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2025: if you're logged in, then we check your age to see if you can do or see some stuff 2027: the companies providing the logins must provide government with

2025: if you're logged in, then we check your age to see if you can do or see some stuff 2027: the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities 2028: because VPNs are being used to circumvent the law, if the logging entity knows you're an Australian citizen, even if you're not in Australia or using an Aussie IP address then they must still apply the law 2030: you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits 2031: Australian ISPs must enforce the login restrictions because some sites are refusing to and there are loopholes 2033: Australian ISPs must provide the government with a list of people who visited this list of specific sites, with dates and times of those visits 2035: you must be logged in to visit these other specific sites, regardless of your age 2036: you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet 2037: all visits to all sites must be logged in 2038: all visits to all sites will be recorded 2039: this list of sites cannot be visited by any Australian of any age 2040: all visits to all sites will be reported to the government 2042: your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case Australian politicians, police, and a good chunk of the population would love this. Australia is quietly extremely authoritarian. It's all "beer and barbies on the beach" but that's all actually illegal.

incompatible 1y ago
> 2042: your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case We already reached that point several years ago.
- marcus_holmes 1y ago
  yeah true, I should have made it more explicit that it's your entire browser history, and every criminal case
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    Interesting question is warrant or no warrant required?
    - marcus_holmes 1y ago
      At the moment I believe a warrant is required but easily obtained. Eventually, if we go down this path, it won't.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  Is this normally pulled from the search company or from your laptop?
OhioMan2943 1y ago
If only there was a name for this fallacy. Something slope something
- tbrownaw 1y ago
  So, is this particular slope likely to be slippery? Do governments have a history of looking for ways to control what information people can see, or looking for ways to identify people who post disfavored information?
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  Slippery slope is only a fallacy when there is no reason to believe the end state is likely or desired. It seems quite likely that governments want to continuously chip away at privacy.
  - its-summertime 1y ago
    Slippery slope is specifically about opening the gates to further slipping. This clearly isn't the case since there is going to be slipping regardless of this specific instance going through all the way or not.
    - fc417fc802 1y ago
      > It's wrong to call this a slippery slope because we're not at the top but instead already well on our way down a slope that is indeed slippery. Not a convincing take.
      - Cartoxy 1y ago
        Australia is already living in a full-blown surveillance state. Over 330,000 metadata access requests were approved in a single year—no warrant needed. Agencies like Centrelink, the ATO, even local councils can tap into your private data. Police get access to your web browsing history directly from ISPs without judicial oversight. Encryption is being quietly undermined through laws like the TOLA Act, forcing tech companies to help spy or weaken their own systems. The government now mandates that AI search tools filter and flag content, shaping what people can even find online. When the AFP raided the ABC, they had the legal power to copy, alter, or delete files. Add to that Australia’s deep involvement in the global Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, and it's clear: this isn’t future dystopia, it’s surveillance as a fact of life. NBN monopoly + TR-069 as default hard locked and custom PCB in NBN hardware (even to the point of new PCB runs with all headers and test points even unpopulated removed) it tooks untill the new rev of arriss hardware before they even complied with the GPRD lisenceing. legit!
tbrownaw 1y ago
> 2030: you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits Some states in the US are doing this already. And I think I saw a headline about some country in Europe trying to put Twitter in that category, implying they have such rules there already.
m3sta 1y ago
Australian politicians, police, and a specific chunk of the population would be exempt from this... like with privacy laws.
- marcus_holmes 1y ago
  indeed. Rules for thee but not for me.
naruhodo 1y ago
Mate... > 2038: all visits to all sites will be recorded That's been the case since 2015. ISPs are required to record customer ID, record date, time and IP address and retain it for two years to be accessed by government agencies. It was meant to be gated by warrants, but a bunch of non-law-enforcement entities applied for warrantless access, including local councils, the RSPCA (animal protection charity), and fucking greyhound racing. It's ancient history, so I'm not sure if they were able to do so. The abuse loopholes might finally be closed up soon though. https://privacy108.com.au/insights/metadata-access/ https://privacy108.com.au/insights/metadata-access/ https://delimiter.com.au/2016/01/18/61-agencies-apply-for-metadata-access/ https://delimiter.com.au/2016/01/18/61-agencies-apply-for-me... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-18/government-releases-list-of-agencies-applying-to-access-metadata/7095836 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-18/government-releases-l... https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2023/government-acts-to-finally-reform-metadata-regime.html https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2023/government-acts-to-finall...
