Comment by cultofmetatron
3 months ago
> I'm sure there are some people really trying to protect kids.
yes, I believe the term for them is "useful idiots"
3 months ago
> I'm sure there are some people really trying to protect kids.
yes, I believe the term for them is "useful idiots"
Not idiots necessarily, sometimes just long-time observers who have finally become cynical. People that were pro-guns for decades may watch several years of failure to adopt basic and uncontroversial gun-control regulation, then eventually become anti-gun. People that were in favor of regulating it once may suddenly become fearful for their safety, and want no regulations at all in case that regulation puts them out in the cold. Since both PR campaigns and any action on policy tends to cater to extremes, there's always pressure that is shrinking the middle
The comment "useful idiots" is more a play on the russian KGB strategy.
They use assets to influence people and achieve certain goals. In this case here, terrorism or child pornography is used as cop-out rationale for censorship, surveillance and so forth. It's never about those topics really, perhaps 5% at best, the rest is just sugar-coated decoy to restrict people and keep them as slaves and pets.
> Since both PR campaigns and any action on policy tends to cater to extremes, there's always pressure that is shrinking the middle
This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I understand how propaganda works so I am never fooled by "this is because of terrorists". This is also why I am for 100% transparency at all times.
> I understand how propaganda works so I am never fooled
That's not how it works.
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> The comment "useful idiots" is more a play on the russian KGB strategy.
Oh, I'm familiar with the phrase, but I'm specifically disputing how applicable it really is to people that are self-aware about the situation they are facing. Useful idiots are ones that are tricked, especially ones that are evangelical about tricking others. People forced to choose between 2 extremes where both choices are very bad are called.. normal citizens participating in the democratic process.
> This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I understand how propaganda works
What? You can see through propaganda, but you can't just pencil in your own policy options. Unfortunately and by design, the things you can ultimately vote for are "all or nothing" flavored. Censor everything, censor nothing. Track everybody, track nobody. Tons of parents who totally understand the surveillance state probably got flipped by meta's memo about chatbots being "sensual" with children. They'd rather vote to force corporations to be good citizens, but they can't. So they'll vote for an age-gated internet as the best of the bad options. I wouldn't assume all those people are naive, confused, or duped.. they've simply switched from a principled/abstract stance to a convenience-based calculus after they were forced into it. Meta wins either way, as planned. Either they get to build a more addictive platform, or they track more info about more people
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Can you explain to me what loopholes that opponents believe this law will exploit?
Is it just "more ID is bad"? Or is there a specific concern that this bill is a targeted overreach to increase censorship and surveillance.
It genuinely doesn't seem like any more of a threat than age-gating Playboy at the bookstore. What have I missed?
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> Not idiots necessarily, sometimes just long-time observers who have finally become cynical.
This doesn't explain why they would support privacy-invasive ID requirements instead of the RTA header.
> People that were pro-guns for decades may watch several years of failure to adopt basic and uncontroversial gun-control regulation, then eventually become anti-gun.
I want to call this a bad example because the only people who call the rules that don't pass "basic and uncontroversial" are the people who were on the other side to begin with, but maybe it's a good example because the analogy lines up so well with exactly the same scenario:
People who are anti-X propose rules with low effectiveness against actual harms but that impose significant burdens on innocent people who are pro-X, persistently insist that their proposal is fine and supported by everyone even as it demonstrably lacks enough support to pass and then point to the period of nothing being done to try to garner enough support from independents to squeak over the line instead of considering less burdensome alternatives, because burdening the pro-X people is the point. And then the people who fall for it are the useful idiots.
Unfortunatwly "keeping kids and teenagers off of algorithmic social media" is one of the most worthy goals one can pursue right now; so is keeping them off infinite porn.
But this is not the way to go about it.
No, I believe the term is "parents don't want 8 year olds getting access to tits, violence and gore"
Given that kids need a device for school in a lot of areas (mine included) and the tools for stopping kids getting either access or bombarded by such stuff are either shit, require deep technical knowledge, or predatory, I can see why people are asking for it.
I presently hate the current system of handing over biometric data in exchange for tits. I don't want some shading startup having my biometrics so that when they go bust, pivot or get hacked, can be used to steal my stuff.
The middle ground is a system that _normal_ people can us to make sure kids who have access to devices can't easily access nefarious shit.
None of that is useful idiots.
