It baffles me that parents have become so lazy they don't even want to monitor what their kid does anymore online, and instead expect the government to do all the work.
I remember when my daughter wanted to play Roblox with some friends I sure as shit did my best to monitor and lock down that horrible thing. Same with just general internet monitoring. Whenever she wants to play some game or something I research it.
I have sat down with her countless times and yeah she has broken my trust a few times and she looses access to the internet.
Brutha when I was young my parents would ring a bell at dinnertime and if I ran to the dining room in 5 minutes I got to eat and that was basically the extent of their monitoring of me.
But did you have unrestricted access to a device with a camera where pedophiles the world over tried to talk thirteen year old you into doing dances in your underwear for them?
I honestly think that pedophiles aren't half as bad as Facebook algorithm making you addicted to doomscrolling. I spent shitload of time online as a kid looking for friends. Once I came across a guy who openly told me he's a pedophile. Nothing bad ever happened to me.
That's kinda the point of online grooming. You get kids to trust you and then you tell them to go to some location where you can kidnap them off the street. It's the predator equivalent of door-to-door snake oil -> email phishing, the Internet allowed them to "upgrade".
This kind of helicopter parenting encourages the child to break your trust even more. Instead of regulating what your child does online, be very transparent and talk about out all the perils of such services. Be ready to invest considerable time with them that encourages physical outdoor activities instead of being lazy and hoping internet will be their parent and then micro manage stuff.
Most people don't actually either know what the perils of such services look like in enough practical detail to describe it to kids, and if they do, they generally feel very uncomfortable describing such things to their children. Ironically the logic is that kids are too young to hear about such things like that and need to be protected against even hearing about it. Seems counter productive to me, but also seems to be the way of the world.
How can such obtuse opinion be the top comment? A good parent builds trust with their kids, not monitor them. If that trust can not be obtained, then block sites in hosts or at the network level. If you believe Roblox is horrible for your kid, why allow them to use it at all?
That makes no sense. For rules to have any meaning at all, there must be consequences to breaking them. If OP doesn't take away his daughter's Internet access when she breaks his trust, it will just teach her that there's no reason to follow his rules because it doesn't affect the outcome for her.
This is unfortunately a common fallacy: rules with consequences can encourage kids to lie, it’s inferior to trust, so let’s have no rules (and don’t say no) and talk through everything. Not only is not how kids brains grow, but inevitably the parents lack time to talk all day long and the kids end up on their own unprepared to face anything with consequences. This is a recipe for the behavior and anxiety problems that have become so common.
There is a fantasy theory that you can just only explain to them why something is bad, and they’ll understand and stop to do it by themselves. In contrast to past generations that are painted as caricatures that only had rules with harsh punishment, never talking and explaining. Looks obviously extremely appealing on paper, at least a generation of "modern" parents fell into the trap and are struggling with teens and young adults highly insecure and non adapted to the adult world.
I'd feel better about a kid smart enough to learn how to get around DNS block lists and other forms of mass surveillance and filtering than one who free ranges and isn't even trying to get out.
My parents didn’t monitor what I was doing on the internet when I was growing up in 00s. I saw a lot of shit and wasted a lot of money on GPRS and WAP portals. I learned from my mistakes and I’m glad I did. I wouldn’t want to monitor everything my children do either.
don't know if you had a similar experience, but my folks didn't pay much attention to ANY of the stuff I ingested, data, chemical, or otherwise.
My partner, a gen Xer, had it even looser. Talks about just hanging out in a patch of random dirt until the street lights came on.
Notably, I haven't heard anyone use the terms 'helicopter' or 'bulldozer' parenting lately, and I kind of wonder if it's because that's just the norm, now.
Frankly the amount of outrageous deranged shit I saw on IRC and Usenet as a preteen kinda makes me conflicted on this point, whether the internet is "worse" today. Like, I had already seen the gaping asshole of goatse probably hundreds of times before I graduated high school so... lol
Whitehouse.com, Goatse, Lemonparty, wondering what results you will get if you type fuck into Dogpile, public and private chat rooms etc all existed on the early Internet.
There was way less advocating that slavery and Nazis weren't so bad and it was much harder to upload a photo of yourself, but nearly everything these censorship laws are trying to block existed in some form on the early Internet. Parents need to parent and we have an entire generation that grew up fine with the Internet and video games.
The internet was pretty fucked up in the 90s / early 00s.
Much less regulated, you could find all sorts of weird stuff (and yes, also porn) in it.
And it didn't mess us up. Before that, we teens had access to naughty magazines. I had a friend who managed to rent porn movies from the local videoclub (before Blockbuster).
With reproduction rates falling, and people having all sorts of trouble with relationships, what does "messed up" look like, and why are we so sure that we actually aren't when the world is increasingly polarized and having trouble with authoritarianism? How can we prove those things aren't actually linked?
