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So, while I agree that this feels foreign and wrong to me as someone who has experienced "The Internet" for so long, I can't help but wonder if we can separate

by xp84 1y ago

So, while I agree that this feels foreign and wrong to me as someone who has experienced "The Internet" for so long, I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works. I'm asking this in good faith. Given that: 1. The Internet is not an optional subscription service today the way it was in 1995. Every kid and adult has 1,000 opportunities to get online including on the multiple devices every one of their peers owns, which a single set of parents has no control over. So "Just keep them off the Internet/control their devices" seems like a silly "Just" instruction. 2. The Internet is nearly infinite. The author of this editorial says "then install a content blocker on your kids’ devices and add my site to it". This is a silly argument since the whole point is that no one has ever heard of him/her and it's obviously impossible for a filter (let's just assume filters can't be bypassed) can "just" enumerate every inappropriate site even if it employed a full-time staff who did nothing but add new sites to the list all day long. So given all of that, how do we justify how the Internet must operate on different rules than the offline world does? One can't open a "Free adult library" downtown and allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn. I'd have to check IDs and do my best to keep kids out. It also seems like it would be gross to do so. If you agree with that, why should the Internet operate on different rules? I'd also like to separate the logistics from the morality here. If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! But then the focus should be on finding a good privacy-respecting solution, not just arguing for the status quo.

