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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

• 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"
    • robot-wrangler 11mo ago
      Not idiots necessarily, sometimes just long-time observers who have finally become cynical. People that were pro-guns for decades may watch several years of failure to adopt basic and uncontroversial gun-control regulation, then eventually become anti-gun. People that were in favor of regulating it once may suddenly become fearful for their safety, and want no regulations at all in case that regulation puts them out in the cold. Since both PR campaigns and any action on policy tends to cater to extremes, there's always pressure that is shrinking the middle
      • shevy-java 11mo ago
        The comment "useful idiots" is more a play on the russian KGB strategy. They use assets to influence people and achieve certain goals. In this case here, terrorism or child pornography is used as cop-out rationale for censorship, surveillance and so forth. It's never about those topics really, perhaps 5% at best, the rest is just sugar-coated decoy to restrict people and keep them as slaves and pets. > Since both PR campaigns and any action on policy tends to cater to extremes, there's always pressure that is shrinking the middle This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I understand how propaganda works so I am never fooled by "this is because of terrorists". This is also why I am for 100% transparency at all times.
        • sroerick 11mo ago
          Can you explain to me what loopholes that opponents believe this law will exploit? Is it just "more ID is bad"? Or is there a specific concern that this bill is a targeted overreach to increase censorship and surveillance. It genuinely doesn't seem like any more of a threat than age-gating Playboy at the bookstore. What have I missed?
          • Ajakks 11mo ago
            I went to check my Social Security administration account like 4 years ago - I forget why. To access it, I have to have an actual video face to face conversation with people from some Real ID company. I'll never look at that account again in my ficking life.
            • sroerick 11mo ago
              Is this affected by this bill at all?
          • JoshTriplett 11mo ago
            > Or is there a specific concern that this bill is a targeted overreach to increase censorship and surveillance. https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy222 https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2... > The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”
    • sroerick 11mo ago
      Can you explain to me what is being exploited here? I had to do KYC for Hetzner, for anything crypto related in the last decade, and a number of other things. Age-gating porn doesnt seem problematic to at all. In fact it's far less worrisome than any of the former, which are kind of important for commerce. What am I missing?
      • socalgal2 11mo ago
        Once there is a record of what porn you looked at, people, government, employeers won't hire you. could be based on that you looked at all, or that you looked at the wrong kind. Wrong = whatever fetish you're into and your employeer/government/health-ins doesn't like.
        • sroerick 11mo ago
          I assume that literally all porn is a data honeypot. Don't you?
        • GoblinSlayer 11mo ago
          Wait, so porn is ok, it's fetish that is bad? So if HR is into brazilian farting fetish, entire company will be run by brazilian farting fetishists?
      • MSFT_Edging 11mo ago
        Lets just hope there's no government that wants to incriminate certain sexuality and gender, then all these logged KYC for every little social thing will be very dangerous.
        • sroerick 11mo ago
          Sure, I think KYC is a big problem. But personally, I'm much more concerned about it in regular commerce. A huge swath of the population thinks that porn is inherently harmful. An even bigger swath thinks that it should be completely separated from both. I agree with both of these things. I'm also strongly against censorship, so I'm trying to figure out how people are worried this is being used. I do not, at all, consider age-gating Playboy at the gas station to be censorship. If you think your porn habits are not already being logged and tracked by intelligence agencies, I think you are fully delusional.
    • citizenpaul 11mo ago
      I believe the term for them is evangelicals. I'm going to guess that a venn diagram of deeply religious people and people pushing for "protecting" the kids is just a circle.
      • singpolyma3 11mo ago
        This is so untrue I wonder if you even bothered to think about it.
    • pyuser583 11mo ago
      The term is “parents.” I really don’t care about what’s on the internet, until my kids get exposed to it. How grownups talk to other grownups in private isn’t my concern. But when kids - and I mean my kids - enter the loop it becomes my business, and ideological concerns go out the window. I’ve ranted and raved about how terrible filtering software is, and how school provided computers contain massive workarounds. The real concern isn’t porn sites — the real concern is poorly moderated social media sites. Ones where kids post things other kids see. And guess what the kids post? But a lot of the nasty content shared in these poorly moderated sites gets it start elsewhere. I’m cynical about any law, but my bias toward legal action is only increasing as the online situation is only getting worse.
      • hellojesus 11mo ago
        Can't you do mac filtering on your router at the very least? Why not install root certs on all your kids' devices and then force them through your home proxy so you can run content classification and proactively block and get reports of what you've blocked? A little privacy-invasive, but if your kids are young enough, it makes sense to get alerts when they've attempted to access boobs or gore so you can have a convo about it.
