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I don't think its unreasonable for a government to ask company to abide by its laws if it want to do business with its citizens. Where I think they are going w

I don't think its unreasonable for a government to ask company to abide by its laws if it want to do business with its citizens. Where I think they are going wrong is that they are trying to levy fines rather than just blocking the business. Oh, and the whole age verification thing is bonkers. I'm a parent of 2 teenagers, I don't think its asking too much for a parent to be responsible for what children see and do on the internet.

cyanydeez 1y ago
The problem with relying on parents is that they're either reckless or simply unable to prevent the kids from smoking. By the time they're teenagers, it's pretty easy for them to access anything on the internet regardless of the controls implemented. 4chan is a cesspool, and society is worse off letting it fester, but you arn't solving this problem by "personal responsibility" of parents.
- mothballed 1y ago
  You can legally order pipe tobacco and cigars on the internet in the US without showing ID. When I was a kid you could do it with wine too, and I doubt that's changed. I don't find it to be a problem.
  - malfist 1y ago
    Depends on the state. You absolutely cannot order alcohol online in Kentucky
    - mothballed 1y ago
      buywinesonline.com (random retailer I found) says they do Buy Wines Online currently does not ship alcohol to AL, MI, MS, UT, HI, AK Says it requires an "adult signature" but anyone who's signed for fedex/ups knows they don't check your ID. I can say, when I was in high school, they did not check...
      - malfist 1y ago
        Kentucky has some weird laws. You can ship, but only if the distillery makes less than so many gallons of stuff per year
        lazide 1y ago
        There is a wide gulf between ‘your county sheriff will get angry if they find out’ and ‘UPS/Fedex will not deliver it in a nondescript brown box’.
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  I think smoking is a little different for a few reasons. It's physically addictive with harsh withdrawal symptoms that makes it difficult to quit; and it has significant healthcare costs for the wider community when smokers eventually get sick and die prematurely. Nobody is going to get addicted and die prematurely from reading 4chan. Cleaning what you consider a cesspool is not the job of the government. These laws are about kids stumbling into the cesspool before they are ready. Parents can choose to just not give their kids phones till they are 12 or 13 (highschool). Before that, internet access is on locked down devices in the family room with somebody else around. Personally I think once your kids are about 13-14 you have probably had your chance to pass on your morals, they need to be mentally prepared to encounter bad stuff on the internet and deal with it.
  - cyanydeez 1y ago
    social media is clearly physically addictive. America's turned into a neonazi democracy partly because of this.
    - exoverito 1y ago
      Psychologically perhaps, but to say physically addictive is not precise. The government in general has been becoming increasingly authoritarian and centralized far before social media, see the abuses of the CIA and MK ULTRA, Operation Mockingbird, COINTELPRO, the War on Terror. You use the term neonazi, yet I hope you're honest enough to recognize the left also has dark authoritarian impulses. It was only a few years ago that we had ruinous lockdowns, widespread censorship, illegal mandates for experimental medical interventions, mostly peaceful riots, a 30% spike in homicides, anarcho-tyranny with the prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny, etc.
      - ares623 1y ago
        How is nicotine different from dopamine? Both are addictive chemistry. One comes in little sticks, the other comes in a black glass and metal slab.
mikkupikku 1y ago
If you honestly believe you can control what your two teens see and do on the internet, you've either got them chained up in a closet, or you're wrong.
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  There is a fairly big gap between chained in the closet and completely free access to the internet. There is also a lot difference between catching a glimpse of some porn and spending hours in their bedroom exploring the darkest corners of the internet. I don't have them chained up, but I'm also not concerned they are become radicalized, or damaging themselves watching snuff films and goatse.
- gorgoiler 1y ago
  Having worked with children from 10 all the way up to 18 in a residential setting, I couldn’t agree more. In a way they are like addicts: you love them and want the best for them but you absolutely have to be on your guard for egregious breaches of trust cropping up without warning. Children / teenagers / young adults can be driven by curiosity, peers, and lack of judgment into all kinds of dreadful behavior, and it can come from the least likely ones just as much as the obviously naughty ones. The best we can do is to warn them in advance, accept that mistakes will be made anyway, and support them in learning from their mistakes. Keep at it for even a short while and you too can experience the shock of how your most charming, academically brilliant, upstanding star pupil is found throwing up a bottle of vodka she just drank!
- Aurornis 1y ago
  With parenting it’s not a case where you have 100% airtight control over everything with no possible leaks. It’s a spectrum where you impose expectations combined with some controls. The parents I’ve seen who give up and make no efforts because they think it’s impossible to perfect control everything don’t have great outcomes. This applies to everything from internet to drinking alcohol and more.
  - mikkupikku 1y ago
    I went through it and circumvented it completely in the 90s when the only way online was a computer with a modem in the living room. It's so much easier today, its absolutely trivial to circumvent anything you're doing. Old smartphones from "a friend's brother" are easily hidden and can be used on wifi you don't control. All it takes is the kid wanting to go behind your back, the rest becomes easy for them. The only chance you have is establishing a good relationship with your kid and instilling good values. You can't actually control them online unless you lock down their life like a supermax prison.
HDThoreaun 1y ago
It is not possible to censor the internet when VPNs are freely available. The more you try the more it backfires. By telling your kids they cant see a website they are sure to visit it, all they have to do is google for a free vpn.
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  I think buy the time your kids can order, pay for, and configure a VPN they are old enough to look at boobies on the internet.
- ninalanyon 1y ago
  > It is not possible to censor the internet when VPNs are freely available. The obvious next step is to ban VPNs too or to block connections to their servers.
  - HDThoreaun 1y ago
    There are ways around this too. When the VPN entrance point is a static IP a ban may work but what happens when a product shows up that spins up dynamic VPSs in the public cloud? All the cloud providers have free trials that let people do this for free forever. Sounds difficult but surely people will come up with a streamlined approach if push comes to shove. Even in china where using a VPN is a major crime they are unable to stop people from using them.
    - gorgoiler 1y ago
      Off the top of my head here are some ways you could fairly easily shut down VPNs. The big one is to start whitelisting good protocols only. That means everything must be https and you have to at least pass the hostname in plaintext. Random traffic on UDP ports is now illegal as it is assumed to be VPN traffic. Another one is to pass a law telling ISPs to flag customers with traffic patterns only to a single IP address, set of IP addresses, or a single ASN. This means that you can’t just tunnel everything to your VPS in Amsterdam. You might also pass a law that still allows, say, ssh and random UDP traffic, but with the provision that bandwidth on any non HTTPS ports is capped at 200kbps. You only use ssh for running a shell after all — why would you need more than that! /s ASNs are a fun feature of the internet in that there are a lot of them but they are finite and scale on the order of organised human activity, mostly businesses. That means it is eminently tractable to categorize them all and regulate traffic from residential ISPs to commercial services ISPs only, and throttle traffic from home users to hosting providers. This already happens — try connecting to Reddit from anything other than a residential IP address.

