What is the final defense? I suppose we create underground relay networks of radio networks within cities that allow for computers to connect directly to eachother, and from there we seed all our pirated content and discuss whatever the hell we'd like.
Maybe we'd have to contend with low bandwidth when we connect outside our own city network, using larger wavelength radio to bounce off the ionosphere across the planet.
As for the FCC, I don't really care. I will set up nodes on top of abandoned buildings. I will set up nodes in front of the local FCC field office. I will set up nodes in the middle of the forest. I will set up nodes on buoys out at sea. They may capture me or worse, so be it. I will not be around forever anyhow.
I pray there are still actual hackers out there on hacker news who might consider this idea and help further the technical side. This is a little out of my wheelhouse. I just can't accept this inevitable incoming future where all our communications will be IDed and censored. That is the end game for them. We can't allow for that to happen. This might be the biggest battle yet, bigger than all the other wars where power used us like pawns against the pawns of some other power, because for once in the history of civilization, we'd be fighting for our own right and not some elite group's right. I hope I am not alone in this line of thinking.
As much as I am completely against this in spirit, all that is needed is restricted access to frontier models and then it just a question of how do you want to see my papers sir?
comms, travel, banking. Exactly why all the privatization of this stuff has top priority for the current administration. They're making their own government.
PGP is not a very effective software suite for encrypting actual messages people want to send to other people, because it's a decades-old tool designed for email workflows that arguably never worked particularly well and is not well-suited to how people want to communicate today. Chat apps like Signal and WhatsApp that include end to end encryption as a matter of course are encrypting far more messages between humans than PGP for emails ever did.
Good for protecting the message itself, but it does nothing for metadata. These days the metadata is what kills you. (Who talks to whom, when, and how often reveals enough to press the drone missile button, apparently.)
OpenPGP + SMTP as a starting point as email can reach many and Thunderbird makes OpenPGP happy clicky simple. The body includes instructions for the E2EE chat servers to use. Metadata trail ends there. Other circles of friends are joined in by other means. E2EE ejabberd (OTR+PGP+OMEMO) servers switched up after everyone is on the first outer layer of chat servers. Old servers are wiped. Of course all of this assumes nobody is silly enough to use a cell phone or all of this is futile. Everyone is using a laptop they paid cash for and a clean install of a generic minimal install of Linux and Coreboot running a script to make everything ephemeral and the OS nearly immutable. No security distros as they have all been infiltrated, just a vanilla simple Linux and a script.
By this you mean that the first line of defense should be to change the government, correct? If so, I'm pretty sure you're right. Technical solutions to social/governmental problems seem like they're making those problems worse due to actively rechanneling energy that could be used for awareness/activism into technical workarounds.
True, I always wonder how that would actually play out.
The geeks would likely be the elite class force to tumble it if it ever became necassary I reckon.
>That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
I think everyone (especially young gen) should absolutely master the offensive hacking skills.
I will certainly teach my kids everything I know about exploiting and destroying enemy computer systems.
This is the equivalent of the 2nd Amendment, but for the Internet space. You should absolutely be able to inspect, disassemble, debug, everything you can in a computer system and have the knowledge to knock it down, if it (or its owner) starts misbehaving.
Literally every single problem with computer system can be solved if the entire population, armed with simple Kali Linux, decides to strike back against the tyranny of the government
Out of the kids (tweens+) I know because of my kids NONE is interested in anything even remotely adjacent to it. They wouldn't be able to troubleshoot a dns issue.
Or even, say, AI. They know about "chatbots" and "generating images" or "adding effects". Herein ends the story.
You can't teach someone this sort of skills if they like staying ignorant.
Trusted IPSec tunnels to form your own trusted internet of peers/friends within the internet. It's all just 'a LAN' then.
I dunno how well that scales, but it's a lot easier than trying to sort out radio shenanigans (which in my experience are actually regularly enforced by FCC/your local equivalents).
That's been done a few times with Tinc (open source VPN) [1][2]. It's great until the group includes one bad apple. All it takes is one person with low impulse control, low opsec to bring the whole thing down. Some hacker groups did this some time ago.
I expect the government will require ISPs to only allow connection from approved operating systems that only allow installation of approved apps so we can't do this. Not in the short term, but eventually.
100% with you, I don't understand that people feel they have privacy in their house but not on the internet. Those people just don't understand how humans work and how we get better as a species.
I will forever keep trying to communicate without anyone else being able to read it. You can't ban my ability to use math to encrypt things. Still, the thought police keeps popping up. They can drag me to jail. I am a good person, a father, but my thoughts are my own. (just kidding, I'll give up all my s* when they actually drag me away from my family, but maybe I'll let them drag me for some meters for the show, to make a point, and hope people are filming it.)
There are things like Ham radio and meshtastic (uses lora). It's all slow of course (atm).
If at any point your counter-governmental action actually threatens to take some share of power away from the government, they will swiftly and quietly deal with you (they have about 1000 ways to track you, and AI reduces the cost of tracking greatly). If you are irrelevant you will mostly be ignored.
By the way, I'm sure that they are aware of all this privacy-first counter-tracking sentiment from certain communities, and are actively working to subvert it.
Self-destruct drones with mesh node transmitters? Radiowave reflectors placed at strategic spots blended with the surroundings? IR multicast transmitters?
You would be breaking numerous laws, your transmitters would be removed quickly, you would be out thousands of dollars in equipment, and no one would be on your network anyway. You would almost certainly go to jail if you tried this.
There’s a difference between violating a dozen obscure laws on a daily basis that never get enforced and operating an unlicensed radio broadcast. See what happens if you try it. The FCC does not mess around.
Then we are the last generation and nothing matters. Sad, isn't it? I'm trying not to cry.
You know, there's an argument that if your soul/consciousness is occupying a randomly selected body (whatever that means - don't take it too literally) you'd expect to be occupying a body during the time when there are the most human bodies to occupy. 6% of all humans who were ever alive so far are alive right now.
It's not really rigorous because some consciousness has to occupy this body and that consciousness would make the same argument, but it's a weak inkling of an argument that the future probably has less humans than the present.
People are already doing that lmao and the general population is so apathetic that they simply don't care cheap flights and buying crap from Temu will cook us to death, they don't care that late stage capitalism has made it harder and harder for people to have families. Even if the replacement rate is magically fixed tomorrow there's still gonna be a long gap and hard times ahead.
It's still far off but I wouldn't be surprised if these were the earliest signs of societal collapse. It does seem impossible to avoid, going in cycles.
> because for once in the history of civilization, we'd be fighting for our own right and not some elite group's right. I hope I am not alone in this line of thinking
They depoliticized people to this degree that they fantasize of joining the a-political resistance movement, its kind of sad. This isn't meant as an insult, you should be angry that you live in a society that left you politically oblivious. Like no dude, people fought against power all the time, the people who you listen to just told you that all that do are dangerous politicized radicals or terrorists. Find who is punching UP, then get a political education in that direction.
No revolution in history has ever succeeded without the support of an alternate group of elites who replace the current elites if the revolution succeeds...
To add to the list: KYC/AML-like regulations and practices (not necessarily financial) that shift the responsibility down the chain, outside the accountability zone, and result in preventive overly broad risk avoidance, self-censorship, and manipulation of your Overton window. See for example DMCA vs YouTube practices vs what actual channels choose to do to dodge both. Or algospeak. Or the PayPal situation which is mentioned in the article.
But it's all talk. Political pressure is like gas pressure. Gas expands to fill the available volume. What do you actually do to push back, besides talking about it on the web? This defines the available volume, if you don't do anything it's infinite.
NB: Weber's definition of government (which your quote misstates, so to speak, as is often the case), is that the state is that entity which has the monopoly on the legitimate claim to violence. It's legitimacy, not violence, which is key.
That said, legitimacy is a political property, and one which cannot be attained through purely technical means. To that extent I agree with your critique.
Which itself is kind of a BS indoctrinated definition.
Wind the clock back a few hundred years and there was plenty of legitimate non-government violence. The government didn't care if the well to do dueled, the townsfolk brawled in the bar, a serial fraudster got what was coming to them, etc, etc. Sure the government could choose to care and construe it's written rules to that effect if it chose but other than exceptional situations it largely didn't and everyone alive then considered this fine.
Wind the clock back further to medieval times and it gets even messier.
My argument isn't that Weber's definition is correct or accurate; that's a whole 'nother discussion.
It's that, to the level of a thought-stopping cliche, the definition is misstated with the emphasis on violence rather than legitimacy, which misses the whole point.
But Weber's claim is also nuanced:
- Non-government violence, if tolerated by the government, is then sanctioned by the government, and hence, government retains its monopoly on legitimacy. Again, the relevant monopoly is legitimacy. Not on who is acting with violence, but who finds that violence legitimate or illegitimate.
- Governmental violence, if deemed illegitimate by the population, means that the government no longer has legitimacy itself, and hence by Weber's definition is no longer a government (at least by his terms).