        • Bender 11mo ago
          The easiest route here in my opinion aside from DNS services that claim to block adult content would be to use a Squid SSL Bump proxy. It's along the lines of what you are suggesting and requires installing a self signed CA cert on the client but gives you centralized management of what domains, URLs, file types, times of day, URL patterns are allowed/permitted as well as a memory and disk cache to reduce bandwidth. This [1] is a really old example based on Squid 3.x but this concept has improved a lot in Squid 6.x. Sites that still do public key pinning there are a handful will have to be added to Squid's SSL BUMP exclusion. Ignore the term SSL, it's TLS but they kept the term the same. [1] - https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump
          • hellojesus 11mo ago
    • andrepd 11mo ago
      Unfortunatwly "keeping kids and teenagers off of algorithmic social media" is one of the most worthy goals one can pursue right now; so is keeping them off infinite porn. But this is not the way to go about it.
    • KaiserPro 11mo ago
      No, I believe the term is "parents don't want 8 year olds getting access to tits, violence and gore" Given that kids need a device for school in a lot of areas (mine included) and the tools for stopping kids getting either access or bombarded by such stuff are either shit, require deep technical knowledge, or predatory, I can see why people are asking for it. I presently hate the current system of handing over biometric data in exchange for tits. I don't want some shading startup having my biometrics so that when they go bust, pivot or get hacked, can be used to steal my stuff. The middle ground is a system that _normal_ people can us to make sure kids who have access to devices can't easily access nefarious shit. None of that is useful idiots. When it get fun is the all or nothing crowd. The internet is going to be age gated, whether you like it or not. If you continue to go "INTERNET MUST BE FREEEEEEEE" without accepting that the tools that the populace _want_ don't exist means you get porn bans, or worse.
      • tim333 11mo ago
        I think there's probably a middle way without going as far as "biometric data in exchange for tits" I'm in the UK and so far the only thing I've noticed age wise is Reddit asked me for a webcam selfie, which could easily have been faked by a kid with an accomplice but if the aim of this is to stop actual vulnerable kids that kind of thing is maybe enough. If they are with it enough to use VPNs and stuff they are probably old enough to see porn etc. Like in the old days people used to avoid the kids looking at porn by putting the porno mags on a high shelf so they couldn't reach them. I don't think you need passport control level ID for this kind of thing.
        • KaiserPro 11mo ago
          > I don't think you need passport control level ID for this kind of thing. I 100% whole heartedly agree. For uk mobile ISPs there is already a system that stopped most of the nasty stuff from getting past. It was pretty difficult to circumvent, hence why I turned it off for me. If that could have been rolled out wider, with an account password for turning it off, that would have been more than enough.
        • triceratops 11mo ago
    • tim333 11mo ago
      I'm pro protecting kids. "useful idiots" was a Stalinist term for people willing to cover up for the murder of millions on the grounds that communism was good and would never do the holodomor. I don't think it's good to conflate them really.
  • tehjoker 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    • arcbyte 11mo ago
      [flagged]
      • tehjoker 11mo ago
        I'm not a libertarian thanks though.
      • amanaplanacanal 11mo ago
        Claiming support from "the vast majority" is clearly nonsense. There is little support for getting rid of social security, Medicare or Medicaid, or several other current wealth transfrr programs.
      • hellojesus 11mo ago
        Given the negative responses, I'd like to strengthen the position against positive rights by stating that positive rights require slavery the extreme whereas negative rights do not. If the government guarantees food for children (or anyone), the government must provide it. If nobody is willing to be a farmer at any rate the private or public sector affords, the government must force someone to be a farmer to produce food to fulfill their positive right grant.
        • tehjoker 11mo ago
          You induce people to do things with payments, not slavery. Or you ask for a volunteer corps. Or you have the army do it if all else fails. I presume you are opposed to the existence of standing armies if you are opposed to slavery in all forms as well as wage slavery.
          • hellojesus 11mo ago
            I'm less opposed to standing armies because a voluntary contract is entered by both parties. I am not a fan of the draft or compulsory service. My example was an edge case. I expect the government could find a price that someone would take long before they required slavery. But it still stands that it is a potential. I prefer all transactions are voluntary, even if that means you lose your country because nobody is willing to sign up for it's defense.
  • hsuduebc2 11mo ago
    Yea. People which cured their children with lobotomy also thought that they we're doing something good. These usefull idiots are in some sense worse than the perpetuators it self because they are primarly the enablers of such behaviot simply because of their naivety or worse, ignorance.
