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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> Not idiots necessarily, sometimes just long-time observers who have finally become cynical.
This doesn't explain why they would support privacy-invasive ID requirements instead of the RTA header.
> 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.
I want to call this a bad example because the only people who call the rules that don't pass "basic and uncontroversial" are the people who were on the other side to begin with, but maybe it's a good example because the analogy lines up so well with exactly the same scenario:
People who are anti-X propose rules with low effectiveness against actual harms but that impose significant burdens on innocent people who are pro-X, persistently insist that their proposal is fine and supported by everyone even as it demonstrably lacks enough support to pass and then point to the period of nothing being done to try to garner enough support from independents to squeak over the line instead of considering less burdensome alternatives, because burdening the pro-X people is the point. And then the people who fall for it are the useful idiots.
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.
> The comment "useful idiots" is more a play on the russian KGB strategy.
Oh, I'm familiar with the phrase, but I'm specifically disputing how applicable it really is to people that are self-aware about the situation they are facing. Useful idiots are ones that are tricked, especially ones that are evangelical about tricking others. People forced to choose between 2 extremes where both choices are very bad are called.. normal citizens participating in the democratic process.
> This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I understand how propaganda works
What? You can see through propaganda, but you can't just pencil in your own policy options. Unfortunately and by design, the things you can ultimately vote for are "all or nothing" flavored. Censor everything, censor nothing. Track everybody, track nobody. Tons of parents who totally understand the surveillance state probably got flipped by meta's memo about chatbots being "sensual" with children. They'd rather vote to force corporations to be good citizens, but they can't. So they'll vote for an age-gated internet as the best of the bad options. I wouldn't assume all those people are naive, confused, or duped.. they've simply switched from a principled/abstract stance to a convenience-based calculus after they were forced into it. Meta wins either way, as planned. Either they get to build a more addictive platform, or they track more info about more people
I think in this case many of these people are "useful idiots" in the sense that they lack a strong technical understanding of how the internet and www are architected. This can cause them to accept erroneous concepts like "tracking the identity of all internet users is the only way to protect the children" while alternatives like the one proposed at the beginning of this thread can be easily glossed over as some techno mumble jumble.
People forced to choose between 2 extreme evils, one (debatably) lesser, are not called "normal", they are called unfree.
The process of making sure people are always in one such situation or another is not called "governance", it's called driving insane.
>I wouldn't assume all those people are naive, confused, or duped.. they've simply switched from a principled/abstract stance to a convenience-based calculus after they were forced into it.
Forced into it under threat of violence, or under threat of denied sustenance and shelter, or "forced" by catering to their naivete, by confusing and duping them, by silently extorting them by enclosure of the commons?
Switching from "principle-based stance" to "convenience-based stance" is not called "being sensible", it's called... cowardice.
>Unfortunately and by design, the things you can ultimately vote for are "all or nothing" flavored. Censor everything, censor nothing. Track everybody, track nobody.
If voting changed anything they'd ban it.
>Tons of parents who totally understand the surveillance state
If you truly understood how the surveillance state feeds on human life, you would deny it sustenance by - yes: - refusing to breed in captivity.
That's one of the few meaningful political actions available to the individual. At least until advances in reproductive medicine get turned on us, same way it happened with the mind-bicycles. A society with the technical capacity to go Gattaca might rather go all-in on Plato's Republic.
Type of beat like yall can have the world to yourselves if yall want it that bad, but believe me, you will choke on it.
see, when you cut out the part about "because of terrorists" that sounds like a patently laughable claim. I would tend to agree with the poster on the strength that some propaganda is very, very easily spotted:
- anything that mentions "terrorists" (or the nouveau "narco-terrorists")
- "think of the children" / "we must protect the children"
- "we need to create jobs" / "job creators"
- "they're turning the frogs gay"
- "we need to protect America"
tbh if you're fooled by any of that (and there's no delicate way to say this) you're dumb. Even a cursory glance at history would reveal the obvious deception and it's on you that you haven't bothered.
> 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.”
Thanks, this was good info.
As an aside, I read the original source. I found the writing completely impenetrable and realized I know nothing about the British legislative process.
But this did, nonetheless, convince me that british legislators are interested in using this bill to regulate the internet.
> It genuinely doesn't seem like any more of a threat than age-gating Playboy at the bookstore
If it was really like that, I would have no problem. Simple ID check, in-person only, that's never stored anywhere.
I've proposed this several times. Age-gated websites (social media, random forums, adult websites) should require a one-time use code or token that expires once a year. The token should only be available for purchase at liquor stores or tobacco stores - someplace they check your ID on pain of losing their license. It should be reasonably priced.
Sometimes someone might resell a token they purchased to a minor. Those people should be actively hunted with sting operations and prosecuted.
There's no good reason to make age verification on the Internet more stringent than age verification to buy alcohol or tobacco. Alcohol and tobacco kill far more people.
I've never had my ID scanned. The sales clerk glances at it. These days they don't even ask :-D
If they scan your ID for alcohol or tobacco purchases where you live it might be time to fix that with legislation too. Insurance companies would love that data.
I don't understand the downvotes. If you have this question then so do others and it ought to be part of the discourse. Anyhow...
From what I've seen, the current wave of ID-gating the internet is a wedge for opening the door to much broader censorship. Specifically, some jurisdictions (Wisconsin, Minnnesota, and the UK) are using recently-passed legislation to argue that we need to make VPNs illegal [0 1 2].
Speaking for my own beliefs, banning the use of VPNs is a huge problem, and it seems like basically anybody who understands the technology would be against it.
I have no problem with banning or age gating pornography at all. Personally it seems weird to me that that's the red line for people.
But this is a good point, which is that lawmakers who don't have a clue what they're regulating will see VPNs as undermining the laws they've made. Thanks for this
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
The issue isn't age-gating Playboy, but to begin censoring requires a line to be drawn, and there's no guarantee that educational material regarding LGTBQ topics wont be considered "adult" or "pornographic".
The whole "know it when you see it" doesn't work when there's a significant group out there who would love to see queer people at large go away from society. With this, you now have teenagers being blocked from actual educational material because Carol from the "burn everyone but me" church down the street believes anything regarding sexuality is "adult" material.
The thing with the porn habits being logged by intelligence agencies, is that data has a large risk-reward for actually being used. They wouldn't burn the secret of their capabilities for something small. Most of the metadata wouldn't be admissible in court assuming courts don't go full kangaroo. The usage of the metadata is general intelligence to point investigations, or parallel reconstruction to get warrants for someone they don't actually have anything on, but want to search.
Doing KYC American style for porn/adult content means mass data leaks are a matter of "when", because there's no consumer protection and this data will be retained indefinitely because ads make money. The leak means real people are put in real danger.
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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
> 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
>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.
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.
There was a podcast episode I listened to once, probably Darknet Diaries but maybe some other tech one, where the person being interviewed was an active community member in some bbs back in the day. Everyone decided to meet up to play dnd, and he showed up as a 13 year old kid when everyone else was 20+. They let him stay after cleaning it with his mom.
This is one type of connection that would be unlikely to form if superficial anonymity is lost. That kid probably would be off in some "safe" walled garden.
This doesn't even touch on more obvious forms of discrimination like gender, religion, etc.
And political affiliation / speech isn't protected in the US, so an employer could term you anytime for policy disagreement. Such a policy would destroy the exploration of ideas overnight, as outrage mobs would try to get any dissident sacked.
If those are your concerns, then why is it so important that this freedom of anonymous expression only happens on the internet? I think what you are really asking for is private, encrypted comms but only to a certain subset of people. Otherwise, you should also argue for freedom of anonymous expression over any other medium.
And of course freedom of speech has practical limits. It's that very tempering that stops non-virtual discourse from turning into a cesspool. I worked for a company that permitted anonymous comments to the leadership team, which they would then review in front of the company. It was a total shit show, and I attached my name to any comments I made.
If you are not happy filling in your workplace questionnaire unless it's anonymous, then something needs to change about your company (and something that probably can't be fixed with anonymous comments).
I'm not asking for anything, I was merely pointing out the advantages of anonymity. You don't need to consider a decision the best one to see its upsides.
I don't really get the rest of that argument. What other mediums are legally deanonimised? Privacy in mail and telephone was a commonly supported right, Watergate was a scandal for a reason.
>If you are not happy filling in your workplace questionnaire unless it's anonymous, then something needs to change
That's the point I was trying to make, that it is a shortcut, but an improvement. Preaching a 'good option' that doesn't survive the real world is a common failure of justice systems.
Example: 'Anonymous tip off for sexual abuse' is a very flawed system. Tell the victims 'no, see, what you need is proper handling of abuse by authorities'. Is that useful when we know for a fact that alternative never worked?
Shortcuts should only be removed _after_ the proper alternative is in place and working. Otherwise, you're just making people lives worse.
> It's that very tempering that stops non-virtual discourse from turning into a cesspool.
Agreed, anonimity introduces many problems we haven't been able to solve properly yet. It can platform abusers. It can empower legitimately wrong behavior. It can make people less willing to take ownership of their actions, or less empathic.
Those are all legitimate points to consider and balance, I'm just not ok with pretending it's a no-brainer.
Agreed, to recycle a past comment on the benefits:
____________
We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.
Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content.
1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.
2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.
3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?
4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
This is society though, hence it is an issue of law and people trying to tell other people what to do.
The Elbonia rite crowd don't just want this for themselves. They want to ensure that their vision of "what is right" is put onto everybody. And the AnkleShowers want their vision of "what is right" put onto everybody. And everyone else has their opinion too.
And the shit-shouting continues until finally someone says "But we can ALLLLLL agree that we want to protect our children yes?"
The issue has never been technical. It is how society has it's debates. Things like each issue becoming a two party extreme. Things like media rules that "both sides get equal airtime" even if one is a tinfoil hat wearing idiot.
As a society, we won't get properly better until we debate better and can accept middle grounds.
> The current solutions are just about tracking people by real identity and incentivizing teens to commit identity crimes
Not all of them.
The solution currently undergoing large scale field testing in the EU uses cryptography (specifically zero-knowledge proofs) to allow you to anonymously prove to a site that your government issued ID shows you are above the site's minimum age, without the site getting any information about your real identity.
I've seen articles on that. What I do not like about that is one has to trust that is really the way the system works and that special people do not have a special API key to get their own hash from the adult site related to a user ID and then submit that has to a special API end-point to reverse or undo the anonymization. Having been a liaison to law enforcement I just assume that is a thing but I am also fine with people saying I am paranoid. A header does not require this level of trust nor a dependency on a third party see recent Cloudflare outage.
I understand the rationale - I am still against that. To me it is censorship.
Making it more sophisticated does not change this problem.
The problem is that some want to control other people. I am against this. For
similar reasons I stopped using reddit - I finally had enough of random moderators
censoring me and others.
I'm starting to see platevoltage's point. Yes it's additional information, but it is an indirect form of censorship.
Remove one more f-bomb and we'll give you that PG-13 rating you're wanting.
Food labels are easier to justify because they have a very tangible effect on one's health. But even those can be misleading in the end.
I say keep the food labels, but reconsider the movie ratings system. What if it went away? The studios and exhibitors would have to *tell us* who the movie is intended for. What's so hard about that? What is this magic benefit we're getting from a rating system?
On the planet I’m from, the pedophile in chief is already intentionally miscategorizing information so it can be censored using mechanisms like this, and is implementing a public playbook explaining how this is one pillar of a platform to force his particular brand of right wing christian “morality” on the rest of the population.
At best, you’re defending coordinated disinformation campaigns, though the article is about attempts to make compliance with the propaganda mandatory.
If you are a small child it is indeed up to your parents to censor adult content and I am all for that. Kids will be upset but that is part of growing up. When the parents believe the kids are emotionally ready for adult content then I am sure they will get parental controls disabled. Even if that should not come to pass the kids once they are teens will bypass it anyway.
If you are an adult and your followers are adults then this does not really apply to you or your device. This would only hurt groomers, most of whom use video games for that purpose.
I don't think we're talking about whether it's appropriate for kids to see the stuff. I think we're talking about who gets to decide to *mandate* an RTA header on a website. (They can already add it voluntarily so we are talking about a hypothetical mandate.)
Let's say your website mentions the MLK assassination. Or maybe the 9/11 attacks. Just a mention; no disturbing details. Is some government entity now going to force the RTA label? Who gets to decide? An RTA label would be a death sentence to educational sites.
Each site operator would have to decide what level of legal risk is appropriate based on content rating and that would likely come from their legal team.
An RTA label would be a death sentence to educational sites.
Maybe but not likely. Adult content for the purposes of education used to be protected but that was a grey area and was abused heavily by some art sites such as Deviant art and then social media. CIPA was passed in 2000/2001 and updated in 2011 to provide guidance on content viewed by children. [1] This is of course up to the parents to decide as has been the case for sex education throughout the history of the USA. If a school was going to view content that would be in conflict with CIPA then I would expect they could get parents to sign a permission slip meaning they have adult consent from the parent of each child. Either way I would expect a school to curate content that is appropriate for children and cache/print it locally.
If RTA is not an option then the alternative will likely be to have parents log into a 3rd party site to prove their identiy for each student via some proxy auth site to give the child permission while also sharing personal details of the parent and child to said third party. More laws get involved when logging the child's personal details with a 3rd party but I am thankfully not a lawyer. Here [2] are some more laws specific to states. Laws will vary wildly by country and province or state.
Bold of you to assume that legislators know how any kind of implementation works. They just propose general rules like "kids underage can not access this content" and the technical implementation doesn't matter to them.
I think this is the reasons we should vote more technical competent people into politics.
How would this work where children are hell bent on bypassing this control? Won't they be able to install browser plugins which will remove this header similar to how they are using free VPNs to bypass age checks?
