SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
on 30 Aug 00:27
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Government sets up page to verify age. You head to it, no referrer. Age check happens by trusted entity (your government, not some sketchy big tech ass), they create a signed cert with a short lifespan to prevent your kid using the one you created yesterday and without the knowledge which service it is for. It does not contain a reference to your identity. You share that cert with the service you want to use, they verify the signature, your age, save the passing and everyone is happy. Your government doesn't know that you're into ladies with big booties, the big booty service doesn't know your identity and you wank along in private.
But oh no, that wouldn't work because think of the... I have no clue.
ActivityPub is a major threat to the commercial social networks.
These laws are purely a way to regulate communication, but they are effectively a way to prevent new social networks from becoming established.
This is why the really big social networks are welcoming them with open arms. Even the criminal social networks are secretly pleased with them.
Laws only affect people too poor to manipulate them and too honest to disobey them.
mostlikelyaperson@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 08:47
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I am sorry but much as I enjoy lemmy, activitypub is absolutely not a threat to anything. Mastodon and co had stagnant to declining user numbers ever since the last twitter exodus. And as things are, that just isn’t going to change and no amount of telling each other so in the mastodon and lemmy echo-chambers is going to change that.
Worse, the open platforms could absolutely not handle massive growth. Moderation would be a nightmare. How many people are going to volunteer to look over the additional thousands of thousands of posts with gore, csam etc. And you would need a lot of them.
Who’s going to pay for the legal advice that inevitably will be needed for the various situations that’d crop up if the network ever got enough users to be an actual threat? Donations? How well is that going to scale? How many volunteer hosters and admins would still be willing to do it in the face of all that?
ActivityPub is a niche, and if you enjoy it, you should hope it stays that way, because it certainly wouldn’t survive mainstream.
Reddit was profitable off of just minimal advertising and Reddit Gold. I’m concerned about video hosting, but I think mastodon and Lemmy can scale just fine.
These are all very good questions, which will all need to be answered eventually, and need to be considered at the platforms move forward.
A lot of these problems could be solved if Governments and business entities started running their own Mastodon servers, and other platforms (as appropriate).
Unfortunately government and businesses are increasingly outsourcing their IT infrastructure to commercial cloud services, rather than keeping them in-house.
I think this starts to not work when you start to include other states that want to do this, other countries, cities, counties, etc… How many trusted authorities should there be and how do you prevent them from being compromised and exploited to falsely verify people? How do you prevent valid certs from being sold?
Some examples of the type of service you mentioned:
Sold by whom? The created cert can be time limited and single use, so the service couldn’t really sell them. You could rate limit how many certs users can create and obviously make it illegal to share them in order to deter people from using them. That’s not enough to prevent it completetly, but should be an improvement for the use cases I hear the most about: social media (because it reduces the network effect) and porn (because kids will at least know that they’re doing some real shady shit).
doughless@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 00:52
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The service provider could even generate a certificate request that the age verification entity signs (again, with no identifying information, other than “I need an age verification signature, please”). That certificate would only be valid for that specific service provider and can’t be re-used.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 01:25
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I give it 2 years till Netflix requires you to have an ID every time you open the app because it has rated R movies.
This is the same principle. The account holder agreement should make the account holder responsible for the use of the service.
The government shouldn’t be parenting our minors, their guardians should be.
Otherswise we should put digital locks on every beer bottle, pack of cigarettes, blunt raps, car door, etc. That requires you to scan your ID before every use.
“Kids shouldn’t be driving cars, it isn’t safe!”
Yes, but somehow we have made it 100 years without requiring proof of age/license to start the car.
And the car is far more deadly than them seeing someone naked.
doughless@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 01:45
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Oh, I was thinking the certificate would only be needed for signups - once the account is created, it absolutely should be on the account holder, not the service provider.
Zachariah@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 01:53
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Why not apply this to the ISP account holder and trust them to protect their own kids the way they see fit?
Philosophically I agree with you. I was just discussing a technological way to accomplish age verification without giving up users’ identities to a service provider, or the government knowing what service you’re using. Unfortunately, too many governments want to know what you’re doing inside your pants.
Yeah, there is likely a tech answer to this that would work. Coming up with one and them choosing not to use it makes it even more clear kids’ safety isn’t their goal.
“Kids shouldn’t be driving cars, it isn’t safe!” Yes, but somehow we have made it 100 years without requiring proof of age/license to start the car.
This is sort of my take. There’s a lot of fun to be had in discussing possible technical solutions to the problem. And technical solutions do exist. But they all have some sort of noteworthy downside, including relying on the government to build and maintain this signing server.
But the best solution, IMO, is much more low-tech. Parental controls. Mandate that all browsers and operating systems support a parental control API where apps and websites can request to know if a user is of age. Mandate that adult sites call this API. And put the onus on parents to actually set up parental controls on their children’s devices, with an appropriately strong password that the children cannot break into.
That sounds like a very functional and rational solution to the problem of age verification. But age verification isn’t the ultimate goal, it’s mass surveillance, which your solution doesn’t work for.
The fact that they haven’t gone for this approach that delivers age verification without disclosing ID, when it’s a common and well known pattern in IT services, very strongly suggests that age verification was never the goal. The goal is to associate your real identity with all the information data brokers have on you, and make that available to state security services and law enforcement. And to do this they will gradually make it impossible to use the internet until they have your ID.
We really need to move community-run sites behind Tor or into i2p or something similar. We need networks where these laws just can’t practically be enforced and information can continue to circulate openly.
The other day my kid wanted me to tweak the parental settings on their Roblox account. I tried to do so and was confronted by a demand for my government-issued ID and a selfie to prove my age. So I went to look at the privacy policy of the company behind it, Persona. Here’s the policy, and it’s without a doubt the worst I’ve ever seen. It basically says they’ll take every last bit of information about you and sell it to everyone, including governments.
The fact that they haven’t gone for this approach that delivers age verification without disclosing ID, when it’s a common and well known pattern in IT services, very strongly suggests that age verification was never the goal.
I don’t agree. It certainly makes it possible that it isn’t the goal. But I genuinely believe that, at least here in Australia (where our recent age-gating law is not about porn, but about social media platforms, with an age limit of 16), the reason behind the laws being designed as they are is (1) optics: despite what those of us here say, keeping young children off of harmful social media algorithms is very politically popular and they wanted to pass a bill that banned it as quickly as they could. No time for serious discussion about methods. And (2) a complete lack of knowledge. Because they wanted the optics, they passed the bill extremely quickly and without a serious amount of consultation. And I don’t trust that even if they had done consultation, they would have known who is more reliable to listen to, the actual experts and privacy advocates, or the big AI companies with big money promising facial recognition will somehow solve this. Because politicians are, by and large, really fucking stupid at technology.
What is it they say? Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity?
First, Mastodon is talking about Mississippi in the US.
Second, why can’t people parent their own kids? What if I don’t agree with the government and want my kid to see stuff the government has decided to block? The government isn’t the parent of your child and you shouldn’t be treating them as such. If you child is doing something you don’t want, it’s your job as their parent to stop it.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 10:43
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“What if I WANT my kids watching porn???”
Really bold stratagy you got there.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
on 30 Aug 13:17
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That argument suggests you bought the lie of what the age verification is for. When every service is required to perform age verification, it quickly becomes not about porn but control.
They’re trying to close the Pandora’s box that is the internet decades after the fact, and they’re learning the hard way how impossible and unpopular that is
Where the hell did I say porn? You think they can’t block anything else?
Also, so what if I did? Shouldn’t that be a parents decision? Say I’m fine with them watching it at 16yo. Shouldn’t that be up to the parent, not the government?
People who give up their freedom to the government are going to lose far more freedom than they’re OK with losing. It starts with something you might agree with, but it never stops there.
“Promoting homosexuality” was illegal in state schools for half my childhood. Imagine the ignorant, hateful people arguing against same-sex sexual education - they would probably say “YOU want to show PORN to CHILDREN” too. It’s a bad-faith character assassination that shouldn’t have merit.
The article says “Mississippi and elsewhere”, so I assumed all sorts of bans were fair game for discussion.
As for your second point, I genuinely don’t really care all that much. Take my solution and require platform vendors provide a parental controls API and require websites and apps call it. From there, whether you legally required parents to set up parental controls, you strongly suggest they do it, or you just leave it there as an option doesn’t matter as much. Maybe different places can have different laws.
The important thing is that parents should at least be given the tools necessary to be able to do this.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 30 Aug 06:26
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Fuck, I went through that with VRchat…
Inkstainthebat@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 09:18
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Do you know if the verification services that require ID have access to official government databases to verify them? Cus I’m starting to have some… Ideas
MunkysUnkEnz0@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 05:19
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Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
on 30 Aug 01:45
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Age check happens by trusted entity (your government, not some sketchy big tech ass), they create a signed cert with a short lifespan to prevent your kid using the one you created yesterday and without the knowledge which service it is for.
Sorry, not sufficient.
Not secure.
" I certify that somebody is >18, but I don’t say who - just somebody "
This is an open invitation to fraud. You are going to create at least a black market for these certificates, since they are anonymous but valid.
And I’m sure some real fraudsters have even stronger ideas than I have.
What stops non-anonymous certificates from being sold?
If John Doe views way too much porn, then you expect the site to shut him down? They have no ability to track other site usage. The authorities have to block him after the 10,000th download.
At that point, why does the site need to know? Either the government blocks someone’s ID or they don’t
You’re not solving any issue by losing privacy. The site itself “knowing” you’re John Doe can’t tell if that’s correct or not. Only the government can verify that, so why give the info to the site?
Making the certs short-lived (a few minutes) and single use and having a rate limit for users could make it difficult enough with serious risks (if you make it a crime) for little profit (I doubt many kids will pay serious amounts of money to watch porn; definetly not drug-scale amounts of money).
You cannot make a certificate “single use” (except if it exists only inside a closed system).
homoludens@feddit.org
on 30 Aug 12:05
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I was using the wording of OP who seems to be talking about tokens. The service asks the trusted entity if the token is valid, the trusted entity deletes the token after the first time.
This can be improved even further to lock a single age verification to a single account. Instead of issuing you a generic signed cert, they use blinded signatures to sign a cert that you generate and encrypt, containing the domain name and your username. The govt never sees the site or your username, because it’s encrypted, and the site never sees the document you provided the govt with to prove your age. But you have a cert that can only be used by you to verify your account is of age.
There’s an alternative solution that would enable a person’s browser or device to verify their age based on a govt-signed cert with repeated hashes. This would have the benefit of the government not even knowing how many verifications you had done, because they only provide one cert per person (with longer renewals. The downside of this is that it requires some form of unique multiple-use identifier. In the sample question that’s fine because it’s a passport. IRL it could be something like an email address, or even just your own unique UUID.
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 30 Aug 02:57
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Ideally, it would be handled directly on the hardware. Allow people to verify their logged in profile, using a government-run site. Then that user is now verified. Any time an age gate needs to happen, the site initiates a secure handshake directly with the device via TLS, and asks the device if the current user is old enough. The device responds with a simple yes/no using that secure protocol. Parents can verify their accounts/devices, while child accounts/devices are left unverified and fail the test.
Government doesn’t know what you’re watching, because they simply verified the user. People don’t need to spam an underfunded government site with requests every day, because the individual user is verified. And age gates are able to happen entirely in the background without any additional effort on the user’s side. The result is that adults get to watch porn without needing to verify every time, while kids automatically get a “you’re not age-verified” wall. And kids can’t MITM the age check, due to the secure handshake. And if it becomes common enough, even a VPN would be meaningless as adult sites will just start requiring it by default.
For instance, on a Windows machine, each individual user would be independently verified. So if the kid is logged into their account, they’d get an age wall. But if the parent is logged into their verified account, they can watch all the porn they want. Then keeping kids away from porn is simply a matter of protecting your adults’ computer password.
But it won’t happen, because protecting kids isn’t the actual goal. The actual goal is surveillance. Google (and other big tech firms like them) is pushing to enact these laws, because they have the infrastructure set up to verify users. And requiring verification via those big tech firms allows them to track you more.
infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net
on 30 Aug 03:38
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Because it’s not actually about age verification, it’s about totalizing surveillance of everyone.
If we’re talking about a hard copy ID (passport, drivers license) that’s one thing. A digital ID, and over the internet, is asking for trouble.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
on 30 Aug 09:21
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That's the reason I wrote what I wrote. everyone only knows what they need to know. How do you think a third entity would identify you?
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
on 30 Aug 18:23
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How do you think a third entity would identify you?
You may want to join us reading along in the privacy communities of the fediverse.
But long story shortened - third parties are very much identifying each of us in staggeringly novel and effective ways.
For example, depending on circumstances, third parties may not be sure which room in my home I am sitting in, right now, while being aware that I’m writing this. This shit has gotten deeply weird and invasive.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
on 30 Aug 19:07
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I doubt the concept of anonymised data. Companies and governments have bad incentives to know who you are, and collect data from brokers to make correlations and educated guesses.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
on 31 Aug 04:14
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You should avoid everything then. Besides that, what has that got to do with the issue?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 31 Aug 03:41
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Easy:
companies have a vested interest in identifying you (ads, data brokers, etc)
governments have a vested interest in tracking you (local police, terrorism tracking, etc)
I don’t trust the government and private interests to come to an agreement that somehow benefits citizens more than their combined interests.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
on 31 Aug 04:16
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I'm not saying I'm for age verification. I'm just saying if it were for it, there'd be solutions.
What I wrote I did while being barely awake in five minutes. Sure it needs work. But there'd be ways to do it without a camera up your butt.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 31 Aug 14:27
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My point is that any solution here will be used for tracking, because that’s in the interests of both regulators and regulated entities. It’s not going to solve the original problem because kids are great at finding workarounds, and it will cause harm to those who follow the rules.
I also could devise a technical solution here that respects users’ privacy and is effective, but once it’s implemented, it will be changed to violate privacy. That’s how these things work.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
on 31 Aug 14:45
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Sadly, I agree with everything you wrote.
GreenShimada@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 10:08
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It bothers me so much that a ZKP system is entirely possible, and no one will just do the first step of setting that up.
Eh, Denmark is. They are building exactly a ZKP system.
Britain has chosen to not make this a legal requirement so it is possible to tie back age verification with who verified. That makes it a lot more suspect.
Sorry, I mean just for the UK, US, and apparently China also.
Fortunately, the EU isn’t going down the same path, and has Estonia, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands as guides. And to just do this in the right order and do step 1: sensible digital ID system.
Right, except for the part where you get verified and nobody can do that except you. Oh, and the part where your kids don’t steal a copy. Or a copy of someone else’s verification. And the part where it actually doesn’t contain references to your real identity; easy to fuck that one up, right… Hmm, that actually means the whole thing wouldn’t work.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz
on 30 Aug 10:59
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rozodru@piefed.social
on 30 Aug 11:27
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meh just do what Amazon does "Hey if you're student you can get Amazon Prime for $5! how old are you?"
me: "I'm 20."
Amazon: "Ok here's your cheap prime!"
/me groans getting out of the chair cause I'm in my 40s
Point being just slap up an unverified age gate and be done with it. Really, truthfully, whose going to actually check? who even cares to check? it's all just a dog and pony show to please the conservative and "think of the children" religious nut jobs who have no idea how any of this shit works anyways. Just spend 2 minutes whipping up a site with a centered div that has a drop down menu asking "how old are you?" less than 18 send it to a "no internet for you page" greater than 18 "go look at porn" page.
Doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what's REALLY happening that they're requiring scanned IDs or faces or what have you. and no company in their right mind is going to fight this as it's free and easy data collection. Bluesky doesn't give a flying fuck as they're just going to end up selling the data they collect.
just_an_average_joe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 30 Aug 11:51
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How about people parent their children?
I believe the issue is that parents themselves are overworked from their job and have no energy to be a parent, because in our society, it is more successful to be a worker than to be a parent.
(Sorry for turning it into a critique of capitalism, I just can’t help it these days)
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
on 30 Aug 12:07
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I'm with you on this one, but that's easy to say for me. I'm in IT anyway. I just have a hard time imagining how my sister for example would set this up for her kids. That doesn't mean I am for all of this bullshit, though.
ItsGhost@sh.itjust.works
on 30 Aug 13:59
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Because think of the shareholders, I’m waiting to see which politicians spouses own controlling shares in the verification companies…
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
on 30 Aug 14:17
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That's the reason I don't want that for profit. What could it cost in additional taxes? 5 cents?
General_Effort@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 14:21
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The problem is that meat-space logic is applied to the cyberspace (as it might have been said in the 90ies).
