If we coddle people too much we risk people not... talking to other people. That's already happening. Maybe instead of tech the world should be focused on physical things, like new innovations in building technology. We have so many homeless people, in my opinion, because we're constantly focusing our attention on tech - which is a skill that a smaller percentage of the population has a brain for.
The trades need to come back, we need to beat SA in projects like "The Line" - and in the words of Joshua Weissman - But Better.
We're at risk for just continued class divisions and potentially a war because we're turning a bunch of coddled spoiled kids into a millionaires that are being looked at with massive disdain.
Maybe the internet should move back to being a background resource, not a precursor to ADHD.
There are certainly things that may be worth trying to protect children from online, like extremely targeted advertising that gets presented like legitimate content. Kids won't necessarily be able to differentiate between the two, and it's definitely not okay for companies to be tracking and profiling them like they do (but pretend to not be doing). A great example is reddit or instagram using the same algorithms that recommend content in their main feeds to also inject advertising. They'll claim all of that data collection is just to provide a "better experience", but advertising companies love it.
I'm really not sure what else you're on about though.
Kids already see tons of ads at movies, billboards, clothes people wear. Those superhero movies are made to sell toys and games. Stores are setup for kids to pressure parents.
Why are targeted ads the thing we should fear for our kids? Are we inventing problems? Kid watches superman movie and is shown an ad for batman vs here is an ad for a random movie. Adults and tracking is bigger issue, kids don't have positions in society to lose or secrets to keep or money to lose.
What are we fooling ourselves into believing we are protecting again?
Ad targeting identifies a lonely person with self esteem issues. Tells them that they'll be more popular and attractive if they consume product. They consume product and of course it doesn't actually help, but more advertisements are already lined up to explain that they're still feeling bad because they need to consume even more product. The ads show unrealistically happy and attractive people, to reinforce the self esteem issues and encourage the consumption of even more product.
This is a standard business practice for the advertising and marketing industry. It's evil.
This sort of willful ignorance is disparaging to see. Surely you must see a difference between an ad block that's clearly differentiated from the main program (ads before a movie plays, ad breaks during TV) and an endless feed of content that has no clear delineation between 'content' and 'product sponsership'. You might well be fine believing that billboards are the pinnacle of advertising, but there's been about 160 years worth of progress in the ad space since those were the big thing.
> Why are targeted ads the thing we should fear for our kids?
Again, you seem to be either defensive or intentionally misconstruing the point. These types of problems shouldn't invoke fear in people. I think you're getting yourself too mixed up in the idea that [X modern issue] is fearmongering and that nothing bad ever happens.
Kids are dumb and impressionable. If they spend 8 hours a day scrolling through an endless feed of cool posts featuring cool products being worn / used by cool people, they will absolutely get attached to the idea that it's normal and expected to have that thing. That's manipulative and disgusting marketing, and it's genuinely worrying that you don't seem to care at all.
> Kid watches superman movie and is shown an ad for batman vs here is an ad for a random movie
Again, intentionally misconstruing the idea... it's more like "kid spends 2/3 of their time awake being mined for data and having every interaction across every platform cross-correlated to ensure that *a company* can profit off of them". I suppose that's perfectly healthy and normal to you, that a company can know more about a child and exactly what they do and what they like than any human does.
> There are certainly things that may be worth trying to protect children from online, like extremely targeted advertising that gets presented like legitimate content.
I'm reminded strongly of cartoons which were created to sell toys. Still happens today.
> There are certainly things that may be worth trying to protect children from online, like extremely targeted advertising that gets presented like legitimate content.
It's better to block targeted advertising from adults too. Blocking ads for everyone in the household is only going to benefit everyone.
I imagine this technology would be deployed to prevent kids from visiting porn, drugs & alcohol, etc. sites. Which TBH seems fine, we already ID people at bars and adult shops.
The onus at that point is on the business to verify your age say, at the bar. This is like requiring every single person who gets into a car to prove they are of age enough to visit such establishments, regardless of whether or not they are even going to them.
There are limits to where a valid driver's license is required to drive a vehicle though. For example, offroad or on private property. You can even cross a road without having to have a drivers license.
In my area, it's been an increasing trend that establishments that must verify age are doing so for all customers, even those who are obviously old enough.
And I don't have a problem with that. I'd have a problem if the age verification leaves a record in a database or is performed by a central entity rather than the employees of the establishment.
I mean we can spend billions building the next facebook, or billions building something that will last, is physical - incredible.
Now I don't know if "the line" will ever exist, but if it does get built, it will likely be the most impressive thing to exist.
If we compete, not only are we making homes, but an entirely new set of jobs for probably hundreds of thousands for potentially 20 years. Past that? Do the next build.
We've gotten to this amazing place with computers and... then we just figure out a billion ways we can flip bits and strings in a database endlessly and call it work... bleh.
Cynically, Google may be supporting this legislation because it believes that it will mandate that Browsers be secured from modification that could undermine the efficacy of the legislation.
They have that Chrome change, whose name eludes me, which provides secure Browser validation to the host; this legislation would make use of that feature ubiquitous and mandatory.
Say a site uses WEI to block Google’s crawlers. If Google actually respected that then maybe it’s a fair playing field. But knowing Google they’ll issue their crawlers valid certs and create a huge dystopian nightmare.
Google don't care if an individual site blocks them (in my experience they are one of the better crawlers at obeying robots.txt) because they know - given their search monopoly - that the vast majority of the internet would never dare to cut them out. WEI is a way to cement their current position further without needing to play dodgy games with special Google certs.
If they put out WEI and start encouraging sites to use it for better SEO, the majority of the internet will do it (and wont put in the same effort to support other crawlers because those search pages are only < 1% of traffic according to their Google Analytics)
At that point, when change (legal, technical, social, whatever) comes to try and break apart their hold on search - there is yet another technical constraint that works in Google's favour. It won't be Google's "fault" that websites give them privileged crawl access and greater reach, but we'll all be stuck with it.
IIRC, it's in the spec to have WEI fail some of the time randomly, so that sites are designed to deal with real failures. Though, that may just be in there to make the spec less unappealing.
