16 ms·

Fighting the age-gated internet

284 points by geox 11mo ago

https://archive.md/nDeuh https://archive.md/nDeuh

Simulacra 11mo ago
I think all of this has gone overboard, even though I agree that children should not be exposed to pornography, I don't know what to do about it because I expect parents to monitor their child's Internet usage, which is a losing ideal. Are there better alternatives?
- jmclnx 11mo ago
  > I don't know what to do about it 1. No smart phones for the child before the age of NN, me I say 18. A Smart phone makes a great High School Graduation gift. 2. Only internet access from a desktop computer with a hosts file that the child cannot change. That probably means no Microsoft Windows PC. See: https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ eazy-peezy
  - casey2 11mo ago
    >> Hmm I can't find any porn on the internet, better ask around > Sure Timmy I'll send you porn, but it's illegal and I'm taking a big risk here so you gotta do something for me, also you can't tell anyone You've failed to solve the porn problem and now you've created a larger grooming/CDM problem.
    - jmclnx 11mo ago
      You can add porn sites to the hosts file yourself.
      - pjc50 11mo ago
        The point that people are making is that while restricting overt internet porn does remove it from sight of a lot of kids, it will also continue to circulate as "samizdat" through whatever filesharing mechanisms exist. When I was at school someone got busted for distributing BBS porn on floppy disks, no network required. Now we have terabyte SD cards.
        iamnothere 11mo ago
        Absolutely true. When I was a kid a few people got in trouble for drawing and circulating pixelated “porn” on their graphing calculators. You can’t stop teenagers from being teenagers.
        pyuser583 11mo ago
        This samizdat is already in existence and the principal way my kids access inappropriate content. Peer to peer, or peer to creepy pedo, is how the stuff gets passed around regardless. Do you have any idea the sorts of things kids send via SMS?
      - casey2 11mo ago
        hosts file isn't even the correct tool for this job. I don't know why this is being suggested a serious solution. I can add domain names and chose which IP address they resolve to. It can't even block websites. If I didn't know any better I would assume you are spreading misinformation to put children into an unsafe situation
        jmclnx 11mo ago
        Yes I know this is technically true. One could use iptables, but it is easier for people (users) to do this instead of getting iptables / pf or whatever configured. It is one size fits all.
  - gwbas1c 11mo ago
    You either don't have kids, or your children are adults. It's impractical in today's world to raise children without access to devices like tablets and smart phones. That's like having a sugar-free, no TV, hand-sewn, ect, ect, household. What's more important is to know what your kids are getting into, making sure they are comfortable discussing what they see, and teaching them independent decision making skills. For example, a few years ago, my then seven-year-old complained to me about all of the Jesus videos that were popping up on Youtube. I told her to thumbs down them, and now Youtube no longer suggests them. She also knows that if other kids watch Jesus videos, that's their right and to keep her mouth shut.
    - FeteCommuniste 11mo ago
      I'm curious, what were the "Jesus videos?"
      - gwbas1c 11mo ago
        Videos about Jesus aimed towards children. She never showed them to me. I'm assuming they're either Bible stories, "Jesus loves you and died for your sins" kind of things, or otherwise typical American evangelizing towards children. We aren't a religious household, but we do occasionally expose our children to religious things because we live in the US and it's a big part of American culture and my extended family. For example, when my oldest was into ancient Egypt, I watched the 10 Commands (Charton Heston Movie) with her, then read Exodus with her. I also explained that this is not literal history but that some people believe it is, and that she shouldn't discuss religion at school. She saw the videos shortly after we read Exodus, so I wonder if she was searching for for clips from the 10 Commandments or things about Exodus.
- Retr0id 11mo ago
  Repurpose the IPv4 "evil bit" as an "is adult" bit.
- iamnothere 11mo ago
  As a culture we just have to come to accept that parents should be responsible for managing kids’ devices, and provide them with the device-level tools for doing so. If a parent lets a 10 year old hang out in a sketchy alleyway every weekend, we would blame them for the inevitable consequences. Why do we not blame them for failing to monitor what their kids are up to online? And before someone tries to bore me with anecdotes about how your particular kid evaded whatever restrictions you put in place, I think if kids put in thoughtful effort and planning to evade restrictions then parents are off the hook. Same as if a kid stages an elaborate ruse (one that would fool most parents) to get out of the house and drink with friends. That’s not on you. Parents aren’t prison wardens and we shouldn’t ask for a police state to fill in parenting gaps. Making the state into the parent will affect us all, not just kids. I (and plenty of others) will fight to the end to preserve the last vestiges of the free, open internet. Overlay networks and even sneakernet if necessary. We’re not going to accept authoritarian control of communications no matter how much politicians want it.
  - seneca 11mo ago
    Well said. This is a social failure being exploited by shrude politicians to usurp more authority. Replacing parents with the state keeps playing out, and keeps being a horrible idea.
    - Simulacra 11mo ago
      That's a very good point
- zug_zug 11mo ago
  Just because something isn't ideal doesn't mean it's worth making a law about. Running with scissors -- not best practice. Worth trying to legislate? Absolutely not. Somebody who's 17 choosing to look at porn? Not in America's top 1 million problems.
- marcosdumay 11mo ago
  > I don't know what to do about it Do something similar to what we do with video: make a government enforced voluntary rating system (that is, you use if you want, if you use and lie, the government hits you) with a standard where sites can tell their ratings to the clients. Have the parents decide if they will use the rating for anything.
- mhitza 11mo ago
  A fraction of the money poured into these mass surveillance systems and proposals would have gone a long way in developing better parental control software. If startups build parental control it carries the wrong incentives. Realistically what's needed for proper parental control. 1. Software that parents can install on phones, and computers (which comes as an upside of less lockdown on devices) 2. A way to whitelist websites and applications (particularly for phones). 3. A way to share, reuse and collaborate on whitelists. No enforcement of a central authority.
- 0xbadcafebee 11mo ago
  Assuming the reason for these laws is to protect children from pornography, you could ask, what are the specific harms from pornography? You could identify those harms through scientific study (some have been done; it appears the harms are mostly due to a lack of education and understanding about what's going on in porn) and address them (educate children to understand what's going on intellectually/emotionally and how to treat people with respect). But that would require talking to kids about sex, which adults are petrified of. Our culture is puritanical, and uses fear and shame to avoid dealing with things like sex. It then perpetuates this fear and shame onto each generation, and it pervades every product and service we have. So we could try fighting the irrational fear and become less afraid of sex (and pornography would probably change because of it). But good luck doing that in this country.
  - procrasturbator 11mo ago
    Hey, yall are still ahead of the curve. A while back, in my country parents protested against their daughters getting free HPV shots. Couldn't handle the idea that their kids are separately embodied beings, you see. Plus I'd wager the long word "papillomavirus" scared most of those folks. So now we have higher STD rates and a significant number of young women permanently traumatized by being denied healthcare just because their parents were too obsessed with their private parts. And that's "thinkin' of the childrin" for ya.
- dfxm12 11mo ago
  I think we must think about what the downside of kids maybe being introduced to porn really. Realistically, it is pretty low. Given that, we shouldn't really be giving up anything to try and stop it. I was exposed to porn several ways pre-Internet. Older siblings, news stands, late night cable. If I wanted more, I could get it. It was simply not a problem. Maybe there is a problem for a tiny number of individuals, OK. A one size fits all approach like this still isn't the solution in these cases, though.
  - nobody9999 11mo ago
    >I was exposed to porn several ways pre-Internet. Older siblings, news stands, late night cable. If I wanted more, I could get it. It was simply not a problem. Yup. Me too. And it goes back much further. Cf. "Pictures of Lily"[0] for a pop culture exposition from nearly sixty years ago. The point being that "porn" isn't anything new, nor was it difficult to obtain (hence a popular song about "porn") even before computer networks. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-PHDR2yhxE&list=RDg-PHDR2yhxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-PHDR2yhxE&list=RDg-PHDR2yh... Edit: For those who would cite the current ubiquity of "hardcore" porn on the 'net, I'd say that's a difference in degree, not in kind. Something to consider.
    - phainopepla2 11mo ago
      A difference in degree can make all the difference.
- SoftTalker 11mo ago