You go into a store and the clerk sees you and knows your age. If it’s borderline, then they ask for ID. They are applying that thinking to internet services. And so are you. You are just trying to figure out a better way to ask for ID.
The UK doesn’t have a system of mandatory national ID. Brits feel that that is totalitarian. So obviously, they do not use the scheme you propose. It’s not their meat-space logic.
Where this falls down is that no ordinary Mastodon instance can comply with the regulations of the close to 200 hundred countries in the world. Of course, just like 4chan, many wouldn’t want to out of principle.
The only way to make this work is to introduce another meat-space thing: Border posts. You need a Great Firewall of the [Local Nation]. At physical border posts, guards check if goods comply with local regulations. We need virtual border posts to check if data is imported and exported in compliance with local regulations.
Such a thing, a virtual Schengen border, was briefly considered in the EU about 15 years ago. It went nowhere at the time. But if you look at EU regulations, you can see that the foundations are already laid, most obviously with the GDPR but also the DSM, DMA, DSA, CRA, …
Eventually, the border will be closed to protect our values; to enforce our laws. We will lock out those American and Chinese Big Tech companies that steal our data. We will only allow their European branches and strictly monitor their communications abroad. We will be taking back control, as the Brexiteers sloganized it. Freedom is just another word for having to ask the government for permission when you enter a country. And increasingly, it is another word for having to ask permission for how you use your own computer.
It won’t be some shady backroom deal. Look here. People in this community love these regulations. Europeans here are happy to tell US companies to “FO if they don’t want to follow our laws”. Well, the Great Firewall of Europe is how you do that.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works
on 30 Aug 22:29
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You sell that cert to a local kid for $50
You generate another cert to sell to a local kid tomorrow
???
Profit
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
on 30 Aug 23:25
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And your solution is...?
starman2112@sh.itjust.works
on 31 Aug 01:15
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There’s no problem, so we don’t need one. We got by just fine without age verification on the internet for decades
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
on 31 Aug 14:47
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I'm not sure if we are doing that fine. The thing about the decades is there wasn't really a web for kids to browse. Nowadays it's different. But still, I agree with you. We should keep responsibility to the parents as long as possible. But I really don't think my friend's daughter should be browsing TikTok at her age.
(Which is my friend's task, not mine or that of some pedo in government)
On a side-note. I do not consider the government to be a trusted party. Whatever solution gets implemented needs to not provide the government any information that they can use for mass surveillance.
The two main requirements in my view are:
The website that needs your age shouldn’t get to know your identity. They only get to verify your age.
The government age verification shouldn’t get to know what service you are requesting access for. They only provide age verification.
Edit: You mention the certificate being short-lived, but one of the concerns mentioned in the proposed implementation for the EU age verification states that if that window is too short it can be used to determine identity.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
on 31 Aug 14:41
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I think I have to specify what I mean by trusted. I do not trust them with my browser history, but I do trust them handling my government-issued identity. I do however not trust a company with that identity because I know they will definitely use it for their own good. What I want is the complete and absolute separation of information. Everyone knows exactly what they need to know, not a byte more. I'm still not convinced we desperately need the possibility to identify us for every fucking service though. Keeping kids from accessing porn should be the task of the parent. Keeping kids out of porn, yes indeed, we all need to tackle that problem.
So basically, yes, I think we have the same solution in mind, but with different wording.
defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 30 Aug 01:46
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Lucky for Mastodon and other ActivityPub projects, they don’t need to host any servers. People outside of regions where age verification is required can host the servers instead.
cmgvd3lw@discuss.tchncs.de
on 30 Aug 01:54
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But what if govt block the site hosted outside? And the VPNs require you to do an age verification?
defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 30 Aug 02:38
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Good luck blocking Tor or I2P. China already tried that.
I’d rather not have the law, or if law then big business pay but exclusions for smaller businesses/hobbyist.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
on 30 Aug 09:46
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NSFW tag and parental controls blocking that, is not enough?
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 30 Aug 11:08
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The better option would be to have Parental controls on by default and inform parents/customers about how to turn them on for their kid’s devices. They won’t do that because some people have investments in YOTI and Data Brokers want our data.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
on 30 Aug 08:48
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“there is nobody that can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi.” (…)
“And this is why real decentralization matters,” said Rochko.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz
on 30 Aug 11:04
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If you know anyone who support age verifications laws remind them that the same governments that care so much about kids is backing and arming israel to murder and starve kids to death.
Collateral damage. They knew this was going to happen, so it’s their fault. And no, I’m no longer an Israel supporter, I’m against both sides.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works
on 30 Aug 22:22
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Oh yeah just pack up and move! What an easy solution! Why didn’t the Jews think of that back in the 30’s and 40’s? They could have ended the holocaust all on their own by simply leaving!
Yes but that would require them to regard all children as being worthy of protection by the law.
They don’t.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 30 Aug 11:07
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I live in the UK, and this is something I was saying about the Online Safety Act. It puts all the onus on the websites and not only do some websites not have the money or resources to comply, but with something like Mastodon, it doesn’t really work. Like this bill was written and passed by people who don’t know shit about fuck about tech. Several Lemmy and Mastodon instances have shut down/Geoblocked the UK because of this, and other jurisdictions don’t seem to understand that either.
General_Effort@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 12:40
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What gets me is how many people in this very community have the same level of ignorance. And on top of that, they don’t understand that these laws also apply to the very service they are using.
SethTaylor@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 14:22
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It’s almost like this law was made to preserve the Meta monopoly. Starting a social media platform just got more expensive and complicated.
They consulted with MindGeek, who own Pornhub etc… They’re one of the few companies big enough to comply. It was designed to preserve their monopoly, not Meta’s. The politicians voting on it didn’t necessarily understand that, but the law had been approved by children’s charities and (a single representative of) the industry, so there’d be no reason (if you didn’t understand how technology works) to question it.
but with something like Mastodon, it doesn’t really work. Like this bill was written and passed by people who don’t know shit about fuck about tech. Several Lemmy and Mastodon instances have shut down/Geoblocked the UK because of this
So they knew what they were doing. Age verification is about removing all sources that can’t be controlled.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 31 Aug 12:30
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The control isn’t complete until VPNs are controlled. Everybody evading the ban will help to make the case that VPNs have to be regulated, too.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 31 Aug 15:02
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That’s already happening, alas, but I suspect things will get very quiet when people realise something like this would affect the bottom line negatively. Look at what happened (twice) with encryption.
Government said they wanna ban encryption.
Starts planning the legislation.
Someone (a civil servant who’s job it is to point out the fucking obvious) points out that Banking and Commerce requires Encryption to function and banning Encryption would crash the Economy.
Plans are quietly dropped.
How it will likely go with VPNs.
Government says they wanna restrict VPNs.
Government Starts planning legistlation (we are here).
Someone points out that Banking, Tech Security, The Military, The Foreign Office and others rely on VPNs to function and getting rid of them will fuck the economy and put national security at risk and risk negatively affecting their pay masters corporate donors.
Plans are quietly dropped.
One of the main purposes of the OSA is to make money for YOTI and the Data brokers, because you and I both know these are the main corporate sponsors, and the MPs and Lords who passed it likely have investments in said companies. Hoovering up IDs and linking them to web activity doesn’t just help the government fuck us, it makes money for MPs, Lords, and their Friends. But here’s the thing: It’ll bite not just US, but them in the arse. So here’s what’s (hopefully) going to happen.
OSA is installed.
Someone important enters their info into a fake age check/Someone important gets age verified for something and the service gets hacked.
The hack gets made public and a lot of important people get burnt.
The Bill gets quietly modified or abolished.
British Politicians are greedy, self serving authoritarian cunts, but they are also remarkably dim. Like sometimes impressively so. Look up this passage in Hansard to see what I mean. It might cause you to have a fucking crisis.
But yes, they do like control, problem is they don’t know what they wish for,
Do you think those debates are for real and not a show that ends with whatever has been decided elsewhere?
The houses don’t need to know because they don’t do the planning.
Since the EU does the same thing at the same time, after it was not a problem for years, the origin for these laws must lie elsewhere.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 31 Aug 21:47
collapse
Do you think those debates are for real and not a show that ends with whatever has been decided elsewhere?
If that was the case, then the Lords wouldn’t have blocked the 2016 Disability Bill. You remember the one. I don’t think that was theatre, I think people in the Lords looked at that and went “lol fuck no.” They also wouldn’t have done a lot of shit if it was all planned behind the scenes and some shadowy cabal actually just called the shots.
Here’s the thing: “It’s all planned” is the cornerstone of most conspiracies, from 9/11 to “Covid is a bioweapon” or “Covid isn’t real” to literally every major conspiracy theory. But wanna know something? All of that is a weighted comfort blanket to sooth people, it is soothing to believe that there is someone or something in control and it’s just a case of getting rid of them, and it’s an ego boost to believe that You are part of a club that figured it out. They used to call it being “woke” until the far right took that term as an Alias for “Degenerate” as the Nazis used it.
But the truth is this: There is no man behind the curtain, there is no shadowy cabal who actually control everything. It’s call Capitalism, Sociopaths, and Morons who either want to make money or think they’re doing good.
I have lived through two governments (a Labour one and a Conservative one) that have floated the idea of banning encryption publicly. Both times they quietly dropped the idea when they were told that doing something like that would crash the economy. My parents are both former Civil Servants. My dad watched the Scottish Secretary at the time nearly type “Thatcher is a Bitch” into a Teletype machine that sent out press releases to every major newspaper.
I watched my own MSP (and Leader of the Scottish Lib Dems) address a crowd of mostly transgender mostly leftist people and ask them to applaud Tories who voted for the Gender Recognition Act.
There is shit in Hansard that looks like it came from a bad sitcom. There are people who are in parliament right now who I wouldn’t trust with a fucking Self Scan Checkout, let alone a seat in either of the houses.
Are there scheming bastards, genuinely Machiavellianism Motherfucks in parliament? Yes! Politics attract people who score high in the Dark Triad. Starmer, Streeting, and Farage are all genuinely horrible people. Starmer and Streeting openly want to harm transgender people, Farage wants to fund the fucking Taliban, and if we wanna talk about non-MPs, Boris Johnson stated he’s rather have mass death than another Lockdown and the last government used Covid as a way to Launder Money.
But alongside that, a good chunk of the people in our parliaments are simply fucking morons. They might be good at a collection of specific things, but they are also impressively Moronic on a level that would make the Thick of It and Yes Minister look fucking optimistic. Indeed, some of the more bastardous people I have listed and not listed here are also, weirdly, fucking morons. Look at Trump’s first term for example.
And if you wanna cling to “there’s a puppet master behind all this”, be it Satan or the Illuminati, to save you from the genuinely terrifying thought that the people at the Helm of the ship of state are Francesco Schettino, Yiannis Avranas and Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, fair, but personally, I’m a realist and the only conspiracy I hold is that the “Phillip Killed Diana” conspiracy was invented by the British Press so they wouldn’t face a shitstorm when people realised what the paps did when they got to the crash scene.
If you wanna know what is actually happening here it is:
A Dunfermline based investment firm, charitable trust and think tank (yes you heard) by the name of Carnegie United Kingdom Trust invested money in data collection firms and age verification firms like YOTI, so they lobbied the government and even basically wrote the Online Safety Act. The government sometimes lets outside groups write legislation for them because Corruption, they have other shit to do, and they don’t often know shit about the fucking shite they’re voting for.
Some of those MPs also likely had investments in YOTI and VPNs. When this was presented to the government, some poor sod of a Civil Servant had to sit down the PM/Minister responsible and try convince them that it’s a bad idea, clearly they failed. So, utilising the moral panic around Porn, Extremist Material, Pro-Ana content and the like, they passed this bill, even when a good number of these fucking numbskulls don’t even know what a VPN is, just “we need to do something” and “it’s just common sense™”.
Now not only do they (and future governments, God help us if Reform get in and us
A market economy is our politico-economic system. If billionaires conspire to distort the markets against the interest of the people, and unbeknownst to them, then that’s a conspiracy, normalized by calling it Capitalism.
In this case it’s old American money. The idea doesn’t come as an investment opportunity from the trust. They are not creating a better future for children with the age verification as the last missing piece. Conspiracies are not magic. You know how it was implemented but you can only guess why.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 02 Sep 19:25
collapse
If billionaires conspire to distort the markets against the interest of the people, and unbeknownst to them, then that’s a conspiracy, normalized by calling it Capitalism.
That’s not distorting the markets, that is what they are for. The market isn’t some magical deity who’s only been stopped because their will is being misinterpretated by the billionaires, they are the market. They control the market. The purpose of a system is what it does. The “Free” market is as much of a myth as when MLMs say the state will “dissolve away” to produce true Communism with the workers owning the means of production. The moment a “free” market is made, it instantly gets manipulated by people with money and the market stops being free anymore. That’s part of the reason why so many rich cunts babble on about “free” markets, because it gives them power The billionaires fucking with the market and the law isn’t an aberration of the system, it is the system. Once you realise that, everything falls into place.
The whole reason why the bill was made and written as it was is money. We live in a period of surveillance capitalism where various companies make fuck tonnes of money from your data. Google, Facebook and the like didn’t make their money from merely “running ads”. They took the data you gave them through cookies and your posting and used it to more accurately target ads at you. Then, they started selling your data to other data brokers who then sold it to anyone with enough money. We’ve all heard the story about how target knew a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did, and we all know about Cambridge Analytica, Brexit and Trump. Facebook will literally monitor your emotional state through your posts and target you with ads for loans when they think your emotionally vulnerable.
So, we all know data brokers are hungry for data to sell, and as one Murray Bookchin once said: “Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing”. So guess what? Investment firms saw a load of moral panics and calls for digital ID. They invested in firms like YOTI (they are not required to say who invested in them, nice and convenient) and started doing research for the government through their think tank arms to convince the government that the OSA is a good idea. The bill says that stringent age checks must be done to view certain pieces of content, but not how, so that means websites have to hire YOTI and co to do that for them or do it themselves. If they can’t afford to they either have to shut down because they don’t care about the little guy.
So now data brokers have some very valuable data they can take from you: Your unedited face, your passport/drivers licence (plus all the biometrics that come with that) and (alongside that), your sexual habits, more controversial views, and your neuroses! The government can buy that off them (not that they couldn’t already find that out), but also so can the people with the big bucks, COMPANIES! On Grindr? Well now your health insurer can increase your premiums if they think you are promiscious. Got political views? Well now they can be manipulated for an outcome favourable to large corporations. Your employer can buy your data and see if you have been saying things they don’t like, annorexic people can be given ads for gym memberships and health fads. Oh, and all this can be sold to the government, be it yours or someone else’s.
It’s all money, it’s no shady conspiracy, literally it is business as usual and it sucks.
You know you can just switch to some small instance that’s not blocked and you’re gonna be good? Even in China the small Lemmy instances work while the big ones are obviously blocked
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 31 Aug 21:47
collapse
Yeah sure, until they find a way to block that too.
I doubt UK could surpass China and Russia in terms of internet censorship any time soon
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 31 Aug 22:20
collapse
You’d think that, but we’re in a political culture right now that puts kneejerk reactionism before reason, logic, and evidence. “It’s Just Common Sense™” is used to shut down anyone who might have any good points to make from history or reason. There used to be a point where a politician in the ruling government would spitball something in public, and then a civil servant who knew what they were talking about would sit them down and explain to them why their idea was bollocks. The OSA has shown to us that said thing is bollocks, and efforts from groups like Collective Shout have shown otherwise.
We have major politicians here saying shit like We should Pay Taxpayers money to the Taliban to take people they wanna kill anyway. We have a whole section of the population banned from using gendered toilets and government policy written by far right activist groups. We have books being banned from libraries in certain council areas for being “woke” and we have the ever looming shadow of fascism over us from Russia and America.
Payment processors are telling us what we can and cannot buy because a reactionary group pressured them into it and the most widely used OSes on our phones and computers are ready made to basically fuck all of us if it’s profitable.
Russia can flip a switch tomorrow and cut off all access to the outside world under their “Sovereign internet” plan. Shit’ll get worse before it gets better.
HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 15:00
nextcollapse
This is exactly the kind of government overreach people like me have been screaming about since, in my case, the 1990s.
“I told you so” just doesn’t feel so good when what’s happening is nothing less than the entirety of human freedom and liberty is being eroded before our very eyes, and those who disagree with it get labeled as kooks, and accused of hating whatever “oppressed group” of the day is in vogue.
I too have been screaming about private online since the 90s. I have an intuitive reaction that sort of mirrors yours.
But can I ask you a question?