- If some other entity holds legitimacy over violence within a given area (say, a neighboring state, a local warlord, Great Power, partisan or resistance movement, corporate or commercial entity such as, say, the British East India Company), then that entity is effectively the government, again, by Weber's definition. As an example, Mohandas Gandhi's ahimsa movement successfully challenged British imperial rule not by claiming violence for itself, but by successfully claiming the principle of nonviolence. The Empire was delegitimated in the process.
- And finally, if no one institution can successfully claim legitimacy of violence within a region, then there is no government. The region is effectively stateless.
There may well be other constructs, situations may be fluid (changing with time or over space), effective control units may be small (city-states, tribes), etc.., but you can generally find a Weberian projection in such cases.
Again, I've raised this point numerous times on HN, largely due to the widespread misrepresentation of Weber. Often, I suspect, by people who have no idea that they're employing a corrupted version of his definition in the first place. I encourage you to look through my earlier discussions to see if your further objections aren't already addressed there: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.
Prior discussion points to where the misleading restatement seems to have originated, more on the elements of Weber's definition as applied to various situations, Weber's original work, and translation into English which didn't occur until the 1950s, followed shortly by the bastardised variant taking hold.
I also strongly recommend British political historian David Runciman's own views on this definition, which I'd first encountered well after forming my own. They're expressed in this episode of his podcast Talking Politics: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership> (at about 15 minutes).
To state the obvious: If anyone can code his way out of something it is someone who codes.
If enough people want something badly enough, when existing governing structures will bow is a question of how many people.
You should pretend your code isn't good enough. That way you can own the problem. You will get plenty of help from those making things worse. Empires crumble eventually.
This and your earlier comment presume that code is a way out. Much of the push-back here is that evidence is strongly suggesting that 1) it is not and 2) code tends in general to be a power-amplifier for those already in power. Put another way: your reform-minded hacker is not the only coder, and the opposition (or more accurately, the establishment) likely has far vaster resources.
The problem in your initial proposal comes in the first step: "Create a government from scratch". That is a political process at best; at worst, one predicated on violence (rebellion, insurrection, coercion).
Again, the solution is inherently political, not technical. There might be technical elements to such a political process, but those follow from rather than lead to.
This represents a significant shift in my own views over the past 20 years or so. In the 1990s I would have tended to agree with you. I no longer do.
> This and your earlier comment presume that code is a way out.
For you yes. If you were a song writer I would suggest you write something like El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido in stead of a new shaking my ass song.
You do what you know. It's much less of a waste of time if it progresses your skills.
A baker in 1683 created the croissant to symbolize eating the ottoman empire.
Did he make a relevant contribution? I honestly don't know.
Just to be clear, I agree in part: people should assist as they can. The examples you cite (protest songs, protest food) work as part of the battle for hearts and minds, and can be quite effective. They're working at the political level, within epistemic space, itself a significant element of political dynamics. When epistemic systems change, so do political ones, and we've seen this repeatedly through history.
I do have a technical background, I write code. I've also been spending much of the past decade or two coming up to speed on things I'd paid less attention to in my near six decades on this rock: political theory, philosophy, and history. David Runciman, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, has been a significant part of that.
There is a code associated with governance, and that is law, along with regulation, constitution, and court practice (which may or may not include case law / common law, depending on the political tradition). Coming up with ways of making law itself clearer and in particular changes to it more apparent (as with revision control) could help in some regards, though my experience from the world of software is that complexity-management constrains complexity, and that the inevitable consequence of more capable complexity management is greater levels of complexity. Beware what you (or others) ask for.
I suspect that there are changes necessary at a more fundamental level, though even deciding on what the aims of that change should be is an open question: is liberal democracy a proper goal, or should we be looking at effective governance based on a changing set of conditions, constraints, and capabilities? There are numerous suggestions for electoral reforms (reduced voting age, increased voter restrictions, ranked-choice, and a whole host of others, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform>). I'm particularly taken by the notion of sortition and how it might be applied. "If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly" has topped my list of most interesting reads for nearly two decades now: <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>.
Other reforms would include finance (personal, business, government, political); economics; technology; social welfare; education; property rights and restrictions; informational autonomy (combining speech, privacy, and choice in numerous manners), etc., etc., etc.
I fear you're prematurely optimising based on misconceptions and ignorance.
I'm not claiming total knowledge, by a long shot. But I do believe my scope of consideration exceeds yours.
>Just to be clear, I agree in part: people should assist as they can.
Actually, one should do very little. We should all do very little. That will already produce a terrifying force that may crush everything precious to us.
And you should only do what you are good at. If you can't sing and dance or can't give a speech - don't do it. You will ruin everything.
> I fear you're prematurely optimising based on misconceptions and ignorance.
If you are going to take on the impossible wilfull ignorance can be a useful tool. You can't think it's impossible, if you do you should just quit.
Coding isn't a bad hand of cards. You can build something awesome without scaring the shit out of the old guard.
>the inevitable consequence of more capable complexity management is greater levels of complexity. Beware what you (or others) ask for.
Law makers keep tagging on new features. It's an incomprehensible mess. If someone wants to build something we don't offer them a nice spec with all relevant information. You get a pile of trash that immediately convinces most to abandon all hope.
If the application has become unusable from technical debt you have to.... well... face the music.
The traditional way is to give a war of some kind, burn everything to the ground and start over. We have it down to an art. We are going to [have to] keep doing this until we come up with a better idea.
It's kind of awesome how the foundation of all advanced civilizations was build by people with few of any tools or resources. I'm sure they had people who thought it couldn't be done not to forget those who paid the ultimate price.
Today the naysayers have airco, washing machines, bubble baths and a super computer in their hands.
> I'm not claiming total knowledge, by a long shot. But I do believe my scope of consideration exceeds yours.
There wouldn't be a need to write this if that wasn't the case. It's not a competition tho. It's a puzzle as old as time. It sits there waiting for someone competent enough to solve it.
>There are numerous suggestions for electoral reforms (reduced voting age, increased voter restrictions, ranked-choice, and a whole host of others, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform>). I'm particularly taken by the notion of sortition and how it might be applied. "If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly" has topped my list of most interesting reads for nearly two decades now: <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>.
Those are fun reads. Thanks.
I wrote this funny thing called subjective sort.
Rather than pick your preferred option you are presented with two random ones.
Provide the 2 election programs, make people sit down and read them for at least 30 minutes and if enough votes are cast this will sort the list from best to worse.
I came to this after wondering what the signal to noise ratio was in elections. I examined Facebook likes and YouTube views and came to the conclusion THERE IS NO SIGNAL.
The 200ish views on the videos from the us Green Party aren't enough to account for journalists. Further down the list the number of Facebook likes didn't even account for friends and relatives.
It also reminds me of conversations where I proposed tiers of voting diplomas and told people I didn't need to read their response or listen to their arguments. I can just disagree without knowing what I'm talking about.
Another fun thought was to make election program legally binding.
The way it currently works is exactly like looking if the bird is on our left or our right while pretending it matters.
But I think it's better to work on documenting existing government before considering changes. The later will limit participation to much.
That was the obvious issue with all the blockchain smart contract stuff that was getting pushed previously. Any time it interacts with the physical world the blockchain goes out the window the moment on someone on the ground decides they don’t agree with it. Your cryptographically signed deed means nothing and can’t evict someone off the land.
There is little room for a property or money transfer system that leaves no avenue for legal recourse. And the DAO fork made it crystal clear why it was always just window dressing on the same social consensus game.
I said little room, not no room. For most entities using crypto where legal recourse is a more realistic threat model than scammers/hackers it isn't the unjust kind they are so worried about.
If you're selling shoes you have little legal threat. If you're doing anything unusual, you need protection from the government because the government hates anything out of the norm unless you bribe it.
This comment ignores the cost of deploying government violence. In most of the world the government cannot "just" rubber hose every petty criminal on the basis that "he might have some crypto he's not telling us about". The people would not stand for it.
I think you misunderstood my comment. The scenario I was thinking of is something like a blockchain contract that declares you own a block of land. If a hacker stole the NFT land contract, the government and society would still agree it belongs to the real owner and thus the blockchain out of sync with reality.
A smart contract can't physically secure ownership of land.
Even if the people did stand for it, it still costs money and human effort for the government to pay its police employees to do the rubber-hosing - and there are principle-agent problems like government agents being susceptible to bribes (perhaps in cryptocurrency!), being too lazy to enforce the written laws, or having personal scruples about cryptocurrency use.
Imagine we had a versioned database with all the laws from all countries where one could compare them side by side. We could begin to understand the mood or spirit of each effort.
Law makers wouldn't need to pretend they are doing something unique.
You might do the same with all infrastructure projects. They can't all be cheap. Half should more expensive than average. It should be fascinating to see where the extra money is going.
Some goes towards corruption, some into incompetence but there should also be plenty of praise worthy efforts.
It seems we have the tools to do such things now without breaking the bank.
Think of the law as a truly outdated code base. Why would you do a rewrite you ask? Because we've learned a thing or two along the way?
> Imagine we had a versioned database with all the laws from all countries where one could compare them side by side. We could begin to understand the mood or spirit of each effort.