When it get fun is the all or nothing crowd. The internet is going to be age gated, whether you like it or not. If you continue to go "INTERNET MUST BE FREEEEEEEE" without accepting that the tools that the populace _want_ don't exist means you get porn bans, or worse.
I think there's probably a middle way without going as far as "biometric data in exchange for tits"
I'm in the UK and so far the only thing I've noticed age wise is Reddit asked me for a webcam selfie, which could easily have been faked by a kid with an accomplice but if the aim of this is to stop actual vulnerable kids that kind of thing is maybe enough. If they are with it enough to use VPNs and stuff they are probably old enough to see porn etc.
Like in the old days people used to avoid the kids looking at porn by putting the porno mags on a high shelf so they couldn't reach them. I don't think you need passport control level ID for this kind of thing.
> I don't think you need passport control level ID for this kind of thing.
I 100% whole heartedly agree.
For uk mobile ISPs there is already a system that stopped most of the nasty stuff from getting past. It was pretty difficult to circumvent, hence why I turned it off for me. If that could have been rolled out wider, with an account password for turning it off, that would have been more than enough.
Webcam selfies are still anonymity destroying. I have a better idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162159
Can you explain to me what is being exploited here? I had to do KYC for Hetzner, for anything crypto related in the last decade, and a number of other things.
Age-gating porn doesnt seem problematic to at all. In fact it's far less worrisome than any of the former, which are kind of important for commerce. What am I missing?
Once there is a record of what porn you looked at, people, government, employeers won't hire you. could be based on that you looked at all, or that you looked at the wrong kind. Wrong = whatever fetish you're into and your employeer/government/health-ins doesn't like.
I assume that literally all porn is a data honeypot. Don't you?
Wait, so porn is ok, it's fetish that is bad? So if HR is into brazilian farting fetish, entire company will be run by brazilian farting fetishists?
Lets just hope there's no government that wants to incriminate certain sexuality and gender, then all these logged KYC for every little social thing will be very dangerous.
Sure, I think KYC is a big problem.
But personally, I'm much more concerned about it in regular commerce.
A huge swath of the population thinks that porn is inherently harmful. An even bigger swath thinks that it should be completely separated from both. I agree with both of these things.
I'm also strongly against censorship, so I'm trying to figure out how people are worried this is being used. I do not, at all, consider age-gating Playboy at the gas station to be censorship.
If you think your porn habits are not already being logged and tracked by intelligence agencies, I think you are fully delusional.
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I believe the term for them is evangelicals. I'm going to guess that a venn diagram of deeply religious people and people pushing for "protecting" the kids is just a circle.
This is so untrue I wonder if you even bothered to think about it.
I'm pro protecting kids.
"useful idiots" was a Stalinist term for people willing to cover up for the murder of millions on the grounds that communism was good and would never do the holodomor.
I don't think it's good to conflate them really.
The term is “parents.”
I really don’t care about what’s on the internet, until my kids get exposed to it. How grownups talk to other grownups in private isn’t my concern.
But when kids - and I mean my kids - enter the loop it becomes my business, and ideological concerns go out the window.
I’ve ranted and raved about how terrible filtering software is, and how school provided computers contain massive workarounds.
The real concern isn’t porn sites — the real concern is poorly moderated social media sites. Ones where kids post things other kids see. And guess what the kids post?
But a lot of the nasty content shared in these poorly moderated sites gets it start elsewhere.
I’m cynical about any law, but my bias toward legal action is only increasing as the online situation is only getting worse.
Can't you do mac filtering on your router at the very least?
Why not install root certs on all your kids' devices and then force them through your home proxy so you can run content classification and proactively block and get reports of what you've blocked? A little privacy-invasive, but if your kids are young enough, it makes sense to get alerts when they've attempted to access boobs or gore so you can have a convo about it.
The easiest route here in my opinion aside from DNS services that claim to block adult content would be to use a Squid SSL Bump proxy. It's along the lines of what you are suggesting and requires installing a self signed CA cert on the client but gives you centralized management of what domains, URLs, file types, times of day, URL patterns are allowed/permitted as well as a memory and disk cache to reduce bandwidth. This [1] is a really old example based on Squid 3.x but this concept has improved a lot in Squid 6.x. Sites that still do public key pinning there are a handful will have to be added to Squid's SSL BUMP exclusion. Ignore the term SSL, it's TLS but they kept the term the same.
[1] - https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump
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