And it’s one that I’m asking because I genuinely wish to learn from others.
Because I can’t quite see the difference and maybe there’s something I’m missing.
Why is it not government overreach to ensure pornography isn’t sold to minors in an adult video store, but government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers?
I would love your enlightened view on this so I can learn from it. Because I can’t quite see the difference.
I understand that many adults go into an adult video store and need not prove their age, because they clearly look like adults.
And so the difference here is that everyone have to prove their age online, even people that are clearly adults by how they look.
But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice. In that world I would also expect the clerk to check every purchase as they would have no other means of assessing the buyer’s age.
Or maybe you think that adult videos should be sold to everyone and it’s the very concept that pornography is restricted to minors that you disagree with. I don’t personally hold that view but then I can least understand why you would also reject online age verification.
Or maybe you think it is ineffective and won’t make a difference. That argument I most definitely agree with, but how we choose to implement a law, and whether it’s effective, is two different discussions I would posit.
Edit: I love that I’m getting downvoted for expressing a POV respectfully.
Not OP, but I think the analogy to what is happening to online privacy would be if you were asked to identify yourself at every location: the grocery store, the farmers market, the corner park, the trail along the river; and all of those checkpoints were aggregated and sold, meaning that someone who might not have your best interests at heart could use your travel timeline against you, to advertise to you, to sue you, to charge you with a crime, to destroy your public reputation.
But for what it is worth the European Union’s proposed framework for this legally mandates zero knowledge proofs.
The UK’s implantation sucks. Big hairy monkey balls.
If you buy alcohol at a farmer’s market, the seller has a responsibility to ensure they’re not supplying it to a child. At least in most countries.
HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 15:38
nextcollapse
Parents have the ultimate say-so of what their kids have access to.
I don’t believe there needs to be a law that says that, no.
If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have their own money, then it’s the parents who are to blame if that kid buys “bad” things with that money.
Same thing online. If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have unrestricted internet access, then it’s their fault if the kid then goes to a “bad” website.
It’s not the store’s fault. Nor is it the website’s fault.
We have given away far too much of our parental responsibility over to 3rd parties, and now we don’t know how to parent anymore.
Make illegal? Nope. Not my business to tell other parents how to raise their children.
And that’s exactly the problem here. People like YOU, who think that if I don’t want something illegal, than that of course means I like that thing, or that I personally want to do that thing.
Nope. It has to do with personal autonomy. I’m not your boss, I shouldn’t get to tell YOU what you can do to yourself. Period.
Except you forget about the whole “as long as it doesn’t directly affect others” thing.
I followed on your steatment. If I forgot it, you also forgot it.
But my point stand, by the traffic code you cannot drive drunk also if you don’t affect anyone else on the road.
Generally it is not that you can do something that is illegal thinking that it is ok as long as it doesn’t affect others.
You think people should be charged with a crime they haven’t done yet? Because that is exactly what happens in some DUI arrests.
Sleeping it off in your car but have the engine on because it’s cold/hot outside? DUI.
Then there are the idiotic open container laws where even an open alcoholic drink is legally a DUI, even if the driver isn’t drinking.
And if you can’t afford a good lawyer? It’s a conviction. Which goes on your permanent record.
A guy I worked with had a motorcycle try to pass his company vehicle as he was turning left. The motorcycle driver was killed.
It fucked the guy up so bad, mentally. He began drinking. Never at work, but he drove a company vehicle. See where this is going yet? If not let me finish.
A block from his house, he cracked open a beer. Now even if he had chugged it, there’s no way he’d be even slightly drunk before he got home. But he didn’t realize the worker who sold him the beer had already called the police and he was being followed.
The arrested him for DUI in his own driveway, due to idiotic open container laws, despite blowing a 0.
He took a plea for reckless endangerment, but it didn’t matter. He was 4 years from retirement. He was fired.
You think people should be charged with a crime they haven’t done yet? Because that is exactly what happens in some DUI arrests.
Of course not, but then maybe the problem is not the DUI law, it is the fact that you cannot fight it if you cannot get a good lawyer, which cost money. Basically your justice system is fucked up.
Sleeping it off in your car but have the engine on because it’s cold/hot outside? DUI.
Slippery slope. How can police know that you just turned on the engine but not moved instead of driving and then stopping because you fall asleep ?
Then there are the idiotic open container laws where even an open alcoholic drink is legally a DUI, even if the driver isn’t drinking.
That is a stupid law, I agree, but it is the law.
A block from his house, he cracked open a beer. Now even if he had chugged it, there’s no way he’d be even slightly drunk before he got home.
Well, he should not have done it. He know the laws. I can feel pity for him in the specific case, but he breaks the stupid law.
The arrested him for DUI in his own driveway, due to idiotic open container laws, despite blowing a 0.
That was the problem here. The laws is written so you fail either way. Here if I have an open wine bottle in the car but I blow a 0, nobody could do anything to me.
But assuming I agree with you, what would be your suggestion to avoid people driving around while drunk ? Or to avoid minors to access porn material ? Aside the charade “parents need to educate they children” that obviously you cannot take for granted.
I don’t like the idea and where it could take us.
In the case of DUI, I think the idea behind the law is to avoid that a drunken driver hurts someone, with potentially lethal consequences, not only punish them if he do it.
Once a drunken driver killed someone is too late, even with the harsher punishment.
Again, your problem is not the law itself, it is the fact that your law and the justice system is designed in such a way that you are always set up to fail, in a way or another, be for the stupid DUI charge if you are sleeping in your car, the open container law or the way too expensive justice system. That is what you should fight.
I don’t like the idea of actions that don’t hurt others being a crime.
Me neither, but I like even less the idea that an action that is, demonstrably, dangerous to other should not be stopped until it provoke damages.
It’s about consistency.
You are right. And it is about consistency the starting point from which we are discussing: minors should not be able to access porn. Now, in the real life there is such law and it in on the seller to check, exactly because you cannot count on the fact that a parent is 24/7 with his child, so I don’t see why we should not try to enforce the same law on the Net, it is only on a different media.
Now, I agree that checking on the net is way harder than in real life, but minors are minors and porn is porn. If it is dangerous to see a naked woman on Playboy is also dangerous to see her on Playboy.com.
If we make it illegal to do things that MIGHT wind up hurting someone there’s no limit to what we can make illegal.
I see your point, but I simply think that if something is proven to hurt someone, like DUI, then maybe it is right to make it illegal.
Excessive alcoholism is known to cause harm. Should we make being an alcoholic illegal? Wouldn’t that make it harder for alcoholicsnto try to get help, for fear of being arrested instead of getting help, much like what happens to drug addicts?
People get hurt constantly while fishing, too. Should we make fishing illegal?
The problem is where do we draw the line. You want to draw it at some possibility of harm to others. I want to draw it at actual harm to others.
Which of these is more or less likely to wind up being stretched over time?
You aren’t thinking about bureaucrats and politicians 20, 30, 50, or 100 years down the road. “We’ll just fix the laws when it becomes a problem!”
Sure. Because we’re really REALLY good at removing or rewriting broken laws… Oh, wait. No we aren’t.
Never heard about people killed in crash caused by drunken driver ? Or pedestrians hit by cars driven by drunked drivers ?
Excessive alcoholism is known to cause harm. Should we make being an alcoholic illegal? Wouldn’t that make it harder for alcoholicsnto try to get help, for fear of being arrested instead of getting help, much like what happens to drug addicts?
No, we should just have laws try to avoid consequences for others
Are you an alcoholic ? Ok, we will help you to be ok but at the same time we try to avoid you drive while drunk. It not seems too unreasonable
People get hurt constantly while fishing, too. Should we make fishing illegal?
Point is: how probable is that someone fishing hurts someone else ? How much damage you can do ?
Again, the point is not to make something illegal because you can hurt yourself, it is about trying to have law that try to prevent you hurt someone else while doing something.
If fishing can hurt others, maybe we should have a law that, while not forbidding to fish, protect the others from what you are doing. I would imagine that you would not like to swim in the sea while someone is fishing with bombs (illegal) 2 meters away from you, don’t you ?
The problem is where do we draw the line. You want to draw it at some possibility of harm to others. I want to draw it at actual harm to others.
Fine as long as you accept the consequences. I just don’t agree with you.
Which of these is more or less likely to wind up being stretched over time?
Both, because you just need to redefine what “harm” means. And some people is good to do it.
True, but there is an history of cases about it where the probabilty became certainty.
I do not want people in jail for doing something that is probably a crime.
Me eighter but at the same time I would like to prevent some behaviors that could be dangerous to others.
I know it could be a slippery slope but honestly it would not console me to know that the drunken driver where punished *after *he hit me, I would prefer if he would be stopped *before *being able to hit me.
Every so-called crime that has no jail time shouldn’t be a crime. Fees are just another way of enforcing class warfare.
But fines works only if they are proportional to your wealth, else they are a punishment only for the poor.
We agree on the last part. But my feeling is that if a crime isn’t “bad” enough to require actual jail time then it probably shouldn’t be a crime at all.
Speeding, DUI, and other risky behaviors should be punished if, and ONLY if, an actual incident occurs. Because then there is actually a victim, and not just some nebulous might-have-been.
Hurt someone while drinking and driving? That’s no accident, that’s an intentional attack. Kill someone? Again, not an accident, but premeditated murder.
Now, if say, your insurance agency decides that you are a risk due to your alcoholism, and either drops you, or increases your premiums that’s not a problem. There’s no criminal punishment happening, and if it’s in the contract you signed, that’s expected.
But, you should only criminally punish someone after they’ve hurt another person. Not when they engage in risky behaviors.
The problem with that is that you quickly become responsible for EVERYONE, and then you wind up right back where we are with government bureaucrats telling parents how to raise their children.
If a law or rule can be used to harass otherwise good people, then it will be.
If you give some self-important bastard an inch, they’ll take a mile. Just look at the police.
The problem with that is that you quickly become responsible for EVERYONE, and then you wind up right back where we are with government bureaucrats telling parents how to raise their children.
Ok, so do you think it is better to not be responsible for nodoby ? Good, as long as you are prepared to pay the consequences of this, both at personal level and a social level.
If a law or rule can be used to harass otherwise good people, then it will be.
If you give some self-important bastard an inch, they’ll take a mile. Just look at the police.
Sadly true, but this do not means that we should not have laws.
General_Effort@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 15:55
nextcollapse
But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice.
There’s the problem. I was tempted to call this Boomer logic, but that would extremely unfair to Boomers. We are only seeing this now, that the Boomers are on the way out.
I think the Boomers understood better how this works. It’s not like entering a store. It’s like making a phone call to the store, and the store may be on the other side of the world. The Boomers understood borders, long distance calls, international mail.
Now the digital natives are taking over. And they understand nothing beyond tapping and swiping.
Spoilered is a post I wrote earlier. Just so you know what’s coming.
spoiler
The problem is that meat-space logic is applied to the cyberspace (as it might have been said in the 90ies).
You go into a store and the clerk sees you and knows your age. If it’s borderline, then they ask for ID. They are applying that thinking to internet services.
Where this falls down is that no ordinary Mastodon instance can comply with the regulations of the close to 200 hundred countries in the world. Of course, just like 4chan, many wouldn’t want to out of principle.
The only way to make this work is to introduce another meat-space thing: Border posts. You need a Great Firewall of the [Local Nation]. At physical border posts, guards check if goods comply with local regulations. We need virtual border posts to check if data is imported and exported in compliance with local regulations.
Such a thing, a virtual Schengen border, was briefly considered in the EU about 15 years ago. It went nowhere at the time. But if you look at EU regulations, you can see that the foundations are already laid, most obviously with the GDPR but also the DSM, DMA, DSA, CRA, …
Eventually, the border will be closed to protect our values; to enforce our laws. We will lock out those American and Chinese Big Tech companies that steal our data. We will only allow their European branches and strictly monitor their communications abroad. We will be taking back control, as the Brexiteers sloganized it. Freedom is just another word for having to ask the government for permission when you enter a country. And increasingly, it is another word for having to ask permission for how you use your own computer.
It won’t be some shady backroom deal. Look here. People in this community love these regulations. Europeans here are happy to tell US companies to “FO if they don’t want to follow our laws”. Well, the Great Firewall of Europe is how you do that.
lemmy.world/comment/19119670
6nk06@sh.itjust.works
on 30 Aug 16:32
nextcollapse
Because I can’t quite see the difference
Parents can (and MUST) monitor what happens in their home. It was expected for the past thousand years, and now it’s the duty of everyone to take care of anyone’s children for some reason. To get to a porn store, you need money to take the bus or you need a car, then the owner of the store can kick your ass or call the cops if you’re underage. Remember that less than 50 years ago, the local priest could smash your face if you didn’t behave properly in the street, With the internet, parents are the sole responsible for what their kids do, but they don’t want to take any responsibility for it. The solution would be a mandatory parental control on every computer, but parents wouldn’t like that.
government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers
Because that overreach happens to remove all my privacy thanks to a few idiot parents who don’t want to do their parenting jobs in another country, and I consider that unacceptable. We can do some whataboutism and say that since parents in Afghanistan don’t want to watch porn, all the porn of the internet has to disappear. Same for blasphemy and freedom of women to browse the internet.
Ok. I get the concept that pornography doesn’t harm children. We can debate that.
But by that reckoning should we also allow children to buy guns online and have them delivered at home? Is there nothing we want to restrict online, on account that whoever is buying it might be too young?
Parents should do some parenting. When did they stopped doing that, and how is it my problem and why am I supposed to renounce my whole privacy due to some idiots online?
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 16:55
nextcollapse
There is no possible way to actually stop teenagers accessing online porn that doesn’t require such a massive invasion of privacy that it leaves no safe way for adults to access it. To go with your adult video store analogy, it’s like if the store staff would have to accompany you home and watch you watching the porn to check there wasn’t anyone standing behind you also looking at the screen, and while they were there, they were supposed to take notes on everything they saw. Even if they had no interest in doing anything nefarious, a criminal could steal their notebook and blackmail all their customers with the details it contained, and there’d be enough proof that there wouldn’t be any way to plausibly claim the blackmailer had just made everything up.
If you want to prove someone on the Internet is a real adult and not a determined teenager, you need lots of layers. E.g. if you just ask for a photo of an ID card, that can be defeated by a photo of someone else’s ID card, and a video of a face can be defeated by a video game character (potentially even one made to resemble the person whose ID has been copied). You need to prove there’s an ID card that belongs to a real person and that it’s that person who is using it, and that’s both easier to fake than going to a store with a fake ID (if you look young, they’ll be suspicious of your ID) or Mission Impossible mask, and unlike in a store, the customer can’t see that you’re not making a copy of the ID card for later blackmail or targeted advertisements. No one would go back to a porn shop that asked for a home address and a bank statement to prove it.
Another big factor is that if there’s a physical shop supplying porn to children, the police will notice and stop it, but online, it’s really easy to make a website and fly under the radar. It’s pretty easy for sites that don’t care about the law to provide an indefinite supply of porn to children, and once that’s happening, there’s no reason to think that it’s only going to be legal porn just being supplied to the wrong people.
Overall, the risk of showing porn to children doesn’t go down very much, but the risk of showing blackmailable data to criminals and showing particularly extreme and illegal porn to children goes up by a lot. Protecting children from extreme material, e.g. videos of real necrophilia and rape, which are widely accepted to be seriously harmful, should be a higher priority than protecting a larger number from less extreme material that the evidence says is less harmful, if at all. Even if it’s taken as fact that any exposure to porn is always harmful to minors, the policies that are possible to implement in the real world can’t prevent it, just add either extra hassle or opportunities for even worse things to happen. There hasn’t been any proposal by any government with a chance of doing more good than harm.
In Finland you could handle this by having people authenticate using their online bank passwords. A LOT of government stuff already works that way, so it would require almost no extra coding at least over here. I wonder why it cannot be done the same way in England?
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 18:00
nextcollapse
Teenagers can find out their parents’ passwords (or their friends’ parents’ passwords) if they really want to, and if things are anonymous enough not to leave a paper trail that would allow spouses to see each other’s porn usage, they’re anonymous enough to let teenagers hide that they’re using their parents’ credentials. 2FA helps, but it’s not like teenagers never see their parents’ phones.
There’s not anything that all adults in the UK have that could be used for everyone. There’s no unified national ID or online government identity. There’s no one-size-fits-all bank login system. You’d have to build and secure tens of independent systems to cover nearly all adults.
As I said in the post above, if it’s too much hassle for teenagers to access mainstream, legitimate porn sites, then there’s very little anyone can do to stop them accessing obscure ones that don’t care about obeying the law or can’t do so competently. If governments could stop websites from existing and providing content, there wouldn’t be any online piracy.