Children who are hell bent on bypassing controls will always find a way. It helps them not just stumble on it though when they're not ready. If they really want to access it, they already know about it and what it is
Youtube has been repeatedly told about videos that are abusive towards children and they do nothing about it. They're not interested in effective solutions
Youtube has been repeatedly told about videos that are abusive towards children and they do nothing about it. They're not interested in effective solutions
Youtube is user-generated content which is precisely why I would prefer they add an RTA header. Random people uploading videos can claim to be kid friendly when they are not. Take that responsibility away from the uploaders and away from Youtube and hand it to the parents. Less work, liability and cost for Youtube should be a nifty incentive at the risk of blocking some advertising to children which is another loaded topic all together.
> Take that responsibility away from the uploaders and away from Youtube and hand it to the parents.
The system described still requires action by the webmaster. Their options are: deny the entire site to those sending an RTA header; evaluate the content themselves; or trust the uploader. (Or a combination: have uploaders opt-in to evaluation for a fee, with the content denied to kids by default.)
The client does not send an RTA header. The RTA header is only sent by the server or load balancer by design. Absolutely no action required by web site operators and owners assuming they enabled the header on any URL that is either adult or user-generated content.
It is up to the client what to do with the header which right now is nothing. A law would be required to get the snippet of code added to user agents. I estimate it would take an intern one afternoon to get it into the clients they support not counting dev/qa, management approval, etc...
Challenge to FAANG: Show off your interns! There is no harm in adding the code required to detect this header. Example header to detect sent from NGinx. If you detect this header activate nanny controls. To be safe do a separate parental_build to get manager approval.
> The RTA header is only sent by the server or load balancer by design. Absolutely no action required by web site operators and owners assuming they enabled the header on any URL that is either adult or user-generated content.
The website owners and operators have to decide which URLs get the header. If the categorization is "either adult or user-generated content", then I already covered that for the case of YouTube: i.e., the entire site is denied to kids (whose parents opt in).
I also covered that here [1]. Indeed if parents do not enable all of Youtube or Youtube does not move most adult content into a unique URL or their server does not send the header for anything flagged as adult the kids will not be advertised to. They would have to go to a kid friendly site that moderates before a video is viewable or Youtube would have to change moderation tactics. Kids need not visit Youtube. There are kid friendly sites.
Out of curiosity, who would YouTube implement an RTA header?
Their app developers unless it is set globally and in that case their network engineering team.
Which resources would have the header and which wouldn’t?
If the app developers send the header on any video flagged as adult then just specific videos. If they created a unique URL that all adult content would reside under then it could potentially be the network engineers. It really depends on how much work they put into it so that more people could view the content assuming user agents become legislated to check for the header.
I mean they have invested a ton into their kid-friendly mode and there have been quite a number of “adpocalips” where ad revenue for many content creators was dramatically slashed due to YouTube’s over-zealous moderation.
It is a serious business concern, there are occasional panics triggered by consumers complaining that a brand ad is shown next to and benefits from the attention of some distasteful content, and they start to bleed important advertisers on mass. YouTube then proceeds to get defensive and demonetizes (removes all ads from) or tags as adult-only any video that may be concerning, where avoiding false negatives takes much more precedence over avoiding false positives.
Of course this is not directly tied to protecting children, but this incentive structure is partly aligned and it is a strong one.
I can't believe in 2025, nearly 2026, that anyone would seriously suggest a header as a valid way of doing anything like this. Headers can be spoofed, modified along the way, or flat out ignored. DNT header is the obvious go to example here.
An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers for all traffic on the network that the parental units never even know about. I'd venture there would be plenty of YT, TikTok, Discord threads, etc that would provide a step-by-step set of instructions to do it. Probably just point to an image to download to copy to your SD and voila.
This would require SSL interception, which requires a custom certificate on the end device.
If your kid can figure out how to install a custom certificate on their device and MITM SSL to evade filters, (a) you never secured the device (b) you already lost long ago and (c) let’s get that kid a job or a scholarship.
how many of those of us reading this right now would have been able to do this? how many of us reading this right now had parents that would had a clue about any of this to question it?
True hacker kids will figure it out no matter what. If the phone is restricted they will jailbreak it or beg an old one from a friend. If the network is locked down they will crack the password for the neighbor’s wifi. If the clearnet is locked down due to authoritarian laws, they will end up on incredibly sketchy sites on the dark web. If you block all escape outlets they will do really stupid things in nihilistic protest like huff cans of whipped cream or scam money from crypto. The power of bored youth springs eternal.
What I’m saying is you can set rules, you can try your best, but under no circumstances can you build an impenetrable wall for determined kids. Things like this header solution or better controls on the end device would make things safe for the vast majority of kids. So don’t ruin the internet for adults because of a handful of unruly kids who are going to get in trouble no matter what.
Walls don't deny access, they change traffic patterns. A header can be honored on a phone designed for a child and ignored by my phone. Can some kids get through, sure. But not the vast majority. If people were honestly doing this for kids, this would be the solution being pushed. This has nothing to do with kids, hence other types of solutions being pushed. Don't trust what people say, observe what they do.
I remember when I was around 11-12 years old, my father got me a computer given to him for free. It had only a console and a black screen, and I figured out by myself how to open, edit files, lock them, navigate the file system, run programs like a calculator and more, with no manual, no internet, and I didn't even know english good enough.
1-2 years later, the teacher at school showed us how to program the turtle program, and I got it stuck in an infinite loop in 10 minutes. The teacher started swearing "Your chair is smashing the ethernet cable. The program is good and you fucked it up."
Around that time, I remember going to a barber shop for a haircut and stealing his nude/porn magazines. Even younger, I used to sneak up to my uncle's bedroom where he hid alcohol, and drunk half a bottle of whisky in an hour, and getting knocked out every time.
I used to get involved in fights all the time, since 8 years old, and my favorite activity at that age, was to climb to roofs of abandoned houses at night, and wander around inside of them.
My parents regularly tried to talk some sense into me, and I was beaten up by my father for all the stuff I did.
When I was sixteen, I managed to steal a car by myself, I drove it around for 1-2 hours and I didn't know how to drive, I figured it out at that moment. After that I returned the car where it was at the start, I didn't do anything with it, but when driving it I managed to flat the tire somehow.
When I was at the university, at some point around 20 years old, I downloaded Kevin Mitnick's book from torrents, I read it, and I got inspired to phone to my university, pretend I am a professor and I want pass a student (me) for 2 courses. I passed the courses without even taking the exam.
It was around that time, a friend of mine, while he was playing the guitar at his house, he looked at me at the eyes and said dead serious: "Man, if you go on like this, you will end up in jail." It was actually earth shattering! First time someone talk some sense into me. I thought, this cannot continue, he is right.
DNT is a client header that failed to get traction and never did anything useful. RTA is a server header and small children will not be doing this for the most part and parents can of course disable parental controls assuming one day they are enabled by default for child accounts. Like I said, it's not perfect. Teens can of course bypass this a million different ways. For every 100 million dollars a company spends to lock teens out of something is just an extra 5 lines of python or 15 seconds of their time on AI if that. Currently many teens watch pirated movies and porn together in VR and assorted games that allow placing a media player in G-rated world building games.
It's probably worth noting that if teens can not view porn, they will likely produce porn making an entirely new tax free underground market on Tor or other networks.
This is just for keeping small children out. Nobody in the history or future of earth have ever or will ever locked teens out of a thing. Archive this comment so we can review it at a later time.
> An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers for all traffic on the network that the parental units never even know about
An aspiring teen could just have sex with another aspiring teen...
You won't stop teenagers from finding a way to be teenagers. Part of being a teenager is learning how to subvert the rules set by adults to fulfil one's hormonal imperative.
If your goal is to make something teenager proof, you have already failed before you started. Many teenagers have the intellectual capacity of full grown adults, it is their emotional intelligence and life experience that is lacking. Doing any more than putting a simple padlock on the door will not stop them, the same way a determined adult couldn't really be stopped, and teenagers are determined in most everything they try by default.
> An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers for all traffic on the network that the parental units never even know about.
Who cares? Why is this an issue? An aspiring teen can (and will) do many things their parents don't know about. It's part of growing up. Making air tight surveillance systems to prevent teens from talking to friends or looking at boobies is many a bridge too far.
If circumventing a measure requires setting up a RPi and modifying headers, I would call it widely successful, that would be less than a thousandth of kids.
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.
I feel like we've always been living on borrowed time, due to the historical accident of the internet being built by academics and public institution employees. If internet protocols had been built by for-profits, HTTP requests would include credit card # as a mandatory header.
People were talking about micropayments for content in the early '90s. The first digital currency proposals were made with exactly this use case in mind. Ironically, the protocol that finally stuck the landing is terrible at handling this exact situation.
It was less commercial then. It was not as much "occupied" by intermediaries who think the internet exists for their commercial gain and anyone who uses it owes them something
I think it is amusing how these commercial third party intermediaries today are trying to frame things like "chat control" and "age restrictions" as attacks on internet users' rights rather than attacks on their intermediation "business model"
Generally, there is no age restriction on subscribing to internet service. However third party intermediaries that have now occupied seemingly every corner of the web, so-called "tech" companies, want everyone to believe that intermediaries _are_ the internet (as opposed to middlemen who seek to surveil as many internet subscribers as they can)
I am glad I grew up before the internet so that I understand and appreciate the only service that matters is _internet service_. People today take internet service for granted perhaps but I can remember when it was a new frontier
With internet service, there were so many possibilities. Today, so-called "tech" companies portray internet service as a given, apparently useless on its own,^1 whilst they advertise themselves as offering "services" (usually for free, a Trojan Horse for commercial surveillance). They utilise bandwidth paid for by the internet subscriber to transfer encrypted surveillance data to themselves
1. For example, when Mozilla claims something like without an online advertising "ecosystem" the internet would be worthless. The greed and self-entitlement behind this framing is both absurd and hilarious
I think it's important to not throw babies out with bathwater here.
One can disagree with Mozilla and think advertising sucks, and use tools to block it or FOSS products that don't force it on us, while also seeing how e2ee encryption bans ("chat control") and age verification rules are a restriction of both the rights of service providers and the rights of users.
Another way to put it is, just because a regulation is a restriction of the rights of a service provider does not mean it isn't also a restriction of the rights of a user.
The former does not make the latter true, but in some cases both are true.
I'd also add that if we can't stop bad laws that restrict the rights of (and piss off) both service providers and users , we have no hope of stopping similarly bad laws that only restrict the rights of users.
(Service providers, even small ones if they take the time to speak with their member of Congress, can be very credible, sympathetic, and persuasive stakeholders. When we can fight on the same side--realizing that sometimes we will fight on opposite sides--it's better for user rights that we do so. One of the tragedies of the left and parts of the right in the Trump era is that they see any regulation that hurts Big Tech as a win, even if it also hurts user rights. User rights are safer if we can distinguish between regs that hurt Big Tech and users from regs that don't hurt users.)
I was on some kind of local BBS in 1995 from my local ISP.
I found a guy selling a gamepad of some kind. Agreed to buy it. Talked to him for a decent amount of time. Finally set time to meet at local Kmart near my house.
The look on his face when a 10 year old rode up on a bicycle to buy his gamepad. I don't have a good memory but I still remember that scene ha.
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.
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.
If we give up the ability to negotiate, then we would not be able to have this conversation in the future. As we have seen many times, all over the world, authoritarian regimes will absolutely suppress dissent and chill speech if they have the tools. Today maybe it's adult content. They're already attacking the press and anyone critical about the administration: they keep trying to get the corporations to fire their comedians and rein in their reporters. So this isn't slippery slope. We're there and nearing the bottom.
We, the people who build and operate the internet as well as the tech that enables it, collectively choose to maintain a free and open internet for the benefit of all free people.
Maybe with enough effort you can force the internet to fracture into a centralized TV-style internet and a “shadow” free internet, but you’ll probably kill the economy in the process. Regardless, you’ll never stamp out those of us who will maintain the free internet over whatever channels we can find.
Kids also cannot sign up for internet service, or pay for it. So in both cases, we're talking about society gating access to something, adults obtaining that product legally and bringing it into their home.
The question, then, is who is responsible for the children in the household? I've always answered this exactly one way: the parents. Power and responsibility must go together, so if the parents are responsible, then the parents must have the power. Parents have been held legally responsible for the crimes of their children, and given the coverage of parents being arrested for letting their kids go on a walk across town, I'd say this sets up incentives pretty well.
But all of that is a sideshow; a narrative. What we actually have is a massive swing towards authoritarianism globally, largely fueled by in increase in the internet allowing for unprecedented surveillance overreach, and the folks trying to seize control of those reins are using children seeing porn as a way to seem benevolent to garner support from folks that don't understand what's actually happening. Huge swathes have been duped into believing the narrative and fighting for age-gating in the worst possible ways, and that's because they're missing the larger pattern.
Kids can access the internet in all kinds of places outside the home, and outside the purview of their parents supervision. Schools, libraries, friend's houses, public wifi anywhere.
You may be right about the authoritarianism; it's a tendency of our species and makes it all the more remarkable that Western freedoms have lasted this long. I think, though, that it's more likely simple greed. The giant tech companies, dependent on ad revenue because nobody would actually pay for what they are offering, must be able to track and profile people.
The "protect kids from porn" lobby has always been around, it has nothing to do with surveillance or the internet. These people would be picketing a bookstore that sold Hustler magazine back in the 1970s, and demanding that customers be made to prove their age.
> Kids can access the internet in all kinds of places outside the home, and outside the purview of their parents supervision. Schools, libraries, friend's houses, public wifi anywhere.
Then these places should make sure kids are not doing wrong things on the web on their machines. Just like a shop should make sure to not sell alcohol to kids. A library should have some kind of web filter anyway to at least block porn.
If only it were that simple. To fix the analogy, imagine that every other kids' dad left the liquor cabinet unlocked and allowed them to carry liquor around anytime they liked.
How does a parent check that a friend isn’t passing pills to them in the back of the bus? How are they checking that they don’t shoplift when out on their own? This is not an argument.
Do your best as a parent and that is enough. Perfection is not possible or even desired; kids do have a degree of agency, and if they want to break the rules they are going to do it! And breaking some rules (ideally in a safe-ish way) is one way that we learn how to be independent from parents as we mature.
The day we have an epidemic of children and teens abusing alcohol to the point of it turning into a national healthcare emergency, you will find that stricter control of alcohol will certainly be put in place.