- marcus_holmes 1y ago
  I didn't know that. Thanks
- SlowTao 1y ago
  I cannot find it any more due to the degradation of Google but there was a report on the amount of times this data was access in NSW for 2018 (?). It was something like 280,000 requests for that year alone!
- closewith 1y ago
  Yes, the 2038, 2040, and 2042 scenarios are already reality in most of the world. We're in the dystopian nightmare.
pmontra 1y ago
> 2039: this list of sites cannot be visited by any Australian of any age Block lists are not new. For example Italy blocks a number of sites, usually at DNS level with the cooperation of ISPs and DNS services. You can autotranslate this article from 2024 to get the gist of what is being blocked and why https://www.money.it/elenco-siti-vietati-italia-vengono-perseguiti https://www.money.it/elenco-siti-vietati-italia-vengono-pers... I believe other countries of the same area block sites for similar reasons.
Nursie 1y ago
> your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case As others have said, that's the case already and not just in Australia. Same in lots of other places like the UK and the whole EU. Less so in the US (though they can demand any data the ISP has, and require ISPs to collect data on individuals) > Australia is quietly extremely authoritarian. It is weird, as a recent-ish migrant I do agree, there are rules for absolutely bloody everything here and the population seems in general to be very keen on "Ban it!" as a solution to everything. It's also rife with regulatory capture - Ah, no mate, you can't change that light fitting yourself, gotta get a registered sparky in for that or you can cop a huge fine. New tap? You have to be kidding me, no, you need a registered plumber to do anything more than plunger your toilet, and we only just legalised that in Western Australia last year. It's been said before, but at some point the great Aussie Larrikin just died. The Wowsers won and most of them don't even know they're wowsers.
- cmoski 1y ago
  There are a lot of people changing their own light fittings. I have never heard about laws against plumbing but I don't see them stopping old mate from doing it. Electrical work can be pretty dangerous...
  - Nursie 1y ago
    Yeah, here in WA at least, there are signs up in the plumbing section of Bunnings saying “Stop! DIY plumbing is illegal! Only buy this stuff if you’re getting a professional to fit it!” The reasoning is often “people might contaminate the water supply for a whole street!” Which just points to poor provision of one way valves at the property line. But yeah, illegal. I agree there are limits with what you want to do on electricity, but turning the breaker off and replacing a light fitting or light switch is pretty trivial. And I know people do just get on with it and do some of this stuff themselves anyway. Was particularly pissed off that in January this year the plumbing “protections” were extended to rural residents who aren’t even connected to mains water or sewage, to protect us from substandard work by … making it illegal for us to do it ourselves. Highly annoying.
almosthere 1y ago
2027: ufos visit, and decide to end the human experiment, game over.
SlowTao 1y ago
As others have pointed out how many of these are already present here. I suspect the rest of your time line is far to optimistic in how long it will take to get there. I suspect that with the pace of decline most of that will be enacted in the next 5 years. I would like to say "It is all because of X political party!" but both the majors are the same in this regard and they usually vote unanimously on these things.
closewith 1y ago
> Australia is quietly extremely authoritarian. Not quietly, I don't think. Not like Australia is known for freedom and human rights. It's known for expeditionary wars, human rights abuses, jailing whistleblowers and protesters, protecting war criminals, environmental and social destruction, and following the United States like a puppy.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  US is the same but with a different leash-holding country.
megablast 1y ago
> your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case Pretty sure google searches have been used in murder trials before, including the mushroom poisoning one going on right now in Victoria.
red_admiral 1y ago
My understanding of US current policy: > your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case Already the case. Mostly for the kind of dumb criminal who is suspected of murder and has been found googling "defences to murder" and "how to hide a body". > the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities If there's a court order (good) or a national security letter (occasionally good but very open to abuse). Maybe the NSA or some guy in DOGE has automatic API access to this data anyway. > you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits Already the case for youtube and reddit content marked NSFW - either by the creator or by a fairly stupid algorithm. (You can see these boobies, but not those ones.) But the age verification is mostly "open a new account and enter a birth date". Also reddit has the dumbest age verification/login bypass ever. (Your honor, editing an URL is nation-state level hacking and we can't reasonably defend against that.) > all visits to all sites will be recorded Something something Permanent Record. > you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet Ok this one is cheating a bit, but don't you need a google (or samsung etc.) account to set up an android let alone access the internet? Also cheating a bit but you need a login and contract with your ISP to get on the internet too.

