Do you know who's responsible to make sure children are safe online? Their parents. Not big tech, not the government, and not me by way of giving up my freedoms.
I think the authoritarian trend accelerated during corona. Our western political nobility got a real taste for power, and they have not been able to free themselves from that afrodisiac ever since. Therefore chat control, 1, 2, 3, and when that didn't go as planned... lo and behold... age verification, and that of course needs control over vpn, and encryption, and there we go... chat control slipped in through the back door.
Soon we can no longer criticize china if this keeps up.
This would probably block most of the internet, and allow access only to sites that are validated as being safe. This would put a lot of pressure on sites and service providers to ensure safety, such as children-only walled gardens within their broader services.
We already have piecemeal attempts at something like this through on device private age restriction software, but it’s not organised at the state level, and I think it’s not effective enough as a result.
If legally enforced it could be made into a pretty effective system that would give adults freedom and anonymity and provide safety for children, while pushing the costs of child safety onto the platforms, which is where it belongs. If you want to cater to children, prove that you can make it on to the whitelist. Otherwise that’s an audience you’re just not able to access.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/blogs/social-media-minim...
It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check.
So foolishly optimistic… people can’t wait to give freedom away if only they get a stable job and housing in exchange. Or if it hits these other guys they don’t like at the moment.
It’s all much, much less dramatic than Orwell. Ordinary even.
You're extremely naive about China. Do you think they wanted the Great Leap Forward and the Eliminate Sparrows campaign? One man's ill-informed policies caused a famine resulting in 15-55 million deaths. The One Child Policy? The state response to Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall? The Social Credit system? Why does Foxconn have anti-suicide nets? You think industry tycoons being in bed with government is bad? It is! Now note that the theory of the Three Represents is part of the Chinese Constitution. Ask yourself why notionally independent Hong Kong imprisoned a large number of pro-democracy campaigners. These are not signs of a benevolent dictatorship. Why do you think there is such a push by rich Chinese to get their capital out of the country?
Perhaps you should read Brave New World instead?
https://www.google.com/search?q=1984+was+not+meant+to+be+an+...
Look at the images tab. This is so cliché there are hundreds of mugs and t-shirts with it!
They link to the full document which lists their VPN subscriber count near the top of the about Mozilla section.
(Edit: I don’t disagree with Mozilla’s position, but failure to declare an obvious conflict of interest undermines their credibility.)
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...
Could you explain what is the theory behind that?
One side of this is driven by a bunch of not too reputable think tanks behind the scenes who persuaded a couple of fringe academics to agree with them and push for it via the civil service. The government is taking bad, paid for advice. I don't know what the agenda is there but there is one and I reckon it's commercial. Probably a consortium of businesses wanting to create a market they can get into.
However the security services do not agree with the government or the think tanks and actually promote advice contrary to the regulators. They will ultimately win.
Attacking the regulators and revealing who is behind all this is what we should be doing.
However no matter what the government or security services want, they won't be able to stop people who want to use VPN or End to end encryption. Nothing would ever change in that regard.
The real problem is that the legislation would bring the power to prosecute people who use them or use it against them.
The security services aren't having any of that shit because it puts their position at risk both from the front-facing side and recommendations and guidance issued and from their own operations.
If they cared about privacy and security they wouldn’t be [redacted].
Does Mozilla not understand that this is the exact reason why the UK wants to forbid them?
Age verification is just mass surveillance under a fake name.
>>I am getting very intolerant of these conspiratorial comments
Weird thing to brag about, but sure.
"officials explained that the regulation in question was 'not primarily aimed at ... the protection of children', but was about regulating 'services that have a significant influence over public discourse'".
It's not clear to me that this is some nefarious underhanded technique. The secretary of state asked why non-porn sites were included in Category 1, and was told that Category 1 wasn't intended to catch porn sites, but is intended to apply to "Large user-to-user services", in line with public communication from the government.
I don't think anybody is under any illusion that "Adults will have more control over the content they see" is intended to protect children.
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act...
The problem is precisely that it doesn't show that. The Online Safety Act is, on this public explainer, described as legislation that provides protections to multiple groups. What they say in paragraph two is that "the strongest protections" are offered to children, while paragraph three then calls out that "The act will also protect adult users".
What is described is a tiered set of protections that at its lowest protects everyone (including adults), and a set of more narrow protections that are only extended to children. It follows quite logically that you will only need to know the users age if you want to show content to adults that you are not allowed to show children.
The "categorization" they are discussing is another axis of "tiering". Smaller provides (in categories 2A and B) are imposed less duty of protection, according to the explainer to account for their "size and capacity".