mindslight 1y ago
> allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn As far as I'm aware, online sites generally don't let children wander in either. One of the reasons being they will make a mess of the cabling. That's obviously in jest, but the point is that physical presence is the entire crux here. When entering a physical space, you do so with a physical body that society has demanded be able to be identified. And age can often be determined without even fully verifying identification, which is why our society has been so accepting of age checks. The Internet has flourished precisely because of the foundation where one does not need to be identified. In fact one does not even need to be human, nor accessing a digital service the way the publisher intends. Separation of concerns. This has worked for what, 30 years at this point? An entire generation? If parents are still buying their kids hardcore pornography terminals these days, they've got no one to blame but themselves. And no, I do not care that "everybody else is doing it". Ultimately, the "logistics" cannot be separated from the "morality" - it is a different type of space, and the moral thing to do is engage with it as it is, instead of demanding centralizing authoritarian changes. These demands are from a narrow contingent of people that could straightforwardly build their own desired environment (the content blocking you've referenced as a straw man, or more accurately kid-friendly content curation), but yet have not done so. Because ultimately these types of calls are never actually about "the kids" but rather a general desire to insert themselves as morality police into everyone's business.
_Algernon_ 1y ago
The fundamental problem—and it's a big one—is that in the physical world, age verification does not result in a centralized log of when and where I was, and what I did. If I buy cigarettes I show my paper id to some dude and then buy smokes. It's transient with no record (except the fallible memory of the bloke doing the ID check). This is not true for the proposed age verification schemes for the internet and that is a big problem. Unless this is solved, these schemes deserve every level of resistance we can muster.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - _Algernon_ 1y ago
    Age verification is easy. Age verification that leaves no record, is anonymous, and not circumvent-able is difficult. In the physical world it relies on the fallibility of human memory. No such luck with replicated databases.
    - chgs 1y ago
      Site generates random key Key and verification passed to verifier Verified list is published Site pulls list and checks its number has been verified Site doesn’t know who it is, and verifier doesn’t know which site was verified against
      - _Algernon_ 1y ago
        How do you prove that the generated key by the site is actually randomly generated? I certainly don't trust a random porn site to do this right. If the verified list is tied against identity, there is only a simple law change required to de-anonymize everything.
        chgs 1y ago
        Doesn’t really matter surely, you only need to trust the identity provider not to leak your identity and your porn provider not to have a key that your identity provider can link to.
perth 1y ago
Nitpick: currently in the US, most public libraries do not regulate anyone, of any age, from reading “adult” books.
- watwut 1y ago
  They wont allow minors to take out porn. Simply, they wont and it would be illegal for them.
  - aaronmdjones 1y ago
    I think the point they were making is that a child can walk into a library, pick up any book, and open it. All without any adults being in the loop. They can do that today.
    - watwut 1y ago
      Yeah, and my point is that the "pick up any book" thing is hiding the fact that selection is in fact seriously limited. And second, underaged kids can not checkout non kid material without adult in the loop. That part is simply not true, the librarian will say no to the child or ask for parents permission.
      - aaronmdjones 1y ago
        > hiding the fact that selection is in fact seriously limited If your goal is "prevent children from accessing adult material", it really isn't that limited. > underaged kids can not checkout non kid material without adult in the loop They don't need to. They can read it in the library; that's what libraries are for.
        watwut 1y ago
        Have you ever been in the library? Cause they really limit minors. And obviously "adult material" is not referencing cookbooks for housewifes nor antic philosophy nor fantasy books meant for adults. It does in fact means porn and such.
kelnos 1y ago
Flip it on its head. An age verification requirement might stop your 12-year-old from accessing a porn site headquartered or hosted in the US, but it will do nothing to keep your kid from finding porn on any of the thousands (tens of thousands? more?) of websites hosted in various other countries who don't care about this sort of thing. These sites are (or will be, if US-based sites become inaccessible) just as easy to find, and just as hard to block with normal parental-controls style content blocking. Requiring age verification in the US doesn't solve the problem. It just stifles free speech and turns us even more into a Christian nanny-state. The people pushing these laws don't care about children, in reality. They care about banning pornography in the US, and this is one step on that road. > If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! That's not the issue. The issue is that it's impossible to achieve the stated goal (making it impossible or even hard for children to access adult content), period. Whether or not the age-verification is done in a privacy-preserving manner is irrelevant. There are two ways to "solve" this problem. One is better parental controls, but this will always be a cat-and-mouse game, and will never be perfect. The other is to accept that your kids will sometimes see things that you don't want them to see. That's how the world has always worked, and will continue to always work. Be there for them to provide context and support when they run across these things by accident and are confused or upset, and punish when they seek it out against the rules and boundaries you've set for them. You know... be a parent, and parent them.
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  Are they actually just as hard to block though? e.g. I don't see much reason to allow traffic to any Russian or Chinese IPs for any reason from my network. To be honest a default blacklist to any non-American IP seems like it'd not cause much trouble for my family, and then if there were some educational or FOSS or whatever sites in Europe, those could be whitelisted on a case by case basis. Similarly the only expected VPN traffic in my network would be inbound to my wire guard server/router. Everything else can be banned by default.
  - Retric 1y ago
    Blocking every country outside the US is simply admitting failure here.
Asooka 1y ago
I would say the best option, if there absolutely must be age verification etc., would be to have a registry of sites that comply with all regulations and by default devices shouldn't access sites off that list. Basically a giant allolist for verified good sites. The internet is already effectively shrunk to less than a dozen sites for regular users, so this won't impact them, and the rest of us can have real free speech and unregulated internet back by switching DNS servers or some similar trivial change. Or we move everything not meant for the sanitised internet to TOR hidden services.
- xp84 1y ago