Online banking passwords? “Find”? How the hell? Have you lived in a barrel?
There is a 8-number code that I’ve got in my head, then there is a 4-number password that I’ve also got in my head. And then a paper with single-use passwords which work so that when I have given the two correct passwords, it tells me which code to use. And no way am I giving full access to my bank account for my children!
Some banks also have a system where you log in with your fingerprint and then a four-number code using an app on your phone.
I think the money on the parents’ accounts is a much better motivation for the children than an ability to watch porn. And yet, I have not heard of anybody’s children actually having found out their parent’s bank passwords.
And also: Maybe there really is a child that installs a keylogger on their parents’ computer and steals the password paper from the parents’ wallet and also happens to really want to go out of their way to watch porn… Well, then there is. Such a child is already in so many ways in trouble that I don’t think seeing porn will traumatize them at all. Such children are few and it makes no sense trying to build a 100-percent foolproof system. In any case, using online banking passwords is a lot more reliable way than the weird hocus-pocus being done now.
My point is that you can’t build a completely teenager-proof system. Even if most parents uphold the most unimpeachable password discipline, someone’s going to put a password on a post-it note near their computer, and have their child see the piece of paper, or use their dog’s name despite their child having also met the family dog.
The original comment I was replying to was framing the issue as teenagers being allowed to watch porn versus no teenager ever seeing porn and maybe some freedom is sacrificed to do that, which doesn’t match the real-world debate. If freedoms are sacrificed just to make it a hassle for teenagers to see porn, that’s much less compelling whether or not you see it as a worthwhile goal.
As for what a teenager with access to their parents’ bank password would do, if they’re not a moron, they’ll realise that spending their parents’ money will leave lots of evidence (e.g. that they have extra stuff, their parents have less money than expected in their account, and there’s an unexpected purchase from The Lego Group on the bank statement), and so they’re guaranteed to end up in trouble for it. It’s not any different to a child taking banknotes from their parent’s wallet. On the other hand, using it to prove adulthood, if it was truly untraceable like adults would want, wouldn’t leave a paper trail.
You can’t build a completely teenager-proof system. But you can build a system that is almost completely teenage-proof. And that’s definitely good enough!
All such systems exist only to support parents in their parenting. It gets easier keeping your children safe and developing well if the amount of ways the teenagers can be idiots is narrowed down.
As I said, I fundamentally disagree. Even if you can make a nearly-teenager-proof website (and so far, your example has been something that most of the people I was at school with could have beaten aged thirteen), teenagers can just go to a different website, so the system is only ever as teenager-resistant as it is difficult to find a website that doesn’t care. Most vaguely competent teenagers know how to find pirate sites with illegally-hosted TV, movies and music (even if they’re not techy, one of their friends just has to tell them a URL and they can visit it). Governments have had minimal success stopping online piracy even when aided by multi-billion-dollar copyright-holding companies, so there’s no realistic reason to think they’ll have any more success stopping porn sites with non-compliant age checks.
While I disagree with the teenagers’ ability to find my banking passwords regardless of where I hide them, for example because I can make a copy of them that has been altered with a password I can calculate in my head and that takes the location of the password on the table into account in the calculation, the rest is true.
I remember having seen things I really wouldn’t want to see even as adult when I was browsing Internet for stuff that wasn’t supposed to be available. Shady websites can be shady in so many ways!
It is true that making an age verification system for a basic porn site will probably direct the youth to other sites with content you wouldn’t see on PornTube. I hope my children won’t ever watch porn, but if they ever do, I hope it’s from a source that doesn’t allow the worst things to be shown. For example PornHub does remove the worst stuff and is quite commonly used. If that one cannot be accessed, then probably something else will. And it’s likely to be worse. Though, PornHub has a lot of really bad abusive things as well. Checked it out now and one of the first videos it showed was something that looked like the woman is really unhappy, even distressed, about the situation she’s being filmed in :(
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 21:51
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There’s not anything that all adults in the UK have that could be used for everyone. There’s no unified national ID or online government identity. There’s no one-size-fits-all bank login system. You’d have to build and secure tens of independent systems to cover nearly all adults.
i mean, that seems like a solveable problem. either build a national (internationl?) or have some reciprocity with the identification systems that allows the different regions to easily access each other’s systems.
Sort of the same system they’re building in Denmark.
You will log into MitID (myID), authenticate with the MitID app, then be issued a bunch of ZKP tokens which you’ll burn off against age verification services. No trace, fully authenticated, fully trusted, damn near impossible to fool.
BangCrash@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 21:50
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People complained about government overreach when seatbelts became a law
Funny - I assume on one here was actually involved in creating the law that requires identification when buying pornography (or alcohol. Or tobacco) at stores, but we are all considered responsible for it to the point we are hypocrite if we object a similar law?
If someone says they are against that law now, years after it’s already established and spread, it won’t be taken as “I’m generally against the government limiting our freedom to consume what we want” but as “I want to push children to consume porn/alcohol/tobacco”. So no one argues against these laws. But it’s much more feasible to argue against the new laws - a ship that’s still in the port.
30 years from now, when they make the law that neural implants must detect illegal thoughts in the users’ biological brains and block them, you’d make the argument that it’s not fundamentally different than blocking the same topics on the internet - a practice that, by that time, will already be accepted by the general populace.
General_Effort@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 15:44
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Yes. I had always worried about the copyright industry. That was the big money pushing for censorship. Controlling access and exchange of information is part of their business model and even personal ideology. But I don’t know how much this has actually to do with them, and how much is simply the will to power.
What I did not see coming at all was how the left would completely 180 on these issues. That, at least, I blame on the copyright industry.
Right wing people have screeched about “the intolerant left” forever, but I always ignored the obvious hypocrisy. I took it as a debate on what is permissible in polite society. But now Europe is at a point where there is simply a consensus against free speech. Only the most illiberal forces will be able to use these legal weapons to full effect. That will be the extreme right.
HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 16:02
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It’s just a logical extension of what happens when government becomes the arbitrator of all.
The biggest issue is that so many people see it just as you do, left vs right, instead of liberty vs authoritarianism.
For decades, the libertarian movement, as seen by the left, has been largely associated with the right, simply because of their professed support of the free market, and dislike of gun control
But that same movement has been seen by the right as largely associated with the left, because of their views on things like the drug war, enforced morality, and anti-corporatism.
Has there been a large shift of alt-right into the libertarian movement over the past few years? Yes. Absolutely. And I despise it with a passion.
But there are still quite a lot of us truly anti-authoritarian libertarians out there who despise both left, and right leaning authoritarianism.
But when I bring up issues of authoritarianism, I get “BoTh SiDeS?!” bullshit responses. Because YES, as we can see, BOTH SIDES do their own fair share of this authoritarian bullshit.
They differ in methods, yes. But the bottom line is an encroachment on personal privacy. Plus, property rights are just a logical extension of personal privacy rights.
The right is typically for gun control. Only one country comes to my mind where they aren’t. Which one were you thinking about? Or is it more common than I thought?
(Or did you just happen to forget that 95 % of Earth’s population exists?)
EDIT: Oh, and also: It is important to keep in mind that it’s the same within the left. There are also left-wingers who prefer authoritarianism and ones who despise it. I do agree with your sentiment: The left-right division does not work very well in our current world. Need to take best parts of everything, but most importantly, make sure we don’t end up under totalitarian rule!
I said “professed” dislike. Yes, I know Reagan is responsible for one of the largest expansions of gun control ever seen in the US…
And yes, I know Marx himself was tremendously in favor of armed workers.
Doesn’t change political narrative being pushed by both major political parties in the US, where in the left supposedly wants guns banned, and the right wants everyone armed.
Yes, I know things aren’t that cut and dry, but the media narrative pushed by both parties definitely seems to say that it is.
Doesn’t change political narrative being pushed by both major political parties in the US, where in the left supposedly wants guns banned, and the right wants everyone armed.
I wasn’t being eurocentric. I was being Asia-Africa-Australia-South America-Europe-Canada-Mexico-Central America-Caribbea centric.
The only country where most of the right want to reduce gun safety is USA. We are talking in an international forum, so here international concepts count, not nation-specific. Typically in the world right-wingers are for safety and typically in the world the politics of the Democrat party count as right-wing.
When in a conversation not specific to USA it is not okay to speak as if everything was about USA. It is not okay to speak as if there was a left-wing party in US Congress or Senate and it is not okay to claim that the right wants more dangerous gun policies.
And here we’re talking about something that takes place most prominently in UK and secondly in a bunch of other countries, but absolutely not in USA. USA has nothing to do with this, so don’t be as insolent as you were.
(Also, for example Australia is not in Europe. Learn some geography.)
Despite what they think, we are human beings too over here. That’s my point.
I don’t care about the politics of nation vs nation.
I care about humanity’s liberty as a whole.
Nations are shit. Because the only ones in power are typically the ones who want to be. And there’s no one worse to hand power to, than one who craves it.
Despite what who think? I don’t think there are people who think people in USA are not human beings. (Or if they are, they are less than one percent of the world population… Of course within 8 billion people you will find a proponent for any opinion…)
But yeah, since you care about humanity’s liberty as a whole, you could maybe kindly stop undermining that goal by assuming that what is done by under 5% of the population on this planet is the standard that the remaining 95 % are following.
You’re right. I shouldn’t have responded in anger. My bad. I get frustrated when I feel like people are talking down to me simply because I’m a USian, and I let it get the better of me.
The biggest issue is that so many people see it just as you do, left vs right, instead of liberty vs authoritarianism.
For the most part the divide between “Left” and “Right” politically speaking IS the divide between Liberty and Authoritarianism. If you look up the History of the terms its easy to see this. Those terms originated during pre-revolutionary war France. The “Left” supported freedom from Tyranny. The “Right” supported the Monarchy. This has remained largely true ever since then.
Where the waters get muddy is so called ‘Authoritarian Communism’. When Communism was first being discussed it, along with Anarchism in general, were correctly labeled as ‘Leftist’ ideologies. Under both the ‘State’ is abolished completely. You can literally go no further left than voluntary association and abolishment of the state. As far back as Karl Marx, elements of ‘Authoritarianism’ began creeping into ‘Communist’ thought. While Marx was a relatively enlightened thinker- neither he nor Engels were the originators of Communism- despite having written “The Manifesto”. They were the originators of Marxism- an important distinction.
The goal- indeed one of the very definitions of ‘Communism’, even under Marxism is “a classless, stateless, society.” As such Communism is a form of Anarchism. Anarchy technically only requires the abolishment state, but the vast majority of Anarchists also believe in “Mutual Aid”, and ‘private property’ is a nonsense concept in the absence of a state- which is why so many Anarchists identify as ‘Anarcho-Communists’.
Now clearly (in my mind at least), removing one of the fundamental ideas of communism- which is that ‘The State’ (and especially a ‘strong/authoritarian’ state) inherently upholds and enforces the class system in society and is a bad thing which needs to be abolished and you replace that with it’s complete opposite- a ‘Strong’ State upholds and enforces ‘classlessness’ in society and is a good thing which should be supported, moves that type of “Communism/Socialism” from being a leftist ideology all the way over to being a far right ideology, as per the original and most commonly used metrics for determining if a position is “Left” or “Right”.
The problem with ‘reclassifying’ ‘Authoritarian Communism’ to it’s correct spot is that A) the ruling class (Capitalists) who are firmly right-wing do not want to be associated with it as it removes power from them and places it solely in the hands of the state. Likewise ‘Authoritarian Communists’ do not want to be associated with Capitalists either for similar reasons. Leaving the only people who care about the correct placement of these ideologies as the actual Anarchists and Communists- which are considered ‘fringe’, ‘extremist’, and ‘radicals’ by society as a whole and no one really cares about our opinions.
A ‘True/Accurate’ Left Right Spectrum would look something like…
Putting them in that order reflects the ‘Liberty-Authoritarian’ spectrum that is the “Left-Right” spectrum. You could of course argue placement and some of them could be rearranged depending on circumstances. For example I put ‘Social Democracy’ as further right than Democracy because ‘Social Democracy’ is still by and large a Capitalist system, yet if the majority of people in a Democracy were right wingers- then the order would flip, however this is largely right imho.
For decades, the libertarian movement, as seen by the left, has been largely associated with the right, simply because of their professed support of the free market, and dislike of gun control…
You are confusing ‘The Left’ with “Liberals”. This is an extremely common and understandable mistake to make in the U.S. as there is a
Well to be fair the left in the usa does have another reason to see the libertarian party as just another right wing party. They vote republican when it comes down to D vs R
I’ve never voted for a Republican OR Democrat that I didn’t know personally in my entire life. Why do I add that qualifier? Because I did know some older small town politicians, in both US parties, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when my grandfather was still alive, and they were his friends.
No. Voting for the lesser of two evil is still voting for evil. I’ll write someone in before I vote for some party functionary that only cares about their own political power.
Given that I havent expressed a preference and have never voted either Democrat or Republican in a single election (owing to not being American) I believe you may be inventing things about me.
And what I said stands, you functionally dont express a preference and what you do is equivalent to staying in bed and not turning out to vote.
As you said. You aren’t American, so you don’t have any right to interject yourself into our voting system. And for the record, our 2 party system is absolutely nothing like most other nations that have multiple strong parties.
You cannot break the stranglehold of the 2 party system by continuing to vote for those two parties.
The ideal of free speech is a naive fantasy especially with social media which can amplify the craziest of ideas which can go viral.
Yes the Left has gone overboard with their thought policing however the right wing in want their personal bigotry to be allowed and nobody else (no mention of DEI in USA government institutions allowed). The Left want free speech for everyone except the bigots but then their definition of bigots becomes a slippery slope.
General_Effort@lemmy.world
on 31 Aug 16:06
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I mushed a lot of things together in my post. Copyright and political censorship have very different motives behind them. The point is that, to enforce copyright, you need extensive surveillance of online content and the means to shut down the exchange of information. That requires an extremely expensive technical infrastructure. But once that is in place, you can use it for political censorship without having to fear pushback over the economic cost that would come even from politically sympathetic actors. Conversely, if you introduce political censorship, you might get support by the copyright industry, including the news media, for helping their economic interests.
Where it gets to political censorship, the paradox of tolerance is exactly the lunacy that I’m talking about. In mad defiance of all historical fact, there is belief that liberalism is weak, that political dissidents must be persecuted, information suppressed. Never in history has democracy fallen because of a commitment to tolerance. All too often, they fall because majorities feel their personal comfort threatened by minorities and support the strong leader who will “sweep out with the iron broom” (as a German idiom goes).
Do you notice how that Wikipedia article has nothing to say on history?
Conversely, if you introduce political censorship, you might get support by the copyright industry, including the news media, for helping their economic interests.
Never occurred to me. Interesting point to ponder.
“sweep out with the iron broom”
The would-be fascists don’t want democracy. Note how Trump is softening up the public by using the term fascism lately.
Good essay:
The goal is to shift the Overton window: dictatorship is not a threat, but a regrettable necessity… dictatorship as safety, democracy as danger.
Just ignore the trolls. Apparently I ate his pie or something equally sinister.
VampirePenguin@lemmy.world
on 30 Aug 15:30
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I don’t see how Mississippi or the UK think they can issue laws on sites hosted outside their jurisdiction. That’s just mind boggling. The onus is on the state to provide age verification, or make their ISPs do it.
No, it’s upto the individuals to police their or their childrens internet usage, have family computer in place they can monitor, children should have special childrens phones that are locked down with parents configuring it, today parents are abdicating responsibility, leaving schools to feed, potty train, how to clean teeth and how to behave.
Whats next expecting schools to provide beds and rooms to sleep in, soon babies will be handed to state and raised by the state, is it any wonder we now have a nanny state in many countries, people are getting lazy and filthy, spitting in streets, peeing and pooping in streets, dumping rubbish in streets 😡
downhomechunk@midwest.social
on 30 Aug 23:25
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Sorry, the sort of individualism you speak of only applies to opting out of vaccines and praying to jeebus in the classroom.
The one compromise I’d like to see is for sites to have to provide keywords like in the robot.txt file that says what they serve. So let’s say a site provides porn or gore and a parent wants to block access to it, it should be a simple toggle on the router or browser or both.
Watch the whole world go “ahaha age verification go brrrrr” in the next months/years, and we’ll talk again. I’m particularly baffled at the EU that was all “privacy friendly, consumer first” until a handful of month ago.