It would be good. There have been some attempts at source code style revision management for statutes (such as https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/ ). Are they a useful start? What should be the next step?
I like the idea, especially the amendments you can visualize almost like a commit tree. They should add something to search like the oldest laws which often are deprecated and useless, in order to help get rid of them.
Last but not least, it is to maintain this website, last updates seem to be from 2022. But I can't manage to imagine if it's a lot of work or not.
I wonder why the rating code is so complex. Pornhub.com has this code enabled, but it also uses a simpler <meta name="rating" content="adult">. 4chan also uses the latter.
I can't find any information on https://rtalabel.org/ to explain why that specific string, but I appreciate that the string being unique made it easy to find the official website, compared to something generic like "adult".
The entire point is to gain control over internet traffic. Your suggestion doesn't work because it requires people to implement it themselves and since you can't control all people, you can't control how they're going to implement it.
The title "for the children" is tongue-in-cheek. It's not serious.
It amazes me how compartmented the mind of the West is: the "protector of Democracy" is barely conscient of its own lies... There is no democracy, barely an illusion of one.
> The entire point is to gain control over internet traffic.
I see many arguments claiming it's about mass surveillance and an invasion of privacy and so on.
We already have mass surveillance, so I don't really buy into those arguments.
I think it's worth considering that it is actually about control. Or more precisely, that it's about dissuading citizens from using social media in the first place.
The damage done to our western democracies from misinformation spread via social media has not gone unnoticed...
Censoring the internet is about as anti-democratic a policy that can be implemented.
I remember reading someone argue that anytime you see a claim that we need to do something to protect democracy just replace the word democracy with bureaucracy and then the statement makes sense.
That's already a thing. One can install Squid on their router, generate a CA cert, sign their server certs with it and install the CA into all the devices in the home. It's called Squid SSL Bump. [1] A small handful of sites still use public key pinning and will have to be added to exclusions in the configuration.
The router must then be configured to only allow Squid HTTPS, Unbound DNS and Chrony NTP out to the internet.
Doing this will of course break things like video games. The parents should have a way to bypass Squid and permit all traffic out during family video game time.
Websites have public key pinning. [1] HPKP Most sites don't do this any more but enough do that anyone running a Squid SSL Bump MitM proxy needs to know.
There were proposals to do this, using encrypted containers of data that would let users authorize apps to use just the data they needed, but the idea got tied to Web3, which got some intense public blowback between the Crypto and NFT hype cycles.
Are there? Because we have had the last 15 years to see it isn’t working. Theres also the issue of peer pressure, it’s incredibly hard for one parent to say no to social media when every other kid has it and all the parties are arranged on Facebook. Right now telling your child they can’t have social media is crippling their ability to have a normal social life.
Banning it outright means parents have a strong foundation of “no you can’t have it, it’s illegal” and all of their peers will instead organise on private messaging apps instead.
That's why I suggest starting with really small children, kids that will be 13 by 2032. Starting with teens is a non starter regardless of how it is attempted in my opinion. It was a very long time ago but I recall being a teen. I could not be locked out of anything. Starting with small children is much easier and when they prove that they are mature and responsible enough then the floodgates open.
You are advocating parenting kids. So many others seem to want "policy" to raise peoples kids for them. That is a fools errand. And personally, I could not care less what some bureaucrat thinks is alright for my children or any others. Simply not their decision to make.
The psychological impacts come from secondary network effects. The studies suggest that taking social media away from just your kid doesn't do anything, because the culture wherever they go will still be driven by it.
So the only way I can protect my kids from it is to pass laws to force other parents' hands.
It is not necessary to dump our kids into institutions to be raised by their peers. It is necessary that you don't make decisions for other peoples kids.
Whether you legalize social media or not (or smoking, or drinking, or riding in a car without a seatbelt), that's making a decision for other people's kids. Choosing parental liberty is still choosing.
I sympathize with the libertarian impulse but for me, protecting my kids from other parents' poor decisions comes first.
Its not a war because children arent combatants. It's instead a one sided slaughter where Meta and Google are destroying the minds of a whole generation of children who cannot and cannot be expected to defend themselves against the claws of trillion dollar corporations, all in the name of profit.
One individual cannot meaningfully fight back. The only way forward is through collective action and legislation, just like what was done to the Tobacco industry a few decades ago.
Confirmation someone is human is harder. Over some age could be accomplished with time should most of the devices and browsers children have access to were to check for RTA/adult headers and activate parental controls. It would not be solved over night thus not perfect but perfect is the enemy of good.
At the moment what we have is no good in my opinion. What we have at the moment will put the identification information of both children and adults at risk. Children can not even consent to sharing this data thus the only people that could protect them are their parents.
I suspect something like this is on the way, in the long term. Every site has some Cloudflare captcha or the like to guard against the AI scraper bots. Eventually, we may need some kind of token which is only issued to real humans.
> Pass laws requiring companies that use third party age or ID verification to take full legal culpability for that data. If any of the data is leaked they must pay each party $1 million dollars regardless of how or why the data was leaked. 300 identities leaked or sold? That will be 300 million dollars not counting criminal penalties. Should this lead to bankruptcy then it is working as intended as they are clearly not qualified to be guardians of this data much less the guardians of your children.
Too much? I suppose the solution would be to not collect the data in the first place and instead use RTA headers and client checks for said header assuming legislators come to their senses and start caring about kids.
Of course for this to work the client has to check it and know the device's user is underage. Any devices or software that either do not check or lie about the user's age will be illegal. Since you can write software that does so too, unsigned software that does network access will be made impossible.
That responsibility must move to the parent to ensure young children are using locked down devices that have parental controls and that detect the RTA/adult headers. At that point no third parties are involved and all web platforms must do is add a header to any URL that has the potential for either adult or user contributed content that could become adult and require moderation.
A perfect example of why Discord should only be sending RTA headers for any server that may contain adult material and the onus is then on the parent to ensure the small children are using devices that have parental controls enabled. If a channel claims to be child friendly and it turns out they are not they get server banned.
I think the only winning move is not to play. Instead just look for RTA/adult headers and if detected trigger parental controls prompting for the admin pw rather than collecting PII.
Friendly reminder this is lobbied into existence by advertising companies since the advent of AI they aren't sure what is real traffic anymore, tying all traffic to a government ID solves that.
We lost this war when we got bamboozled into putting the V-Chip into televisions.
The obvious tradeoff was that we should have been able to have all forms of offensive and pornographic choices on the public airwaves, because we've given those who are concerned the tools to explicitly block it. (not that "unplugging the set when the parents weren't around" wasn't a viable tool already).
We never got that.
I do wonder how much of it is directly that the "won't someone think of the children" demographic is politically loud and courtable in and of itself, and how much of it has been fostered by firms that see it as a conduit for more nefarious aims (i. e. commercial social providers who want desperately for a legal CYA so they don't have to do the dance of COPPA compliance and have an incentive in the verified demographic details age attestation provides)
In the world where people with authority lie casually and bots are cheaper and smarter than people, anonymity does not grant freedom or empower democracy anymore. West is hopelessly outgunned to modern polit&propaganda technologies of russia and China, still citing 1984 like this is 20th century.
we are having similar issues here in Australia with the government very quickly trying to become the overall "Lord of our Lives". Digital Id, banning kids from whatever/whenever the government dreams up another idea "to keep them (and us) safe". Nope, that is the job of the parents. Digital currency is another "awesome" idea, as far as they are concerned. Because, you see, we should not travel too far or eat too much meat, etc. And the "good old" Agenda 2030, where it sounds so wonderful, where "you will own nothing and be happy". Of course that won't include the elites - they will be very happy and own everything
There is no need for id. IMO granting children access to the internet is no different than handing a child a loaded gun with no safety. Both should be treated the same way. Make it illegal for parents or any adult to:
- purchase an internet capable device for anyone under the age of 18 (or whatever age is deemed appropriate to allow unfettered access without any ID)
- allow anyone under the age of 18 (or ##) to operate a device connected to the internet
That removes the government's attempted false flag operations to use "children's access to the internet" as the excuse to obtain the right to monitor every second of your online activity for the rest of your life.
And simultaneously likely saves our children's brains.
Edit: Hyperbole is an easy accusation. But the concept is straight forward:
If the internet is so dangerous as to require everyone to have government issued ID to get online, then change the law preventing smartphones and other internet mobile devices to be possessed by children. That's easy to do.
Put the burden on parents where it belongs to monitor their children in their own homes just as they do as gun owners (required to use gun lockers etc). If you are ok with your 10 year old being in his/her room online without you monitoring, then imo that's probably child abuser, but hey, go for it.
> IMO granting children access to the internet is no different than handing a child a loaded gun with no safety.
The hyperbole is getting a little out of control.
> - allow anyone under the age of 18 (or ##) to operate a device connected to the internet
I don't understand how anyone can think that keeping kids entirely away from internet-connected devices through age 17 is possible or a good idea. These aren't serious comments or suggestions.
Not only that but like, if your child touches the screen in your car have you committed a crime? Using a smart fridge is verboten- speaking to the house's Alexa? Straight to jail.