Genuine question: do you think that the police do absolutely nothing but make their communities worse? Like I get the attempt at a parallel but it's just weirdly forced.
Exclusively? No. But on the balance? The scale of budget they co-opt to pay for the harm they inflict makes a pretty strong case that they're net negatives.
There's more possibilities than "corrupt, abusive police" and "corrupt, abusive private security". The police, in the US at least, are in clear need of some reform.
Most of Europe is a good example of how much better policing can be done than we do it here.
A pretty huge part of the problem is that our police act as vastly inferior substitutes to just proper social services. An incredibly simple and good example of how this could be done better is being demonstrated in Denver, where they have unarmed mental health first responders, because most of the time someone is in crisis they're only a threat to themselves, so being armed only makes the situation worse.
They're also trained to view the public as the enemy (warrior training), making them a walking threat. Our police kill people at a rate many times higher than other comparably developed nations; about 60x the UK, for reference. Yes our gun ownership is higher, but the relatively low rate of police deaths shows that their readiness to resort to violence is unjustified.
If we allocated even half of our police budgets towards social services, we'd live safer lives.
Your argument says that we can improve the police, not that the police is net negative. You said that there are strong arguments for the police being net negative, that is very extreme.
Net negative means that society would improve if we just removed it without replacing it with anything. Can you defend that?
"The police are a net negative" does not mean that they are irreparably terrible, and "net negative" even makes it clear that I think they have some benefits.
But yes, I think freeing up that enormous amount of budget for almost any other purpose would be an improvement.
> But yes, I think freeing up that enormous amount of budget for almost any other purpose would be an improvement.
Do you have good arguments for this? For example, if we dismantled the entire police force to reduce the government deficit, or to increase healthcare spending, or to reduce taxes, do you really think society would improve?
Your examples above didn't dismantle the police entirely and had a very small set of alternative spending. It isn't consistent with what you said in this post. You need to explain why you think that dismantling the entire police force would be a net positive, how do you think that society would work without a police force?
You keep bringing up dismantling the police force, but the person you're repsonding to never said that. Argue against their points, not the positions you have imagined for them in your head.
> Your argument says that we can improve the police, not that the police is net negative.
>Net negative means that society would improve if we just removed it without replacing it with anything. Can you defend that?
Also, net negative means that their negative actions outweigh their positive actions. I don't know how you got the idea that negative == not repairable. You're putting arguments that they didn't say into their mouth. You're only arguing in false dilemmas.
If we demolished the police to spend instead on social services and taking care of more people with mental illness, improving fire and EMT services, and providing a very small number of detectives to handle investigating significant crimes, I believe my specific county would be overalls safer. The idea that maintaining public order takes a cop with a gun for every 300 or 400 citizens is just ludicrous. I live in a county with a large rural area and even here we have a cop with a gun for every 600 to 700 citizens which is still far too many. There are over 100 CHP for about 25 miles of highway in the area, for Pete's sake.
It can simultaneously be true that X causes more problems than it solves, and that the disappearance of X would cause even worse problems. Also, this is a common strawman: almost no one advocates police abolition over police reform, but discussions about police reform very often involve someone who advocates reform being asked to defend abolition anyway.
> It can simultaneously be true that X causes more problems than it solves, and that the disappearance of X would cause even worse problems
No it can't, if removing X causes more problems then having X prevents those worse problems.
> Also, this is a common strawman: almost no one advocates police abolition over police reform
The person I responded to argued just this. This is what police being net negative means, that society would improve by removing the police. I wouldn't have said anything if he just thought that the police could use a budget cut or a reform.
>Our police kill people at a rate many times higher than other comparably developed nations; about 60x the UK, for reference. Yes our gun ownership is higher, but the relatively low rate of police deaths shows that their readiness to resort to violence is unjustified.
TBF I still feel that's a gun problem. It's very hard to "accidentally" kill someone with a baton, taser, or even a knife (not that I know any police with a knife). Meanwhile, richochet bullets can kill someone in the complete opposite direction of fire if your're really unlucky. more likely, a shot misses and goes past the scene and into the crossfire of someone innocent.
but as anyone battling 2A knows, that's (and was) going to be a very long debate.
You can in USA. Inform the grand jury and they can investigate and indict. Most anyone can do this by, for example, mail to the grand jury foreperson. I pulled up a big State for you:
"DUTIES OF GRAND JURY. The grand jury shall inquire into all offenses subject to indictment of which any grand juror may have knowledge or of which the grand jury is informed by the attorney representing the state or by any other credible person."
Informing a court isn't enough to enforce a law. Who is going to carry out the punishment of that jury if not for the police? I don't think you understand how society works, without the police the courts doesn't have power to punish you.
Police are called law-enforcement for a reason, it is because they are how we enforce laws.
In USA, grand jury is not court - they are the grand jury and can indict. In USA, court decides punishment like prison or fine and that (punishment for a crime) is defined by Legislature. Sublime sang about a specific criminal code of California:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
edit: A criminal defendant may be tried in front of a jury. A grand jury is something completely different - regular people who meet in private, can review information, and can indict.
But who puts you in prison? Indictment doesn't matter if there is nobody to enforce it. Laws without law enforcement doesn't work.
What will happen if you remove the police force is that someone creates a private police force, like a mafia. So now the government no longer can make laws, the mafia makes the laws, essentially dismantling the country.
I guess you could use the military to enforce laws, but martial law isn't a good thing either.
So saying you think the police is net negative is essentially saying you think it would be better to live with a mafia ruling your life. They would knock on your door and demand money instead of the democratically decided tax rates etc, is that really better?
Courts have bailiffs, judicial marshals, and security officers. They should have no problem transferring convicted criminals to jail. Police aren't required at all.
a fundamental question is "who, when and why can adults use the Internet while anonymous" .. followed closely by "who provides, checks and verifies identity including age"
I feel like anonymity is just a band-aid. Ideally we would have freedom and accountability. If everyone knew that I watched porn but respected by right to do so, that's the ideal. Without anonymity we would know that account is run by a bot or a foreign state. It goes to how homosexuals were forced to be underground for so many years (and still today for many) and if they were out of sight they were out of mind. That isn't equality if you have to have a really good way to hide.
