Of course.
Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
The immediate reply is the accusational: "why are you trying to trying to prevent safety for kids".
It's a simple next step to accuse you of hiding your own child abuse ring.
This sounds like hype, but it's the normal path here in Australian.
You don't argue with these people. You summarily dismiss them. You recognize the game they are playing and you refuse to engage.
Yes it might actually work out ok if a mythical benevolent dictator could manage things with infinite precision and unlimited compassion. I would imagine that has never happened at any reasonable scale.
The Conservative folks seem to phrase this as a desire to “keep government small” - which always seemed a little clunky given the stakes and track record of these governments.
OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
Only if "following this logic" means "extrapolate to an unreasonable extreme." Compare:
1. "Just eat healthy food and you'll be healthy!"
2. "Yes, but [things are complex]"
3. "Following that logic, we should just eat trash."
Or perhaps you’re not actually following the logic but rather an oversimplified characterization of it?
Or are you suggesting these would turn as problematic as zero-privacy surveillance systems in case the government becomes totalitarian?
Conservatives seem to be fine with mafia rule, so long as the don has the correct party affiliation.
> When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
Mob rule doesn't with very well as a defacto government, or oligarchy. Nor food and drug safety or national defense. Some things just have to be tackled by society as a larger group. Ideally as locally as possible, but not so locally that minorities are crushed or rule becomes petty and micromanaged.
Not possible. You can strengthen defenses but you cannot guarantee it can withstand any possible, dynamic and adaptive attack strategies.
So what you say is impossible to do.
This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.
You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.
When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!
What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?
The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?
The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.
I do believe we should allow for a lot more nuance in our political opinions and avoid most statements that can be made in the constraints of a short comment on social media.
> parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids
For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
That one can get deep really quick.
These are NGOs not parents. And "child safety" is often a euphemism. The point is it's hard to argue against child safety. For example, if opaque NGOs demand deanonymization to stop CSAM, I am assuming most people would not want to seem like they are in favor of CSAM. So you need an organized effort to argue in favor of privacy and even then anyone who does it can easily be smeared as a CSAM user. So child safety can backdoor something else.
"The government says all children need to be vaccinated in order to be safe"
I'm not saying these arguments are equivalent, but they seem equivalent because they induce the same feeling of loss of agency. And one cannot simply ignore and dismiss something like this.
That's exactly what this is.
They want to build an internet where it is structurally impossible for children to be harmed in any way.
This requires the destruction of the very concept of agency. You can't just do things. You need government approval.
Not just for the war on anonymity. NGOs, often funded by government money (so missing two third of their name), have unified on other topics.
One example that comes to mind is teaming up to organize the biggest influx of migrants into the EU following the arab spring movements: there have been hidden camera recording NGO employees explaining how to dodge controls, how to answer questions (by lying), and they've been actively helping sneaking people illegally in the EU.
A good question one could ask itself before downvoting me is this: if it's a fact that NGOs are teaming up, worldwide, to lie using the rethoric of "child safety" [1]... On which other topics did NGOs lie?
Or are we to believe all NGOs are good and well-meaning, except those working to end anonymity?
And before I forget: in Africa for example it's fully well known that NGO typical means "DGSE":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_General_for_Extern...
There are french "doctors" in some of those NGOs who know less about medicine than what I know about medicine by having ex-girlfriends that were doctors.
By squinting one's eye just a little it look like NGO is not that far from a synonym of "shady undercover gov op".
And btw why should any of my taxpayers dollars go to even a single NGO if it's non-governmental?
And another big one: while some of those NGOs have been hard at work passing legislation which as a a result gets people arrested for "hate speech" (or even just for saying "christian prayers in their heads") in the UK, other NGOs are even harder at work making sure that the absolute most horrible of all hate speech cannot ever be criticized "because it's religious".
The double standards are literally insane.
If I was in the UK, I'd GTFO. And not to the EU.
[1] speaking of which, btw, there are serious allegations about NGOs participating in child trafficking, for example in the Haiti SNAFU
Either you participate and help drive privacy preserving methods to solve the problems, or someone else will solve it in a way less desirable to you.
Deny: the laws aren’t about this! (Many of the laws are)
Attack: these people are lying! (They are not)
Reverse victim and offender: these people are Meta lobbyists! (Meta has spent a lot of money on groups campaigning for these laws)
[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20230829-Think-Of-The-Chi...
