Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools(blog.mozilla.org) |
Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools(blog.mozilla.org) |
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reddit-user-uncovers-beh...
Basically Meta wants age verification done by devices, the device makers (apple, google) want it on the platform, two sides who don't want the responsibility. On the other side are hundreds of billions invested in companies that offer age verification to websites (persona, etc.). All of these monied interests generate billions into lobbying/corruption efforts that drive all the legislation across the western liberal "democracies" rn.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Adtech companies are working tiresly in order to deceive us and drop us into their narrative, but I don't believe that everything is lost. After all, even fbpurity continues being developed. We need to write scrapers to extract our friends, relatives, and everyone else's data from walled gardens, not whine about gardens having walls.
Yes, Google enshittified, OkCupid enshuttified, many things enshittified, and many people who were the founders just passed away. But this only means that we need to be the militant generation, not that the battle is lost.
What makes problems into disasters is denying that there is a problem until it is too late.
Past generations mostly tried (with varying success) to fix the problems in their world. Sometimes the past generations' solutions are good, like much of the world mandating 40 hour work weeks and public pensions and workplace health and safety and so on; other times even when the problem is real, the solutions are worse, like the US experience with prohibition.
But when problems get ignored, you get stuff like leaded gasoline, cigarettes, and asbestos being everywhere, the Irish potato famine, the dissolution of the USSR, and the 2007 global financial crisis.
Even if AI doesn't do what it promises, the internet brings with it even more globalisation, cheap labour that undercuts any rich nation for jobs which can be done on a computer (which we've already seen examples of, not just with coding but also call centres). Even if Musk's promised about Optimus remain as unfulfilled as whichever version of full-self-driving just got made obsolete, a remote-controlled android does much the same for manual labour. And the internet does enable much weirder warfare: our governments can blame hacks on whoever they like, but there is often no dramatic photo of something burning as a result, just a diffuse degradation of economic performance from fully automated scams and blackmails.
And that's without any questions about demographic shift and who pays for the current generation's pensions when they retire, and if this has anything to do with free porn and the state of online dating apps. And without personalised propaganda. Without your home surveillance system (or robot vacuum cleaner) being turned against you by hacks only possible from cheap ubiquitous internet. Without any questions about if doomscrolling does or doesn't induce psychological problems, if sexual deepfakes are worse than schoolyard rumours, or if AI is sopping kids from learning as cheating is easier.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/blogs/social-media-minim...
The eSafety Commissioner should be elected, especially since the changes impact every day Australians, with no ability to have a say on the matters.
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.
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.)
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"?
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.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...
Could you explain what is the theory behind that?
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.
I am using a fork of Firefox and it works perfectly fine.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Could you, my wonderful Western friends, do that again?
I mean, all of it is even on video and largely on YouTube.
Apart from those things, the Australian government did an excellent job.
If it was reasonable it would have been taken to an election, and not rushed in as a measure to scrub the internet of the chrstchurch massacre.
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.
No it doesn't make that assumption? The crazy tricks are for the engaged, for the outer party members. The proles just get bread and circuses.
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?
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.
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!
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
If we don't want to lose our freedoms, we need to offer constructive and realistic solutions that don't involve the government. Simply saying "not my problem" may feel good, but it's going to end up with a government-enforced tech dystopia.
ISPs come with adult content disabled by default and someone has to opt in to it. Every major OS (Windows, Mac, iOS, android) ships with device level parental controls. Games consoles enforce these based on birth date. ISPs here also provide free network level filtering on top of that. All of this only matters if the parents don’t bypass them when asked.
If a kid is determined enough to get past Apple family controls and the network level filtering on their home network, they’ll have a VPN from a dodgy source in 15 minutes. The solution is to use the tools that are there right now, or accept that age verification is coming for everything.
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.
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.
Nor can it, because it takes a village to raise a human being.
And in this (global) village, we have determined that we will monetise everything... and for the victims, there's thoughts and prayers. [1]
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.
