[HN Gopher] Fighting the age-gated internet
___________________________________________________________________
Fighting the age-gated internet
https://archive.md/nDeuh
Author : geox
Score : 272 points
Date : 2025-12-04 13:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| Simulacra wrote:
| I think all of this has gone overboard, even though I agree that
| children should not be exposed to pornography, I don't know what
| to do about it because I expect parents to monitor their child's
| Internet usage, which is a losing ideal. Are there better
| alternatives?
| jmclnx wrote:
| > I don't know what to do about it
|
| 1. No smart phones for the child before the age of NN, me I say
| 18. A Smart phone makes a great High School Graduation gift.
|
| 2. Only internet access from a desktop computer with a hosts
| file that the child cannot change. That probably means no
| Microsoft Windows PC. See: https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
|
| eazy-peezy
| casey2 wrote:
| >> Hmm I can't find any porn on the internet, better ask
| around
|
| > Sure Timmy I'll send you porn, but it's illegal and I'm
| taking a big risk here so you gotta do something for me, also
| you can't tell anyone
|
| You've failed to solve the porn problem and now you've
| created a larger grooming/CDM problem.
| jmclnx wrote:
| You can add porn sites to the hosts file yourself.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The point that people are making is that while
| restricting overt internet porn does remove it from sight
| of a lot of kids, it will also continue to circulate as
| "samizdat" through whatever filesharing mechanisms exist.
| When I was at school someone got busted for distributing
| BBS porn on floppy disks, no network required. Now we
| have terabyte SD cards.
| iamnothere wrote:
| Absolutely true. When I was a kid a few people got in
| trouble for drawing and circulating pixelated "porn" on
| their graphing calculators. You can't stop teenagers from
| being teenagers.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| This samizdat is already in existence and the principal
| way my kids access inappropriate content.
|
| Peer to peer, or peer to creepy pedo, is how the stuff
| gets passed around regardless.
|
| Do you have any idea the sorts of things kids send via
| SMS?
| casey2 wrote:
| hosts file isn't even the correct tool for this job. I
| don't know why this is being suggested a serious
| solution. I can add domain names and chose which IP
| address they resolve to. It can't even block websites.
|
| If I didn't know any better I would assume you are
| spreading misinformation to put children into an unsafe
| situation
| jmclnx wrote:
| Yes I know this is technically true. One could use
| iptables, but it is easier for people (users) to do this
| instead of getting iptables / pf or whatever configured.
| It is one size fits all.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| You either don't have kids, or your children are adults.
|
| It's impractical in today's world to raise children without
| access to devices like tablets and smart phones. That's like
| having a sugar-free, no TV, hand-sewn, ect, ect, household.
|
| What's more important is to know what your kids are getting
| into, making sure they are comfortable discussing what they
| see, and teaching them independent decision making skills.
|
| For example, a few years ago, my then seven-year-old
| complained to me about all of the Jesus videos that were
| popping up on Youtube. I told her to thumbs down them, and
| now Youtube no longer suggests them. She also knows that if
| other kids watch Jesus videos, that's their right and to keep
| her mouth shut.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| I'm curious, what were the "Jesus videos?"
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Videos about Jesus aimed towards children. She never
| showed them to me. I'm assuming they're either Bible
| stories, "Jesus loves you and died for your sins" kind of
| things, or otherwise typical American evangelizing
| towards children.
|
| We aren't a religious household, but we do occasionally
| expose our children to religious things because we live
| in the US and it's a big part of American culture and my
| extended family. For example, when my oldest was into
| ancient Egypt, I watched the 10 Commands (Charton Heston
| Movie) with her, then read Exodus with her. I also
| explained that this is not literal history but that some
| people believe it is, and that she shouldn't discuss
| religion at school.
|
| She saw the videos shortly after we read Exodus, so I
| wonder if she was searching for for clips from the 10
| Commandments or things about Exodus.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Repurpose the IPv4 "evil bit" as an "is adult" bit.
| iamnothere wrote:
| As a culture we just have to come to accept that parents should
| be responsible for managing kids' devices, and provide them
| with the device-level tools for doing so. If a parent lets a 10
| year old hang out in a sketchy alleyway every weekend, we would
| blame them for the inevitable consequences. Why do we not blame
| them for failing to monitor what their kids are up to online?
|
| And before someone tries to bore me with anecdotes about how
| your particular kid evaded whatever restrictions you put in
| place, I think if kids put in thoughtful effort and planning to
| evade restrictions then parents are off the hook. Same as if a
| kid stages an elaborate ruse (one that would fool most parents)
| to get out of the house and drink with friends. That's not on
| you. Parents aren't prison wardens and we shouldn't ask for a
| police state to fill in parenting gaps.
|
| Making the state into the parent will affect us all, not just
| kids. I (and plenty of others) will fight to the end to
| preserve the last vestiges of the free, open internet. Overlay
| networks and even sneakernet if necessary. We're not going to
| accept authoritarian control of communications no matter how
| much politicians want it.
| seneca wrote:
| Well said. This is a social failure being exploited by shrude
| politicians to usurp more authority. Replacing parents with
| the state keeps playing out, and keeps being a horrible idea.
| Simulacra wrote:
| That's a very good point
| zug_zug wrote:
| Just because something isn't ideal doesn't mean it's worth
| making a law about. Running with scissors -- not best practice.
| Worth trying to legislate? Absolutely not.
|
| Somebody who's 17 choosing to look at porn? Not in America's
| top 1 million problems.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I don't know what to do about it
|
| Do something similar to what we do with video: make a
| government enforced voluntary rating system (that is, you use
| if you want, if you use and lie, the government hits you) with
| a standard where sites can tell their ratings to the clients.
|
| Have the parents decide if they will use the rating for
| anything.
| mhitza wrote:
| A fraction of the money poured into these mass surveillance
| systems and proposals would have gone a long way in developing
| better parental control software.
|
| If startups build parental control it carries the wrong
| incentives.
|
| Realistically what's needed for proper parental control.
|
| 1. Software that parents can install on phones, and computers
| (which comes as an upside of less lockdown on devices)
|
| 2. A way to whitelist websites and applications (particularly
| for phones).
|
| 3. A way to share, reuse and collaborate on whitelists. No
| enforcement of a central authority.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Assuming the reason for these laws is to protect children from
| pornography, you could ask, what are the specific harms from
| pornography? You could identify those harms through scientific
| study (some have been done; it appears the harms are mostly due
| to a lack of education and understanding about what's going on
| in porn) and address them (educate children to understand
| what's going on intellectually/emotionally and how to treat
| people with respect). But that would require talking to kids
| about sex, which adults are _petrified_ of. Our culture is
| puritanical, and uses fear and shame to avoid dealing with
| things like sex. It then perpetuates this fear and shame onto
| each generation, and it pervades every product and service we
| have. So we could try fighting the irrational fear and become
| less afraid of sex (and pornography would probably change
| because of it). But good luck doing that in this country.
| procrasturbator wrote:
| Hey, yall are still ahead of the curve.
|
| A while back, in my country parents _protested against their
| daughters getting free HPV shots_.
|
| Couldn't handle the idea that their kids are separately
| embodied beings, you see.
|
| Plus I'd wager the long word "papillomavirus" scared most of
| those folks.
|
| So now we have higher STD rates _and_ a significant number of
| young women permanently traumatized by being denied
| healthcare just because their parents were too obsessed with
| their private parts.
|
| And that's "thinkin' of the childrin" for ya.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I think we must think about what the downside of kids maybe
| being introduced to porn really. Realistically, it is pretty
| low. Given that, we shouldn't really be giving up anything to
| try and stop it. I was exposed to porn several ways pre-
| Internet. Older siblings, news stands, late night cable. If I
| wanted more, I could get it. It was simply not a problem.
|
| Maybe there is a problem for a tiny number of individuals, OK.
| A one size fits all approach like this still isn't the solution
| in these cases, though.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >I was exposed to porn several ways pre-Internet. Older
| siblings, news stands, late night cable. If I wanted more, I
| could get it. It was simply not a problem.
|
| Yup. Me too.
|
| And it goes back much further. Cf. "Pictures of Lily"[0] for
| a pop culture exposition from nearly sixty years ago. The
| point being that "porn" isn't anything new, nor was it
| difficult to obtain (hence a popular song about "porn") even
| before computer networks.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-PHDR2yhxE&list=RDg-
| PHDR2yh...
|
| Edit: For those who would cite the current ubiquity of
| "hardcore" porn on the 'net, I'd say that's a difference in
| degree, not in kind. Something to consider.
| phainopepla2 wrote:
| A difference in degree can make all the difference.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If we had a way to prove age without revealing any other
| identity that could be used for tracking/profile building. I
| don't see that being supported by the tech industry though, as
| they are almost completely reliant on tracking to earn money.
| tarentel wrote:
| So it is up to me to monitor your child? I don't work in porn
| or an even remotely related field but I have to implement age
| verification now because of Texas's law. Someone explain to me
| how this is protecting any children.
| AngryData wrote:
| Why do we need to do something? Is there really such a problem
| that needs to be solved? Because I see so many people who grew
| up with unrestricted access to the internet and did not go
| around watching every beheading or BDSM porn video around like
| everyone seems to think kids do today despite them being easily
| available at the time, and when they were come across they
| certainly didn't get everyone fucked in the head because of it.
| Everyone knew rotten.com, everyone was using napster/kazaa/mirc
| that was full of porn and BDSM and snuff videos. If we were
| going to have problems, people 40 years old now would have
| signs of it and be messed up, except they aren't.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Guess at some point in the future it will come out who bankrolled
| all this because multiple countries in Europe and America don't
| just roll something like this out in 8 months organically without
| someone paying off politicians to push it
| matwood wrote:
| It has nothing to do with age gating, and everything to do with
| tracking. While there may be some funding going on behind the
| scenes, governments love tracking on its own merits.
| iterance wrote:
| The fight for this kind of legislature has been ongoing for
| many years as part of a broader program that seeks to shape the
| kinds of information that can be stored, consumed, and
| propagated on the Internet. Age verification is only one branch
| of the fight, but an important one to the many who support
| government control: it is an inroad that allows governments to
| say they have a stake in who sees what.
| rkachowski wrote:
| It would be excellent to know who is pushing this and through
| what means. There is some unprecedented alignment across
| borders to restrict access and rights.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Those pesky... adults!
| jamesbelchamber wrote:
| This strikes me as almost conspiratorial thinking, and it's
| reflected in the article. At one point they say KOSA is
| unpopular but.. it isn't? These laws (KOSA, OSA) enjoy broad,
| bipartisan popularity and politicians are jumping on the
| bandwagon because they want votes. It really is as simple as
| that.
|
| There's absolutely no way to counter this, or at least to round
| off the censorship power-grab this is allowing, if we don't
| admit to ourselves that people have become suspicious of the
| tech sector (us) and are reaching to clip our wings - starting
| with access to their kids.
| iamnothere wrote:
| The laws are only moderately popular in the abstract, but
| when you show people the reality and the future implications
| then popularity drops. The key is educating people about the
| dangers of this type of legislation, including dangers to
| privacy and authoritarian control over information. In the US
| especially both major parties hate each other with a passion;
| this animosity can be leveraged with proper framing.
| zug_zug wrote:
| What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have
| ever expressed interest in this?
|
| If the politicians keep voting for things their constituents
| don't (and in these cases actively push back against so hard
| that the politician are forced to withdraw the push) that
| seems like strong evidence that politicians are doing
| something with an external incentive...
|
| Politicians having bad incentives (e.g. campaign donations)
| isn't conspiracy thinking, it's a documented reality. Hell,
| we even had a supreme court judge taking a present from
| somebody who's case he was ACTIVELY OVERSEEING.
| jamesbelchamber wrote:
| > What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have
| ever expressed interest in this?
|
| UK: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-
| results/daily/202...
|
| US: https://issueone.org/press/new-poll-finds-near-
| universal-pub...
|
| Aus: https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-
| for-un...
|
| So far as I know there's nothing confounding here - people
| from across the political spectrum just seem to think it's
| a good idea to introduce age checks and to restrict
| children from accessing adult content.
| zug_zug wrote:
| That's a powerpoint of somebody really trying to push an
| agenda and has nothing to do with age verification. The
| 88% support is for "social media platforms to protect
| minors from online harms, such as the promotion of eating
| disorders, suicide, substance abuse, and sexual
| exploitation."
|
| I'm sure social media could say with 99% accuracy whether
| somebody is a minor already just based on advertising
| data and if a law prevented facebook from showing diet
| pill ads to a kid that has absolutely zero with some sort
| of government tracking bullshit.
|
| The fact that you are citing 3 studies without even
| reading them apparently really makes me suspicious of
| your motivation here.
| jamesbelchamber wrote:
| I'm disappointed that you call my motivations into
| question instead of engaging me in good faith. It's not
| possible to solve a problem without being honest about
| the pertinent facts, and I think you (and the person I
| responded to) are engaging in denialism.
|
| My experiences are all in the UK but everything I've read
| and everyone I've spoken to (outside of tech circles)
| reinforces my belief that this is popular. If you
| disagree then fine but I don't think you can find any
| polling to support that.
|
| If you can then be my guest - I genuinely would like to
| see it. I'm not happy with my conclusions.
| zug_zug wrote:
| Well either you didn't read what you cited, in which case
| you sort of owe us an apology and need to back off your
| claim.
|
| Or you did read it in which case you'd realize it has
| nothing to do with people wanting government age
| verification, and then you also need to back off your
| claim and owe us an apology.
| Gormo wrote:
| This seems like an attempt to leverage something widely
| regarded as reasonable (stop kids from accessing pornographic
| content without parental oversight) as the camel's nose through
| the tent to establish widespread identity tracking on the
| internet.
| TZubiri wrote:
| I get the sentiment, but just denouncing that the given
| reason is a facade is not sufficient.
|
| It creates a divide between people that are looking for a
| solution to a problem, and people that disregard the problem
| completely. If you just ignore the actual problem and
| cynically call it a front for something else, you are just
| going to be ignored in the actual conversation. The problem
| is real and it needs a solution, suggest something better or
| be forced to stay out of the conversation.
|
| For example, if there's a lot of car accidents, and we
| suggest a speed limit, you might say that it's actually a way
| for cops and cities to control the population, and make
| everything slow, and increase city income by charging fines.