With proper parental controls there is no signalling.
Come on. Like 80% of my entire post was devoted to pointing out a gradual erosion of rights over time, and I explicitly stated that it's not the case today.
But don't underestimate human adaptability. Slippery slope arguments assume that once a technology introduces a specific risk, society lacks the agency to create counter-measures, new norms, or alternative uses for that technology.
I haven't found that to be the case throughout most of history.
If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups established to manufacture consent, but this is infowars-type conspiracy thinking. Most people are just not that facile with technology and people who have kids are atavistically opposed to anything that could harm their kids.
Tech people's unwillingness to even engage with concerns about harm to children (eg the GP) more or less guarantees more aggressive regulation. IT's a self-defeating position.
Was I exposed to some clearly adult content? Yes. But I didn't find it particularly compelling, the video games I could download and other things I could explore were more interesting.
It is also concerning to me that gen-alpha (or whatever the age bracket is called) people are increasingly being pushed into walled garden, app-based social media platforms instead of actually learning what the Internet really is, and what it's capable of.
It was a mix of being afraid of getting a virus from a porn site, knowing that porn wasn't for my age, and late-night FTA TV airing softcore anyways.
My parents told me to be responsible and kind of explained the dangers of the world the best way they could, and it was expected that I'd be grounded and lose computer access if they found me on a porn site. I preferred playing games. I definitely encountered some dark places on the clearnet (and on the darknet as well) and promptly GTFO.
At the school's computer lab they had plenty of content control which I had the most fun trying to bypass them. For what reason? Just so I could.
We can debate if these systems and people existed before (they did), but the reach and scale is different now. My most controversial opinion these days is that not everyone should be allowed to upload to YouTube if it’s public facing. We need basic screening and filtering.
For instance in about 1994 I remember coming across a set of textfiles that were some lengthy manifesto about how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere. But it never got any traction.
Now we have the unfortunate venn diagram overlap between something like a Tate and a major social media platform, and he can get his message out to millions of angry, horny, unemployed young men...
There was a BBS in my area that ran on a small bank of 14.4 USR modems that had a gold mine of content like that. It was such a fun time.
You still fantasize about building mechanisms for restricting information as if the very people you oppose won't use it on you when they get into power; no, as if the very people you oppose aren't _currently_ ascendant or even in office and would delightedly use it against you right this moment. Madness.
When you build a high tech muzzle, remember that it will fit onto your head just as well as it fits those you built it for.
Change in behavior can only follow from change in incentives. Parents must be held legally liable if they allow their children access to social media. That means jail time for negligence.
The power imbalance between individual parents and big tech is immense.
How can we be mad at random parents for not defeating the most powerful and rich people in history?
The government has just decided to fall back on "think of the children" as a way to implement more surveillance and control.
Incentives incite action. No action. No incentive.
Incentives play a role, you don't want to encourage wrong behaviors certainly, but they're just one factor in determining what people do or don't do. At best, they nudge. Those nudges aren't likely to overcome stronger forces, or even several weaker ones.
Someone may have a desire or intention to lose weight. But unless they lose the weight they lack incentive.
It's simple: incentives incite action. Don't make it more complicated to win an argument.
Here are just some of the incentives overweight people have to lose weight:
They'll look better, to themselves and others. They'll have more clothing options. They'll feel better. They'll be healthier. They'll have drastically lower odds of many future heath problems. They'll live longer which means they can spend more time being with their loved ones.
Those are all incentives. Everyone who is obese has those incentives, even though different individuals may assign different values to them. Even with all those incentives that hasn't stopped the obesity problem. incentives don't incite action, but they can encourage them.
incentive noun [ C or U ] Something that encourages a person to do something by offering them a reward (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/incentiv...)
You can have a ton of encouragement, but that doesn't mean it will be enough to incite a behavior. What definition of incentive are you using?
It literally says incite "to determination or action". Given that parents aren't actually taking smart phones away, neither determination nor action are present.
I'll grant you the examples you give incite people to desire to change weight just as negative consequences incite parents to desire that "something should be done," but it doesn't incite them to actually do something.
Describing something as incentive because it incites desire without changing behavior is not exactly what I think of when I think of incentives.
Think of being in the position of trying to come up with incentives for a group of people. Would you call your incentives successful if they created a desire in that group without anyone actually doing anything differently?