Like with normal cases - have court go over this.
But decision if any form of age lock should be implemented or not is up to parents. You cannot just shift argument to "you HAVE to restrict children from internet or else!"
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.
Asking for less tech at school is not an authoritarian move, but rather a point of view about how schools should work.
If you asked me, I think that parents should throw away their TVs and minimize screen time at home, both for them and the kids. However I won't ask this to be enforced by the State - if anything, it will make my kids more competitive against the cartoons-infused ones of the other parents.
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.
...is there evidence that it's parents who are the constituency you describe?
... every aspect of parenting.
It is a collective problem with collective solutions.
Even if I had, your argument is we must surveil more to protect the kids from the surveillance state?
If the side effect is that you also end up controlling adults and making them behave “properly,” then that is considered a plus.
It's just selfishness. "I want some privacy utopia on the internet (which can no longer exist, the internet isn't the place of the 90s and early 00s), so your kids can be exploited by social media and porn".
I've gotten exactly one response on what that looks like. The parent suggested writing custom moderation rules for his router. He was serious that this was feasible general solution.
Parents have the responsibility to do what is necessary to protect their kids
In the case of parents v. so-called "tech" companies, who should win
What happens when the companies are protected from parents by Section 230
A group of parents? I’m more hoepeful.
(In my country,) There are many levels of government between the individual and the nation. Sometimes that is a curse. But sometimes change needs to start locally. This is an excellent example.
If Facebook decided to start showing hardcore porn to people it identifies as being under 14, would you blame the parents for letting the kids use Facebook, and not blame Facebook? If you would blame Facebook, that means you believe Facebook has (at least some) responsibility.
I have a little boy. He does not use computers yet. One day he will. His friends will have YouTube or it’s spiritual successor and everyone in his school will be on TikTok where they’re hammered with whatever brainrot gets the most engagement.
What do you propose, exactly?
I guarantee you are not as dedicated as me trying to protect my kids, so there will be age gates, and that includes VPNs.
Everyone knows VPNs are only used for getting shit for free, so there is also a pretty powerful corporate interest to lock them down. In the case of the "corporate content provides" vs the "tech bros", the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I'll take a win however it comes.
Mozilla have picked a battle that will kill off Firefox, I am now not longer interested in recommending or using it. I'd bet their user base skews to older people, more likely to be parents.
Presumably your support is for a browser developed by Google instead, as they are clearly not interested in surveillance or being in your children’s life?
I don't use my vpn for 'shit for free'.
I shouldn't have to consider getting a parent an under 18 account to protect them better.
This whole thing where parents are expected to do it all themselves is actually a new phenomenon. Historically, across basically every culture, it was up to the community to raise all the kids together. To sacrifice and make compromises together.
Your parents likely didn’t have to deal with YouTube. There were basic laws in place that guarantee the content on broadcast TV fell within certain limits. Was that unacceptable to you as well? It strikes me that you take for granted the fact that you could never have been exposed to Alex Jones as a child. Let’s not pretend your parents knew everything you watched and saw, they just knew it could only be so bad most of the time. Yet you now expect parents to know everything on every screen in front of their kids with no assistance ever as the “attention economy” machine attacks all of us. It’s not a fair fight at all and your response is “parents just solve it yourselves” without a second thought.
I do not agree with all these age verification and surveillance state initiatives we are seeing. I am categorically against them. But your philosophy is harmful and frankly selfish. You live in a community. You have to make compromises.
Sounds like you made a decision you regret and expect everyone else to bend their life around you. It is selfish to assume others will take care of your shitty kids.
I don't think it's as successful as it sounds on paper, from the comfort of our western society homes.
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].
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.
This already is the threat, and all the solutions social media comes up with are eerily “Age Verification” shaped. They are all going to be shitty.