  If we had a way to prove age without revealing any other identity that could be used for tracking/profile building. I don't see that being supported by the tech industry though, as they are almost completely reliant on tracking to earn money.
- tarentel 11mo ago
  So it is up to me to monitor your child? I don't work in porn or an even remotely related field but I have to implement age verification now because of Texas's law. Someone explain to me how this is protecting any children.
- AngryData 11mo ago
  Why do we need to do something? Is there really such a problem that needs to be solved? Because I see so many people who grew up with unrestricted access to the internet and did not go around watching every beheading or BDSM porn video around like everyone seems to think kids do today despite them being easily available at the time, and when they were come across they certainly didn't get everyone fucked in the head because of it. Everyone knew rotten.com, everyone was using napster/kazaa/mirc that was full of porn and BDSM and snuff videos. If we were going to have problems, people 40 years old now would have signs of it and be messed up, except they aren't.
whywhywhywhy 11mo ago
Guess at some point in the future it will come out who bankrolled all this because multiple countries in Europe and America don’t just roll something like this out in 8 months organically without someone paying off politicians to push it
- matwood 11mo ago
  It has nothing to do with age gating, and everything to do with tracking. While there may be some funding going on behind the scenes, governments love tracking on its own merits.
- iterance 11mo ago
  The fight for this kind of legislature has been ongoing for many years as part of a broader program that seeks to shape the kinds of information that can be stored, consumed, and propagated on the Internet. Age verification is only one branch of the fight, but an important one to the many who support government control: it is an inroad that allows governments to say they have a stake in who sees what.
- rkachowski 11mo ago
  It would be excellent to know who is pushing this and through what means. There is some unprecedented alignment across borders to restrict access and rights.
  - indoordin0saur 11mo ago
    Those pesky... adults!
- jamesbelchamber 11mo ago
  This strikes me as almost conspiratorial thinking, and it's reflected in the article. At one point they say KOSA is unpopular but.. it isn't? These laws (KOSA, OSA) enjoy broad, bipartisan popularity and politicians are jumping on the bandwagon because they want votes. It really is as simple as that. There's absolutely no way to counter this, or at least to round off the censorship power-grab this is allowing, if we don't admit to ourselves that people have become suspicious of the tech sector (us) and are reaching to clip our wings - starting with access to their kids.
fooqux 11mo ago
I consider myself lucky to have grown up before the internet, but after local BBS' were a thing. My parents had absolutely no idea what went on in those systems, and I found the freedom incredible. Being able to explore and spread my wings a bit was a huge part of my childhood and teen years, and it wouldn't have been possible if my parents were hovering over my shoulder, or if I were unable to make an account because I wasn't 18. That said, I was mostly dealing with griefers in Trade Wars or LoRD, and the worst thing I could find locally was GIFs of women in bikinis (and waiting for them to download was an excellent way to learn patience). I didn't have to worry so much about the threats that exist today online. I am so grateful that I grew up when I did and got to experience that.
- debo_ 11mo ago
  I remember winning a 10-kill LORD game on a local BBS. It took ages of me staying up until midnight to kill all the resurrected players after the daily reset. I had only one real competitor on that server and he gave up after I slew the dragon twice in one week (due to great luck.)
- nkrisc 11mo ago
  And when I was a kid some of my peers were watching Al Queda execution videos. I don’t know what the solution is, but I do not think kids should have unrestricted access to the internet, especially if their parents can’t/won’t set limits.
  - iamnothere 11mo ago
    If they won’t set limits that’s an issue with the parents, not the internet. If dad leaves the liquor cabinet unlocked the solution isn’t to ban alcohol. A free and open internet is non negotiable.
    - nkrisc 11mo ago
      Everything is negotiable. We collectively choose where to draw all the arbitrary lines you draw. Free and open internet is as arbitrary as a completely locked-down internet.
benbojangles 11mo ago
Internet Gatekeeping, ID Cards, New Facial Recognition Powers, Secret government talks have identified a huge problem, planned all this during the covid years is my guess. Something is going down and this is their safest bet i reckon. Possibly to do with unregistered recent inhabitants and improving the capability to identify them. That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you something.
- OutOfHere 11mo ago
  What does the movie Scarface have to say about it?
  - benbojangles 11mo ago
    https://www.realclearhistory.com/2017/04/01/the_migrant_crisis_that_brought_039scarface039_5646.html https://www.realclearhistory.com/2017/04/01/the_migrant_cris... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift https://www.reddit.com/r/moviequestions/comments/133gbzl/in_scarface_1983_was_tony_montana_actually_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/moviequestions/comments/133gbzl/in_... https://www.vice.com/en/article/we-talked-to-migrants-about-the-cultural-significance-of-scarface/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/we-talked-to-migrants-about-... From what i can gather, there was some confusion as to why some nations which clearly and obviously have very high crime/fraud/corruption statistics yet at the same time have incredibly low prison/prisoner statistics (https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-the-most-prisoners/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-th...) and the governments couldn't figure it out or overlooked it. It turns out that those nations just kick out the trouble and the trouble arrives at other shores, quickly setting up black market trade routes, money laundering shops, heavy violence, and a complete disregard for laws.
- profstasiak 11mo ago
  nice conspiracy thinking. I for one can't wait for ID confirmed social media, where I don't have to read anything produced by russian bots
  - deleted 11mo ago
JSR_FDED 11mo ago
Social media is more damaging to kids than porn
- earlyreturns 11mo ago
  Porn is a special subset of social media.
  - balamatom 11mo ago
    And social media is a special subset of porn.
- SoftTalker 11mo ago
  Damaging in different ways. I'm not sure you can say one is worse. Sure most kids can look at naked people and not be too affected, we all have the same parts. But beyond that, a lot of really harmful behavior is depicted in some porn and kids are not really mature enough to understand that in real healthy relationships people don't actually have sex like that. Both porn and social media can be addictive and unhealthy if they become a substitute for interacting with real people. And this also happens with adults not just kids.
  - tete 11mo ago
    > a lot of really harmful behavior is depicted in some porn and movies, and kids shows, and in fast food ads and in sitcoms and in comics and even in some churches, even in children's books and school books, and famously in Disney movies I am sometimes wondering if the whole "shielding" can be counterproductive. If you look at perpetrators and victims backstories it was either absolute lack of parenting (nobody to talk to) or it was households where everything was taboo. Eg. "hardcore Christians" and such. And I worry that the whole "everything is taboo" might turn out badly. Sure, I totally wished it was like "shield till they are 16/18/21" and then it will all be fine, but then we will end up with 16/18/21 year olds who will lose all hope when they first come across anything that might make them uncomfortable or in general cannot deal with. I also dislike the notion of other people deciding how to love each other. Sounds scary. But I really would wonder if children who cannot judge stuff end up watching some BDSM and suddenly think it's normal to be violent. Like even relatively young children witness or are involved in fights in kindergarten. Doesn't mean they'll end up having issues with violence. Different story if they learn it's the only way to get respect. But I really don't think you can equate that with a child coming across porn or non vanilla porn. It feels like the same story as "ego shooters will make everyone think it's okay to shoot people". Pretty sure that a big part of people here played ego shooters. On top of that I think creating the mindset that sex is something bad, to maybe be ashamed of, etc. is a good thing. I really do think that makes people not speak out when something is wrong. It creates that whole taboo. We don't have that with other crimes that we allow children to witness in media. Theft, violence, etc. No I don't think children should watch pornography. However the whole "you cannot even speak about sex" and it's all way worse than weapons seems to feed the "bad porn" to some degree.
Noaidi 11mo ago
Google is suddenly asking to verify my age on an account I have used for five years linked to my credit card. This is about surveillance of all of us, not "protecting kids".
mrgolderberg 11mo ago
[flagged]
sneak 11mo ago
It’s not age-gated. It’s ID-required.
tokai 11mo ago
With how harshly HN users have been going at UK and the EU, I was surprised seeing that not only is the mass surveillance build out better in the US, but also the user verification.
Bender 11mo ago