BigMacHole@sopuli.xyz
on 31 Aug 01:51
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We NEED to Protect The Children which is WHY we’re SO LUCKY to have a President who is SO KEEN to PROTECT Child Rapists like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell!
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works
on 31 Aug 10:24
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Protect Jeffrey Epstein? Last I checked, he doesn’t need anymore “protecting”.
Trump only cares about himself. If he accidentally “protected” anyone but himself, it’s purely a coincidence.
cley_faye@lemmy.world
on 31 Aug 10:14
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I think that was the point. Not only decentralized services, but a lot of small and/or individual services too. The way age verification is done is both stupid, and expensive. Only the big names will remain.
threaded - newest
Government sets up page to verify age. You head to it, no referrer. Age check happens by trusted entity (your government, not some sketchy big tech ass), they create a signed cert with a short lifespan to prevent your kid using the one you created yesterday and without the knowledge which service it is for. It does not contain a reference to your identity. You share that cert with the service you want to use, they verify the signature, your age, save the passing and everyone is happy. Your government doesn't know that you're into ladies with big booties, the big booty service doesn't know your identity and you wank along in private.
But oh no, that wouldn't work because think of the... I have no clue.
ActivityPub is a major threat to the commercial social networks.
These laws are purely a way to regulate communication, but they are effectively a way to prevent new social networks from becoming established.
This is why the really big social networks are welcoming them with open arms. Even the criminal social networks are secretly pleased with them.
Laws only affect people too poor to manipulate them and too honest to disobey them.
I am sorry but much as I enjoy lemmy, activitypub is absolutely not a threat to anything. Mastodon and co had stagnant to declining user numbers ever since the last twitter exodus. And as things are, that just isn’t going to change and no amount of telling each other so in the mastodon and lemmy echo-chambers is going to change that.
Worse, the open platforms could absolutely not handle massive growth. Moderation would be a nightmare. How many people are going to volunteer to look over the additional thousands of thousands of posts with gore, csam etc. And you would need a lot of them.
Who’s going to pay for the legal advice that inevitably will be needed for the various situations that’d crop up if the network ever got enough users to be an actual threat? Donations? How well is that going to scale? How many volunteer hosters and admins would still be willing to do it in the face of all that?
ActivityPub is a niche, and if you enjoy it, you should hope it stays that way, because it certainly wouldn’t survive mainstream.
Reddit was profitable off of just minimal advertising and Reddit Gold. I’m concerned about video hosting, but I think mastodon and Lemmy can scale just fine.
These are all very good questions, which will all need to be answered eventually, and need to be considered at the platforms move forward.
A lot of these problems could be solved if Governments and business entities started running their own Mastodon servers, and other platforms (as appropriate).
Unfortunately government and businesses are increasingly outsourcing their IT infrastructure to commercial cloud services, rather than keeping them in-house.
I think this starts to not work when you start to include other states that want to do this, other countries, cities, counties, etc… How many trusted authorities should there be and how do you prevent them from being compromised and exploited to falsely verify people? How do you prevent valid certs from being sold?
Some examples of the type of service you mentioned:
I can only verify with my own government. The rest I don't know. But shut up, that's how it works! /s
To be honest, I have no clue. But dropping my pants to write a mail isn't what I want to do.
Sold by whom? The created cert can be time limited and single use, so the service couldn’t really sell them. You could rate limit how many certs users can create and obviously make it illegal to share them in order to deter people from using them. That’s not enough to prevent it completetly, but should be an improvement for the use cases I hear the most about: social media (because it reduces the network effect) and porn (because kids will at least know that they’re doing some real shady shit).
The service provider could even generate a certificate request that the age verification entity signs (again, with no identifying information, other than “I need an age verification signature, please”). That certificate would only be valid for that specific service provider and can’t be re-used.
I give it 2 years till Netflix requires you to have an ID every time you open the app because it has rated R movies.
This is the same principle. The account holder agreement should make the account holder responsible for the use of the service.
The government shouldn’t be parenting our minors, their guardians should be.
Otherswise we should put digital locks on every beer bottle, pack of cigarettes, blunt raps, car door, etc. That requires you to scan your ID before every use.
“Kids shouldn’t be driving cars, it isn’t safe!” Yes, but somehow we have made it 100 years without requiring proof of age/license to start the car.
And the car is far more deadly than them seeing someone naked.
Oh, I was thinking the certificate would only be needed for signups - once the account is created, it absolutely should be on the account holder, not the service provider.
Why not apply this to the ISP account holder and trust them to protect their own kids the way they see fit?
Philosophically I agree with you. I was just discussing a technological way to accomplish age verification without giving up users’ identities to a service provider, or the government knowing what service you’re using. Unfortunately, too many governments want to know what you’re doing inside your pants.
Yeah, there is likely a tech answer to this that would work. Coming up with one and them choosing not to use it makes it even more clear kids’ safety isn’t their goal.
Signups + random checks to prevent reselling accounts.
This is sort of my take. There’s a lot of fun to be had in discussing possible technical solutions to the problem. And technical solutions do exist. But they all have some sort of noteworthy downside, including relying on the government to build and maintain this signing server.
But the best solution, IMO, is much more low-tech. Parental controls. Mandate that all browsers and operating systems support a parental control API where apps and websites can request to know if a user is of age. Mandate that adult sites call this API. And put the onus on parents to actually set up parental controls on their children’s devices, with an appropriately strong password that the children cannot break into.
Driving is a much more visible activity than looking at your phone in a locked room though.
but they know who they issued it to, and can secretly subpoena your data from your instance.
no thank you.
They (the govt) would know that they issued a certificate to ex. lemmy.dbzer0.com
They can’t know that the certificate is issued to conmie
Unless, of course, the instance logs the age certificate used by each user
And also, unless the govt’s age verification service logs the certificate issued by each citizen
They can only subpoena your data if it is stored. Make the code open source (by law) and only store the cert, no connection to the user.
That sounds like a very functional and rational solution to the problem of age verification. But age verification isn’t the ultimate goal, it’s mass surveillance, which your solution doesn’t work for.
The fact that they haven’t gone for this approach that delivers age verification without disclosing ID, when it’s a common and well known pattern in IT services, very strongly suggests that age verification was never the goal. The goal is to associate your real identity with all the information data brokers have on you, and make that available to state security services and law enforcement. And to do this they will gradually make it impossible to use the internet until they have your ID.
We really need to move community-run sites behind Tor or into i2p or something similar. We need networks where these laws just can’t practically be enforced and information can continue to circulate openly.
The other day my kid wanted me to tweak the parental settings on their Roblox account. I tried to do so and was confronted by a demand for my government-issued ID and a selfie to prove my age. So I went to look at the privacy policy of the company behind it, Persona. Here’s the policy, and it’s without a doubt the worst I’ve ever seen. It basically says they’ll take every last bit of information about you and sell it to everyone, including governments.
withpersona.com/legal/privacy-policy
So I explained to my kid that I wasn’t willing to do this. This is a taste of how everything will be soon.
I don’t agree. It certainly makes it possible that it isn’t the goal. But I genuinely believe that, at least here in Australia (where our recent age-gating law is not about porn, but about social media platforms, with an age limit of 16), the reason behind the laws being designed as they are is (1) optics: despite what those of us here say, keeping young children off of harmful social media algorithms is very politically popular and they wanted to pass a bill that banned it as quickly as they could. No time for serious discussion about methods. And (2) a complete lack of knowledge. Because they wanted the optics, they passed the bill extremely quickly and without a serious amount of consultation. And I don’t trust that even if they had done consultation, they would have known who is more reliable to listen to, the actual experts and privacy advocates, or the big AI companies with big money promising facial recognition will somehow solve this. Because politicians are, by and large, really fucking stupid at technology.
What is it they say? Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity?
First, Mastodon is talking about Mississippi in the US.
Second, why can’t people parent their own kids? What if I don’t agree with the government and want my kid to see stuff the government has decided to block? The government isn’t the parent of your child and you shouldn’t be treating them as such. If you child is doing something you don’t want, it’s your job as their parent to stop it.
“What if I WANT my kids watching porn???”
Really bold stratagy you got there.
That argument suggests you bought the lie of what the age verification is for. When every service is required to perform age verification, it quickly becomes not about porn but control.
They’re trying to close the Pandora’s box that is the internet decades after the fact, and they’re learning the hard way how impossible and unpopular that is
Where the hell did I say porn? You think they can’t block anything else?
Also, so what if I did? Shouldn’t that be a parents decision? Say I’m fine with them watching it at 16yo. Shouldn’t that be up to the parent, not the government?
People who give up their freedom to the government are going to lose far more freedom than they’re OK with losing. It starts with something you might agree with, but it never stops there.
“Promoting homosexuality” was illegal in state schools for half my childhood. Imagine the ignorant, hateful people arguing against same-sex sexual education - they would probably say “YOU want to show PORN to CHILDREN” too. It’s a bad-faith character assassination that shouldn’t have merit.
The article says “Mississippi and elsewhere”, so I assumed all sorts of bans were fair game for discussion.
As for your second point, I genuinely don’t really care all that much. Take my solution and require platform vendors provide a parental controls API and require websites and apps call it. From there, whether you legally required parents to set up parental controls, you strongly suggest they do it, or you just leave it there as an option doesn’t matter as much. Maybe different places can have different laws.
The important thing is that parents should at least be given the tools necessary to be able to do this.
Fuck, I went through that with VRchat…
Do you know if the verification services that require ID have access to official government databases to verify them? Cus I’m starting to have some… Ideas
Don’t forget censorship.
what exactly is the problem, though?
Sorry, not sufficient.
Not secure.
" I certify that somebody is >18, but I don’t say who - just somebody "
This is an open invitation to fraud. You are going to create at least a black market for these certificates, since they are anonymous but valid.
And I’m sure some real fraudsters have even stronger ideas than I have.
What stops non-anonymous certificates from being sold?
If John Doe views way too much porn, then you expect the site to shut him down? They have no ability to track other site usage. The authorities have to block him after the 10,000th download.
At that point, why does the site need to know? Either the government blocks someone’s ID or they don’t
Not useful to look at it in such a black or white manner. The possibilities are presumably less, and surely not that obvious.
You’re not solving any issue by losing privacy. The site itself “knowing” you’re John Doe can’t tell if that’s correct or not. Only the government can verify that, so why give the info to the site?
Making the certs short-lived (a few minutes) and single use and having a rate limit for users could make it difficult enough with serious risks (if you make it a crime) for little profit (I doubt many kids will pay serious amounts of money to watch porn; definetly not drug-scale amounts of money).
You cannot make a certificate “single use” (except if it exists only inside a closed system).
I was using the wording of OP who seems to be talking about tokens. The service asks the trusted entity if the token is valid, the trusted entity deletes the token after the first time.
The website generates a random value, your government signs a cert for that value. That’s what makes it single use and zero trust.
This can be improved even further to lock a single age verification to a single account. Instead of issuing you a generic signed cert, they use blinded signatures to sign a cert that you generate and encrypt, containing the domain name and your username. The govt never sees the site or your username, because it’s encrypted, and the site never sees the document you provided the govt with to prove your age. But you have a cert that can only be used by you to verify your account is of age.
There’s an alternative solution that would enable a person’s browser or device to verify their age based on a govt-signed cert with repeated hashes. This would have the benefit of the government not even knowing how many verifications you had done, because they only provide one cert per person (with longer renewals. The downside of this is that it requires some form of unique multiple-use identifier. In the sample question that’s fine because it’s a passport. IRL it could be something like an email address, or even just your own unique UUID.
Ideally, it would be handled directly on the hardware. Allow people to verify their logged in profile, using a government-run site. Then that user is now verified. Any time an age gate needs to happen, the site initiates a secure handshake directly with the device via TLS, and asks the device if the current user is old enough. The device responds with a simple yes/no using that secure protocol. Parents can verify their accounts/devices, while child accounts/devices are left unverified and fail the test.
Government doesn’t know what you’re watching, because they simply verified the user. People don’t need to spam an underfunded government site with requests every day, because the individual user is verified. And age gates are able to happen entirely in the background without any additional effort on the user’s side. The result is that adults get to watch porn without needing to verify every time, while kids automatically get a “you’re not age-verified” wall. And kids can’t MITM the age check, due to the secure handshake. And if it becomes common enough, even a VPN would be meaningless as adult sites will just start requiring it by default.
For instance, on a Windows machine, each individual user would be independently verified. So if the kid is logged into their account, they’d get an age wall. But if the parent is logged into their verified account, they can watch all the porn they want. Then keeping kids away from porn is simply a matter of protecting your adults’ computer password.
But it won’t happen, because protecting kids isn’t the actual goal. The actual goal is surveillance. Google (and other big tech firms like them) is pushing to enact these laws, because they have the infrastructure set up to verify users. And requiring verification via those big tech firms allows them to track you more.
Because it’s not actually about age verification, it’s about totalizing surveillance of everyone.
Bold of you to assume a government entity is trusted. In the UK we have a large misrepresentative error due to our voting system.
Depends in what part you trust. I trust them with my ID, I wouldn't trust a random website. They know it anyway as they made it.
If we’re talking about a hard copy ID (passport, drivers license) that’s one thing. A digital ID, and over the internet, is asking for trouble.
That's the reason I wrote what I wrote. everyone only knows what they need to know. How do you think a third entity would identify you?
You may want to join us reading along in the privacy communities of the fediverse.
But long story shortened - third parties are very much identifying each of us in staggeringly novel and effective ways.
For example, depending on circumstances, third parties may not be sure which room in my home I am sitting in, right now, while being aware that I’m writing this. This shit has gotten deeply weird and invasive.
I'm not talking about fingerprinting.
I doubt the concept of anonymised data. Companies and governments have bad incentives to know who you are, and collect data from brokers to make correlations and educated guesses.
You should avoid everything then. Besides that, what has that got to do with the issue?
Easy:
I don’t trust the government and private interests to come to an agreement that somehow benefits citizens more than their combined interests.
I'm not saying I'm for age verification. I'm just saying if it were for it, there'd be solutions.
What I wrote I did while being barely awake in five minutes. Sure it needs work. But there'd be ways to do it without a camera up your butt.
My point is that any solution here will be used for tracking, because that’s in the interests of both regulators and regulated entities. It’s not going to solve the original problem because kids are great at finding workarounds, and it will cause harm to those who follow the rules.
I also could devise a technical solution here that respects users’ privacy and is effective, but once it’s implemented, it will be changed to violate privacy. That’s how these things work.
Sadly, I agree with everything you wrote.
It bothers me so much that a ZKP system is entirely possible, and no one will just do the first step of setting that up.
Eh, Denmark is. They are building exactly a ZKP system.
Britain has chosen to not make this a legal requirement so it is possible to tie back age verification with who verified. That makes it a lot more suspect.
Sorry, I mean just for the UK, US, and apparently China also.
Fortunately, the EU isn’t going down the same path, and has Estonia, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands as guides. And to just do this in the right order and do step 1: sensible digital ID system.
Right, except for the part where you get verified and nobody can do that except you. Oh, and the part where your kids don’t steal a copy. Or a copy of someone else’s verification. And the part where it actually doesn’t contain references to your real identity; easy to fuck that one up, right… Hmm, that actually means the whole thing wouldn’t work.
It was never about the kids.
en.wikipedia.org/…/2010s_global_surveillance_disc…
meh just do what Amazon does "Hey if you're student you can get Amazon Prime for $5! how old are you?"
me: "I'm 20."
Amazon: "Ok here's your cheap prime!"
/me groans getting out of the chair cause I'm in my 40s
Point being just slap up an unverified age gate and be done with it. Really, truthfully, whose going to actually check? who even cares to check? it's all just a dog and pony show to please the conservative and "think of the children" religious nut jobs who have no idea how any of this shit works anyways. Just spend 2 minutes whipping up a site with a centered div that has a drop down menu asking "how old are you?" less than 18 send it to a "no internet for you page" greater than 18 "go look at porn" page.
Doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what's REALLY happening that they're requiring scanned IDs or faces or what have you. and no company in their right mind is going to fight this as it's free and easy data collection. Bluesky doesn't give a flying fuck as they're just going to end up selling the data they collect.
How about people parent their children?
I believe the issue is that parents themselves are overworked from their job and have no energy to be a parent, because in our society, it is more successful to be a worker than to be a parent.
(Sorry for turning it into a critique of capitalism, I just can’t help it these days)
I'm with you on this one, but that's easy to say for me. I'm in IT anyway. I just have a hard time imagining how my sister for example would set this up for her kids. That doesn't mean I am for all of this bullshit, though.
Because think of the shareholders, I’m waiting to see which politicians spouses own controlling shares in the verification companies…
That's the reason I don't want that for profit. What could it cost in additional taxes? 5 cents?