Kids are going to get into stuff you don’t want them to no matter how hard you try to prevent that, short of keeping them in locked padded rooms with no electronics (which would be abuse). Parents are right to want to steer them in the right direction and keep them out of the worst trouble, but that’s as far as it goes.
So really, both sides need to improve here.
Anonymity, the right to move privately and be private online is much bigger than parents who are frustrated with out of control capitalism.
Besides, this only benefits the big corporations. They of course will happily back anything that absolves them of their sins.
We don't need to make parents the enemy of our online privacy. We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children to every shitty social media company and shady website on the internet to "protect" them.
We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children
OK, but (as I have asked many times before) what is your alternative, beter proposal? People intuitively understand the idea of checking ID to prevent sales of alcohol to minors, keep teens out of adult spaces and so on, because virtually every adult remembers being a teenager and not being allowed to do certain things due to not being old enough. That makes checking identity an easy sell to people.
What is your better idea that is similarly easy to sell? Because if you don't have one,people will fall back on the mediocre idea of ID checks. I feel like anyone working in the tech field should understand that the best technological solution does not always win out.
How about laws that prevent social media websites from pushing harmful content users didn't ask for? How about forcing them to abandon the practices and dark patterns that result in those platforms being addictive? How about putting executives behind bars when their algorithms are shown to cause mental health and body image issues in children? These platforms know that what they're doing is hurting people, but they don't care because they're profiting from it. These companies intentionally designed systems that are harmful and user-hostile. They've got algorithms that seek out and target people's vulnerabilities. They ignored repeated warnings from their own researchers, and actively concealed evidence of the harms they were causing. We don't have to let them do it. Not to children or anyone else. Facebook isn't going to die off if they go back to showing people only things their friends and family post. It might even get more popular. They might make fewer billions though and that's unthinkable to them.
There are a lot of things that can be done, but the government isn't interested because actually solving the problems social media causes isn't going to give them the power they're actually after and it could cause them the bribe money they get from these companies.
So, what actual rules do you want to make in service of these desirable outcomes? They have to be clear and straightforward enough that they can't be just gotten around with clever lawyers or argued past the point of meaninglessness by shills posing as philosophers. I do not like the idea of everyone having to show ID online (or even much in real life), but I can see why it's popular because it's very easy to explain and understand.
This is the "Christian moms need Congress to regulate Cable TV" problem all over again. Don't let them watch TV if you oppose what is on it. It's not HBO's responsibility to raise your child, it's yours.
You may not be aware of this, but Meta has been actively spending millions of dollars to redirect the rage against their algorithms and addictive harms, especially against children, and one of their strategies to try and help avoid liability is to put the onus on the federal government to pass ID legislation, to literally make it easier for Meta and similar companies to age gate most content under simple blanket policies. The way that they are doing this is by funding otherwise very small "parents rights organizations" with money and connections they otherwise wouldn't have. What does Meta gain from this? Less liability and lower cost in content moderation. What do the parents rights groups get? "Check ID laws".
That's enough motivation for both groups, it's very simple.
Now where do you get into "conspiracy theory" territory? Well thetr are also other groups that want online ID for their own purposes, and they are more than happy to help fund these groups to get something they also want.
All of this is very easy to provide backing links for with a simple Google search, if you're interested.
How should online services be regulated to mitigate algorithmic harms? To get something over the line politically, it needs to be simple enough that it can be articulated in a few sentences.
That would be a good conversation to have!
Instead what is happening is moneyed interests are inputting hundreds of millions of dollars into organizations that otherwise wouldn't have it, which is giving an "unnatural" amount of political influence to those groups, which is changing our country, and not just on this issue. They're literally doing it just to keep their money, and ID checks let them keep it without actually reducing the harms.
Any argument with such blatant oversimplifications is almost certainly lacking in nuance and can be ignored and dismissed.
I get what you’re pointing at: politicians regularly abuse these arguments, but that doesn’t mean it’s 100% of all arguments involving children.
Then watch as they accuse you of supporting pedophilia.
Should that argument be ignored too?
It's a tradeoff situation and nobody wants to leave it as such to find an answer which serves the best balance. Instead, we are doomed to discuss the absolutes of freedoms vs the absolutes of child safety.