However, the penchant for people to be complete assholes to each other over things that are none of their business is real and a huge problem. So, yes it makes sense to be able to hide but, sadly, it doesn't advance the social contract.
In an ideal world we respect that what other people do is largely none of our business. I don't agree with any ideal that thinks everyone should agree on some set of rules and we respect anything that doesn't violate those rules.
I think an ideal society has rich disagreement and a wide diversity of thoughts and opinions. With that diversity comes conflict which provides us all with opportunities to more deeply reflect on our own beliefs.
I think that depends on the level of disagreement. I think gay people, women, and people of color should have the same rights as everyone else, which includes how they are treated at work. I'm willing to say that is a mandatory part of my social contract.
Someone liking to dress in a cowboy hat, underwear, and playing a guitar in Times Square? Not my cup of tea, but sure, go for it.
It only depends on if it's a social contract, which implies some localized majority. You may believe your ideals are the best in the world, but I assure you many other people with vastly different ideals than your own believe differently with just as much, if not more, conviction.
You can't simply beat your chest and claim superiority and thus we need competition of ideas. E.g. the most prosperous happy places on earth tend to have social contracts that look out for groups such as women, homosexuals, etc.
You can't simply prove an idea is better by appealing to your own sense of morals/justice and if there's no evidence that some ideals are better than others, how would you reach consensus anyways?
In order to make everyone share the same social contract you either have evidence based progress or authoritarianism and historically the evidence suggests authoritarianism doesn't pan out all that great.
I think I see what you are saying, an I agree that practically speaking, we have to have some common ground to make things work.
So at some point there is also a line that has to be drawn. The Holocaust is one of those lines, and I pray that I would had the strength to stand up to my peers and say, no this isn't right,and go to whatever lengths I thought I could do to make change. In a lot of ways, I think the civil rights movement was a lot of chest beating and I think that actually helped.
It's not really clear to me that "most prosperous happy places on earth tend to have social contracts that look out for groups such as women, homosexuals, etc." Certainly, when you look at economic prosperity and I don't know how you'd measure happiness.
I don't really measure it, I wouldn't know exactly where to start, but there are people who try to measure it. https://worldhappiness.report/data/ and admittedly I haven't looked at their methods at all, so I'm just parroting information without understanding it. Hopefully I'm not just spreading junk data.
Anonymity is not a band-aid, but a fundamental component of privacy. Privacy is an important right which people often take for granted and its erosion makes people less free in a multitude of ways. Even the expectation that one might be surveilled can change a person's behavior in profound ways (Foucault's panopticon has never been more relevant).
It comes down to the fact that other people may do things which we find distasteful or even offensive. You will never, ever be able to get a large group of people to conform to standards of personal behavior to the extent that this is not true, and so privacy becomes a necessity. But as long as those things aren't causing real harm then they simply aren't my business or that of the government.
In my opinion the only worthwhile discussion when it comes to privacy is what constitutes harm and whether a given harm is possible to prevent without causing even greater harm through restriction of privacy and anonymity. In many cases when it comes to safety and privacy, the cure can be worse than the disease.
I don't think Anonymity is linked to privacy. Anonymity is the ability to do public things without being identified. For example, writing a death threat online. There is good evidence that anonymity encourages bad behavior.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/who-is-that-th...
Privacy is what I do without interacting with the public. Playing D&D is a privacy matter. Only my friends and I know we do it.
>It's still better that they were forced to hide, than a world where they couldn't hide.
Agreed. Just like it was better we had some not great laws protecting abortion than the shit-show we have now. That is the challenge I think, is getting something that is actually in the real world vs. what the ideal is, since none of us seem to be able to agree on that ideal.
Which could definitely be a problem, but is that worse than being able to harass and bully people with no consequences at all because you don't know who it is?
Of course, there could be a lot of bullying just out in the open too, but anonymity isn't a cure all, just helps with the symptom. IMHO.
That is not possible though. You cannot refrain from being judged and if you are honest you are also judging others. This is true for clothing and much more so for more intimate proclivities. Also, a certain amount of inhibition might be quite healthy.
Additionally I don't want to share even trivial stuff like interest in music or movies with everyone. If I do, it is on my own terms. I don't want to share who is in my social circle either. My social media presence is highly curated and shallow for professional reasons (although by being shallow it doesn't contrast other online presences too much).
I hide stuff and that is completely fine and something I want to do. If people are interested, they can ask me.
Anonymity isn't just a band-aid here, it is a tool and I value it quite highly. Nothing to do with equality or advancing rights.
I think your version of anonymity is more to what I'd call privacy. There is no reason anyone even needs to know that you have a playlist, much less what is on it.
Anonymity would be you posting your playlist of songs with the theme of Down with Martians (or other group) without anyone knowing it was you. I don't necessarily think we have to have that ability to allow people to do that.
>Ideally we would have freedom and accountability. If everyone knew that I watched porn but respected by right to do so, that's the ideal.
sure, but we know ideals are just that. We know even today that saying you are homosexual can get you harassed by certain circles. We know that anonymous sources are necessary so that the whistleblower isn't retaliated upon by the government, company, or peers.
These aren't new issues and humanity has probably dealt with it in all of civilized history. I think preserving anonymity is a much easier fight than trying to make everyone get along and accept one another.
>Privacy is what I do without interacting with the public
You are granted privacy even when in public. You may be wearing a skirt and a strong breeze blows in the park. A pervert isn't entitled to take a picture of you because you were in public and happened to have your underwear revealed. or worse, throw themselves under you and take a picture directly.
Even without the extreme example, there are a bunch of privacy laws in terms of how and who and where you can record in public. Privacy in general simply means:
>The state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people.
And this is granted to you even if in public spaces. It's part of why we have public indecency laws to begin with: because a person performing lewd conduct (especially in front of minors) has been determined to be disturbing the public's privacy.
Maybe Google thinks that "age assurance" is a product they can sell? If it's required by state or federal law, other companies will have to pay for the service.