  I actually agree with this. One would just need Apple, Google, and Microsoft to buy into this and listing a legitimate site on the registry would be adopted as fast as universal HTTPS was. Keeping pubescent kids from mainly learning about sexuality through the lens of often-disturbing porn is a worthwhile goal. Still need a solution to age-verify without tracking though, or else people would think of it as something to be turned off immediately since Reddit and X would obviously not be on the registry since they host tremendous amounts of porn. I don't think that's an intractable problem at all, and I think as technologists we should be putting our efforts into building the most trustworthy system for that instead of just campaigning for nothing to change because it's "the parents' problem." Easy for us to say: We're all either not parents, or we're the type who are equipped to properly filter access to the Internet for our young kids. In reality, the single mom of 3 working 12 hours a day is not equipped to "just" set up a proxy server or figure out how to install internet filtering software on the Amazon Fire tablet she got her 8-year-old to watch Spider-Man.
- int_19h 1y ago
  But we don't need any government intervention for this kind of thing. You can already maintain such a whitelist yourself, and interest groups can collaborate with businesses interested in maintaining their public image to have a centralized registry of voluntary certification for websites (similar to those ratings for e.g. movies that we already have). Separately from that, if switching DNS servers is an easy workaround to keep access to porn, kids interested in it will quickly learn how to do so, trading recipes and even downloaded content directly. Ditto with Tor etc. The fundamental problem here is that it is an attempt to censor something for which there is huge demand among the very group that's being excluded. The only way you can do so that would actually work is full-fledged panopticon, where all communication channels are pervasively monitored.
djeastm 1y ago
RE Point 1. All it takes is one of those other peers' parents to allow them to view pornography and then that kid just becomes the porn-distributor for the school, just like some kids in my day passed around porno mags. In essence, nothing changes for the kids, but every single adult is at best inconvenienced and at worst at risk of government invasion of their privacy. Not worth doing, imo. RE Point 2. They could just use a whitelist instead of a blacklist/filter. They exist already, after all. Fill it up with sites showing the wholesome version of the world you want your child exposed to and they can only visit those places.
- imtringued 1y ago
  Yeah this is the thing everyone here seems to ignore. The moment someone does age verification and downloads a file the whole thing falls apart. You would have to lock down any electronics device that can be used to bypass the restrictions. In reality the best way to do this is to build a screen based nudity filter into the device, which is not only more effective, it exposes this whole nonsense as an attempt to grow the police state.
anondude24 1y ago
> I'd also like to separate the logistics from the morality here. If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! But then the focus should be on finding a good privacy-respecting solution, not just arguing for the status quo. I like this point. I feel like the tech community just figured politicians would forget about the issue. Instead of working together to develop a solution.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  Are you assuming the "tech community" doesn't have the right to argue this on morality and thus refuse to provide technical means ?
  - anondude24 1y ago
    No. The tech community absolutely has the right to refuse to provide technical means and argue any views they want. However we're seeing what happens next. Politicians write laws anyway forcing the tech community to do what they want. I am just saying that in hindsight a bit of cooperation may have resulted in a less privacy invasive solution. I guess with the supreme court ruling it's too late now. The politicians have already won.
- int_19h 1y ago
  By providing technical means to implement such censorship in "more acceptable" ways, you lower the political bar for its passing. Not only that, but once you do so, you effectively concede that such censorship is valid to begin with, which can and will be used against you to pass further laws along those lines in the future. And if those laws cannot be implemented without ditching all that privacy you worked so carefully to respect in your compromise, well, too bad about that.
makeitdouble 1y ago
> I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works. From a different angle: many people went into the web in disagreement with how the physical world is managed. Those who were good at politics also tried to improve the offline rules, but not everyone can. From that POV, opposing the application of irl biggotery into the online world isn't some illogical or whimsical move. They tried to make a better world for the likes of them, and in a way you're using the success of the platform to explain why they're not welcome anymore. I'd be sympathetic to your logic if it was for the betterment of the online world, but IMHO it surely isn't and we're looking at bullies expanding irl power to crush other platforms as well.
totallykvothe 1y ago
You're correct, and all the arguments against it simply boil down to "but we can't guarantee a perfect solution so therefore we shouldn't even try".
derbOac 1y ago
Several things: 1. In the offline world, the child and media provider are in the same physical location, subject to the same laws. On the internet, they're in different places. This is central, as the argument by SCOTUS seems to be that the most restrictive law anywhere applies everywhere. 2. I don't think "just" is a silly instruction. Your child can do any number of things and we expect parents to have a certain amount of oversight and/or involvement to help children navigate it. I don't see how the internet is any different from anything else. 3. There's an important difference between a child entering a store or library and finding a page on the internet. Entering a store, library, or physical home, or whatever, presupposes a certain amount of effort involved in entering the premises, and that the owner of the store or whatever is present and can in fact monitor each visitor easily; on the internet it's a matter of linking from one text to another. Sometimes I don't think you can draw analogies easily, and this is one of those cases. To me it's less like requiring an ID for purchase of a media item within a store, and more like having ID requirements to view something in a public square, or having ID requirements to publish the media item in the first place. It's a bit like SCOTUS saying "if you publish a book in state X where it's legal, but state Y requires a publisher to be responsible for monitoring every purchaser of their book everywhere, then you have to comply with state Y." For what it's worth, I think its absurd to have legal age requirements for speech, offline or online.
realusername 1y ago
> can "just" enumerate every inappropriate site even if it employed a full-time staff who did nothing but add new sites to the list all day long. That's also an argument against an id verification mechanism then, the list of sites to block who don't implement one will be infinite.
efreak 1y ago
Also, censorship software is infamously bad at curation. Peacefire isn't around anymore these days, but the sites blocked by local censorship software around 2000 is pretty terrible, whether they used keyword filters or URL lists. See the list of sites in the left column at https://web.archive.org/web/2020/http://www.peacefire.org https://web.archive.org/web/2020/http://www.peacefire.org (peacefire circumventor is a tool I used to use to access blocked sites at school)