I stand by my repeated statements of how this could have been solved simply using an RTA header [1] on the server side and require the most common user agents to look for that header putting the onus on parents where it currently legally resides. It's not perfect, nothing is nor ever will be but using the header solution is entirely private, does not store or leak data and puts the decision into the device owners rather than creating perverse incentives to track everyone. It may actually protect most small children whereas today teens quickly find a work-around and then teach smaller children how to work around these centralized gate-keepers. The current solutions are just about tracking people by real identity and incentivizing teens to commit identity crimes. [1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php
- thewebguyd 11mo ago
  Correct. None of these laws are actually about protecting children. That's not the real goal. The real goal is the complete elimination of anonymity on the web, where both private companies and the state can keep tabs on everything you do. Not being able to be at least pseudo-anonymous has a real chilling effect on speech and expression. Even if there are laws in place protecting such rights, people will self-censor when knowing they are being watched. It's how freedom of speech and expression dies without actually scratching that part off of the bill of rights.
  - amanaplanacanal 11mo ago
    It's a mix. I'm sure there are some people really trying to protect kids. There are other people that just want all porn off the Internet. And there are bad actors that want total surveillance. And they are all on the same side of this issue.
    - cultofmetatron 11mo ago
      > I'm sure there are some people really trying to protect kids. yes, I believe the term for them is "useful idiots"
wagwang 11mo ago
PLEASE give me an age gated, geofenced internet. I would pay for such a service.
- protocolture 11mo ago
  Just unplug, keep everything local. Run your own BBS for your house.
- balamatom 11mo ago
  You can get it for free right now - you just need to go to prison for something.
stego-tech 11mo ago
Every single discussion I have with folks on this seemingly goes like this: “Does the child pay for internet access?” “No, but they have a device that can access the internet!” “Oh, so the child bought the device and paid the bill?” “No, the parents do!” “Ah, so would you say it’s the parent’s responsibility to monitor their children’s internet usage since they gave them a network-connected device?” “You obviously don’t want to protect kids!” Look, I do want to protect kids. I really do, but I also am sick and tired of bad actors using “BuT tHe ChIlDrEn” to recruit idiots and -phobes in a quest to make the entire planet and all of its spaces magically safe for children of all ages - at the expense of the superior number of adults who need our own spaces devoid of kids for community, for socialization, for being our full, human selves. The internet already has an age gate, and it’s called “the adults paying the damn bills”. Those adults are responsible for making internet access safe for kids, not the entire digital planet dropping what it’s doing to make every single private space safe for kids to access without parental supervision. Bring back curated services like Prodigy and Compuserve, or just don’t give kids internet access until they’re ready for it. Most of humanity grew up just fine without regular internet access as children, and there’s no reason whatsoever we have to foist net-connected terminals onto kids of any age. That’s parental choice, and I refuse to be punished because of someone else’s bad parenting.
- iamnothere 11mo ago
  > Bring back curated services like Prodigy and Compuserve, or just don’t give kids internet access until they’re ready for it. This comment should be highlighted on a forum like this. There is absolutely a business opportunity here, and it would double as a public service. You might even be able to get some grants for it!
  - RandomBacon 11mo ago
    Cell phone companies like AT&T could offer kid-lines (with filtered Internet access) and Google and Apple could provide kid-modes on their phones that don't allow VPNs or apps to be installed that parents do not approve of. Maybe there might already be ways to prevent VPNs/apps, but it doesn't seem to be easy and/or publicized.
TZubiri 11mo ago
"You’ve read your last free article." How ironic. Age-gating is immoral, but pay-gating is fine.
torified 11mo ago
As a child I had unlimited time to work out how to access stuff that interested me, a lot of which was forbidden in some way, because that's the most interesting stuff! In the process I learned about computers and eventually got a modem to access BBSes. It was exhilarating! I would have spent any amount of effort and time to access it. I basically attribute my entire career to accessing stuff the puritans would have tried to prevent me from accessing. Also, almost all of the porn I have came from private trackers. I very much doubt they will be concerned with any of these rules. Things will just move more underground if that happens. And the more underground you go, the more unsavory stuff you might find. But we all know this isn't actually about protecting children. In a way, I hope that it ends up being a good thing because the whole clearnet should probably be nuked from orbit. Us nerds can come up with something better. Federated, encrypted, anonymous and unblockable. It's just the spam problem that is the hard thing to solve. Maybe reputation with proof of work could work. I'll happily leave the normies to their milquetoast, corporate, manipulated existence.
- fragmede 11mo ago
  "isn't actually". It's dual use. It is about protecting children, but also along the way these other properties happen to come along. Thing is, with enough cryptography, we could get a way that this would work, but it's too complicated, which results in you being right after all.
  - maccard 11mo ago
    > with enough cryptography we could get a way this would work No amount of cryptography will stop a parent from handing a verified device to a child. Parental controls (however effective you think they might be) have come enabled by default in the UK for the last decade and literally need to be turned off - which is exactly what will continue to happen.
- tete 11mo ago
  > Us nerds can come up with something better. Federated, encrypted, anonymous and unblockable. And eventually illegal. That's what we see already. And if it's not technically illegal then Google, Apple and OpenAI will censor it. Again, we see that already. On YouTube you cannot even talk about important topics such as suicide. It's also coordinated. As much as I dislike Infowars, the fact that private institutions killed it at the same time is just scary. Just like it's scary that we now have ethics taught by private entities. Be it what you can search or what ChatGPT or Gemini think. It feels like a lot of these are strongly locked in place, which if you look at history is extremely bad. Only now private institutions have more power and control than any king ever had. And all of that is if you don't consider the pockets full of money.
shevy-java 11mo ago
I am against all age-verification systems here. These are ways to try to control the flow of information - aka censorship. There are a few situations where I can see verification is necessary; number #1 is in regards to online transactions involving money from a bank account. But the whole "show your age to watch pr0n" - that is just rubbish nonsense. Same with "people of age 14 are too young to use anti-social media". Now, I think people should quit wasting their time with facebook and so forth anyway, but I consistently reject these attempts to restrict freedom by state authorities acting as lobbyists for control-freaks, dictators or over-eager corporations. The internet could not have gotten big with those restrictions in the first place - so let's remove all of those without mercy.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
miniBill 11mo ago
On behalf of my younger self: fuck this shit
- balamatom 11mo ago
  Of course the only comment representing the perspective of the actual "protected group" is near the very bottom of the section and unanswered. Every time someone says "think of the children", just remember that nobody is motivated by protecting children from their parents; it's all to protect parents from their children. Always has been. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/william-gillis-the-first-prison https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/william-gillis-the-f... And, on a larger scale, to keep us all infantilized indefinitely.
honkycat 11mo ago
"Age Gated"?? minnesota and wisconsin are trying to ban VPNs!
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
AJ007 11mo ago
The real story is we are training millions/billions of people to send what is basically biometric data to sources which they should never trust. You think stolen credit cards are bad? The long term consequence are so dumb and obvious that all I can say is "good luck."
nacozarina 11mo ago
centralized censorship mechanisms just cause migration to peer2peer alternatives it’s a cue not a threat, get back into p2p computing
256_ 11mo ago
"This year, the UK also passed a mandate for age verification—the Online Safety Act—" No we didn't. That was 2023, and it went into effect in multiple phases, the last of which I believe was July 25th this year. Also, I can't help but wonder what young people now will think of these laws years later, as adults. In the UK, the OSA tries to prevent 17 year olds from watching porn, even though the age of consent here is 16. How will they remember contradictions like that?
- tete 11mo ago
  I think laws that you grew up with are a lot easier to accept until there is a major shift (civil war, etc.).
TavsiE9s 11mo ago
Why is everyone acting surprised? We’ve had 20-ish years of social media and algorithms being forced upon everyone and everything and any fine that was handed out was essentially paid off by not even a day of revenue. This is the result of social media companies optimising their feeds for monetisation.