cyanydeez 1y ago

The problem with relying on parents is that they're either reckless or simply unable to prevent the kids from smoking. By the time they're teenagers, it's pretty easy for them to access anything on the internet regardless of the controls implemented. 4chan is a cesspool, and society is worse off letting it fester, but you arn't solving this problem by "personal responsibility" of parents.

mothballed 1y ago
You can legally order pipe tobacco and cigars on the internet in the US without showing ID. When I was a kid you could do it with wine too, and I doubt that's changed. I don't find it to be a problem.
- malfist 1y ago
  Depends on the state. You absolutely cannot order alcohol online in Kentucky
  - mothballed 1y ago
    buywinesonline.com (random retailer I found) says they do Buy Wines Online currently does not ship alcohol to AL, MI, MS, UT, HI, AK Says it requires an "adult signature" but anyone who's signed for fedex/ups knows they don't check your ID. I can say, when I was in high school, they did not check...
    - malfist 1y ago
      Kentucky has some weird laws. You can ship, but only if the distillery makes less than so many gallons of stuff per year
      - lazide 1y ago
        There is a wide gulf between ‘your county sheriff will get angry if they find out’ and ‘UPS/Fedex will not deliver it in a nondescript brown box’.
jay_kyburz 1y ago
I think smoking is a little different for a few reasons. It's physically addictive with harsh withdrawal symptoms that makes it difficult to quit; and it has significant healthcare costs for the wider community when smokers eventually get sick and die prematurely. Nobody is going to get addicted and die prematurely from reading 4chan. Cleaning what you consider a cesspool is not the job of the government. These laws are about kids stumbling into the cesspool before they are ready. Parents can choose to just not give their kids phones till they are 12 or 13 (highschool). Before that, internet access is on locked down devices in the family room with somebody else around. Personally I think once your kids are about 13-14 you have probably had your chance to pass on your morals, they need to be mentally prepared to encounter bad stuff on the internet and deal with it.
- cyanydeez 1y ago
  social media is clearly physically addictive. America's turned into a neonazi democracy partly because of this.
  - exoverito 1y ago
    Psychologically perhaps, but to say physically addictive is not precise. The government in general has been becoming increasingly authoritarian and centralized far before social media, see the abuses of the CIA and MK ULTRA, Operation Mockingbird, COINTELPRO, the War on Terror. You use the term neonazi, yet I hope you're honest enough to recognize the left also has dark authoritarian impulses. It was only a few years ago that we had ruinous lockdowns, widespread censorship, illegal mandates for experimental medical interventions, mostly peaceful riots, a 30% spike in homicides, anarcho-tyranny with the prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny, etc.
    - ares623 1y ago
      How is nicotine different from dopamine? Both are addictive chemistry. One comes in little sticks, the other comes in a black glass and metal slab.