by xp84 1y ago

mindslight 1y ago

> allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn As far as I'm aware, online sites generally don't let children wander in either. One of the reasons being they will make a mess of the cabling. That's obviously in jest, but the point is that physical presence is the entire crux here. When entering a physical space, you do so with a physical body that society has demanded be able to be identified. And age can often be determined without even fully verifying identification, which is why our society has been so accepting of age checks. The Internet has flourished precisely because of the foundation where one does not need to be identified. In fact one does not even need to be human, nor accessing a digital service the way the publisher intends. Separation of concerns. This has worked for what, 30 years at this point? An entire generation? If parents are still buying their kids hardcore pornography terminals these days, they've got no one to blame but themselves. And no, I do not care that "everybody else is doing it". Ultimately, the "logistics" cannot be separated from the "morality" - it is a different type of space, and the moral thing to do is engage with it as it is, instead of demanding centralizing authoritarian changes. These demands are from a narrow contingent of people that could straightforwardly build their own desired environment (the content blocking you've referenced as a straw man, or more accurately kid-friendly content curation), but yet have not done so. Because ultimately these types of calls are never actually about "the kids" but rather a general desire to insert themselves as morality police into everyone's business.

_Algernon_ 1y ago

The fundamental problem—and it's a big one—is that in the physical world, age verification does not result in a centralized log of when and where I was, and what I did. If I buy cigarettes I show my paper id to some dude and then buy smokes. It's transient with no record (except the fallible memory of the bloke doing the ID check). This is not true for the proposed age verification schemes for the internet and that is a big problem. Unless this is solved, these schemes deserve every level of resistance we can muster.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
[flagged]
- _Algernon_ 1y ago
  Age verification is easy. Age verification that leaves no record, is anonymous, and not circumvent-able is difficult. In the physical world it relies on the fallibility of human memory. No such luck with replicated databases.
  - chgs 1y ago
    Site generates random key Key and verification passed to verifier Verified list is published Site pulls list and checks its number has been verified Site doesn’t know who it is, and verifier doesn’t know which site was verified against
    - _Algernon_ 1y ago
      How do you prove that the generated key by the site is actually randomly generated? I certainly don't trust a random porn site to do this right. If the verified list is tied against identity, there is only a simple law change required to de-anonymize everything.
      - chgs 1y ago
        Doesn’t really matter surely, you only need to trust the identity provider not to leak your identity and your porn provider not to have a key that your identity provider can link to.

perth 1y ago

Nitpick: currently in the US, most public libraries do not regulate anyone, of any age, from reading “adult” books.

watwut 1y ago
They wont allow minors to take out porn. Simply, they wont and it would be illegal for them.
- aaronmdjones 1y ago
  I think the point they were making is that a child can walk into a library, pick up any book, and open it. All without any adults being in the loop. They can do that today.
  - watwut 1y ago
    Yeah, and my point is that the "pick up any book" thing is hiding the fact that selection is in fact seriously limited. And second, underaged kids can not checkout non kid material without adult in the loop. That part is simply not true, the librarian will say no to the child or ask for parents permission.
    - aaronmdjones 1y ago
      > hiding the fact that selection is in fact seriously limited If your goal is "prevent children from accessing adult material", it really isn't that limited. > underaged kids can not checkout non kid material without adult in the loop They don't need to. They can read it in the library; that's what libraries are for.
      - watwut 1y ago
        Have you ever been in the library? Cause they really limit minors. And obviously "adult material" is not referencing cookbooks for housewifes nor antic philosophy nor fantasy books meant for adults. It does in fact means porn and such.