It seems like a bridge towards being able to pitch their Web Environment Integrity so that they can ensure the verification is not being tampered with. Coincidentally, that will also prove beneficial to their advertising business. Or maybe I'm overly cynical?
They already have to do it for age-gating youtube videos in some regions, like the EU. AFAIK, they want a CC number or phone number, neither of which really confirms your age.
Google has been going down that path for a long time, they won't stop until the web looks like cable tv, every part infested with adds with content reduced to target the lowest denominator among the greatest number of people. It should have been broken up in smaller companies 20 years ago.
Thinking back years, going back to my first Debian install in 2000, in retrospect this is where things were always heading.
It’s the same path every other industry has gone down, to ultimately yield all power to a few large corporations.
The main issue with this is that even if you have a group of people passionately defending against this, googles attempts will likely persist long after any one person or group is no longer able to work against.
On a side note, this is part of the reason why corporations were never intended to be allowed to exist as long as they do today, they were supposed to come with an expiration date.
Not sure dismantling a company like Google is the right play, it just amazes me how much foresight people had 100 years ago and that we still let a bunch of those things happen.
Here's a better compromise, if we must find a compromise, that Google won't be so in favor of:
"No parent, or guardian, shall permit their children under the age of 13, to possess or easily have access to any device, which provides unfiltered and unrestricted access to the internet in such a way that said parent, or guardian, is not fully aware of each and every website that the child may access with said device."
[As for anyone like, what about the vulnerable? There's this thing called a library, and don't tell me public schools don't have resources.]
These "don't be evil" and "do the right thing" must have been taken from the well known buddhist story: "When a disciple approached the buddha, he asked to explain buddhism in one verse; the buddha answered: stop doing evil, start doing good and clean your heart - that's the religion of buddhas."
However google here is that junkie who tattoed buddhists scriptures on his arms, but never bothered to live by them. He did the "don't do evil" tattoo when he was devising a plan to rob a monastery. That was his inner self tried to stop him. When he decided to take hostages, he added "learn to do good". Shortly before he decided to build a torture chamber, his inner self made the final attempt and made him do the "clean your heart" tattoo. Corporations are soulless creatures, and can't tell what's good and what's evil.
This is one of those things where it's cold practicality. A company realizes the political headwinds and has decided that it'll do its best with a bad hand. This is what leaders want? We'll throw our support behind the least bad option.
But articles like this complain about the company, instead of the politicians. What a load of crap.
> Government has legislature and litigation focused on big tech right now on multiple fronts.
If corporation gets a fine that's lower than their profits from breaking the law, then it's not a punishment but government getting its cut. Prosecuting few low hanging fruits doesn't make this administration any less neoliberal than previous ones, also remember that they will get prosecuted mostly for stealing from richer.
Since you want to get to the root cause and we're talking about USA, I believe that would be the American people.
Also - corporations are full of people. And those are all Americans. Even lobbyists are Americans.
But we should do something useful, and we're looking for easier targets to focus our rage and aggression on. I recommend those being the people that explicitly have been given power. Based on what I know about the American constitution, I believe that would be the government.
This isn't some ragtag blogger, he very much makes sure to utilize and report on all available channels on issues like these. But of course, what HackerNews votes on will be swayed more by "complaining about tech company" instead of "complaining to the judges".
It looks like the direction we’re headed is a two-tiered Internet. The first layer will require your real world identity (more than simply your ISP knowing who you are because of billing) to access, post, download, upload, etc, which I suppose will first be required to access banking, social networks, etc, destroying anonymity.
The second will be more or less what we have now, but my fear is that access to this layer will be restricted further and further until it goes the way of Usenet and ISPs either willingly (or by regulation) turn off access to it.
I think there are actually several reasons why this is a likely direction:
1. Children (duh, this article)
2. Misinformation (accountability, no astroturfing)
3. Misinformation Robots (age verifying robots is a difficult task)
4. Malicious Robots (do you need Cloudflare if you have an Age ID Firewall?)
5. Scraping Robots (nothing prevents scraping like knowing who to sue...)
6. Hackers (nothing prevents hacking like knowing who to sue, even if it's only 80% of the time...)
7. AI Use / Abuse (anonymity is a dangerous thing with AI)
Etc. To be honest, if I was an Age ID verification company, I'd be calling around to my competition to figure out how to develop some kind of interoperability standard; in the hopes that would make age-restricted services much more convenient and thus widespread. Now if they could get Billing integrated into the system as well, then we're cooking with gas.
9. Increase privacy by preventing reposting (by robots or trolls) of information that a court has ordered suppressed. (Example from the near future: AI-generated revenge porn.)
10. Increase privacy by preventing companies like Clearview AI from legally getting away with murder of privacy.
Edit for Belopolye's response below: Very good point; but that would require all websites to be in on it and not just a partial implementation. But the movie and video game industries would love that...
A website which is hosted (physically located) in a country not participating in Safe Content Marking Agreement or owner of which is anonymous or is from a foreign country.
Basically any site whose owner or operator you cannot put to jail.
They are, see the international cooperations on CSAM. Literally every state with a barely functioning government agrees that this kind of conduct is inacceptable.
Instead of expecting every web service to present the appropriate headers, let's decentralize this work: Create a web of trust where users authoritatively declare content to be safe/unsafe/nsfw/etc. Then just restrict your browser to the curated web of your choice.
This means that every site in the world must interpret the headers, while with my proposal sites need to opt-in (and pass certification) to be available on children's devices.
* A site must be certified by some board in order to be accessible. At what level is a site certified? Root level? Page level? Individual content item.
* A site hosts user generated content. This could be as small as comments on an article, or as large as YouTube. How is the site certified? If each piece of content must be certified, who assumes responsibility for certification?
* A site is certified as appropriate for all ages. The owner of the site then puts content that would have caused to to fail certification. At what interval is a site expected to recertify? What is the ramification for certification and then hosting of objectionable content?
* You have a process that is onerous for site administrators to comply with in order to host content for children. What incentive is for them to comply vs. not host a site that requires certification?
* As a parent, you install a compliant operating system that enforces this system. Sites comply with the program and it works without exception. Kids talk, as they do, and share how to get around this system by using a Linux live environment to boot into an OS that does not enforce the parental control header. How do you prevent this?