incompatible 1y ago

> 2042: your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case We already reached that point several years ago.

marcus_holmes 1y ago
yeah true, I should have made it more explicit that it's your entire browser history, and every criminal case
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Interesting question is warrant or no warrant required?
  - marcus_holmes 1y ago
    At the moment I believe a warrant is required but easily obtained. Eventually, if we go down this path, it won't.
frollogaston 1y ago
Is this normally pulled from the search company or from your laptop?

OhioMan2943 1y ago

If only there was a name for this fallacy. Something slope something

tbrownaw 1y ago
So, is this particular slope likely to be slippery? Do governments have a history of looking for ways to control what information people can see, or looking for ways to identify people who post disfavored information?
SchemaLoad 1y ago
Slippery slope is only a fallacy when there is no reason to believe the end state is likely or desired. It seems quite likely that governments want to continuously chip away at privacy.
- its-summertime 1y ago
  Slippery slope is specifically about opening the gates to further slipping. This clearly isn't the case since there is going to be slipping regardless of this specific instance going through all the way or not.
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    > It's wrong to call this a slippery slope because we're not at the top but instead already well on our way down a slope that is indeed slippery. Not a convincing take.
    - Cartoxy 1y ago
      Australia is already living in a full-blown surveillance state. Over 330,000 metadata access requests were approved in a single year—no warrant needed. Agencies like Centrelink, the ATO, even local councils can tap into your private data. Police get access to your web browsing history directly from ISPs without judicial oversight. Encryption is being quietly undermined through laws like the TOLA Act, forcing tech companies to help spy or weaken their own systems. The government now mandates that AI search tools filter and flag content, shaping what people can even find online. When the AFP raided the ABC, they had the legal power to copy, alter, or delete files. Add to that Australia’s deep involvement in the global Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, and it's clear: this isn’t future dystopia, it’s surveillance as a fact of life. NBN monopoly + TR-069 as default hard locked and custom PCB in NBN hardware (even to the point of new PCB runs with all headers and test points even unpopulated removed) it tooks untill the new rev of arriss hardware before they even complied with the GPRD lisenceing. legit!

tbrownaw 1y ago

> 2030: you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits Some states in the US are doing this already. And I think I saw a headline about some country in Europe trying to put Twitter in that category, implying they have such rules there already.

m3sta 1y ago

Australian politicians, police, and a specific chunk of the population would be exempt from this... like with privacy laws.

marcus_holmes 1y ago
indeed. Rules for thee but not for me.

naruhodo 1y ago

Mate... > 2038: all visits to all sites will be recorded That's been the case since 2015. ISPs are required to record customer ID, record date, time and IP address and retain it for two years to be accessed by government agencies. It was meant to be gated by warrants, but a bunch of non-law-enforcement entities applied for warrantless access, including local councils, the RSPCA (animal protection charity), and fucking greyhound racing. It's ancient history, so I'm not sure if they were able to do so. The abuse loopholes might finally be closed up soon though. https://privacy108.com.au/insights/metadata-access/ https://privacy108.com.au/insights/metadata-access/ https://delimiter.com.au/2016/01/18/61-agencies-apply-for-metadata-access/ https://delimiter.com.au/2016/01/18/61-agencies-apply-for-me... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-18/government-releases-list-of-agencies-applying-to-access-metadata/7095836 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-18/government-releases-l... https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2023/government-acts-to-finally-reform-metadata-regime.html https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2023/government-acts-to-finall...

marcus_holmes 1y ago
I didn't know that. Thanks
SlowTao 1y ago
I cannot find it any more due to the degradation of Google but there was a report on the amount of times this data was access in NSW for 2018 (?). It was something like 280,000 requests for that year alone!
closewith 1y ago
Yes, the 2038, 2040, and 2042 scenarios are already reality in most of the world. We're in the dystopian nightmare.

pmontra 1y ago

> 2039: this list of sites cannot be visited by any Australian of any age Block lists are not new. For example Italy blocks a number of sites, usually at DNS level with the cooperation of ISPs and DNS services. You can autotranslate this article from 2024 to get the gist of what is being blocked and why https://www.money.it/elenco-siti-vietati-italia-vengono-perseguiti https://www.money.it/elenco-siti-vietati-italia-vengono-pers... I believe other countries of the same area block sites for similar reasons.

