For anyone unaware, a few months ago, the UK passed the Online Safety Act which means any online services that host any mature content must add age verification. This involves uploading a photo of yourself or some form of identification for a third-party service to approve, but a lot of people (myself included) are against this as they don't want their personal information being handled by potentially questionable companies — plus, there's the whole issue of data breaches that happen so often these days.
Many sites have been forced to add age verification, including the types of sites you're probably thinking of, plus more innocent ones like Reddit and Spotify.
Sadly, some sites don't see it economically feasible to implement age verification so they've blocked UK traffic outright. One of those sites being Imgur, which I rely on to host all my images.
As a result, all the images on my blog and my Inspiration Database (around 2,000 images in total) are now offline to UK readers.
I've figured out a way of saving them but I'll have to save and re-upload each one individually, so it's going to take me a while.
The fix
If you'd still like to see images on this blog or the Inspiration Database, you have a few options:
- Install the Imgur Unblock extension for your web browser, which is available for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. This is the cheapest (it's free) and easiest method. I use the Firefox one and it's amazing how well it works.
- Use your web browser's built-in VPN. Opera has a built-in one, as does Firefox.
- Use a paid VPN, such as Mullvad which is what I use.
I'll find an alternative image host that won't be subject to the OSA for my future posts. Hopefully, one day, the OSA will be repealed but since it's supported by the two main parties, I don't see it happening any time soon.
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