kelnos 1y ago

Flip it on its head. An age verification requirement might stop your 12-year-old from accessing a porn site headquartered or hosted in the US, but it will do nothing to keep your kid from finding porn on any of the thousands (tens of thousands? more?) of websites hosted in various other countries who don't care about this sort of thing. These sites are (or will be, if US-based sites become inaccessible) just as easy to find, and just as hard to block with normal parental-controls style content blocking. Requiring age verification in the US doesn't solve the problem. It just stifles free speech and turns us even more into a Christian nanny-state. The people pushing these laws don't care about children, in reality. They care about banning pornography in the US, and this is one step on that road. > If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! That's not the issue. The issue is that it's impossible to achieve the stated goal (making it impossible or even hard for children to access adult content), period. Whether or not the age-verification is done in a privacy-preserving manner is irrelevant. There are two ways to "solve" this problem. One is better parental controls, but this will always be a cat-and-mouse game, and will never be perfect. The other is to accept that your kids will sometimes see things that you don't want them to see. That's how the world has always worked, and will continue to always work. Be there for them to provide context and support when they run across these things by accident and are confused or upset, and punish when they seek it out against the rules and boundaries you've set for them. You know... be a parent, and parent them.

ndriscoll 1y ago
Are they actually just as hard to block though? e.g. I don't see much reason to allow traffic to any Russian or Chinese IPs for any reason from my network. To be honest a default blacklist to any non-American IP seems like it'd not cause much trouble for my family, and then if there were some educational or FOSS or whatever sites in Europe, those could be whitelisted on a case by case basis. Similarly the only expected VPN traffic in my network would be inbound to my wire guard server/router. Everything else can be banned by default.
- Retric 1y ago
  Blocking every country outside the US is simply admitting failure here.

Asooka 1y ago

I would say the best option, if there absolutely must be age verification etc., would be to have a registry of sites that comply with all regulations and by default devices shouldn't access sites off that list. Basically a giant allolist for verified good sites. The internet is already effectively shrunk to less than a dozen sites for regular users, so this won't impact them, and the rest of us can have real free speech and unregulated internet back by switching DNS servers or some similar trivial change. Or we move everything not meant for the sanitised internet to TOR hidden services.

xp84 1y ago
I actually agree with this. One would just need Apple, Google, and Microsoft to buy into this and listing a legitimate site on the registry would be adopted as fast as universal HTTPS was. Keeping pubescent kids from mainly learning about sexuality through the lens of often-disturbing porn is a worthwhile goal. Still need a solution to age-verify without tracking though, or else people would think of it as something to be turned off immediately since Reddit and X would obviously not be on the registry since they host tremendous amounts of porn. I don't think that's an intractable problem at all, and I think as technologists we should be putting our efforts into building the most trustworthy system for that instead of just campaigning for nothing to change because it's "the parents' problem." Easy for us to say: We're all either not parents, or we're the type who are equipped to properly filter access to the Internet for our young kids. In reality, the single mom of 3 working 12 hours a day is not equipped to "just" set up a proxy server or figure out how to install internet filtering software on the Amazon Fire tablet she got her 8-year-old to watch Spider-Man.
int_19h 1y ago
But we don't need any government intervention for this kind of thing. You can already maintain such a whitelist yourself, and interest groups can collaborate with businesses interested in maintaining their public image to have a centralized registry of voluntary certification for websites (similar to those ratings for e.g. movies that we already have). Separately from that, if switching DNS servers is an easy workaround to keep access to porn, kids interested in it will quickly learn how to do so, trading recipes and even downloaded content directly. Ditto with Tor etc. The fundamental problem here is that it is an attempt to censor something for which there is huge demand among the very group that's being excluded. The only way you can do so that would actually work is full-fledged panopticon, where all communication channels are pervasively monitored.

djeastm 1y ago

RE Point 1. All it takes is one of those other peers' parents to allow them to view pornography and then that kid just becomes the porn-distributor for the school, just like some kids in my day passed around porno mags. In essence, nothing changes for the kids, but every single adult is at best inconvenienced and at worst at risk of government invasion of their privacy. Not worth doing, imo. RE Point 2. They could just use a whitelist instead of a blacklist/filter. They exist already, after all. Fill it up with sites showing the wholesome version of the world you want your child exposed to and they can only visit those places.