| But the problem still exists despite your cynicism, unless
| you suggest another solution for the problem, you won't be
| able to keep your precious speed freedom. Because of course
| reducing car fatalities is more important than the freedom to
| go super fast, that's not really under discussion.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| So I get it, but you have to include the time frame that
| this is happening. Its more than just a solution to a
| problem. This particular idea of age-gating just happens to
| be pushed forward during the worst time in history for
| internet freedoms. Freedoms are being attacked on multiple
| fronts. I look at this more like them introducing license
| plate cameras to stop crime, or real estate apps that use
| algorithms to help land lords and renters to get better
| pricing. Except these corporations that sell this tech are
| promoting and utilizing the features of this tech to make
| sure it gets abused. You can see this with the license
| plate readers, its giving police more control than they
| need, and for the real estate companies that are pushing
| algorithmic pricing for rents, they are spending time
| contacting landlords and asking them what they are charging
| for rent so they can artificially inflate the market.
|
| This issue is way more nuanced then you are making it.
| There is no legislation, or anyone enforcing laws to reign
| in the abuses and therefor the tech is being abused, and
| will continue to be abused with no end it sight. If you
| want laws and mechanisms to protect children, first have
| something in-place that protects people from the abuse that
| these corporations are encouraging. Until that happens, I
| do not support any of these initiatives. Its the wrong time
| for them.
| TZubiri wrote:
| traffic control and real estate pricing collusions are
| unrelated topics. I don't know that this is the worst
| moment for freedoms, I think you would be well served to
| look into other periods of history
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| It's too soon and too coordinated. If it were organic but
| underhand as you suggest the timeline would be 15 years,
| seeing it hit the goal elsewhere and copying not 8 months.
|
| This is being bankrolled.
| sfdlkj3jk342a wrote:
| I think it's possible that there are secretive efforts to
| destroy permissionless access to the internet, but my guess is
| that states are simply copying each other and/or global
| conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the
| same conclusions around the same time.
|
| A somewhat analogous situation is how landlords raise rents in
| sync with each other, not because they're intentionally
| colluding to fix prices, but because nowadays it's easy to see
| average rental prices in neighborhoods, and the natural
| strategy is to set your rental prices based on that.
| mhitza wrote:
| > my guess is that states are simply copying each other
| and/or global conditions are similar enough that they
| naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time.
|
| I think that's the wrong guess. Even with chat control, in
| some previous forms, the proposals came of the back of
| lobbying. One such case was Ashton Kutcker's startup
| https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-
| start...
|
| The more recent proposals for chat control were drafted by
| non-public "high level groups", the identity of which wasn't
| revealed to the public https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-
| matters/going-dark
| sfdlkj3jk342a wrote:
| Do you think the main force is misplaced good intentions
| (which I assume is what drives Ashton Kutcher) or more
| sinister intentional efforts to harm the public?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Those are heavily co-mingled. Policing and intelligence
| agencies in particular view themselves as having good
| intentions which look like harm from the outside.
| mindslight wrote:
| Good intentions misplaced into efforts to control other
| people _are_ sinister intentional efforts to harm the
| public.
| mhitza wrote:
| I don't think anyone is that naive to not see the
| negative implications of the things they are proposing,
| or helping develop. They might feign ignorance, and
| excuse themselves with "following orders" but the
| majority know it's not right in principle.
|
| I tend to follow information in this space, and could
| talk about it endlessly (though it would still have
| minimal effect in the end).
|
| From the things I'm seeing right now, in my mind, all
| this clampdown on privacy is to have better control of
| the message and discussion in order to preserve the
| corrupt status quo. To give one example, many leaks and
| reports initially come in anonymous due to fear of
| repercussion from those in power. My country (Romania)
| changed the legislation a couple of years back to prevent
| people from reporting corruption anonymously (in a highly
| corrupt state). Maybe that's why Trump said he loves
| Romanians, recently, he'd like to do that at home as
| well.
|
| > more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public
|
| Until recently I wasn't the type of person that would
| entertain the idea of a shadowy organization that tries
| to puppetmaster the world. Though with the recent Epstein
| emails release that in black and white stated about
| Slovakia's 2018 government "the government will fall this
| week - as planned" (day prior to mass protests that lead
| to it falling), makes you wonder about the backroom
| politics of the western world, and why we need more
| transparency there, and less control from them.
|
| edit:
|
| And of course, any change that is put behind a "think of
| the children" message, should raise everybody's eyebrows
| to the max.
| _factor wrote:
| Just imagine a capable individual just like yourself, but
| with such a rotting core that they see the same devious
| plans you and I do, but lack the backbone/principles and
| moral/ethical fiber to prevent them from pursuing those
| ideas. Instead, they full endorse and selfishly benefit
| from them at the expense of others. With our large
| population, this individual, and many such like them are
| guaranteed to exist at all levels of the socio-economic
| ladder. Solipsism is the root of corruption continuing to
| sprout.
| deltoidmaximus wrote:
| Kutcher wrote a letter of support for his friend Danny
| Masterson who was convicted raping multiple women so if
| he is truly concerned about abuse of women it doesn't
| seem to apply when it involves people he knows doing it.
| When this came to light his defense was that he didn't
| think anyone but the judge was going to see the letter.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Reminds me of a little piece about PR firms and how many
| ideas are not really an organic zeitgeist but are actively
| manufactured by monied interests:
| https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
| Wojtkie wrote:
| Written in '05 and still very poignant. I'd love to see a
| follow-up of this article updated for how it's changed 20
| years later. Seems like the scale and decentralization
| has changed the most.
| iamnothere wrote:
| Off-topic, but actually a number of landlords raise prices in
| sync with each other because they use price-setting services
| like RealPage that intentionally try to maximize rents across
| multiple landlords. They just settled a lawsuit over this:
| https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-realpage-
| settlement-r...
| everdrive wrote:
| Do social movements _always_ have people at the top pulling the
| strings? Is it _never_ the case that even when you can identify
| thought leaders, the movement itself is organic and broadly
| supported?
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Yeah, this is much more easily explained by the fact that a
| lot of things on the internet are damaging kids.
| mindslight wrote:
| Yes, and that thing is chiefly corporate social media.
| Which could be fixed literally overnight by parents, over a
| few weeks by school district policy, and over a few months
| with sites publishing metadata to aid client side blocking.
| Phones, the primary independent computing device for kids,
| are already locked down to the point that an owner has to
| jump through many (detectable and auditable) hoops to
| install arbitrary software.
|
| None of this requires some draconian regime where it
| becomes sites' own responsibilities to obtain and verify
| their users meatspace identities.
| tokai wrote:
| This isn't a social movement.
| everdrive wrote:
| Concern over accessibility of internet pornography is
| absolutely a social movement. I don't necessarily agree
| with some of what is being pushed, but there's a large
| constituency here.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Internet comments aren't a social movement
|
| Everything that these laws are supposedly regulating has
| always been there and we have an entire generation now that
| grew up with it. Everyone was fine just like video games were
| fine, movies were fine, racy books were fine, and the
| printing press was fine.
|
| The Internet comments make it seem like lazy parents but it's
| very convenient that the solution is to ID every single
| person on the Internet. Facebook pushed this hard with their
| real name policy and then had to back off because people
| complained about trans people being forced to use their old
| names. They've been successfully demonized so now it's time
| to push as hard as they can. It's probably not just Facebook
| but it's obviously not organic.
| everdrive wrote:
| >Internet comments aren't a social movement
|
| This seems strictly wrong. People talk online. People get
| their ideas online, and share their ideas online. Internet
| comments _alone_ are not a social movement, but they
| certainly do frequently represent social movements.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Musk in his tit for tat with Trump recently revealed huge
| numbers of the Internet comments supporting MAGA were
| foreign plants. He didn't reveal which accounts were bots
| though. All these comments supporting censorship appear
| mostly on platforms that would love to ID every person on
| their platform.
|
| Internet comments do not represent anything anymore that
| doesn't manifest in the actual world. They are excellent
| at having a few influence the many
| everdrive wrote:
| I agree with you, and probably more than it sounds. But I
| think the point you make is still too strong a case. ie,
| even if the online comments are ~90% foreign influence it
| doesn't also follow that everything is astroturfing or
| that real people do not discuss issues online.
|
| To your point though, maybe we can no longer reliably
| tell the difference, and so it'd be better to adopt your
| view as a rule of thumb.
| mindslight wrote:
| I think it's "organic" from the big tech companies looking
| to pull up the ladder behind them. These laws are straight
| up regulatory capture to make it much harder to start new
| Internet businesses, while forcing their users to divulge
| even more personal info.
|
| Google has been bugging me with Android popups _for years_
| "please add your birthday to help Google comply with the
| law". Obtaining that bit of my information isn't something
| they need to do - it's something they _want_ to do because
| every bit of personal information they scrape out of me
| makes their adtech surveillance database joins that much
| more accurate.
| axus wrote:
| Today an email purportedly from Google said I will need
| to send age verification on my 20yo account, or they'll
| stop targeting me for advertisements and showing me
| inappropriate material. This sounds like an excellent
| deal for me, not going to bother determining if its a
| phishing attempt.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Plot twist: It's Ashton Kutcher.
|
| https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotligh...
| bparsons wrote:
| The Christian right has been pushing for this forever. They
| finally acquired enough political and cultural purchase to get
| this measure pushed over the line.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Protecting children is one of the four horsemen of the
| infopocalypse:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
|
| Governments are also getting more conservative recently with
| regards to domestic surveillance & social freedoms. In this
| regard, it's not anyone new, it's just the usual suspects: the
| same people who fund conservative media, the prison industrial
| complex, etc.
| RunSet wrote:
| > The SESTA-FOSTA law is a combination of two bills: the Stop
| Enabling Sex Traffickers Act; and the Fight Online Sex
| Trafficking Act. It passed Congress in March, and President
| Donald Trump signed it into law in April.
|
| > ...
|
| > The biggest companies say they can manage the risks. Match
| Group--owner of Match.com, Tinder, Ok Cupid and Plenty of Fish
| --says any potential legal issues give "huge advantages" to
| those with enough size to comply. "We are able to have a big
| legal team, a big customer care team," Chief Executive Mandy
| Ginsberg said.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-law-targets-sex-trafficking...
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| In the last couple years we've seen the internet version of
| "Vietnam war being televised made it unpopular at home".
|
| After Vietnam, it was easier for journalists to embed with the
| terrorist groups than it was to embed with US forces, as the US
| learned that people seeing how the sausage is made immediately
| cuts the support for said sausage making.
|
| Massive political weight was thrown behind getting control of
| TikTok because of the sheer amount of reporting from Gaza.
| Politicians are still trying to tell people that they're
| essentially wrong for forming their views on actual images of
| violence they're seeing.
|
| The world at large was shown the brutality against the people
| of Gaza, and the plot was lost at home.
|
| If the "enemies" aren't shown, it's easy to go along with "good
| guys" and "bad guys", but when you see 100s of children missing
| limbs, mourning their family members, and begging on to not be
| killed over the course of a few months, suddenly the fairy tale
| that allows some countries to brutalize others falls apart.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| I consider myself lucky to have grown up before the internet, but
| after local BBS' were a thing. My parents had absolutely no idea
| what went on in those systems, and I found the freedom
| incredible. Being able to explore and spread my wings a bit was a
| huge part of my childhood and teen years, and it wouldn't have
| been possible if my parents were hovering over my shoulder, or if
| I were unable to make an account because I wasn't 18.
|
| That said, I was mostly dealing with griefers in Trade Wars or
| LoRD, and the worst thing I could find locally was GIFs of women
| in bikinis (and waiting for them to download was an excellent way
| to learn patience). I didn't have to worry so much about the
| threats that exist today online.
|
| I am so grateful that I grew up when I did and got to experience
| that.
| debo_ wrote:
| I remember winning a 10-kill LORD game on a local BBS. It took
| ages of me staying up until midnight to kill all the
| resurrected players after the daily reset. I had only one real
| competitor on that server and he gave up after I slew the
| dragon twice in one week (due to great luck.)
| nkrisc wrote:
| And when I was a kid some of my peers were watching Al Queda
| execution videos.
|
| I don't know what the solution is, but I do not think kids
| should have unrestricted access to the internet, especially if
| their parents can't/won't set limits.
| iamnothere wrote:
| If they won't set limits that's an issue with the parents,
| not the internet.
|
| If dad leaves the liquor cabinet unlocked the solution isn't
| to ban alcohol.
|
| A free and open internet is non negotiable.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Everything is negotiable. We collectively choose where to
| draw all the arbitrary lines you draw. Free and open
| internet is as arbitrary as a completely locked-down
| internet.
| iamnothere wrote:
| We, the people who build and operate the internet as well
| as the tech that enables it, collectively choose to
| maintain a free and open internet for the benefit of all
| free people.
|
| _Maybe_ with enough effort you can force the internet to
| fracture into a centralized TV-style internet and a
| "shadow" free internet, but you'll probably kill the
| economy in the process. Regardless, you'll never stamp
| out those of us who will maintain the free internet over
| whatever channels we can find.
| imglorp wrote:
| If we give up the ability to negotiate, then we would not
| be able to have this conversation in the future. As we
| have seen many times, all over the world, authoritarian
| regimes will absolutely suppress dissent and chill speech
| if they have the tools. Today maybe it's adult content.
| They're already attacking the press and anyone critical
| about the administration: they keep trying to get the
| corporations to fire their comedians and rein in their
| reporters. So this isn't slippery slope. We're there and
| nearing the bottom.
| quavan wrote:
| The day we have an epidemic of children and teens abusing
| alcohol to the point of it turning into a national
| healthcare emergency, you will find that stricter control
| of alcohol will certainly be put in place.
|
| We are at that point now with children having unrestricted
| access to online content that isn't age appropriate, as
| well as being influenced by insane weirdos on TikTok and
| the like at an age where they are particularly
| impressionable.
| stvltvs wrote:
| Isn't that day today?
|
| The CDC says 4,000 underage drinkers die in the US every
| year. Maybe we could reduce that with stricter controls,
| but at what point does that become too burdensome to the
| rights of legal drinkers?
|
| It's even harder to get the balance right when it comes
| to free speech issues like online pornography.
| tzs wrote:
| > The CDC says 4,000 underage drinkers die in the US
| every year
|
| That's not quite correct. They count both deaths where
| the decedent had a high blood alcohol level and deaths
| where someone else who was responsible for the death had
| a high blood alcohol level. Because of this many of those
| in the count were underage but were not drinkers.