We are at that point now with children having unrestricted access to online content that isn’t age appropriate, as well as being influenced by insane weirdos on TikTok and the like at an age where they are particularly impressionable.
The CDC says 4,000 underage drinkers die in the US every year. Maybe we could reduce that with stricter controls, but at what point does that become too burdensome to the rights of legal drinkers?
It's even harder to get the balance right when it comes to free speech issues like online pornography.
> The CDC says 4,000 underage drinkers die in the US every year
That's not quite correct. They count both deaths where the decedent had a high blood alcohol level and deaths where someone else who was responsible for the death had a high blood alcohol level. Because of this many of those in the count were underage but were not drinkers.
For example if I'm driving drunk and you are my sober passenger and I drive us off a tall cliff killing you your death will be included in their count because I was drunk and responsible for it. It also works the other way. If I'm sober and you are drunk, and I drive us off the cliff and you die it counts because you died drunk.
When grandpa was young, if there was a wolf in the forest, they went and killed the wolf. They would not break the children legs to keep them home.
Killing the wolf saved both the children of busy parents that couldn't be bothered to break their legs, and the children that grew old enough to have their leg fixed but weren't yet adult.
Today instead of chasing predators away from children spaces, we just box the children so at one magic birthday they'd be out in the world untouched by evil. The world will be still evil however, and the not children for a day unprepared for it.
What if, here's a radical idea, we terminate corporation with toxic ads or that let predators use their system to target children.
I was driving in a rural area, and almost hit deer several times. I finally made it to my destination, and island, with no deer, but a healthy wolf population.
The state would breed wolves on the island then release them on the mainland to keep the deer in check.
Sorry to ruin your metaphor, but we really need more wolves.
If you could offer the proponents of these laws a deal where all the bills die in committee and in exchange Pornhub gets shut down, I suspect they'd take it. But you can't. The First Amendment doesn't permit such targeting, and almost nobody who opposes age gating would concede the premise that porn is inherently bad.
But again, the problem isn't this or that content-exchange site; the problem is people doing illegal activities within, or facilitated by, such sites, or people within the site that are sourcing willingly illegal material or distributing material that is illegal to some recipients. And lawmakers are targeting the middlemen and the recipient instead of going to the root cause, and the cynic in me thinks, "Of course they'd do that, why would they go after themselves?" But it's a bit of a reduction, and not all wolves are rich and powerful (though those who are uncaught or get away scot-free mostly are).
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." - Heinlein
If you hand power to the state every time people fail to properly handle their responsibilities, you end up in a dictatorship. It is a parent's responsibility to keep their kids away from the dark corners of the internet. Thoughtful regulation would create tools to allow them to do that easily, not hand parenting over to governments.
Where are those former peers now? You reference this like their life trajectory must have been irreparably harmed by it. Are they in prison? Were they killed while committing violent crime? Are they on disability from being permanently emotionally crippled? Or what?
A little tangential since this is more about gating white supremacist content than violence or sex, but I was on 4chan when it was being infiltrated by genuine white supremacist organizations and Russians that talked about how manly Assad was to influence teenagers interested in anime. I had people in real life to talk to about these things so I narrowly escaped the influence. Looking at the current state of the US, not everyone did. That being said, despite my hope that older people would be less prone to such influence, it doesn't always seem to be the case.
Something that is way worse today in my opinion is that back then everyone has nicknames, talks even for deep topics somewhat generically.
Nowadays everyone wants you to put your real name, expects a real photo of you, track every step you take.
I think it would be nice to go back to how you could talk openly, just like you were able to have "discussion forums" in newspapers pseudonymously without it being trivially abused for identity theft, etc.
My feelings of freedom in that era, as a teen in a small 90s US city, were what fueled me to co-found one of the organizations (Fight for the Future) cited in the article!
(No longer in the trenches, just on the board, deserve zero direct credit for any of this work--it's all them!)
I'm grateful as well. While I was born after the early internet, I still got to experience the true internet. Truly one of the wonders of humanity. It will be missed.
Ha, I remember finding the adult section of the file uploads. It took fourteen year old me thirty minutes to download one jpeg of boobs.
LoRD was fantastic, as were the turn based games that other people would dial in to take part of. It was such a different era, but we made it work by setting time limits and cooperating.
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.)
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
Governments are also getting more conservative recently with regards to domestic surveillance & social freedoms. In this regard, it's not anyone new, it's just the usual suspects: the same people who fund conservative media, the prison industrial complex, etc.
This seems like an attempt to leverage something widely regarded as reasonable (stop kids from accessing pornographic content without parental oversight) as the camel's nose through the tent to establish widespread identity tracking on the internet.
It’s too soon and too coordinated. If it were organic but underhand as you suggest the timeline would be 15 years, seeing it hit the goal elsewhere and copying not 8 months.
I get the sentiment, but just denouncing that the given reason is a facade is not sufficient.
It creates a divide between people that are looking for a solution to a problem, and people that disregard the problem completely. If you just ignore the actual problem and cynically call it a front for something else, you are just going to be ignored in the actual conversation. The problem is real and it needs a solution, suggest something better or be forced to stay out of the conversation.
For example, if there's a lot of car accidents, and we suggest a speed limit, you might say that it's actually a way for cops and cities to control the population, and make everything slow, and increase city income by charging fines. But the problem still exists despite your cynicism, unless you suggest another solution for the problem, you won't be able to keep your precious speed freedom. Because of course reducing car fatalities is more important than the freedom to go super fast, that's not really under discussion.
So I get it, but you have to include the time frame that this is happening. Its more than just a solution to a problem. This particular idea of age-gating just happens to be pushed forward during the worst time in history for internet freedoms. Freedoms are being attacked on multiple fronts. I look at this more like them introducing license plate cameras to stop crime, or real estate apps that use algorithms to help land lords and renters to get better pricing. Except these corporations that sell this tech are promoting and utilizing the features of this tech to make sure it gets abused. You can see this with the license plate readers, its giving police more control than they need, and for the real estate companies that are pushing algorithmic pricing for rents, they are spending time contacting landlords and asking them what they are charging for rent so they can artificially inflate the market.
This issue is way more nuanced then you are making it. There is no legislation, or anyone enforcing laws to reign in the abuses and therefor the tech is being abused, and will continue to be abused with no end it sight. If you want laws and mechanisms to protect children, first have something in-place that protects people from the abuse that these corporations are encouraging. Until that happens, I do not support any of these initiatives. Its the wrong time for them.
traffic control and real estate pricing collusions are unrelated topics. I don't know that this is the worst moment for freedoms, I think you would be well served to look into other periods of history
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.
I think it's possible that there are secretive efforts to destroy permissionless access to the internet, but my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time.
A somewhat analogous situation is how landlords raise rents in sync with each other, not because they're intentionally colluding to fix prices, but because nowadays it's easy to see average rental prices in neighborhoods, and the natural strategy is to set your rental prices based on that.
> my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time.
Reminds me of a little piece about PR firms and how many ideas are not really an organic zeitgeist but are actively manufactured by monied interests: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Written in '05 and still very poignant. I'd love to see a follow-up of this article updated for how it's changed 20 years later. Seems like the scale and decentralization has changed the most.
Do you think the main force is misplaced good intentions (which I assume is what drives Ashton Kutcher) or more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public?
Kutcher wrote a letter of support for his friend Danny Masterson who was convicted raping multiple women so if he is truly concerned about abuse of women it doesn't seem to apply when it involves people he knows doing it. When this came to light his defense was that he didn't think anyone but the judge was going to see the letter.
Those are heavily co-mingled. Policing and intelligence agencies in particular view themselves as having good intentions which look like harm from the outside.
I don't think anyone is that naive to not see the negative implications of the things they are proposing, or helping develop. They might feign ignorance, and excuse themselves with "following orders" but the majority know it's not right in principle.
I tend to follow information in this space, and could talk about it endlessly (though it would still have minimal effect in the end).
From the things I'm seeing right now, in my mind, all this clampdown on privacy is to have better control of the message and discussion in order to preserve the corrupt status quo. To give one example, many leaks and reports initially come in anonymous due to fear of repercussion from those in power. My country (Romania) changed the legislation a couple of years back to prevent people from reporting corruption anonymously (in a highly corrupt state). Maybe that's why Trump said he loves Romanians, recently, he'd like to do that at home as well.
> more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public
Until recently I wasn't the type of person that would entertain the idea of a shadowy organization that tries to puppetmaster the world. Though with the recent Epstein emails release that in black and white stated about Slovakia's 2018 government "the government will fall this week - as planned" (day prior to mass protests that lead to it falling), makes you wonder about the backroom politics of the western world, and why we need more transparency there, and less control from them.
edit:
And of course, any change that is put behind a "think of the children" message, should raise everybody's eyebrows to the max.
Just imagine a capable individual just like yourself, but with such a rotting core that they see the same devious plans you and I do, but lack the backbone/principles and moral/ethical fiber to prevent them from pursuing those ideas. Instead, they full endorse and selfishly benefit from them at the expense of others. With our large population, this individual, and many such like them are guaranteed to exist at all levels of the socio-economic ladder. Solipsism is the root of corruption continuing to sprout.
Off-topic, but actually a number of landlords raise prices in sync with each other because they use price-setting services like RealPage that intentionally try to maximize rents across multiple landlords. They just settled a lawsuit over this: https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-realpage-settlement-r...
In the last couple years we've seen the internet version of "Vietnam war being televised made it unpopular at home".
After Vietnam, it was easier for journalists to embed with the terrorist groups than it was to embed with US forces, as the US learned that people seeing how the sausage is made immediately cuts the support for said sausage making.
Massive political weight was thrown behind getting control of TikTok because of the sheer amount of reporting from Gaza. Politicians are still trying to tell people that they're essentially wrong for forming their views on actual images of violence they're seeing.
The world at large was shown the brutality against the people of Gaza, and the plot was lost at home.
If the "enemies" aren't shown, it's easy to go along with "good guys" and "bad guys", but when you see 100s of children missing limbs, mourning their family members, and begging on to not be killed over the course of a few months, suddenly the fairy tale that allows some countries to brutalize others falls apart.
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.
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.
Do social movements _always_ have people at the top pulling the strings? Is it _never_ the case that even when you can identify thought leaders, the movement itself is organic and broadly supported?
Everything that these laws are supposedly regulating has always been there and we have an entire generation now that grew up with it. Everyone was fine just like video games were fine, movies were fine, racy books were fine, and the printing press was fine.
The Internet comments make it seem like lazy parents but it's very convenient that the solution is to ID every single person on the Internet. Facebook pushed this hard with their real name policy and then had to back off because people complained about trans people being forced to use their old names. They've been successfully demonized so now it's time to push as hard as they can. It's probably not just Facebook but it's obviously not organic.
This seems strictly wrong. People talk online. People get their ideas online, and share their ideas online. Internet comments _alone_ are not a social movement, but they certainly do frequently represent social movements.
Musk in his tit for tat with Trump recently revealed huge numbers of the Internet comments supporting MAGA were foreign plants. He didn't reveal which accounts were bots though. All these comments supporting censorship appear mostly on platforms that would love to ID every person on their platform.
Internet comments do not represent anything anymore that doesn't manifest in the actual world. They are excellent at having a few influence the many
I agree with you, and probably more than it sounds. But I think the point you make is still too strong a case. ie, even if the online comments are ~90% foreign influence it doesn't also follow that everything is astroturfing or that real people do not discuss issues online.
To your point though, maybe we can no longer reliably tell the difference, and so it'd be better to adopt your view as a rule of thumb.
I think it's "organic" from the big tech companies looking to pull up the ladder behind them. These laws are straight up regulatory capture to make it much harder to start new Internet businesses, while forcing their users to divulge even more personal info.
Google has been bugging me with Android popups for years "please add your birthday to help Google comply with the law". Obtaining that bit of my information isn't something they need to do - it's something they want to do because every bit of personal information they scrape out of me makes their adtech surveillance database joins that much more accurate.
Today an email purportedly from Google said I will need to send age verification on my 20yo account, or they'll stop targeting me for advertisements and showing me inappropriate material. This sounds like an excellent deal for me, not going to bother determining if its a phishing attempt.
Concern over accessibility of internet pornography is absolutely a social movement. I don't necessarily agree with some of what is being pushed, but there's a large constituency here.
Yes, and that thing is chiefly corporate social media. Which could be fixed literally overnight by parents, over a few weeks by school district policy, and over a few months with sites publishing metadata to aid client side blocking. Phones, the primary independent computing device for kids, are already locked down to the point that an owner has to jump through many (detectable and auditable) hoops to install arbitrary software.
None of this requires some draconian regime where it becomes sites' own responsibilities to obtain and verify their users meatspace identities.
> The SESTA-FOSTA law is a combination of two bills: the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act; and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. It passed Congress in March, and President Donald Trump signed it into law in April.
> ...
> The biggest companies say they can manage the risks. Match Group—owner of Match.com, Tinder, Ok Cupid and Plenty of Fish—says any potential legal issues give “huge advantages” to those with enough size to comply. “We are able to have a big legal team, a big customer care team,” Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg said.
The Christian right has been pushing for this forever. They finally acquired enough political and cultural purchase to get this measure pushed over the line.
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.
The laws are only moderately popular in the abstract, but when you show people the reality and the future implications then popularity drops. The key is educating people about the dangers of this type of legislation, including dangers to privacy and authoritarian control over information. In the US especially both major parties hate each other with a passion; this animosity can be leveraged with proper framing.
What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have ever expressed interest in this?
If the politicians keep voting for things their constituents don't (and in these cases actively push back against so hard that the politician are forced to withdraw the push) that seems like strong evidence that politicians are doing something with an external incentive...
Politicians having bad incentives (e.g. campaign donations) isn't conspiracy thinking, it's a documented reality. Hell, we even had a supreme court judge taking a present from somebody who's case he was ACTIVELY OVERSEEING.
So far as I know there's nothing confounding here - people from across the political spectrum just seem to think it's a good idea to introduce age checks and to restrict children from accessing adult content.