The problem is that meat-space logic is applied to the cyberspace (as it might have been said in the 90ies).
You go into a store and the clerk sees you and knows your age. If it’s borderline, then they ask for ID. They are applying that thinking to internet services. And so are you. You are just trying to figure out a better way to ask for ID.
The UK doesn’t have a system of mandatory national ID. Brits feel that that is totalitarian. So obviously, they do not use the scheme you propose. It’s not their meat-space logic.
Where this falls down is that no ordinary Mastodon instance can comply with the regulations of the close to 200 hundred countries in the world. Of course, just like 4chan, many wouldn’t want to out of principle.
The only way to make this work is to introduce another meat-space thing: Border posts. You need a Great Firewall of the [Local Nation]. At physical border posts, guards check if goods comply with local regulations. We need virtual border posts to check if data is imported and exported in compliance with local regulations.
Such a thing, a virtual Schengen border, was briefly considered in the EU about 15 years ago. It went nowhere at the time. But if you look at EU regulations, you can see that the foundations are already laid, most obviously with the GDPR but also the DSM, DMA, DSA, CRA, …
Eventually, the border will be closed to protect our values; to enforce our laws. We will lock out those American and Chinese Big Tech companies that steal our data. We will only allow their European branches and strictly monitor their communications abroad. We will be taking back control, as the Brexiteers sloganized it. Freedom is just another word for having to ask the government for permission when you enter a country. And increasingly, it is another word for having to ask permission for how you use your own computer.
It won’t be some shady backroom deal. Look here. People in this community love these regulations. Europeans here are happy to tell US companies to “FO if they don’t want to follow our laws”. Well, the Great Firewall of Europe is how you do that.
You sell that cert to a local kid for $50
You generate another cert to sell to a local kid tomorrow
???
Profit
And your solution is...?
There’s no problem, so we don’t need one. We got by just fine without age verification on the internet for decades
I'm not sure if we are doing that fine. The thing about the decades is there wasn't really a web for kids to browse. Nowadays it's different. But still, I agree with you. We should keep responsibility to the parents as long as possible. But I really don't think my friend's daughter should be browsing TikTok at her age.
(Which is my friend's task, not mine or that of some pedo in government)
Funnily enough that is roughly the implementation the EU seems to be working on.
…ec.europa.eu/…/eu-age-verification
On a side-note. I do not consider the government to be a trusted party. Whatever solution gets implemented needs to not provide the government any information that they can use for mass surveillance.
The two main requirements in my view are:
Edit: You mention the certificate being short-lived, but one of the concerns mentioned in the proposed implementation for the EU age verification states that if that window is too short it can be used to determine identity.
I think I have to specify what I mean by trusted. I do not trust them with my browser history, but I do trust them handling my government-issued identity. I do however not trust a company with that identity because I know they will definitely use it for their own good. What I want is the complete and absolute separation of information. Everyone knows exactly what they need to know, not a byte more. I'm still not convinced we desperately need the possibility to identify us for every fucking service though. Keeping kids from accessing porn should be the task of the parent. Keeping kids out of porn, yes indeed, we all need to tackle that problem.
So basically, yes, I think we have the same solution in mind, but with different wording.
Lucky for Mastodon and other ActivityPub projects, they don’t need to host any servers. People outside of regions where age verification is required can host the servers instead.
But what if govt block the site hosted outside? And the VPNs require you to do an age verification?
Good luck blocking Tor or I2P. China already tried that.
This does come with a (maybe trivial) cost for those hosts of not being able to enter the UK.
Hey, UK! When you are being compared to Mississippi, you are fucking up very very badly.
If it’s a law, it should be free for both businesses and users.
That means being paid by the tax payers.
The free option is to trust your children.
Oh noes, won’t somebody think of the blessed tax payers.
I’d rather not have the law, or if law then big business pay but exclusions for smaller businesses/hobbyist.
NSFW tag and parental controls blocking that, is not enough?
The better option would be to have Parental controls on by default and inform parents/customers about how to turn them on for their kid’s devices. They won’t do that because some people have investments in YOTI and Data Brokers want our data.
.
If you know anyone who support age verifications laws remind them that the same governments that care so much about kids is backing and arming israel to murder and starve kids to death.
That’s far too many words for them to properly understand
Then let me summarize:
They’ll ask chatgpt to summarize it, and got forbid what gpt will hallucate.
Kids of Families who chose to stay despite efforts to evacuate them 👍
No effort could have evacuated the entire population of Gaza without free movement across land borders. It was never a practical option.
Even if it had been, parents making a dumbass decision doesn’t justify killing their kids.
It doesn’t justify it but it’s expected collateral damage. And hamas would just hide behind children if they provided protection.
Ew. Please stop talking.
Nope
Fucking creepy comment.
are you suggesting the Palestine government does not have a right to exist you antisemitic troll
Calling me antisemitic is funny.
And no, necer said that. Just calling the people stupid that let their children die for propaganda
Say you’re trash without saying you’re trash
You racist antisemitic terrorist.
Please elaborate 👍
Please leave, your voice is not wanted here.
If you continue to spread blantant disinformation about the genocide of palestinians I will report you.
You could just read up on the facts
If I wanted you I was gonna steal your house, and you didn’t leave, you’d be okay with your children being murdered? You’re fucking nuts
Collateral damage. They knew this was going to happen, so it’s their fault. And no, I’m no longer an Israel supporter, I’m against both sides.
Oh yeah just pack up and move! What an easy solution! Why didn’t the Jews think of that back in the 30’s and 40’s? They could have ended the holocaust all on their own by simply leaving!
Uh yeah just go. Die or go but don’t complain if you die because you didn’t wanna go. This was to be expected
“Move or I’ll kill you”
Ah yes, the one that’s being said to is at fault
Yeah exactly. It’s not right but they are at fault.
Yes but that would require them to regard all children as being worthy of protection by the law.
They don’t.
I live in the UK, and this is something I was saying about the Online Safety Act. It puts all the onus on the websites and not only do some websites not have the money or resources to comply, but with something like Mastodon, it doesn’t really work. Like this bill was written and passed by people who don’t know shit about fuck about tech. Several Lemmy and Mastodon instances have shut down/Geoblocked the UK because of this, and other jurisdictions don’t seem to understand that either.
What gets me is how many people in this very community have the same level of ignorance. And on top of that, they don’t understand that these laws also apply to the very service they are using.
It’s almost like this law was made to preserve the Meta monopoly. Starting a social media platform just got more expensive and complicated.
They consulted with MindGeek, who own Pornhub etc… They’re one of the few companies big enough to comply. It was designed to preserve their monopoly, not Meta’s. The politicians voting on it didn’t necessarily understand that, but the law had been approved by children’s charities and (a single representative of) the industry, so there’d be no reason (if you didn’t understand how technology works) to question it.
So they knew what they were doing. Age verification is about removing all sources that can’t be controlled.
and yet they’re doing a fucking terrible job at it (source, I’m using a VPN, something people in the Lords didn’t even know was a thing until it was too late). It would be funny if it wasn’t my reality.
The control isn’t complete until VPNs are controlled. Everybody evading the ban will help to make the case that VPNs have to be regulated, too.
That’s already happening, alas, but I suspect things will get very quiet when people realise something like this would affect the bottom line negatively. Look at what happened (twice) with encryption.
How it will likely go with VPNs.
pay masterscorporate donors.One of the main purposes of the OSA is to make money for YOTI and the Data brokers, because you and I both know these are the main corporate sponsors, and the MPs and Lords who passed it likely have investments in said companies. Hoovering up IDs and linking them to web activity doesn’t just help the government fuck us, it makes money for MPs, Lords, and their Friends. But here’s the thing: It’ll bite not just US, but them in the arse. So here’s what’s (hopefully) going to happen.
British Politicians are greedy, self serving authoritarian cunts, but they are also remarkably dim. Like sometimes impressively so. Look up this passage in Hansard to see what I mean. It might cause you to have a fucking crisis.
But yes, they do like control, problem is they don’t know what they wish for,
Do you think those debates are for real and not a show that ends with whatever has been decided elsewhere?
The houses don’t need to know because they don’t do the planning.
Since the EU does the same thing at the same time, after it was not a problem for years, the origin for these laws must lie elsewhere.
If that was the case, then the Lords wouldn’t have blocked the 2016 Disability Bill. You remember the one. I don’t think that was theatre, I think people in the Lords looked at that and went “lol fuck no.” They also wouldn’t have done a lot of shit if it was all planned behind the scenes and some shadowy cabal actually just called the shots.
Here’s the thing: “It’s all planned” is the cornerstone of most conspiracies, from 9/11 to “Covid is a bioweapon” or “Covid isn’t real” to literally every major conspiracy theory. But wanna know something? All of that is a weighted comfort blanket to sooth people, it is soothing to believe that there is someone or something in control and it’s just a case of getting rid of them, and it’s an ego boost to believe that You are part of a club that figured it out. They used to call it being “woke” until the far right took that term as an Alias for “Degenerate” as the Nazis used it.
But the truth is this: There is no man behind the curtain, there is no shadowy cabal who actually control everything. It’s call Capitalism, Sociopaths, and Morons who either want to make money or think they’re doing good.
I have lived through two governments (a Labour one and a Conservative one) that have floated the idea of banning encryption publicly. Both times they quietly dropped the idea when they were told that doing something like that would crash the economy. My parents are both former Civil Servants. My dad watched the Scottish Secretary at the time nearly type “Thatcher is a Bitch” into a Teletype machine that sent out press releases to every major newspaper.
I watched my own MSP (and Leader of the Scottish Lib Dems) address a crowd of mostly transgender mostly leftist people and ask them to applaud Tories who voted for the Gender Recognition Act.
There is shit in Hansard that looks like it came from a bad sitcom. There are people who are in parliament right now who I wouldn’t trust with a fucking Self Scan Checkout, let alone a seat in either of the houses.
Are there scheming bastards, genuinely Machiavellianism Motherfucks in parliament? Yes! Politics attract people who score high in the Dark Triad. Starmer, Streeting, and Farage are all genuinely horrible people. Starmer and Streeting openly want to harm transgender people, Farage wants to fund the fucking Taliban, and if we wanna talk about non-MPs, Boris Johnson stated he’s rather have mass death than another Lockdown and the last government used Covid as a way to Launder Money.
But alongside that, a good chunk of the people in our parliaments are simply fucking morons. They might be good at a collection of specific things, but they are also impressively Moronic on a level that would make the Thick of It and Yes Minister look fucking optimistic. Indeed, some of the more bastardous people I have listed and not listed here are also, weirdly, fucking morons. Look at Trump’s first term for example.
And if you wanna cling to “there’s a puppet master behind all this”, be it Satan or the Illuminati, to save you from the genuinely terrifying thought that the people at the Helm of the ship of state are Francesco Schettino, Yiannis Avranas and Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, fair, but personally, I’m a realist and the only conspiracy I hold is that the “Phillip Killed Diana” conspiracy was invented by the British Press so they wouldn’t face a shitstorm when people realised what the paps did when they got to the crash scene.
If you wanna know what is actually happening here it is:
A Dunfermline based investment firm, charitable trust and think tank (yes you heard) by the name of Carnegie United Kingdom Trust invested money in data collection firms and age verification firms like YOTI, so they lobbied the government and even basically wrote the Online Safety Act. The government sometimes lets outside groups write legislation for them because Corruption, they have other shit to do, and they don’t often know shit about the fucking shite they’re voting for.
Some of those MPs also likely had investments in YOTI and VPNs. When this was presented to the government, some poor sod of a Civil Servant had to sit down the PM/Minister responsible and try convince them that it’s a bad idea, clearly they failed. So, utilising the moral panic around Porn, Extremist Material, Pro-Ana content and the like, they passed this bill, even when a good number of these fucking numbskulls don’t even know what a VPN is, just “we need to do something” and “it’s just common sense™”.
Now not only do they (and future governments, God help us if Reform get in and us
To me, that is a conspiracy. Turning it into a business is the way to remove political oversight, but the profits don’t hurt.
Capitalism isn’t a conspiracy, it’s the current Politico-economic system.
A market economy is our politico-economic system. If billionaires conspire to distort the markets against the interest of the people, and unbeknownst to them, then that’s a conspiracy, normalized by calling it Capitalism.
In this case it’s old American money. The idea doesn’t come as an investment opportunity from the trust. They are not creating a better future for children with the age verification as the last missing piece. Conspiracies are not magic. You know how it was implemented but you can only guess why.
That’s not distorting the markets, that is what they are for. The market isn’t some magical deity who’s only been stopped because their will is being misinterpretated by the billionaires, they are the market. They control the market. The purpose of a system is what it does. The “Free” market is as much of a myth as when MLMs say the state will “dissolve away” to produce true Communism with the workers owning the means of production. The moment a “free” market is made, it instantly gets manipulated by people with money and the market stops being free anymore. That’s part of the reason why so many rich cunts babble on about “free” markets, because it gives them power The billionaires fucking with the market and the law isn’t an aberration of the system, it is the system. Once you realise that, everything falls into place.
This isn’t a conspiracy, this was pretty much done out in the open. To call it a conspiracy suggests there was some amount of subterfuge. Like Carnegie UK published papers on why they think the OSA is a good idea in 2022, the Online Safety Act 2023, plus the additions made in '25, are publicly viewable here. The transcripts of the debates are here on Handsard.
Oh Oh! I can guess why!
<img alt="" src="https://media1.tenor.com/m/sqOZZnRhjMsAAAAC/money-mr.gif">
The whole reason why the bill was made and written as it was is money. We live in a period of surveillance capitalism where various companies make fuck tonnes of money from your data. Google, Facebook and the like didn’t make their money from merely “running ads”. They took the data you gave them through cookies and your posting and used it to more accurately target ads at you. Then, they started selling your data to other data brokers who then sold it to anyone with enough money. We’ve all heard the story about how target knew a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did, and we all know about Cambridge Analytica, Brexit and Trump. Facebook will literally monitor your emotional state through your posts and target you with ads for loans when they think your emotionally vulnerable.
So, we all know data brokers are hungry for data to sell, and as one Murray Bookchin once said: “Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing”. So guess what? Investment firms saw a load of moral panics and calls for digital ID. They invested in firms like YOTI (they are not required to say who invested in them, nice and convenient) and started doing research for the government through their think tank arms to convince the government that the OSA is a good idea. The bill says that stringent age checks must be done to view certain pieces of content, but not how, so that means websites have to hire YOTI and co to do that for them or do it themselves. If they can’t afford to they either have to shut down because they don’t care about the little guy.
So now data brokers have some very valuable data they can take from you: Your unedited face, your passport/drivers licence (plus all the biometrics that come with that) and (alongside that), your sexual habits, more controversial views, and your neuroses! The government can buy that off them (not that they couldn’t already find that out), but also so can the people with the big bucks, COMPANIES! On Grindr? Well now your health insurer can increase your premiums if they think you are promiscious. Got political views? Well now they can be manipulated for an outcome favourable to large corporations. Your employer can buy your data and see if you have been saying things they don’t like, annorexic people can be given ads for gym memberships and health fads. Oh, and all this can be sold to the government, be it yours or someone else’s.
It’s all money, it’s no shady conspiracy, literally it is business as usual and it sucks.
You know you can just switch to some small instance that’s not blocked and you’re gonna be good? Even in China the small Lemmy instances work while the big ones are obviously blocked
Yeah sure, until they find a way to block that too.
I doubt UK could surpass China and Russia in terms of internet censorship any time soon
You’d think that, but we’re in a political culture right now that puts kneejerk reactionism before reason, logic, and evidence. “It’s Just Common Sense™” is used to shut down anyone who might have any good points to make from history or reason. There used to be a point where a politician in the ruling government would spitball something in public, and then a civil servant who knew what they were talking about would sit them down and explain to them why their idea was bollocks. The OSA has shown to us that said thing is bollocks, and efforts from groups like Collective Shout have shown otherwise.
We have major politicians here saying shit like We should Pay Taxpayers money to the Taliban to take people they wanna kill anyway. We have a whole section of the population banned from using gendered toilets and government policy written by far right activist groups. We have books being banned from libraries in certain council areas for being “woke” and we have the ever looming shadow of fascism over us from Russia and America.
Payment processors are telling us what we can and cannot buy because a reactionary group pressured them into it and the most widely used OSes on our phones and computers are ready made to basically fuck all of us if it’s profitable.
Russia can flip a switch tomorrow and cut off all access to the outside world under their “Sovereign internet” plan. Shit’ll get worse before it gets better.