If one existed, it will probably be like: children under 18 using the internet without parent permission, but then that doesn't do much. They are not guns which you might not ever use. Many people use it daily.
If a web client (fridge, infotainment system, alexa, etc...) can access the internet then it must be updated to look for RTA/adult headers and prompt for an admin password for parental controls to approve access to the site.
Indeed. My focus is on protecting families, small children and small children are primarily using tablets and phones. It's not perfect but it is a valid starting point. Grabbing everyone's PII and leaking it is a non starter. We can knock down the other goal posts once we fix this piece.
Another option of course is to force all these companies and their age/ID vendors to be under something much stricter than PCI DSS and Fedramp for their entire data-centers as a starting point if we must allow storing PII data of children and their parents.
1. Eliminate all the false flag attempts by governments and their supporters to use "danger to children" to require government ID for every adult to get online.
2. If the internet is so dangerous as to require ID to get online, then change the law preventing smartphones and other internet mobile devices to be possessed by children. That's easy to do. Put the burden on parents where it belongs to monitor their children in their own homes just as they do as gun owners.
To be fair with the way politicians are treating the internet and social media, it is the equivalent of giving them a loaded gun. Because otherwise how can they justify these laws? Politicians are the ones claiming kids are being irrevocably harmed by the internet.
So apparently you believe that a 17-year-old should not be allowed to (a) order a pizza; (b) drive a car; (c) adjust the thermostat, unless they live in a sort of pre-internet Amish society which is probably based on the level of technology that was widely available when you were a child.
I do not believe we should even try to restrict teens. Rather kids that would be 13 or younger by 2032 thus current teens not affected and kids that grow into teens that are still under parental controls could prove to their parents they are responsible enough to access adult content thus keeping parenting in the family and away from politicians.
If the internet is so dangerous that it requires every adult to obtain a government ID to get online, then yes, a 10 year old (or 17 yo if that's the age you want to use) is going to have to wait just like he/she has to wait to drive a car or buy liquor or cigarettes or pot.
Don't blame me. Blame the people pushing for a government ID that YOU must have before you can order your pizza.
I feel genuinely conflicted: On the one hand I get the "authoritarian overreach heebie-jeebies", that I think a lot of people on HN probably share. On the other hand I'd also really like the West to harden its election processes from election interference by its adversaries (e.g. Russia) - and shoring up dysinfo on e.g. Facebook by requiring users to prove their identity with a government ID is one of the only ways to truly effectively combat this at its source (fact-checking just can't keep up with a firehose of dysinformation). Ideally I'd want "real id requirements" to be limited " partake in public discourse" (mainly Facebook and Twitter). But the slippery slop argument just feels pretty strong here too - once a mechanism like this is in place, its use will only ever expand, and it's much easier for a new government to commit overreach if it's already there and just needs expanding. And of course all this "think of the children" nonsense needs to stop.
Elections are easier to solve technically. No mail in ballots. Require state ID in person at the voting center. But that's a different topic that can get divisive, long and derailed very quickly.
Only if you're fine with disenfranchising voters. In which case, securing elections is the easiest thing in the world: I vote and nobody else does. It's securing elections while not disenfranchising voters that's the hard part.
And how exactly is that a bigger problem than fraudulent votes? And how could you possibly solve it outside of segmenting the country's internet to prevent foreign ISP routes?
Because fraudulent votes in most developed counties are a complete non issue while people getting psyopped by troll farms and AI is monumental.
And yes, I think we likely will see social media become segmented so hostile nations will be blocked from posting on local social media. Or at least having them flagged as foreign accounts.
In an interesting way this is a good example. It is indeed up to parents on a ranch to decide when their children are ready to see animals mate. It's another matter all together to decide when the small children or teens are ready to see humans mate. Either way that needs to be up to the parent or legal guardian. That is already their job.
You think ranch owners are hiding their farm practices from their children? Nah I don't believe that for one second. Ive watched 10 year olds of the most prudish family I ever known holding piglets so their dad can castrate them. Hell 20 year old Amish people can't even hold hands but will have kids help artificially inseminate cows.
Most small children on ranches have seen everything that can happen with animals including but not limited to mating, shooting coyotes, death from diseases. And yeah it's up to the parents when the kids see and do these things. Three year olds have a hard time with a lever action 45-70. There is a time when it makes sense and it's up to the parents when the kids are ready to understand and correctly follow instructions and are mature enough.
This thread is about stopping the insanity of uploading and ultimately leaking PII of families before the kids can even consent to it. Kids will despise their parents if they could have stopped this and did not. They will absolutely appreciate their parents for protecting them from predatory companies.
If we must pursue these predatory practices of colluding companies and governments then both of them need to be under stricter technical and audit requirements than PCI DSS and Fedramp.
The billionaires don't want it though, that's why most of the big tech CEOs are against it. Perhaps we should listen to Elon Musk though, after all, he "brought free speech back to Twitter." That is, as long as we ignore the adjustments to the algorithm that boost his personal flavour of politics. At least he isn't banning anyone, bots included.
and parents should actually parent their kids. Their kids do not need phones at such a young age and their parents should be in control of their own kid's phone.
What is the final defense? I suppose we create underground relay networks of radio networks within cities that allow for computers to connect directly to eachother, and from there we seed all our pirated content and discuss whatever the hell we'd like.
Maybe we'd have to contend with low bandwidth when we connect outside our own city network, using larger wavelength radio to bounce off the ionosphere across the planet.
As for the FCC, I don't really care. I will set up nodes on top of abandoned buildings. I will set up nodes in front of the local FCC field office. I will set up nodes in the middle of the forest. I will set up nodes on buoys out at sea. They may capture me or worse, so be it. I will not be around forever anyhow.
I pray there are still actual hackers out there on hacker news who might consider this idea and help further the technical side. This is a little out of my wheelhouse. I just can't accept this inevitable incoming future where all our communications will be IDed and censored. That is the end game for them. We can't allow for that to happen. This might be the biggest battle yet, bigger than all the other wars where power used us like pawns against the pawns of some other power, because for once in the history of civilization, we'd be fighting for our own right and not some elite group's right. I hope I am not alone in this line of thinking.
Compliance is much easier though.
You want access to Fable? Show us your ID.
As much as I am completely against this in spirit, all that is needed is restricted access to frontier models and then it just a question of how do you want to see my papers sir?
The final defense is always to change the government (one way or another). When we need to resort to technical mean we have lost.
Would-be revolutionaries need secure, reliable comms even more than the average person.
comms, travel, banking. Exactly why all the privatization of this stuff has top priority for the current administration. They're making their own government.
PGP
PGP is not a very effective software suite for encrypting actual messages people want to send to other people, because it's a decades-old tool designed for email workflows that arguably never worked particularly well and is not well-suited to how people want to communicate today. Chat apps like Signal and WhatsApp that include end to end encryption as a matter of course are encrypting far more messages between humans than PGP for emails ever did.
Good for protecting the message itself, but it does nothing for metadata. These days the metadata is what kills you. (Who talks to whom, when, and how often reveals enough to press the drone missile button, apparently.)
OpenPGP + SMTP as a starting point as email can reach many and Thunderbird makes OpenPGP happy clicky simple. The body includes instructions for the E2EE chat servers to use. Metadata trail ends there. Other circles of friends are joined in by other means. E2EE ejabberd (OTR+PGP+OMEMO) servers switched up after everyone is on the first outer layer of chat servers. Old servers are wiped. Of course all of this assumes nobody is silly enough to use a cell phone or all of this is futile. Everyone is using a laptop they paid cash for and a clean install of a generic minimal install of Linux and Coreboot running a script to make everything ephemeral and the OS nearly immutable. No security distros as they have all been infiltrated, just a vanilla simple Linux and a script.
what...?
Change the governance. Both red, blue and the corporate sides are supportive of this.
The opposite is true.
By this you mean that the first line of defense should be to change the government, correct? If so, I'm pretty sure you're right. Technical solutions to social/governmental problems seem like they're making those problems worse due to actively rechanneling energy that could be used for awareness/activism into technical workarounds.
I completely agree with you, and it's strange to see you downvoted on a technical forum
Technology is what has always precipitated political change
Which technology caused the French revolution?
The printing press and the guillotine.
So the guillotine (15th century [1]) and printing press (invented in 1440) [2] precipitated the French Revolution (1789)[3]?
It’s a theory for sure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
Before that they didn't know how to kill people?
Yes. Before that they didn't know how to kill people.
True, I always wonder how that would actually play out.
The geeks would likely be the elite class force to tumble it if it ever became necassary I reckon.
>That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
I think everyone (especially young gen) should absolutely master the offensive hacking skills.
I will certainly teach my kids everything I know about exploiting and destroying enemy computer systems.
This is the equivalent of the 2nd Amendment, but for the Internet space. You should absolutely be able to inspect, disassemble, debug, everything you can in a computer system and have the knowledge to knock it down, if it (or its owner) starts misbehaving.
Literally every single problem with computer system can be solved if the entire population, armed with simple Kali Linux, decides to strike back against the tyranny of the government
Out of the kids (tweens+) I know because of my kids NONE is interested in anything even remotely adjacent to it. They wouldn't be able to troubleshoot a dns issue.