How can we be sure that it isn’t the result of the US leaving the gold standard? Or the increase in automotive recalls? Or the increase in the number of hot dogs consumed at hot dog eating competitions? I’m sure there’s a connection. https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Hating women and having her waste money on a flight is way better than burning her at the stake, stoning her, or chatting her up because you are a serial killer.
Theres a long history there. It is already a good thing that most people identify that behavior as weird and awful instead of it being socially acceptable or even the law.
> I sure as shit did my best to monitor and lock down that horrible thing
How much of that "horrible thing" is due to a handful of youtube videos you've seen as opposed to first-hand experiences? What if you found out that the very well-produced youtube videos which regularly attack Roblox have the exact same agenda as the US/UK laws you're opposing?
Within the past week the CEO described predatory behavior on the platform as "not necessarily just a problem, but an opportunity as well". Not sure what YouTube videos have to do with that, regardless of production value.
CEO is an autistic dumbass who isn't good at conveying his thoughts. What he could have said: "While we have the best protection of any gaming or social media platform today, any amount of predatory behavior is an unacceptable problem. Roblox has increased from 20M DAUs to 150M DAUs over the last 5 years and the absolute number of these unfortunate incidents has remained flat: an 80% decline in incidence rate. In this way, we view it also as an opportunity: How can we can continue to scale the platform while getting the incidence rate to zero?"
Oh, its definitely a dumpster fire. And they keep changing the parental controls to make it less obvious what's appropriate for what age.
And then there's the constant begging for fewer restrictions and more things being permitted, to the point where you're basically screaming "no" in their face and want to smash the damn tablet.
Then it settles down, and starts up again a month later.
It's not about parents failing to do their jobs, it is about heavy handed big government wanting to step even further into our lives using our own technology.
If it's baffling it's because it's bullshit. Very few parents are calling for this. It's just 'Wont someone please think of the children' moral hand-wringing on its face and not very subtle creeping fascism underneath.
The world doesn’t consider it reasonable for businesses to sell beer to kids, and expect us all to constantly follow our kids around to make sure they don’t get beer. Bars don’t get to say ‘woops, we got thousands of 9 year olds drunk, their parents should keep an eye on them’”.
And at this point, most kids, most people, spend more time online than outside walking around
> Bars don’t get to say ‘woops, we got thousands of 9 year olds drunk, their parents should keep an eye on them’”.
Because there's no whatsoever downside in requiring bars to not serve children (if we assume that it's just to not give alcohol to children); online age checks instead have very big negative consequences for the whole populace.
You know, there's prison and capital punishment, and yet people still commit crimes. There's a point you have just give up protecting, otherwise you're hurting yourself, just like an over-reacting immune system killing the host.
What if the kid just rent a foreign VPS, put Windows on it, enable RDP, and then just "gooning" away on that? UK is going to ban all VPS providers too?
Then what if it's "just a foreign friend's computer"? Ban all foreign IPs?
Beside that, I never believed that what UK's doing is for protecting the children, otherwise where are so many other more important things to do, for example, UK can support low income families so their kids won't go hunger, UK can also provide social housings for young people so they know they have a roof to safely sleep under.
None of that, but porn and VPN, wow, that's the enemy number one, kids must be protected from those things.
"I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War. Terror.
Disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt
your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of
you and in your panic, you turned to the now High Chancellor Keir Starmer. He promised you order. He promised you peace. And all he
demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent."
It'll be alright. We've dealt with manic authoritarians who dream of planetary control before. Just another quick world war and the development of an even more sinister superweapon and we'll be right back to thinking in sane, evenhanded terms. Or dead.
Or, you know, we could huck our failed systems out with the trash instead. Reinvent democracy to be more direct and flexible. Could be nice.
Not OP but while I don't seek "punishment", I do seek accountability. I know that might seem like a flowery synonym at best, or an amorphous piece of jargon at worst, but if we are to treat online spaces as public forums, we need to structure these spaces like public forums, which means having consequences for abject lies. The "but who decides" response is a thought-terminating cliche that we need to collectively move past. Until we stop letting the perfect get in the way of the good enough, we will continue to let bad actors dictate the public understanding of technological issues, and of issues more generally (eg: antivax).
The trump administration in the US also frames its crackdown on civil society in terms of "accountability for lies". But I guess its fine when your side does it.
I don't see Trump doing this or his Administration. For the first time in years I'm actually not worried about the FBI and what dastardly political maneuverings they are up to. The CIA is still probably pretty bad. Yes, there are a lot of Republicans who are neo-authoritarians who need to be shut down before they ruin open and free society for a pipe dream. It's like you can't win no matter which party is running things because there are always the freaky lunatics who want to limit your freedoms, expand government, and cover for their own horrible misdeeds.
> I don't see Trump doing this or his Administration.
It's been a hallmark of his Administration, so you not seeing it is...interesting.
> For the first time in years I'm actually not worried about the FBI and what dastardly political maneuverings they are up to.
