Show HN: Use Their Dd – Use your local UK MP's ID for the online safety act
587 timje1 153 7/28/2025, 9:49:10 PM use-their-id.com ↗
Hi HN -
I made a site that takes a UK postcode, grabs the local MP's information and generates an AI mockup of what their ID might look like.
It's a small, silly protest at the stupidity of the Online Safety Act that just came into force.
edit - My open AI credits got hugged to death, please use a known postcode (like one from Kier Starmer's constituency, WC2B6NH) in the meantime.
https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/commons/division/1926
So the Tories, who created this awful bill in the first place, are now voting against it? Clown country.
It wasn't a "time bomb". They introduced this legislation because they wanted it.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Labour voted in conservative policy. Conservatives voted against it. Reform, whilst all over the news for being against it, voted for it.
Have you ever met or spoken to a Conservative voter in your entire life?
Just as a slight correction – the only "Reform MP" that voted for it is James McMurdock, but he's no longer a Reform MP and I'm not sure why he is still listed as one here.
Neither did a lot of conservatives and labour, interestingly.
Greens and Lib Dems voted no, which raises my opinion of them.
Agreed its a mess.
Crap like Communications Act 2003 and Ofcom has been Labour policy for decades.
* https://legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/notes/division/3/in...
Here's the Conservative white paper on Online Harms from 2019, during the May government:
* https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/online-harms-whi...
That's just marketing from the right to discourage people with average income to vote left ("they want to give all your money to the immigrants!"). The only people the left doesn't want freedom for is those who are actively trying to take it away.
The bigger issue is that the left hasn't really existed in most countries for a long time, like the UK. "new labour" betrayed their heritage and adopted conservative points of view. Leaders who are trying to bring it back like Corbyn are ridiculed and marginalised.
Yes, I know. still much worse
That defeats the point of the legislation since it creates a gaping wide backdoor to exploit official people, who are now the most valuable targets because of that exemption.
Never mind the matter of providing a rule for the people and making the people who made the rule immune to it.
ID verification is enforced on all Chinese websites. People figured out they can just use Xi's ID number.
Is that really true? So search engines? News sites? Pseudo-anonymous discussion forums?
No, you don't need ID verification to use search engine or read news in China.
However, sites that depend on user-generated content (like forums) would ask for at least your phone number.
Are sim cards easily swapped?
Very easily. Apple even specifically introduced dual-sim iPhone for China.
> How easily can a burner be used?
You need to bring your ID to a telecom to get a phone number legally. But I don't know if there is a black market for burner sims.
(Last time I've been there was a few years ago so take it with a grain of salt.)
Because they don't support eSIMs there.
Anyone from behind the great wall care to comment? Is HN event reachable from behind the great wall with out Tor?
Source: https://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2016-11/07/content_5129723.htm
> Cybersecurity Law of the People's Republic of China, Article 24: When network operators provide users with network access, domain name registration services, fixed-line and mobile phone network access procedures, or provide users with information publishing, instant messaging and other services, they shall require users to provide real identity information when signing an agreement with the user or confirming the provision of services. If the user does not provide real identity information, the network operator shall not provide the relevant services to the user.
The big asterisk: there's no anonymous internet service in China, you have to ID yourself to get access to the internet (article 24), and the service provider are required to keep record of you (IP and everything) (article 21), and they are also required to cooperate with the authority (no surprise here) (article 28). And using VPN or Tor is likely illegal (article 27).
EDIT: actually, depending on your age and what you watched on TV, maybe you were visiting from Boston?
It's obvious that they care (to some extent) that they're getting valid emails, so why not use a basic regex on the FE and an OTP which gets sent to the provided address?
I can't prove I control an email in order to use your wifi, if I can't use your wifi.
I'm not in the UK, so I don't have any idea about their laws, but I'd be shocked to find this was above board. Your FAQ claims it's a parody site and claims "The ID number isn't valid and you can't use the card for anything real." but you've just confirmed here it can indeed be used for real things (discord, reddit).
Your domain registration is UK-based, so, be careful!
However, I doubt that's a strong legal argument.
It's certainly illegal to make fake IDs, but I don't know if that applies to just generating an image rather than fully forging a physical copy. And anyway these images look nothing like the real IDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_...
https://go.photoshelter.com/brands/blog/photographers/blog/t...
We hold that LLMs are incapable of generating copyrighted images, so it's not just a tool - if it was just a tool then the author would be able to copyright the images. The courts recognise that an LLM is capable of generating things in its own right (which is why they're not copyrightable - copyrights only protect human works).