I'd really like to see something like a required parental controls architecture products had to support (but not every device had to force universally). These kind of solutions only goes as far as the problem is a technical one, e.g. a kid on their dad's office computer they weren't supposed to access can still see things they shouldn't, but such is the truth with any pure technical approach to the problem which is not actually fully technically bound.
If there is a problem with children not being sufficiently protected, that is the level at which to solve it. Give families tools and information to do so.
The companies pushing age verification make their money monetizing access to children. They are exactly the sorts of groups I’d like to keep my kids away from. Forcing the kids to label themselves as minors just makes them more vulnerable to online exploitation.
No school zone speed limits, or protected crossings on streets near schools.
No requirements for railings on public balconies, fencing around public pools, protective covers over drains or other holes in the ground.
Parents/guardians can just supervise.
Sounds great!
Parents should have the tools to protect their children, the providers should have those tools in place. But those that are dealing the goods as also heavily invested in trying to maximize engagement and so they do not really work to hard on providing those tools.
Even if perfect age verification is implemented, kids will be harmed. Because they are vulnerable while above the arbitrary age limit. So -arguing for age verification is harming children. Won't somebody think of the children?
And the answer comes back to the same point. Parents should mediate this. Online content should advertise its maturity level, and parents should be able to configure devices at setup time for the maturity level they are appropriate for. Then apps should respect that and everyone can be better off without robbing everybody of anonymity or freedom.
How is Buffy Wicks so damn gullible with tech legislation? Her AB 1043 and AB 1856 (Digital Age Assurance Act), intended to protect children online and regulate Big Tech (but unintentionally criminalizing open source), was sponsored by a dark money influence operation from Meta.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
She is actually well-respected with housing and transportation bills but I don't know what's going on with her tech bills.
By demonizing them and failing to engage with the worries over social media and pornography We have brought it on ourselves.
Is it to be wondered at that many people are angry when tech companies have polluted the commons with their effluvium?
Believe it or not, sometimes the best answer is to do nothing until the crowd moves on to the next panic, as with the “Satanic Panic” in the 1980s. Turns out D&D was not actually a gateway to Satan worship.
The FTC let the free-market run riot with children’s TV. Shows used commercials to push expensive plastic toys. The shows themselves became commercials for their associated product lines. Parents felt unable to resist the social pressure channeled through their children and congress eventually passed an act that let the FCC reign in the FTC’s damage.
In the 2020s family economics has raced to the bottom: wages have stagnated, the cost of goods and services is set based on a household where everyone is in full time employment, and latch-key kids now have He-Man in the palm of their hands courtesy of Apple, Google, Samsung, and Xiomai.
That said, I’m a father of 3. I’m a millennial and tech worker. I have the digital literacy to teach my kids about the internet and its horrors in a safe way. Not every parent does, so passing this off as a “parent better” issue doesn’t solve anything either.
I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”, but I’m open to similar ideas so parents can get some support without compromising on privacy.
If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag. Lock it behind the most basic parental controls that can be protected and remotely monitored. There are some loopholes with kids downloading apps that allow custom web requests without the flag being sent, so there probably needs to be an app allowlist or special App Store category to match.
Carve out some legal exemptions for Linux distributions that no kids are using and leave it to the iOS, Android, Windows, and Macs of the world. Any parent who doesn’t like the idea doesn’t have to enable it on their kids’ devices.
Parental controls already exist. Lawmakers want to step in and parent peoples' kids for them by removing these freedoms from everyone.
What a fucking stupid, impossible, idea.
Like, explain to me how you think this could be done meaningfully other than some setting that can just be arbitrarily flipped without adding massive complexity.
And arbitrarily changed? Can a regular user arbitrarily change the super user password?
Why would you think that? Most of my friends are parents now and all of them are quite concerned about the effect of social media, phones, and technology more broadly.
Basically all of them are planning to delay exposing their kids to phones and screens for as long as possible.
The sentiment of "keep my kids safe on the internet" definitely comes from parents. Yes. We agree.
How we actually get there in a privacy-respecting way is the issue.
Parents do not have the time or energy to configure modern parental controls which work more like tuning firewall rules.
The other part of the problem is you need collective action, if you ban your child from Facebook, they won’t get invited to parties anymore. If all children get banned, the parties will be arranged over sms or some other non social media. As it is today, banning your kids from social media is overly punishing since all the other kids are using it.