Nursie 1y ago

> your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case As others have said, that's the case already and not just in Australia. Same in lots of other places like the UK and the whole EU. Less so in the US (though they can demand any data the ISP has, and require ISPs to collect data on individuals) > Australia is quietly extremely authoritarian. It is weird, as a recent-ish migrant I do agree, there are rules for absolutely bloody everything here and the population seems in general to be very keen on "Ban it!" as a solution to everything. It's also rife with regulatory capture - Ah, no mate, you can't change that light fitting yourself, gotta get a registered sparky in for that or you can cop a huge fine. New tap? You have to be kidding me, no, you need a registered plumber to do anything more than plunger your toilet, and we only just legalised that in Western Australia last year. It's been said before, but at some point the great Aussie Larrikin just died. The Wowsers won and most of them don't even know they're wowsers.

cmoski 1y ago
There are a lot of people changing their own light fittings. I have never heard about laws against plumbing but I don't see them stopping old mate from doing it. Electrical work can be pretty dangerous...
- Nursie 1y ago
  Yeah, here in WA at least, there are signs up in the plumbing section of Bunnings saying “Stop! DIY plumbing is illegal! Only buy this stuff if you’re getting a professional to fit it!” The reasoning is often “people might contaminate the water supply for a whole street!” Which just points to poor provision of one way valves at the property line. But yeah, illegal. I agree there are limits with what you want to do on electricity, but turning the breaker off and replacing a light fitting or light switch is pretty trivial. And I know people do just get on with it and do some of this stuff themselves anyway. Was particularly pissed off that in January this year the plumbing “protections” were extended to rural residents who aren’t even connected to mains water or sewage, to protect us from substandard work by … making it illegal for us to do it ourselves. Highly annoying.

almosthere 1y ago

2027: ufos visit, and decide to end the human experiment, game over.

SlowTao 1y ago

As others have pointed out how many of these are already present here. I suspect the rest of your time line is far to optimistic in how long it will take to get there. I suspect that with the pace of decline most of that will be enacted in the next 5 years. I would like to say "It is all because of X political party!" but both the majors are the same in this regard and they usually vote unanimously on these things.

closewith 1y ago

> Australia is quietly extremely authoritarian. Not quietly, I don't think. Not like Australia is known for freedom and human rights. It's known for expeditionary wars, human rights abuses, jailing whistleblowers and protesters, protecting war criminals, environmental and social destruction, and following the United States like a puppy.

bravesoul2 1y ago
US is the same but with a different leash-holding country.

megablast 1y ago

> your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case Pretty sure google searches have been used in murder trials before, including the mushroom poisoning one going on right now in Victoria.

red_admiral 1y ago

My understanding of US current policy: > your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case Already the case. Mostly for the kind of dumb criminal who is suspected of murder and has been found googling "defences to murder" and "how to hide a body". > the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities If there's a court order (good) or a national security letter (occasionally good but very open to abuse). Maybe the NSA or some guy in DOGE has automatic API access to this data anyway. > you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits Already the case for youtube and reddit content marked NSFW - either by the creator or by a fairly stupid algorithm. (You can see these boobies, but not those ones.) But the age verification is mostly "open a new account and enter a birth date". Also reddit has the dumbest age verification/login bypass ever. (Your honor, editing an URL is nation-state level hacking and we can't reasonably defend against that.) > all visits to all sites will be recorded Something something Permanent Record. > you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet Ok this one is cheating a bit, but don't you need a google (or samsung etc.) account to set up an android let alone access the internet? Also cheating a bit but you need a login and contract with your ISP to get on the internet too.