|
| For example if I'm driving drunk and you are my sober
| passenger and I drive us off a tall cliff killing you
| your death will be included in their count because I was
| drunk and responsible for it. It also works the other
| way. If I'm sober and you are drunk, and I drive us off
| the cliff and you die it counts because you died drunk.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Alcohol _is_ banned for minors so that argument doesn 't
| work.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Kids also cannot sign up for internet service, or pay for
| it. So in both cases, we're talking about society gating
| access to something, adults obtaining that product
| legally and bringing it into their home.
|
| The question, then, is who is responsible for the
| children in the household? I've always answered this
| exactly one way: the parents. Power and responsibility
| must go together, so if the parents are responsible, then
| the parents must have the power. Parents have been held
| legally responsible for the crimes of their children, and
| given the coverage of parents being arrested for letting
| their kids go on a walk across town, I'd say this sets up
| incentives pretty well.
|
| But all of that is a sideshow; a narrative. What we
| actually have is a massive swing towards authoritarianism
| globally, largely fueled by in increase in the internet
| allowing for unprecedented surveillance overreach, and
| the folks trying to seize control of those reins are
| using children seeing porn as a way to seem benevolent to
| garner support from folks that don't understand what's
| actually happening. Huge swathes have been duped into
| believing the narrative and fighting for age-gating in
| the worst possible ways, and that's because they're
| missing the larger pattern.
|
| It's manufactured consent.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Kids can access the internet in all kinds of places
| outside the home, and outside the purview of their
| parents supervision. Schools, libraries, friend's houses,
| public wifi anywhere.
|
| You may be right about the authoritarianism; it's a
| tendency of our species and makes it all the more
| remarkable that Western freedoms have lasted this long. I
| think, though, that it's more likely simple greed. The
| giant tech companies, dependent on ad revenue because
| nobody would actually pay for what they are offering,
| must be able to track and profile people.
|
| The "protect kids from porn" lobby has always been
| around, it has nothing to do with surveillance or the
| internet. These people would be picketing a bookstore
| that sold _Hustler_ magazine back in the 1970s, and
| demanding that customers be made to prove their age.
| cocoto wrote:
| > Kids can access the internet in all kinds of places
| outside the home, and outside the purview of their
| parents supervision. Schools, libraries, friend's houses,
| public wifi anywhere.
|
| Then these places should make sure kids are not doing
| wrong things on the web on their machines. Just like a
| shop should make sure to not sell alcohol to kids. A
| library should have some kind of web filter anyway to at
| least block porn.
| bityard wrote:
| They meant banning alcohol altogether. A.k.a.
| prohibition.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| How does a parent check what the child does on the way to
| school or meeting friends in a shopping mall.
|
| Public wifi and smart phones chngaes what can be done and
| what needs to be done.
| iamnothere wrote:
| How does a parent check that a friend isn't passing pills
| to them in the back of the bus? How are they checking
| that they don't shoplift when out on their own? This is
| not an argument.
|
| Do your best as a parent and that is enough. Perfection
| is not possible or even desired; kids do have a degree of
| agency, and if they want to break the rules they are
| going to do it! And breaking some rules (ideally in a
| safe-ish way) is one way that we learn how to be
| independent from parents as we mature.
| SPICLK2 wrote:
| If only it were that simple. To fix the analogy, imagine
| that every other kids' dad left the liquor cabinet unlocked
| and allowed them to carry liquor around anytime they liked.
| seneca wrote:
| "Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just
| because a baby can't chew it." - Heinlein
|
| If you hand power to the state every time people fail to
| properly handle their responsibilities, you end up in a
| dictatorship. It is a parent's responsibility to keep their
| kids away from the dark corners of the internet. Thoughtful
| regulation would create tools to allow them to do that
| easily, not hand parenting over to governments.
| mindslight wrote:
| Where are those former peers now? You reference this like
| their life trajectory must have been irreparably harmed by
| it. Are they in prison? Were they killed while committing
| violent crime? Are they on disability from being permanently
| emotionally crippled? Or what?
| birthdaywizard wrote:
| A little tangential since this is more about gating white
| supremacist content than violence or sex, but I was on
| 4chan when it was being infiltrated by genuine white
| supremacist organizations and Russians that talked about
| how manly Assad was to influence teenagers interested in
| anime. I had people in real life to talk to about these
| things so I narrowly escaped the influence. Looking at the
| current state of the US, not everyone did. That being said,
| despite my hope that older people would be less prone to
| such influence, it doesn't always seem to be the case.
| avereveard wrote:
| When grandpa was young, if there was a wolf in the forest,
| they went and killed the wolf. They would not break the
| children legs to keep them home.
|
| Killing the wolf saved both the children of busy parents that
| couldn't be bothered to break their legs, and the children
| that grew old enough to have their leg fixed but weren't yet
| adult.
|
| Today instead of chasing predators away from children spaces,
| we just box the children so at one magic birthday they'd be
| out in the world untouched by evil. The world will be still
| evil however, and the not children for a day unprepared for
| it.
|
| What if, here's a radical idea, we terminate corporation with
| toxic ads or that let predators use their system to target
| children.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| If you could offer the proponents of these laws a deal
| where all the bills die in committee and in exchange
| Pornhub gets shut down, I suspect they'd take it. But you
| can't. The First Amendment doesn't permit such targeting,
| and almost nobody who opposes age gating would concede the
| premise that porn is inherently bad.
| avereveard wrote:
| But again, the problem isn't this or that content-
| exchange site; the problem is people doing illegal
| activities within, or facilitated by, such sites, or
| people within the site that are sourcing willingly
| illegal material or distributing material that is illegal
| to some recipients. And lawmakers are targeting the
| middlemen and the recipient instead of going to the root
| cause, and the cynic in me thinks, "Of course they'd do
| that, why would they go after themselves?" But it's a bit
| of a reduction, and not all wolves are rich and powerful
| (though those who are uncaught or get away scot-free
| mostly are).
| pyuser583 wrote:
| I was driving in a rural area, and almost hit deer several
| times. I finally made it to my destination, and island,
| with no deer, but a healthy wolf population.
|
| The state would breed wolves on the island then release
| them on the mainland to keep the deer in check.
|
| Sorry to ruin your metaphor, but we really need more
| wolves.
| avereveard wrote:
| The age pyramid and natality stats show the
| inapplicability of the example to our situation.
| protocolture wrote:
| >I do not think kids should have unrestricted access to the
| internet
|
| I will be restricting my kids access to the internet.
|
| I judge him worthy of viewing whatever he wants when he
| inevitably works around those restrictions.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| It was less commercial then. It was not as much "occupied" by
| intermediaries who think the internet exists for their
| commercial gain and anyone who uses it owes them something
|
| I think it is amusing how these commercial third party
| intermediaries today are trying to frame things like "chat
| control" and "age restrictions" as attacks on internet users'
| rights rather than attacks on their intermediation "business
| model"
|
| Generally, there is no age restriction on subscribing to
| internet service. However third party intermediaries that have
| now occupied seemingly every corner of the web, so-called
| "tech" companies, want everyone to believe that intermediaries
| _are_ the internet (as opposed to middlemen who seek to surveil
| as many internet subscribers as they can)
|
| I am glad I grew up before the internet so that I understand
| and appreciate the only service that matters is _internet
| service_. People today take internet service for granted
| perhaps but I can remember when it was a new frontier
|
| With internet service, there were so many possibilities. Today,
| so-called "tech" companies portray internet service as a given,
| apparently useless on its own,^1 whilst they advertise
| themselves as offering "services" (usually for free, a Trojan
| Horse for commercial surveillance). They utilise bandwidth paid
| for by the internet subscriber to transfer encrypted
| surveillance data to themselves
|
| 1. For example, when Mozilla claims something like without an
| online advertising "ecosystem" the internet would be worthless.
| The greed and self-entitlement behind this framing is both
| absurd and hilarious
| holmesworcester wrote:
| I think it's important to not throw babies out with bathwater
| here.
|
| One can disagree with Mozilla and think advertising sucks,
| and use tools to block it or FOSS products that don't force
| it on us, while also seeing how e2ee encryption bans ("chat
| control") and age verification rules are a restriction of
| _both_ the rights of service providers _and_ the rights of
| users.
|
| Another way to put it is, just because a regulation is a
| restriction of the rights of a service provider does not mean
| it isn't _also_ a restriction of the rights of a user.
|
| The former does not make the latter true, but in some cases
| both are true.
|
| I'd also add that if we can't stop bad laws that restrict the
| rights of (and piss off) _both_ service providers _and_ users
| , we have no hope of stopping similarly bad laws that _only_
| restrict the rights of users.
|
| (Service providers, even small ones if they take the time to
| speak with their member of Congress, can be very credible,
| sympathetic, and persuasive stakeholders. When we can fight
| on the same side--realizing that sometimes we will fight on
| opposite sides--it's better for user rights that we do so.
| One of the tragedies of the left and parts of the right in
| the Trump era is that they see any regulation that hurts Big
| Tech as a win, even if it also hurts user rights. User rights
| are safer if we can distinguish between regs that hurt Big
| Tech _and_ users from regs that don 't hurt users.)
| SPICLK2 wrote:
| Arguably, those early adopters of online services were
| "occupiers" of a system designed and funded by military and
| academic goverment bodies.
| holmesworcester wrote:
| Same, so much so!
|
| My feelings of freedom in that era, as a teen in a small 90s US
| city, were what fueled me to co-found one of the organizations
| (Fight for the Future) cited in the article!
|
| (No longer in the trenches, just on the board, deserve zero
| direct credit for any of this work--it's all them!)
| ineptech wrote:
| I feel like we've always been living on borrowed time, due to
| the historical accident of the internet being built by
| academics and public institution employees. If internet
| protocols had been built by for-profits, HTTP requests would
| include credit card # as a mandatory header.
| ok123456 wrote:
| People were talking about micropayments for content in the
| early '90s. The first digital currency proposals were made
| with exactly this use case in mind. Ironically, the protocol
| that finally stuck the landing is terrible at handling this
| exact situation.
| fullstop wrote:
| Ha, I remember finding the adult section of the file uploads.
| It took fourteen year old me thirty minutes to download one
| jpeg of boobs.
|
| LoRD was fantastic, as were the turn based games that other
| people would dial in to take part of. It was such a different
| era, but we made it work by setting time limits and
| cooperating.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Born just in time to explore GIFs of women in bikinis. Born too
| early to explore trans porn and be confused about sexuality by
| age 13.
|
| That's a sweetspot if you ask me.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| I was on some kind of local BBS in 1995 from my local ISP. I
| found a guy selling a gamepad of some kind. Agreed to buy it.
| Talked to him for a decent amount of time. Finally set time to
| meet at local Kmart near my house.
|
| The look on his face when a 10 year old rode up on a bicycle to
| buy his gamepad. I don't have a good memory but I still
| remember that scene ha.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| This is what I always loved about the early scene. All that
| mattered was how you presented yourself in the text you
| typed.
| tete wrote:
| Something that is way worse today in my opinion is that back
| then everyone has nicknames, talks even for deep topics
| somewhat generically.
|
| Nowadays everyone wants you to put your real name, expects a
| real photo of you, track every step you take.
|
| I think it would be nice to go back to how you could talk
| openly, just like you were able to have "discussion forums" in
| newspapers pseudonymously without it being trivially abused for
| identity theft, etc.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I'm grateful as well. While I was born after the early
| internet, I still got to experience the true internet. Truly
| one of the wonders of humanity. It will be missed.
| benbojangles wrote:
| Internet Gatekeeping, ID Cards, New Facial Recognition Powers,
| Secret government talks have identified a huge problem, planned
| all this during the covid years is my guess. Something is going
| down and this is their safest bet i reckon. Possibly to do with
| unregistered recent inhabitants and improving the capability to
| identify them. That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells
| you something.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| What does the movie Scarface have to say about it?
| benbojangles wrote:
| https://www.realclearhistory.com/2017/04/01/the_migrant_cris.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/moviequestions/comments/133gbzl/in_.
| ..
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/we-talked-to-migrants-
| about-...
|
| From what i can gather, there was some confusion as to why
| some nations which clearly and obviously have very high
| crime/fraud/corruption statistics yet at the same time have
| incredibly low prison/prisoner statistics
| (https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-
| th...) and the governments couldn't figure it out or
| overlooked it. It turns out that those nations just kick out
| the trouble and the trouble arrives at other shores, quickly
| setting up black market trade routes, money laundering shops,
| heavy violence, and a complete disregard for laws.
| profstasiak wrote:
| nice conspiracy thinking. I for one can't wait for ID confirmed
| social media, where I don't have to read anything produced by
| russian bots
| benbojangles wrote:
| i'm not a russian bot and i hope the id cards and face
| recognition stuff is temporary while the world collaborates
| to catch the problem people. But my guess is once they see
| how successful it is they will get addicted to the power and
| not let go.
| protocolture wrote:
| Implying bots will have any restrictions or issues at all.
| AngryData wrote:
| You honestly believe these ID laws will get rid of bots?
| Maybe for a year or two the volume will be lower as they
| catch up on how to circumvent restrictions, but I don't see
| it making any real serious dent in bot traffic.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| Identity fraudsters beg to differ.
| sunaookami wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
| balamatom wrote:
| The Russian bots are a much more entertaining read than the
| good-faith North American humans.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Corporations and center-left/center-right liberal governments
| support now and have always supported mass immigration because
| it lowers wages. Nobody especially cares about identifying
| them, the reason they flooded in recently (over the past couple
| decades) is because they were deliberately let in through
| written policies. They did this despite public objections. In
| the US, we know exactly who they are; we issue illegal
| immigrants special IDs and business licenses. They get bank
| loans; they're homeowners. They get in-state tuition at
| colleges.
|
| Starmer is currently using anti-immigrant sentiment to push his
| digital IDs, but that's because he is a cynic. He does whatever
| he needs to do to satisfy his bosses.
|
| > That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you
| something.
|
| It tells you that the US puts nations under siege for decades
| for committing the crime of self-determination, then lets in
| with absolutely no obstacles all of the economically destroyed
| and desperate, the extremely right wing, and the participants
| in CIA-financed death squads who flee, then uses them as a
| voting block (and a resource) to support the continuation and
| escalation of those sieges.
|
| edit: immigrants commit less crime in the US than natives.
| Their children commit more crime, because they rise to the
| level of natives at their socioeconomic bracket.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| Social media is more damaging to kids than porn
| earlyreturns wrote:
| Porn is a special subset of social media.