- squigz 11mo ago
  "We've tried nothing and it didn't work!" The fines didn't do anything because they make too much money? Maybe... increase the fines? Maybe... don't just fine them? Maybe... fix the "algorithms being forced upon us"?
  - cindyllm 11mo ago
    [dead]
  - jeroenhd 11mo ago
    The algorithms are part of the EU's DSA/DMA partially because of this reason. Too bad these laws won't be enforced properly because of things like https://www.euractiv.com/news/trump-threatens-retaliation-against-eu-over-google-fine/ https://www.euractiv.com/news/trump-threatens-retaliation-ag... and other geopolitical reasons.
nottorp 11mo ago
Rephrase as "figthing the end of anonymity on the internet".
cess11 11mo ago
Anonymous file sharing was always a noble pursuit, for as long as the Internet has existed. Start a local one and give some support to one of the global ones.
dathinab 11mo ago
This is a fight you are going to lose. A better approach would be to put your energy into making sure the used methods are _reasonable_. We don't require every FSK16 game sail to register the buyers name, age, contact info on physical checkouts etc. In most countries a law requiring that would be seen as excessive and in some places unconstitutional. Instead it's fine to visually look at a id, and if it "obvious" they are adult (e.g. very old person) we don't even require that. And thats fine. Because we don't need a perfect prevention we just need something which helps parents parent "a bit" and helps "a bit" in cases where parents don't parent. If everyone fight "all age check solutions" the chance that they get fully ignored and some horrible shit gets passed into law is very high. If everyone fighting also provides a alternative and strict guidelines about what is and isn't acceptable in their opinion there is a chance for reasonable solutions being implemented instead. (Like e.g. put a age gate header into http responses, like "min-audience-age: region=US, age=123; region=EU, age=456", say OS must have a API where you pass that in and they say yes/no for that account, do NOT require any crypto, signing etc. This is not fraud prevention but parenting helper. The OS then can store `18+|age` internally and have some integrations with country specific age verification services (it must only store 18+|birthday and only birthday iff <18, I guess for US 21). But there is no need to prevent anyone from changing this value with e.g. windows regestry changes, except if it's a child account. So require any widely _sold_ OS to have a parent controls/child account functionality. But really any solution which effectively requires mass surveillance, exclude hobby OS or similar, require some clever signing scheme involving device attestation etc. is VERY excessive and unneeded.
Dazzler5648 11mo ago
On Monday it was TIL that in my state (the big Mormon one) I cannot view Pornhub… until I turn on my VPN. What a joke. That big Mormonny Pornhub landing page puts up a privacy fight worth reading - and the woman on it is fully clothed!
qwerty456127 11mo ago
I don't believe children need to be guarded from porn and can be seriously harmed by it but if we assume they do - why not just disallow children to use devices and apps made for adults? Why not just give kids locked-down phones with special pre-installed apps and leave the normal devices and normal web the way they are?
- iteria 11mo ago
  I don't believe that _teens_ can be harmed bu porn because they have some understanding of cultural norms. Kids, though, absolutely. Porn as it exists can teach a person who doesn't understand such basics as "hitting people just because you're mad is wrong" that having sex with an adult (aka pedophile) it perfectly okay. Engaging in sex with family members is okay. If you get hurt, that's expected and honestly you should like it. Not all porn is like this, but a shocking amount it. I wouldn't want someone who is learning what is acceptable and normal to come across this. It's already a problem for preteens and teens who consume too much and enter into relationships with unrealistic and sometimes dangerous ideas. Unlike violence, sex is private and privately talked about so kids will not receive correction when they misunderstand.
  - tete 11mo ago
    > I wouldn't want someone who is learning what is acceptable and normal to come across this. I think that is a very very long stretch. We live in a world where ads - also ads specifically targeting children - give wrong impressions of what's acceptable, "normal" and reasonable. We see huge effects of this. Meanwhile we are in a society where romantic movies with sudden kisses are bordering on "rape" because there wasn't any verbal clear consent. All while we live in a society where most people had relatively easy access to porn online and offline and that by today's standards was incredibly sexist only a few years ago. I really think that if you have a child young enough to not understand that is not okay and at the same time looks at porn out of their own free will you have a serious problem in first place. The whole "sex is something secret and forbidden" does a lot more harm and can also be seen by both perpetrators and victims. It's also why schools start earlier and earlier about those things. Before there would be first contact with pornography even if there were zero measures and no parenting. The idea that young children just happen to come across these things and not instantly close or even watch them, and draw morale conclusions from them if there wasn't any age verification is ridiculous. But even if it wasn't, if parenting is that bad the expectation shouldn't be that this is the one thing that protects them from pornography. Because then it might as well run all day off a DVD or something. I really dislike the whole "Let's think of the most ridiculous specific scenarios to justify laws" to then say "And if only one child can be saved", when we as a society seem to be arguing about whether it is morally okay to take a dime from a company to guarantee for proper healthcare for children - and parents so they actually can do a good job. And when we don't look at stuff marketed to children. We have Pokemon being a children's version of cockfights and that is evidently okay. We have dozens of fast food chains normalizing living off fat and sugar. We buy children toy guns and show them shows where they learn it's about being the strongest. We have a mental health pandemic. We teach children that the right thing to do with your life is working for a soulless company at a bullshit job to then get shitfaced in a bar. The stuff that lets suicides skyrocket. At the same time we are worried that children see two consenting adults having sex. I think at this point that's "normal", but I really don't think it should be. Totally willing to change my opinion if anyone can come up with perpetrators or victims become that by having seen porn, and then show it makes sense to do age verification here but not for James Bond, Superhero Movies or McDonalds ads.
beemboy 11mo ago
Can someone enlighten me as to what the debate here is really about? Is the concern that the implementers of age gating could steal data? Is it that one entity (the "government") would obtain information about your age, etc? Doesn't this already happy IRL? Why is an online version suddenly more draconian? As a parent, here is my perspective: - there is no debate about seat belts in cars. I'm not choosing whether or not my child should or should not wear them - there is no debate about ID checking outside businesses that sell alcohol. No one is debating whether I should get to choose whether my 7 year old has alcohol or not - pornographic content on television is already banned and we have ratings for media content - etc Why are "privacy" and "freedom" arguments for age-gating of internet content? As a parent, it is impossible for me to gate access or exposure to internet content like 4chan or YouTube conspiracy theorists and what not on my kids' developing brains so some mandated help sounds common sensical. And busy, poor, or uninitiated parents may not have time to invest in something like self-driven internet censoring, and I believe society as a whole benefits when every child is automatically kept safe from unsavory content (by definition a subjective phrase yet a moral choice every society must make). I can see an argument for mandating that every parent must individually purchase an in home internet age-gating "device" (hardware, software or whatnot) as a compromise so that the gating is still done by the parent (possibly with the help of a third party of their choice) while the mandation is done by the government. But it seems overly heavy handed in the other direction to me to say everything everywhere should be accessible to everybody of every age without gating and left to individuals (often sometimes with poor, underdeveloped, or temporarily ill-advised) judgment. Looking for someone to change my mind on some of these (or links to studies or articles making the arguments pro-freedom in this context). I'll also virtue-signal for context, that I'm fully aware of and actively mourn the ill effects of corporations like Meta, etc that vacuum up our data and build profiles and sell to data brokers, etc.
earlyreturns 11mo ago
I mean, there’s the internet and then there’s the internet. People are too rigid and old timey in their thinking on this issue. “We have to keep the internet anonymous and open to all!” No, we don’t. There is no singular “internet.” We have networks plural and society requires some networks that restrict access to some people.
eigencoder 11mo ago
I just disagree with this article. Age gating is a good thing. We should have more gates to keep kids out in the online world and less in the physical world. I want to see legislation that age gates every social media site. Social media companies have harmed a huge amount of my generation and we should stop them from addicting children. Privacy preserving methods for age verification exist, and we should use them.