If we actually cared about supporting children and parents as a country, parental controls and access, and making sure that systems were actually safe and protected privacy, would NOT be an afterthought.
The polling I have seen from Germany and Australia of a social media ban for children was quite in favor of it. Sentiment here on HN and on Reddit was the polar opposite. We are in a bubble.
The answer every time is “well then Google/Apple/Facebook/Shopify/mcMaster Carr shouldn’t exist as a business” and if I’m being honest that is not an achievable target so you’re going to arrive at the attested internet.
I'm not trying to call everyone else voting for these things dumb, but does the average person who doesn't think about this stuff for a living actually know what they're voting for?
There is a really good way to do this that solves most concerns: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...
The only real downside to this is that a 0kp cannot be reliably tied to an identity of the person using the device and thus tickets could be proxied/shared around with semi technical tools (and/or an ai agent tasked with creating a proxy). This really isn't solvable without device-level attestation[0], as if a website needs to reliably say "this person is actually this person" then it needs all pieces of data itself.
This could be solved by adding in a still privacy-preserving step like "The device is doing periodic face id scans and matching them to an identity, and constantly renews/re-presents to the age assurance consumer", but that has its own drawbacks[0].
0: Namely, lock in to devices that can do this, and that includes basically guaranteeing a double digit percentage of adult humans would not have access due to their device being old, unsupported, missing the hardware, etc. And with so many humans excluded, you would not have mass adoption. Probably also excludes rooted devices if we bring in attestation of unmodified software.
The unspoken part of this requirement is that websites would have to block users who aren’t connecting via one of these attested, verified, locked down devices.
There is the obvious loophole that using a VPN to a country without these requirements would circumvent it. That’s how kids are already circumventing age restrictions in places like Australia and it’s why the UK has taken an interest in attacking VPNs.
The alternative is what we're getting right now: laws that require verifying ID documents, often in ways that restrict even the notion of maintaining the user's privacy. Attestation might be an "OK" to "good" solution while this is between bad and really bad.
There is no form of digital ID that isn't evil, but anything requiring attestation is super evil.
Old hardware will have to be grandfathered. Old cars don't track us and that has created a market for old cars.
Hardware age attestation will be a long timeframe project. The current work should be towards standards that can get us there.
Finally, anonymity didn't exist for my grandparents. It won't exist for my grandchildren.
Your grandparents could walk to the next town over and give themselves a different name and nobody would ever know who they were. They could get a job, be paid in cash, and deposit that money in a bank account, no KYC. They could drop a letter in a public mailbox without a return address, or put up posters at night, or make phone calls from public telephones, and nobody would know who did it, and there would be no surveillance footage to review after the fact. There were no ALPRs, no built-in vehicle telematics, no drones, no smartphones, no doorbell cameras on every block, no video tapes, no DNA analysis. Anonymity was the default.
Make a value judgement on whether what we have now is better or worse than before if you want, but don’t invent history.
Unfortunately it's so much easier for lawmakers to slap down a law that says "you must verify IDs right now if you want to continue to exist" with no requirement, and often not even support for, privacy preserving ways to make this happen. The laws are happening now. The chance of reform to align with a privacy-preserving option once the laws are implemented is slim to none.
edit: sp
In letting things flow to easily the opposition is to have heavy lock down on information. A lot of the time, the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.
Is there, though? The push is coming from lobbyists who seem to be largely funded by wealthy elites, corporations, and other opaque organizations. One of them seems to be Meta. It doesn’t look like a grassroots effort.
And here's like ~120 of us who showed up to oppose AB 2023 (the 3D printer spyware bill). It was incredible. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279741#t=19...
I think the easiest way to get involved is to become an EFF member. They'll keep you up to date on all the censorship and surveillance bills. Then you can contact your legislator, sent letters to the CA legislature committees, or show up to the hearings in Sacramento.
I have never wanted to move out of Europe more than now tbf. Complete f* morons - I get spammed by the wanna be child protectors who are giving a smartphone to their kids.
I don't know how to deal with this anymore - what we are not realizing is that *we* are under engagement - this *is* state surveillance.
IMHO you have more freedom in China than in Europe. Can you walk on the street and say "Fuck Xi Jinping" like you would in France with Macron? Probably not. But it's a completely useless freedom to have.
At least in China you get relative safety when you walk on the street at night. And when the government decides to restrict some liberties you don't have to pay tens of thousands of politicians and lobbyist to do it.