| balamatom wrote:
| And social media is a special subset of porn.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Damaging in different ways. I'm not sure you can say one is
| worse.
|
| Sure most kids can look at naked people and not be too
| affected, we all have the same parts. But beyond that, a lot of
| really harmful behavior is depicted in some porn and kids are
| not really mature enough to understand that in real healthy
| relationships people don't actually have sex like that.
|
| Both porn and social media can be addictive and unhealthy if
| they become a substitute for interacting with real people. And
| this also happens with adults not just kids.
| tete wrote:
| > a lot of really harmful behavior is depicted in some porn
|
| and movies, and kids shows, and in fast food ads and in
| sitcoms and in comics and even in some churches, even in
| children's books and school books, and famously in Disney
| movies
|
| I am sometimes wondering if the whole "shielding" can be
| counterproductive. If you look at perpetrators and victims
| backstories it was either absolute lack of parenting (nobody
| to talk to) or it was households where everything was taboo.
| Eg. "hardcore Christians" and such.
|
| And I worry that the whole "everything is taboo" might turn
| out badly.
|
| Sure, I totally wished it was like "shield till they are
| 16/18/21" and then it will all be fine, but then we will end
| up with 16/18/21 year olds who will lose all hope when they
| first come across anything that might make them uncomfortable
| or in general cannot deal with.
|
| I also dislike the notion of other people deciding how to
| love each other. Sounds scary. But I really would wonder if
| children who cannot judge stuff end up watching some BDSM and
| suddenly think it's normal to be violent. Like even
| relatively young children witness or are involved in fights
| in kindergarten. Doesn't mean they'll end up having issues
| with violence.
|
| Different story if they learn it's the only way to get
| respect. But I really don't think you can equate that with a
| child coming across porn or non vanilla porn.
|
| It feels like the same story as "ego shooters will make
| everyone think it's okay to shoot people". Pretty sure that a
| big part of people here played ego shooters.
|
| On top of that I think creating the mindset that sex is
| something bad, to maybe be ashamed of, etc. is a good thing.
| I really do think that makes people not speak out when
| something is wrong. It creates that whole taboo. We don't
| have that with other crimes that we allow children to witness
| in media. Theft, violence, etc.
|
| No I don't think children should watch pornography. However
| the whole "you cannot even speak about sex" and it's all way
| worse than weapons seems to feed the "bad porn" to some
| degree.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Facebook is over 20 years old and has never enforced its
| minimum age (13 years.)
|
| I, for one, would have started with legal threats and financial
| penalties long ago. But it just won't happen. So I'm fine with
| technical solutions.
|
| Facebook is able to sell you ads based on your favorite shoe
| lace colour. They ban terrorists, bots, porn and people named
| "Mark Zuckerberg" all the time. Noone can claim it's too hard
| for them to ban minors under 13.
| balamatom wrote:
| Granted, your favorite shoe lace colour _does_ say a whole
| lot about you.
| Noaidi wrote:
| Google is suddenly asking to verify my age on an account I have
| used for five years linked to my credit card. This is about
| surveillance of all of us, not "protecting kids".
| sneak wrote:
| It's not age-gated. It's ID-required.
| tokai wrote:
| With how harshly HN users have been going at UK and the EU, I was
| surprised seeing that not only is the mass surveillance build out
| better in the US, but also the user verification.
| Bender wrote:
| I stand by my repeated statements of how this could have been
| solved simply using an RTA header [1] on the server side and
| require the most common user agents to look for that header
| putting the onus on parents where it currently legally resides.
| It's not perfect, nothing is nor ever will be but using the
| header solution is entirely private, does not store or leak data
| and puts the decision into the device owners rather than creating
| perverse incentives to track everyone. It may actually protect
| most small children whereas today teens quickly find a work-
| around and then teach smaller children how to work around these
| centralized gate-keepers. The current _solutions_ are just about
| tracking people by real identity and incentivizing teens to
| commit identity crimes.
|
| [1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Correct.
|
| None of these laws are _actually_ about protecting children.
| That 's not the real goal. The real goal is the complete
| elimination of anonymity on the web, where both private
| companies and the state can keep tabs on everything you do.
|
| Not being able to be at least pseudo-anonymous has a real
| chilling effect on speech and expression. Even if there are
| laws in place protecting such rights, people will self-censor
| when knowing they are being watched.
|
| It's how freedom of speech and expression dies without actually
| scratching that part off of the bill of rights.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| It's a mix. I'm sure there are some people really trying to
| protect kids. There are other people that just want all porn
| off the Internet. And there are bad actors that want total
| surveillance. And they are all on the same side of this
| issue.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| > I'm sure there are some people really trying to protect
| kids.
|
| yes, I believe the term for them is "useful idiots"
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| Not idiots necessarily, sometimes just long-time
| observers who have finally become cynical. People that
| were pro-guns for decades may watch several years of
| failure to adopt basic and uncontroversial gun-control
| regulation, then eventually become anti-gun. People that
| were in favor of regulating it once may suddenly become
| fearful for their safety, and want no regulations at all
| in case that regulation puts them out in the cold. Since
| both PR campaigns and any action on policy tends to cater
| to extremes, there's always pressure that is shrinking
| the middle
| shevy-java wrote:
| The comment "useful idiots" is more a play on the russian
| KGB strategy.
|
| They use assets to influence people and achieve certain
| goals. In this case here, terrorism or child pornography
| is used as cop-out rationale for censorship, surveillance
| and so forth. It's never about those topics really,
| perhaps 5% at best, the rest is just sugar-coated decoy
| to restrict people and keep them as slaves and pets.
|
| > Since both PR campaigns and any action on policy tends
| to cater to extremes, there's always pressure that is
| shrinking the middle
|
| This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I
| understand how propaganda works so I am never fooled by
| "this is because of terrorists". This is also why I am
| for 100% transparency at all times.
| sroerick wrote:
| Can you explain to me what loopholes that opponents
| believe this law will exploit?
|
| Is it just "more ID is bad"? Or is there a specific
| concern that this bill is a targeted overreach to
| increase censorship and surveillance.
|
| It genuinely doesn't seem like any more of a threat than
| age-gating Playboy at the bookstore. What have I missed?
| Ajakks wrote:
| I went to check my Social Security administration account
| like 4 years ago - I forget why. To access it, I have to
| have an actual video face to face conversation with
| people from some Real ID company.
|
| I'll never look at that account again in my ficking life.
| sroerick wrote:
| Is this affected by this bill at all?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Or is there a specific concern that this bill is a
| targeted overreach to increase censorship and
| surveillance.
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmsw
| my2...
|
| > The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed
| in a recent High Court case) "not primarily aimed at
| protecting children" but at regulating "services that
| have a significant influence over public discourse."
| sroerick wrote:
| Thanks, this was good info. As an aside, I read the
| original source. I found the writing completely
| impenetrable and realized I know nothing about the
| British legislative process.
|
| But this did, nonetheless, convince me that british
| legislators are interested in using this bill to regulate
| the internet.
| triceratops wrote:
| > It genuinely doesn't seem like any more of a threat
| than age-gating Playboy at the bookstore
|
| If it was really like that, I would have no problem.
| Simple ID check, in-person only, that's never stored
| anywhere.
|
| I've proposed this several times. Age-gated websites
| (social media, random forums, adult websites) should
| require a one-time use code or token that expires once a
| year. The token should only be available for purchase at
| liquor stores or tobacco stores - someplace they check
| your ID on pain of losing their license. It should be
| reasonably priced.
|
| Sometimes someone might resell a token they purchased to
| a minor. Those people should be actively hunted with
| sting operations and prosecuted.
|
| There's no good reason to make age verification on the
| Internet more stringent than age verification to buy
| alcohol or tobacco. Alcohol and tobacco kill far more
| people.
| sroerick wrote:
| I don't know much about modern PoS but I assume that when
| you scan your ID for tobacco that data is stored and
| retained.
| triceratops wrote:
| I've never had my ID scanned. The sales clerk glances at
| it. These days they don't even ask :-D
|
| If they scan your ID for alcohol or tobacco purchases
| where you live it might be time to fix that with
| legislation too. Insurance companies would love that
| data.
| pksebben wrote:
| I don't understand the downvotes. If you have this
| question then so do others and it ought to be part of the
| discourse. Anyhow...
|
| From what I've seen, the current wave of ID-gating the
| internet is a wedge for opening the door to much broader
| censorship. Specifically, some jurisdictions (Wisconsin,
| Minnnesota, and the UK) are using recently-passed
| legislation to argue that we need to make VPNs illegal [0
| 1 2].
|
| 0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-
| ban-vpn...
|
| 1 https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-
| usage...
|
| 2 https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-09-15/debates/
| 57714...
| sroerick wrote:
| Thanks, I appreciate this.
|
| Speaking for my own beliefs, banning the use of VPNs is a
| huge problem, and it seems like basically anybody who
| understands the technology would be against it.
|
| I have no problem with banning or age gating pornography
| at all. Personally it seems weird to me that that's the
| red line for people.
|
| But this is a good point, which is that lawmakers who
| don't have a clue what they're regulating will see VPNs
| as undermining the laws they've made. Thanks for this
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| > The comment "useful idiots" is more a play on the
| russian KGB strategy.
|
| Oh, I'm familiar with the phrase, but I'm specifically
| disputing how applicable it really is to people that are
| self-aware about the situation they are facing. Useful
| idiots are ones that are tricked, especially ones that
| are evangelical about tricking others. People forced to
| choose between 2 extremes where both choices are very bad
| are called.. normal citizens participating in the
| democratic process.
|
| > This only works on people who are susceptible to this.
| I understand how propaganda works
|
| What? You can see through propaganda, but you can't just
| pencil in your own policy options. Unfortunately and by
| design, the things you can ultimately vote for are "all
| or nothing" flavored. Censor everything, censor nothing.
| Track everybody, track nobody. Tons of parents who
| totally understand the surveillance state probably got
| flipped by meta's memo about chatbots being "sensual"
| with children. They'd rather vote to force corporations
| to be good citizens, but they can't. So they'll vote for
| an age-gated internet as the best of the bad options. I
| wouldn't assume all those people are naive, confused, or
| duped.. they've simply switched from a
| principled/abstract stance to a convenience-based
| calculus after they were forced into it. Meta wins either
| way, as planned. Either they get to build a more
| addictive platform, or they track more info about more
| people
| balamatom wrote:
| >tricked [and] evangelical about tricking others
|
| Nah, that's just your "democratic" process.
|
| People forced to choose between 2 extreme evils, one
| (debatably) lesser, are not called "normal", they are
| called _unfree_.
|
| The process of making sure people are always in one such
| situation or another is not called "governance", it's
| called _driving insane_.
|
| >I wouldn't assume all those people are naive, confused,
| or duped.. they've simply switched from a
| principled/abstract stance to a convenience-based
| calculus after they were forced into it.
|
| Forced into it under threat of violence, or under threat
| of denied sustenance and shelter, or "forced" by catering
| to their naivete, by confusing and duping them, by
| silently extorting them by enclosure of the commons?
|
| Switching from "principle-based stance" to "convenience-
| based stance" is not called "being sensible", it's
| called... _cowardice_.
|
| >Unfortunately and by design, the things you can
| ultimately vote for are "all or nothing" flavored. Censor
| everything, censor nothing. Track everybody, track
| nobody.
|
| If voting changed anything they'd ban it.
|
| >Tons of parents who totally understand the surveillance
| state
|
| If you truly understood how the surveillance state feeds
| on human life, you would deny it sustenance by - yes: -
| _refusing to breed in captivity._
|
| That's one of the few meaningful political actions
| available to the individual. At least until advances in
| reproductive medicine get turned on us, same way it
| happened with the mind-bicycles. A society with the
| technical capacity to go Gattaca might rather go all-in
| on Plato's Republic.
|
| Type of beat like yall can have the world to yourselves
| if yall want it _that_ bad, but believe me, you _will_
| choke on it.
| c22 wrote:
| I think in this case many of these people are "useful
| idiots" in the sense that they lack a strong technical
| understanding of how the internet and www are
| architected. This can cause them to accept erroneous
| concepts like "tracking the identity of all internet
| users is the _only_ way to protect the children " while
| alternatives like the one proposed at the beginning of
| this thread can be easily glossed over as some techno
| mumble jumble.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > I understand how propaganda works so I am never fooled
|
| That's not how it works.
| pksebben wrote:
| see, when you cut out the part about "because of
| terrorists" that sounds like a patently laughable claim.
| I would tend to agree with the poster on the strength
| that _some_ propaganda is very, very easily spotted:
|
| - anything that mentions "terrorists" (or the nouveau
| "narco-terrorists")
|
| - "think of the children" / "we must protect the
| children"
|
| - "we need to create jobs" / "job creators"
|
| - "they're turning the frogs gay"
|
| - "we need to protect America"
|
| tbh if you're fooled by any of that (and there's no
| delicate way to say this) you're dumb. Even a cursory
| glance at history would reveal the obvious deception and
| it's on you that you haven't bothered.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Not idiots necessarily, sometimes just long-time
| observers who have finally become cynical.
|
| This doesn't explain why they would support privacy-
| invasive ID requirements instead of the RTA header.
|
| > People that were pro-guns for decades may watch several
| years of failure to adopt basic and uncontroversial gun-
| control regulation, then eventually become anti-gun.
|
| I want to call this a bad example because the only people
| who call the rules that don't pass "basic and
| uncontroversial" are the people who were on the other
| side to begin with, but maybe it's a good example because
| the analogy lines up so well with exactly the same
| scenario:
|
| People who are anti-X propose rules with low
| effectiveness against actual harms but that impose
| significant burdens on innocent people who are pro-X,
| persistently insist that their proposal is fine and
| supported by everyone even as it demonstrably lacks
| enough support to pass and then point to the period of
| nothing being done to try to garner enough support from
| independents to squeak over the line instead of
| considering less burdensome alternatives, because
| burdening the pro-X people is the point. And then the
| people who fall for it are the useful idiots.
| sroerick wrote:
| Can you explain to me what is being exploited here? I had
| to do KYC for Hetzner, for anything crypto related in the
| last decade, and a number of other things.
|
| Age-gating porn doesnt seem problematic to at all. In
| fact it's far less worrisome than any of the former,
| which are kind of important for commerce. What am I
| missing?