So it follows that an LLM must be able to create images itself, separate from the human prompter.
Whether that's enough to absolve the human of the crime, though - IANAL, and I suspect it would take the House of Lords to rule on it definitively.
Whether that's actually legal in this case I don't know, but I'm pretty sure courts won't conclude "welp, it was the AI, not the user" in a case like this.
I’m not suggesting that everyone most do self-immolation, but if it were me, I would draw the line at being afraid of being “caught” for an obvious prank using no PII. Screw that, come arrest me if things have really gotten that bad.
Most MPs' home addresses are actually quite easy to find. Mine's was printed below his name on the ballot paper last election – a nice reminder of how we used to have a high-trust society. I doubt this practice will be continued for much longer.
I'm more talking about the developer of the site rather than the users. And the developer could potentially be found out if they posted it on a popular hacking website and used a known alias and registered the domain in the UK.
But, if they're comfortable, all the more power to them. As I said, I do really like the spirit of the site.
MPs can be litigious. Especially if this is seen to be enabling things like ID fraud.
Also, there are only 650 constituencies. I would pre-populate the list so when entering a new postcode, it doesn't stall waiting for AI.
> I would pre-populate the list so when entering a new postcode, it doesn't stall waiting for AI.
It looks like it already works like this? It was slow the first time I searched for my postcode, subsequent times have been very fast.
Do you think porn sites are more interested in a) correctly preventing unauthorized people from accessing their site, or b) selling as many subscriptions as they can while nominally complying with the law?
I’m not from the UK, so I’m not familiar with what their IDs are supposed to look like.
I was suspicious, though—the hands holding the ID cards looked kind of “crispy.” But at the same time, I thought, “woah, where did the website owner even get these photos?” It wasn’t until I read the Hacker News post that I realized they were all AI-generated (and now cached).
And here’s the thing: I’m an engineer at Apple with decades of experience in the tech industry—I’m not exactly new to this stuff. If I got fooled even for a couple of seconds, imagine how easy it would be to trick someone who isn’t technical.
There's also some obvious tells if you know what UK driving licenses look like: the layout is wrong, the background is too plain, and all the anti-forgery features are missing. Real licenses have much more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_...
I've heard many government workers say that it's funny but they can't watch it, as it's so accurate it's depressing.
Hire an expert they said. From the pool of experts they had heard about through contacts in the civil service. None of whom have any industry or real world experience. At best, someone was on an industry eating and drinking with the right people panel. I was there for 3 months and crawled back to my previous job cap in hand, bruised and educated.
It was long enough ago that I can away with rounding errors of months on my CV thank goodness...
Civil servants aren't there to say whether a policy is good, sensible, or a vote-winner. The CS policy profeasion is there, in part, to advise on risks. Ministers decide whether to accept those risks.
There were plenty of people (like me) who would have pointed out the various risks and problems. Some of which caused policy to change, and some were accepted.
I don't think I've ever seen in recent years the CS be blamed for something like this.
From the FAQ:
> How did you do this?
> This site uses React for the frontend and Node.js for the backend. The MP data is fetched from the UK government public API, and the AI-generated images use the latest model from open AI. The images are stored on a Cloudflare R2 bucket. The code is open source, so you can check it out on GitHub. It was done in a hurry.
The git repo linked from that FAQ shows a 404: https://github.com/timje/use-my-mps-id
It's actually the postcode of a WeWork in Holborn (which happens to be in Starmer's constituency.)
Keir Starmer's postcode is SW1A 2AA.
All in all, one of those ideas that sounds good on the surface, but the more you think about it the better it gets.
Seems odd, but probably wouldn't be noticed by an automated validator anyway.
Create a scandal. Bad PR is the only way out now.
Could you give a short TL;DR of how ids are constructed so we can all laugh here in comments?
Most are on Wikipedia, no?
Btw UK surpassed Russia in these kinda arrests
If so it’d be kinda crazy to go after you if anyone can just make an image like this in ChatGPT anyway.
It get all sorts of complaints from it and then it eventually says it’ll make one but only someone similar and only similar to a uk licensed and then makes something pretty close to reality - but not as recognisable as yours.
On the otherhand Ashfield (NG178DA) fails spectacularly.
These heckin' kids needs more protection. I suggest banning all VPNs too, only this way kids are truly protected like they are in China and Iran.