If you have to choose your poison pill, you might as well pick the cheap one that does bring a semblance of harmony and not complete polarization and chaos.
You see, China and the US aren't that different you know. In the US, I can go up to Donald Trump and say "I don't like Donald Trump. The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"
In China, I can go up to Xi Jinping and say "I don't like Donald Trump! The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"
USA. As soon as the democrats win they'll open the borders wide again: so if the entirety of Mexico and South America, plus people from the middle-east, can enter the US, certainly european refugees shall be welcomed too?
China: at this point my wife and I are seriously considering it.
We saw the situation degrade in the EU more than 10 years ago already and decided to only ever raise our kid in british schools (and now a british college), so she speaks a perfectly fluent english (with a british accent).
We know we'll have to get out relatively soon.
The EU Commission is preparing legislation to inventory every single asset owned by every single EU citizen: down to every valuable watch and every valuable Pokemon card (I'm not kidding). Every single painting. Every statue. Every bank account. Every stock you own. Just everything.
When the EU Parliament questioned the EU Commission as to whether the EU Commission could promise that that registry would never ever be used as the basis for taxation/confiscation, the EU Commission answered "We cannot promise that".
This is where we're at. All that with constant hammering in EU schools that the EU is the champion of freedom and liberty and the greatest place on earth ever invented.
And, of course, let's not forget to incite hatred of libertarians: they get 0.0003% of votes or something, but fun as to be constantly be made of evil libertarians.
Full on propaganda. I puke on my EU. I vomit it.
It is more expensive today to maintain your privacy and anonymity than it is to surveil you. The collective surveillance grid makes it possible to track people's movements, whereabouts, their predilections, political views, personal images and more for a few cents every day. It's a bargain.
And in this new world, the eye watches everyone, all the time, forever. Most people, including people on HN, are still stuck in a human-first world. The new surveillance state isn't going to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.
And they will be used to watch you. Especially if you're attractive. Or, valuable. Or, blackmail-able. After all, NSA employees routinely abuse multi-billion dollar surveillance assets to stalk women. It's so common that the NSA calls it LOVEINT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
In the world to come, people are going to wish they were being surveilled by the NSA. Because at least the NSA punishes these people. Occasionally.
When this kind of technology becomes this cheap and this pervasive, then the end of anonymity means unaccountable sheriff deputies stalking their former spouse and family. Or, prospective romantic interests.
https://www.firstalert4.com/2026/08/03/brentwood-officer-acc...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/cops-using-license-pl...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/rogue-officers-turned...
https://www.newsweek.com/flock-camera-police-arrests-1226378...
https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-rea...
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/26/us/flock-cameras-surveill...
With this new oracle, these people will be able to set up alerts for when their spouse is thinking of leaving them. To catch their child accessing support for abuse or something more ephemeral like being an atheist, having different political views or LGBT+.
Anyone who doesn't see the forest for the trees, or who embraces this because "parental controls are too hard to use" will doom themselves and future generations to a world that's materially worse than our hyper-surveilled present.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but at this rate I'm going to miss the days when it was just the NSA reading my emails (and they still do! Howdy!). I know the track record. But at least the NSA has some sense of institutional responsibility and control. Most institutions in your life, including your HOA don't.
https://ktvz.com/cnn-regional/2021/07/22/arnold-residents-ce...
Cheaper computer technology has been great for the average persons uses but it cuts both ways. It also means much cheaper surveillance. I suspect that governmental/corporate surveillance now costs less than 1% of their spending, something that simple couldn't have been done even a few decades back.
I do wonder what the world would have been like is say computer technology peaked at 486 level performance/memory. Much of what we have today simply could not have happened in terms of surveillance and social media damages. Alas, this is the world we didn't get.
George Orwell was pretty on the mark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-F...
[1] https://www.vxsafenet.com/ (Not affiliated with the company. The product and the site seems like it's still in early stages.)
The one thing he always said is, they have always been watching and know who is who, what these things do is allow it to be entered into the court of law. Now they can act on these things.
They want the OS to report the user's age. People will use this to claim whatever age they want. For instance, if companies cannot advertise to children, they might find that almost every computer is reporting that the user is a child--turns out adults want the protections kids receive as well--sometimes.
