tue Jul 07 2026 02:00 pm

Ofr course, VPNs are next on the choipping block in the UK. So anything is possible.

VPNs are only good for bypassing/tricking geofencing. Otherwise they are a scam. The "privacy" thing is bullshit. That's the commercial/public VPNs, I'm talking about. Not like using a VPN to get into your home or business network.

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Re: Mandated age checking and
By: phigan to Hebrix on Thu Jul 09 2026 11:38 am

Ofr course, VPNs are next on the choipping block in the UK. So anything is possible.

VPNs are only good for bypassing/tricking geofencing. Otherwise they are a scam. The "privacy" thing is bullshit. That's the commercial/public VPNs,

If a VPN doesn't leak your IP to the sites you visit, then it's not a scam. Whether or not it leaks the info to the authorities is another matter.

-Hx

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Re: Mandated age checking and
By: Hebrix to phigan on Fri Jul 10 2026 02:23 pm

If a VPN doesn't leak your IP to the sites you visit, then it's not a sca Whether or not it leaks the info to authorities is another matter.

For hiding my IP from the place I'm connecting to, there are plenty of places I could tunnel through.. but.. What's the use case for hiding your IP from the place you are connecting to? I suppose you could be trying to use multiple accounts for something that only allows one account per household? (On a side note, that def isn't 'privacy'). I would think the authorities would be who you'd hide your IP from. It's not like random people could get your real personal information by having your IP, but authorities certainly can. Also as long as authorities have access too all upstream providers (and they do), they can tell who all connections are to/from regardless of using a VPN or even TOR (most of the time, outside of the Onion network).

Those public VPNs that charge money
are a total waste of money. Get yourself a super cheap VPS and tunnel through that. Also, there are TONS of free proxies and whatnot out there, too.

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Re: Mandated age checking and
By: phigan to Hebrix on Fri Jul 10 2026 05:09 pm

What's the use case for hiding your IP

1) It negates traffic analysis for advertisers and makes their business of shoving ads into people's face less profitable, which is good.

2) If some website discriminates you based on region or IP pool then IP switching protects you from discrimination.

3) If you do any sort of network/service engineering, it is often nice to VPN into an external adress for running tests against your network from an IP that does not belong to your network.

But also, when it comes to tunneling specifically:

4) You might be in a LAN that enforces stupid policies and blocks certain legit sites. Punching a hole through a tunnel in order to access those sites might be your only option (ethics of this are debatable but IMO if traffic does not generate trouble for anybody, then this is fair game. I don't believe there is a thing such as a victimless ethical infraction).

5) You might want your provider not to analyze your traffic so tunneling is a good protection if you don't want the LAN administrator to know you are reading articles about erectile disfunction.


--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken

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Re: Mandated age checking and
By: Arelor to phigan on Tue Jul 14 2026 12:24 pm

3) If you do any sort of network/service engineering, it is often nice to VP

Sure, those are all valid points... and starting with #3, if you do any of that you aren't going to be relying on some crappy VPN provider and would have your own machine or VPS somewhere that you could do these things from.

My thought is that most people with any one or more of the reasons you listed would have (or at least know of) a better option than scammy VPN services.

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Re: Mandated age checking and
By: phigan to Hebrix on Thu Jul 09 2026 11:38 am

VPNs are only good for bypassing/tricking geofencing. Otherwise they are a scam. The "privacy" thing is bullshit. That's the commercial/public VPNs, I'm talking about. Not like using a VPN to get into your home or business network.

Bypassing geofencing is one of the main reasons I see advertised to use a VPN. As far as privacy, I thought there may be something to that, because a lot of people who torrent stuff recommend doing so on a VPN so that your ISP can't easily track what you're torrenting. I suppose using a VPN might not make it impossible to track, but maybe more difficult?

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Re: Mandated age checking and
By: Nightfox to phigan on Fri Jul 17 2026 02:17 am

into your home or business network.

Bypassing geofencing is one of the main reasons I see advertised to use a VPN. As far as privacy, I thought there may be something to that, because a lot of people who torrent stuff recommend doing so on a VPN so that your ISP can't easily track what you're torrenting. I suppose using a VPN might not make it impossible to track, but maybe more difficult?

I don't think it is realistic to police VPN traffic when it comes to things such as torrenting. But then, "professional" torrenters torrent from datacenters.

In fact there are torrent seups out there in which the torrenters have some 20 bay server in colocation in some datacenter who does not give a damn for DCMAs, and they often operate in closed pirate communities which are invite only, for trusted members only. Many of those communities either discourage the use of VPNs or outright ban it.

But as far as a regular user who torrents from a cheap NAS goes, an VPN does not look so bad because it is not trivial for an outsider to correlate torrent traffic going out of an VPN with the encrypted traffic you send into an VPN. It is not that it can't be done, but nobody is going to take the effort or doing endpoint traffic correlation against you in order to prevent you from downloading interracial.creampie.blowjob.bigtits.avi.

For a domestic torrenter, the bigest threats are ISPs and copyright enforcers. ISPs might take action against your torrent traffic for either legal or practical reasons but they don't care if you are downloading movies illegally. You are doing them a favor by tunelling your torrenting because that means they are not responsible for the traffic anymore. Copyright enforcers, on the other hand, run swarm analisys and notify the ISPs running the endpoints of illegal downloads that might be taking place - for a domestic user, if that notification goes to an ISP who does not care or who is not going to work hard to locate them, that is a huge win.


--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken

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