https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/blogs/social-media-minim...
As far as I can tell, there is no requirement to be a UK citizen to answer this – if you are, were, or could be resident in the UK I urge you to fill it out and help provide a voice of reason...
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...
I guess since I complain about Mozilla a lot for their past 5-10 years (minimum) of poor management decisions, I should give them their due when they do come out with a statement of support on our rights.
It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check.
So foolishly optimistic… people can’t wait to give freedom away if only they get a stable job and housing in exchange. Or if it hits these other guys they don’t like at the moment.
It’s all much, much less dramatic than Orwell. It is an ordinary, everyday erosion of your rights until one day you will realize that you lost something very important but it will be no longer possible to say it out loud.
One such example is China where all dissent was eliminated because people there prefer comfortable cage. Or Singapore. Seemingly majority doesn’t give a flying dick as long as government buys them.
Maybe the Orwellian times were different but it is what it is. It’s easier than ever to just buy people.
It actually asks hard questions and explores the tradeoff of an "utopian dystopia." In contrast to the society Orwell describes, where the government is cartoonishly evil, the one of "Brave New World" genuinely cares for the happiness of its subjects, and most of its subjects are genuinely happy, even if we disagree with the methods that it uses. This is by design; I read somewhere that Orwell wanted to position 1984 in explicit contract to Huxley, killing any debate on whether his described society was better or worse than the one the book was written in.
I think he heavily underestimated the human ability to ferret out the truth when the only thing the state gives them is lies. Even without access to reliable news sources, most people will at least realize that the news is lying to them. Even if they don't know what the truth is, they'll know that it's not what they're told it is.
I think the key to a working dystopia is to genuinely make people's lives pleasant. We care about the economics a lot more than we care about the politics. If you're a free democratic socialist republic and decrease people's monthly meat rations, citizens will riot and demand true democracy. If you are a democracy and the price of meat goes up due to the bird flu epidemic, people will riot and demand communism and wealth redistribution.
You're extremely naive about China. Do you think they wanted the Great Leap Forward and the Eliminate Sparrows campaign? One man's ill-informed policies caused a famine resulting in 15-55 million deaths. The One Child Policy? The state response to Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall? The Social Credit system? Why does Foxconn have anti-suicide nets? You think industry tycoons being in bed with government is bad? It is! Now note that the theory of the Three Represents is part of the Chinese Constitution. Ask yourself why notionally independent Hong Kong imprisoned a large number of pro-democracy campaigners. These are not signs of a benevolent dictatorship. It's a totalitarian state maintaining its dominance over the masses and its elites revelling in the spoils. Why do you think there is such a push by rich Chinese to get their capital out of the country?
Perhaps you should read Brave New World instead?
Look, it’s extremely hard to remain some kind of objective nowadays on the internet. I no longer know what is true and what is false.
Truth has lost all meaning and was replaced by politics.
Even history books written by scientists are routinely under attack.
In my country of Poland a Nobel prize winner someone that my teachers said was a hero suddenly became a villain. I never got my head around it. It still puzzles me. Like a some thorn in my side. He was a national hero? Now he is the bad guy? Why? It’s strange and unsettling.
https://www.google.com/search?q=1984+was+not+meant+to+be+an+...
Look at the images tab. This is so cliché there are hundreds of mugs and t-shirts with it!
Novel analysis here by IshKebab. :P
They link to the full document which lists their VPN subscriber count near the top of the about Mozilla section.
(Edit: I don’t disagree with Mozilla’s position, but failure to declare an obvious conflict of interest undermines their credibility.)
That sounds silly.
Honest question: if you tell Pornhub "now you will be fined heavily if you let 10-year old kids access porn", won't Pornhub implement some kind of age verification?
How else would the platform "address the root cause"?
Other than that, there is no "online harm". No root cause of anything that would need to be addressed, no problems whatsoever. It's just information passing through from one person to another.
Laws like age verification will just push kids to even weirder corners of the internet. When will 4chan or motherless implement age verification? On pornhub you see vanilla porn on the front page. On 4chan or motherless you see CP (AI, but still), (fake) rape or (fake) murders. And there are many more sites like those.