• reactordev 11mo ago
  The goal was to put Company A in between you and the web. Collecting data and selling it for profit. It’s never about what they say it’s about. Lobbyists have bought every aspect.
  • Schiendelman 11mo ago
    I think you're right. Surveillance power is nearly a side effect of the personal enrichment.
• TZubiri 11mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46154208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46154208
• stuffn 11mo ago
  Technical people have been gleefully eliminating anonymity on the web for the last 20 years. Progressives should be the party on the side of maximal freedom but really in the US we have one neo-liberal party wearing two different disguises. The problem is normies don't operate under assumed anonymity. So when the hordes of unwashed regular people joined the internet they wanted their face everywhere. People were shamed out of their handles. Some people gave up their anonymity to make yet another faceless bullshit blog-as-a-resume. Look at most of the top karma farmers on HN. Most of them post their personal information in the their bio. Pathetic. > people will self-censor when knowing they are being watched. This has been happening both in public and on the internet for over a decade now. > Not being able to be at least pseudo-anonymous has a real chilling effect on speech and expression. The normies would argue you have nothing to hide if you aren't doing anything wrong. The average voter, regardless of party, will happily surrender every ounce of freedom for the thought of security. Hell, I remember sometime around 2007 DEFCON became a first-name-basis conference! > bill of rights It's more of a bill of privileges given NGOs and PACs are regularly paying to erode the core rights granted to citizens. Either through lawfare by circumventing the courts and suing companies into bankruptcy, or by directly purchasing congressmen via donation. What I have found in general is people who cry and complain about this kind of thing were, at one point, happy to have it happen to their political enemies. The laws that are paving the way for age-gated deanonymized internet were at one point used as a cudgel to beat their political enemies down. When the tables finally turn after the Nth "protect the children" bill, it's the other people left crying and now suddenly its a "problem".
  • Earw0rm 11mo ago
    This was inevitable on the day the Web ceased to be a third space and became an integral part of day-to-day life. Some time between Facebook opening to the general public (mid 2006) and the launch of the iPhone (early 2007). "Online" was no longer a meaningful distinction from there on out.
• travisgriggs 11mo ago
  > The real goal is the complete elimination of anonymity on the web... I'm ok with running this experiment (not sure how it really turns out) BUT only if everyone participates. Governments and businesses get to watch me... I get to watch them. If the death if anonymity is inevitable, as unpleasant as that sounds, the goal to shoot for then is universal application
• stocksinsmocks 11mo ago
  You may not be old enough to remember Edward Snowden or Mark Klein (who went unnoticed), but there never was anonymity. My pet theory is that this requirement is part of a mob war and porn and whatever else the MindGeek people are involved with is being attacked for the much of the same reasons Ukraine attacks Russian oil refineries.
• miki123211 11mo ago
  How do you know this?
• planb 11mo ago
  > None of these laws are actually about protecting children. That's not the real goal. I fear that for 90% of the supporters of such laws (just like with chat control) this statement is wrong, and they truly do want to protect minors from harm. But that only makes it worse, because this type of argument completely misses the mark while the other 10% get to laugh up their sleeves while continuing to manipulate public opinion.
  • phrotoma 11mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
• SPICLK2 11mo ago
  >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. This supposed golden era of communication lasted for a very short period. Why is is so important that freedom of speech also be anonymous? What you're asking for is the right to talk to anyone with all societal, cultural, and interpersonal contexts removed.
  • torben-friis 11mo ago
    >Why is is so important that freedom of speech also be anonymous? Because it is a shortcut for an otherwise extremely hard to enforce freedom. Can you afford to defend your speech in court? Can you prove that an action taken against you by someone in power is retaliation against your speech? Can you handle social ostracism by a majority that disagrees? If the answer to some is no, your freedom of speech has practical limits. This is not to say that a world with anonymous speech is necessarily better, I’m just saying that in terms of guarantees it has a clear advantage. Case in point: will you answer a workplace questionnaire the same way whether or not it is anonymous?
    • chii 11mo ago
      It is not only freedom of speech, but freedom of association that would also be jeopardized. People long ago used to have to hide that they're gay, not only because they could be ostracized, but that people they associate with could also be under scrutiny. Being able to track one's movements, or who they associate with, could reveal information that said person would want kept secret.
      • torben-friis 11mo ago
        Yes, and even though not a normally named right, the possibility of someone’s ideas being detached from their identity is a godsend for some people. They won’t be dismissed (consciously or not) due to gender, background, look, or anything else if no one knows anything beyond their words.
• 8bitsrule 11mo ago
  Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. — Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981