* As a parent, you install a compliant operating system that enforces this system. Your kid either does not know how, or is prevented from circumventing these access controls. They have one or more friends that have computers that are not blocked from accessing this content. How do you prevent them from accessing content in this system?
> A site must be certified by some board in order to be accessible. At what level is a site certified? Root level? Page level? Individual content item.
There could be an organization that verifies that the owner and operator of the site are not foreign (so they can be taken to court if needed), reviews the content policy and moderation policy to ensure that no unsafe content can be published, and issues a cryptographic signature to the website. The website displays a signature in HTTP headers.
> How is the site certified? If each piece of content must be certified, who assumes responsibility for certification?
There should be moderation policy guaranteering safety, for example, all comments must be reviewed by moderators.
> The owner of the site then puts content that would have caused to to fail certification
Then they can get into jail if they do it intentionally.
> What incentive is for them to comply vs. not host a site that requires certification?
They can have paid content or show ads.
> by using a Linux live environment to boot into an OS that does not enforce the parental control header.
Requirement to install Linux will stop majority of children.
Well TBH the open internet provided a ton of benefit, but has metastasized into a force of misery and evil.
The near collapse of democracy in the United States, the various nasty impacts of social media, the death of professional journalism, the emergence of automated propaganda bots, etc are all negative impacts of open internet that are destroying society.
This may not be the answer, but neither is that status quo. We can't go back to 2003 or 1993.
The older people here live like it's 2003. It's not. HN is a throwback to those days, but we live in a world shaped by anonymous actors performing in bad faith.
> The near collapse of democracy in the United States, the various nasty impacts of social media, the death of professional journalism, the emergence of automated propaganda bots, etc are all negative impacts of open internet that are destroying society.
So which of these is a walled-garden internet going to fix?
Actually which of these are even a consequence of the internet being open in the first place?
Pretty sure the answer to both is: none. These (perceived) issues are completely tangential and have absolutely nothing to do with the internet being open or closed.
This sounds a lot to me like: "People I don't like are using this thing, so let's ruin it for everyone."
You're still not going to like these people afterwards, nor are going to change them for the better by antagonizing everyone.
Octogenarians saved democracy by mailing everybody ballots with their names on them. Controlling distribution channels is probably more important than anonymity, which is why the article points to things like “impact assessments” and other blockers to free distribution.
> The near collapse of democracy in the United States
So you propose a controlled demolition? That's what abolishing the right or opportunity to speak anonymously amounts to. Professional journalists don't need to be protected from anonymous jeers, if anything is killing their industry it's their failure to monetize and maybe you can blame adblockers for that, but not anonymous speech. And frankly, professional journalists have always predominantly been the mouthpieces of wealthy. Need I remind you that professional journalists working for the likes of William Randolph Hearst cynically provoked the Spanish-American War for profit? The glory days of journalism are an illusion that appears when you look back at the past through rose-tinted glasses. Whatever the answer is, it isn't to silence those who already have the least power, those who can only speak anonymously without corporate apparatuses to back them up.
the death of journalism has nothing to do with the open internet; it mostly has to do with their complete failure to find a functional online business model outside advertising. I'm pretty sure propaganda bots are largely a result of the death of journalism -- given that the trusted sources of information have become largely and obviously untrustworthy, then your only option is to go to the "community", where conspiracy and propaganda can reign freely.
Social media is the only thing you could possibly blame on the open internet, but it has more to do with the same incentive problem as internet journalism -- advertising is money, and advertising needs "engagement". Social media, like journalism, needs propaganda and conspiracy and flamewars to thrive in order to exist. They have no real incentive to reduce it, except to make it sure it doesn't cross the point where it goes a little too far and they start getting accused of "causing the near collapse of democracy in the united states"
> Social media, like journalism, needs propaganda and conspiracy and flamewars to thrive
Absolutely not, you are perhaps caught in the 2023 notion of social media. Early social sites thrived without any ads and company or celeb profiles even, just like early FB. Social media is and should be about common user interactions, most importantly the inner circle of acquaintances and then interest groups. Everything else was just made up to drive clicks and ad revenue.
Depends what you describe as social media. Forums and boards are different than Twitter or TikTok. Usually social media is associated with wanting to present yourself while other platforms are focused around topics. One type might leak into the other, but usually the behavior and content is vastly different.
I keep my opinion that Instagram is for idiots for example. Yes, probably an ignorant perspective and it isn't exclusively the case, but an opinion I can very much live with.
> has metastasized into a force of misery and evil.
Has much is metastasizing, and how much is it just perceived to have done so because of failing media literacy about the internet? Basic late 90s/early 2000s internet safety was to assume untrustworthyness for everything. And regardless of how well a source proves itself, you keep giving it the side-eye.
But, where would people learn that media literacy today? The people and institutions that are branded as "serious" in our society don't have any financial incentive to want their audience to know critical reading/listening. Quite the opposite actually.
My internet happy place is pretty dandy. Trust in media and democracy wasn't destroyed by the internet, on the contrary, it was destroyed by people that didn't want to accept different perspectives anymore, tried to silence others and consolidate the content on previously free internet platforms.
Agree with your sentiment, but I see the future I expect at the confluence of a lot of different parties/positions (domestic politics, geopolitics, advertising, anti-piracy, “save the children,” anti-terrorism, etc) who have the money, vested interest, and ideological motivation to accomplish this.
For myself, if this plays out as I’ve described it just means it’s time to…go read a book or something, I don’t know.
> I expect at the confluence of a lot of different parties/positions (domestic politics, geopolitics, advertising, anti-piracy, “save the children,” anti-terrorism, etc) who have the money, vested interest, and ideological motivation to accomplish this.
That is their leverage, yes, but the tool at hand is copyright.
This comment caught my eye more than all the others.
As I get older and live through this amazing ride, I am increasingly
of the mind that the total abolition of "intellectual property" in all
its manifest forms would not only be the saving move for humanity, but
that it's more or less inevitable.