284 points by geox 11mo ago

https://archive.md/nDeuh https://archive.md/nDeuh

I think all of this has gone overboard, even though I agree that children should not be exposed to pornography, I don't know what to do about it because I expect parents to monitor their child's Internet usage, which is a losing ideal. Are there better alternatives?

jmclnx 11mo ago
> I don't know what to do about it 1. No smart phones for the child before the age of NN, me I say 18. A Smart phone makes a great High School Graduation gift. 2. Only internet access from a desktop computer with a hosts file that the child cannot change. That probably means no Microsoft Windows PC. See: https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ eazy-peezy
- casey2 11mo ago
  >> Hmm I can't find any porn on the internet, better ask around > Sure Timmy I'll send you porn, but it's illegal and I'm taking a big risk here so you gotta do something for me, also you can't tell anyone You've failed to solve the porn problem and now you've created a larger grooming/CDM problem.
  - jmclnx 11mo ago
    You can add porn sites to the hosts file yourself.
    - pjc50 11mo ago
      The point that people are making is that while restricting overt internet porn does remove it from sight of a lot of kids, it will also continue to circulate as "samizdat" through whatever filesharing mechanisms exist. When I was at school someone got busted for distributing BBS porn on floppy disks, no network required. Now we have terabyte SD cards.
      - iamnothere 11mo ago
        Absolutely true. When I was a kid a few people got in trouble for drawing and circulating pixelated “porn” on their graphing calculators. You can’t stop teenagers from being teenagers.
      - pyuser583 11mo ago
        This samizdat is already in existence and the principal way my kids access inappropriate content. Peer to peer, or peer to creepy pedo, is how the stuff gets passed around regardless. Do you have any idea the sorts of things kids send via SMS?
    - casey2 11mo ago
      hosts file isn't even the correct tool for this job. I don't know why this is being suggested a serious solution. I can add domain names and chose which IP address they resolve to. It can't even block websites. If I didn't know any better I would assume you are spreading misinformation to put children into an unsafe situation
      - jmclnx 11mo ago
        Yes I know this is technically true. One could use iptables, but it is easier for people (users) to do this instead of getting iptables / pf or whatever configured. It is one size fits all.
- gwbas1c 11mo ago
  You either don't have kids, or your children are adults. It's impractical in today's world to raise children without access to devices like tablets and smart phones. That's like having a sugar-free, no TV, hand-sewn, ect, ect, household. What's more important is to know what your kids are getting into, making sure they are comfortable discussing what they see, and teaching them independent decision making skills. For example, a few years ago, my then seven-year-old complained to me about all of the Jesus videos that were popping up on Youtube. I told her to thumbs down them, and now Youtube no longer suggests them. She also knows that if other kids watch Jesus videos, that's their right and to keep her mouth shut.
  - FeteCommuniste 11mo ago
    I'm curious, what were the "Jesus videos?"
    - gwbas1c 11mo ago
      Videos about Jesus aimed towards children. She never showed them to me. I'm assuming they're either Bible stories, "Jesus loves you and died for your sins" kind of things, or otherwise typical American evangelizing towards children. We aren't a religious household, but we do occasionally expose our children to religious things because we live in the US and it's a big part of American culture and my extended family. For example, when my oldest was into ancient Egypt, I watched the 10 Commands (Charton Heston Movie) with her, then read Exodus with her. I also explained that this is not literal history but that some people believe it is, and that she shouldn't discuss religion at school. She saw the videos shortly after we read Exodus, so I wonder if she was searching for for clips from the 10 Commandments or things about Exodus.
Retr0id 11mo ago
Repurpose the IPv4 "evil bit" as an "is adult" bit.
iamnothere 11mo ago
As a culture we just have to come to accept that parents should be responsible for managing kids’ devices, and provide them with the device-level tools for doing so. If a parent lets a 10 year old hang out in a sketchy alleyway every weekend, we would blame them for the inevitable consequences. Why do we not blame them for failing to monitor what their kids are up to online? And before someone tries to bore me with anecdotes about how your particular kid evaded whatever restrictions you put in place, I think if kids put in thoughtful effort and planning to evade restrictions then parents are off the hook. Same as if a kid stages an elaborate ruse (one that would fool most parents) to get out of the house and drink with friends. That’s not on you. Parents aren’t prison wardens and we shouldn’t ask for a police state to fill in parenting gaps. Making the state into the parent will affect us all, not just kids. I (and plenty of others) will fight to the end to preserve the last vestiges of the free, open internet. Overlay networks and even sneakernet if necessary. We’re not going to accept authoritarian control of communications no matter how much politicians want it.
- seneca 11mo ago
  Well said. This is a social failure being exploited by shrude politicians to usurp more authority. Replacing parents with the state keeps playing out, and keeps being a horrible idea.
  - Simulacra 11mo ago
    That's a very good point
zug_zug 11mo ago
Just because something isn't ideal doesn't mean it's worth making a law about. Running with scissors -- not best practice. Worth trying to legislate? Absolutely not. Somebody who's 17 choosing to look at porn? Not in America's top 1 million problems.
marcosdumay 11mo ago
> I don't know what to do about it Do something similar to what we do with video: make a government enforced voluntary rating system (that is, you use if you want, if you use and lie, the government hits you) with a standard where sites can tell their ratings to the clients. Have the parents decide if they will use the rating for anything.
mhitza 11mo ago
A fraction of the money poured into these mass surveillance systems and proposals would have gone a long way in developing better parental control software. If startups build parental control it carries the wrong incentives. Realistically what's needed for proper parental control. 1. Software that parents can install on phones, and computers (which comes as an upside of less lockdown on devices) 2. A way to whitelist websites and applications (particularly for phones). 3. A way to share, reuse and collaborate on whitelists. No enforcement of a central authority.
0xbadcafebee 11mo ago
Assuming the reason for these laws is to protect children from pornography, you could ask, what are the specific harms from pornography? You could identify those harms through scientific study (some have been done; it appears the harms are mostly due to a lack of education and understanding about what's going on in porn) and address them (educate children to understand what's going on intellectually/emotionally and how to treat people with respect). But that would require talking to kids about sex, which adults are petrified of. Our culture is puritanical, and uses fear and shame to avoid dealing with things like sex. It then perpetuates this fear and shame onto each generation, and it pervades every product and service we have. So we could try fighting the irrational fear and become less afraid of sex (and pornography would probably change because of it). But good luck doing that in this country.
- procrasturbator 11mo ago
  Hey, yall are still ahead of the curve. A while back, in my country parents protested against their daughters getting free HPV shots. Couldn't handle the idea that their kids are separately embodied beings, you see. Plus I'd wager the long word "papillomavirus" scared most of those folks. So now we have higher STD rates and a significant number of young women permanently traumatized by being denied healthcare just because their parents were too obsessed with their private parts. And that's "thinkin' of the childrin" for ya.
dfxm12 11mo ago
I think we must think about what the downside of kids maybe being introduced to porn really. Realistically, it is pretty low. Given that, we shouldn't really be giving up anything to try and stop it. I was exposed to porn several ways pre-Internet. Older siblings, news stands, late night cable. If I wanted more, I could get it. It was simply not a problem. Maybe there is a problem for a tiny number of individuals, OK. A one size fits all approach like this still isn't the solution in these cases, though.
- nobody9999 11mo ago
  >I was exposed to porn several ways pre-Internet. Older siblings, news stands, late night cable. If I wanted more, I could get it. It was simply not a problem. Yup. Me too. And it goes back much further. Cf. "Pictures of Lily"[0] for a pop culture exposition from nearly sixty years ago. The point being that "porn" isn't anything new, nor was it difficult to obtain (hence a popular song about "porn") even before computer networks. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-PHDR2yhxE&list=RDg-PHDR2yhxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-PHDR2yhxE&list=RDg-PHDR2yh... Edit: For those who would cite the current ubiquity of "hardcore" porn on the 'net, I'd say that's a difference in degree, not in kind. Something to consider.
  - phainopepla2 11mo ago
    A difference in degree can make all the difference.
SoftTalker 11mo ago
If we had a way to prove age without revealing any other identity that could be used for tracking/profile building. I don't see that being supported by the tech industry though, as they are almost completely reliant on tracking to earn money.
tarentel 11mo ago
So it is up to me to monitor your child? I don't work in porn or an even remotely related field but I have to implement age verification now because of Texas's law. Someone explain to me how this is protecting any children.
AngryData 11mo ago
Why do we need to do something? Is there really such a problem that needs to be solved? Because I see so many people who grew up with unrestricted access to the internet and did not go around watching every beheading or BDSM porn video around like everyone seems to think kids do today despite them being easily available at the time, and when they were come across they certainly didn't get everyone fucked in the head because of it. Everyone knew rotten.com, everyone was using napster/kazaa/mirc that was full of porn and BDSM and snuff videos. If we were going to have problems, people 40 years old now would have signs of it and be messed up, except they aren't.