Or even, say, AI. They know about "chatbots" and "generating images" or "adding effects". Herein ends the story.
You can't teach someone this sort of skills if they like staying ignorant.
I don't think there's some magical technical trick that lets you do an end run around politics.
Oh, there is.
It was invented by China in the 10th century.
"War is politics by other means" is the one line of Clausewitz everyone can quote.
Violence is a form of politics and always has been. Whether that be violence from the state to the people or vice versa.
What was that?
gunpowder.
Trusted IPSec tunnels to form your own trusted internet of peers/friends within the internet. It's all just 'a LAN' then. I dunno how well that scales, but it's a lot easier than trying to sort out radio shenanigans (which in my experience are actually regularly enforced by FCC/your local equivalents).
That's been done a few times with Tinc (open source VPN) [1][2]. It's great until the group includes one bad apple. All it takes is one person with low impulse control, low opsec to bring the whole thing down. Some hacker groups did this some time ago.
[1] - https://www.tinc-vpn.org/
[2] - https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/how-to-set-up-tinc-peer-t...
That's just the technical problem. It can be solved.
Including an untrustworthy person is a political problem actually
You can already do this, it’s called reticulum.
Essentially it’s encrypted internet/networking over any type of network including LoRa.
Issue is the size of the community and linking up to actually serve internet or surface public services there.
I expect the government will require ISPs to only allow connection from approved operating systems that only allow installation of approved apps so we can't do this. Not in the short term, but eventually.
100% with you, I don't understand that people feel they have privacy in their house but not on the internet. Those people just don't understand how humans work and how we get better as a species.
I will forever keep trying to communicate without anyone else being able to read it. You can't ban my ability to use math to encrypt things. Still, the thought police keeps popping up. They can drag me to jail. I am a good person, a father, but my thoughts are my own. (just kidding, I'll give up all my s* when they actually drag me away from my family, but maybe I'll let them drag me for some meters for the show, to make a point, and hope people are filming it.)
There are things like Ham radio and meshtastic (uses lora). It's all slow of course (atm).
If at any point your counter-governmental action actually threatens to take some share of power away from the government, they will swiftly and quietly deal with you (they have about 1000 ways to track you, and AI reduces the cost of tracking greatly). If you are irrelevant you will mostly be ignored.
By the way, I'm sure that they are aware of all this privacy-first counter-tracking sentiment from certain communities, and are actively working to subvert it.
If and only if you give up, you forfeit and oouse.
Or... use a protocol that hides packets in Minecraft traffic with out-of-band control through steganographic Discord audio.
It's really slow, but its private.
How do you run that program if it's not on the app store and you can only run programs from the app store?
Self-destruct drones with mesh node transmitters? Radiowave reflectors placed at strategic spots blended with the surroundings? IR multicast transmitters?
You would be breaking numerous laws, your transmitters would be removed quickly, you would be out thousands of dollars in equipment, and no one would be on your network anyway. You would almost certainly go to jail if you tried this.
Have you ever actually read all the laws? It's functionally impossible to survive without breaking laws.
There’s a difference between violating a dozen obscure laws on a daily basis that never get enforced and operating an unlicensed radio broadcast. See what happens if you try it. The FCC does not mess around.
Not that quickly. Tracking down a low-power transmitter in an urban core is technically feasible but a lot of work. Police don't like doing work.
The police? Wouldn't that be the FCC?
Yes the FCC. Here [1] were their recent enforcement actions in April 2026 and in May 2026 [2].
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeMjMlHpus8
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFutq5wyYcI
This one happens quickly.
The final defense is to stop having children. Then there's no one to think of.
Then we are the last generation and nothing matters. Sad, isn't it? I'm trying not to cry.
You know, there's an argument that if your soul/consciousness is occupying a randomly selected body (whatever that means - don't take it too literally) you'd expect to be occupying a body during the time when there are the most human bodies to occupy. 6% of all humans who were ever alive so far are alive right now.
It's not really rigorous because some consciousness has to occupy this body and that consciousness would make the same argument, but it's a weak inkling of an argument that the future probably has less humans than the present.
People are already doing that lmao and the general population is so apathetic that they simply don't care cheap flights and buying crap from Temu will cook us to death, they don't care that late stage capitalism has made it harder and harder for people to have families. Even if the replacement rate is magically fixed tomorrow there's still gonna be a long gap and hard times ahead.
It's still far off but I wouldn't be surprised if these were the earliest signs of societal collapse. It does seem impossible to avoid, going in cycles.
> because for once in the history of civilization, we'd be fighting for our own right and not some elite group's right. I hope I am not alone in this line of thinking
They depoliticized people to this degree that they fantasize of joining the a-political resistance movement, its kind of sad. This isn't meant as an insult, you should be angry that you live in a society that left you politically oblivious. Like no dude, people fought against power all the time, the people who you listen to just told you that all that do are dangerous politicized radicals or terrorists. Find who is punching UP, then get a political education in that direction.
No revolution in history has ever succeeded without the support of an alternate group of elites who replace the current elites if the revolution succeeds...
and if these elites are better aligned with you, siding with them is better than doing nothing
To add to the list: KYC/AML-like regulations and practices (not necessarily financial) that shift the responsibility down the chain, outside the accountability zone, and result in preventive overly broad risk avoidance, self-censorship, and manipulation of your Overton window. See for example DMCA vs YouTube practices vs what actual channels choose to do to dodge both. Or algospeak. Or the PayPal situation which is mentioned in the article.
But it's all talk. Political pressure is like gas pressure. Gas expands to fill the available volume. What do you actually do to push back, besides talking about it on the web? This defines the available volume, if you don't do anything it's infinite.
Create a government from scratch.
Version control the laws.
Compare the laws with all other countries.
Hoard data.
Write code to replace government employees and to make laws easy to implement. (If done well consider selling a product or service)
Make everything modular so that the establishment can steal it.
Get people involved. Doesn't matter if you need to write a sim and convince them it is a game.
Pretend the whole exercise is writing code so that you can imagine you are perfect for the job.
I learn that people from all political angles like the idea of voluntary taxes (but no one believes it can work)
If the whole thing can run on donations and volunteers with a few "state" owned companies a hot swap becomes inevitable.
I'm not sure you can code your way into having a monopoly on violence.
NB: Weber's definition of government (which your quote misstates, so to speak, as is often the case), is that the state is that entity which has the monopoly on the legitimate claim to violence. It's legitimacy, not violence, which is key.
For the longer explanation, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37366751>.
That said, legitimacy is a political property, and one which cannot be attained through purely technical means. To that extent I agree with your critique.
Which itself is kind of a BS indoctrinated definition.
Wind the clock back a few hundred years and there was plenty of legitimate non-government violence. The government didn't care if the well to do dueled, the townsfolk brawled in the bar, a serial fraudster got what was coming to them, etc, etc. Sure the government could choose to care and construe it's written rules to that effect if it chose but other than exceptional situations it largely didn't and everyone alive then considered this fine.
Wind the clock back further to medieval times and it gets even messier.
My argument isn't that Weber's definition is correct or accurate; that's a whole 'nother discussion.
It's that, to the level of a thought-stopping cliche, the definition is misstated with the emphasis on violence rather than legitimacy, which misses the whole point.
But Weber's claim is also nuanced:
- Non-government violence, if tolerated by the government, is then sanctioned by the government, and hence, government retains its monopoly on legitimacy. Again, the relevant monopoly is legitimacy. Not on who is acting with violence, but who finds that violence legitimate or illegitimate.
- Governmental violence, if deemed illegitimate by the population, means that the government no longer has legitimacy itself, and hence by Weber's definition is no longer a government (at least by his terms).
- If some other entity holds legitimacy over violence within a given area (say, a neighboring state, a local warlord, Great Power, partisan or resistance movement, corporate or commercial entity such as, say, the British East India Company), then that entity is effectively the government, again, by Weber's definition. As an example, Mohandas Gandhi's ahimsa movement successfully challenged British imperial rule not by claiming violence for itself, but by successfully claiming the principle of nonviolence. The Empire was delegitimated in the process.
- And finally, if no one institution can successfully claim legitimacy of violence within a region, then there is no government. The region is effectively stateless.
There may well be other constructs, situations may be fluid (changing with time or over space), effective control units may be small (city-states, tribes), etc.., but you can generally find a Weberian projection in such cases.
Again, I've raised this point numerous times on HN, largely due to the widespread misrepresentation of Weber. Often, I suspect, by people who have no idea that they're employing a corrupted version of his definition in the first place. I encourage you to look through my earlier discussions to see if your further objections aren't already addressed there: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.
Prior discussion points to where the misleading restatement seems to have originated, more on the elements of Weber's definition as applied to various situations, Weber's original work, and translation into English which didn't occur until the 1950s, followed shortly by the bastardised variant taking hold.
I also strongly recommend British political historian David Runciman's own views on this definition, which I'd first encountered well after forming my own. They're expressed in this episode of his podcast Talking Politics: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership> (at about 15 minutes).