Eventually they will have to enforce a system intrusive enough that no lying or abuse of the system is possible. We might even approach "Verification Can" levels of verification.
Can also just lie about your age, "I am as old as the fjords, as young as a newborn lamb" - Thor - GTA Vice City radio ;)
You’ll also notice that Anduril is quickly being accepted now that we’re expending munitions faster than our replacement rate.
Put in a less polite way, they're preparing for the metaphorical pitchforks and torches held by mobs of the common people which might manifest themselves in a more kinetic format.
Military's, intelligence agencies and actuaries have been warning about this for decades now and their language is getting very direct on this and the time lines nowadays.
If you have ever been caught in a rip while swimming, there is a moment when you suddenly getting a sucking sensation as you transition from stable waters into an outward flow. I am starting to think we are in that transitional phase on global stability, that the 2030's are not going to be a comfortable time for many.
They are ensuring that potential disruptors can be reigned in if needed. To try and stop things from being even more unpredictable, for better or worse. Buckle up.
You don't build long term surveillance systems and billionaires don't build bunkers for what they think of as a temporary tough situation.
I really wish I had kept all the others from the US, Europe, Aus/NZ etc. It is a very common theme but they are largely kept quiet and only typically (partially) released through freedom of information requests.
This one from Actuaries UK was one that set off alarm bells. As they advise the insurance industry, they are structured to be politically neutral. The key takeaway is the impacts of 3c temperature rise by 2050 on page 9. The reason this is an issue, we are currently on target to hit that with us likely to pass 2c mid next decade with the rate of warming increasing.
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/r3cporjb/planetary-solvency-c...
This one from the UK government is all about addressing national security regarding this issue. Typically they are advising that they secure their food supplies and hardened up boarders in the next 5 years. Funnily enough Brexit may have given them the power to enforce this much more than they would have otherwise had. But that just means they have built a unique flavor of oppression.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nature-security-a...
I have said it for years now about a lot of countries. They will welcome immigrants with open arms, those arms being machine guns, rockets and drones.
They also pass my personal test of not advocating for dumb feel-good ideas. Recently they published a well-sourced article on why the US rail system isn’t a good candidate for electrification.
Was all about just doing the math on energy transitions. He wasn't anti renewable technology but did want to point out how scale is a problem that few understand.
My favorite number of his is, that at 3% growth year over year, we would need all the energy of the Milky way galaxy by the year 13,000. As the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, this would defy physics itself.
"We need the plebs to want to mock people who work from home, to reduce the reticence in coming back to work in the office"
"We need our commercial property values to go back up"
Edited to add:
"Our managers need to _feel_ as if they're actually managing people"
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
The threat from COVID (and more importantly, long COVID) never went away, but they sure convinced the average person that it did.
Today you can see an N95 in the wild once in awhile, so some people are paying attention, but they are less than 1%. Many others are suffering brain damage, unexplained heart issues, taxed immune systems, etc and have no idea why (nor does their doctor).
A cursory google suggests that the return-to-office movement is primarily driven by management's desire for voluntary turnover, avoiding the bad press of mass layoffs. But certainly doesn't show that it's 'been debunked 100 times'.
In my own experience, it's been 50/50 a desire for voluntary turnover, and also a control tactic. Employees are easier to strong-arm when they're immersed in the idea that company culture actually matters.
I haven't come across much of the debunking of the commercial property issue. I would say it's undeniably factor, but we can argue about the scale.
A total of $800 billion—in real terms—of value is at stake by 2030, and, on average, the total value of office space is expected to decline by 26 percent from 2019 to 2030.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/real-estate/our-insights...
This is simply a risk that I am willing to make. Just fuck off already.
This is something I have noted with Trump, he seems to be one of the last names that made it really big in pre-social media era and had a somewhat unified presence in peoples minds.
Making it to that level nowadays is actually really difficult, heck I would argue that even people like Mr Beast hasn't hit that level of awareness due to the fragmented nature of media and fame.
You can build movement in an echo chamber, it just depends if that is enough.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/prot...
They can keep floating this stuff and we have to put in a thousand times as much energy to shoot it down. We get worn down quicker than they can. It only has to work once for them, we have to keep pushing back.
My very pessimistic take is one out of Taoism. If you wish for them to fail, let them grow. Eventually the weight of the whole system collapses itself, the question is just on what time frame.
The way out is to go through. I don't like this framing but it seems to be the most accurate.