Climate change is going to put so much pressure on us to innovate very
rapidly, and patents and copyright now form such obvious impediments,
nobody except Disney is going to give a care about enforcing
intellectual property within 20 years. These are the last desperate
days of the old order trying to bury its spoils through centralisation
and locking-down.
As an author, coder, inventor and creator I also see that generative
"AI" - or rather the emergence of a portable semiotic/literary digital
collective consciousness - will spell the end for ego-driven
protection rackets that make us say "Think of the creators who need
food!"
New tools will provide such abundance to creativity. We will still
create of course, and enjoy it very much.
"The Internet" is such a fascinating story. Just at the point when we
think all is lost, quite by surprise, and suddenly, we win. So in the
22nd century I imagine we will look back on the days when one couldn't
freely share any digital artifact as we look back on slavery and witch
hunting today.
And in that richness and abundance people will stop seeking out what
is harmful to them to nurse their empty, depressive desperation and
hopelessness. And those that profit from pushing misery at others will
have no place the table.
I am only sad I won't get to live in that time - but watching the
death of such rotten conceits as "intellectual property" and the
"advertising industry" will be satisfaction enough.
The first layer is unacceptable to me, so I guess I just wouldn't access that at all. If the second layer goes, then that's the whole game. The internet would be closed off to me entirely.
Maybe the joke was always on us techies thinking that the wild west internet could survive in this world?
I mean the internet at first got away being what it was, because it was small, and because it didn't affect outside of the internet that much.
But now that the net is big, and connected to 'real things' that suddenly being a degree of separation from the "Genocide power hour forum" is actually quite unpleasant and has many risks. Businesses will gladly move to some walled garden to avoid this, they don't care about freedom, they care about profit. And while your aunt and uncle say they care about freedom, they mean "Freedom to be exactly like them and any other degenerates get nailed to a cross".
Your average voter will get tired of the crime and harassment online will vote in the next authoritarian that says they have an simple easy solution for the internet problem. Us techies will say "but the authoritarian is wrong, this isn't simple or easy". The authoritarian knowing how propaganda works will tell the lie twice as big and twice as often and win the next election.
> Businesses will gladly move to some walled garden to avoid this
I support this entirely. One of the largest reasons why the internet is getting much worse with time is that businesses want to use it. Getting them off the open internet would eliminate a fair amount of nastiness and might return some of what we've lost.
It will become more like how it already is: the ""open"" internet with a need for registration/real names everywhere, and the ""dark"" net with zero rules and the usual cat and mouse of police raids/honeypots vs technical advancements in obfuscation. And seeing how this repeated so many times in tech and other industries, I think that's the best we as humanity can do for the near future.
Honestly I think we're close to there already, with the Play Store and App Store leading the charge.
The giveaway is the amount of traffic generated by users in the second category is much lower than it used to be, while the first category grows. Just look at how much everyone here complains about their inability to find interesting things in this second tier today. Now that the VC money isn't going to prop up free stuff, or the ecosystem of dev tools to support free stuff, it's hard to see how the second lives on.
What will be left is P2P, torrents, and psyops masquerading as organic meme wars, everything else will evaporate or migrate to the first tier.
Possibly where we're headed is an expansion of the first layer, but it already exists. You currently need to use your real identity to do things like access banking and file taxes. You also need to provide your age to access services like porn and gambling.
The complaint here isn't the use of age and/or identity verification for anything at all. It's using it to access social media. There isn't much in the way of a good legal reason to do this and previous attempts have seemingly been shut down by courts. Children are currently allowed to enter and occupy congregation spaces also used by adults, i.e. churches, parks, community centers, libraries. Private clubs are allowed to ban children if they want to, but have never been legally required to unless they specifically provide adult services like strippers and booze.
This also, of course, seems way less workable than real-world versions. At least in person, if a child presents a fake ID, a bouncer can sanity check that they look like the photo and look like they might actually be an adult. 12 year-olds with pocket change to spare can pretty trivially pay a poor person who doesn't give a shit to scan their retinas in Sam Altman's world coin face reader and hand over their private keys and now they've got a fake ID that no website can call bullshit on. Even without that, a kid can easily get an older sibling or friend to share a login, just like my wife's younger sister used to borrow my wife's ID to get into clubs and bars or I used to buy cigarettes and liquor for my friends because I had the earliest birthday.
Policymakers don't want to admit it, but it is ultimately up to parents to police what their children do on the Internet. There is no automated system that can't be beaten until they figure out a way to hook up a blood prick to your computer and check telomere length to estimate your genetic age, assuming we don't figure out how to reverse that, and even that can't prevent a child from shoulder-surfing an adult.
While I appreciate the spirit of your comment, that's actually not true! There's an (admittedly winding and untested) route for The People to alter the constitution called an Article V Convention or 'convention of states':
I'm posting because a lot of people are unaware of this part of the American constitution, similar to how jury nullification is something 'they' don't want you to know about ;-)
If a set of basic laws can only be interpreted by professional judges, the laws are more or less useless. On the contrary basic laws should be a foundation of a social contract that hopefully most within a society agree upon.
There is an easier way to protect everyone from kids. Make an OS-level setting ("show safe content only") that only parents can change. With this setting, the browser would open only pages that declare that they are safe for kids, by using an HTTP header (safe-content: yes). Any other websites are blocked by the browser.
Make it a legal requirement for parents to set up this option for their children on every device they use. Make it illegal to send invalid "safe content" headers.
Also, with "safe content" setting OS should allow running and installing only apps that are verified to be safe (for example, it should not allow installing messengers like Telegram or browsers that do not respect safe content settings).
This way there is no need to verify anything and make life complicated for adult people.
This solution is the lowest cost solution and I am in favor. Will OS developers (because their market power is obviously more relevant here than the viewpoint of web developers) see it the same way?
Every computer, laptop or smartphone imported, or sold, must have this setting. If OS developers do not want their OS to be pre-installed they don't need to implement the setting.
Apologies, my above remark was a bit unclear. When I said "will OS developers see it the same way" what I meant was whether OS developers will lobby against this law or be in favor.
