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Pornhub will stop offering full access to new users in the UK on February 2, its parent company Aylo said Tuesday, citing the nation's Online Safety Act and its age-verification requirements. The company said users who already verified their ages before the cutoff will still be able to access the adult site through existing accounts.
The move follows the Online Safety Act's Protection of Children Codes, which took effect last summer and require adult sites to use "highly effective" methods of age verification. Aylo claims the system is backfiring and shifting both adults and minors to noncompliant porn sites that don't verify age or moderate content according to Politico. Aylo's lawyers argued that only device-based age verification methods sufficiently protect user data.
Alexzandra Kekesi, VP of Brand and Community at Aylo, said "anyone who has not gone through that process prior to February 2 will no longer be able to access [the sites] and they're going to be met with a wall," according to
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The French government is saying au revoir to Microsoft Teams and Zoom as it embraces a home-grown alternative. By next year, civil servants across all departments will have switched to French videoconference platform Visio, as EuroNews reports.
As with Teams and Zoom, Visio has an AI-powered transcription tool. Visio runs on a French company's cloud infrastructure as well. The platform has around 40,000 users and it's been in testing for the last year. The government expects the switch to help reduce costs by as much as €1 million ($1.2 million) each year for every 100,000 users.
The decision to ditch Microsoft Teams and Zoom is part of a broader effort to rely less on foreign software services — particularly US ones. Under the Suite Numérique project, France also plans to jettison the likes of Gmail and Slack for government use.
"The aim is to end the use of non-European solutions and guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool," David Amiel, minister for the civil service and state reform, said. "This strategy highlights France's commitment to digital sovereignty amid rising geopolitical tensions and fears of foreign surveillance or ser
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Owen Poole covers today's top tech stories, including how TikTok's new American owners will impact your feed. Plus, Apple announced an updated AirTag that promises to track things even more easily. The European Commission starts investigating Elon Musk's Grok for generating explicit images, following its bans in various countries.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced that his office is investigating whether TikTok is truly censoring content critical of Trump, days after ByteDance finalized a deal to spin off its business in the US. Newsom made the announcement in response to a post on X, claiming that you can no longer send messages in the app with the word "Epstein" in it. Newsom's office, in a separate post, said it was able to independently confirm instances wherein TikTok suppressed content critical of President Donald Trump.
The governor's office told Politico that it tried to send a direct message with the word "Epstein" in it and got a warning that it could not be sent because it may violate TikTok's community guidelines. Newsom's team is now "launching a review of this conduct and is calling on the California Department of Justice to determine whether it violates California law."
If you'll recall, ByteDance finalized a deal for a new US entity just as TikTok was about to be banned in the US. ByteDance only owns 19.9 percent of the new entity called the TikTok USDS Joint Venture, while the new investors own 80 percent. Oracle, Silver Lake and Emirati fund MGX have a 15 percent stake each. The US business will now retrain TikTok's algorithm on US data and will also be in charge of content moderation.
After the US entity's announcement, users started
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