mikkupikku 1y ago

If you honestly believe you can control what your two teens see and do on the internet, you've either got them chained up in a closet, or you're wrong.

jay_kyburz 1y ago
There is a fairly big gap between chained in the closet and completely free access to the internet. There is also a lot difference between catching a glimpse of some porn and spending hours in their bedroom exploring the darkest corners of the internet. I don't have them chained up, but I'm also not concerned they are become radicalized, or damaging themselves watching snuff films and goatse.
gorgoiler 1y ago
Having worked with children from 10 all the way up to 18 in a residential setting, I couldn’t agree more. In a way they are like addicts: you love them and want the best for them but you absolutely have to be on your guard for egregious breaches of trust cropping up without warning. Children / teenagers / young adults can be driven by curiosity, peers, and lack of judgment into all kinds of dreadful behavior, and it can come from the least likely ones just as much as the obviously naughty ones. The best we can do is to warn them in advance, accept that mistakes will be made anyway, and support them in learning from their mistakes. Keep at it for even a short while and you too can experience the shock of how your most charming, academically brilliant, upstanding star pupil is found throwing up a bottle of vodka she just drank!
Aurornis 1y ago
With parenting it’s not a case where you have 100% airtight control over everything with no possible leaks. It’s a spectrum where you impose expectations combined with some controls. The parents I’ve seen who give up and make no efforts because they think it’s impossible to perfect control everything don’t have great outcomes. This applies to everything from internet to drinking alcohol and more.
- mikkupikku 1y ago
  I went through it and circumvented it completely in the 90s when the only way online was a computer with a modem in the living room. It's so much easier today, its absolutely trivial to circumvent anything you're doing. Old smartphones from "a friend's brother" are easily hidden and can be used on wifi you don't control. All it takes is the kid wanting to go behind your back, the rest becomes easy for them. The only chance you have is establishing a good relationship with your kid and instilling good values. You can't actually control them online unless you lock down their life like a supermax prison.

HDThoreaun 1y ago

It is not possible to censor the internet when VPNs are freely available. The more you try the more it backfires. By telling your kids they cant see a website they are sure to visit it, all they have to do is google for a free vpn.

jay_kyburz 1y ago
I think buy the time your kids can order, pay for, and configure a VPN they are old enough to look at boobies on the internet.
ninalanyon 1y ago
> It is not possible to censor the internet when VPNs are freely available. The obvious next step is to ban VPNs too or to block connections to their servers.
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  There are ways around this too. When the VPN entrance point is a static IP a ban may work but what happens when a product shows up that spins up dynamic VPSs in the public cloud? All the cloud providers have free trials that let people do this for free forever. Sounds difficult but surely people will come up with a streamlined approach if push comes to shove. Even in china where using a VPN is a major crime they are unable to stop people from using them.
  - gorgoiler 1y ago
    Off the top of my head here are some ways you could fairly easily shut down VPNs. The big one is to start whitelisting good protocols only. That means everything must be https and you have to at least pass the hostname in plaintext. Random traffic on UDP ports is now illegal as it is assumed to be VPN traffic. Another one is to pass a law telling ISPs to flag customers with traffic patterns only to a single IP address, set of IP addresses, or a single ASN. This means that you can’t just tunnel everything to your VPS in Amsterdam. You might also pass a law that still allows, say, ssh and random UDP traffic, but with the provision that bandwidth on any non HTTPS ports is capped at 200kbps. You only use ssh for running a shell after all — why would you need more than that! /s ASNs are a fun feature of the internet in that there are a lot of them but they are finite and scale on the order of organised human activity, mostly businesses. That means it is eminently tractable to categorize them all and regulate traffic from residential ISPs to commercial services ISPs only, and throttle traffic from home users to hosting providers. This already happens — try connecting to Reddit from anything other than a residential IP address.