That's a powerpoint of somebody really trying to push an agenda and has nothing to do with age verification. The 88% support is for "social media platforms to protect minors from online harms, such as the promotion of eating disorders, suicide, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation."
I'm sure social media could say with 99% accuracy whether somebody is a minor already just based on advertising data and if a law prevented facebook from showing diet pill ads to a kid that has absolutely zero with some sort of government tracking bullshit.
The fact that you are citing 3 studies without even reading them apparently really makes me suspicious of your motivation here.
I'm disappointed that you call my motivations into question instead of engaging me in good faith. It's not possible to solve a problem without being honest about the pertinent facts, and I think you (and the person I responded to) are engaging in denialism.
My experiences are all in the UK but everything I've read and everyone I've spoken to (outside of tech circles) reinforces my belief that this is popular. If you disagree then fine but I don't think you can find any polling to support that.
If you can then be my guest - I genuinely would like to see it. I'm not happy with my conclusions.
Well either you didn't read what you cited, in which case you sort of owe us an apology and need to back off your claim.
Or you did read it in which case you'd realize it has nothing to do with people wanting government age verification, and then you also need to back off your claim and owe us an apology.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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"?
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.
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-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.
Corporations and center-left/center-right liberal governments support now and have always supported mass immigration because it lowers wages. Nobody especially cares about identifying them, the reason they flooded in recently (over the past couple decades) is because they were deliberately let in through written policies. They did this despite public objections. In the US, we know exactly who they are; we issue illegal immigrants special IDs and business licenses. They get bank loans; they're homeowners. They get in-state tuition at colleges.
Starmer is currently using anti-immigrant sentiment to push his digital IDs, but that's because he is a cynic. He does whatever he needs to do to satisfy his bosses.
> That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you something.
It tells you that the US puts nations under siege for decades for committing the crime of self-determination, then lets in with absolutely no obstacles all of the economically destroyed and desperate, the extremely right wing, and the participants in CIA-financed death squads who flee, then uses them as a voting block (and a resource) to support the continuation and escalation of those sieges.
edit: immigrants commit less crime in the US than natives. Their children commit more crime, because they rise to the level of natives at their socioeconomic bracket.
You honestly believe these ID laws will get rid of bots? Maybe for a year or two the volume will be lower as they catch up on how to circumvent restrictions, but I don't see it making any real serious dent in bot traffic.
i'm not a russian bot and i hope the id cards and face recognition stuff is temporary while the world collaborates to catch the problem people. But my guess is once they see how successful it is they will get addicted to the power and not let go.
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.
> 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!
I’ve thought about it, but that’s still technology trying to solve a societal problem, and my experience is that doesn’t work (it just makes someone a lot of money by giving them data to exploit). Don’t get me wrong, I am still all for said services existing as an option for parents to leverage, but it’s not my thing.
My soapbox is addressing the crux of the social problem: we have built a society where both parents in most families have to work full-time jobs to have a chance at making ends meet, increasingly taking on extra overtime or gig work to improve their odds of paying the bills. This means children have no consistent adult available in their lives to engage with them: nurture, monitor, teach, mentor, demonstrate, assist, etc.
I want to build a society where only one parent has to work, and the other (whoever they are, I am not advocating a return to “traditional gender role” bullshit) can stay at home full-time. This way someone is always available to engage with the child and ensure their safety at home, with the suite of knock-on benefits that entails for the child’s development.
I don’t want to make a child-safe planet at the expense of children lacking present and available parents; I want a world where parents aren’t so wiped from working multiple jobs and struggling to pay rent or buy food that their children become a forced secondary concern.
I would also like to see this happen, but the developed world as a whole seems to be moving away from single working parents. Even across very different cultures. I’d like to see a change, but I’m not sure how it could happen.
The closest thing we have is the stay at home working parent, which has grown after COVID. This is a lot better than neither parent being at home, but unless it’s a very easy job, they still won’t be able to supervise much. I also think some of these newer “email jobs” are facing competition from overseas workers and AI. Unless politicians learn to find value in having a stay at home parent, and supporting that through policy, these jobs may go away as quickly as they arrived.
I think the stay-at-home working parent idea is a good one as a transition stage, but ultimately this is a large problem that'll require years of reforms and fundamental changes to accomplish - a plurality of society must be on board and willing to sacrifice to make it happen, because employers never will be despite the research data showing the benefits of these approaches.
It's hard playing the long game, but we need more folks to do it. The big, important problems of life are never solved in a single fiscal year, after all.
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.
Don't worry the kid mode is coming on all devices, one thing you wouldn't want kids doing is sideloading applications after all.
I think this is the wrong approach, an example is youtube kids. There seems to be a abundance of inappropriate content for kids on there. These companies don't actually care about you or your kids they care about profit.
Only (hopefully most) parents care about their kids. They have the power to push a solution as a collective so the solution should empower them to choose and not not take power away from them and others (for example adults without kids). The age verification mandated on a government level constitutes to limiting access to content, and in my eyes that is censorship.
Either a kid phone built on AOSP or a kid-focused MDM system, coupled with kid-focused apps, would seem to be sufficient. No need to go to the carriers.
I'm also opposed to this law (mainly I think it is a huge invasion of privacy with near zero chance of actually protecting kids), but there are some realities people should know.
My kids were all exposed to some relatively extreme stuff long before they had a network connected device (starting around 1st grade). This is because other kids at school had network connected devices, and some of those kids show other kids stuff for shock value.
In a more extreme instance, the child did pay for internet access; they got an old phone from a friend and paid cash for a sim card.
No no no. Many schools require students to have Chromebooks that use Google Classroom.
In the state I live in, public education is a constitutional. Yet the state can predicate my child’s constitutional rights on using Google Classroom.
Google Classroom also has workaround that expose kids to harmful materials.
While homeschooling is an option, I have a constitutional right to send my kids to public school. The school lends them free notebooks, which they then control.
Some have strict settings - not enough to prevent toxic content - while others let lots of crap in.
Then I would say that communities and administrators need to do a better job of restricting the internet access of those devices they provide kids, rather than punishing the outside world for the bad decisions of a handful of adults in neglecting their obligations. My schools implemented restricted ISPs with curated content as I was growing up, and eventually just a basic DNS filter by the time I reached HS. My current employer implements similar DNS checks on the firewall to block social media sites and, presumably, adult content (I’m not dumb enough to test the latter). My schools also had no problem providing local storage and collaboration tooling without internet access, so perhaps the argument should be made that schools shouldn’t be getting kids hooked on Big Tech cloud services a la iPads and Chromebooks, especially when children and parents become captive markets via school equipment mandates. Maybe we should be loaning out Linux laptops without WiFi or Ethernet ports with “Internet in a Box” preloaded on them for reference material, rather than shoving kids out into the wild internet absent guidance and context.
I also flatly refuse the whole “we ID people in real life all the time” argument. The physical world is a default shared space, with finite boundaries and clear obligations. The digital world is the exact opposite: vague, nebulous, ever-shifting and changing, with no clear demarcation between states, or countries, or people. That argument reveals a complete misunderstanding of why physical ID checks work and digital ones never, ever will at scale, and I refuse to entertain anything predicated upon it.
And here’s the dirty, nasty, disgusting little secret that parents don’t seem to realize or care about: bad actors in education are leveraging the fact kids have internet devices to spy on them. I’ve had CIO-equivalents in public and private education ask me to build surveillance tools to scan messages and photos on students’ private devices when connected to school networks under the guise of “safety”, which I refused to do because hell naw does anyone other than parents need full access to a child’s device. I have worked in the education sector, I have seen first hand the mismatch between the goals of parents, the needs of children, and the ambitions of grotesquely underpaid technical talent and the resultant quality of candidates that often seems to attract (or lack thereof - no disrespect to the good ones out there, but ya’ll are the fringe minority based on my experiences).
Website age checks aren’t protecting kids, they’re harming adults. And bad adults are exploiting this knowledge gap to harm kids, too.
My first exception: school homework now done on PC. school requires laptop they can use in classroom. Friends.
Now yeah blame the parents.
But we already restrict alcohol to minors (but what stupid parent gave their kid money!) why not addictive, manipulative apps.
Tldr. Kids need devices of some sort to do life these days. Pare nts will monitor and restrict. But we can also clear the dealers from the corners. That helps too.
I do have kids. I still blame parents. I see so many parents who can't even do the lazy thing of turning on the parental controls for the devices they give their kids. Because they don't want to or can't deal with their kod whining and being obnoxious about having boundaries. I see adults who will create adult accounts for their kids even when they have to lie about their age because it's too annoying to them to either set up or deal with all the notifications and approvals of a kid account.
They want to protect their kid while being lazy. It's why my aunt bought my cousin an M rated game. That said on the box is was violent and everything else and then presented her ID so she could prove she was an adult in order to buy the videogame. Then she she was upset because that game wasn't for kids. It shouldn't be allowed for kids.
It wasn't. She just didn't pay any attention. And that's how I think of all parents of these lazy initiatives. They want to deny and inconvenience adults because they can't be bothered.
That line right there sank your entire argument, because A) you don’t have to have kids to want to protect kids, and B) it makes the position that anyone without kids should have no say in how those with kids rear and raise their children, which could be (and is often) dangerously expanded to oppose Doctors, Teachers, Social Workers, and other people in other professions or knowledge areas solely because they’re childless.
A more generous reading of this is "If you were around kids more, you would probably understand that kids have internet access even without their parent's permission and/or help" At least some of this access is essentially state-mandated, as it happens at public schools, which you are required to send your kids to unless you have the resources to arrange alternative education.
I don’t give generous readings to bad arguments from online anons. The point of anonymous discourse is to come at it with your best arguments and debate them thoroughly, which is why there’s a lot of discussion about common methods of “bad faith” argument styles like the preceding commenter used (“you don’t have kids” = “your opinion is irrelevant”).
Also, a lot of folks are making some assumptions about my person and profession to suit their own arguments, rather than discuss the merits of what I raised. These assumptions ultimately destroy their own arguments by showing a resultant lack of curiosity and a reliance on pre-existing narratives rather than carefully thought out rationale.
That’s why these ID checks keep winning: suckers drinking the Kool-Aid without thinking for themselves and dismissing what they perceive to be opposition, who in reality have more experience with this with kids and in education than they assume when dismissing our positions.
I don’t need to be more understanding of bad actors or bad arguments, they need to be better at discussing their positions rationally or trusting experts who have lived these problems.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Facebook is over 20 years old and has never enforced its minimum age (13 years.)
I, for one, would have started with legal threats and financial penalties long ago. But it just won't happen. So I'm fine with technical solutions.
Facebook is able to sell you ads based on your favorite shoe lace colour. They ban terrorists, bots, porn and people named "Mark Zuckerberg" all the time. Noone can claim it's too hard for them to ban minors under 13.
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.
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.
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."
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> I'm sure there are some people really trying to protect kids.
yes, I believe the term for them is "useful idiots"
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
> Not idiots necessarily, sometimes just long-time observers who have finally become cynical.
This doesn't explain why they would support privacy-invasive ID requirements instead of the RTA header.
> 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.
I want to call this a bad example because the only people who call the rules that don't pass "basic and uncontroversial" are the people who were on the other side to begin with, but maybe it's a good example because the analogy lines up so well with exactly the same scenario:
People who are anti-X propose rules with low effectiveness against actual harms but that impose significant burdens on innocent people who are pro-X, persistently insist that their proposal is fine and supported by everyone even as it demonstrably lacks enough support to pass and then point to the period of nothing being done to try to garner enough support from independents to squeak over the line instead of considering less burdensome alternatives, because burdening the pro-X people is the point. And then the people who fall for it are the useful idiots.
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.
> The comment "useful idiots" is more a play on the russian KGB strategy.
Oh, I'm familiar with the phrase, but I'm specifically disputing how applicable it really is to people that are self-aware about the situation they are facing. Useful idiots are ones that are tricked, especially ones that are evangelical about tricking others. People forced to choose between 2 extremes where both choices are very bad are called.. normal citizens participating in the democratic process.
> This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I understand how propaganda works
What? You can see through propaganda, but you can't just pencil in your own policy options. Unfortunately and by design, the things you can ultimately vote for are "all or nothing" flavored. Censor everything, censor nothing. Track everybody, track nobody. Tons of parents who totally understand the surveillance state probably got flipped by meta's memo about chatbots being "sensual" with children. They'd rather vote to force corporations to be good citizens, but they can't. So they'll vote for an age-gated internet as the best of the bad options. I wouldn't assume all those people are naive, confused, or duped.. they've simply switched from a principled/abstract stance to a convenience-based calculus after they were forced into it. Meta wins either way, as planned. Either they get to build a more addictive platform, or they track more info about more people
I think in this case many of these people are "useful idiots" in the sense that they lack a strong technical understanding of how the internet and www are architected. This can cause them to accept erroneous concepts like "tracking the identity of all internet users is the only way to protect the children" while alternatives like the one proposed at the beginning of this thread can be easily glossed over as some techno mumble jumble.
>tricked [and] evangelical about tricking others
Nah, that's just your "democratic" process.
People forced to choose between 2 extreme evils, one (debatably) lesser, are not called "normal", they are called unfree.
The process of making sure people are always in one such situation or another is not called "governance", it's called driving insane.
>I wouldn't assume all those people are naive, confused, or duped.. they've simply switched from a principled/abstract stance to a convenience-based calculus after they were forced into it.
Forced into it under threat of violence, or under threat of denied sustenance and shelter, or "forced" by catering to their naivete, by confusing and duping them, by silently extorting them by enclosure of the commons?
Switching from "principle-based stance" to "convenience-based stance" is not called "being sensible", it's called... cowardice.
>Unfortunately and by design, the things you can ultimately vote for are "all or nothing" flavored. Censor everything, censor nothing. Track everybody, track nobody.
If voting changed anything they'd ban it.
>Tons of parents who totally understand the surveillance state
If you truly understood how the surveillance state feeds on human life, you would deny it sustenance by - yes: - refusing to breed in captivity.
That's one of the few meaningful political actions available to the individual. At least until advances in reproductive medicine get turned on us, same way it happened with the mind-bicycles. A society with the technical capacity to go Gattaca might rather go all-in on Plato's Republic.