In the sense of it not being a mystery because it is more naked in both the direction and the specific approach to partisan political abuse, I guess I could see that, but in terms of not being concerned, the only explanation for that is GP’s “But I guess its fine when your side does it.”
Most claims of 'the other side' is lying are themselves lies. It's mostly people just spinning things to suit their own personal biases (without necessarily even realizing that's what they're doing). For instance the vaccine topic is one I did a deep dive on not too long ago when deciding which vaccines to approve for my children. This [1] is essentially the bible of vaccines - it's a massive study across a large sampling of evidence for all major vaccines, carried out by the National Academies of Science. I'll quote them:
----
The vast majority of causality conclusions in the report are that the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship. Some might interpret that to mean either of the following statements:
- Because the committee did not find convincing evidence that the vaccine does cause the adverse event, the vaccine is safe.
- Because the committee did not find convincing evidence that the vaccine does not cause the adverse event, the vaccine is unsafe.
Neither of these interpretations is correct. “Inadequate to accept or reject” means just that—inadequate. If there is evidence in either direction that is suggestive but not sufficiently strong about the causal relationship, it will be reflected in the weight-of-evidence assessments of the epidemiologic or the mechanistic data. However suggestive those assessments might be, in the end the committee concluded that the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal association.
----
The overwhelming majority of the rhetoric around vaccines, including from governmental figures, is doing exactly what they warn against. There's simply a lot of nuance on most of every issue worth discussing, that people often don't want to acknowledge.
> but if we are to treat online spaces as public forums, we need to structure these spaces like public forums, which means having consequences for abject lies. The "but who decides" response is a thought-terminating cliche that we need to collectively move past.
In order to "move past" that, you have to find a way to address official lies and cases where the majority is wrong.
.
For example the official denial of the fact that the Wuhan lab was researching things similar to covid-19. (Doesn't matter whether it actually came from there.)
Or the official lies about mask effectiveness. (Regardless of whether they're effective or not, the government told people things that it believed at the time were false.)
Or the lies about the world's best anti-parasite medication (that just isn't an antiviral) being dangerous horse-paste.
Or the lies about Hunter Biden's laptop being Russian disinformation.
Or that still-ongoing culture war topic where both sides claim the other is lying.
That's not exactly true. Social engineering at scale is becoming better and better. You don't need to remove dangerous opinions, you simply need to make sure nobody cares about them. And the fun thing is, most people say that they support freedom of speech, but when they see an opinion they dislike, they say the opinion should be blocked. This is why all the laws restricting freedom of speech pass without major issues.
So here's the solution. AGO: Artificial General Orgasmatron. Be working on it.
Since it's hardware, parents can restrict access at the source.
Age verification built-in? Well, since it knows your secret desires in order to work, it obviously knows your age.
One in every home. Hallucinations? It works entirely through hallucinations. Since the user builds the fantasy bank (Large Lust Model, or LLM) there's no need for an internet connection.
How much more will it take before people resort to direct action against the government? It's been shown time and time again that once stuff like this has been done that the government will never let it be undone.
It's more likely we get some kind of new tech that works even better than a VPN but is totally deniable as far as it being used at all. A more stealthy VPN. I have advocated for Internet privacy for decades now, mostly to deaf ears. We're finally seeing some of the affects of neglecting our privacy. The little guy can win with technology and governments are terrified of that.
There are people working on systems to create networks without using the internet at all. They work pretty well. It may be slow compared to the internet, but text is fine for most things anyway. It will be good enough for scrappy rebels.
In my opinion, the government never had the authority to restrict access to online content in the first place. That authority was seized from us and more and more countries are falling into the black hole of censorship. It's the Satanic Panic all over again.
Lawmakers making laws about technical matters don't realize that they don't understand those technical matters well enough to make intelligent laws about them.
The money quote is that it's not at all clear whether the sudden VPN usage is from kids or from adults to (I think rightfully) don't want to hand over their government id or their CC to random websites.
Because yeah, fuck that shit. The presumption should be that all content on the internet is for adults. If you want your site to be child friendly you can opt into a higher standard of moderation. How did we go from the internet is for porn to this?!
If I were of the mind that children are delicate little flowers that must be protected from everything in the world lest they shatter like a fancy vase (and I am not), this is not the plan I would be pushing. There's no way this path leads to better protection for kids.
You want to sequester children from the 'harms' of the internet? You have to do more work - create a .kids TLD and build browsers and websites for that. Make a smartphone that has the protections baked into the kernel (and works fine for everything else a phone must be so parents actually buy them). Attempting to graft child protection into the existing ecosystem is attempting to build a tower on top of a swamp. It simply isn't happening.
Unless (and I think we all see this) the goal isn't to build the tower, but to convince people to pave the swamp.
The 'think of the kids' argument is also kind of dumb at face value. So what, like at 18 you're magically gifted with the ability to understand and manage the hard edges of the world? How on earth are you supposed to develop that understanding in a vacuum? I think we're not giving kids enough credit, frankly. Each generation seems to develop a more nuanced and complex view of the world than the generations previous (which makes sense, they learned with better tech).