Interesting idea... Opt in to opting out of adult content... Some potential issues:
1. Might be hard to enforce the safe content header... They have a hard enough time with copyright content, and there's a much larger financial incentive in that case.
2. Need to agree on what is safe and what isn't. Bit of a can of worms there...
Let there be an government-assigned organization that verifies website owner, content and issues a cryptographic signature proving that the site has been verified. The browser shall not open any page without the signature.
This is what I mean by enforcement though. It is going to be hard to enforce for that government assisted organization. They either allow everyone who wants to set the header to do it, in which case they need to spend a lot on policing, or they need to actually have someone review. Either case, it is a huge undertaking with a lot of staff and regulations and decisions to be made about how to handle gray areas. Additionally, things can change over time and sites kind of evolve . You need to decide what would trigger a new review.
> There are ratings for games and movies, let's consider "safe content" to be a content which a 12-year old can watch.
The existing ratings are terrible, though, and as a parent I think they allow things that I very much object to my children seeing, and prohibit things that I don't.
That's a bit of a false dichotomy. The choice doesn't have to be between blanket restrictions that are bad or no restrictions at all. There's also the option of giving some sort of mechanism to allow parents to set the restrictions they consider appropriate.
You're right. Safe content header is a relatively weak solution. Strongest solution is either Microsoft or Apple stepping up to develop a child designed device from the ground up. It would have access to a limited walled garden of the Internet. The device itself is marketed specifically to children and has no advertising allowed on it. It also incorporates health guidelines and screen time limits, etc. that cannot be changed by the device owner or user, only by Apple/Microsoft. It is essentially a fascist phone. Admittedly, this would make an adult, unlocked smart phone a hot item on the youth black market, but hopefully most kids will be too lazy to save up the money needed to buy a black market unlocked phone before they're ready to watch porn and be inundated with endless advertising and doomscrolls.
> so expensive they don’t need to show ads to be profitable
Yes, but there is no company that feels they are profitable enough so they still shows ads. Apple shows ads and makes decent profits from it, they are just a massive company like all the others.
This may very well be worse: children would have no access to internet except for websites designed with the single goal of extracting money from parents.
What does “safe for kids” mean, though? How do you imagine that being codified in law? What about different age ranges? Or does it all flip from off to on at age 18?
There are obvious examples of unsuitable content like pornography but there’s also a wide variety of content out there at varying levels of suitability. And a lot of people with different opinions about what is suitable (e.g. non pornographic nudity). Good luck finding universal agreement on that. And how would anyone act on a violator? Would the police have access to a universal blocklist in all ISPs?
There are already a number of voluntary systems that operate the way you describe. Legally mandating it would be very difficult.
Those ratings are only advisory, though, which allows parents who disagree with how the ratings are determined to ignore them. If we're going to use a rating system that has teeth, then we still smack directly into "who gets to decide what 'safe for kids' means".
Yes. There will be a fight and a status quo will emerge. Like movies rated G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17. Like video games rated E, E-10+, T, M, AO. Like the nebulous Parental Advisory:Explicit Lyrics you will find on certain records.
> And how would anyone act on a violator? Would the police have access to a universal blocklist in all ISPs?
Another user suggested that there should be an organization that issues or revokes the cryptographic signatures after verifying website's content. The site displays the signature proving that it was checked to be safe, in HTTP headers.
Great, but then the content on the site has to be relatively static. Maybe social media is inherently "unsafe", but what about a news site? Do kids only get to see yesterday's news?
You do not need to verify every single page. You verify that owner and operator are not foreign entities (so you can catch them and put in jail), review the moderation policies and get a written promise to follow the law.
But if you did, you gain protection from defaced sites (in addition to making "show safe content only" actually true). Most of the worst things I saw online as a kid were on otherwise okay sites attacked in whatever way to show shock images.
My thoughts exactly. While there are some categories which are easy to agree on as being unsuitable for kids (and some adults, for that matter), you will inevitably find such content restrictions used to attempt to legislate morality.
Look at Florida and their "don't say gay" bill. They want kids to remain oblivious to the existence of LGBT people, using "think of the children" rhetoric, and I have no doubt they would use "child friendly internet" legislation to ban even the most milquetoast acknowledgment of our existence, because they see it all as "indoctrination" and "grooming." As a lesbian, I find this abhorrent, but even if you're not LGBT, you should be afraid of these kinds of laws, because the Christian right will inevitably use them against you, too. If you're atheist (and if you use HN, you probably are), believe in the theory of evolution, believe in climate change, are a person of color...you get the picture.
And then there's the fact that the internet is international. Content about women's suffrage, for instance, would likely be deemed "inappropriate for children" in much of the Arab world, both because most of those nations are not democratic, but also because they want to avoid empowering women.
The suggestions to "just use the MPA rating system" are bad because, even if those ratings were objective (they're not), the good thing about them is that they're not legislatively enforced. If a child wants to see an R-rated movie, the theater won't sell them a ticket directly, but if they're accompanied by a parent, they can see it, and that's probably the best system we can hope for: a voluntary system where parents can allow their kids access to what they feel is appropriate. And for all the flaws that has, it's better than having CPS take your kids because you let them read the wikipedia page about being trans.
The point is that either there will be locked-down child devices or there will be total surveillance, ban of encryption and much worse things in the name of children safety.
Regarding foreign countries, they already block the content they don't like, but for everyone, so this plan won't change anything there.
> The point is that either there will be locked-down child devices or there will be total surveillance, ban of encryption and much worse things in the name of children safety.
Speaking as someone who was once a 15 year old, why is pornography "unsuitable" and why in the world would you think we couldn't and didn't get hold of it?
Same for alcohol, which amazingly isn't legal in US till 21!!!
So let's be clear. We aren't talking about good policy or maximizing safety and minimizing harm. We're talking about trigger issue to make pro and con demographics vote along party lines on this issue instead of having the freedom to vote on relevant issues which would positively impact society.
Yes, yes, I know teenagers get ahold of porn, I was also a teenager once. But the OP was talking about passing a law for this stuff. You think a politician that stands up and says “porn for 15 year olds is cool by me!” is going to last more than five minutes? Of course they won’t.