I don't think we can (and I don't think we should) completely block porn from the Internet. But I could imagine that privacy-preserving age verification on Pornhub could make it slightly less accessible to kids (even it if is by opening a link without knowing what it is). I wouldn't block VPNs though: if someone is able to access Pornhub with a VPN through a country that doesn't mandate age verification, then they will be able to access porn anyway.
And then there is not only porn. To me the value of age verification is really to block kids from accessing social media. And again, no need to block VPNs there: it just has to be less accessible to kids. I don't believe that most kids will get a VPN to access social media. Kids are on social media because kids are on social media, we just need to break the network effect.
For instance, the government could provide privacy-preserving age verification and mandate that those platforms use it to check the age, and at the same time not ban VPNs.
Maybe (I am asking) it would make it harder for kids to access social media and porn in general, but it would not make it impossible (they could use a VPN). But I don't think we need to make it impossible for social media and I don't think we can make it impossible for porn:
* For social media, we just need it annoying enough that most kids don't bother using them. I feel like social media are a problem for kids mostly when (almost) all kids have access, because it is difficult to explain to your kid why they should be left apart.
* For porn, there are many ways to access it, it's impossible to entirely block it. And I am not convinced that it is a good thing to make it super illegal. Making it slightly less accessible so that it's not one URL away from the kids, though, may not be so terrible?
We do that kind of compromise for many other things: it's impossible to prevent kids from smoking cigarettes. Still we try to prevent it. I feel like sometimes it's okay to compromise, instead of fighting for all or nothing.
It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."
In theory, one could implement age verification by negligent parent imprisonment, in practice, I don't think that would work, and definitely not in all cases.
If we accept the premise that children having unfettered access to the internet is a bad thing (which, again, I don't think we should), there have to be multiple layers to it. Punishment is one, increasing friction and "making honest people honest" is another.
The last thing we need is society deciding in detail how children should be raised. CPS horror stories are bad enough as it is.
I’m somewhat in favour of these foolish attempts at control because they always drive innovation in technology to circumvent them and adoption of that technology creating a thriving underground scene. Content piracy and alternative platforms could use a resurgence and this is just the thing to get it jumpstarted.
Define “properly” and how often do the self-righteous themselves cause harm. I see a strong desire for people to want to “control” all outcomes on everything and have everyone in the world think and say and act as they want.
We turned out alright.
I think the authoritarian trend accelerated during corona. Our western political nobility got a real taste for power, and they have not been able to free themselves from that afrodisiac ever since. Therefore chat control, 1, 2, 3, and when that didn't go as planned... lo and behold... age verification, and that of course needs control over vpn, and encryption, and there we go... chat control slipped in through the back door.
Soon we can no longer criticize china if this keeps up.
It's not like parents have much of a choice. When you gotta work 2 jobs to barely make rent and groceries, you need some sort of "safe space" to pawn your children off to.
... every aspect of parenting.
...is there evidence that it's parents who are the constituency you describe?
I don't think it's as successful as it sounds on paper, from the comfort of our western society homes.
That regulation would be orders of magnitude more difficult to implement. Just look at the malicious compliance the cookie regulations created, that was a single modal.
Better to just ban it for under 16s. That might happen before my kids are old enough to be fully exploited.
One side of this is driven by a bunch of not too reputable think tanks behind the scenes who persuaded a couple of fringe academics to agree with them and push for it via the civil service. The government is taking bad, paid for advice. I don't know what the agenda is there but there is one and I reckon it's commercial. Probably a consortium of businesses wanting to create a market they can get into.
However the security services do not agree with the government or the think tanks and actually promote advice contrary to the regulators. They will ultimately win.
Attacking the regulators and revealing who is behind all this is what we should be doing.
Sorry, who will win?
However no matter what the government or security services want, they won't be able to stop people who want to use VPN or End to end encryption. Nothing would ever change in that regard.