"Rid of both"? This is against all kinds of porn, sexy stuff, erotica, and also unsexy things considered not suitable for teens. It has nothing to do with "scummy", even honest to goodness porn is affected.
And I'm sure you can see grownups don't necessarily want to be tied to specific porn watching habits (multiple scenarios for why this is, but all can be chalked up to "human nature").
I'm not troubled by porn or my kids seeing it. If anything, I advocate healthy sex lives for my kids once they are of age because there is some kind of massive Puritanism push going on that looks to be the end of the human race--look how they are destroying the common bonds of love and intimacy using technology to demolish our ability to relate to one another. Don't think it's happening? Look around you--people are more and more isolated and miserable and fearful of making contact, especially intimate contact, for fear of accusations of r-a-p-e or assault or whatever. Of course I don't want predators finding my kids online and using the Internet to get to them, but that's where actual parenting comes in--teaching kids what to watch out for and to make smart choices. It's just that I don't believe we can bubble wrap everything and still have a functioning civilization on the other end. It will fail and fall down, all due to good intentions.
I'm arguing this isn't about "scummy porn". It's about censorship in general, but when it's about porn it's about all sorts of porn or sexy/naughty content. And it's wrong to want to restrict access to that.
What's wrong with sexy? Everyone seems afraid to even talk about it. It's safer to talk about other things like free speech.
But it's ok to watch porn made legally between consenting adults. And as for teens watching it, most of us old enough had access to naughty magazines back then, and it didn't mess us up.
Regardless of your opinion of porn qua porn, surely you can admit there is something scummy about algorithmic, ad filled porn platforms, and parasocial porn influencer platforms? HN regularly and rightly dumps on these elements on the context of Facebook, IG, etc. Does porn get a pass just because porn in some incarnations is avante garde?
Wait, I'm not taking about "avant garde porn". I'm not being snobbish about this.
I mean two (or more) people of your preference fucking. Nothing avant garde about it, just the good ol' thing goes inside another thing, or rubbing things together.
I don't know what "algorithmic ad filled parasocial platforms" you mean, but when you're ready to discuss banning Facebook, Twitter, and almost every platform we can resume this chat.
Let's be honest about the other stuff: there's nothing wrong about watching porn. Maybe if this impedes you forming real world relationships, but heh... everything in excess is bad for you.
I know this is an uncomfortable topic to discuss openly in some cultures. The USA or the UK, for example. They like their porn habits private and not talked about... which is why banning VPNs is bad!
It baffles me that parents have become so lazy they don't even want to monitor what their kid does anymore online, and instead expect the government to do all the work.
I remember when my daughter wanted to play Roblox with some friends I sure as shit did my best to monitor and lock down that horrible thing. Same with just general internet monitoring. Whenever she wants to play some game or something I research it.
I have sat down with her countless times and yeah she has broken my trust a few times and she looses access to the internet.
Brutha when I was young my parents would ring a bell at dinnertime and if I ran to the dining room in 5 minutes I got to eat and that was basically the extent of their monitoring of me.
But did you have unrestricted access to a device with a camera where pedophiles the world over tried to talk thirteen year old you into doing dances in your underwear for them?
I honestly think that pedophiles aren't half as bad as Facebook algorithm making you addicted to doomscrolling. I spent shitload of time online as a kid looking for friends. Once I came across a guy who openly told me he's a pedophile. Nothing bad ever happened to me.
My dude if someone wanted 13 year old me to do undie dances for their pleasure, they'd just kidnap me off the street.
Are you under the impression that crime was just invented 5 years ago?
That's kinda the point of online grooming. You get kids to trust you and then you tell them to go to some location where you can kidnap them off the street. It's the predator equivalent of door-to-door snake oil -> email phishing, the Internet allowed them to "upgrade".
This kind of helicopter parenting encourages the child to break your trust even more. Instead of regulating what your child does online, be very transparent and talk about out all the perils of such services. Be ready to invest considerable time with them that encourages physical outdoor activities instead of being lazy and hoping internet will be their parent and then micro manage stuff.
Most people don't actually either know what the perils of such services look like in enough practical detail to describe it to kids, and if they do, they generally feel very uncomfortable describing such things to their children. Ironically the logic is that kids are too young to hear about such things like that and need to be protected against even hearing about it. Seems counter productive to me, but also seems to be the way of the world.
Do you have children?
Does my point becomes invalid if I say I don't? I've been a child before.
How can such obtuse opinion be the top comment? A good parent builds trust with their kids, not monitor them. If that trust can not be obtained, then block sites in hosts or at the network level. If you believe Roblox is horrible for your kid, why allow them to use it at all?
> I have sat down with her countless times and yeah she has broken my trust a few times and she looses access to the internet.