This is exactly the kind of government overreach people like me have been screaming about since, in my case, the 1990s.
“I told you so” just doesn’t feel so good when what’s happening is nothing less than the entirety of human freedom and liberty is being eroded before our very eyes, and those who disagree with it get labeled as kooks, and accused of hating whatever “oppressed group” of the day is in vogue.
I too have been screaming about private online since the 90s. I have an intuitive reaction that sort of mirrors yours.
But can I ask you a question?
And it’s one that I’m asking because I genuinely wish to learn from others.
Because I can’t quite see the difference and maybe there’s something I’m missing.
Why is it not government overreach to ensure pornography isn’t sold to minors in an adult video store, but government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers?
I would love your enlightened view on this so I can learn from it. Because I can’t quite see the difference.
I understand that many adults go into an adult video store and need not prove their age, because they clearly look like adults.
And so the difference here is that everyone have to prove their age online, even people that are clearly adults by how they look.
But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice. In that world I would also expect the clerk to check every purchase as they would have no other means of assessing the buyer’s age.
Or maybe you think that adult videos should be sold to everyone and it’s the very concept that pornography is restricted to minors that you disagree with. I don’t personally hold that view but then I can least understand why you would also reject online age verification.
Or maybe you think it is ineffective and won’t make a difference. That argument I most definitely agree with, but how we choose to implement a law, and whether it’s effective, is two different discussions I would posit.
Edit: I love that I’m getting downvoted for expressing a POV respectfully.
Not OP, but I think the analogy to what is happening to online privacy would be if you were asked to identify yourself at every location: the grocery store, the farmers market, the corner park, the trail along the river; and all of those checkpoints were aggregated and sold, meaning that someone who might not have your best interests at heart could use your travel timeline against you, to advertise to you, to sue you, to charge you with a crime, to destroy your public reputation.
I’m am 100% any form of checks that identify you.
But for what it is worth the European Union’s proposed framework for this legally mandates zero knowledge proofs.
The UK’s implantation sucks. Big hairy monkey balls.
If you buy alcohol at a farmer’s market, the seller has a responsibility to ensure they’re not supplying it to a child. At least in most countries.
Parents have the ultimate say-so of what their kids have access to.
I don’t believe there needs to be a law that says that, no.
If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have their own money, then it’s the parents who are to blame if that kid buys “bad” things with that money.
Same thing online. If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have unrestricted internet access, then it’s their fault if the kid then goes to a “bad” website.
It’s not the store’s fault. Nor is it the website’s fault.
We have given away far too much of our parental responsibility over to 3rd parties, and now we don’t know how to parent anymore.
So you would also support a child buying alcohol online on account of being given money and access to the internet?
Support? Absolutely not.
Allow? Not my child.
Make illegal? Nope. Not my business to tell other parents how to raise their children.
And that’s exactly the problem here. People like YOU, who think that if I don’t want something illegal, than that of course means I like that thing, or that I personally want to do that thing.
Nope. It has to do with personal autonomy. I’m not your boss, I shouldn’t get to tell YOU what you can do to yourself. Period.
Wait, this way every **laws **is useless then, I am not your boss, I shouldn’t get to tell YOU that you cannot drive while drunk.
Except you forget about the whole “as long as it doesn’t directly affect others” thing.
Or, more likely, you intentionally ignored it in order to score some “gotcha” for Internet points.
I followed on your steatment. If I forgot it, you also forgot it.
But my point stand, by the traffic code you cannot drive drunk also if you don’t affect anyone else on the road.
Generally it is not that you can do something that is illegal thinking that it is ok as long as it doesn’t affect others.
Let me turn that around on you.
You think people should be charged with a crime they haven’t done yet? Because that is exactly what happens in some DUI arrests.
Sleeping it off in your car but have the engine on because it’s cold/hot outside? DUI.
Then there are the idiotic open container laws where even an open alcoholic drink is legally a DUI, even if the driver isn’t drinking.
And if you can’t afford a good lawyer? It’s a conviction. Which goes on your permanent record.
A guy I worked with had a motorcycle try to pass his company vehicle as he was turning left. The motorcycle driver was killed.
It fucked the guy up so bad, mentally. He began drinking. Never at work, but he drove a company vehicle. See where this is going yet? If not let me finish.
A block from his house, he cracked open a beer. Now even if he had chugged it, there’s no way he’d be even slightly drunk before he got home. But he didn’t realize the worker who sold him the beer had already called the police and he was being followed.
The arrested him for DUI in his own driveway, due to idiotic open container laws, despite blowing a 0.
He took a plea for reckless endangerment, but it didn’t matter. He was 4 years from retirement. He was fired.
Of course not, but then maybe the problem is not the DUI law, it is the fact that you cannot fight it if you cannot get a good lawyer, which cost money. Basically your justice system is fucked up.
Slippery slope. How can police know that you just turned on the engine but not moved instead of driving and then stopping because you fall asleep ?
That is a stupid law, I agree, but it is the law.
Well, he should not have done it. He know the laws. I can feel pity for him in the specific case, but he breaks the stupid law.
That was the problem here. The laws is written so you fail either way. Here if I have an open wine bottle in the car but I blow a 0, nobody could do anything to me.
But assuming I agree with you, what would be your suggestion to avoid people driving around while drunk ? Or to avoid minors to access porn material ? Aside the charade “parents need to educate they children” that obviously you cannot take for granted.
If they hurt someone, then they get charged with a crime. If they do not there’s no injury to anyone else so it’s not a crime.
I don’t like the idea and where it could take us.
In the case of DUI, I think the idea behind the law is to avoid that a drunken driver hurts someone, with potentially lethal consequences, not only punish them if he do it.
Once a drunken driver killed someone is too late, even with the harsher punishment.
Again, your problem is not the law itself, it is the fact that your law and the justice system is designed in such a way that you are always set up to fail, in a way or another, be for the stupid DUI charge if you are sleeping in your car, the open container law or the way too expensive justice system. That is what you should fight.
I don’t like the idea of actions that don’t hurt others being a crime.
It’s about consistency. If we make it illegal to do things that MIGHT wind up hurting someone there’s no limit to what we can make illegal.
Me neither, but I like even less the idea that an action that is, demonstrably, dangerous to other should not be stopped until it provoke damages.
You are right. And it is about consistency the starting point from which we are discussing: minors should not be able to access porn. Now, in the real life there is such law and it in on the seller to check, exactly because you cannot count on the fact that a parent is 24/7 with his child, so I don’t see why we should not try to enforce the same law on the Net, it is only on a different media.
Now, I agree that checking on the net is way harder than in real life, but minors are minors and porn is porn. If it is dangerous to see a naked woman on Playboy is also dangerous to see her on Playboy.com.
I see your point, but I simply think that if something is proven to hurt someone, like DUI, then maybe it is right to make it illegal.
Proven? To whom?
Excessive alcoholism is known to cause harm. Should we make being an alcoholic illegal? Wouldn’t that make it harder for alcoholicsnto try to get help, for fear of being arrested instead of getting help, much like what happens to drug addicts?
People get hurt constantly while fishing, too. Should we make fishing illegal?
The problem is where do we draw the line. You want to draw it at some possibility of harm to others. I want to draw it at actual harm to others.
Which of these is more or less likely to wind up being stretched over time?
You aren’t thinking about bureaucrats and politicians 20, 30, 50, or 100 years down the road. “We’ll just fix the laws when it becomes a problem!”
Sure. Because we’re really REALLY good at removing or rewriting broken laws… Oh, wait. No we aren’t.
Never heard about people killed in crash caused by drunken driver ? Or pedestrians hit by cars driven by drunked drivers ?
No, we should just have laws try to avoid consequences for others Are you an alcoholic ? Ok, we will help you to be ok but at the same time we try to avoid you drive while drunk. It not seems too unreasonable
Point is: how probable is that someone fishing hurts someone else ? How much damage you can do ?
Again, the point is not to make something illegal because you can hurt yourself, it is about trying to have law that try to prevent you hurt someone else while doing something.
If fishing can hurt others, maybe we should have a law that, while not forbidding to fish, protect the others from what you are doing. I would imagine that you would not like to swim in the sea while someone is fishing with bombs (illegal) 2 meters away from you, don’t you ?
Fine as long as you accept the consequences. I just don’t agree with you.
Both, because you just need to redefine what “harm” means. And some people is good to do it.
Probability is not certainty.
I do not want people in jail for doing something that is probably a crime.
Every so-called crime that has no jail time shouldn’t be a crime. Fees are just another way of enforcing class warfare.
True, but there is an history of cases about it where the probabilty became certainty.
Me eighter but at the same time I would like to prevent some behaviors that could be dangerous to others.
I know it could be a slippery slope but honestly it would not console me to know that the drunken driver where punished *after *he hit me, I would prefer if he would be stopped *before *being able to hit me.
But fines works only if they are proportional to your wealth, else they are a punishment only for the poor.
We agree on the last part. But my feeling is that if a crime isn’t “bad” enough to require actual jail time then it probably shouldn’t be a crime at all.
Speeding, DUI, and other risky behaviors should be punished if, and ONLY if, an actual incident occurs. Because then there is actually a victim, and not just some nebulous might-have-been.
Hurt someone while drinking and driving? That’s no accident, that’s an intentional attack. Kill someone? Again, not an accident, but premeditated murder.
Now, if say, your insurance agency decides that you are a risk due to your alcoholism, and either drops you, or increases your premiums that’s not a problem. There’s no criminal punishment happening, and if it’s in the contract you signed, that’s expected.
But, you should only criminally punish someone after they’ve hurt another person. Not when they engage in risky behaviors.
A responsible parent can do as you say, but there are also not so much responsible parents out there, so maybe we need a backup option in these cases.
The problem with that is that you quickly become responsible for EVERYONE, and then you wind up right back where we are with government bureaucrats telling parents how to raise their children.
If a law or rule can be used to harass otherwise good people, then it will be.
If you give some self-important bastard an inch, they’ll take a mile. Just look at the police.
Ok, so do you think it is better to not be responsible for nodoby ? Good, as long as you are prepared to pay the consequences of this, both at personal level and a social level.
Sadly true, but this do not means that we should not have laws.
There’s the problem. I was tempted to call this Boomer logic, but that would extremely unfair to Boomers. We are only seeing this now, that the Boomers are on the way out.
I think the Boomers understood better how this works. It’s not like entering a store. It’s like making a phone call to the store, and the store may be on the other side of the world. The Boomers understood borders, long distance calls, international mail.
Now the digital natives are taking over. And they understand nothing beyond tapping and swiping.
Spoilered is a post I wrote earlier. Just so you know what’s coming.
spoiler
The problem is that meat-space logic is applied to the cyberspace (as it might have been said in the 90ies). You go into a store and the clerk sees you and knows your age. If it’s borderline, then they ask for ID. They are applying that thinking to internet services. Where this falls down is that no ordinary Mastodon instance can comply with the regulations of the close to 200 hundred countries in the world. Of course, just like 4chan, many wouldn’t want to out of principle. The only way to make this work is to introduce another meat-space thing: Border posts. You need a Great Firewall of the [Local Nation]. At physical border posts, guards check if goods comply with local regulations. We need virtual border posts to check if data is imported and exported in compliance with local regulations. Such a thing, a virtual Schengen border, was briefly considered in the EU about 15 years ago. It went nowhere at the time. But if you look at EU regulations, you can see that the foundations are already laid, most obviously with the GDPR but also the DSM, DMA, DSA, CRA, … Eventually, the border will be closed to protect our values; to enforce our laws. We will lock out those American and Chinese Big Tech companies that steal our data. We will only allow their European branches and strictly monitor their communications abroad. We will be taking back control, as the Brexiteers sloganized it. Freedom is just another word for having to ask the government for permission when you enter a country. And increasingly, it is another word for having to ask permission for how you use your own computer. It won’t be some shady backroom deal. Look here. People in this community love these regulations. Europeans here are happy to tell US companies to “FO if they don’t want to follow our laws”. Well, the Great Firewall of Europe is how you do that. lemmy.world/comment/19119670
Parents can (and MUST) monitor what happens in their home. It was expected for the past thousand years, and now it’s the duty of everyone to take care of anyone’s children for some reason. To get to a porn store, you need money to take the bus or you need a car, then the owner of the store can kick your ass or call the cops if you’re underage. Remember that less than 50 years ago, the local priest could smash your face if you didn’t behave properly in the street, With the internet, parents are the sole responsible for what their kids do, but they don’t want to take any responsibility for it. The solution would be a mandatory parental control on every computer, but parents wouldn’t like that.
Because that overreach happens to remove all my privacy thanks to a few idiot parents who don’t want to do their parenting jobs in another country, and I consider that unacceptable. We can do some whataboutism and say that since parents in Afghanistan don’t want to watch porn, all the porn of the internet has to disappear. Same for blasphemy and freedom of women to browse the internet.
Ok. I get the concept that pornography doesn’t harm children. We can debate that.
But by that reckoning should we also allow children to buy guns online and have them delivered at home? Is there nothing we want to restrict online, on account that whoever is buying it might be too young?
Parents should do some parenting. When did they stopped doing that, and how is it my problem and why am I supposed to renounce my whole privacy due to some idiots online?
There is no possible way to actually stop teenagers accessing online porn that doesn’t require such a massive invasion of privacy that it leaves no safe way for adults to access it. To go with your adult video store analogy, it’s like if the store staff would have to accompany you home and watch you watching the porn to check there wasn’t anyone standing behind you also looking at the screen, and while they were there, they were supposed to take notes on everything they saw. Even if they had no interest in doing anything nefarious, a criminal could steal their notebook and blackmail all their customers with the details it contained, and there’d be enough proof that there wouldn’t be any way to plausibly claim the blackmailer had just made everything up.
If you want to prove someone on the Internet is a real adult and not a determined teenager, you need lots of layers. E.g. if you just ask for a photo of an ID card, that can be defeated by a photo of someone else’s ID card, and a video of a face can be defeated by a video game character (potentially even one made to resemble the person whose ID has been copied). You need to prove there’s an ID card that belongs to a real person and that it’s that person who is using it, and that’s both easier to fake than going to a store with a fake ID (if you look young, they’ll be suspicious of your ID) or Mission Impossible mask, and unlike in a store, the customer can’t see that you’re not making a copy of the ID card for later blackmail or targeted advertisements. No one would go back to a porn shop that asked for a home address and a bank statement to prove it.
Another big factor is that if there’s a physical shop supplying porn to children, the police will notice and stop it, but online, it’s really easy to make a website and fly under the radar. It’s pretty easy for sites that don’t care about the law to provide an indefinite supply of porn to children, and once that’s happening, there’s no reason to think that it’s only going to be legal porn just being supplied to the wrong people.
Overall, the risk of showing porn to children doesn’t go down very much, but the risk of showing blackmailable data to criminals and showing particularly extreme and illegal porn to children goes up by a lot. Protecting children from extreme material, e.g. videos of real necrophilia and rape, which are widely accepted to be seriously harmful, should be a higher priority than protecting a larger number from less extreme material that the evidence says is less harmful, if at all. Even if it’s taken as fact that any exposure to porn is always harmful to minors, the policies that are possible to implement in the real world can’t prevent it, just add either extra hassle or opportunities for even worse things to happen. There hasn’t been any proposal by any government with a chance of doing more good than harm.
In Finland you could handle this by having people authenticate using their online bank passwords. A LOT of government stuff already works that way, so it would require almost no extra coding at least over here. I wonder why it cannot be done the same way in England?
Online banking passwords? “Find”? How the hell? Have you lived in a barrel?
There is a 8-number code that I’ve got in my head, then there is a 4-number password that I’ve also got in my head. And then a paper with single-use passwords which work so that when I have given the two correct passwords, it tells me which code to use. And no way am I giving full access to my bank account for my children!
Some banks also have a system where you log in with your fingerprint and then a four-number code using an app on your phone.
I think the money on the parents’ accounts is a much better motivation for the children than an ability to watch porn. And yet, I have not heard of anybody’s children actually having found out their parent’s bank passwords.
And also: Maybe there really is a child that installs a keylogger on their parents’ computer and steals the password paper from the parents’ wallet and also happens to really want to go out of their way to watch porn… Well, then there is. Such a child is already in so many ways in trouble that I don’t think seeing porn will traumatize them at all. Such children are few and it makes no sense trying to build a 100-percent foolproof system. In any case, using online banking passwords is a lot more reliable way than the weird hocus-pocus being done now.
My point is that you can’t build a completely teenager-proof system. Even if most parents uphold the most unimpeachable password discipline, someone’s going to put a password on a post-it note near their computer, and have their child see the piece of paper, or use their dog’s name despite their child having also met the family dog.