Now 25 years later, they know who you are talking too, what you are talking about, where you are almost in real time, what websites you browse, books you read, music you like, podcasts you indulge in, what social media trends you follow, general political points of view, sexual orientation, what you look like and so on... It was all taken one little inch at a time and now we have mass apathy about it all.
And once they have taken that little bit, they will never let it go by choice.
Here in Australia, there are now ID proof of age requirements for Social media (still a little loosely enforced)and pornography. They have their foot in the door, you can see where it is going next.
No, it's trite and useless. You don't need to refer to popular literature to talk about authoritarianism, there are plenty of examples in real life.
These are unfortunately rather half-baked and should be improved. Which is exactly what could be mandated instead of invading everyone's privacy.
You are right though - the fact that those controls exist and are in place and the UK government isn’t enforcing that Apple Microsoft and Google provide better tools (which would actually achieve the aim) tells you that what they actually want is what they’re asking for - a VPN backdoor.
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 the 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 how fast narrative changed to serve some political goal and everyone just went with it.
I am not resistant to narratives but I seem to routinely miss them. Then I wake up and everyone is saying some strange extreme things and are angry at each other and it seems fabricated to me many times.
Such as in my city was recently some uptick of anti car sentiment. Yeah like discussion is normal and we want to live in best possible environment but this wasn’t discussion. It was just people throwing shit at each other and extreme tribalism. It’s unsettling to see this. Social media has been doing something terrible to people. And I think it all serves somebody’s interests. Someone benefits from these divisions and wars.
We need to collectively unplug and get a grip
Try visiting if you get the chance and see for yourself how things are. Depending on your workplace you may also have many Chinese coworkers who would be glad to tell you what life is like there.
Definitely don’t listen to Reddit, but also don’t listen to the countless other forums trying to convince you it’s a North Korea like dystopia.
There's always a tussle for who "controls the narrative", it's not always the well-informed. Look at the Covid 19 outbreak. An honest medic would say it's your choice to take the rapidly-developed vaccine, we don't have as extensive safety and efficacy studies as usual but we're in a time crunch, here are its known side-effects, but also consider what happens if you don't take it and end up contracting the virus, which was ultimately fatal for millions, more fatal the older you were. I wouldn't have believed such basic medical advice could be politicised, but there it was with an American right-wing claiming the medics were lying (why would they?!) and performatively defying basic instructions to avoid spreading a pandemic, then predictably dying of something they could completely have avoided, like Herman Cain. Then they started going for the absolutely bonkers science-free "remedies" invented by their tribe, like shining UV light up your arse or taking horse de-worming tablets. Meanwhile the American left-wing wanted to insist on people wearing masks (even where distancing or ventilation improvements would be more effective) and fire people for not taking the vaccine (what happened to informed consent?)
I don't know which Nobel prize winner became the villain, but I can believe both that it can happen unjustly (politicians or social activists start attacking them for their other beliefs), and sometimes justly; "Nobel disease" is when the celebrated scientist lets recognition go to their head and starts speaking in areas where they aren't experts. The famed example is Linus Pauling who got the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, but in later years started hawking vitamin C tablets saying it could cure cancer; it can't, and he died of cancer. Additional studies have shown that when taken intravenously it can have an effect on some cancer cells as part of a chemotherapy regime, but as orally ingested tablets it's worthless.
For what I've said on China in the previous comment, I have never been, but I am fairly certain of the veracity of all the issues I raised. I can't speak for any specific Chinese person and how they feel about their government, I'm sure millions of them are happy in life no matter how the country is run, and certainly the country is more prosperous these days, but these issues are still there, and we in the West should try our best to avoid lapsing into authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
Orwell has been quoted that Animal Farm was a also a critique of capitalism, in favor of democratic socialism.
You also say GP is naive about China. But China has been actually less oppressive as time goes along. In fact, historically, authoritarian states often become less oppressive without foreign interference (my home country, Czechoslovakia, was on path towards democratic socialism in the 1960s, unfortunately, it was reversed for geopolitical reasons; such has been experience of many American client states as well). (And you also have liberal states becoming more authoritarian on their own, we can see that in the western world, due to concentration of wealth.)