To state the obvious: If anyone can code his way out of something it is someone who codes.
If enough people want something badly enough, when existing governing structures will bow is a question of how many people.
You should pretend your code isn't good enough. That way you can own the problem. You will get plenty of help from those making things worse. Empires crumble eventually.
This and your earlier comment presume that code is a way out. Much of the push-back here is that evidence is strongly suggesting that 1) it is not and 2) code tends in general to be a power-amplifier for those already in power. Put another way: your reform-minded hacker is not the only coder, and the opposition (or more accurately, the establishment) likely has far vaster resources.
The problem in your initial proposal comes in the first step: "Create a government from scratch". That is a political process at best; at worst, one predicated on violence (rebellion, insurrection, coercion).
Again, the solution is inherently political, not technical. There might be technical elements to such a political process, but those follow from rather than lead to.
This represents a significant shift in my own views over the past 20 years or so. In the 1990s I would have tended to agree with you. I no longer do.
> This and your earlier comment presume that code is a way out.
For you yes. If you were a song writer I would suggest you write something like El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido in stead of a new shaking my ass song.
You do what you know. It's much less of a waste of time if it progresses your skills.
A baker in 1683 created the croissant to symbolize eating the ottoman empire.
Did he make a relevant contribution? I honestly don't know.
Just to be clear, I agree in part: people should assist as they can. The examples you cite (protest songs, protest food) work as part of the battle for hearts and minds, and can be quite effective. They're working at the political level, within epistemic space, itself a significant element of political dynamics. When epistemic systems change, so do political ones, and we've seen this repeatedly through history.
I do have a technical background, I write code. I've also been spending much of the past decade or two coming up to speed on things I'd paid less attention to in my near six decades on this rock: political theory, philosophy, and history. David Runciman, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, has been a significant part of that.
There is a code associated with governance, and that is law, along with regulation, constitution, and court practice (which may or may not include case law / common law, depending on the political tradition). Coming up with ways of making law itself clearer and in particular changes to it more apparent (as with revision control) could help in some regards, though my experience from the world of software is that complexity-management constrains complexity, and that the inevitable consequence of more capable complexity management is greater levels of complexity. Beware what you (or others) ask for.
I suspect that there are changes necessary at a more fundamental level, though even deciding on what the aims of that change should be is an open question: is liberal democracy a proper goal, or should we be looking at effective governance based on a changing set of conditions, constraints, and capabilities? There are numerous suggestions for electoral reforms (reduced voting age, increased voter restrictions, ranked-choice, and a whole host of others, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform>). I'm particularly taken by the notion of sortition and how it might be applied. "If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly" has topped my list of most interesting reads for nearly two decades now: <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>.
Other reforms would include finance (personal, business, government, political); economics; technology; social welfare; education; property rights and restrictions; informational autonomy (combining speech, privacy, and choice in numerous manners), etc., etc., etc.
I fear you're prematurely optimising based on misconceptions and ignorance.
I'm not claiming total knowledge, by a long shot. But I do believe my scope of consideration exceeds yours.
>Just to be clear, I agree in part: people should assist as they can.
Actually, one should do very little. We should all do very little. That will already produce a terrifying force that may crush everything precious to us.
And you should only do what you are good at. If you can't sing and dance or can't give a speech - don't do it. You will ruin everything.
> I fear you're prematurely optimising based on misconceptions and ignorance.
If you are going to take on the impossible wilfull ignorance can be a useful tool. You can't think it's impossible, if you do you should just quit.
Coding isn't a bad hand of cards. You can build something awesome without scaring the shit out of the old guard.
>the inevitable consequence of more capable complexity management is greater levels of complexity. Beware what you (or others) ask for.
Law makers keep tagging on new features. It's an incomprehensible mess. If someone wants to build something we don't offer them a nice spec with all relevant information. You get a pile of trash that immediately convinces most to abandon all hope.
If the application has become unusable from technical debt you have to.... well... face the music.
The traditional way is to give a war of some kind, burn everything to the ground and start over. We have it down to an art. We are going to [have to] keep doing this until we come up with a better idea.
It's kind of awesome how the foundation of all advanced civilizations was build by people with few of any tools or resources. I'm sure they had people who thought it couldn't be done not to forget those who paid the ultimate price.
Today the naysayers have airco, washing machines, bubble baths and a super computer in their hands.
> I'm not claiming total knowledge, by a long shot. But I do believe my scope of consideration exceeds yours.
There wouldn't be a need to write this if that wasn't the case. It's not a competition tho. It's a puzzle as old as time. It sits there waiting for someone competent enough to solve it.
>There are numerous suggestions for electoral reforms (reduced voting age, increased voter restrictions, ranked-choice, and a whole host of others, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform>). I'm particularly taken by the notion of sortition and how it might be applied. "If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly" has topped my list of most interesting reads for nearly two decades now: <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>.
Those are fun reads. Thanks.
I wrote this funny thing called subjective sort.
Rather than pick your preferred option you are presented with two random ones.
https://subjective-sort.go-here.nl/
Provide the 2 election programs, make people sit down and read them for at least 30 minutes and if enough votes are cast this will sort the list from best to worse.
I came to this after wondering what the signal to noise ratio was in elections. I examined Facebook likes and YouTube views and came to the conclusion THERE IS NO SIGNAL.
The 200ish views on the videos from the us Green Party aren't enough to account for journalists. Further down the list the number of Facebook likes didn't even account for friends and relatives.
It also reminds me of conversations where I proposed tiers of voting diplomas and told people I didn't need to read their response or listen to their arguments. I can just disagree without knowing what I'm talking about.
Another fun thought was to make election program legally binding.
The way it currently works is exactly like looking if the bird is on our left or our right while pretending it matters.
But I think it's better to work on documenting existing government before considering changes. The later will limit participation to much.
That was the obvious issue with all the blockchain smart contract stuff that was getting pushed previously. Any time it interacts with the physical world the blockchain goes out the window the moment on someone on the ground decides they don’t agree with it. Your cryptographically signed deed means nothing and can’t evict someone off the land.
There is little room for a property or money transfer system that leaves no avenue for legal recourse. And the DAO fork made it crystal clear why it was always just window dressing on the same social consensus game.
Sure there is, it's the one for people who are trying to avoid unjust legal recourse.
I said little room, not no room. For most entities using crypto where legal recourse is a more realistic threat model than scammers/hackers it isn't the unjust kind they are so worried about.
If you're selling shoes you have little legal threat. If you're doing anything unusual, you need protection from the government because the government hates anything out of the norm unless you bribe it.
The "violence" in that case is taking someone's money away so they might lose their home or starve.
This comment ignores the cost of deploying government violence. In most of the world the government cannot "just" rubber hose every petty criminal on the basis that "he might have some crypto he's not telling us about". The people would not stand for it.
I think you misunderstood my comment. The scenario I was thinking of is something like a blockchain contract that declares you own a block of land. If a hacker stole the NFT land contract, the government and society would still agree it belongs to the real owner and thus the blockchain out of sync with reality.
A smart contract can't physically secure ownership of land.
Even if the people did stand for it, it still costs money and human effort for the government to pay its police employees to do the rubber-hosing - and there are principle-agent problems like government agents being susceptible to bribes (perhaps in cryptocurrency!), being too lazy to enforce the written laws, or having personal scruples about cryptocurrency use.
There are already N governments, why would making government N+1 improve anything.
Imagine we had a versioned database with all the laws from all countries where one could compare them side by side. We could begin to understand the mood or spirit of each effort.
Law makers wouldn't need to pretend they are doing something unique.
You might do the same with all infrastructure projects. They can't all be cheap. Half should more expensive than average. It should be fascinating to see where the extra money is going.
Some goes towards corruption, some into incompetence but there should also be plenty of praise worthy efforts.
It seems we have the tools to do such things now without breaking the bank.
Think of the law as a truly outdated code base. Why would you do a rewrite you ask? Because we've learned a thing or two along the way?
> Imagine we had a versioned database with all the laws from all countries where one could compare them side by side. We could begin to understand the mood or spirit of each effort.
It would be good. There have been some attempts at source code style revision management for statutes (such as https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/ ). Are they a useful start? What should be the next step?
I like the idea, especially the amendments you can visualize almost like a commit tree. They should add something to search like the oldest laws which often are deprecated and useless, in order to help get rid of them.
Last but not least, it is to maintain this website, last updates seem to be from 2022. But I can't manage to imagine if it's a lot of work or not.
Get more people involved to lower the bus factor and get people to pay for it. Coordinate with different countries?
Do what you enjoy or think meaningful.
<meta name="RATING" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" />
I wonder why the rating code is so complex. Pornhub.com has this code enabled, but it also uses a simpler <meta name="rating" content="adult">. 4chan also uses the latter.
I can't find any information on https://rtalabel.org/ to explain why that specific string, but I appreciate that the string being unique made it easy to find the official website, compared to something generic like "adult".
Maybe because it leads people to cease providing non-rated contents, contrary to the intent of regulations.