All that does is encourage her to lie and find work-arounds rather than fess-up and suffer consequences.
Good breeding ground for new techies however. Circumventing net nannies and school protections got a lot of us interested in the first place.
That makes no sense. For rules to have any meaning at all, there must be consequences to breaking them. If OP doesn't take away his daughter's Internet access when she breaks his trust, it will just teach her that there's no reason to follow his rules because it doesn't affect the outcome for her.
This is unfortunately a common fallacy: rules with consequences can encourage kids to lie, it’s inferior to trust, so let’s have no rules (and don’t say no) and talk through everything. Not only is not how kids brains grow, but inevitably the parents lack time to talk all day long and the kids end up on their own unprepared to face anything with consequences. This is a recipe for the behavior and anxiety problems that have become so common.
What would a better approach look like?
There is a fantasy theory that you can just only explain to them why something is bad, and they’ll understand and stop to do it by themselves. In contrast to past generations that are painted as caricatures that only had rules with harsh punishment, never talking and explaining. Looks obviously extremely appealing on paper, at least a generation of "modern" parents fell into the trap and are struggling with teens and young adults highly insecure and non adapted to the adult world.
Explain why it was bad, show them how you caught them, and tell them they have to do better next time. Rinse and repeat until a young hacker is born.
my teenager self finds this as a challenge and just a way to defy your authority
I'd feel better about a kid smart enough to learn how to get around DNS block lists and other forms of mass surveillance and filtering than one who free ranges and isn't even trying to get out.
TBF my boomer parents didn't monitor a single thing I did on the internet, so I kinda doubt it's some unique failure of contemporary parents.
But was this in the late 90s/early 00s? I mean … it was kinda different then, no?
I - 49 - also had boomer parents who didn't monitor my internet back then. I really don't think it can be compared to today.
My parents didn’t monitor what I was doing on the internet when I was growing up in 00s. I saw a lot of shit and wasted a lot of money on GPRS and WAP portals. I learned from my mistakes and I’m glad I did. I wouldn’t want to monitor everything my children do either.
don't know if you had a similar experience, but my folks didn't pay much attention to ANY of the stuff I ingested, data, chemical, or otherwise.
My partner, a gen Xer, had it even looser. Talks about just hanging out in a patch of random dirt until the street lights came on.
Notably, I haven't heard anyone use the terms 'helicopter' or 'bulldozer' parenting lately, and I kind of wonder if it's because that's just the norm, now.
Frankly the amount of outrageous deranged shit I saw on IRC and Usenet as a preteen kinda makes me conflicted on this point, whether the internet is "worse" today. Like, I had already seen the gaping asshole of goatse probably hundreds of times before I graduated high school so... lol
Whitehouse.com, Goatse, Lemonparty, wondering what results you will get if you type fuck into Dogpile, public and private chat rooms etc all existed on the early Internet.
There was way less advocating that slavery and Nazis weren't so bad and it was much harder to upload a photo of yourself, but nearly everything these censorship laws are trying to block existed in some form on the early Internet. Parents need to parent and we have an entire generation that grew up fine with the Internet and video games.
every generation thinks they live in unique times. that there existed some idyllic lost time innocence. it’s a fantasy.
The internet was pretty fucked up in the 90s / early 00s.
Much less regulated, you could find all sorts of weird stuff (and yes, also porn) in it.
And it didn't mess us up. Before that, we teens had access to naughty magazines. I had a friend who managed to rent porn movies from the local videoclub (before Blockbuster).
"Life, uh, finds a way."
> And it didn't mess us up.
Honest question: If it did, how would we know? Here is a thread on incels.is where a dude tricked a woman into flying to another country because he "knows she deserves it". https://incels.is/threads/i-just-made-a-woman-fly-from-spain...
With reproduction rates falling, and people having all sorts of trouble with relationships, what does "messed up" look like, and why are we so sure that we actually aren't when the world is increasingly polarized and having trouble with authoritarianism? How can we prove those things aren't actually linked?
How can we be sure that it isn’t the result of the US leaving the gold standard? Or the increase in automotive recalls? Or the increase in the number of hot dogs consumed at hot dog eating competitions? I’m sure there’s a connection. https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Hating women and having her waste money on a flight is way better than burning her at the stake, stoning her, or chatting her up because you are a serial killer.
Theres a long history there. It is already a good thing that most people identify that behavior as weird and awful instead of it being socially acceptable or even the law.
My parents tried but they know about as much about technology as a typical boomer so by the time I was in high school it became totally ineffective.
> I sure as shit did my best to monitor and lock down that horrible thing
How much of that "horrible thing" is due to a handful of youtube videos you've seen as opposed to first-hand experiences? What if you found out that the very well-produced youtube videos which regularly attack Roblox have the exact same agenda as the US/UK laws you're opposing?
Within the past week the CEO described predatory behavior on the platform as "not necessarily just a problem, but an opportunity as well". Not sure what YouTube videos have to do with that, regardless of production value.