If you make money by laying asphalt on British streets and get paid in British pounds, there's no way for you to pay an internet business in Malta if the British government doesn't want you to. Sure, there's crypto, but crypto needs businesses which let it interface with the British banking system, which the UK government can instruct banks to shut down.
The real problem is that the legislation would bring the power to prosecute people who use them or use it against them.
The security services aren't having any of that shit because it puts their position at risk both from the front-facing side and recommendations and guidance issued and from their own operations.
If they cared about privacy and security they wouldn’t be [redacted].
I am using a fork of Firefox and it works perfectly fine.
I know Cloudflare works fine on Firefox desktops and probably also on Android.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...
Could you explain what is the theory behind that?
If a government has the ability to fine content providers for providing content to its citizens, why accept IP verification is good enough to determine the user’s jurisdiction and not fine them anyway for providing the content?
This would probably block most of the internet, and allow access only to sites that are validated as being safe. This would put a lot of pressure on sites and service providers to ensure safety, such as children-only walled gardens within their broader services.
We already have piecemeal attempts at something like this through on device private age restriction software, but it’s not organised at the state level, and I think it’s not effective enough as a result.
If legally enforced it could be made into a pretty effective system that would give adults freedom and anonymity and provide safety for children, while pushing the costs of child safety onto the platforms, which is where it belongs. If you want to cater to children, prove that you can make it on to the whitelist. Otherwise that’s an audience you’re just not able to access.
Nor do these devices require the identity of non-parents who will never enable the childproofing mode
Nor does legislation invert the burden of proof and require the device's manufacturer obtain and store identity documents just to use the devices, otherwise it must restrict all access to a small handful of "kid safe" actions.
These aren't "child safety" laws, they're "adult anonymity eradication" laws
What’s wrong with making it the social media companies’ problem? If they sign up a child, they get fined. Everyone is then incentivized to come up with solutions. If some of those are shit, restrict them. If they’re not, great.
There is evidence of a growing consensus that this does have to be age limited. Both in the research and in voter polls. (I personally believe in it.)
> it will inevitably be worked around by motivated 13 year olds
The same goes for liquor and cigarette laws. They're still of net benefit.
The real answer to what's going on is one that HN doesn't like to consider. It's simply that a lot of people in a lot of countries are worried about what children are able to access on the internet and want the government to help restrict it.
I don't support these sorts of restrictions. However, HN seems completely unable to have a sensible discussion about them because most posters are convinced that this is all part of some kind of sinister authoritarian scheme. In reality, it's just some bad legislation pushed by various people who largely have good motives, and who are concerned about something that is a real problem.
The bad legislation should be opposed. In order to do so effectively, we have to address the actual concerns driving it, rather than railing ineffectually against a largely imaginary authoritarian conspiracy.
Could you, my wonderful Western friends, do that again?
I mean, all of it is even on video and largely on YouTube.
That's what they keep reducing it to. They're also making it a false dichotomy of sorts, but in reality it's a gradient of possibilities. For example, VPNs aren't like Tor in that they can't really resist "NSA" level global wiretap monitoring in any meaningful way. Or even ISP-level data-analysis driven investigations.
It's also important to correlate any privacy protections VPNs provide, with a real-world pre-internet equivalent. paper mail for example has always been subject to Mitm by the authorities. It is possible to divulge who visited what site, and at what time, and only directly to the authorities, and make that disclosure public (after gag orders expire, if any are issued).
You can use VPNs for privacy against all sorts of creepy eyes, but your local government being considered one of those hostile actors is the threat model that's under attack here.
I would argue for example that the pre-internet equivalent would be two people chatting in the privacy of one of their homes. A bit of a stretch, but alright. But in that there must be the element that the two persons are able to identify each other positively. If one of them is harmed by the other, the victim can identify the attacker to the authorities and pursue justice. How can that be done with VPNs? If middle-actors can't snoop, then can logs on both ends positively identify the other party? Was there a common way pre-internet, where people anonymously gathered and discussed things, with capability to harm each other, but without the authorities being able to do anything about it after the fact?