This btw actually happen: "Sesame Scheme: Unintended Consequences of Allergen Food Labeling"( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074487 )
I think it should be fairly simple client code to look for either of them.
probably for uniqueness. This code is set by a very specific standard while adult could mean almost anything.
Simple solution, Use your router to block whatever you need to, control your kids devices, the internet stays free and open.
What are we talking about?
There are no laws that will turn out well.
The entire point is to gain control over internet traffic. Your suggestion doesn't work because it requires people to implement it themselves and since you can't control all people, you can't control how they're going to implement it.
The title "for the children" is tongue-in-cheek. It's not serious.
But somehow "force all adults to sort their thrash" instead of "let's standardize the packaging and materials" is fine? Oh I see
Not addressing to you specifically, just figure of speech
It amazes me how compartmented the mind of the West is: the "protector of Democracy" is barely conscient of its own lies... There is no democracy, barely an illusion of one.
> The entire point is to gain control over internet traffic.
I see many arguments claiming it's about mass surveillance and an invasion of privacy and so on.
We already have mass surveillance, so I don't really buy into those arguments.
I think it's worth considering that it is actually about control. Or more precisely, that it's about dissuading citizens from using social media in the first place.
The damage done to our western democracies from misinformation spread via social media has not gone unnoticed...
Censoring the internet is about as anti-democratic a policy that can be implemented.
I remember reading someone argue that anytime you see a claim that we need to do something to protect democracy just replace the word democracy with bureaucracy and then the statement makes sense.
You know what we are talking about. It was written in the book.
You want the internet to be engineered so you will be able to MITM traffic?
That's already a thing. One can install Squid on their router, generate a CA cert, sign their server certs with it and install the CA into all the devices in the home. It's called Squid SSL Bump. [1] A small handful of sites still use public key pinning and will have to be added to exclusions in the configuration.
The router must then be configured to only allow Squid HTTPS, Unbound DNS and Chrony NTP out to the internet.
Doing this will of course break things like video games. The parents should have a way to bypass Squid and permit all traffic out during family video game time.
[1] - https://github.com/alatas/squid-alpine-ssl Not my repo, needs updating
Apps have cert pinning. What now?
Websites have public key pinning. [1] HPKP Most sites don't do this any more but enough do that anyone running a Squid SSL Bump MitM proxy needs to know.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning
And do you block children from accessing any of them?
Which of them specifically are you asking about?
20 years before that, there was “The Digital Imprimatur”: <https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/>
ahhh fourmilab. I still run John's earth screensaver.
There has got to be a way to assert that a user is human, and over some age, without having to identify which specific human that is.
There were proposals to do this, using encrypted containers of data that would let users authorize apps to use just the data they needed, but the idea got tied to Web3, which got some intense public blowback between the Crypto and NFT hype cycles.
https://www.w3.org/2023/Talks/0727-wearedevelopers-tbl/solid...
Now we’re onto AI, so we have suboptimal age verification, with implementations in law written by politicians
This is an impossible task. If a certain business wants to make human id required, let them. It should not be enforced by government.
You have full control over your router and kid's devices so start there. Not anyone else's responsibility.
Parents are the main ones begging for this change. They are losing the war against Zuckerberg
Turning the entire thing into a doomed panopticon to "own the Zuck" is not going to end the way they think it will.
Farewell to freedom on the Internet and the days of wild abandon.
There are other options, it's not binary.
They need to be informed there are options that do not involve giving their information and their children's information to shady vendors.
Are there? Because we have had the last 15 years to see it isn’t working. Theres also the issue of peer pressure, it’s incredibly hard for one parent to say no to social media when every other kid has it and all the parties are arranged on Facebook. Right now telling your child they can’t have social media is crippling their ability to have a normal social life.
Banning it outright means parents have a strong foundation of “no you can’t have it, it’s illegal” and all of their peers will instead organise on private messaging apps instead.
That's why I suggest starting with really small children, kids that will be 13 by 2032. Starting with teens is a non starter regardless of how it is attempted in my opinion. It was a very long time ago but I recall being a teen. I could not be locked out of anything. Starting with small children is much easier and when they prove that they are mature and responsible enough then the floodgates open.
You are advocating parenting kids. So many others seem to want "policy" to raise peoples kids for them. That is a fools errand. And personally, I could not care less what some bureaucrat thinks is alright for my children or any others. Simply not their decision to make.
> and all the parties are arranged on Facebook
Bro… it’s joever for you
It's a collective action problem.
The psychological impacts come from secondary network effects. The studies suggest that taking social media away from just your kid doesn't do anything, because the culture wherever they go will still be driven by it.
So the only way I can protect my kids from it is to pass laws to force other parents' hands.
It is not necessary to dump our kids into institutions to be raised by their peers. It is necessary that you don't make decisions for other peoples kids.
Whether you legalize social media or not (or smoking, or drinking, or riding in a car without a seatbelt), that's making a decision for other people's kids. Choosing parental liberty is still choosing.
I sympathize with the libertarian impulse but for me, protecting my kids from other parents' poor decisions comes first.
Parenting your child is not a political ideology. What a world we live in.
They're outsourcing their babysitting lol there is no war against Zuckerburg unless you buy your brat a smartphone
Its not a war because children arent combatants. It's instead a one sided slaughter where Meta and Google are destroying the minds of a whole generation of children who cannot and cannot be expected to defend themselves against the claws of trillion dollar corporations, all in the name of profit.
One individual cannot meaningfully fight back. The only way forward is through collective action and legislation, just like what was done to the Tobacco industry a few decades ago.
You mean TikTok? Kids aren't on FB
They are on Instagram which is a Meta product.
Confirmation someone is human is harder. Over some age could be accomplished with time should most of the devices and browsers children have access to were to check for RTA/adult headers and activate parental controls. It would not be solved over night thus not perfect but perfect is the enemy of good.
At the moment what we have is no good in my opinion. What we have at the moment will put the identification information of both children and adults at risk. Children can not even consent to sharing this data thus the only people that could protect them are their parents.
I suspect something like this is on the way, in the long term. Every site has some Cloudflare captcha or the like to guard against the AI scraper bots. Eventually, we may need some kind of token which is only issued to real humans.
that's what Apple gives behind the scenes to Cloudflare, and people learn about it from Hacker News for the first time over and over again.
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https://zkpassport.id/
> Pass laws requiring companies that use third party age or ID verification to take full legal culpability for that data. If any of the data is leaked they must pay each party $1 million dollars regardless of how or why the data was leaked. 300 identities leaked or sold? That will be 300 million dollars not counting criminal penalties. Should this lead to bankruptcy then it is working as intended as they are clearly not qualified to be guardians of this data much less the guardians of your children.
Too much? I suppose the solution would be to not collect the data in the first place and instead use RTA headers and client checks for said header assuming legislators come to their senses and start caring about kids.
Of course for this to work the client has to check it and know the device's user is underage. Any devices or software that either do not check or lie about the user's age will be illegal. Since you can write software that does so too, unsigned software that does network access will be made impossible.
That responsibility must move to the parent to ensure young children are using locked down devices that have parental controls and that detect the RTA/adult headers. At that point no third parties are involved and all web platforms must do is add a header to any URL that has the potential for either adult or user contributed content that could become adult and require moderation.
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Oh no not my LLC that keeps zero dollars on the books.
Discord used a 3rd party and they were supposed to delete IDs they were sent, but they didn't do that and it got leaked
A perfect example of why Discord should only be sending RTA headers for any server that may contain adult material and the onus is then on the parent to ensure the small children are using devices that have parental controls enabled. If a channel claims to be child friendly and it turns out they are not they get server banned.
I think the only winning move is not to play. Instead just look for RTA/adult headers and if detected trigger parental controls prompting for the admin pw rather than collecting PII.
Friendly reminder this is lobbied into existence by advertising companies since the advent of AI they aren't sure what is real traffic anymore, tying all traffic to a government ID solves that.
I fully expect anonymity to disappear, but also certain causes will still be supported by massive amounts of bot accounts.
We lost this war when we got bamboozled into putting the V-Chip into televisions.
The obvious tradeoff was that we should have been able to have all forms of offensive and pornographic choices on the public airwaves, because we've given those who are concerned the tools to explicitly block it. (not that "unplugging the set when the parents weren't around" wasn't a viable tool already).
We never got that.
I do wonder how much of it is directly that the "won't someone think of the children" demographic is politically loud and courtable in and of itself, and how much of it has been fostered by firms that see it as a conduit for more nefarious aims (i. e. commercial social providers who want desperately for a legal CYA so they don't have to do the dance of COPPA compliance and have an incentive in the verified demographic details age attestation provides)
Taylor Lorenz has been sounding the alarm. Peter Thiel and all his pets have been pushing the same narrative https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0RRxR4LvK4&t=661s
I've never really liked Taylor Lorenz's writing, but after following her work in 2025/2026, I have to admit that she is our girl on this one.
Think of the children. Cuz its been 30 years and we finally think its time ... and this is what fixes it!
Cool. Thanks for the memories, internet.
