UK government quietly cancels "age verification" system that would have compiled a database of every Briton's sexual fantasies

Since the days of David Cameron, the UK has been pressing ahead on a plan to force every British person who wants to see pornography to register as an adult through a private-public partnership (administered by a Canadian porn monopolist that pretends to be a Luxembourg company) before they could see sexy times on the internet.

This plan was so stupid, it burned. First of all, kids in the UK could simply avail themselves of a VPN and handily evade the No Sex Please We're British scheme. Second of all, anyone foolish enough to partake of this scheme would be voluntarily compiling a database of kompromat that when -- not if, when -- it leaked could be used to comprehensively compromise them from a[rse|ss]hole to appetite.

The only reason that the British public was not furious about this was that no one knew it was in the offing: the scheme was meant to go into effect on July 15, but as of March, 76% of the country didn't know about it.

The plan has been brought forward and then delayed innumerable times. Now, it seems, it has been shelved "indefinitely" (whatever that means in a country with no effective leadership that is steamrollering towards the most spectacularly idiotic act of political suicide in living memory). The government has made no announcements, but when the Guardian chased up a rumour from Sky (backed by various anonymous sources in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport), HMG "did not deny" that the plan had been scrapped.

It's remarkable to see HMG climb down from something idiotic and technoligically illiterate and badly-thought-through, really an off-brand moment for the Conservatives.