Type of beat like yall can have the world to yourselves if yall want it that bad, but believe me, you will choke on it.
> I understand how propaganda works so I am never fooled
That's not how it works.
see, when you cut out the part about "because of terrorists" that sounds like a patently laughable claim. I would tend to agree with the poster on the strength that some propaganda is very, very easily spotted:
- anything that mentions "terrorists" (or the nouveau "narco-terrorists")
- "think of the children" / "we must protect the children"
- "we need to create jobs" / "job creators"
- "they're turning the frogs gay"
- "we need to protect America"
tbh if you're fooled by any of that (and there's no delicate way to say this) you're dumb. Even a cursory glance at history would reveal the obvious deception and it's on you that you haven't bothered.
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?
> 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/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.”
Thanks, this was good info. As an aside, I read the original source. I found the writing completely impenetrable and realized I know nothing about the British legislative process.
But this did, nonetheless, convince me that british legislators are interested in using this bill to regulate the internet.
> It genuinely doesn't seem like any more of a threat than age-gating Playboy at the bookstore
If it was really like that, I would have no problem. Simple ID check, in-person only, that's never stored anywhere.
I've proposed this several times. Age-gated websites (social media, random forums, adult websites) should require a one-time use code or token that expires once a year. The token should only be available for purchase at liquor stores or tobacco stores - someplace they check your ID on pain of losing their license. It should be reasonably priced.
Sometimes someone might resell a token they purchased to a minor. Those people should be actively hunted with sting operations and prosecuted.
There's no good reason to make age verification on the Internet more stringent than age verification to buy alcohol or tobacco. Alcohol and tobacco kill far more people.
I don't know much about modern PoS but I assume that when you scan your ID for tobacco that data is stored and retained.
I've never had my ID scanned. The sales clerk glances at it. These days they don't even ask :-D
If they scan your ID for alcohol or tobacco purchases where you live it might be time to fix that with legislation too. Insurance companies would love that data.
I don't understand the downvotes. If you have this question then so do others and it ought to be part of the discourse. Anyhow...
From what I've seen, the current wave of ID-gating the internet is a wedge for opening the door to much broader censorship. Specifically, some jurisdictions (Wisconsin, Minnnesota, and the UK) are using recently-passed legislation to argue that we need to make VPNs illegal [0 1 2].
0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpn...
1 https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-usage...
2 https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-09-15/debates/57714...
Thanks, I appreciate this.
Speaking for my own beliefs, banning the use of VPNs is a huge problem, and it seems like basically anybody who understands the technology would be against it.
I have no problem with banning or age gating pornography at all. Personally it seems weird to me that that's the red line for people.
But this is a good point, which is that lawmakers who don't have a clue what they're regulating will see VPNs as undermining the laws they've made. Thanks for this
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.
Is this affected by this bill at all?
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.
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.
> 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.
Webcam selfies are still anonymity destroying. I have a better idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162159
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?
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.
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.
The issue isn't age-gating Playboy, but to begin censoring requires a line to be drawn, and there's no guarantee that educational material regarding LGTBQ topics wont be considered "adult" or "pornographic".
The whole "know it when you see it" doesn't work when there's a significant group out there who would love to see queer people at large go away from society. With this, you now have teenagers being blocked from actual educational material because Carol from the "burn everyone but me" church down the street believes anything regarding sexuality is "adult" material.
The thing with the porn habits being logged by intelligence agencies, is that data has a large risk-reward for actually being used. They wouldn't burn the secret of their capabilities for something small. Most of the metadata wouldn't be admissible in court assuming courts don't go full kangaroo. The usage of the metadata is general intelligence to point investigations, or parallel reconstruction to get warrants for someone they don't actually have anything on, but want to search.
Doing KYC American style for porn/adult content means mass data leaks are a matter of "when", because there's no consumer protection and this data will be retained indefinitely because ads make money. The leak means real people are put in real danger.
So your position is that pornography must be fully unrestricted because any attempt to curb it would inevitably infringe on gay rights?
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.
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?
I assume that literally all porn is a data honeypot. Don't you?
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.
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.
This is so untrue I wonder if you even bothered to think about it.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I think you're right. Surveillance power is nearly a side effect of the personal enrichment.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. — Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
How do you know this?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46154208
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".
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.
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.
> 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
>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.
>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?
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.
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.
There was a podcast episode I listened to once, probably Darknet Diaries but maybe some other tech one, where the person being interviewed was an active community member in some bbs back in the day. Everyone decided to meet up to play dnd, and he showed up as a 13 year old kid when everyone else was 20+. They let him stay after cleaning it with his mom.
This is one type of connection that would be unlikely to form if superficial anonymity is lost. That kid probably would be off in some "safe" walled garden.
This doesn't even touch on more obvious forms of discrimination like gender, religion, etc.
And political affiliation / speech isn't protected in the US, so an employer could term you anytime for policy disagreement. Such a policy would destroy the exploration of ideas overnight, as outrage mobs would try to get any dissident sacked.
If those are your concerns, then why is it so important that this freedom of anonymous expression only happens on the internet? I think what you are really asking for is private, encrypted comms but only to a certain subset of people. Otherwise, you should also argue for freedom of anonymous expression over any other medium.
And of course freedom of speech has practical limits. It's that very tempering that stops non-virtual discourse from turning into a cesspool. I worked for a company that permitted anonymous comments to the leadership team, which they would then review in front of the company. It was a total shit show, and I attached my name to any comments I made.
If you are not happy filling in your workplace questionnaire unless it's anonymous, then something needs to change about your company (and something that probably can't be fixed with anonymous comments).
> I think what you are really asking for
I'm not asking for anything, I was merely pointing out the advantages of anonymity. You don't need to consider a decision the best one to see its upsides.
I don't really get the rest of that argument. What other mediums are legally deanonimised? Privacy in mail and telephone was a commonly supported right, Watergate was a scandal for a reason.
>If you are not happy filling in your workplace questionnaire unless it's anonymous, then something needs to change
That's the point I was trying to make, that it is a shortcut, but an improvement. Preaching a 'good option' that doesn't survive the real world is a common failure of justice systems.
Example: 'Anonymous tip off for sexual abuse' is a very flawed system. Tell the victims 'no, see, what you need is proper handling of abuse by authorities'. Is that useful when we know for a fact that alternative never worked?
Shortcuts should only be removed _after_ the proper alternative is in place and working. Otherwise, you're just making people lives worse.
> It's that very tempering that stops non-virtual discourse from turning into a cesspool.
Agreed, anonimity introduces many problems we haven't been able to solve properly yet. It can platform abusers. It can empower legitimately wrong behavior. It can make people less willing to take ownership of their actions, or less empathic.
Those are all legitimate points to consider and balance, I'm just not ok with pretending it's a no-brainer.
Agreed, to recycle a past comment on the benefits:
____________
We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.
Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content.
1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.
2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.
3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?
4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.
I agree with your approach.
This is society though, hence it is an issue of law and people trying to tell other people what to do.
The Elbonia rite crowd don't just want this for themselves. They want to ensure that their vision of "what is right" is put onto everybody. And the AnkleShowers want their vision of "what is right" put onto everybody. And everyone else has their opinion too.
And the shit-shouting continues until finally someone says "But we can ALLLLLL agree that we want to protect our children yes?"
The issue has never been technical. It is how society has it's debates. Things like each issue becoming a two party extreme. Things like media rules that "both sides get equal airtime" even if one is a tinfoil hat wearing idiot.
As a society, we won't get properly better until we debate better and can accept middle grounds.
> The current solutions are just about tracking people by real identity and incentivizing teens to commit identity crimes
Not all of them.
The solution currently undergoing large scale field testing in the EU uses cryptography (specifically zero-knowledge proofs) to allow you to anonymously prove to a site that your government issued ID shows you are above the site's minimum age, without the site getting any information about your real identity.
I've seen articles on that. What I do not like about that is one has to trust that is really the way the system works and that special people do not have a special API key to get their own hash from the adult site related to a user ID and then submit that has to a special API end-point to reverse or undo the anonymization. Having been a liaison to law enforcement I just assume that is a thing but I am also fine with people saying I am paranoid. A header does not require this level of trust nor a dependency on a third party see recent Cloudflare outage.
I understand the rationale - I am still against that. To me it is censorship.
Making it more sophisticated does not change this problem.
The problem is that some want to control other people. I am against this. For similar reasons I stopped using reddit - I finally had enough of random moderators censoring me and others.
I strongly disagree. Having ratings on content isn’t censorship. It’s providing additional information.
Like a nutrition label. It’s your choice (as an adult) what you want to do with that information.
I'm starting to see platevoltage's point. Yes it's additional information, but it is an indirect form of censorship.
Remove one more f-bomb and we'll give you that PG-13 rating you're wanting.
Food labels are easier to justify because they have a very tangible effect on one's health. But even those can be misleading in the end.
I say keep the food labels, but reconsider the movie ratings system. What if it went away? The studios and exhibitors would have to *tell us* who the movie is intended for. What's so hard about that? What is this magic benefit we're getting from a rating system?
Sure it is. An NC-17 rating is basically a death sentence for any movie.
Consider the alternative - people go with their kids to the latest Popeye movie only to find out that it’s a slasher horror.
The natural result is people push their representatives for something to protect themselves.
Some form of social contract will end up existing.
Pulling a wild bait and switch like that is also a death sentence for a movie. The parent could easily watch or read a review.
I was a kid before the video game rating system came out. Mom wouldn't let me buy Mortal Kombat.
When Popeye entered the public domain, a slasher horror movie was made on the IP.
Sure - Parents should pay attention and the trailers would make it obvious.
However - under your regime, there is no loss to such movies. They get some extra views from an audience segment they weren’t targeting at all.
Replicate this case ad infinitum - people should check and review a multitude of things. Medicines, cosmetics, food, contracts, games etc.
Firms use this as a way to offset risk onto the purchaser.
I hope we can both agree - that the burden of review of regular folk is now impossible.
On the planet I’m from, the pedophile in chief is already intentionally miscategorizing information so it can be censored using mechanisms like this, and is implementing a public playbook explaining how this is one pillar of a platform to force his particular brand of right wing christian “morality” on the rest of the population.
At best, you’re defending coordinated disinformation campaigns, though the article is about attempts to make compliance with the propaganda mandatory.
I’m sorry but I have no idea what you’re even saying.
I’m talking about ratings like we have in movies, tv shows, games, music, apps.
Many facets of our lives.
Or nutrition labels.
To me it is censorship.
If you are a small child it is indeed up to your parents to censor adult content and I am all for that. Kids will be upset but that is part of growing up. When the parents believe the kids are emotionally ready for adult content then I am sure they will get parental controls disabled. Even if that should not come to pass the kids once they are teens will bypass it anyway.
If you are an adult and your followers are adults then this does not really apply to you or your device. This would only hurt groomers, most of whom use video games for that purpose.
I don't think we're talking about whether it's appropriate for kids to see the stuff. I think we're talking about who gets to decide to *mandate* an RTA header on a website. (They can already add it voluntarily so we are talking about a hypothetical mandate.)
Let's say your website mentions the MLK assassination. Or maybe the 9/11 attacks. Just a mention; no disturbing details. Is some government entity now going to force the RTA label? Who gets to decide? An RTA label would be a death sentence to educational sites.
who gets to decide
Each site operator would have to decide what level of legal risk is appropriate based on content rating and that would likely come from their legal team.
An RTA label would be a death sentence to educational sites.
Maybe but not likely. Adult content for the purposes of education used to be protected but that was a grey area and was abused heavily by some art sites such as Deviant art and then social media. CIPA was passed in 2000/2001 and updated in 2011 to provide guidance on content viewed by children. [1] This is of course up to the parents to decide as has been the case for sex education throughout the history of the USA. If a school was going to view content that would be in conflict with CIPA then I would expect they could get parents to sign a permission slip meaning they have adult consent from the parent of each child. Either way I would expect a school to curate content that is appropriate for children and cache/print it locally.
If RTA is not an option then the alternative will likely be to have parents log into a 3rd party site to prove their identiy for each student via some proxy auth site to give the child permission while also sharing personal details of the parent and child to said third party. More laws get involved when logging the child's personal details with a 3rd party but I am thankfully not a lawyer. Here [2] are some more laws specific to states. Laws will vary wildly by country and province or state.
[1] - https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-internet-prot...
[2] - https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/social-med...
Bold of you to assume that legislators know how any kind of implementation works. They just propose general rules like "kids underage can not access this content" and the technical implementation doesn't matter to them. I think this is the reasons we should vote more technical competent people into politics.
How would this work where children are hell bent on bypassing this control? Won't they be able to install browser plugins which will remove this header similar to how they are using free VPNs to bypass age checks?
Children who are hell bent on bypassing controls will always find a way. It helps them not just stumble on it though when they're not ready. If they really want to access it, they already know about it and what it is
Youtube has been repeatedly told about videos that are abusive towards children and they do nothing about it. They're not interested in effective solutions
Youtube has been repeatedly told about videos that are abusive towards children and they do nothing about it. They're not interested in effective solutions
Youtube is user-generated content which is precisely why I would prefer they add an RTA header. Random people uploading videos can claim to be kid friendly when they are not. Take that responsibility away from the uploaders and away from Youtube and hand it to the parents. Less work, liability and cost for Youtube should be a nifty incentive at the risk of blocking some advertising to children which is another loaded topic all together.
> Take that responsibility away from the uploaders and away from Youtube and hand it to the parents.
The system described still requires action by the webmaster. Their options are: deny the entire site to those sending an RTA header; evaluate the content themselves; or trust the uploader. (Or a combination: have uploaders opt-in to evaluation for a fee, with the content denied to kids by default.)
The client does not send an RTA header. The RTA header is only sent by the server or load balancer by design. Absolutely no action required by web site operators and owners assuming they enabled the header on any URL that is either adult or user-generated content.
It is up to the client what to do with the header which right now is nothing. A law would be required to get the snippet of code added to user agents. I estimate it would take an intern one afternoon to get it into the clients they support not counting dev/qa, management approval, etc...