whywhywhywhy 11mo ago

Guess at some point in the future it will come out who bankrolled all this because multiple countries in Europe and America don’t just roll something like this out in 8 months organically without someone paying off politicians to push it

matwood 11mo ago
It has nothing to do with age gating, and everything to do with tracking. While there may be some funding going on behind the scenes, governments love tracking on its own merits.
iterance 11mo ago
The fight for this kind of legislature has been ongoing for many years as part of a broader program that seeks to shape the kinds of information that can be stored, consumed, and propagated on the Internet. Age verification is only one branch of the fight, but an important one to the many who support government control: it is an inroad that allows governments to say they have a stake in who sees what.
rkachowski 11mo ago
It would be excellent to know who is pushing this and through what means. There is some unprecedented alignment across borders to restrict access and rights.
- indoordin0saur 11mo ago
  Those pesky... adults!
jamesbelchamber 11mo ago
This strikes me as almost conspiratorial thinking, and it's reflected in the article. At one point they say KOSA is unpopular but.. it isn't? These laws (KOSA, OSA) enjoy broad, bipartisan popularity and politicians are jumping on the bandwagon because they want votes. It really is as simple as that. There's absolutely no way to counter this, or at least to round off the censorship power-grab this is allowing, if we don't admit to ourselves that people have become suspicious of the tech sector (us) and are reaching to clip our wings - starting with access to their kids.

fooqux 11mo ago

I consider myself lucky to have grown up before the internet, but after local BBS' were a thing. My parents had absolutely no idea what went on in those systems, and I found the freedom incredible. Being able to explore and spread my wings a bit was a huge part of my childhood and teen years, and it wouldn't have been possible if my parents were hovering over my shoulder, or if I were unable to make an account because I wasn't 18. That said, I was mostly dealing with griefers in Trade Wars or LoRD, and the worst thing I could find locally was GIFs of women in bikinis (and waiting for them to download was an excellent way to learn patience). I didn't have to worry so much about the threats that exist today online. I am so grateful that I grew up when I did and got to experience that.

debo_ 11mo ago
I remember winning a 10-kill LORD game on a local BBS. It took ages of me staying up until midnight to kill all the resurrected players after the daily reset. I had only one real competitor on that server and he gave up after I slew the dragon twice in one week (due to great luck.)
nkrisc 11mo ago
And when I was a kid some of my peers were watching Al Queda execution videos. I don’t know what the solution is, but I do not think kids should have unrestricted access to the internet, especially if their parents can’t/won’t set limits.
- iamnothere 11mo ago
  If they won’t set limits that’s an issue with the parents, not the internet. If dad leaves the liquor cabinet unlocked the solution isn’t to ban alcohol. A free and open internet is non negotiable.
  - nkrisc 11mo ago
    Everything is negotiable. We collectively choose where to draw all the arbitrary lines you draw. Free and open internet is as arbitrary as a completely locked-down internet.

benbojangles 11mo ago

Internet Gatekeeping, ID Cards, New Facial Recognition Powers, Secret government talks have identified a huge problem, planned all this during the covid years is my guess. Something is going down and this is their safest bet i reckon. Possibly to do with unregistered recent inhabitants and improving the capability to identify them. That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you something.

OutOfHere 11mo ago
What does the movie Scarface have to say about it?
- benbojangles 11mo ago
  https://www.realclearhistory.com/2017/04/01/the_migrant_crisis_that_brought_039scarface039_5646.html https://www.realclearhistory.com/2017/04/01/the_migrant_cris... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift https://www.reddit.com/r/moviequestions/comments/133gbzl/in_scarface_1983_was_tony_montana_actually_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/moviequestions/comments/133gbzl/in_... https://www.vice.com/en/article/we-talked-to-migrants-about-the-cultural-significance-of-scarface/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/we-talked-to-migrants-about-... From what i can gather, there was some confusion as to why some nations which clearly and obviously have very high crime/fraud/corruption statistics yet at the same time have incredibly low prison/prisoner statistics (https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-the-most-prisoners/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-th...) and the governments couldn't figure it out or overlooked it. It turns out that those nations just kick out the trouble and the trouble arrives at other shores, quickly setting up black market trade routes, money laundering shops, heavy violence, and a complete disregard for laws.
profstasiak 11mo ago
nice conspiracy thinking. I for one can't wait for ID confirmed social media, where I don't have to read anything produced by russian bots
- deleted 11mo ago

JSR_FDED 11mo ago

Social media is more damaging to kids than porn

earlyreturns 11mo ago
Porn is a special subset of social media.
- balamatom 11mo ago
  And social media is a special subset of porn.
SoftTalker 11mo ago
Damaging in different ways. I'm not sure you can say one is worse. Sure most kids can look at naked people and not be too affected, we all have the same parts. But beyond that, a lot of really harmful behavior is depicted in some porn and kids are not really mature enough to understand that in real healthy relationships people don't actually have sex like that. Both porn and social media can be addictive and unhealthy if they become a substitute for interacting with real people. And this also happens with adults not just kids.
- tete 11mo ago
  > a lot of really harmful behavior is depicted in some porn and movies, and kids shows, and in fast food ads and in sitcoms and in comics and even in some churches, even in children's books and school books, and famously in Disney movies I am sometimes wondering if the whole "shielding" can be counterproductive. If you look at perpetrators and victims backstories it was either absolute lack of parenting (nobody to talk to) or it was households where everything was taboo. Eg. "hardcore Christians" and such. And I worry that the whole "everything is taboo" might turn out badly. Sure, I totally wished it was like "shield till they are 16/18/21" and then it will all be fine, but then we will end up with 16/18/21 year olds who will lose all hope when they first come across anything that might make them uncomfortable or in general cannot deal with. I also dislike the notion of other people deciding how to love each other. Sounds scary. But I really would wonder if children who cannot judge stuff end up watching some BDSM and suddenly think it's normal to be violent. Like even relatively young children witness or are involved in fights in kindergarten. Doesn't mean they'll end up having issues with violence. Different story if they learn it's the only way to get respect. But I really don't think you can equate that with a child coming across porn or non vanilla porn. It feels like the same story as "ego shooters will make everyone think it's okay to shoot people". Pretty sure that a big part of people here played ego shooters. On top of that I think creating the mindset that sex is something bad, to maybe be ashamed of, etc. is a good thing. I really do think that makes people not speak out when something is wrong. It creates that whole taboo. We don't have that with other crimes that we allow children to witness in media. Theft, violence, etc. No I don't think children should watch pornography. However the whole "you cannot even speak about sex" and it's all way worse than weapons seems to feed the "bad porn" to some degree.

Noaidi 11mo ago

Google is suddenly asking to verify my age on an account I have used for five years linked to my credit card. This is about surveillance of all of us, not "protecting kids".

mrgolderberg 11mo ago

[flagged]

sneak 11mo ago

It’s not age-gated. It’s ID-required.

tokai 11mo ago

With how harshly HN users have been going at UK and the EU, I was surprised seeing that not only is the mass surveillance build out better in the US, but also the user verification.