It’s also a good idea to maintain your own private means of communication, as there will be some hard times ahead.
If it actually did anything to protect the children it wouldn’t be so objectionable
Worse, these laws will actually create new harms to children who will be forced to give their identity to websites and identity services that will exploit them and fail to protect that data.
I challenge anyone to post the proof here.
And if it was mostly about posting content anonymously instead of even reading these sites.
Ask yourself logically - who would pay these NGOs to do things like attempt to extort meta into a $500M+ settlement over “harming child mental health.”
This is all connected and intelligence agency backed. It’s far from innocent, it’s non corporate - some had suggested meta was behind it - but as we have seen meta is the one getting targeted.
Other countries have already implemented this or are making strenuous efforts towards it. In Pakistan right now you need to submit a copy of your national ID card and scan your fingerprints to get a live LTE data service SIM card. This is not hyperbole but is real practice in some places that is soon going to be imported to jurisdictions that traditionally have more "freedom".
https://www.pta.gov.pk/category/biometric-verification-77103...
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202607/pakistan-fast-tracks-...
Statements like this are inflammatory—basically a personal attack—and ironically are much more likely to violate HN guidelines.
And to point out the obvious on the actual quality of the piece, The US has itself passed age verification laws in 20 states, such as Texas where it was driven not by the British but by domestic interest groups and decidedly state senators like Angela Paxton.
Also given the slant of the site it's pretty obvious was the political motivation here is, I guess yelling at the British always works
Corporations all over the world routinely and knowingly poison, injure, or outright murder their employees and their customers. They spend massive amounts of money preventing the public from knowing about the harms they are causing. Even in the most egregious cases where there is well documented proof of what they've done the heads of these companies still get away with it. They profit from it. They're just happily living their lives in their mansions and on their yachts while graves are dug and families are torn apart.
Government violence is different though. When the government acts against the public they are generally required to follow long and complex procedures with multiple points of checks and accountability. A cop has to get enough evidence to convince a judge to issue an arrest warrant. A person is taken into custody and given access to a lawyer. A trial is held in court with a jury. At every step there are volumes of records detailing exactly what was done, by whom, and why. All of that information is public record and we can request those records to keep watch on what the government does. If the government abuses the power we give them we can vote them out of office and replace them.
Obviously there are a lot of problems with our legal system and places where all of that breaks down, but the goal was for there to be transparency and accountability and nothing stops us from improving the situation. With corporations on the other hand, they act in secret, they don't have to ask anyone for permission, they aren't required to keep records of everything they do, you have no legal right to examine the records they have, and even if you find out a CEO is responsible for murdering a bunch of people for profit you have no power to vote that CEO out of office.
It's pretty clear which of whose two entities is the larger threat. Which one of them has already repeatedly poisoned you and your entire family. Which one do you think was responsible for more violence done to your loved ones?
The end results is they are two sides of the same coin but with very different mechanics. Neither should be accepted.
Governments want control, Companies want money. Control typically comes from a reduction in rights, freedoms, money. When you fail to give those up "naturally" violence, worsened living conditions and abuse are the tools used.
Privacy doomerism is a form of complicity.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says.
If the same standard were applied for posts, this one would fail. I recognize that it is a popular perspective that these measures are essentially a war on anonymity, but that is not what they intend to fix, although it is quite possible that anonymity is a casualty of whatever war is at hand.
I believe efforts to resist these measures would be more effective if they engaged with the problem: the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds, beyond what any society should consider acceptable. I personally don't think shocking content is the worst of it. Algorithms that maximize engagement over enriching experience are a curse for any age group, and developing brains face the worst of it.
Is age-gating the internet the right answer? Will it even help? Are there ulterior motives? Those are open questions that need discussion. Dismissing a genuine problem is choosing not to engage in the discussion.
Larry Ellison on surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
This is not new and it’s not about kids. This is the culmination of years of planning that began after the Arab Spring, when elites began to get concerned about how the Internet could be leveraged for domestic regime change.
While I do think we should make efforts to reduce crime and create better spaces for kids, laws like this aren’t the answer.
Because of the goal of advertising revenue as the ultimate driver as to build an addictive permanent scroll of slop on tiktok or instagram, and the desire of social media companies to build walled gardens where someone's entire online experience stays in their "app.". As you say, this affects young and old alike.