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Once there is a record of what porn you looked at,
| people, government, employeers won't hire you. could be
| based on that you looked at all, or that you looked at
| the wrong kind. Wrong = whatever fetish you're into and
| your employeer/government/health-ins doesn't like.
| sroerick wrote:
| I assume that literally all porn is a data honeypot.
| Don't you?
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Wait, so porn is ok, it's fetish that is bad? So if HR is
| into brazilian farting fetish, entire company will be run
| by brazilian farting fetishists?
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Lets just hope there's no government that wants to
| incriminate certain sexuality and gender, then all these
| logged KYC for every little social thing will be very
| dangerous.
| sroerick wrote:
| Sure, I think KYC is a big problem.
|
| But personally, I'm much more concerned about it in
| regular commerce.
|
| A huge swath of the population thinks that porn is
| inherently harmful. An even bigger swath thinks that it
| should be completely separated from both. I agree with
| both of these things.
|
| I'm also strongly against censorship, so I'm trying to
| figure out how people are worried this is being used. I
| do not, at all, consider age-gating Playboy at the gas
| station to be censorship.
|
| If you think your porn habits are not already being
| logged and tracked by intelligence agencies, I think you
| are fully delusional.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| The issue isn't age-gating Playboy, but to begin
| censoring requires a line to be drawn, and there's no
| guarantee that educational material regarding LGTBQ
| topics wont be considered "adult" or "pornographic".
|
| The whole "know it when you see it" doesn't work when
| there's a significant group out there who would love to
| see queer people at large go away from society. With
| this, you now have teenagers being blocked from actual
| educational material because Carol from the "burn
| everyone but me" church down the street believes anything
| regarding sexuality is "adult" material.
|
| The thing with the porn habits being logged by
| intelligence agencies, is that data has a large risk-
| reward for actually being used. They wouldn't burn the
| secret of their capabilities for something small. Most of
| the metadata wouldn't be admissible in court assuming
| courts don't go full kangaroo. The usage of the metadata
| is general intelligence to point investigations, or
| parallel reconstruction to get warrants for someone they
| don't actually have anything on, but want to search.
|
| Doing KYC American style for porn/adult content means
| mass data leaks are a matter of "when", because there's
| no consumer protection and this data will be retained
| indefinitely because ads make money. The leak means real
| people are put in real danger.
| sroerick wrote:
| So your position is that pornography must be fully
| unrestricted because any attempt to curb it would
| inevitably infringe on gay rights?
| citizenpaul wrote:
| I believe the term for them is evangelicals. I'm going to
| guess that a venn diagram of deeply religious people and
| people pushing for "protecting" the kids is just a
| circle.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| This is so untrue I wonder if you even bothered to think
| about it.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| The term is "parents."
|
| I really don't care about what's on the internet, until
| my kids get exposed to it. How grownups talk to other
| grownups in private isn't my concern.
|
| But when kids - and I mean my kids - enter the loop it
| becomes my business, and ideological concerns go out the
| window.
|
| I've ranted and raved about how terrible filtering
| software is, and how school provided computers contain
| massive workarounds.
|
| The real concern isn't porn sites -- the real concern is
| poorly moderated social media sites. Ones where kids post
| things other kids see. And guess what the kids post?
|
| But a lot of the nasty content shared in these poorly
| moderated sites gets it start elsewhere.
|
| I'm cynical about any law, but my bias toward legal
| action is only increasing as the online situation is only
| getting worse.
| hellojesus wrote:
| Can't you do mac filtering on your router at the very
| least?
|
| Why not install root certs on all your kids' devices and
| then force them through your home proxy so you can run
| content classification and proactively block and get
| reports of what you've blocked? A little privacy-
| invasive, but if your kids are young enough, it makes
| sense to get alerts when they've attempted to access
| boobs or gore so you can have a convo about it.
| Bender wrote:
| The easiest route here in my opinion aside from DNS
| services that claim to block adult content would be to
| use a Squid SSL Bump proxy. It's along the lines of what
| you are suggesting and requires installing a self signed
| CA cert on the client but gives you centralized
| management of what domains, URLs, file types, times of
| day, URL patterns are allowed/permitted as well as a
| memory and disk cache to reduce bandwidth. This [1] is a
| really old example based on Squid 3.x but this concept
| has improved a lot in Squid 6.x. Sites that still do
| public key pinning _there are a handful_ will have to be
| added to Squid 's SSL BUMP exclusion. Ignore the term
| SSL, it's TLS but they kept the term the same.
|
| [1] - https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump
| andrepd wrote:
| Unfortunatwly "keeping kids and teenagers off of
| algorithmic social media" is one of the most worthy goals
| one can pursue right now; so is keeping them off infinite
| porn.
|
| But this is not the way to go about it.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| No, I believe the term is "parents don't want 8 year olds
| getting access to tits, violence and gore"
|
| Given that kids need a device for school in a lot of
| areas (mine included) and the tools for stopping kids
| getting either access or bombarded by such stuff are
| either shit, require deep technical knowledge, or
| predatory, I can see why people are asking for it.
|
| I presently hate the current system of handing over
| biometric data in exchange for tits. I don't want some
| shading startup having my biometrics so that when they go
| bust, pivot or get hacked, can be used to steal my stuff.
|
| The middle ground is a system that _normal_ people can us
| to make sure kids who have access to devices can't easily
| access nefarious shit.
|
| None of that is useful idiots.
|
| When it get fun is the all or nothing crowd. The internet
| is going to be age gated, whether you like it or not. If
| you continue to go "INTERNET MUST BE FREEEEEEEE" without
| accepting that the tools that the populace _want_ don't
| exist means you get porn bans, or worse.
| tim333 wrote:
| I think there's probably a middle way without going as
| far as "biometric data in exchange for tits"
|
| I'm in the UK and so far the only thing I've noticed age
| wise is Reddit asked me for a webcam selfie, which could
| easily have been faked by a kid with an accomplice but if
| the aim of this is to stop actual vulnerable kids that
| kind of thing is maybe enough. If they are with it enough
| to use VPNs and stuff they are probably old enough to see
| porn etc.
|
| Like in the old days people used to avoid the kids
| looking at porn by putting the porno mags on a high shelf
| so they couldn't reach them. I don't think you need
| passport control level ID for this kind of thing.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > I don't think you need passport control level ID for
| this kind of thing.
|
| I 100% whole heartedly agree.
|
| For uk mobile ISPs there is already a system that stopped
| most of the nasty stuff from getting past. It was pretty
| difficult to circumvent, hence why I turned it off for
| me. If that could have been rolled out wider, with an
| account password for turning it off, that would have been
| more than enough.
| triceratops wrote:
| Webcam selfies are still anonymity destroying. I have a
| better idea:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162159
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm pro protecting kids.
|
| "useful idiots" was a Stalinist term for people willing
| to cover up for the murder of millions on the grounds
| that communism was good and would never do the holodomor.
|
| I don't think it's good to conflate them really.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Yea. People which cured their children with lobotomy also
| thought that they we're doing something good. These usefull
| idiots are in some sense worse than the perpetuators it
| self because they are primarly the enablers of such
| behaviot simply because of their naivety or worse,
| ignorance.
| reactordev wrote:
| The goal was to put _Company A_ in between you and the web.
| Collecting data and selling it for profit. It's never about
| what they say it's about. Lobbyists have bought every aspect.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| I think you're right. Surveillance power is nearly a side
| effect of the personal enrichment.
| TZubiri wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46154208
| stuffn wrote:
| Technical people have been gleefully eliminating anonymity on
| the web for the last 20 years. Progressives should be the
| party on the side of maximal freedom but really in the US we
| have one neo-liberal party wearing two different disguises.
|
| The problem is normies don't operate under assumed anonymity.
| So when the hordes of unwashed regular people joined the
| internet they wanted their face everywhere. People were
| shamed out of their handles. Some people gave up their
| anonymity to make yet another faceless bullshit blog-as-a-
| resume. Look at most of the top karma farmers on HN. Most of
| them post their personal information in the their bio.
| Pathetic.
|
| > people will self-censor when knowing they are being
| watched.
|
| This has been happening both in public and on the internet
| for over a decade now.
|
| > Not being able to be at least pseudo-anonymous has a real
| chilling effect on speech and expression.
|
| The normies would argue you have nothing to hide if you
| aren't doing anything wrong. The average voter, regardless of
| party, will happily surrender every ounce of freedom for the
| thought of security. Hell, I remember sometime around 2007
| DEFCON became a first-name-basis conference!
|
| > bill of rights
|
| It's more of a bill of privileges given NGOs and PACs are
| regularly paying to erode the core rights granted to
| citizens. Either through lawfare by circumventing the courts
| and suing companies into bankruptcy, or by directly
| purchasing congressmen via donation.
|
| What I have found in general is people who cry and complain
| about this kind of thing were, at one point, happy to have it
| happen to their political enemies. The laws that are paving
| the way for age-gated deanonymized internet were at one point
| used as a cudgel to beat their political enemies down. When
| the tables finally turn after the Nth "protect the children"
| bill, it's the other people left crying and now suddenly its
| a "problem".
| Earw0rm wrote:
| This was inevitable on the day the Web ceased to be a third
| space and became an integral part of day-to-day life.
|
| Some time between Facebook opening to the general public
| (mid 2006) and the launch of the iPhone (early 2007).
|
| "Online" was no longer a meaningful distinction from there
| on out.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| > The real goal is the complete elimination of anonymity on
| the web...
|
| I'm ok with running this experiment (not sure how it really
| turns out) BUT only if everyone participates. Governments and
| businesses get to watch me... I get to watch them. If the
| death if anonymity is inevitable, as unpleasant as that
| sounds, the goal to shoot for then is universal application
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| You may not be old enough to remember Edward Snowden or Mark
| Klein (who went unnoticed), but there never was anonymity.
|
| My pet theory is that this requirement is part of a mob war
| and porn and whatever else the MindGeek people are involved
| with is being attacked for the much of the same reasons
| Ukraine attacks Russian oil refineries.
| miki123211 wrote:
| How do you know this?
| planb wrote:
| > None of these laws are actually about protecting children.
| That's not the real goal.
|
| I fear that for 90% of the supporters of such laws (just like
| with chat control) this statement is wrong, and they truly do
| want to protect minors from harm. But that only makes it
| worse, because this type of argument completely misses the
| mark while the other 10% get to laugh up their sleeves while
| continuing to manipulate public opinion.
| phrotoma wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
| SPICLK2 wrote:
| >Not being able to be at least pseudo-anonymous has a real
| chilling effect on speech and expression. Even if there are
| laws in place protecting such rights, people will self-censor
| when knowing they are being watched.
|
| This supposed golden era of communication lasted for a very
| short period. Why is is so important that freedom of speech
| also be anonymous? What you're asking for is the right to
| talk to anyone with all societal, cultural, and interpersonal
| contexts removed.
| kace91 wrote:
| >Why is is so important that freedom of speech also be
| anonymous?
|
| Because it is a shortcut for an otherwise extremely hard to
| enforce freedom.
|
| Can you afford to defend your speech in court?
|
| Can you prove that an action taken against you by someone
| in power is retaliation against your speech?
|
| Can you handle social ostracism by a majority that
| disagrees?
|
| If the answer to some is no, your freedom of speech has
| practical limits.
|
| This is not to say that a world with anonymous speech is
| necessarily better, I'm just saying that in terms of
| guarantees it has a clear advantage.
|
| Case in point: will you answer a workplace questionnaire
| the same way whether or not it is anonymous?
| chii wrote:
| It is not only freedom of speech, but freedom of
| association that would also be jeopardized.
|
| People long ago used to have to hide that they're gay,
| not only because they could be ostracized, but that
| people they associate with could also be under scrutiny.
|
| Being able to track one's movements, or who they
| associate with, could reveal information that said person
| would want kept secret.
| kace91 wrote:
| Yes, and even though not a normally named right, the
| possibility of someone's ideas being detached from their
| identity is a godsend for some people.
|
| They won't be dismissed (consciously or not) due to
| gender, background, look, or anything else if no one
| knows anything beyond their words.
| hellojesus wrote:
| There was a podcast episode I listened to once, probably
| Darknet Diaries but maybe some other tech one, where the
| person being interviewed was an active community member
| in some bbs back in the day. Everyone decided to meet up
| to play dnd, and he showed up as a 13 year old kid when
| everyone else was 20+. They let him stay after cleaning
| it with his mom.
|
| This is one type of connection that would be unlikely to
| form if superficial anonymity is lost. That kid probably
| would be off in some "safe" walled garden.
|
| This doesn't even touch on more obvious forms of
| discrimination like gender, religion, etc.
|
| And political affiliation / speech isn't protected in the
| US, so an employer could term you anytime for policy
| disagreement. Such a policy would destroy the exploration
| of ideas overnight, as outrage mobs would try to get any
| dissident sacked.
| SPICLK2 wrote:
| If those are your concerns, then why is it so important
| that this freedom of anonymous expression only happens on
| the internet? I think what you are really asking for is
| private, encrypted comms but only to a certain subset of
| people. Otherwise, you should also argue for freedom of
| anonymous expression over any other medium.
|
| And of course freedom of speech has practical limits.
| It's that very tempering that stops non-virtual discourse
| from turning into a cesspool. I worked for a company that
| permitted anonymous comments to the leadership team,
| which they would then review in front of the company. It
| was a total shit show, and I attached my name to any
| comments I made.
|
| If you are not happy filling in your workplace
| questionnaire unless it's anonymous, then something needs
| to change about your company (and something that probably
| can't be fixed with anonymous comments).
| kace91 wrote:
| > I think what you are really asking for
|
| I'm not asking for anything, I was merely pointing out
| the advantages of anonymity. You don't need to consider a
| decision the best one to see its upsides.
|
| I don't really get the rest of that argument. What other
| mediums are legally deanonimised? Privacy in mail and
| telephone was a commonly supported right, Watergate was a
| scandal for a reason.
|
| >If you are not happy filling in your workplace
| questionnaire unless it's anonymous, then something needs
| to change
|
| That's the point I was trying to make, that it is a
| shortcut, but an improvement. Preaching a 'good option'
| that doesn't survive the real world is a common failure
| of justice systems.
|
| Example: 'Anonymous tip off for sexual abuse' is a very
| flawed system. Tell the victims 'no, see, what you need
| is proper handling of abuse by authorities'. Is that
| useful when we know for a fact that alternative never
| worked?
