Comment by pibaker
15 hours ago
What happens when federal agents kick down your front door because you ran a free range mom and pop BBS that did not comply with latest ID verification requirements?
Big companies will benefit the most from these regulations. It's just good ol regulatory capture. They will have the most resources to comply with the laws. They have a captive audience that will be more willing to give up their personal info when asked — keep in mind Facebook and instagram is widely used for business. It is your small time forum admin who would rather shut down his hobbyist online community that never made him any money anyway than to ask for IDs. We have already seen stories of websites shutting down due to existing UK regulations. Curiously, all small, personal operations, not the kind of corporate social media they tell you the laws are meant to target.
This is coming, eventually, and it will be a rehash of the 90s. Someone will have to be a sympathetic test case, and the EFF will get back into full gear.
Then either freedom wins again or freedom-loving individuals move to Soviet-style samizdat, “lying flat”, and clever subversion. And the world continues turning as usual.
If you violate memory protection you get a segfault, consistently. That isn't how the law works. Federal agents only kick down your door if they want to - which in this case probably means your forum users disparaged ICE or Trump.
I mean, social networks already made genocide happen. They they were instrumental in the curren winning march of fascism - in USA, in EU in Asia.
This is why China and Russia are shiny beacons of democracy and liberalism — they heavily regulate their social media!
Seriously, do people not look at history or at least the world around them when they make such claims? Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to. Hatred and violence are parts of human nature and trying to blame it on technology is just us trying not to make ourselves look bad.
My point is, the "what happens when federal agents kick down your front" thing is already happening and happened. And curiously, tech libertarians ranting about the freedom were facilitating every single step along the way, actively helping those every single step along the way.
> Genocides have happened before we had internet, or TV, or radio, or any modern technology people attribute genocides to.
Genocides became more frequent every since we have technology. Technology facilitates genocides. Both by creating actual means of killing (industrial killing in WWII) and by creating conditions for distribution of "work". Radio specifically was instrumental in Rwanda.
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That’s a very dramatic take - and I dare say a counter-factual one too.
Which actual genocide would you be talking about?
I really don’t think people should water out words like that over what is essentially tiny political differences.
Myanmar?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-46105934
Facebook has said it agrees with a report that found it had failed to prevent its platform being used to "incite offline violence" in Myanmar. The independent report, commissioned by Facebook, said the platform had created an "enabling environment" for the proliferation of human rights abuse. It comes after widespread violence against the Rohingya minority which the UN has said may amount to genocide.
> I really don’t think people should water out words like that over what is essentially tiny political differences.
I really don’t think people should minimize actual historical and current events for political purposes. Knee jerk "bad things are inconvenient, therefore they did not happened" denial is how we got here.
> essentially tiny political differences
The political differences between actual fascism that is on the rise, its actual opposition and those in between are large. Not small. Also, in more recent events there were pogroms in Belfast now. Elon Musk personally contributed to their incitement.
It seems unlikely that running a website without age verification will be illegal across the entire planet.
So if you want to run a BBS for say vintage motorcycle owners, you have to move to a country without such laws and make sure to never set foot in any country that does?
No, you just have to host it there and use a VPN. Like all piracy sites are done right now.
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People are downvoting this, but the objective is precisely that.
It seemed unlikely to me that cookie banners would be a thing across the whole internet if nothing else because no website operators would put them in. How wrong was I.
All they need to do is popularize the idea of "if your website doesn't do X, it'll place lower on google" and people will do anything.
My websites still don't have cookie banners and the police still hasn't come to my house. And the websites uses cookies like every other website always did.
Ironically 99% of them don’t meet legal requirements. They serve no purpose.
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Cookie banners aren't across the whole internet.
You really only need the banners if you're doing privacy-impinging things.
Much like the GDPR notices that a small industry of 'compliance' product companies sold seemingly to everyone as necessary, they aren't if you're only using cookies for functional reasons and not tracking people. Unfortunately that leads to lower margins for advertisers and we can't have that.