If the authorities are able to gain access to a private key, or some other proof of possession of one end of the connection, can the VPN provider, the network, or the protocol disclose the identity of the source of traffic on the other end?
I'm only making these arguments to point out how nuanced the topic is. The false dichotomy of all-or-nothing for VPNs is silly. this is moving towards an outright ban of VPNs with criminal consequence, and with that all other similar tech (including Tor) and privacy measures go down the toilet. Would you rather have that or propose a nuanced compromise one jurisdiction at a time?
I get this is just PR for Mozilla though.
Does Mozilla not understand that this is the exact reason why the UK wants to forbid them?
Age verification is just mass surveillance under a fake name.
I always remember a video snippet of some meeting in US, some chinese looking woman says something like "Mao took our guns and killed us all, I'm never giving up my rifle". Some politician reminds her that they live in the democracy. She asks him something like "can you guarantee me that in 20 years it will still be a democracy", which he admits he can't
found the video https://www.reddit.com/r/GunMemes/comments/1c13kkz/survivor_...
Historically they were fairly smart at doing it subtly but the mask slipped during Covid and they never really put it back on.
Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular. Normies supported covid lockdowns and they don’t want their kids watching porn either.
The people yearn to be ruled and nannied
This stuff wasn't unpopular on HN until it actually happened. Almost every submission on HN about social media had people calling for similar regulations or even outright bans. It was not until they actually started asking for IDs when HNers realized what they really wanted to achieve with these laws.
Normies don't see the difference and politicians don't want there to be a difference. Normies want security and politicians will offer it wrapped in surveilance.
What about just banning phones for children? Could we ever make that work? It would be like cigarette bans except we now have 5 year olds addicted to tobacco and addict parents who don't want to make them go cold turkey.
Public libraries and schools can be used for genuine research purposes, but not addictive shit. And implemented ad blockers at the network level.
Sexualization of teens is a thing. I personally blame social media together with showbusiness. But kids had access to the internet at the same time.
And the internet was slightly different than it's now. It had much more sharp edges that we learned how to live with.
But it also was much less predatory. World's smartest psychologists and programmers didn't work 80 hour weeks for small fortunes to make it as much addictive as possible.. if it was only that. It's also as triggering and depressing as possible, because distressed and depressed people are engaging more and can't stop.
What I mean to say is that you can't really draw an equal sign between internet we grew up with and the one we give (or choose to limit) to our children.
I don't mean we should block them, just that it's not the same.
How much the problems today are due to, rather than coincidental with, the internet, is a much more difficult thing to discern.
Back then the internet was a wild west run by thousands of clever people. It was like living in a neighborhood full of people kind of like you. Nobody built it to be addictive or to cultivate attention. If you wanted something you searched for it. Nowadays everyone is on there and it's run by evil adtech companies. Kids these days are not having the experience we had back then.
It also didn't really do us much good. Already back then geeky types like me had somewhere to retreat to and we did. It took me years to learn real social skills and build a life off of the internet. When I see headlines like "Gen Z aren't having sex" I'm hardly surprised. They're not having sex because they're on the internet. What's more is nobody is learning to be an adult at all. People are in a adult bodies but still totally children at heart. They don't own anything, shun responsibility etc.
Practically speaking, when I look at the actual number of people affected by VPN I estimate that:
- Very low: Protecting political activists and dissidents
- Low: Circumvention of overzealous blocking and surveillance
- Low-to-Medium: Hiding abusive and malicious behavior
- Medium: Additional layers of trust and network security (mostly business related, which makes it tangental to the consumer VPN market)
- VERY High: Enabling piracy and avoiding geo-content restrictions (no judgment on good-vs-bad, just asserting magnitude)
So... conundrum! If I take the position that piracy-related stuff isn't a net drag and that business VPN use is fundamentally a separate beast, VPNs in this context are hard to justify.
For a start, you should consider this fact: Privacy for a bad actor goes directly against the security for citizens and good actors.
So when you talk about privacy you are making an assumption that it is contributing to safety. But for whom? Bad actors or good actors? Without such qualification, you are just talking lofy-sounding but meaningless ideals.