|
| Shortcuts should only be removed _after_ the proper
| alternative is in place and working. Otherwise, you're
| just making people lives worse.
|
| > It's that very tempering that stops non-virtual
| discourse from turning into a cesspool.
|
| Agreed, anonimity introduces many problems we haven't
| been able to solve properly yet. It can platform abusers.
| It can empower legitimately wrong behavior. It can make
| people less willing to take ownership of their actions,
| or less empathic.
|
| Those are all legitimate points to consider and balance,
| I'm just not ok with pretending it's a no-brainer.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of
| tapes hurtling down the highway. -- Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
| alex1138 wrote:
| Youtube has been repeatedly told about videos that are abusive
| towards children and they do nothing about it. They're not
| interested in effective solutions
| Bender wrote:
| _Youtube has been repeatedly told about videos that are
| abusive towards children and they do nothing about it. They
| 're not interested in effective solutions_
|
| Youtube is user-generated content which is precisely why I
| would prefer they add an RTA header. Random people uploading
| videos can claim to be kid friendly when they are not. Take
| that responsibility away from the uploaders and away from
| Youtube and hand it to the parents. Less work, liability _and
| cost_ for Youtube should be a nifty incentive at the risk of
| blocking some advertising to children which is another loaded
| topic all together.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Take that responsibility away from the uploaders and away
| from Youtube and hand it to the parents.
|
| The system described still requires action by the
| webmaster. Their options are: deny the entire site to those
| sending an RTA header; evaluate the content themselves; or
| trust the uploader. (Or a combination: have uploaders opt-
| in to evaluation for a fee, with the content denied to kids
| by default.)
| Bender wrote:
| The client does not send an RTA header. The RTA header is
| only sent by the server or load balancer by design.
| Absolutely no action required by web site operators and
| owners assuming they enabled the header on any URL that
| is either adult or user-generated content.
|
| It is up to the client what to do with the header which
| right now is nothing. A law would be required to get the
| snippet of code added to user agents. I estimate it would
| take an intern one afternoon to get it into the clients
| they support _not counting dev /qa, management approval,
| etc..._
|
| Challenge to FAANG: Show off your interns! There is no
| harm in adding the code required to detect this header.
| _Example header to detect sent from NGinx. If you detect
| this header activate nanny controls._ To be safe do a
| separate _parental_build_ to get manager approval.
| add_header Rating 'RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA' always;
|
| All one need detect is: RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA
|
| For fun, search for this on Shodan.
| zahlman wrote:
| > The RTA header is only sent by the server or load
| balancer by design. Absolutely no action required by web
| site operators and owners assuming they enabled the
| header on any URL that is either adult or user-generated
| content.
|
| The website owners and operators have to decide which
| URLs get the header. If the categorization is "either
| adult or user-generated content", then I already covered
| that for the case of YouTube: i.e., the entire site is
| denied to kids (whose parents opt in).
| Bender wrote:
| _the entire site is denied to kids_
|
| I also covered that here [1]. Indeed if parents do not
| enable all of Youtube or Youtube does not move most adult
| content into a unique URL or their server does not send
| the header for anything flagged as adult the kids will
| not be advertised to. They would have to go to a kid
| friendly site that moderates _before a video is viewable_
| or Youtube would have to change moderation tactics. Kids
| need not visit Youtube. There are kid friendly sites.
|
| [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152727
| oersted wrote:
| I mean they have invested a ton into their kid-friendly mode
| and there have been quite a number of "adpocalips" where ad
| revenue for many content creators was dramatically slashed
| due to YouTube's over-zealous moderation.
|
| It is a serious business concern, there are occasional panics
| triggered by consumers complaining that a brand ad is shown
| next to and benefits from the attention of some distasteful
| content, and they start to bleed important advertisers on
| mass. YouTube then proceeds to get defensive and demonetizes
| (removes all ads from) or tags as adult-only any video that
| may be concerning, where avoiding false negatives takes much
| more precedence over avoiding false positives.
|
| Of course this is not directly tied to protecting children,
| but this incentive structure is partly aligned and it is a
| strong one.
| Popeyes wrote:
| Their kid friendly mode is still completely full of
| absolute crap that you wouldn't want your kid to see.
| oersted wrote:
| It is definitely mind-rotting crap, but I think they are
| very strict with technically inappropriate content.
|
| I agree that they are not doing a good thing, but one
| can't say they aren't doing massive efforts around it
| either.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, who would YouTube implement an RTA header?
| Which resources would have the header and which wouldn't?
| Bender wrote:
| _Out of curiosity, who would YouTube implement an RTA
| header?_
|
| Their app developers unless it is set globally and in that
| case their network engineering team.
|
| _Which resources would have the header and which
| wouldn't?_
|
| If the app developers send the header on any video flagged
| as adult then just specific videos. If they created a
| unique URL that all adult content would reside under then
| it could potentially be the network engineers. It really
| depends on how much work they put into it so that more
| people could view the content assuming user agents become
| legislated to check for the header.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I can't believe in 2025, nearly 2026, that anyone would
| seriously suggest a _header_ as a valid way of doing anything
| like this. Headers can be spoofed, modified along the way, or
| flat out ignored. DNT header is the obvious go to example here.
|
| An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers for
| all traffic on the network that the parental units never even
| know about. I'd venture there would be plenty of YT, TikTok,
| Discord threads, etc that would provide a step-by-step set of
| instructions to do it. Probably just point to an image to
| download to copy to your SD and voila.
| Bender wrote:
| DNT is a client header that failed to get traction and never
| did anything useful. RTA is a server header and small
| children will not be doing this for the most part and parents
| can of course disable parental controls assuming one day they
| are enabled by default for child accounts. Like I said, it's
| not perfect. Teens can of course bypass this a million
| different ways. For every 100 million dollars a company
| spends to lock teens out of something is just an extra 5
| lines of python or 15 seconds of their time on AI _if that_.
| Currently many teens watch pirated movies and porn _together_
| in VR and assorted games that allow placing a media player
| _in G-rated world building games_.
|
| It's probably worth noting that if teens can not view porn,
| they will likely produce porn making an entirely new tax free
| underground market on Tor or other networks.
|
| This is just for keeping small children out. Nobody in the
| history or future of earth have ever or will ever locked
| teens out of a thing. Archive this comment so we can review
| it at a later time.
| iamnothere wrote:
| This would require SSL interception, which requires a custom
| certificate on the end device.
|
| If your kid can figure out how to install a custom
| certificate on their device and MITM SSL to evade filters,
| (a) you never secured the device (b) you already lost long
| ago and (c) let's get that kid a job or a scholarship.
| dylan604 wrote:
| how many of those of us reading this right now would have
| been able to do this? how many of us reading this right now
| had parents that would had a clue about any of this to
| question it?
| iamnothere wrote:
| True hacker kids will figure it out no matter what. If
| the phone is restricted they will jailbreak it or beg an
| old one from a friend. If the network is locked down they
| will crack the password for the neighbor's wifi. If the
| clearnet is locked down due to authoritarian laws, they
| will end up on incredibly sketchy sites on the dark web.
| If you block all escape outlets they will do really
| stupid things in nihilistic protest like huff cans of
| whipped cream or scam money from crypto. The power of
| bored youth springs eternal.
|
| What I'm saying is you can set rules, you can try your
| best, but under no circumstances can you build an
| impenetrable wall for determined kids. Things like this
| header solution or better controls on the end device
| would make things safe for the vast majority of kids. So
| don't ruin the internet for adults because of a handful
| of unruly kids who are going to get in trouble no matter
| what.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Walls don't deny access, they change traffic patterns. A
| header can be honored on a phone designed for a child and
| ignored by my phone. Can some kids get through, sure. But
| not the vast majority. If people were honestly doing this
| for kids, this would be the solution being pushed. This
| has nothing to do with kids, hence other types of
| solutions being pushed. Don't trust what people say,
| observe what they do.
| emporas wrote:
| I remember when I was around 11-12 years old, my father
| got me a computer given to him for free. It had only a
| console and a black screen, and I figured out by myself
| how to open, edit files, lock them, navigate the file
| system, run programs like a calculator and more, with no
| manual, no internet, and I didn't even know english good
| enough.
|
| 1-2 years later, the teacher at school showed us how to
| program the turtle program, and I got it stuck in an
| infinite loop in 10 minutes. The teacher started swearing
| "Your chair is smashing the ethernet cable. The program
| is good and you fucked it up."
|
| Around that time, I remember going to a barber shop for a
| haircut and stealing his nude/porn magazines. Even
| younger, I used to sneak up to my uncle's bedroom where
| he hid alcohol, and drunk half a bottle of whisky in an
| hour, and getting knocked out every time.
|
| I used to get involved in fights all the time, since 8
| years old, and my favorite activity at that age, was to
| climb to roofs of abandoned houses at night, and wander
| around inside of them.
|
| My parents regularly tried to talk some sense into me,
| and I was beaten up by my father for all the stuff I did.
|
| When I was sixteen, I managed to steal a car by myself, I
| drove it around for 1-2 hours and I didn't know how to
| drive, I figured it out at that moment. After that I
| returned the car where it was at the start, I didn't do
| anything with it, but when driving it I managed to flat
| the tire somehow.
|
| When I was at the university, at some point around 20
| years old, I downloaded Kevin Mitnick's book from
| torrents, I read it, and I got inspired to phone to my
| university, pretend I am a professor and I want pass a
| student (me) for 2 courses. I passed the courses without
| even taking the exam.
|
| It was around that time, a friend of mine, while he was
| playing the guitar at his house, he looked at me at the
| eyes and said dead serious: "Man, if you go on like this,
| you will end up in jail." It was actually earth
| shattering! First time someone talk some sense into me. I
| thought, this cannot continue, he is right.
| basilikum wrote:
| Parental control software on general purpose computing
| devices has always been an intelligence test. If you
| cannot bypass it you fail.
| TZubiri wrote:
| > An aspiring teen could set up an RPi
|
| If circumventing a measure requires setting up a RPi and
| modifying headers, I would call it widely successful, that
| would be less than a thousandth of kids.
| zarzavat wrote:
| > An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers
| for all traffic on the network that the parental units never
| even know about
|
| An aspiring teen could just have sex with another aspiring
| teen...
|
| You won't stop teenagers from finding a way to be teenagers.
| Part of being a teenager is learning how to subvert the rules
| set by adults to fulfil one's hormonal imperative.
| AngryData wrote:
| If your goal is to make something teenager proof, you have
| already failed before you started. Many teenagers have the
| intellectual capacity of full grown adults, it is their
| emotional intelligence and life experience that is lacking.
| Doing any more than putting a simple padlock on the door will
| not stop them, the same way a determined adult couldn't
| really be stopped, and teenagers are determined in most
| everything they try by default.
| elric wrote:
| > An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers
| for all traffic on the network that the parental units never
| even know about.
|
| Who cares? Why is this an issue? An aspiring teen can (and
| will) do many things their parents don't know about. It's
| part of growing up. Making air tight surveillance systems to
| prevent teens from talking to friends or looking at boobies
| is many a bridge too far.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| > An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers
| for all traffic on the network that the parental units never
| even know about.
|
| Just like how teens are _already_ bypassing age-gates? The
| point is to make it the responsibility of the parents and not
| of the government.
| tzs wrote:
| > The current _solutions_ are just about tracking people by
| real identity and incentivizing teens to commit identity crimes
|
| Not all of them.
|
| The solution currently undergoing large scale field testing in
| the EU uses cryptography (specifically zero-knowledge proofs)
| to allow you to anonymously prove to a site that your
| government issued ID shows you are above the site's minimum
| age, without the site getting any information about your real
| identity.
| Bender wrote:
| I've seen articles on that. What I do not like about that is
| one has to trust that is really the way the system works and
| that special people do not have a special API key to get
| their own hash from the adult site related to a user ID and
| then submit that has to a special API end-point to reverse or
| undo the anonymization. Having been a liaison to law
| enforcement I just assume that is a thing but I am also fine
| with people saying I am paranoid. A header does not require
| this level of trust nor a dependency on a third party _see
| recent Cloudflare outage_.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Agreed, to recycle a past comment on the benefits:
|
| ____________
|
| We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying
| the government to impose crap onto every possible service and
| website across the entire world.
|
| Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have
| a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is
| add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content.
|
| 1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be
| paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.
|
| 2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.
|
| 3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can
| actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy
| holding?
|
| 4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to
| handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make
| it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that
| region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| I agree with your approach.
|
| This is society though, hence it is an issue of law and
| people trying to tell _other_ people what to do.
|
| The Elbonia rite crowd don't just want this for themselves.
| They want to ensure that their vision of "what is right" is
| put onto everybody. And the AnkleShowers want _their_ vision
| of "what is right" put onto everybody. And everyone else has
| their opinion too.
|
| And the shit-shouting continues until finally someone says
| "But we can ALLLLLL agree that we want to protect our
| children yes?"
|
| The issue has never been technical. It is how society has
| it's debates. Things like each issue becoming a two party
| extreme. Things like media rules that "both sides get equal
| airtime" even if one is a tinfoil hat wearing idiot.
|
| As a society, we won't get properly better until we debate
| better and can accept middle grounds.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I understand the rationale - I am still against that. To me it
| is censorship.
|
| Making it more sophisticated does not change this problem.
|
| The problem is that some want to control other people. I am
| against this. For similar reasons I stopped using reddit - I
| finally had enough of random moderators censoring me and
| others.
| Bender wrote:
| _To me it is censorship._
|
| If you are a small child it is indeed up to your parents to
| censor adult content and I am all for that. Kids will be
| upset but that is part of growing up. When the parents
| believe the kids are emotionally ready for adult content then
| I am sure they will get parental controls disabled. Even if
| that should not come to pass the kids _once they are teens_
| will bypass it anyway.
|
| If you are an adult and your followers are adults then this
| does not really apply to you or your device. This would only
| hurt groomers, most of whom use video games for that purpose.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I don't think we're talking about whether it's appropriate
| for kids to see the stuff. I think we're talking about who
| gets to decide to *mandate* an RTA header on a website.
| (They can already add it voluntarily so we are talking
| about a hypothetical mandate.)
|
| Let's say your website mentions the MLK assassination. Or
| maybe the 9/11 attacks. Just a mention; no disturbing
| details. Is some government entity now going to force the
| RTA label? Who gets to decide? An RTA label would be a
| death sentence to educational sites.