Challenge to FAANG: Show off your interns! There is no harm in adding the code required to detect this header. Example header to detect sent from NGinx. If you detect this header activate nanny controls. To be safe do a separate parental_build to get manager approval.
All one need detect is: RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTAFor fun, search for this on Shodan.
> The RTA header is only sent by the server or load balancer by design. Absolutely no action required by web site operators and owners assuming they enabled the header on any URL that is either adult or user-generated content.
The website owners and operators have to decide which URLs get the header. If the categorization is "either adult or user-generated content", then I already covered that for the case of YouTube: i.e., the entire site is denied to kids (whose parents opt in).
the entire site is denied to kids
I also covered that here [1]. Indeed if parents do not enable all of Youtube or Youtube does not move most adult content into a unique URL or their server does not send the header for anything flagged as adult the kids will not be advertised to. They would have to go to a kid friendly site that moderates before a video is viewable or Youtube would have to change moderation tactics. Kids need not visit Youtube. There are kid friendly sites.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152727
Out of curiosity, who would YouTube implement an RTA header? Which resources would have the header and which wouldn’t?
Out of curiosity, who would YouTube implement an RTA header?
Their app developers unless it is set globally and in that case their network engineering team.
Which resources would have the header and which wouldn’t?
If the app developers send the header on any video flagged as adult then just specific videos. If they created a unique URL that all adult content would reside under then it could potentially be the network engineers. It really depends on how much work they put into it so that more people could view the content assuming user agents become legislated to check for the header.
I mean they have invested a ton into their kid-friendly mode and there have been quite a number of “adpocalips” where ad revenue for many content creators was dramatically slashed due to YouTube’s over-zealous moderation.
It is a serious business concern, there are occasional panics triggered by consumers complaining that a brand ad is shown next to and benefits from the attention of some distasteful content, and they start to bleed important advertisers on mass. YouTube then proceeds to get defensive and demonetizes (removes all ads from) or tags as adult-only any video that may be concerning, where avoiding false negatives takes much more precedence over avoiding false positives.
Of course this is not directly tied to protecting children, but this incentive structure is partly aligned and it is a strong one.
Their kid friendly mode is still completely full of absolute crap that you wouldn't want your kid to see.
It is definitely mind-rotting crap, but I think they are very strict with technically inappropriate content.
I agree that they are not doing a good thing, but one can’t say they aren’t doing massive efforts around it either.
I can't believe in 2025, nearly 2026, that anyone would seriously suggest a header as a valid way of doing anything like this. Headers can be spoofed, modified along the way, or flat out ignored. DNT header is the obvious go to example here.
An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers for all traffic on the network that the parental units never even know about. I'd venture there would be plenty of YT, TikTok, Discord threads, etc that would provide a step-by-step set of instructions to do it. Probably just point to an image to download to copy to your SD and voila.
This would require SSL interception, which requires a custom certificate on the end device.
If your kid can figure out how to install a custom certificate on their device and MITM SSL to evade filters, (a) you never secured the device (b) you already lost long ago and (c) let’s get that kid a job or a scholarship.
how many of those of us reading this right now would have been able to do this? how many of us reading this right now had parents that would had a clue about any of this to question it?
True hacker kids will figure it out no matter what. If the phone is restricted they will jailbreak it or beg an old one from a friend. If the network is locked down they will crack the password for the neighbor’s wifi. If the clearnet is locked down due to authoritarian laws, they will end up on incredibly sketchy sites on the dark web. If you block all escape outlets they will do really stupid things in nihilistic protest like huff cans of whipped cream or scam money from crypto. The power of bored youth springs eternal.
What I’m saying is you can set rules, you can try your best, but under no circumstances can you build an impenetrable wall for determined kids. Things like this header solution or better controls on the end device would make things safe for the vast majority of kids. So don’t ruin the internet for adults because of a handful of unruly kids who are going to get in trouble no matter what.
Walls don't deny access, they change traffic patterns. A header can be honored on a phone designed for a child and ignored by my phone. Can some kids get through, sure. But not the vast majority. If people were honestly doing this for kids, this would be the solution being pushed. This has nothing to do with kids, hence other types of solutions being pushed. Don't trust what people say, observe what they do.
I remember when I was around 11-12 years old, my father got me a computer given to him for free. It had only a console and a black screen, and I figured out by myself how to open, edit files, lock them, navigate the file system, run programs like a calculator and more, with no manual, no internet, and I didn't even know english good enough.
1-2 years later, the teacher at school showed us how to program the turtle program, and I got it stuck in an infinite loop in 10 minutes. The teacher started swearing "Your chair is smashing the ethernet cable. The program is good and you fucked it up."
Around that time, I remember going to a barber shop for a haircut and stealing his nude/porn magazines. Even younger, I used to sneak up to my uncle's bedroom where he hid alcohol, and drunk half a bottle of whisky in an hour, and getting knocked out every time.
I used to get involved in fights all the time, since 8 years old, and my favorite activity at that age, was to climb to roofs of abandoned houses at night, and wander around inside of them.
My parents regularly tried to talk some sense into me, and I was beaten up by my father for all the stuff I did.
When I was sixteen, I managed to steal a car by myself, I drove it around for 1-2 hours and I didn't know how to drive, I figured it out at that moment. After that I returned the car where it was at the start, I didn't do anything with it, but when driving it I managed to flat the tire somehow.
When I was at the university, at some point around 20 years old, I downloaded Kevin Mitnick's book from torrents, I read it, and I got inspired to phone to my university, pretend I am a professor and I want pass a student (me) for 2 courses. I passed the courses without even taking the exam.
It was around that time, a friend of mine, while he was playing the guitar at his house, he looked at me at the eyes and said dead serious: "Man, if you go on like this, you will end up in jail." It was actually earth shattering! First time someone talk some sense into me. I thought, this cannot continue, he is right.
Parental control software on general purpose computing devices has always been an intelligence test. If you cannot bypass it you fail.
DNT is a client header that failed to get traction and never did anything useful. RTA is a server header and small children will not be doing this for the most part and parents can of course disable parental controls assuming one day they are enabled by default for child accounts. Like I said, it's not perfect. Teens can of course bypass this a million different ways. For every 100 million dollars a company spends to lock teens out of something is just an extra 5 lines of python or 15 seconds of their time on AI if that. Currently many teens watch pirated movies and porn together in VR and assorted games that allow placing a media player in G-rated world building games.
It's probably worth noting that if teens can not view porn, they will likely produce porn making an entirely new tax free underground market on Tor or other networks.
This is just for keeping small children out. Nobody in the history or future of earth have ever or will ever locked teens out of a thing. Archive this comment so we can review it at a later time.
> An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers for all traffic on the network that the parental units never even know about
An aspiring teen could just have sex with another aspiring teen...
You won't stop teenagers from finding a way to be teenagers. Part of being a teenager is learning how to subvert the rules set by adults to fulfil one's hormonal imperative.
If your goal is to make something teenager proof, you have already failed before you started. Many teenagers have the intellectual capacity of full grown adults, it is their emotional intelligence and life experience that is lacking. Doing any more than putting a simple padlock on the door will not stop them, the same way a determined adult couldn't really be stopped, and teenagers are determined in most everything they try by default.
> An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers for all traffic on the network that the parental units never even know about.
Who cares? Why is this an issue? An aspiring teen can (and will) do many things their parents don't know about. It's part of growing up. Making air tight surveillance systems to prevent teens from talking to friends or looking at boobies is many a bridge too far.
> An aspiring teen could set up an RPi that modifies headers for all traffic on the network that the parental units never even know about.
Just like how teens are already bypassing age-gates? The point is to make it the responsibility of the parents and not of the government.
> An aspiring teen could set up an RPi
If circumventing a measure requires setting up a RPi and modifying headers, I would call it widely successful, that would be less than a thousandth of kids.
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.
I feel like we've always been living on borrowed time, due to the historical accident of the internet being built by academics and public institution employees. If internet protocols had been built by for-profits, HTTP requests would include credit card # as a mandatory header.
People were talking about micropayments for content in the early '90s. The first digital currency proposals were made with exactly this use case in mind. Ironically, the protocol that finally stuck the landing is terrible at handling this exact situation.
It was less commercial then. It was not as much "occupied" by intermediaries who think the internet exists for their commercial gain and anyone who uses it owes them something
I think it is amusing how these commercial third party intermediaries today are trying to frame things like "chat control" and "age restrictions" as attacks on internet users' rights rather than attacks on their intermediation "business model"
Generally, there is no age restriction on subscribing to internet service. However third party intermediaries that have now occupied seemingly every corner of the web, so-called "tech" companies, want everyone to believe that intermediaries _are_ the internet (as opposed to middlemen who seek to surveil as many internet subscribers as they can)
I am glad I grew up before the internet so that I understand and appreciate the only service that matters is _internet service_. People today take internet service for granted perhaps but I can remember when it was a new frontier
With internet service, there were so many possibilities. Today, so-called "tech" companies portray internet service as a given, apparently useless on its own,^1 whilst they advertise themselves as offering "services" (usually for free, a Trojan Horse for commercial surveillance). They utilise bandwidth paid for by the internet subscriber to transfer encrypted surveillance data to themselves
1. For example, when Mozilla claims something like without an online advertising "ecosystem" the internet would be worthless. The greed and self-entitlement behind this framing is both absurd and hilarious
I think it's important to not throw babies out with bathwater here.
One can disagree with Mozilla and think advertising sucks, and use tools to block it or FOSS products that don't force it on us, while also seeing how e2ee encryption bans ("chat control") and age verification rules are a restriction of both the rights of service providers and the rights of users.
Another way to put it is, just because a regulation is a restriction of the rights of a service provider does not mean it isn't also a restriction of the rights of a user.
The former does not make the latter true, but in some cases both are true.
I'd also add that if we can't stop bad laws that restrict the rights of (and piss off) both service providers and users , we have no hope of stopping similarly bad laws that only restrict the rights of users.
(Service providers, even small ones if they take the time to speak with their member of Congress, can be very credible, sympathetic, and persuasive stakeholders. When we can fight on the same side--realizing that sometimes we will fight on opposite sides--it's better for user rights that we do so. One of the tragedies of the left and parts of the right in the Trump era is that they see any regulation that hurts Big Tech as a win, even if it also hurts user rights. User rights are safer if we can distinguish between regs that hurt Big Tech and users from regs that don't hurt users.)
Arguably, those early adopters of online services were "occupiers" of a system designed and funded by military and academic goverment bodies.
I was on some kind of local BBS in 1995 from my local ISP. I found a guy selling a gamepad of some kind. Agreed to buy it. Talked to him for a decent amount of time. Finally set time to meet at local Kmart near my house.
The look on his face when a 10 year old rode up on a bicycle to buy his gamepad. I don't have a good memory but I still remember that scene ha.
This is what I always loved about the early scene. All that mattered was how you presented yourself in the text you typed.
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.
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.
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.
If we give up the ability to negotiate, then we would not be able to have this conversation in the future. As we have seen many times, all over the world, authoritarian regimes will absolutely suppress dissent and chill speech if they have the tools. Today maybe it's adult content. They're already attacking the press and anyone critical about the administration: they keep trying to get the corporations to fire their comedians and rein in their reporters. So this isn't slippery slope. We're there and nearing the bottom.
We, the people who build and operate the internet as well as the tech that enables it, collectively choose to maintain a free and open internet for the benefit of all free people.
Maybe with enough effort you can force the internet to fracture into a centralized TV-style internet and a “shadow” free internet, but you’ll probably kill the economy in the process. Regardless, you’ll never stamp out those of us who will maintain the free internet over whatever channels we can find.
Alcohol is banned for minors so that argument doesn't work.
Kids also cannot sign up for internet service, or pay for it. So in both cases, we're talking about society gating access to something, adults obtaining that product legally and bringing it into their home.
The question, then, is who is responsible for the children in the household? I've always answered this exactly one way: the parents. Power and responsibility must go together, so if the parents are responsible, then the parents must have the power. Parents have been held legally responsible for the crimes of their children, and given the coverage of parents being arrested for letting their kids go on a walk across town, I'd say this sets up incentives pretty well.
But all of that is a sideshow; a narrative. What we actually have is a massive swing towards authoritarianism globally, largely fueled by in increase in the internet allowing for unprecedented surveillance overreach, and the folks trying to seize control of those reins are using children seeing porn as a way to seem benevolent to garner support from folks that don't understand what's actually happening. Huge swathes have been duped into believing the narrative and fighting for age-gating in the worst possible ways, and that's because they're missing the larger pattern.
It's manufactured consent.
Kids can access the internet in all kinds of places outside the home, and outside the purview of their parents supervision. Schools, libraries, friend's houses, public wifi anywhere.
You may be right about the authoritarianism; it's a tendency of our species and makes it all the more remarkable that Western freedoms have lasted this long. I think, though, that it's more likely simple greed. The giant tech companies, dependent on ad revenue because nobody would actually pay for what they are offering, must be able to track and profile people.
The "protect kids from porn" lobby has always been around, it has nothing to do with surveillance or the internet. These people would be picketing a bookstore that sold Hustler magazine back in the 1970s, and demanding that customers be made to prove their age.
> Kids can access the internet in all kinds of places outside the home, and outside the purview of their parents supervision. Schools, libraries, friend's houses, public wifi anywhere.
Then these places should make sure kids are not doing wrong things on the web on their machines. Just like a shop should make sure to not sell alcohol to kids. A library should have some kind of web filter anyway to at least block porn.
They meant banning alcohol altogether. A.k.a. prohibition.
If only it were that simple. To fix the analogy, imagine that every other kids' dad left the liquor cabinet unlocked and allowed them to carry liquor around anytime they liked.
How does a parent check what the child does on the way to school or meeting friends in a shopping mall.
Public wifi and smart phones chngaes what can be done and what needs to be done.
How does a parent check that a friend isn’t passing pills to them in the back of the bus? How are they checking that they don’t shoplift when out on their own? This is not an argument.