This indicates there is no "natural law" that makes things more (or less) authoritarian. It depends on people pursuing politics, and being informed.
I don't argue for a surveillance state. Authoritarians push authoritarian policies with convinient excuses. I do understand that.
I think there need to be a cultural shift and that involves the collective of parents not indivual families.
Like, my TV installed adtech shovelware over night and my son woke up early and watched it. Sport teams organize on Facebook. The school headmaster wants CCTVs. Door bell cameras are getting more and more common.
We can't fight those things as individuals.
But constrained to those using the platforms. My issue with these broader measures is even if I don't use social media, I'm still caught up in the dragnet.
In no Western society that I can name are parents omnipotent owners of their children. Parents may even lose custody of their children. If you know that parents are doing physical harm to children, you have a social obligation to try to do something for those children.
Even though we may turn a blind eye, we do have a social obligation to all children. Human anthropological history reflects this.
Although intellectual harm tends to be seen as sunken cost (and possibly "correctable"), social harm has intolerable consequences.
Misinformation smells like your own farts, disgusting to everyone but you.
For other readers who may be too young to remember, improper privacy controls (unenforced HTTPS, poor encryption in the form of WEP, easy MitM attacks, etc) meant that public/untrusted WiFi was a legitimate security risk as things like passwords, bank details, etc were very easy to steal as they were sent unencrypted over the air. This is fortunately much less true these days with the advent of better protections across the entire stack (HTTPS everywhere, WPA*, etc) but unscrupulous VPN merchants still use this outdated argument to try to sell their products to less technically-savvy customers.
What these technologies (and VPNs) _do not_ prevent is the legitimate (and consensual) capture of user data by captive portal software (email, phone, etc), which is typically submitted by a user wishing to connect to a public network. This is what the parent comment is mentioning. Different risk profiles, obviously.
what about whitelists? this never comes up anymore. I can load profiles from the 'child safety council' if that's what I want, and should expect to cover some of the overhead in evaluating all the submitted links. particularly in an educational setting, part of the problem is kids playing games and hanging out on social instead of working.
it seems a lot more tractable than trying to classify everything and get everyone to play along. let 1000 different filters bloom.
what's fundamentally wrong with that approach?
In practice I don't think it's an issue. What I'm arguing for is the infra to facilitate self categorization and (likely) also a legal requirement limited to only a few specific categories. For example the government might mandate that porn, social media, and user generated content all be accurately tagged and provide legal definitions.
Nothing about what I describe would preclude additional layers of categorization such as (but not limited to) whitelists. In fact it should improve such efforts by providing a standardized method they can use for arbitrarily fine grained categorization that will be compatible with other software out of the box.
Note that my tagging proposition could be applied per network request. So if the service operator wants to it should facilitate filtering out (for example) a comment section without blocking access to the rest of the site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s-1990s_Romanian_orphans_p...
The main thing the state can do is stop requiring kids to have portable internet-connected devices for state schooling.
For 90% of kids, that’s not going to be an issue and everyone can feel like they’re such a great parent. But for another group of kids, they absolutely cannot handle it and have not developed the executive function to be able to manage access to everything the Internet offers.
In the past we understood this as a society. Broadcasters on public airwaves had standards for what was appropriate. We’ve completely thrown those out in one generation and decided gambling, porn, extremely violence, social and emotional grooming and abuse, and lots more are all OK to give children access to, unchecked and with limited education. It’s really kind of sick.
Eventually the bans will be widespread enough that VPNs become near meaningless. You won't be able to bypass streaming region locks, or access regional discounts. You won't be able to ensure E2EE privacy in some other region because all the major ones will be cracked down.