| Bender wrote:
| _who gets to decide_
|
| Each site operator would have to decide what level of
| legal risk is appropriate based on content rating and
| that would likely come from their legal team.
|
| _An RTA label would be a death sentence to educational
| sites._
|
| Maybe but not likely. Adult content for the purposes of
| education used to be protected but that was a grey area
| and was abused heavily by some art sites _such as Deviant
| art and then social media_. CIPA was passed in 2000 /2001
| and updated in 2011 to provide guidance on content viewed
| by children. [1] This is of course up to the parents to
| decide as has been the case for sex education throughout
| the history of the USA. If a school was going to view
| content that would be in conflict with CIPA then I would
| expect they could get parents to sign a permission slip
| meaning they have adult consent from the parent of each
| child. Either way I would expect a school to curate
| content that is appropriate for children and cache/print
| it locally.
|
| If RTA is not an option then the alternative will likely
| be to have parents log into a 3rd party site to prove
| their identiy for each student via some proxy auth site
| to give the child permission while also sharing personal
| details of the parent and child to said third party. More
| laws get involved when logging the child's personal
| details with a 3rd party but I am thankfully not a
| lawyer. Here [2] are some more laws specific to states.
| Laws will vary wildly by country and province or state.
|
| [1] - https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-
| internet-prot...
|
| [2] - https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-
| communication/social-med...
| atonse wrote:
| I strongly disagree. Having ratings on content isn't
| censorship. It's providing additional information.
|
| Like a nutrition label. It's your choice (as an adult) what
| you want to do with that information.
| hedora wrote:
| On the planet I'm from, the pedophile in chief is already
| intentionally miscategorizing information so it can be
| censored using mechanisms like this, and is implementing a
| public playbook explaining how this is one pillar of a
| platform to force his particular brand of right wing
| christian "morality" on the rest of the population.
|
| At best, you're defending coordinated disinformation
| campaigns, though the article is about attempts to make
| compliance with the propaganda mandatory.
| atonse wrote:
| I'm sorry but I have no idea what you're even saying.
|
| I'm talking about ratings like we have in movies, tv
| shows, games, music, apps.
|
| Many facets of our lives.
|
| Or nutrition labels.
| platevoltage wrote:
| Sure it is. An NC-17 rating is basically a death sentence
| for any movie.
| intended wrote:
| Consider the alternative - people go with their kids to
| the latest Popeye movie only to find out that it's a
| slasher horror.
|
| The natural result is people push their representatives
| for something to protect themselves.
|
| Some form of social contract will end up existing.
| platevoltage wrote:
| Pulling a wild bait and switch like that is also a death
| sentence for a movie. The parent could easily watch or
| read a review.
|
| I was a kid before the video game rating system came out.
| Mom wouldn't let me buy Mortal Kombat.
| intended wrote:
| When Popeye entered the public domain, a slasher horror
| movie was made on the IP.
|
| Sure - Parents should pay attention and the trailers
| would make it obvious.
|
| However - under your regime, there is no loss to such
| movies. They get some extra views from an audience
| segment they weren't targeting at all.
|
| Replicate this case ad infinitum - people should check
| and review a multitude of things. Medicines, cosmetics,
| food, contracts, games etc.
|
| Firms use this as a way to offset risk onto the
| purchaser.
|
| I hope we can both agree - that the burden of review of
| regular folk is now impossible.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I'm starting to see platevoltage's point. Yes it's
| additional information, but it is an indirect form of
| censorship.
|
| _Remove one more f-bomb and we 'll give you that PG-13
| rating you're wanting._
|
| Food labels are easier to justify because they have a very
| tangible effect on one's health. But even those can be
| misleading in the end.
|
| I say keep the food labels, but reconsider the movie
| ratings system. What if it went away? The studios and
| exhibitors would have to *tell us* who the movie is
| intended for. What's so hard about that? What is this magic
| benefit we're getting from a rating system?
| sam-cop-vimes wrote:
| How would this work where children are hell bent on bypassing
| this control? Won't they be able to install browser plugins
| which will remove this header similar to how they are using
| free VPNs to bypass age checks?
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Children who are hell bent on bypassing controls will always
| find a way. It helps them not just stumble on it though when
| they're not ready. If they really want to access it, they
| already know about it and what it is
| trashb wrote:
| Bold of you to assume that legislators know how any kind of
| implementation works. They just propose general rules like
| "kids underage can not access this content" and the technical
| implementation doesn't matter to them. I think this is the
| reasons we should vote more technical competent people into
| politics.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Every single discussion I have with folks on this seemingly goes
| like this:
|
| "Does the child pay for internet access?"
|
| "No, but they have a device that can access the internet!"
|
| "Oh, so the child bought the device and paid the bill?"
|
| "No, the parents do!"
|
| "Ah, so would you say it's the parent's responsibility to monitor
| their children's internet usage since they gave them a network-
| connected device?"
|
| "You obviously don't want to protect kids!"
|
| Look, I do want to protect kids. I really do, but I also am sick
| and tired of bad actors using "BuT tHe ChIlDrEn" to recruit
| idiots and -phobes in a quest to make the entire planet and all
| of its spaces magically safe for children of all ages - at the
| expense of the superior number of adults who need our own spaces
| devoid of kids for community, for socialization, for being our
| full, human selves.
|
| The internet already has an age gate, and it's called "the adults
| paying the damn bills". Those adults are responsible for making
| internet access safe for kids, not _the entire digital planet_
| dropping what it's doing to make every single private space safe
| for kids to access without parental supervision. Bring back
| curated services like Prodigy and Compuserve, or just don't give
| kids internet access until they're ready for it.
|
| Most of humanity grew up just fine without regular internet
| access as children, and there's no reason whatsoever we have to
| foist net-connected terminals onto kids of any age. That's
| _parental choice_ , and I refuse to be punished because of
| someone else's bad parenting.
| iamnothere wrote:
| > Bring back curated services like Prodigy and Compuserve, or
| just don't give kids internet access until they're ready for
| it.
|
| This comment should be highlighted on a forum like this. There
| is absolutely a business opportunity here, and it would double
| as a public service. You might even be able to get some grants
| for it!
| RandomBacon wrote:
| Cell phone companies like AT&T could offer kid-lines (with
| filtered Internet access) and Google and Apple could provide
| kid-modes on their phones that don't allow VPNs or apps to be
| installed that parents do not approve of.
|
| Maybe there might already be ways to prevent VPNs/apps, but
| it doesn't seem to be easy and/or publicized.
| iamnothere wrote:
| Either a kid phone built on AOSP or a kid-focused MDM
| system, coupled with kid-focused apps, would seem to be
| sufficient. No need to go to the carriers.
| trashb wrote:
| Don't worry the kid mode is coming on all devices, one
| thing you wouldn't want kids doing is sideloading
| applications after all.
|
| I think this is the wrong approach, an example is youtube
| kids. There seems to be a abundance of inappropriate
| content for kids on there. These companies don't actually
| care about you or your kids they care about profit.
|
| Only (hopefully most) parents care about their kids. They
| have the power to push a solution as a collective so the
| solution should empower them to choose and not not take
| power away from them and others (for example adults without
| kids). The age verification mandated on a government level
| constitutes to limiting access to content, and in my eyes
| that is censorship.
| stego-tech wrote:
| I've thought about it, but that's still technology trying to
| solve a societal problem, and my experience is that doesn't
| work (it just makes someone a lot of money by giving them
| data to exploit). Don't get me wrong, I am still all for said
| services existing as an option for parents to leverage, but
| it's not my thing.
|
| _My_ soapbox is addressing the crux of the social problem:
| we have built a society where both parents in most families
| have to work full-time jobs to have a chance at making ends
| meet, increasingly taking on extra overtime or gig work to
| improve their odds of paying the bills. This means children
| have no consistent adult available in their lives to engage
| with them: nurture, monitor, teach, mentor, demonstrate,
| assist, etc.
|
| I want to build a society where only one parent has to work,
| and the other (whoever they are, I am _not_ advocating a
| return to "traditional gender role" bullshit) can stay at
| home full-time. This way someone is always available to
| engage with the child and ensure their safety at home, with
| the suite of knock-on benefits that entails for the child's
| development.
|
| I don't want to make a child-safe planet at the expense of
| children lacking present and available parents; I want a
| world where parents aren't so wiped from working multiple
| jobs and struggling to pay rent or buy food that their
| children become a forced secondary concern.
| iamnothere wrote:
| I would also like to see this happen, but the developed
| world as a whole seems to be moving away from single
| working parents. Even across very different cultures. I'd
| like to see a change, but I'm not sure how it could happen.
|
| The closest thing we have is the stay at home working
| parent, which has grown after COVID. This is a lot better
| than neither parent being at home, but unless it's a very
| easy job, they still won't be able to supervise much. I
| also think some of these newer "email jobs" are facing
| competition from overseas workers and AI. Unless
| politicians learn to find value in having a stay at home
| parent, and supporting that through policy, these jobs may
| go away as quickly as they arrived.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| No no no. Many schools require students to have Chromebooks
| that use Google Classroom.
|
| In the state I live in, public education is a constitutional.
| Yet the state can predicate my child's constitutional rights on
| using Google Classroom.
|
| Google Classroom also has workaround that expose kids to
| harmful materials.
|
| While homeschooling is an option, I have a constitutional right
| to send my kids to public school. The school lends them free
| notebooks, which they then control.
|
| Some have strict settings - not enough to prevent toxic content
| - while others let lots of crap in.
|
| All without me spending a dime.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Then I would say that communities and administrators need to
| do a better job of restricting the internet access of those
| devices they provide kids, rather than _punishing the outside
| world for the bad decisions of a handful of adults in
| neglecting their obligations_. My schools implemented
| restricted ISPs with curated content as I was growing up, and
| eventually just a basic DNS filter by the time I reached HS.
| My current employer implements similar DNS checks on the
| firewall to block social media sites and, presumably, adult
| content (I'm not dumb enough to test the latter). My schools
| also had no problem providing local storage and collaboration
| tooling without internet access, so perhaps the argument
| should be made that schools shouldn't be getting kids hooked
| on Big Tech cloud services a la iPads and Chromebooks,
| especially when children and parents become captive markets
| via school equipment mandates. _Maybe_ we should be loaning
| out Linux laptops without WiFi or Ethernet ports with
| "Internet in a Box" preloaded on them for reference material,
| rather than shoving kids out into the wild internet absent
| guidance and context.
|
| I also flatly refuse the whole "we ID people in real life all
| the time" argument. The physical world is a default shared
| space, with finite boundaries and clear obligations. The
| digital world is the exact opposite: vague, nebulous, ever-
| shifting and changing, with no clear demarcation between
| states, or countries, or people. That argument reveals a
| complete misunderstanding of why physical ID checks work and
| digital ones never, ever will at scale, and I refuse to
| entertain anything predicated upon it.
|
| And here's the dirty, nasty, disgusting little secret that
| parents don't seem to realize or care about: bad actors in
| education are leveraging the fact kids have internet devices
| to _spy on them_. I've had CIO-equivalents in public and
| private education ask me to build surveillance tools to scan
| messages and photos on students' private devices when
| connected to school networks under the guise of "safety",
| which I refused to do because _hell naw does anyone other
| than parents need full access to a child's device_. I have
| worked in the education sector, I have seen first hand the
| mismatch between the goals of parents, the needs of children,
| and the ambitions of grotesquely underpaid technical talent
| and the resultant quality of candidates that often seems to
| attract (or lack thereof - no disrespect to the good ones out
| there, but ya'll are the fringe minority based on my
| experiences).
|
| Website age checks aren't protecting kids, they're harming
| adults. And bad adults are exploiting this knowledge gap to
| harm kids, too.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| You dont have kids do you.
|
| My first exception: school homework now done on PC. school
| requires laptop they can use in classroom. Friends.
|
| Now yeah blame the parents.
|
| But we already restrict alcohol to minors (but what stupid
| parent gave their kid money!) why not addictive, manipulative
| apps.
|
| Tldr. Kids need devices of some sort to do life these days.
| Pare nts will monitor and restrict. But we can also clear the
| dealers from the corners. That helps too.
| stego-tech wrote:
| > You dont have kids do you.
|
| That line right there sank your entire argument, because A)
| you don't have to have kids to want to protect kids, and B)
| it makes the position that anyone without kids should have no
| say in how those with kids rear and raise their children,
| which could be (and is often) dangerously expanded to oppose
| Doctors, Teachers, Social Workers, and other people in other
| professions or knowledge areas solely because they're
| childless.
|
| Be better.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| A more generous reading of this is "If you were around kids
| more, you would probably understand that kids have internet
| access even without their parent's permission and/or help"
| At least some of this access is essentially state-mandated,
| as it happens at public schools, which you are required to
| send your kids to unless you have the resources to arrange
| alternative education.
| stego-tech wrote:
| I don't give generous readings to bad arguments from
| online anons. The point of anonymous discourse is to come
| at it with your best arguments and debate them
| thoroughly, which is why there's a lot of discussion
| about common methods of "bad faith" argument styles like
| the preceding commenter used ("you don't have kids" =
| "your opinion is irrelevant").
|
| Also, a _lot_ of folks are making some assumptions about
| my person and profession to suit their own arguments,
| rather than discuss the merits of what I raised. These
| assumptions ultimately destroy their own arguments by
| showing a resultant lack of curiosity and a reliance on
| pre-existing narratives rather than carefully thought out
| rationale.
|
| That's why these ID checks keep winning: suckers drinking
| the Kool-Aid without thinking for themselves and
| dismissing what they perceive to be opposition, who in
| reality have _more_ experience with this with kids and in
| education than they assume when dismissing our positions.
|
| I don't need to be more understanding of bad actors or
| bad arguments, they need to be better at discussing their
| positions rationally or trusting experts who have lived
| these problems.
| iteria wrote:
| I do have kids. I still blame parents. I see so many parents
| who can't even do the lazy thing of turning on the parental
| controls for the devices they give their kids. Because they
| don't want to or can't deal with their kod whining and being
| obnoxious about having boundaries. I see adults who will
| create adult accounts for their kids even when they have to
| lie about their age because it's too annoying to them to
| either set up or deal with all the notifications and
| approvals of a kid account.
|
| They want to protect their kid while being lazy. It's why my
| aunt bought my cousin an M rated game. That said on the box
| is was violent and everything else and then presented her ID
| so she could prove she was an adult in order to buy the
| videogame. Then she she was upset because that game wasn't
| for kids. It shouldn't be allowed for kids.