CEO is an autistic dumbass who isn't good at conveying his thoughts. What he could have said: "While we have the best protection of any gaming or social media platform today, any amount of predatory behavior is an unacceptable problem. Roblox has increased from 20M DAUs to 150M DAUs over the last 5 years and the absolute number of these unfortunate incidents has remained flat: an 80% decline in incidence rate. In this way, we view it also as an opportunity: How can we can continue to scale the platform while getting the incidence rate to zero?"
Oh, its definitely a dumpster fire. And they keep changing the parental controls to make it less obvious what's appropriate for what age.
And then there's the constant begging for fewer restrictions and more things being permitted, to the point where you're basically screaming "no" in their face and want to smash the damn tablet.
Then it settles down, and starts up again a month later.
It's not about parents failing to do their jobs, it is about heavy handed big government wanting to step even further into our lives using our own technology.
Kids need room to explore the boundaries and fail, it is part of growing up.
If it's baffling it's because it's bullshit. Very few parents are calling for this. It's just 'Wont someone please think of the children' moral hand-wringing on its face and not very subtle creeping fascism underneath.
The world doesn’t consider it reasonable for businesses to sell beer to kids, and expect us all to constantly follow our kids around to make sure they don’t get beer. Bars don’t get to say ‘woops, we got thousands of 9 year olds drunk, their parents should keep an eye on them’”.
And at this point, most kids, most people, spend more time online than outside walking around
> Bars don’t get to say ‘woops, we got thousands of 9 year olds drunk, their parents should keep an eye on them’”.
Because there's no whatsoever downside in requiring bars to not serve children (if we assume that it's just to not give alcohol to children); online age checks instead have very big negative consequences for the whole populace.
You know, there's prison and capital punishment, and yet people still commit crimes. There's a point you have just give up protecting, otherwise you're hurting yourself, just like an over-reacting immune system killing the host.
What if the kid just rent a foreign VPS, put Windows on it, enable RDP, and then just "gooning" away on that? UK is going to ban all VPS providers too?
Then what if it's "just a foreign friend's computer"? Ban all foreign IPs?
Beside that, I never believed that what UK's doing is for protecting the children, otherwise where are so many other more important things to do, for example, UK can support low income families so their kids won't go hunger, UK can also provide social housings for young people so they know they have a roof to safely sleep under.
None of that, but porn and VPN, wow, that's the enemy number one, kids must be protected from those things.
It’s hard to control the narrative when people can say what they want on the internet, anonymously, without being punished for it.
"I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War. Terror. Disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you and in your panic, you turned to the now High Chancellor Keir Starmer. He promised you order. He promised you peace. And all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent."
It'll be alright. We've dealt with manic authoritarians who dream of planetary control before. Just another quick world war and the development of an even more sinister superweapon and we'll be right back to thinking in sane, evenhanded terms. Or dead.
Or, you know, we could huck our failed systems out with the trash instead. Reinvent democracy to be more direct and flexible. Could be nice.
Why do you want people punished for saying things?
I guess maybe this was sarcasm. If so, carry on good sir.
> Why do you want people punished for saying things?
I am not the OP, but I interpreted them as suggesting this serves as a good form of censorship while advertised as improving child safety.
Rather, they are saying governments want to control the narrative and anonymous speech impedes that.
Not OP but while I don't seek "punishment", I do seek accountability. I know that might seem like a flowery synonym at best, or an amorphous piece of jargon at worst, but if we are to treat online spaces as public forums, we need to structure these spaces like public forums, which means having consequences for abject lies. The "but who decides" response is a thought-terminating cliche that we need to collectively move past. Until we stop letting the perfect get in the way of the good enough, we will continue to let bad actors dictate the public understanding of technological issues, and of issues more generally (eg: antivax).
The trump administration in the US also frames its crackdown on civil society in terms of "accountability for lies". But I guess its fine when your side does it.
And here is Exhibit A of those responsible for our current state of affairs
I don't see Trump doing this or his Administration. For the first time in years I'm actually not worried about the FBI and what dastardly political maneuverings they are up to. The CIA is still probably pretty bad. Yes, there are a lot of Republicans who are neo-authoritarians who need to be shut down before they ruin open and free society for a pipe dream. It's like you can't win no matter which party is running things because there are always the freaky lunatics who want to limit your freedoms, expand government, and cover for their own horrible misdeeds.
> I don't see Trump doing this or his Administration.
It's been a hallmark of his Administration, so you not seeing it is...interesting.
> For the first time in years I'm actually not worried about the FBI and what dastardly political maneuverings they are up to.
In the sense of it not being a mystery because it is more naked in both the direction and the specific approach to partisan political abuse, I guess I could see that, but in terms of not being concerned, the only explanation for that is GP’s “But I guess its fine when your side does it.”
DHS is the one currently expanding its collective intelligence reach into becoming the CIA+FBI for americans.
