After the British spilled the beans with the Online Safety Act 2023 (Effective today), I wondered if there were any leaks I could use to prove forced verification is not the way the internet should be built, parents need to be liable for such things children do, not the server room hosted in Vietnam, I may not agree what the servers contain but this is not how you solve a problem.
Turns out a 4Chan user leaked hundreds of photos by finding a “public firebase storage bucket”. It has now been made private and gives an 403 error, but the damage is done, its already in torrents and there is no way to reverse such action.
Someone has already made a location list based on the photos (allegedly, I could not find such metadata in the photos yet).
Just wanted to make an informational post for fun, I cannot show any “illegal numbers” here, sorry.
I’ve been routing all of my traffic through UK-located VPN servers specifically to avoid shenanigans like this and the UK goes and fucks it up.
I can’t wait to arm wrestle all my accounts into allowing me to use Swiss servers. Mullvad doesn’t have enough Irish servers for me to reliably exit from there, that would be my top choice (English + GDPR). But then again, GDPR means a fraction of American sites don’t work.
I just really don’t like having my government or the governments of the places I travel to looking at my traffic. And now this ID shit is here. Just let me use the Internet goddamn it, I already pay out the ass for it.
pro-tip: find a small-ish VPS provider with decent reviews. prepaid debit card with $100 on it & an alias. easy, lonely wireguard exit.