The original comment I was replying to was framing the issue as teenagers being allowed to watch porn versus no teenager ever seeing porn and maybe some freedom is sacrificed to do that, which doesn’t match the real-world debate. If freedoms are sacrificed just to make it a hassle for teenagers to see porn, that’s much less compelling whether or not you see it as a worthwhile goal.
As for what a teenager with access to their parents’ bank password would do, if they’re not a moron, they’ll realise that spending their parents’ money will leave lots of evidence (e.g. that they have extra stuff, their parents have less money than expected in their account, and there’s an unexpected purchase from The Lego Group on the bank statement), and so they’re guaranteed to end up in trouble for it. It’s not any different to a child taking banknotes from their parent’s wallet. On the other hand, using it to prove adulthood, if it was truly untraceable like adults would want, wouldn’t leave a paper trail.
You can’t build a completely teenager-proof system. But you can build a system that is almost completely teenage-proof. And that’s definitely good enough!
All such systems exist only to support parents in their parenting. It gets easier keeping your children safe and developing well if the amount of ways the teenagers can be idiots is narrowed down.
As I said, I fundamentally disagree. Even if you can make a nearly-teenager-proof website (and so far, your example has been something that most of the people I was at school with could have beaten aged thirteen), teenagers can just go to a different website, so the system is only ever as teenager-resistant as it is difficult to find a website that doesn’t care. Most vaguely competent teenagers know how to find pirate sites with illegally-hosted TV, movies and music (even if they’re not techy, one of their friends just has to tell them a URL and they can visit it). Governments have had minimal success stopping online piracy even when aided by multi-billion-dollar copyright-holding companies, so there’s no realistic reason to think they’ll have any more success stopping porn sites with non-compliant age checks.
While I disagree with the teenagers’ ability to find my banking passwords regardless of where I hide them, for example because I can make a copy of them that has been altered with a password I can calculate in my head and that takes the location of the password on the table into account in the calculation, the rest is true.
I remember having seen things I really wouldn’t want to see even as adult when I was browsing Internet for stuff that wasn’t supposed to be available. Shady websites can be shady in so many ways! It is true that making an age verification system for a basic porn site will probably direct the youth to other sites with content you wouldn’t see on PornTube. I hope my children won’t ever watch porn, but if they ever do, I hope it’s from a source that doesn’t allow the worst things to be shown. For example PornHub does remove the worst stuff and is quite commonly used. If that one cannot be accessed, then probably something else will. And it’s likely to be worse. Though, PornHub has a lot of really bad abusive things as well. Checked it out now and one of the first videos it showed was something that looked like the woman is really unhappy, even distressed, about the situation she’s being filmed in :(
i mean, that seems like a solveable problem. either build a national (internationl?) or have some reciprocity with the identification systems that allows the different regions to easily access each other’s systems.
Sort of the same system they’re building in Denmark.
You will log into MitID (myID), authenticate with the MitID app, then be issued a bunch of ZKP tokens which you’ll burn off against age verification services. No trace, fully authenticated, fully trusted, damn near impossible to fool.
People complained about government overreach when seatbelts became a law
Funny - I assume on one here was actually involved in creating the law that requires identification when buying pornography (or alcohol. Or tobacco) at stores, but we are all considered responsible for it to the point we are hypocrite if we object a similar law?
If someone says they are against that law now, years after it’s already established and spread, it won’t be taken as “I’m generally against the government limiting our freedom to consume what we want” but as “I want to push children to consume porn/alcohol/tobacco”. So no one argues against these laws. But it’s much more feasible to argue against the new laws - a ship that’s still in the port.
30 years from now, when they make the law that neural implants must detect illegal thoughts in the users’ biological brains and block them, you’d make the argument that it’s not fundamentally different than blocking the same topics on the internet - a practice that, by that time, will already be accepted by the general populace.
Yes. I had always worried about the copyright industry. That was the big money pushing for censorship. Controlling access and exchange of information is part of their business model and even personal ideology. But I don’t know how much this has actually to do with them, and how much is simply the will to power.
What I did not see coming at all was how the left would completely 180 on these issues. That, at least, I blame on the copyright industry.
Right wing people have screeched about “the intolerant left” forever, but I always ignored the obvious hypocrisy. I took it as a debate on what is permissible in polite society. But now Europe is at a point where there is simply a consensus against free speech. Only the most illiberal forces will be able to use these legal weapons to full effect. That will be the extreme right.
It’s just a logical extension of what happens when government becomes the arbitrator of all.
The biggest issue is that so many people see it just as you do, left vs right, instead of liberty vs authoritarianism.
For decades, the libertarian movement, as seen by the left, has been largely associated with the right, simply because of their professed support of the free market, and dislike of gun control
But that same movement has been seen by the right as largely associated with the left, because of their views on things like the drug war, enforced morality, and anti-corporatism.
Has there been a large shift of alt-right into the libertarian movement over the past few years? Yes. Absolutely. And I despise it with a passion.
But there are still quite a lot of us truly anti-authoritarian libertarians out there who despise both left, and right leaning authoritarianism.
But when I bring up issues of authoritarianism, I get “BoTh SiDeS?!” bullshit responses. Because YES, as we can see, BOTH SIDES do their own fair share of this authoritarian bullshit.
They differ in methods, yes. But the bottom line is an encroachment on personal privacy. Plus, property rights are just a logical extension of personal privacy rights.
The right is typically for gun control. Only one country comes to my mind where they aren’t. Which one were you thinking about? Or is it more common than I thought?
(Or did you just happen to forget that 95 % of Earth’s population exists?)
EDIT: Oh, and also: It is important to keep in mind that it’s the same within the left. There are also left-wingers who prefer authoritarianism and ones who despise it. I do agree with your sentiment: The left-right division does not work very well in our current world. Need to take best parts of everything, but most importantly, make sure we don’t end up under totalitarian rule!
I said “professed” dislike. Yes, I know Reagan is responsible for one of the largest expansions of gun control ever seen in the US…
And yes, I know Marx himself was tremendously in favor of armed workers.
Doesn’t change political narrative being pushed by both major political parties in the US, where in the left supposedly wants guns banned, and the right wants everyone armed.
Yes, I know things aren’t that cut and dry, but the media narrative pushed by both parties definitely seems to say that it is.
How is US relevant in this discussion?
Because the US has humans inside it, despite what all the Eurocentric trash think.I let my anger control me, shouldn’t have said this.
I wasn’t being eurocentric. I was being Asia-Africa-Australia-South America-Europe-Canada-Mexico-Central America-Caribbea centric. The only country where most of the right want to reduce gun safety is USA. We are talking in an international forum, so here international concepts count, not nation-specific. Typically in the world right-wingers are for safety and typically in the world the politics of the Democrat party count as right-wing.
When in a conversation not specific to USA it is not okay to speak as if everything was about USA. It is not okay to speak as if there was a left-wing party in US Congress or Senate and it is not okay to claim that the right wants more dangerous gun policies.
And here we’re talking about something that takes place most prominently in UK and secondly in a bunch of other countries, but absolutely not in USA. USA has nothing to do with this, so don’t be as insolent as you were.
(Also, for example Australia is not in Europe. Learn some geography.)
Despite what they think, we are human beings too over here. That’s my point.
I don’t care about the politics of nation vs nation.
I care about humanity’s liberty as a whole.
Nations are shit. Because the only ones in power are typically the ones who want to be. And there’s no one worse to hand power to, than one who craves it.
Despite what who think? I don’t think there are people who think people in USA are not human beings. (Or if they are, they are less than one percent of the world population… Of course within 8 billion people you will find a proponent for any opinion…)
But yeah, since you care about humanity’s liberty as a whole, you could maybe kindly stop undermining that goal by assuming that what is done by under 5% of the population on this planet is the standard that the remaining 95 % are following.
You’re right. I shouldn’t have responded in anger. My bad. I get frustrated when I feel like people are talking down to me simply because I’m a USian, and I let it get the better of me.
Beautifully said. I wish people on Internet could behave like you in this comment. Have a virtual hug, you are awesome! :)
For the most part the divide between “Left” and “Right” politically speaking IS the divide between Liberty and Authoritarianism. If you look up the History of the terms its easy to see this. Those terms originated during pre-revolutionary war France. The “Left” supported freedom from Tyranny. The “Right” supported the Monarchy. This has remained largely true ever since then.
Where the waters get muddy is so called ‘Authoritarian Communism’. When Communism was first being discussed it, along with Anarchism in general, were correctly labeled as ‘Leftist’ ideologies. Under both the ‘State’ is abolished completely. You can literally go no further left than voluntary association and abolishment of the state. As far back as Karl Marx, elements of ‘Authoritarianism’ began creeping into ‘Communist’ thought. While Marx was a relatively enlightened thinker- neither he nor Engels were the originators of Communism- despite having written “The Manifesto”. They were the originators of Marxism- an important distinction.
The goal- indeed one of the very definitions of ‘Communism’, even under Marxism is “a classless, stateless, society.” As such Communism is a form of Anarchism. Anarchy technically only requires the abolishment state, but the vast majority of Anarchists also believe in “Mutual Aid”, and ‘private property’ is a nonsense concept in the absence of a state- which is why so many Anarchists identify as ‘Anarcho-Communists’.
Now clearly (in my mind at least), removing one of the fundamental ideas of communism- which is that ‘The State’ (and especially a ‘strong/authoritarian’ state) inherently upholds and enforces the class system in society and is a bad thing which needs to be abolished and you replace that with it’s complete opposite- a ‘Strong’ State upholds and enforces ‘classlessness’ in society and is a good thing which should be supported, moves that type of “Communism/Socialism” from being a leftist ideology all the way over to being a far right ideology, as per the original and most commonly used metrics for determining if a position is “Left” or “Right”.
The problem with ‘reclassifying’ ‘Authoritarian Communism’ to it’s correct spot is that A) the ruling class (Capitalists) who are firmly right-wing do not want to be associated with it as it removes power from them and places it solely in the hands of the state. Likewise ‘Authoritarian Communists’ do not want to be associated with Capitalists either for similar reasons. Leaving the only people who care about the correct placement of these ideologies as the actual Anarchists and Communists- which are considered ‘fringe’, ‘extremist’, and ‘radicals’ by society as a whole and no one really cares about our opinions.
A ‘True/Accurate’ Left Right Spectrum would look something like…
Anarchism> Communism> Democracy> Social Democracy> Neoliberalism/ “Libertarianism(U.S. definition)” > Conservatism> ‘Far Right’> “Authoritarian Socialism”> Fascism
Putting them in that order reflects the ‘Liberty-Authoritarian’ spectrum that is the “Left-Right” spectrum. You could of course argue placement and some of them could be rearranged depending on circumstances. For example I put ‘Social Democracy’ as further right than Democracy because ‘Social Democracy’ is still by and large a Capitalist system, yet if the majority of people in a Democracy were right wingers- then the order would flip, however this is largely right imho.
You are confusing ‘The Left’ with “Liberals”. This is an extremely common and understandable mistake to make in the U.S. as there is a
Well to be fair the left in the usa does have another reason to see the libertarian party as just another right wing party. They vote republican when it comes down to D vs R
I’ve never voted for a Republican OR Democrat that I didn’t know personally in my entire life. Why do I add that qualifier? Because I did know some older small town politicians, in both US parties, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when my grandfather was still alive, and they were his friends.
So you just don’t vote for most offices then?
No. Voting for the lesser of two evil is still voting for evil. I’ll write someone in before I vote for some party functionary that only cares about their own political power.
So functionally, you abstain from voting and dont express a preference about how you are goverened.
.
Given that I havent expressed a preference and have never voted either Democrat or Republican in a single election (owing to not being American) I believe you may be inventing things about me.
And what I said stands, you functionally dont express a preference and what you do is equivalent to staying in bed and not turning out to vote.
As you said. You aren’t American, so you don’t have any right to interject yourself into our voting system. And for the record, our 2 party system is absolutely nothing like most other nations that have multiple strong parties.
You cannot break the stranglehold of the 2 party system by continuing to vote for those two parties.
The ideal of free speech is a naive fantasy especially with social media which can amplify the craziest of ideas which can go viral.
Yes the Left has gone overboard with their thought policing however the right wing in want their personal bigotry to be allowed and nobody else (no mention of DEI in USA government institutions allowed). The Left want free speech for everyone except the bigots but then their definition of bigots becomes a slippery slope.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I mushed a lot of things together in my post. Copyright and political censorship have very different motives behind them. The point is that, to enforce copyright, you need extensive surveillance of online content and the means to shut down the exchange of information. That requires an extremely expensive technical infrastructure. But once that is in place, you can use it for political censorship without having to fear pushback over the economic cost that would come even from politically sympathetic actors. Conversely, if you introduce political censorship, you might get support by the copyright industry, including the news media, for helping their economic interests.
Where it gets to political censorship, the paradox of tolerance is exactly the lunacy that I’m talking about. In mad defiance of all historical fact, there is belief that liberalism is weak, that political dissidents must be persecuted, information suppressed. Never in history has democracy fallen because of a commitment to tolerance. All too often, they fall because majorities feel their personal comfort threatened by minorities and support the strong leader who will “sweep out with the iron broom” (as a German idiom goes).
Do you notice how that Wikipedia article has nothing to say on history?
Never occurred to me. Interesting point to ponder.
The would-be fascists don’t want democracy. Note how Trump is softening up the public by using the term fascism lately.
Good essay:
The goal is to shift the Overton window: dictatorship is not a threat, but a regrettable necessity… dictatorship as safety, democracy as danger.
…substack.com/…/trump-says-americans-would-rather
I’m so so very tired of being right.
have you tried being intentionally and absurdly wrong?
When Weird Al tries that, somehow he circles right back around to “right”.
i should pay more attention. we had a chance to see him live the other day but it was a very bad time for us at work to go so next tour we hope
You’ve been screaming about internet censorship since before the internet?
Fucking time traveller right here
What are you talking about? The internet existed all through the 90s
It sure did. Well done!
… I was online in 1993, bro. I was dialing into BBSs with worldwide fidonet bulletin boards even earlier than that.
Don’t be such a dipshit.
Back in my day we had to dial in to get the internet.
GoddamnGl Gubberment ruining everything
Wtf are you doing
Brother, delete this silly comment and be a nicer person. Please, there is still time!
Nah. OCs a whinging boomer.
“Screaming” “People like me” “liberties eroding before our very eyes”
It’s like he’s never read a history book. Or travelled outside his state.
This makes no sense at all. Were you drunk when you posted this?
Just ignore the trolls. Apparently I ate his pie or something equally sinister.
I don’t see how Mississippi or the UK think they can issue laws on sites hosted outside their jurisdiction. That’s just mind boggling. The onus is on the state to provide age verification, or make their ISPs do it.
No, it’s upto the individuals to police their or their childrens internet usage, have family computer in place they can monitor, children should have special childrens phones that are locked down with parents configuring it, today parents are abdicating responsibility, leaving schools to feed, potty train, how to clean teeth and how to behave.
Whats next expecting schools to provide beds and rooms to sleep in, soon babies will be handed to state and raised by the state, is it any wonder we now have a nanny state in many countries, people are getting lazy and filthy, spitting in streets, peeing and pooping in streets, dumping rubbish in streets 😡
Sorry, the sort of individualism you speak of only applies to opting out of vaccines and praying to jeebus in the classroom.
The one compromise I’d like to see is for sites to have to provide keywords like in the robot.txt file that says what they serve. So let’s say a site provides porn or gore and a parent wants to block access to it, it should be a simple toggle on the router or browser or both.
Anything beyond that is just bullshit
“You have no power here” - Some server hosted on a satellite (probably)
Watch the whole world go “ahaha age verification go brrrrr” in the next months/years, and we’ll talk again. I’m particularly baffled at the EU that was all “privacy friendly, consumer first” until a handful of month ago.
We NEED to Protect The Children which is WHY we’re SO LUCKY to have a President who is SO KEEN to PROTECT Child Rapists like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell!
Protect Jeffrey Epstein? Last I checked, he doesn’t need anymore “protecting”.
Trump only cares about himself. If he accidentally “protected” anyone but himself, it’s purely a coincidence.
I think that was the point. Not only decentralized services, but a lot of small and/or individual services too. The way age verification is done is both stupid, and expensive. Only the big names will remain.
As intended. Obvious regulatory capture
If a government wants this in place, they should also facilitate the means.
Nice.
And of course, even if they did, tech savvy kids can just self-host an instance on their own computer.
Comply or be defederated !