imtringued 1y ago
Yeah this is the thing everyone here seems to ignore. The moment someone does age verification and downloads a file the whole thing falls apart. You would have to lock down any electronics device that can be used to bypass the restrictions. In reality the best way to do this is to build a screen based nudity filter into the device, which is not only more effective, it exposes this whole nonsense as an attempt to grow the police state.

anondude24 1y ago

> I'd also like to separate the logistics from the morality here. If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! But then the focus should be on finding a good privacy-respecting solution, not just arguing for the status quo. I like this point. I feel like the tech community just figured politicians would forget about the issue. Instead of working together to develop a solution.

makeitdouble 1y ago
Are you assuming the "tech community" doesn't have the right to argue this on morality and thus refuse to provide technical means ?
- anondude24 1y ago
  No. The tech community absolutely has the right to refuse to provide technical means and argue any views they want. However we're seeing what happens next. Politicians write laws anyway forcing the tech community to do what they want. I am just saying that in hindsight a bit of cooperation may have resulted in a less privacy invasive solution. I guess with the supreme court ruling it's too late now. The politicians have already won.
int_19h 1y ago
By providing technical means to implement such censorship in "more acceptable" ways, you lower the political bar for its passing. Not only that, but once you do so, you effectively concede that such censorship is valid to begin with, which can and will be used against you to pass further laws along those lines in the future. And if those laws cannot be implemented without ditching all that privacy you worked so carefully to respect in your compromise, well, too bad about that.

makeitdouble 1y ago

> I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works. From a different angle: many people went into the web in disagreement with how the physical world is managed. Those who were good at politics also tried to improve the offline rules, but not everyone can. From that POV, opposing the application of irl biggotery into the online world isn't some illogical or whimsical move. They tried to make a better world for the likes of them, and in a way you're using the success of the platform to explain why they're not welcome anymore. I'd be sympathetic to your logic if it was for the betterment of the online world, but IMHO it surely isn't and we're looking at bullies expanding irl power to crush other platforms as well.

totallykvothe 1y ago

You're correct, and all the arguments against it simply boil down to "but we can't guarantee a perfect solution so therefore we shouldn't even try".

derbOac 1y ago

Several things: 1. In the offline world, the child and media provider are in the same physical location, subject to the same laws. On the internet, they're in different places. This is central, as the argument by SCOTUS seems to be that the most restrictive law anywhere applies everywhere. 2. I don't think "just" is a silly instruction. Your child can do any number of things and we expect parents to have a certain amount of oversight and/or involvement to help children navigate it. I don't see how the internet is any different from anything else. 3. There's an important difference between a child entering a store or library and finding a page on the internet. Entering a store, library, or physical home, or whatever, presupposes a certain amount of effort involved in entering the premises, and that the owner of the store or whatever is present and can in fact monitor each visitor easily; on the internet it's a matter of linking from one text to another. Sometimes I don't think you can draw analogies easily, and this is one of those cases. To me it's less like requiring an ID for purchase of a media item within a store, and more like having ID requirements to view something in a public square, or having ID requirements to publish the media item in the first place. It's a bit like SCOTUS saying "if you publish a book in state X where it's legal, but state Y requires a publisher to be responsible for monitoring every purchaser of their book everywhere, then you have to comply with state Y." For what it's worth, I think its absurd to have legal age requirements for speech, offline or online.

realusername 1y ago

> can "just" enumerate every inappropriate site even if it employed a full-time staff who did nothing but add new sites to the list all day long. That's also an argument against an id verification mechanism then, the list of sites to block who don't implement one will be infinite.

efreak 1y ago

Also, censorship software is infamously bad at curation. Peacefire isn't around anymore these days, but the sites blocked by local censorship software around 2000 is pretty terrible, whether they used keyword filters or URL lists. See the list of sites in the left column at https://web.archive.org/web/2020/http://www.peacefire.org https://web.archive.org/web/2020/http://www.peacefire.org (peacefire circumventor is a tool I used to use to access blocked sites at school)