Bender 11mo ago

I stand by my repeated statements of how this could have been solved simply using an RTA header [1] on the server side and require the most common user agents to look for that header putting the onus on parents where it currently legally resides. It's not perfect, nothing is nor ever will be but using the header solution is entirely private, does not store or leak data and puts the decision into the device owners rather than creating perverse incentives to track everyone. It may actually protect most small children whereas today teens quickly find a work-around and then teach smaller children how to work around these centralized gate-keepers. The current solutions are just about tracking people by real identity and incentivizing teens to commit identity crimes. [1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php

thewebguyd 11mo ago
Correct. None of these laws are actually about protecting children. That's not the real goal. The real goal is the complete elimination of anonymity on the web, where both private companies and the state can keep tabs on everything you do. Not being able to be at least pseudo-anonymous has a real chilling effect on speech and expression. Even if there are laws in place protecting such rights, people will self-censor when knowing they are being watched. It's how freedom of speech and expression dies without actually scratching that part off of the bill of rights.
- amanaplanacanal 11mo ago
  It's a mix. I'm sure there are some people really trying to protect kids. There are other people that just want all porn off the Internet. And there are bad actors that want total surveillance. And they are all on the same side of this issue.
  - cultofmetatron 11mo ago
    > I'm sure there are some people really trying to protect kids. yes, I believe the term for them is "useful idiots"

wagwang 11mo ago

PLEASE give me an age gated, geofenced internet. I would pay for such a service.

protocolture 11mo ago
Just unplug, keep everything local. Run your own BBS for your house.
balamatom 11mo ago
You can get it for free right now - you just need to go to prison for something.

stego-tech 11mo ago

Every single discussion I have with folks on this seemingly goes like this: “Does the child pay for internet access?” “No, but they have a device that can access the internet!” “Oh, so the child bought the device and paid the bill?” “No, the parents do!” “Ah, so would you say it’s the parent’s responsibility to monitor their children’s internet usage since they gave them a network-connected device?” “You obviously don’t want to protect kids!” Look, I do want to protect kids. I really do, but I also am sick and tired of bad actors using “BuT tHe ChIlDrEn” to recruit idiots and -phobes in a quest to make the entire planet and all of its spaces magically safe for children of all ages - at the expense of the superior number of adults who need our own spaces devoid of kids for community, for socialization, for being our full, human selves. The internet already has an age gate, and it’s called “the adults paying the damn bills”. Those adults are responsible for making internet access safe for kids, not the entire digital planet dropping what it’s doing to make every single private space safe for kids to access without parental supervision. Bring back curated services like Prodigy and Compuserve, or just don’t give kids internet access until they’re ready for it. Most of humanity grew up just fine without regular internet access as children, and there’s no reason whatsoever we have to foist net-connected terminals onto kids of any age. That’s parental choice, and I refuse to be punished because of someone else’s bad parenting.

iamnothere 11mo ago
> Bring back curated services like Prodigy and Compuserve, or just don’t give kids internet access until they’re ready for it. This comment should be highlighted on a forum like this. There is absolutely a business opportunity here, and it would double as a public service. You might even be able to get some grants for it!
- RandomBacon 11mo ago
  Cell phone companies like AT&T could offer kid-lines (with filtered Internet access) and Google and Apple could provide kid-modes on their phones that don't allow VPNs or apps to be installed that parents do not approve of. Maybe there might already be ways to prevent VPNs/apps, but it doesn't seem to be easy and/or publicized.

TZubiri 11mo ago

"You’ve read your last free article." How ironic. Age-gating is immoral, but pay-gating is fine.

torified 11mo ago

As a child I had unlimited time to work out how to access stuff that interested me, a lot of which was forbidden in some way, because that's the most interesting stuff! In the process I learned about computers and eventually got a modem to access BBSes. It was exhilarating! I would have spent any amount of effort and time to access it. I basically attribute my entire career to accessing stuff the puritans would have tried to prevent me from accessing. Also, almost all of the porn I have came from private trackers. I very much doubt they will be concerned with any of these rules. Things will just move more underground if that happens. And the more underground you go, the more unsavory stuff you might find. But we all know this isn't actually about protecting children. In a way, I hope that it ends up being a good thing because the whole clearnet should probably be nuked from orbit. Us nerds can come up with something better. Federated, encrypted, anonymous and unblockable. It's just the spam problem that is the hard thing to solve. Maybe reputation with proof of work could work. I'll happily leave the normies to their milquetoast, corporate, manipulated existence.

fragmede 11mo ago
"isn't actually". It's dual use. It is about protecting children, but also along the way these other properties happen to come along. Thing is, with enough cryptography, we could get a way that this would work, but it's too complicated, which results in you being right after all.
- maccard 11mo ago
  > with enough cryptography we could get a way this would work No amount of cryptography will stop a parent from handing a verified device to a child. Parental controls (however effective you think they might be) have come enabled by default in the UK for the last decade and literally need to be turned off - which is exactly what will continue to happen.
tete 11mo ago
> Us nerds can come up with something better. Federated, encrypted, anonymous and unblockable. And eventually illegal. That's what we see already. And if it's not technically illegal then Google, Apple and OpenAI will censor it. Again, we see that already. On YouTube you cannot even talk about important topics such as suicide. It's also coordinated. As much as I dislike Infowars, the fact that private institutions killed it at the same time is just scary. Just like it's scary that we now have ethics taught by private entities. Be it what you can search or what ChatGPT or Gemini think. It feels like a lot of these are strongly locked in place, which if you look at history is extremely bad. Only now private institutions have more power and control than any king ever had. And all of that is if you don't consider the pockets full of money.

shevy-java 11mo ago

I am against all age-verification systems here. These are ways to try to control the flow of information - aka censorship. There are a few situations where I can see verification is necessary; number #1 is in regards to online transactions involving money from a bank account. But the whole "show your age to watch pr0n" - that is just rubbish nonsense. Same with "people of age 14 are too young to use anti-social media". Now, I think people should quit wasting their time with facebook and so forth anyway, but I consistently reject these attempts to restrict freedom by state authorities acting as lobbyists for control-freaks, dictators or over-eager corporations. The internet could not have gotten big with those restrictions in the first place - so let's remove all of those without mercy.

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miniBill 11mo ago

On behalf of my younger self: fuck this shit

balamatom 11mo ago
Of course the only comment representing the perspective of the actual "protected group" is near the very bottom of the section and unanswered. Every time someone says "think of the children", just remember that nobody is motivated by protecting children from their parents; it's all to protect parents from their children. Always has been. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/william-gillis-the-first-prison https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/william-gillis-the-f... And, on a larger scale, to keep us all infantilized indefinitely.

honkycat 11mo ago

"Age Gated"?? minnesota and wisconsin are trying to ban VPNs!

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AJ007 11mo ago

The real story is we are training millions/billions of people to send what is basically biometric data to sources which they should never trust. You think stolen credit cards are bad? The long term consequence are so dumb and obvious that all I can say is "good luck."

nacozarina 11mo ago

centralized censorship mechanisms just cause migration to peer2peer alternatives it’s a cue not a threat, get back into p2p computing

256_ 11mo ago

"This year, the UK also passed a mandate for age verification—the Online Safety Act—" No we didn't. That was 2023, and it went into effect in multiple phases, the last of which I believe was July 25th this year. Also, I can't help but wonder what young people now will think of these laws years later, as adults. In the UK, the OSA tries to prevent 17 year olds from watching porn, even though the age of consent here is 16. How will they remember contradictions like that?

tete 11mo ago
I think laws that you grew up with are a lot easier to accept until there is a major shift (civil war, etc.).