|
| It wasn't. She just didn't pay any attention. And that's how
| I think of all parents of these lazy initiatives. They want
| to deny and inconvenience adults because they can't be
| bothered.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I'm also opposed to this law (mainly I think it is a huge
| invasion of privacy with near zero chance of actually
| protecting kids), but there are some realities people should
| know.
|
| My kids were all exposed to some relatively extreme stuff
| _long_ before they had a network connected device (starting
| around 1st grade). This is because other kids at school had
| network connected devices, and some of those kids show other
| kids stuff for shock value.
|
| In a more extreme instance, the child _did_ pay for internet
| access; they got an old phone from a friend and paid cash for a
| sim card.
| TZubiri wrote:
| "You've read your last free article."
|
| How ironic. Age-gating is immoral, but pay-gating is fine.
| torified wrote:
| As a child I had unlimited time to work out how to access stuff
| that interested me, a lot of which was forbidden in some way,
| because that's the most interesting stuff!
|
| In the process I learned about computers and eventually got a
| modem to access BBSes. It was exhilarating! I would have spent
| any amount of effort and time to access it.
|
| I basically attribute my entire career to accessing stuff the
| puritans would have tried to prevent me from accessing.
|
| Also, almost all of the porn I have came from private trackers.
|
| I very much doubt they will be concerned with any of these rules.
| Things will just move more underground if that happens. And the
| more underground you go, the more unsavory stuff you might find.
|
| But we all know this isn't actually about protecting children.
|
| In a way, I hope that it ends up being a good thing because the
| whole clearnet should probably be nuked from orbit.
|
| Us nerds can come up with something better. Federated, encrypted,
| anonymous and unblockable. It's just the spam problem that is the
| hard thing to solve. Maybe reputation with proof of work could
| work.
|
| I'll happily leave the normies to their milquetoast, corporate,
| manipulated existence.
| fragmede wrote:
| "isn't actually".
|
| It's dual use. It _is_ about protecting children, but also
| along the way these other properties happen to come along.
| Thing is, with enough cryptography, we could get a way that
| this would work, but it 's too complicated, which results in
| you being right after all.
| maccard wrote:
| > with enough cryptography we could get a way this would work
|
| No amount of cryptography will stop a parent from handing a
| verified device to a child. Parental controls (however
| effective you think they might be) have come enabled by
| default in the UK for the last decade and literally need to
| be turned off - which is exactly what will continue to
| happen.
| tete wrote:
| > Us nerds can come up with something better. Federated,
| encrypted, anonymous and unblockable.
|
| And eventually illegal. That's what we see already.
|
| And if it's not technically illegal then Google, Apple and
| OpenAI will censor it. Again, we see that already. On YouTube
| you cannot even talk about important topics such as suicide.
|
| It's also coordinated. As much as I dislike Infowars, the fact
| that private institutions killed it at the same time is just
| scary.
|
| Just like it's scary that we now have ethics taught by private
| entities. Be it what you can search or what ChatGPT or Gemini
| think.
|
| It feels like a lot of these are strongly locked in place,
| which if you look at history is extremely bad. Only now private
| institutions have more power and control than any king ever
| had.
|
| And all of that is if you don't consider the pockets full of
| money.
| wagwang wrote:
| PLEASE give me an age gated, geofenced internet. I would pay for
| such a service.
| protocolture wrote:
| Just unplug, keep everything local. Run your own BBS for your
| house.
| balamatom wrote:
| You can get it for free right now - you just need to go to
| prison for something.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I am against all age-verification systems here. These are ways to
| try to control the flow of information - aka censorship.
|
| There are a few situations where I can see verification is
| necessary; number #1 is in regards to online transactions
| involving money from a bank account. But the whole "show your age
| to watch pr0n" - that is just rubbish nonsense. Same with "people
| of age 14 are too young to use anti-social media". Now, I think
| people should quit wasting their time with facebook and so forth
| anyway, but I consistently reject these attempts to restrict
| freedom by state authorities acting as lobbyists for control-
| freaks, dictators or over-eager corporations. The internet could
| not have gotten big with those restrictions in the first place -
| so let's remove all of those without mercy.
| honkycat wrote:
| "Age Gated"?? minnesota and wisconsin are trying to ban VPNs!
| miniBill wrote:
| On behalf of my younger self: fuck this shit
| balamatom wrote:
| Of course the only comment representing the perspective of the
| actual "protected group" is near the very bottom of the section
| and unanswered.
|
| Every time someone says "think of the children", just remember
| that nobody is motivated by protecting children from their
| parents; it's all to protect parents from their children.
| Always has been.
|
| https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/william-gillis-the-f...
|
| And, on a larger scale, to keep us all infantilized
| indefinitely.
| AJ007 wrote:
| The real story is we are training millions/billions of people to
| send what is basically biometric data to sources which they
| should never trust. You think stolen credit cards are bad?
|
| The long term consequence are so dumb and obvious that all I can
| say is "good luck."
| nacozarina wrote:
| centralized censorship mechanisms just cause migration to
| peer2peer alternatives
|
| it's a cue not a threat, get back into p2p computing
| 256_ wrote:
| "This year, the UK also passed a mandate for age verification--
| the Online Safety Act--"
|
| No we didn't. That was 2023, and it went into effect in multiple
| phases, the last of which I believe was July 25th this year.
|
| Also, I can't help but wonder what young people now will think of
| these laws years later, as adults. In the UK, the OSA tries to
| prevent 17 year olds from watching porn, even though the age of
| consent here is 16. How will they remember contradictions like
| that?
| tete wrote:
| I think laws that you grew up with are a lot easier to accept
| until there is a major shift (civil war, etc.).
| TavsiE9s wrote:
| Why is everyone acting surprised? We've had 20-ish years of
| social media and algorithms being forced upon everyone and
| everything and any fine that was handed out was essentially paid
| off by not even a day of revenue.
|
| This is the result of social media companies optimising their
| feeds for monetisation.
| squigz wrote:
| "We've tried nothing and it didn't work!"
|
| The fines didn't do anything because they make too much money?
| Maybe... increase the fines? Maybe... don't just fine them?
| Maybe... fix the "algorithms being forced upon us"?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The algorithms are part of the EU's DSA/DMA partially because
| of this reason.
|
| Too bad these laws won't be enforced properly because of
| things like https://www.euractiv.com/news/trump-threatens-
| retaliation-ag... and other geopolitical reasons.
| nottorp wrote:
| Rephrase as "figthing the end of anonymity on the internet".
| cess11 wrote:
| Anonymous file sharing was always a noble pursuit, for as long as
| the Internet has existed.
|
| Start a local one and give some support to one of the global
| ones.
| dathinab wrote:
| This is a fight you are going to lose.
|
| A better approach would be to put your energy into making sure
| the used methods are _reasonable_.
|
| We don't require every FSK16 game sail to register the buyers
| name, age, contact info on physical checkouts etc. In most
| countries a law requiring that would be seen as excessive and in
| some places unconstitutional.
|
| Instead it's fine to visually look at a id, and if it "obvious"
| they are adult (e.g. very old person) we don't even require that.
| And thats fine. Because we don't need a perfect prevention we
| just need something which helps parents parent "a bit" and helps
| "a bit" in cases where parents don't parent.
|
| If everyone fight "all age check solutions" the chance that they
| get fully ignored and some horrible shit gets passed into law is
| very high.
|
| If everyone fighting also provides a alternative and strict
| guidelines about what is and isn't acceptable in their opinion
| there is a chance for reasonable solutions being implemented
| instead.
|
| (Like e.g. put a age gate header into http responses, like "min-
| audience-age: region=US, age=123; region=EU, age=456", say OS
| must have a API where you pass that in and they say yes/no for
| that account, do NOT require any crypto, signing etc. This is not
| fraud prevention but parenting helper. The OS then can store
| `18+|age` internally and have some integrations with country
| specific age verification services (it must only store
| 18+|birthday and only birthday iff <18, I guess for US 21). But
| there is no need to prevent anyone from changing this value with
| e.g. windows regestry changes, except if it's a child account. So
| require any widely _sold_ OS to have a parent controls/child
| account functionality.
|
| But really any solution which effectively requires mass
| surveillance, exclude hobby OS or similar, require some clever
| signing scheme involving device attestation etc. is VERY
| excessive and unneeded.
| Dazzler5648 wrote:
| On Monday it was TIL that in my state (the big Mormon one) I
| cannot view Pornhub... until I turn on my VPN. What a joke.
|
| That big Mormonny Pornhub landing page puts up a privacy fight
| worth reading - and the woman on it is fully clothed!
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I don't believe children need to be guarded from porn and can be
| seriously harmed by it but if we assume they do - why not just
| disallow children to use devices and apps made for adults? Why
| not just give kids locked-down phones with special pre-installed
| apps and leave the normal devices and normal web the way they
| are?
| iteria wrote:
| I don't believe that _teens_ can be harmed bu porn because they
| have some understanding of cultural norms. Kids, though,
| absolutely. Porn as it exists can teach a person who doesn't
| understand such basics as "hitting people just because you're
| mad is wrong" that having sex with an adult (aka pedophile) it
| perfectly okay. Engaging in sex with family members is okay. If
| you get hurt, that's expected and honestly you should like it.
|
| Not all porn is like this, but a shocking amount it. I wouldn't
| want someone who is learning what is acceptable and normal to
| come across this.
|
| It's already a problem for preteens and teens who consume too
| much and enter into relationships with unrealistic and
| sometimes dangerous ideas. Unlike violence, sex is private and
| privately talked about so kids will not receive correction when
| they misunderstand.
| tete wrote:
| > I wouldn't want someone who is learning what is acceptable
| and normal to come across this.
|
| I think that is a very very long stretch.
|
| We live in a world where ads - also ads specifically
| targeting children - give wrong impressions of what's
| acceptable, "normal" and reasonable. We see huge effects of
| this.
|
| Meanwhile we are in a society where romantic movies with
| sudden kisses are bordering on "rape" because there wasn't
| any verbal clear consent.
|
| All while we live in a society where most people had
| relatively easy access to porn online and offline and that by
| today's standards was incredibly sexist only a few years ago.
|
| I really think that if you have a child young enough to not
| understand that is not okay and at the same time looks at
| porn out of their own free will you have a serious problem in
| first place.
|
| The whole "sex is something secret and forbidden" does a lot
| more harm and can also be seen by both perpetrators and
| victims.
|
| It's also why schools start earlier and earlier about those
| things. Before there would be first contact with pornography
| even if there were zero measures and no parenting.
|
| The idea that young children just happen to come across these
| things and not instantly close or even watch them, and draw
| morale conclusions from them if there wasn't any age
| verification is ridiculous.
|
| But even if it wasn't, if parenting is that bad the
| expectation shouldn't be that this is the one thing that
| protects them from pornography. Because then it might as well
| run all day off a DVD or something.
|
| I really dislike the whole "Let's think of the most
| ridiculous specific scenarios to justify laws" to then say
| "And if only one child can be saved", when we as a society
| seem to be arguing about whether it is morally okay to take a
| dime from a company to guarantee for proper healthcare for
| children - and parents so they actually can do a good job.
| And when we don't look at stuff marketed to children. We have
| Pokemon being a children's version of cockfights and that is
| evidently okay. We have dozens of fast food chains
| normalizing living off fat and sugar. We buy children toy
| guns and show them shows where they learn it's about being
| the strongest.
|
| We have a mental health pandemic. We teach children that the
| right thing to do with your life is working for a soulless
| company at a bullshit job to then get shitfaced in a bar. The
| stuff that lets suicides skyrocket.
|
| At the same time we are worried that children see two
| consenting adults having sex.
|
| I think at this point that's "normal", but I really don't
| think it should be.
|
| Totally willing to change my opinion if anyone can come up
| with perpetrators or victims become that by having seen porn,
| and then show it makes sense to do age verification here but
| not for James Bond, Superhero Movies or McDonalds ads.
| beemboy wrote:
| Can someone enlighten me as to what the debate here is really
| about? Is the concern that the implementers of age gating could
| steal data? Is it that one entity (the "government") would obtain
| information about your age, etc? Doesn't this already happy IRL?
| Why is an online version suddenly more draconian?
|
| As a parent, here is my perspective: - there is no debate about
| seat belts in cars. I'm not choosing whether or not my child
| should or should not wear them - there is no debate about ID
| checking outside businesses that sell alcohol. No one is debating
| whether I should get to choose whether my 7 year old has alcohol
| or not - pornographic content on television is already banned and
| we have ratings for media content - etc
|
| Why are "privacy" and "freedom" arguments for age-gating of
| internet content? As a parent, it is impossible for me to gate
| access or exposure to internet content like 4chan or YouTube
| conspiracy theorists and what not on my kids' developing brains
| so some mandated help sounds common sensical. And busy, poor, or
| uninitiated parents may not have time to invest in something like
| self-driven internet censoring, and I believe society as a whole
| benefits when every child is automatically kept safe from
| unsavory content (by definition a subjective phrase yet a moral
| choice every society must make).
|
| I can see an argument for _mandating_ that every parent must
| individually purchase an in home internet age-gating "device"
| (hardware, software or whatnot) as a compromise so that the
| gating is still done by the parent (possibly with the help of a
| third party of their choice) while the mandation is done by the
| government. But it seems overly heavy handed in the _other
| direction_ to me to say everything everywhere should be
| accessible to everybody of every age without gating and left to
| individuals (often sometimes with poor, underdeveloped, or
| temporarily ill-advised) judgment.
|
| Looking for someone to change my mind on some of these (or links
| to studies or articles making the arguments pro-freedom in this
| context). I'll also virtue-signal for context, that I'm fully
| aware of and actively mourn the ill effects of corporations like
| Meta, etc that vacuum up our data and build profiles and sell to
| data brokers, etc.
| earlyreturns wrote:
| I mean, there's the internet and then there's the internet.
| People are too rigid and old timey in their thinking on this
| issue. "We have to keep the internet anonymous and open to all!"
| No, we don't. There is no singular "internet." We have networks
| _plural_ and society requires some networks that restrict access
| to some people.
| eigencoder wrote:
| I just disagree with this article. Age gating is a good thing. We
| should have more gates to keep kids out in the online world and
| less in the physical world.
|
| I want to see legislation that age gates every social media site.
| Social media companies have harmed a huge amount of my generation
| and we should stop them from addicting children.
|
| Privacy preserving methods for age verification exist, and we
| should use them.
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