The only way forward will be running VPNs out of poorer countries, countries with less telecommunication restrictions, etc. Although this will come at the cost of latency. 100-200ms to connect to a Tajikistan VPN. From my experience, even Google Searches and YouTube playback become sluggish at 100ms+, the modern web has 1000 .js files executing every time a page loads and the 100ms delay just screws everything up. It's like browsing the web on a PS3 in 2026.
Once people start switching to Guatemalan VPNs, the Government will ban "manipulating networking routing" at the backhaul and ISP levels. You will not be able to adjust routing, it will become illegal. Before anyone says "you can't do that, it won't work", I was told the same thing when I said they'd ban VPNs, yet here we are.
One step at a time to erode privacy, security and freedom. Once you jump up a level, you cannot comprehend a world below that level. The mega restrictions of tomorrow are normalized in the new world.
Kids go to school to learn, not to watch modern cable shopping network (aka Tiktok/Instagram).
That sounds silly.
and instead of burdening the isp the publisher of mango sorbet recipes with ticking off all the right schema boxes, this can all be enforced at the consumer.
all the rest of these approaches kind of assume that there is 'reasonable' and 'unreasonable' content, and that we all mostly agree on the difference. which I think is fundamentally fallacious. do you really think we can agree, as a species, what PG-13 should mean for the entire internet?
The reality is, VPNs help people learn, have freedoms and explore alternative world views. This is a direct "harm" to the Governments, because they have trouble dictating the narrative.
Force ISPs to log all connections and make ISP customers accountable for their traffic, like they are in Germany for example. If you detect an IP to be used for a VPN, ask every ISP to disclose al customers who interacted with it and issue them a ticket. Three tickets and you're denied internet service for two years.
I think this would scare most people off.
The government is vastly overreaching in this and quite frankly if one argues that this is a good thing, then where to draw the line? Will we want to see government legislation for every possible permutation of potentially harmful behaviours or consequences.
Sorry Johnny can't come out to play because I have not yet bought the latest government-legislated knee guard armour to prevent a graze, and BTW I notice that you have not renewed the foam coating on your sidewalk, if Johnny trips and falls there...
Some will experience a significant down regulation of dopamine receptors caused by the constant artificial reward stimulus. As tolerance builds, more is needed for longer to get the same response, while the ability to function normally becomes more difficult. That’s screen addiction, not meth.
We regulate most things with that potential, even if it only affects a small percentage. About 1% of the population struggles with meth. 6-10% with internet related addictions and more like 40% among youth.
120 years ago, opium, alcohol, marijuana were a free for all. There was similar opposition to their control. Now it’s accepted as a public health benefit and most people would probably be shocked at how recent these became regulated.
My elementary aged kids can’t use “safe search” without being exposed to pornography, extreme violence, Five Nights at Epstein’s, flat earther’s, etc. Tech company’s have failed to create a safe product and when that goes on for long enough, the government steps in.
People will debate all day what should and shouldn't be regulated for adults but it seems the vast majority agree on shielding children from having potentially harmful things actively pushed onto them by strangers.
I’m all for helping people in the situations that aren’t of their own creation, so using the excuse “what are they supposed to do” doesn’t really fit for me? The first option is to use a condom if they are in a bad financial situation. It’s been amazing how every time I’ve used one, I haven’t had a child.
When did we stop making people responsible for their choices? I’m not against assistance, I’m against the idea that it is my responsibility to give up rights and freedoms because <insert person> made poor personal choices and now society is once again a surrogate to yet another child of irresponsible parents. If you aren’t able to parent, don’t have children. Don’t care what your situation is that rule stays the same.
And of course, someone will jump in with “but maybe” and “what if the situation changed”. Again…I’m not against helping parents who fall on hard times to get back on their feet — society SHOULD be there to help with assistance and programs, even help with getting your kids watched. And all of that exists. I’m against expecting every individual of society to not only help bear the costs, fund and administrate these programs, provide countless charities, etc…
But now the suggestions is also somehow that we are required to be the surrogate parent to every one of their offspring by giving up our rights to create an entire society of a padded playground?