Do your best as a parent and that is enough. Perfection is not possible or even desired; kids do have a degree of agency, and if they want to break the rules they are going to do it! And breaking some rules (ideally in a safe-ish way) is one way that we learn how to be independent from parents as we mature.
The day we have an epidemic of children and teens abusing alcohol to the point of it turning into a national healthcare emergency, you will find that stricter control of alcohol will certainly be put in place.
We are at that point now with children having unrestricted access to online content that isn’t age appropriate, as well as being influenced by insane weirdos on TikTok and the like at an age where they are particularly impressionable.
Isn't that day today?
The CDC says 4,000 underage drinkers die in the US every year. Maybe we could reduce that with stricter controls, but at what point does that become too burdensome to the rights of legal drinkers?
It's even harder to get the balance right when it comes to free speech issues like online pornography.
> The CDC says 4,000 underage drinkers die in the US every year
That's not quite correct. They count both deaths where the decedent had a high blood alcohol level and deaths where someone else who was responsible for the death had a high blood alcohol level. Because of this many of those in the count were underage but were not drinkers.
For example if I'm driving drunk and you are my sober passenger and I drive us off a tall cliff killing you your death will be included in their count because I was drunk and responsible for it. It also works the other way. If I'm sober and you are drunk, and I drive us off the cliff and you die it counts because you died drunk.
When grandpa was young, if there was a wolf in the forest, they went and killed the wolf. They would not break the children legs to keep them home.
Killing the wolf saved both the children of busy parents that couldn't be bothered to break their legs, and the children that grew old enough to have their leg fixed but weren't yet adult.
Today instead of chasing predators away from children spaces, we just box the children so at one magic birthday they'd be out in the world untouched by evil. The world will be still evil however, and the not children for a day unprepared for it.
What if, here's a radical idea, we terminate corporation with toxic ads or that let predators use their system to target children.
I was driving in a rural area, and almost hit deer several times. I finally made it to my destination, and island, with no deer, but a healthy wolf population.
The state would breed wolves on the island then release them on the mainland to keep the deer in check.
Sorry to ruin your metaphor, but we really need more wolves.
The age pyramid and natality stats show the inapplicability of the example to our situation.
If you could offer the proponents of these laws a deal where all the bills die in committee and in exchange Pornhub gets shut down, I suspect they'd take it. But you can't. The First Amendment doesn't permit such targeting, and almost nobody who opposes age gating would concede the premise that porn is inherently bad.
But again, the problem isn't this or that content-exchange site; the problem is people doing illegal activities within, or facilitated by, such sites, or people within the site that are sourcing willingly illegal material or distributing material that is illegal to some recipients. And lawmakers are targeting the middlemen and the recipient instead of going to the root cause, and the cynic in me thinks, "Of course they'd do that, why would they go after themselves?" But it's a bit of a reduction, and not all wolves are rich and powerful (though those who are uncaught or get away scot-free mostly are).
>I do not think kids should have unrestricted access to the internet
I will be restricting my kids access to the internet.
I judge him worthy of viewing whatever he wants when he inevitably works around those restrictions.
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." - Heinlein
If you hand power to the state every time people fail to properly handle their responsibilities, you end up in a dictatorship. It is a parent's responsibility to keep their kids away from the dark corners of the internet. Thoughtful regulation would create tools to allow them to do that easily, not hand parenting over to governments.
Where are those former peers now? You reference this like their life trajectory must have been irreparably harmed by it. Are they in prison? Were they killed while committing violent crime? Are they on disability from being permanently emotionally crippled? Or what?
A little tangential since this is more about gating white supremacist content than violence or sex, but I was on 4chan when it was being infiltrated by genuine white supremacist organizations and Russians that talked about how manly Assad was to influence teenagers interested in anime. I had people in real life to talk to about these things so I narrowly escaped the influence. Looking at the current state of the US, not everyone did. That being said, despite my hope that older people would be less prone to such influence, it doesn't always seem to be the case.
Something that is way worse today in my opinion is that back then everyone has nicknames, talks even for deep topics somewhat generically.
Nowadays everyone wants you to put your real name, expects a real photo of you, track every step you take.
I think it would be nice to go back to how you could talk openly, just like you were able to have "discussion forums" in newspapers pseudonymously without it being trivially abused for identity theft, etc.
Same, so much so!
My feelings of freedom in that era, as a teen in a small 90s US city, were what fueled me to co-found one of the organizations (Fight for the Future) cited in the article!
(No longer in the trenches, just on the board, deserve zero direct credit for any of this work--it's all them!)
I'm grateful as well. While I was born after the early internet, I still got to experience the true internet. Truly one of the wonders of humanity. It will be missed.
Ha, I remember finding the adult section of the file uploads. It took fourteen year old me thirty minutes to download one jpeg of boobs.
LoRD was fantastic, as were the turn based games that other people would dial in to take part of. It was such a different era, but we made it work by setting time limits and cooperating.
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.)
Born just in time to explore GIFs of women in bikinis. Born too early to explore trans porn and be confused about sexuality by age 13.
That's a sweetspot if you ask me.
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
Protecting children is one of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Governments are also getting more conservative recently with regards to domestic surveillance & social freedoms. In this regard, it's not anyone new, it's just the usual suspects: the same people who fund conservative media, the prison industrial complex, etc.
This seems like an attempt to leverage something widely regarded as reasonable (stop kids from accessing pornographic content without parental oversight) as the camel's nose through the tent to establish widespread identity tracking on the internet.
It’s too soon and too coordinated. If it were organic but underhand as you suggest the timeline would be 15 years, seeing it hit the goal elsewhere and copying not 8 months.
This is being bankrolled.
I get the sentiment, but just denouncing that the given reason is a facade is not sufficient.
It creates a divide between people that are looking for a solution to a problem, and people that disregard the problem completely. If you just ignore the actual problem and cynically call it a front for something else, you are just going to be ignored in the actual conversation. The problem is real and it needs a solution, suggest something better or be forced to stay out of the conversation.
For example, if there's a lot of car accidents, and we suggest a speed limit, you might say that it's actually a way for cops and cities to control the population, and make everything slow, and increase city income by charging fines. But the problem still exists despite your cynicism, unless you suggest another solution for the problem, you won't be able to keep your precious speed freedom. Because of course reducing car fatalities is more important than the freedom to go super fast, that's not really under discussion.
So I get it, but you have to include the time frame that this is happening. Its more than just a solution to a problem. This particular idea of age-gating just happens to be pushed forward during the worst time in history for internet freedoms. Freedoms are being attacked on multiple fronts. I look at this more like them introducing license plate cameras to stop crime, or real estate apps that use algorithms to help land lords and renters to get better pricing. Except these corporations that sell this tech are promoting and utilizing the features of this tech to make sure it gets abused. You can see this with the license plate readers, its giving police more control than they need, and for the real estate companies that are pushing algorithmic pricing for rents, they are spending time contacting landlords and asking them what they are charging for rent so they can artificially inflate the market.
This issue is way more nuanced then you are making it. There is no legislation, or anyone enforcing laws to reign in the abuses and therefor the tech is being abused, and will continue to be abused with no end it sight. If you want laws and mechanisms to protect children, first have something in-place that protects people from the abuse that these corporations are encouraging. Until that happens, I do not support any of these initiatives. Its the wrong time for them.
traffic control and real estate pricing collusions are unrelated topics. I don't know that this is the worst moment for freedoms, I think you would be well served to look into other periods of history
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.
I think it's possible that there are secretive efforts to destroy permissionless access to the internet, but my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time.
A somewhat analogous situation is how landlords raise rents in sync with each other, not because they're intentionally colluding to fix prices, but because nowadays it's easy to see average rental prices in neighborhoods, and the natural strategy is to set your rental prices based on that.
> my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time.
I think that's the wrong guess. Even with chat control, in some previous forms, the proposals came of the back of lobbying. One such case was Ashton Kutcker's startup https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start...
The more recent proposals for chat control were drafted by non-public "high level groups", the identity of which wasn't revealed to the public https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters/going-dark
Reminds me of a little piece about PR firms and how many ideas are not really an organic zeitgeist but are actively manufactured by monied interests: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Written in '05 and still very poignant. I'd love to see a follow-up of this article updated for how it's changed 20 years later. Seems like the scale and decentralization has changed the most.
Do you think the main force is misplaced good intentions (which I assume is what drives Ashton Kutcher) or more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public?
Kutcher wrote a letter of support for his friend Danny Masterson who was convicted raping multiple women so if he is truly concerned about abuse of women it doesn't seem to apply when it involves people he knows doing it. When this came to light his defense was that he didn't think anyone but the judge was going to see the letter.
Those are heavily co-mingled. Policing and intelligence agencies in particular view themselves as having good intentions which look like harm from the outside.
Good intentions misplaced into efforts to control other people are sinister intentional efforts to harm the public.
I don't think anyone is that naive to not see the negative implications of the things they are proposing, or helping develop. They might feign ignorance, and excuse themselves with "following orders" but the majority know it's not right in principle.
I tend to follow information in this space, and could talk about it endlessly (though it would still have minimal effect in the end).
From the things I'm seeing right now, in my mind, all this clampdown on privacy is to have better control of the message and discussion in order to preserve the corrupt status quo. To give one example, many leaks and reports initially come in anonymous due to fear of repercussion from those in power. My country (Romania) changed the legislation a couple of years back to prevent people from reporting corruption anonymously (in a highly corrupt state). Maybe that's why Trump said he loves Romanians, recently, he'd like to do that at home as well.
> more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public
Until recently I wasn't the type of person that would entertain the idea of a shadowy organization that tries to puppetmaster the world. Though with the recent Epstein emails release that in black and white stated about Slovakia's 2018 government "the government will fall this week - as planned" (day prior to mass protests that lead to it falling), makes you wonder about the backroom politics of the western world, and why we need more transparency there, and less control from them.
edit:
And of course, any change that is put behind a "think of the children" message, should raise everybody's eyebrows to the max.
Just imagine a capable individual just like yourself, but with such a rotting core that they see the same devious plans you and I do, but lack the backbone/principles and moral/ethical fiber to prevent them from pursuing those ideas. Instead, they full endorse and selfishly benefit from them at the expense of others. With our large population, this individual, and many such like them are guaranteed to exist at all levels of the socio-economic ladder. Solipsism is the root of corruption continuing to sprout.
Off-topic, but actually a number of landlords raise prices in sync with each other because they use price-setting services like RealPage that intentionally try to maximize rents across multiple landlords. They just settled a lawsuit over this: https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-realpage-settlement-r...
In the last couple years we've seen the internet version of "Vietnam war being televised made it unpopular at home".
After Vietnam, it was easier for journalists to embed with the terrorist groups than it was to embed with US forces, as the US learned that people seeing how the sausage is made immediately cuts the support for said sausage making.
Massive political weight was thrown behind getting control of TikTok because of the sheer amount of reporting from Gaza. Politicians are still trying to tell people that they're essentially wrong for forming their views on actual images of violence they're seeing.
The world at large was shown the brutality against the people of Gaza, and the plot was lost at home.
If the "enemies" aren't shown, it's easy to go along with "good guys" and "bad guys", but when you see 100s of children missing limbs, mourning their family members, and begging on to not be killed over the course of a few months, suddenly the fairy tale that allows some countries to brutalize others falls apart.
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.
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.
Those pesky... adults!
Do social movements _always_ have people at the top pulling the strings? Is it _never_ the case that even when you can identify thought leaders, the movement itself is organic and broadly supported?
Internet comments aren't a social movement
Everything that these laws are supposedly regulating has always been there and we have an entire generation now that grew up with it. Everyone was fine just like video games were fine, movies were fine, racy books were fine, and the printing press was fine.
The Internet comments make it seem like lazy parents but it's very convenient that the solution is to ID every single person on the Internet. Facebook pushed this hard with their real name policy and then had to back off because people complained about trans people being forced to use their old names. They've been successfully demonized so now it's time to push as hard as they can. It's probably not just Facebook but it's obviously not organic.
>Internet comments aren't a social movement
This seems strictly wrong. People talk online. People get their ideas online, and share their ideas online. Internet comments _alone_ are not a social movement, but they certainly do frequently represent social movements.
Musk in his tit for tat with Trump recently revealed huge numbers of the Internet comments supporting MAGA were foreign plants. He didn't reveal which accounts were bots though. All these comments supporting censorship appear mostly on platforms that would love to ID every person on their platform.
Internet comments do not represent anything anymore that doesn't manifest in the actual world. They are excellent at having a few influence the many
I agree with you, and probably more than it sounds. But I think the point you make is still too strong a case. ie, even if the online comments are ~90% foreign influence it doesn't also follow that everything is astroturfing or that real people do not discuss issues online.
To your point though, maybe we can no longer reliably tell the difference, and so it'd be better to adopt your view as a rule of thumb.
I think it's "organic" from the big tech companies looking to pull up the ladder behind them. These laws are straight up regulatory capture to make it much harder to start new Internet businesses, while forcing their users to divulge even more personal info.
Google has been bugging me with Android popups for years "please add your birthday to help Google comply with the law". Obtaining that bit of my information isn't something they need to do - it's something they want to do because every bit of personal information they scrape out of me makes their adtech surveillance database joins that much more accurate.
Today an email purportedly from Google said I will need to send age verification on my 20yo account, or they'll stop targeting me for advertisements and showing me inappropriate material. This sounds like an excellent deal for me, not going to bother determining if its a phishing attempt.
This isn't a social movement.
Concern over accessibility of internet pornography is absolutely a social movement. I don't necessarily agree with some of what is being pushed, but there's a large constituency here.
Yeah, this is much more easily explained by the fact that a lot of things on the internet are damaging kids.
Yes, and that thing is chiefly corporate social media. Which could be fixed literally overnight by parents, over a few weeks by school district policy, and over a few months with sites publishing metadata to aid client side blocking. Phones, the primary independent computing device for kids, are already locked down to the point that an owner has to jump through many (detectable and auditable) hoops to install arbitrary software.
None of this requires some draconian regime where it becomes sites' own responsibilities to obtain and verify their users meatspace identities.