Most claims of 'the other side' is lying are themselves lies. It's mostly people just spinning things to suit their own personal biases (without necessarily even realizing that's what they're doing). For instance the vaccine topic is one I did a deep dive on not too long ago when deciding which vaccines to approve for my children. This [1] is essentially the bible of vaccines - it's a massive study across a large sampling of evidence for all major vaccines, carried out by the National Academies of Science. I'll quote them:
----
The vast majority of causality conclusions in the report are that the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship. Some might interpret that to mean either of the following statements:
- Because the committee did not find convincing evidence that the vaccine does cause the adverse event, the vaccine is safe.
- Because the committee did not find convincing evidence that the vaccine does not cause the adverse event, the vaccine is unsafe.
Neither of these interpretations is correct. “Inadequate to accept or reject” means just that—inadequate. If there is evidence in either direction that is suggestive but not sufficiently strong about the causal relationship, it will be reflected in the weight-of-evidence assessments of the epidemiologic or the mechanistic data. However suggestive those assessments might be, in the end the committee concluded that the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal association.
----
The overwhelming majority of the rhetoric around vaccines, including from governmental figures, is doing exactly what they warn against. There's simply a lot of nuance on most of every issue worth discussing, that people often don't want to acknowledge.
[1] - https://www.nationalacademies.org/projects/PHPH-H-08-17-A/pu...
> but if we are to treat online spaces as public forums, we need to structure these spaces like public forums, which means having consequences for abject lies. The "but who decides" response is a thought-terminating cliche that we need to collectively move past.
In order to "move past" that, you have to find a way to address official lies and cases where the majority is wrong.
.
For example the official denial of the fact that the Wuhan lab was researching things similar to covid-19. (Doesn't matter whether it actually came from there.)
Or the official lies about mask effectiveness. (Regardless of whether they're effective or not, the government told people things that it believed at the time were false.)
Or the lies about the world's best anti-parasite medication (that just isn't an antiviral) being dangerous horse-paste.
Or the lies about Hunter Biden's laptop being Russian disinformation.
Or that still-ongoing culture war topic where both sides claim the other is lying.
That's not exactly true. Social engineering at scale is becoming better and better. You don't need to remove dangerous opinions, you simply need to make sure nobody cares about them. And the fun thing is, most people say that they support freedom of speech, but when they see an opinion they dislike, they say the opinion should be blocked. This is why all the laws restricting freedom of speech pass without major issues.
First websites, then VPN's, and then keywords ...
WAIT! SCRATCH THAT!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
Why not just build spyware into every computer?
WAIT! SCRATCH THAT!
https://copilot.microsoft.com/
So here's the solution. AGO: Artificial General Orgasmatron. Be working on it.
Since it's hardware, parents can restrict access at the source.
Age verification built-in? Well, since it knows your secret desires in order to work, it obviously knows your age.
One in every home. Hallucinations? It works entirely through hallucinations. Since the user builds the fantasy bank (Large Lust Model, or LLM) there's no need for an internet connection.
How much more will it take before people resort to direct action against the government? It's been shown time and time again that once stuff like this has been done that the government will never let it be undone.
Direct action against a government is usually taken when the economy crashes, families cannot make ends meet, there's no food on the table, etc.
It won't happen over VPN restrictions.
I'd like people to protest these draconian measures, but realistically, outside the tech bubble of HN, this is not foremost on people's minds.
It's more likely we get some kind of new tech that works even better than a VPN but is totally deniable as far as it being used at all. A more stealthy VPN. I have advocated for Internet privacy for decades now, mostly to deaf ears. We're finally seeing some of the affects of neglecting our privacy. The little guy can win with technology and governments are terrified of that.
There are people working on systems to create networks without using the internet at all. They work pretty well. It may be slow compared to the internet, but text is fine for most things anyway. It will be good enough for scrappy rebels.
https://archive.is/PJapz
The UK government is facing calls to restrict children’s access to VPNs.
VPNs aren't capable of harming kids. They aren't content and even the usual imagined harms can't be caused by a VPN.
The Gov's entire argument seems to be 'We aren't getting our way".
Imagine if Gov officials cared about Gov officials trading law for favors - like they do about popular hysteria.
In my opinion, the government never had the authority to restrict access to online content in the first place. That authority was seized from us and more and more countries are falling into the black hole of censorship. It's the Satanic Panic all over again.
Who is making these calls?
Attacks on tech that protect speech tend to come from political interests. Attacks on tech that protect privacy often come from law enforcement.
The actual goals are always to maximize control over the public while Gov officials and their allies avoid accountability.
I guess we’ll need to run Snowflake bridges for the UK soon, as well. What’s next, will Bloody Sunday get the Tiananmen treatment?
What is the best way to harden the internet against these imbeciles?
Antitrust. Smaller more distributed ISPs.
Or internet backbone alternatives. Household backyard microwave repeater mesh networks? Residential wifi meshes?