In the world where people with authority lie casually and bots are cheaper and smarter than people, anonymity does not grant freedom or empower democracy anymore. West is hopelessly outgunned to modern polit&propaganda technologies of russia and China, still citing 1984 like this is 20th century.
we are having similar issues here in Australia with the government very quickly trying to become the overall "Lord of our Lives". Digital Id, banning kids from whatever/whenever the government dreams up another idea "to keep them (and us) safe". Nope, that is the job of the parents. Digital currency is another "awesome" idea, as far as they are concerned. Because, you see, we should not travel too far or eat too much meat, etc. And the "good old" Agenda 2030, where it sounds so wonderful, where "you will own nothing and be happy". Of course that won't include the elites - they will be very happy and own everything
There is no need for id. IMO granting children access to the internet is no different than handing a child a loaded gun with no safety. Both should be treated the same way. Make it illegal for parents or any adult to:
- purchase an internet capable device for anyone under the age of 18 (or whatever age is deemed appropriate to allow unfettered access without any ID)
- allow anyone under the age of 18 (or ##) to operate a device connected to the internet
That removes the government's attempted false flag operations to use "children's access to the internet" as the excuse to obtain the right to monitor every second of your online activity for the rest of your life.
And simultaneously likely saves our children's brains.
Edit: Hyperbole is an easy accusation. But the concept is straight forward:
If the internet is so dangerous as to require everyone to have government issued ID to get online, then change the law preventing smartphones and other internet mobile devices to be possessed by children. That's easy to do.
Put the burden on parents where it belongs to monitor their children in their own homes just as they do as gun owners (required to use gun lockers etc). If you are ok with your 10 year old being in his/her room online without you monitoring, then imo that's probably child abuser, but hey, go for it.
> IMO granting children access to the internet is no different than handing a child a loaded gun with no safety.
The hyperbole is getting a little out of control.
> - allow anyone under the age of 18 (or ##) to operate a device connected to the internet
I don't understand how anyone can think that keeping kids entirely away from internet-connected devices through age 17 is possible or a good idea. These aren't serious comments or suggestions.
Not only that but like, if your child touches the screen in your car have you committed a crime? Using a smart fridge is verboten- speaking to the house's Alexa? Straight to jail.
If one existed, it will probably be like: children under 18 using the internet without parent permission, but then that doesn't do much. They are not guns which you might not ever use. Many people use it daily.
If a web client (fridge, infotainment system, alexa, etc...) can access the internet then it must be updated to look for RTA/adult headers and prompt for an admin password for parental controls to approve access to the site.
The internet is more than the www
Indeed. My focus is on protecting families, small children and small children are primarily using tablets and phones. It's not perfect but it is a valid starting point. Grabbing everyone's PII and leaking it is a non starter. We can knock down the other goal posts once we fix this piece.
Another option of course is to force all these companies and their age/ID vendors to be under something much stricter than PCI DSS and Fedramp for their entire data-centers as a starting point if we must allow storing PII data of children and their parents.
The concept is straight forward:
1. Eliminate all the false flag attempts by governments and their supporters to use "danger to children" to require government ID for every adult to get online.
2. If the internet is so dangerous as to require ID to get online, then change the law preventing smartphones and other internet mobile devices to be possessed by children. That's easy to do. Put the burden on parents where it belongs to monitor their children in their own homes just as they do as gun owners.
To be fair with the way politicians are treating the internet and social media, it is the equivalent of giving them a loaded gun. Because otherwise how can they justify these laws? Politicians are the ones claiming kids are being irrevocably harmed by the internet.
The internet as a whole is not a loaded gun, just social media and adult content. Wikipedia, educational sites, school websites and such are fine.
Giving a kid Instagram and tiktok is like handing them over to a junkie on the street to try meth.
So apparently you believe that a 17-year-old should not be allowed to (a) order a pizza; (b) drive a car; (c) adjust the thermostat, unless they live in a sort of pre-internet Amish society which is probably based on the level of technology that was widely available when you were a child.
I do not believe we should even try to restrict teens. Rather kids that would be 13 or younger by 2032 thus current teens not affected and kids that grow into teens that are still under parental controls could prove to their parents they are responsible enough to access adult content thus keeping parenting in the family and away from politicians.
If the internet is so dangerous that it requires every adult to obtain a government ID to get online, then yes, a 10 year old (or 17 yo if that's the age you want to use) is going to have to wait just like he/she has to wait to drive a car or buy liquor or cigarettes or pot.
Don't blame me. Blame the people pushing for a government ID that YOU must have before you can order your pizza.
I feel genuinely conflicted: On the one hand I get the "authoritarian overreach heebie-jeebies", that I think a lot of people on HN probably share. On the other hand I'd also really like the West to harden its election processes from election interference by its adversaries (e.g. Russia) - and shoring up dysinfo on e.g. Facebook by requiring users to prove their identity with a government ID is one of the only ways to truly effectively combat this at its source (fact-checking just can't keep up with a firehose of dysinformation). Ideally I'd want "real id requirements" to be limited " partake in public discourse" (mainly Facebook and Twitter). But the slippery slop argument just feels pretty strong here too - once a mechanism like this is in place, its use will only ever expand, and it's much easier for a new government to commit overreach if it's already there and just needs expanding. And of course all this "think of the children" nonsense needs to stop.
Elections are easier to solve technically. No mail in ballots. Require state ID in person at the voting center. But that's a different topic that can get divisive, long and derailed very quickly.
Only if you're fine with disenfranchising voters. In which case, securing elections is the easiest thing in the world: I vote and nobody else does. It's securing elections while not disenfranchising voters that's the hard part.
We should make a new thread for voting challenges.
> Only if you're fine with disenfranchising voters
I don't love disenfranchising voters but I think it's probably better than allowing elections to be vulnerable to foreign tampering, don't you think?
That’s a false dichotomy. Better practices for election security can be implemented without disenfranchising voters.
Disenfranchising the entire populace by nature of ID verification to use the internet naturally includes voters as well.
The foreign tampering wasn't at the ballot box.
Social media also lets foreign agents tamper elections.
The problem is not fake votes, it’s boomers having their brains cooked by AI videos coming from Russia they can’t identify as fake.
And how exactly is that a bigger problem than fraudulent votes? And how could you possibly solve it outside of segmenting the country's internet to prevent foreign ISP routes?
Because fraudulent votes in most developed counties are a complete non issue while people getting psyopped by troll farms and AI is monumental.
And yes, I think we likely will see social media become segmented so hostile nations will be blocked from posting on local social media. Or at least having them flagged as foreign accounts.
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>It’s just that a certain side is dependent on illegal voters.
This is so obviously the reason why, I can't believe anyone pretends its anything but.
"Why yes it makes total sense to have to present your ID to use the internet, dont wanna let kids use it freely!"
"You want in-person ID requirements for our domestic elections? What, do you hate black people or something?"
Porn companies should be held liable for distributing porn to minors. Its already illegal.
Denial about requiring basic KYC is causing all sorts of perverse solutions. Accept the requirement so we can have a sensible technical solution.
Oh no, children seeing naked people and sex! How horrible!
Now lets bring them all to the family friendly farm where they can watch a horse with a monster dong screw his way through a herd of mares.
In an interesting way this is a good example. It is indeed up to parents on a ranch to decide when their children are ready to see animals mate. It's another matter all together to decide when the small children or teens are ready to see humans mate. Either way that needs to be up to the parent or legal guardian. That is already their job.
You think ranch owners are hiding their farm practices from their children? Nah I don't believe that for one second. Ive watched 10 year olds of the most prudish family I ever known holding piglets so their dad can castrate them. Hell 20 year old Amish people can't even hold hands but will have kids help artificially inseminate cows.
Most small children on ranches have seen everything that can happen with animals including but not limited to mating, shooting coyotes, death from diseases. And yeah it's up to the parents when the kids see and do these things. Three year olds have a hard time with a lever action 45-70. There is a time when it makes sense and it's up to the parents when the kids are ready to understand and correctly follow instructions and are mature enough.
This thread is about stopping the insanity of uploading and ultimately leaking PII of families before the kids can even consent to it. Kids will despise their parents if they could have stopped this and did not. They will absolutely appreciate their parents for protecting them from predatory companies.
If we must pursue these predatory practices of colluding companies and governments then both of them need to be under stricter technical and audit requirements than PCI DSS and Fedramp.
This is a really weird thing to comment
Travel not even needed.
Lovebugs are visible and land on their arm.
Try explaining WHY the bugs are connected…
don't be so naive. if the billionaires want this, it can't be good for you. it really is that simple
Sometimes they want to take on a liability because it shields an even bigger liability
Tech billionaires want you and your kids on their social media platforms so they can manipulate you and serve ads.
The billionaires don't want it though, that's why most of the big tech CEOs are against it. Perhaps we should listen to Elon Musk though, after all, he "brought free speech back to Twitter." That is, as long as we ignore the adjustments to the algorithm that boost his personal flavour of politics. At least he isn't banning anyone, bots included.
Billionaires also want vaccines, sometimes do they have our best interests in mind. They can’t extract wealth from the poor masses if we’re sick!
and parents should actually parent their kids. Their kids do not need phones at such a young age and their parents should be in control of their own kid's phone.