With this context. I think it's quite clear that the comments about the targeting of Category 1 are completely pedestrian. It isn't supposed to apply differently to PornHub and Amazon, because both are large multinationals that have enough resources to uphold their imposed duty.
The original framing of the quote in that blue sky thread is highly misleading as a result.
However the context is highly misleading, as in the original context it appears to be in reference to parts of the act that deal with content recommendation, not parts that deal with age verification -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910161
But as usual, that no longer matters in online discourse, it forms a soundbite that backs up the preconceptions of one side of an argument, that the whole exercise is nefarious, so it doesn’t matter if it’s actually true.
I always remember a video snippet of some meeting in US, some chinese looking woman says something like "Mao took our guns and killed us all, I'm never giving up my rifle". Some politician reminds her that they live in the democracy. She asks him something like "can you guarantee me that in 20 years it will still be a democracy", which he admits he can't
found the video https://www.reddit.com/r/GunMemes/comments/1c13kkz/survivor_...
Could you, my wonderful Western friends, do that again?
I mean, all of it is even on video and largely on YouTube.
Historically they were fairly smart at doing it subtly but the mask slipped during Covid and they never really put it back on.
Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular. Normies supported covid lockdowns and they don’t want their kids watching porn either.
The people yearn to be ruled and nannied
This stuff wasn't unpopular on HN until it actually happened. Almost every submission on HN about social media had people calling for similar regulations or even outright bans. It was not until they actually started asking for IDs when HNers realized what they really wanted to achieve with these laws.
Normies don't see the difference and politicians don't want there to be a difference. Normies want security and politicians will offer it wrapped in surveilance.
What about just banning phones for children? Could we ever make that work? It would be like cigarette bans except we now have 5 year olds addicted to tobacco and addict parents who don't want to make them go cold turkey.
Public libraries and schools can be used for genuine research purposes, but not addictive shit. And implemented ad blockers at the network level.
Sexualization of teens is a thing. I personally blame social media together with showbusiness. But kids had access to the internet at the same time.
And the internet was slightly different than it's now. It had much more sharp edges that we learned how to live with.
But it also was much less predatory. World's smartest psychologists and programmers didn't work 80 hour weeks for small fortunes to make it as much addictive as possible.. if it was only that. It's also as triggering and depressing as possible, because distressed and depressed people are engaging more and can't stop.
What I mean to say is that you can't really draw an equal sign between internet we grew up with and the one we give (or choose to limit) to our children.
I don't mean we should block them, just that it's not the same.
How much the problems today are due to, rather than coincidental with, the internet, is a much more difficult thing to discern.
What makes problems into disasters is denying that there is a problem until it is too late.
Past generations mostly tried (with varying success) to fix the problems in their world. Sometimes the past generations' solutions are good, like much of the world mandating 40 hour work weeks and public pensions and workplace health and safety and so on; other times even when the problem is real, the solutions are worse, like the US experience with prohibition.
But when problems get ignored, you get stuff like leaded gasoline, cigarettes, and asbestos being everywhere, the Irish potato famine, the dissolution of the USSR, and the 2007 global financial crisis.
Even if AI doesn't do what it promises, the internet brings with it even more globalisation, cheap labour that undercuts any rich nation for jobs which can be done on a computer (which we've already seen examples of, not just with coding but also call centres). Even if Musk's promised about Optimus remain as unfulfilled as whichever version of full-self-driving just got made obsolete, a remote-controlled android does much the same for manual labour. And the internet does enable much weirder warfare: our governments can blame hacks on whoever they like, but there is often no dramatic photo of something burning as a result, just a diffuse degradation of economic performance from fully automated scams and blackmails.
And that's without any questions about demographic shift and who pays for the current generation's pensions when they retire, and if this has anything to do with free porn and the state of online dating apps. And without personalised propaganda. Without your home surveillance system (or robot vacuum cleaner) being turned against you by hacks only possible from cheap ubiquitous internet. Without any questions about if doomscrolling does or doesn't induce psychological problems, if sexual deepfakes are worse than schoolyard rumours, or if AI is sopping kids from learning as cheating is easier.
Back then the internet was a wild west run by thousands of clever people. It was like living in a neighborhood full of people kind of like you. Nobody built it to be addictive or to cultivate attention. If you wanted something you searched for it. Nowadays everyone is on there and it's run by evil adtech companies. Kids these days are not having the experience we had back then.
It also didn't really do us much good. Already back then geeky types like me had somewhere to retreat to and we did. It took me years to learn real social skills and build a life off of the internet. When I see headlines like "Gen Z aren't having sex" I'm hardly surprised. They're not having sex because they're on the internet. What's more is nobody is learning to be an adult at all. People are in a adult bodies but still totally children at heart. They don't own anything, shun responsibility etc.