No, I think that’s the line for me.
Parents can give up all their own rights they want and live in their padded kingdoms, but that ends at your doorstep when you walk out to the space you share with every other person…including digitally. You can build the physical and virtual walls around your padded kingdom as high and thick as you want to keep your children shielded from the world.
That's what they've been doing in unprecedented numbers. Which via demographic collapse is going to cause an even worse crisis, economic, social, political, and more, further down the line.
Also not everyone is a trust fund kid that works at a FAANG: people get sick, lose jobs, divorce, change homes, and so on.
I'm really happy that you found the perfect antifragile optimum in your life, but this kind of "vae victis" thinking will only make parents more miserable and decrease birth rates.
I know several parents that limit screen time, require screen usage be restricted to public areas of the home, have parental controls and filtering operating etc.. some of the parents I know won’t even let their kids watch a movie unless they screen it first.
I usually give a fake email or phone number to get free wifi anyway.
And who should look out for the child's interests if the parents can't or won't?
Actually not, since I use Linux, but most people's do. It's much worse on my phone.
What do you do when punishment doesn’t work? When therapy doesn’t work? When strict control doesn’t work? When there is no remorse, shame, fear of repercussion, or ability to anticipate consequences or risk? When the kid has the highest IQ in the house but fails tests and doesn’t turn in homework because they don’t care about anything but their vice? When they literally spend 2 hours a day _at school_ on YouTube and games (among other things) on a device the district mandates they have?
Do you punish a child for years because they can’t function with access most people consider normal? When their siblings have all of the same access and devices and don’t have the same issues and would respond to rules and who would punishment in exactly the way you would describe?
Maybe it’s a parenting issue, but I’d like to think we’ve done far more than most parents could imagine for over a decade and come up short for one of our kids. Meanwhile 3 others are just fine.
Fortunately many states are experimenting with school vouchers and other programs to help parents choose alternatives. It has some downsides (some public schools are having trouble adapting and special ed is an issue) but it may help with situations like yours.
But what will you do when this one will grow? There will be no restrictions - not from you, not from the state. Does restriction really solved the root problem?
How do you monitor what a child is using a device for when you don’t have access to the device and they’re at a school that doesn’t care? What device is safe to use, even when in a public area? You’re able to see the screen of all devices I your house at all times? You’re awake at all hours monitoring public areas of the house? Would you think an elementary schooler could get into trouble with an eink Kindle? With an Xbox (beyond gaming to long)? With a school issued Chromebook? What happens when Screen Time fails and the whitelist of allowed sites and limits on time no longer work (as happens several times a year)? What happens when the locked down Chromebook allows arbitrary web access through a log in screen buried deep in help that all the kids know about and despite layers and layers of controls out in place the school device happily ignores them all and lets children do whatever they want?
The idea that a child can be given a device and that they could be monitored 24/7 suggests you don’t have kids, they don’t have any technology in their life, you don’t know what they and/or their friends are actually doing, or you only have children like my daughter. I suppose if everyone was like her I’d be naive to what most kids are doing as well.
You have a class with 30 kids with gaming (or social media or or porn) devices and a teacher whose just as internet addicted behind their own computer at the front expecting the kids to work on their own through the lesson while they do who knows what.
How much YouTube do you think you can you watch in a a high school PE class? About 50 minutes at today’s public schools. The teacher doesn’t care, the principal doesn’t care, the superintendent doesn’t care, and the school board doesn’t care. As long as the PE teacher’s baseball team does well, who cares, right? (Hi Scottsdale Unified School District! I’m talking about you!)
Oh, I guess you’re not my neighbor. You had me going there for a long time.
Stories like this are everywhere. Parents don’t share them because they perceive it is an individual problem, and a shameful problem.
We don’t even have a good way to talk about the problems, never mind their solutions.
What I do know is that we have an epidemic of mental illness affecting children and adults are crying about how it affects them. Privacy is important. Protecting children it’s important. Let’s have both.