I'm only indulging in sci fi because I don't have a good answer either. I do hate being dependent on systems with few points of failure.
Take the control of its direction away from companies like Google, which double as government access points to mass surveillance, for one.
So when do we get to the Great Firewall of the UK?
Enjoy the internet without poms, and hope trump does the same thing?
Lawmakers making laws about technical matters don't realize that they don't understand those technical matters well enough to make intelligent laws about them.
Shocking! Unprecedented! Film at 11!
It’s for the kids…
The money quote is that it's not at all clear whether the sudden VPN usage is from kids or from adults to (I think rightfully) don't want to hand over their government id or their CC to random websites.
Because yeah, fuck that shit. The presumption should be that all content on the internet is for adults. If you want your site to be child friendly you can opt into a higher standard of moderation. How did we go from the internet is for porn to this?!
If I were of the mind that children are delicate little flowers that must be protected from everything in the world lest they shatter like a fancy vase (and I am not), this is not the plan I would be pushing. There's no way this path leads to better protection for kids.
You want to sequester children from the 'harms' of the internet? You have to do more work - create a .kids TLD and build browsers and websites for that. Make a smartphone that has the protections baked into the kernel (and works fine for everything else a phone must be so parents actually buy them). Attempting to graft child protection into the existing ecosystem is attempting to build a tower on top of a swamp. It simply isn't happening.
Unless (and I think we all see this) the goal isn't to build the tower, but to convince people to pave the swamp.
The 'think of the kids' argument is also kind of dumb at face value. So what, like at 18 you're magically gifted with the ability to understand and manage the hard edges of the world? How on earth are you supposed to develop that understanding in a vacuum? I think we're not giving kids enough credit, frankly. Each generation seems to develop a more nuanced and complex view of the world than the generations previous (which makes sense, they learned with better tech).
VPNs were the target from the beginning. Whenever a politician says "think of the children," it's the beginning of the wedge strategy.
That implies a plan, its more lurch from one thing to the next expedient thing.
On the one hand, fuck creepy government overreach.
On the other hand, fuck scummy porn and social media platforms.
Can we get rid of both? Maybe we can have some kind of Hamlet-esque ending where they all die in the duel.
> fuck scummy porn
It usually does involve fucking, yes.
"Rid of both"? This is against all kinds of porn, sexy stuff, erotica, and also unsexy things considered not suitable for teens. It has nothing to do with "scummy", even honest to goodness porn is affected.
And I'm sure you can see grownups don't necessarily want to be tied to specific porn watching habits (multiple scenarios for why this is, but all can be chalked up to "human nature").
I'm not troubled by porn or my kids seeing it. If anything, I advocate healthy sex lives for my kids once they are of age because there is some kind of massive Puritanism push going on that looks to be the end of the human race--look how they are destroying the common bonds of love and intimacy using technology to demolish our ability to relate to one another. Don't think it's happening? Look around you--people are more and more isolated and miserable and fearful of making contact, especially intimate contact, for fear of accusations of r-a-p-e or assault or whatever. Of course I don't want predators finding my kids online and using the Internet to get to them, but that's where actual parenting comes in--teaching kids what to watch out for and to make smart choices. It's just that I don't believe we can bubble wrap everything and still have a functioning civilization on the other end. It will fail and fall down, all due to good intentions.
We are in agreement.
I'm arguing this isn't about "scummy porn". It's about censorship in general, but when it's about porn it's about all sorts of porn or sexy/naughty content. And it's wrong to want to restrict access to that.
What's wrong with sexy? Everyone seems afraid to even talk about it. It's safer to talk about other things like free speech.
But it's ok to watch porn made legally between consenting adults. And as for teens watching it, most of us old enough had access to naughty magazines back then, and it didn't mess us up.
The moral panic is unwarranted is my point.
Regardless of your opinion of porn qua porn, surely you can admit there is something scummy about algorithmic, ad filled porn platforms, and parasocial porn influencer platforms? HN regularly and rightly dumps on these elements on the context of Facebook, IG, etc. Does porn get a pass just because porn in some incarnations is avante garde?
Wait, I'm not taking about "avant garde porn". I'm not being snobbish about this.
I mean two (or more) people of your preference fucking. Nothing avant garde about it, just the good ol' thing goes inside another thing, or rubbing things together.
I don't know what "algorithmic ad filled parasocial platforms" you mean, but when you're ready to discuss banning Facebook, Twitter, and almost every platform we can resume this chat.
Let's be honest about the other stuff: there's nothing wrong about watching porn. Maybe if this impedes you forming real world relationships, but heh... everything in excess is bad for you.
I know this is an uncomfortable topic to discuss openly in some cultures. The USA or the UK, for example. They like their porn habits private and not talked about... which is why banning VPNs is bad!
how are kids paying for VPNs? /s
we really are living in a dumb timeline
This honestly so pathetic, you have to consider that bongs arent even people anymore.
people pay to read The Verge?
or they use archive.is