Tuesday 15 May 2018

top priority

Despite having yet to formulate a clear and comprehensive divorce settlement from the European Union with crucial deadlines approaching, law-makers in the UK have devised a somewhat elegant solution to another crisis of their own making: namely, to prevent underage people from accessing on-line pornography, as Gizmodo reports, by enlisting kiosks and corner shops to sell passes for £10 (cheaper than identity-theft but still a strange, arbitrary sort of surcharge) with a sixteen digit code that will allow the bearer to access adult websites.
The newsstand agent (previously), purveyors of all sorts of vices, will verify that the purchaser is of majority age and is a filthy, raunchy deviant. While this method seems far preferable to having the government maintain a database on all of its porn-lookers (primed to fall into the hands of extortionists and opportunists) or demanding credit card information as a means of authentication with the exchange being essentially anonymous, it is still the lesser of two evils to implement and enforce a rather needless, ridiculous and unenforceable response to the latest moral panic.