> The SESTA-FOSTA law is a combination of two bills: the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act; and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. It passed Congress in March, and President Donald Trump signed it into law in April.
> ...
> The biggest companies say they can manage the risks. Match Group—owner of Match.com, Tinder, Ok Cupid and Plenty of Fish—says any potential legal issues give “huge advantages” to those with enough size to comply. “We are able to have a big legal team, a big customer care team,” Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-law-targets-sex-trafficking...
Plot twist: It's Ashton Kutcher.
https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotligh...
The Christian right has been pushing for this forever. They finally acquired enough political and cultural purchase to get this measure pushed over the line.
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.
The laws are only moderately popular in the abstract, but when you show people the reality and the future implications then popularity drops. The key is educating people about the dangers of this type of legislation, including dangers to privacy and authoritarian control over information. In the US especially both major parties hate each other with a passion; this animosity can be leveraged with proper framing.
What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have ever expressed interest in this?
If the politicians keep voting for things their constituents don't (and in these cases actively push back against so hard that the politician are forced to withdraw the push) that seems like strong evidence that politicians are doing something with an external incentive...
Politicians having bad incentives (e.g. campaign donations) isn't conspiracy thinking, it's a documented reality. Hell, we even had a supreme court judge taking a present from somebody who's case he was ACTIVELY OVERSEEING.
> What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have ever expressed interest in this?
UK: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
US: https://issueone.org/press/new-poll-finds-near-universal-pub...
Aus: https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-un...
So far as I know there's nothing confounding here - people from across the political spectrum just seem to think it's a good idea to introduce age checks and to restrict children from accessing adult content.
That's a powerpoint of somebody really trying to push an agenda and has nothing to do with age verification. The 88% support is for "social media platforms to protect minors from online harms, such as the promotion of eating disorders, suicide, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation."
I'm sure social media could say with 99% accuracy whether somebody is a minor already just based on advertising data and if a law prevented facebook from showing diet pill ads to a kid that has absolutely zero with some sort of government tracking bullshit.
The fact that you are citing 3 studies without even reading them apparently really makes me suspicious of your motivation here.
I'm disappointed that you call my motivations into question instead of engaging me in good faith. It's not possible to solve a problem without being honest about the pertinent facts, and I think you (and the person I responded to) are engaging in denialism.
My experiences are all in the UK but everything I've read and everyone I've spoken to (outside of tech circles) reinforces my belief that this is popular. If you disagree then fine but I don't think you can find any polling to support that.
If you can then be my guest - I genuinely would like to see it. I'm not happy with my conclusions.
Well either you didn't read what you cited, in which case you sort of owe us an apology and need to back off your claim.
Or you did read it in which case you'd realize it has nothing to do with people wanting government age verification, and then you also need to back off your claim and owe us an apology.
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.
> 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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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?
I think laws that you grew up with are a lot easier to accept until there is a major shift (civil war, etc.).
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.
"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"?
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-ag... and other geopolitical reasons.
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.
What does the movie Scarface have to say about it?
https://www.realclearhistory.com/2017/04/01/the_migrant_cris...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift
https://www.reddit.com/r/moviequestions/comments/133gbzl/in_...
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-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.
Corporations and center-left/center-right liberal governments support now and have always supported mass immigration because it lowers wages. Nobody especially cares about identifying them, the reason they flooded in recently (over the past couple decades) is because they were deliberately let in through written policies. They did this despite public objections. In the US, we know exactly who they are; we issue illegal immigrants special IDs and business licenses. They get bank loans; they're homeowners. They get in-state tuition at colleges.
Starmer is currently using anti-immigrant sentiment to push his digital IDs, but that's because he is a cynic. He does whatever he needs to do to satisfy his bosses.
> That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you something.
It tells you that the US puts nations under siege for decades for committing the crime of self-determination, then lets in with absolutely no obstacles all of the economically destroyed and desperate, the extremely right wing, and the participants in CIA-financed death squads who flee, then uses them as a voting block (and a resource) to support the continuation and escalation of those sieges.
edit: immigrants commit less crime in the US than natives. Their children commit more crime, because they rise to the level of natives at their socioeconomic bracket.
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
Implying bots will have any restrictions or issues at all.
You honestly believe these ID laws will get rid of bots? Maybe for a year or two the volume will be lower as they catch up on how to circumvent restrictions, but I don't see it making any real serious dent in bot traffic.
i'm not a russian bot and i hope the id cards and face recognition stuff is temporary while the world collaborates to catch the problem people. But my guess is once they see how successful it is they will get addicted to the power and not let go.
The Russian bots are a much more entertaining read than the good-faith North American humans.
Identity fraudsters beg to differ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
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.
> 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!
I’ve thought about it, but that’s still technology trying to solve a societal problem, and my experience is that doesn’t work (it just makes someone a lot of money by giving them data to exploit). Don’t get me wrong, I am still all for said services existing as an option for parents to leverage, but it’s not my thing.
My soapbox is addressing the crux of the social problem: we have built a society where both parents in most families have to work full-time jobs to have a chance at making ends meet, increasingly taking on extra overtime or gig work to improve their odds of paying the bills. This means children have no consistent adult available in their lives to engage with them: nurture, monitor, teach, mentor, demonstrate, assist, etc.
I want to build a society where only one parent has to work, and the other (whoever they are, I am not advocating a return to “traditional gender role” bullshit) can stay at home full-time. This way someone is always available to engage with the child and ensure their safety at home, with the suite of knock-on benefits that entails for the child’s development.
I don’t want to make a child-safe planet at the expense of children lacking present and available parents; I want a world where parents aren’t so wiped from working multiple jobs and struggling to pay rent or buy food that their children become a forced secondary concern.
I would also like to see this happen, but the developed world as a whole seems to be moving away from single working parents. Even across very different cultures. I’d like to see a change, but I’m not sure how it could happen.
The closest thing we have is the stay at home working parent, which has grown after COVID. This is a lot better than neither parent being at home, but unless it’s a very easy job, they still won’t be able to supervise much. I also think some of these newer “email jobs” are facing competition from overseas workers and AI. Unless politicians learn to find value in having a stay at home parent, and supporting that through policy, these jobs may go away as quickly as they arrived.
I think the stay-at-home working parent idea is a good one as a transition stage, but ultimately this is a large problem that'll require years of reforms and fundamental changes to accomplish - a plurality of society must be on board and willing to sacrifice to make it happen, because employers never will be despite the research data showing the benefits of these approaches.
It's hard playing the long game, but we need more folks to do it. The big, important problems of life are never solved in a single fiscal year, after all.
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.
Don't worry the kid mode is coming on all devices, one thing you wouldn't want kids doing is sideloading applications after all.
I think this is the wrong approach, an example is youtube kids. There seems to be a abundance of inappropriate content for kids on there. These companies don't actually care about you or your kids they care about profit.
Only (hopefully most) parents care about their kids. They have the power to push a solution as a collective so the solution should empower them to choose and not not take power away from them and others (for example adults without kids). The age verification mandated on a government level constitutes to limiting access to content, and in my eyes that is censorship.
Either a kid phone built on AOSP or a kid-focused MDM system, coupled with kid-focused apps, would seem to be sufficient. No need to go to the carriers.
I'm also opposed to this law (mainly I think it is a huge invasion of privacy with near zero chance of actually protecting kids), but there are some realities people should know.
My kids were all exposed to some relatively extreme stuff long before they had a network connected device (starting around 1st grade). This is because other kids at school had network connected devices, and some of those kids show other kids stuff for shock value.
In a more extreme instance, the child did pay for internet access; they got an old phone from a friend and paid cash for a sim card.
No no no. Many schools require students to have Chromebooks that use Google Classroom.
In the state I live in, public education is a constitutional. Yet the state can predicate my child’s constitutional rights on using Google Classroom.
Google Classroom also has workaround that expose kids to harmful materials.
While homeschooling is an option, I have a constitutional right to send my kids to public school. The school lends them free notebooks, which they then control.
Some have strict settings - not enough to prevent toxic content - while others let lots of crap in.
All without me spending a dime.
Then I would say that communities and administrators need to do a better job of restricting the internet access of those devices they provide kids, rather than punishing the outside world for the bad decisions of a handful of adults in neglecting their obligations. My schools implemented restricted ISPs with curated content as I was growing up, and eventually just a basic DNS filter by the time I reached HS. My current employer implements similar DNS checks on the firewall to block social media sites and, presumably, adult content (I’m not dumb enough to test the latter). My schools also had no problem providing local storage and collaboration tooling without internet access, so perhaps the argument should be made that schools shouldn’t be getting kids hooked on Big Tech cloud services a la iPads and Chromebooks, especially when children and parents become captive markets via school equipment mandates. Maybe we should be loaning out Linux laptops without WiFi or Ethernet ports with “Internet in a Box” preloaded on them for reference material, rather than shoving kids out into the wild internet absent guidance and context.
I also flatly refuse the whole “we ID people in real life all the time” argument. The physical world is a default shared space, with finite boundaries and clear obligations. The digital world is the exact opposite: vague, nebulous, ever-shifting and changing, with no clear demarcation between states, or countries, or people. That argument reveals a complete misunderstanding of why physical ID checks work and digital ones never, ever will at scale, and I refuse to entertain anything predicated upon it.
And here’s the dirty, nasty, disgusting little secret that parents don’t seem to realize or care about: bad actors in education are leveraging the fact kids have internet devices to spy on them. I’ve had CIO-equivalents in public and private education ask me to build surveillance tools to scan messages and photos on students’ private devices when connected to school networks under the guise of “safety”, which I refused to do because hell naw does anyone other than parents need full access to a child’s device. I have worked in the education sector, I have seen first hand the mismatch between the goals of parents, the needs of children, and the ambitions of grotesquely underpaid technical talent and the resultant quality of candidates that often seems to attract (or lack thereof - no disrespect to the good ones out there, but ya’ll are the fringe minority based on my experiences).
Website age checks aren’t protecting kids, they’re harming adults. And bad adults are exploiting this knowledge gap to harm kids, too.
You dont have kids do you.
My first exception: school homework now done on PC. school requires laptop they can use in classroom. Friends.
Now yeah blame the parents.
But we already restrict alcohol to minors (but what stupid parent gave their kid money!) why not addictive, manipulative apps.
Tldr. Kids need devices of some sort to do life these days. Pare nts will monitor and restrict. But we can also clear the dealers from the corners. That helps too.
I do have kids. I still blame parents. I see so many parents who can't even do the lazy thing of turning on the parental controls for the devices they give their kids. Because they don't want to or can't deal with their kod whining and being obnoxious about having boundaries. I see adults who will create adult accounts for their kids even when they have to lie about their age because it's too annoying to them to either set up or deal with all the notifications and approvals of a kid account.
They want to protect their kid while being lazy. It's why my aunt bought my cousin an M rated game. That said on the box is was violent and everything else and then presented her ID so she could prove she was an adult in order to buy the videogame. Then she she was upset because that game wasn't for kids. It shouldn't be allowed for kids.
It wasn't. She just didn't pay any attention. And that's how I think of all parents of these lazy initiatives. They want to deny and inconvenience adults because they can't be bothered.
> You dont have kids do you.
That line right there sank your entire argument, because A) you don’t have to have kids to want to protect kids, and B) it makes the position that anyone without kids should have no say in how those with kids rear and raise their children, which could be (and is often) dangerously expanded to oppose Doctors, Teachers, Social Workers, and other people in other professions or knowledge areas solely because they’re childless.
Be better.
A more generous reading of this is "If you were around kids more, you would probably understand that kids have internet access even without their parent's permission and/or help" At least some of this access is essentially state-mandated, as it happens at public schools, which you are required to send your kids to unless you have the resources to arrange alternative education.
I don’t give generous readings to bad arguments from online anons. The point of anonymous discourse is to come at it with your best arguments and debate them thoroughly, which is why there’s a lot of discussion about common methods of “bad faith” argument styles like the preceding commenter used (“you don’t have kids” = “your opinion is irrelevant”).
Also, a lot of folks are making some assumptions about my person and profession to suit their own arguments, rather than discuss the merits of what I raised. These assumptions ultimately destroy their own arguments by showing a resultant lack of curiosity and a reliance on pre-existing narratives rather than carefully thought out rationale.
That’s why these ID checks keep winning: suckers drinking the Kool-Aid without thinking for themselves and dismissing what they perceive to be opposition, who in reality have more experience with this with kids and in education than they assume when dismissing our positions.
I don’t need to be more understanding of bad actors or bad arguments, they need to be better at discussing their positions rationally or trusting experts who have lived these problems.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
Social media is more damaging to kids than porn
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.
> 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.
Porn is a special subset of social media.
And social media is a special subset of porn.
Facebook is over 20 years old and has never enforced its minimum age (13 years.)
I, for one, would have started with legal threats and financial penalties long ago. But it just won't happen. So I'm fine with technical solutions.
Facebook is able to sell you ads based on your favorite shoe lace colour. They ban terrorists, bots, porn and people named "Mark Zuckerberg" all the time. Noone can claim it's too hard for them to ban minors under 13.
Granted, your favorite shoe lace colour does say a whole lot about you.
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.
PLEASE give me an age gated, geofenced internet. I would pay for such a service.
You can get it for free right now - you just need to go to prison for something.
Just unplug, keep everything local. Run your own BBS for your house.
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.
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."
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.
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".
centralized censorship mechanisms just cause migration to peer2peer alternatives
it’s a cue not a threat, get back into p2p computing
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.
Rephrase as "figthing the end of anonymity on the internet".
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!
It’s not age-gated. It’s ID-required.
"Age Gated"?? minnesota and wisconsin are trying to ban VPNs!
"You’ve read your last free article."
How ironic. Age-gating is immoral, but pay-gating is fine.
On behalf of my younger self: fuck this shit
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-f...
And, on a larger scale, to keep us all infantilized indefinitely.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That's a very good point
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.
Repurpose the IPv4 "evil bit" as an "is adult" bit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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-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.
A difference in degree can make all the difference.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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/
eazy-peezy
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.
I'm curious, what were the "Jesus videos?"
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.
>> 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.
You can add porn sites to the hosts file yourself.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.