TavsiE9s 11mo ago

Why is everyone acting surprised? We’ve had 20-ish years of social media and algorithms being forced upon everyone and everything and any fine that was handed out was essentially paid off by not even a day of revenue. This is the result of social media companies optimising their feeds for monetisation.

squigz 11mo ago
"We've tried nothing and it didn't work!" The fines didn't do anything because they make too much money? Maybe... increase the fines? Maybe... don't just fine them? Maybe... fix the "algorithms being forced upon us"?
- cindyllm 11mo ago
  [dead]
- jeroenhd 11mo ago
  The algorithms are part of the EU's DSA/DMA partially because of this reason. Too bad these laws won't be enforced properly because of things like https://www.euractiv.com/news/trump-threatens-retaliation-against-eu-over-google-fine/ https://www.euractiv.com/news/trump-threatens-retaliation-ag... and other geopolitical reasons.

nottorp 11mo ago

Rephrase as "figthing the end of anonymity on the internet".

cess11 11mo ago

Anonymous file sharing was always a noble pursuit, for as long as the Internet has existed. Start a local one and give some support to one of the global ones.

dathinab 11mo ago

This is a fight you are going to lose. A better approach would be to put your energy into making sure the used methods are _reasonable_. We don't require every FSK16 game sail to register the buyers name, age, contact info on physical checkouts etc. In most countries a law requiring that would be seen as excessive and in some places unconstitutional. Instead it's fine to visually look at a id, and if it "obvious" they are adult (e.g. very old person) we don't even require that. And thats fine. Because we don't need a perfect prevention we just need something which helps parents parent "a bit" and helps "a bit" in cases where parents don't parent. If everyone fight "all age check solutions" the chance that they get fully ignored and some horrible shit gets passed into law is very high. If everyone fighting also provides a alternative and strict guidelines about what is and isn't acceptable in their opinion there is a chance for reasonable solutions being implemented instead. (Like e.g. put a age gate header into http responses, like "min-audience-age: region=US, age=123; region=EU, age=456", say OS must have a API where you pass that in and they say yes/no for that account, do NOT require any crypto, signing etc. This is not fraud prevention but parenting helper. The OS then can store `18+|age` internally and have some integrations with country specific age verification services (it must only store 18+|birthday and only birthday iff <18, I guess for US 21). But there is no need to prevent anyone from changing this value with e.g. windows regestry changes, except if it's a child account. So require any widely _sold_ OS to have a parent controls/child account functionality. But really any solution which effectively requires mass surveillance, exclude hobby OS or similar, require some clever signing scheme involving device attestation etc. is VERY excessive and unneeded.

Dazzler5648 11mo ago

On Monday it was TIL that in my state (the big Mormon one) I cannot view Pornhub… until I turn on my VPN. What a joke. That big Mormonny Pornhub landing page puts up a privacy fight worth reading - and the woman on it is fully clothed!

qwerty456127 11mo ago

I don't believe children need to be guarded from porn and can be seriously harmed by it but if we assume they do - why not just disallow children to use devices and apps made for adults? Why not just give kids locked-down phones with special pre-installed apps and leave the normal devices and normal web the way they are?

iteria 11mo ago
I don't believe that _teens_ can be harmed bu porn because they have some understanding of cultural norms. Kids, though, absolutely. Porn as it exists can teach a person who doesn't understand such basics as "hitting people just because you're mad is wrong" that having sex with an adult (aka pedophile) it perfectly okay. Engaging in sex with family members is okay. If you get hurt, that's expected and honestly you should like it. Not all porn is like this, but a shocking amount it. I wouldn't want someone who is learning what is acceptable and normal to come across this. It's already a problem for preteens and teens who consume too much and enter into relationships with unrealistic and sometimes dangerous ideas. Unlike violence, sex is private and privately talked about so kids will not receive correction when they misunderstand.
- tete 11mo ago
  > I wouldn't want someone who is learning what is acceptable and normal to come across this. I think that is a very very long stretch. We live in a world where ads - also ads specifically targeting children - give wrong impressions of what's acceptable, "normal" and reasonable. We see huge effects of this. Meanwhile we are in a society where romantic movies with sudden kisses are bordering on "rape" because there wasn't any verbal clear consent. All while we live in a society where most people had relatively easy access to porn online and offline and that by today's standards was incredibly sexist only a few years ago. I really think that if you have a child young enough to not understand that is not okay and at the same time looks at porn out of their own free will you have a serious problem in first place. The whole "sex is something secret and forbidden" does a lot more harm and can also be seen by both perpetrators and victims. It's also why schools start earlier and earlier about those things. Before there would be first contact with pornography even if there were zero measures and no parenting. The idea that young children just happen to come across these things and not instantly close or even watch them, and draw morale conclusions from them if there wasn't any age verification is ridiculous. But even if it wasn't, if parenting is that bad the expectation shouldn't be that this is the one thing that protects them from pornography. Because then it might as well run all day off a DVD or something. I really dislike the whole "Let's think of the most ridiculous specific scenarios to justify laws" to then say "And if only one child can be saved", when we as a society seem to be arguing about whether it is morally okay to take a dime from a company to guarantee for proper healthcare for children - and parents so they actually can do a good job. And when we don't look at stuff marketed to children. We have Pokemon being a children's version of cockfights and that is evidently okay. We have dozens of fast food chains normalizing living off fat and sugar. We buy children toy guns and show them shows where they learn it's about being the strongest. We have a mental health pandemic. We teach children that the right thing to do with your life is working for a soulless company at a bullshit job to then get shitfaced in a bar. The stuff that lets suicides skyrocket. At the same time we are worried that children see two consenting adults having sex. I think at this point that's "normal", but I really don't think it should be. Totally willing to change my opinion if anyone can come up with perpetrators or victims become that by having seen porn, and then show it makes sense to do age verification here but not for James Bond, Superhero Movies or McDonalds ads.

beemboy 11mo ago

Can someone enlighten me as to what the debate here is really about? Is the concern that the implementers of age gating could steal data? Is it that one entity (the "government") would obtain information about your age, etc? Doesn't this already happy IRL? Why is an online version suddenly more draconian? As a parent, here is my perspective: - there is no debate about seat belts in cars. I'm not choosing whether or not my child should or should not wear them - there is no debate about ID checking outside businesses that sell alcohol. No one is debating whether I should get to choose whether my 7 year old has alcohol or not - pornographic content on television is already banned and we have ratings for media content - etc Why are "privacy" and "freedom" arguments for age-gating of internet content? As a parent, it is impossible for me to gate access or exposure to internet content like 4chan or YouTube conspiracy theorists and what not on my kids' developing brains so some mandated help sounds common sensical. And busy, poor, or uninitiated parents may not have time to invest in something like self-driven internet censoring, and I believe society as a whole benefits when every child is automatically kept safe from unsavory content (by definition a subjective phrase yet a moral choice every society must make). I can see an argument for mandating that every parent must individually purchase an in home internet age-gating "device" (hardware, software or whatnot) as a compromise so that the gating is still done by the parent (possibly with the help of a third party of their choice) while the mandation is done by the government. But it seems overly heavy handed in the other direction to me to say everything everywhere should be accessible to everybody of every age without gating and left to individuals (often sometimes with poor, underdeveloped, or temporarily ill-advised) judgment. Looking for someone to change my mind on some of these (or links to studies or articles making the arguments pro-freedom in this context). I'll also virtue-signal for context, that I'm fully aware of and actively mourn the ill effects of corporations like Meta, etc that vacuum up our data and build profiles and sell to data brokers, etc.

earlyreturns 11mo ago

I mean, there’s the internet and then there’s the internet. People are too rigid and old timey in their thinking on this issue. “We have to keep the internet anonymous and open to all!” No, we don’t. There is no singular “internet.” We have networks plural and society requires some networks that restrict access to some people.

eigencoder 11mo ago

I just disagree with this article. Age gating is a good thing. We should have more gates to keep kids out in the online world and less in the physical world. I want to see legislation that age gates every social media site. Social media companies have harmed a huge amount of my generation and we should stop them from addicting children. Privacy preserving methods for age verification exist, and we should use them.