No, if you even know anyone tech savvy enough (within several degrees of separation) to figure it out. Kids are very good at getting around things like this and the solutions go viral. You would have to restrict a lot more than just the browser.
But now the promise goes from "kids can only see safe things" to "kids can only see safe things unless they want to see a single unsafe thing, then they see everything". With "safe things" being a government-created whitelist, it's going to be pretty easy for almost every kid to want "unsafe things" that aren't porn or gore. They'll want to play games (by your standards, even a T rated game is unsafe since it's T for Teen, not T for Twelve-Year-Old), watch whatever videos (zero anime/cartoon/whatever streaming sites would be deemed safe), and use social media. This whole filter would be pointless if you accept it being easy to get around.
What you are describing are small issues. Of course there will be those who try to circumvent the regulations (like children who drink alcohol or smoke). Does it mean that we should sell alcohol without age verification?
Instead of one "safe mode" there could be several, for example "safe for all", "safe for teens" etc.
Regarding movie sites, there are paid sites where you can legally watch anime or cartoons, and I am sure they will pass the certification for safe content.
>Does it mean that we should sell alcohol without age verification?
That has an objective standard and a clear harm to children (and adults, but we're not able to prevent it). Meanwhile, there would definitely be a wide range of relatively harmless content arbitrarily not on your whitelist.
>Instead of one "safe mode" there could be several, for example "safe for all", "safe for teens" etc.
This is a good improvement on your idea, but it won't fix a lot of the issues people have with it.
>I am sure they will pass the certification for safe content.
Not the anime or cartoons I would have wanted to watch as a minor. The Simpsons, Family Guy, do I need to go on to South Park or Rick and Morty? Banned, there's sexuality and violence. Kids want these and will work around it.
Booting a live usb (or even creating one) has very little to do with programming. I bet anyone who wants to (especially horny teens who want to access porn) can figure it out in an afternoon.
How do you define "safe"? What is the process for amending this definition in the future? What if different countries have different definitions? At what point is a person allowed to view not "safe" web content? How do you enforce this policy? How do you identify violations of the policy? What is the penalty for violating the policy?
... and this is just the tip of the iceberg
IMO a policy like this would not be easy to pull off at all.
There are ratings for movies and games, we can use them.
> What if different countries have different definitions?
Then browser will refuse to open pages from that countries. For example, there could be an organization assigning rating to websites and issuing them a cryptographic signature as a proof. The browser will refuse to open any page without this signature, including pages from countries with different standards.
> How do you enforce this policy?
With jail terms.
> At what point is a person allowed to view not "safe" web content?
> There are ratings for movies and games, we can use them.
much of social media is unrated, and no organization is going to rate every tiktok before releasing it to the wild. Even rated Video Games with online (even as family friendly as Nintendo) have the same "online interactions are not rated", because you cannot predict what activity will happen between two people in real time.
>At the age of 18.
TV and movie ratings have multiple age gates. 6+, 10+, and 17+ are the most common (and there are all kinds of 12/13/14/16+ ratings). This is exactly why "for kids" is such a asinine binary to base things on. the government doesn't define any age gates, but pretty much every single piece of media that rates content recognizes that a 5 year old is different from a 16 year old.
>The browser will refuse to open any page without this signature, including pages from countries with different standards.
neat, more region locking. just what everyone wanted. I guess NordVPN is going to campaign hard for this.
Safe content header is a relatively weak solution. Strongest solution is either Microsoft or Apple stepping up to develop a child designed device from the ground up. It would have access to a limited walled garden of the Internet. The device itself is marketed specifically to children and has no advertising allowed on it. It also incorporates health guidelines and screen time limits, etc. that cannot be changed by the device owner or user, only by Apple/Microsoft. It is essentially a fascist phone. Admittedly, this would make an adult, unlocked smart phone a hot item on the youth black market, but hopefully most kids will be too lazy to save up the money needed to buy a black market unlocked phone before they're ready to watch porn and be inundated with endless advertising and doomscrolls.
It is an investment. You build brand loyalty by selling a safe device. Train kids to only use your OS. Then when they're 18 hopefully they stick with your OS.
Furthermore, OS makers could lobby for additional age gates. I.e. a child phone for ages 15 and under, a teenager phone for ages 16-17, an adult phone for 21.
I doubt that. For example, look at iOS "parental controls". Judging by screenshots [1] here, it is a complicated system that requires a parent to be a system administrator not to get lost in hundreds of settings. For example, you might have to manually compile a white list of websites, white list of apps etc.
The system is so complicated that I think many parents simply get confused and do not want to use it.
Instead there should be a single checkbox: "allow safe content only on this device". That's all (and you can leave detailed settings for system administrators).
Do they provide a complete solution (you only need to tick a checkbox) or parents need to be power users and manually set up whitelist for websites and apps? Do they prevent children from using for example Telegram in locked mode?
- Web browser, both Safari and embedded app browsers honour these settings
- You can disable apps that do not have parental controls integrated
I do not know if there are generally available whitelists for websites, and I assume this would depend on the cultural context like the nationality and religion of the parents. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Agreed. It's really only based on a focus group of various audiences and surveys on what parents (dis)agree regarding certain content and how old you should be to view it.
The closest thing to government intervention is the FCC, since the govt. does have some regulations on how TV and Radio can run (since the govt. infrastructure is used to broadcast). e.g.:
>Broadcasting obscene content is prohibited by law at all times of the day. Indecent and profane content are prohibited on broadcast TV and radio between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.
So the only things really controlled are profanity (i.e. a relatively tiny list of words you must not say or bleep out) and "obscenity" (feel free to look up that govt. definition. Enjoy the rabbit hole). As for "indecency"
>Indecent content portrays sexual or excretory organs or activities in a way that is patently
offensive but does not meet the three-prong test for obscenity.
so, not really much for radio. Mostly prevents non-artistic/educational genitalia for TV's sake.
-----
but all that was a tangent. The internet is not under FCC protocol and the FCC only endorses certain advertising, spam, and malware related issues, not content.
You keep repeating this, but those ratings are not government issued and are not all that useful when it comes to general information. A movie can be made to be sufficiently sanitized for the target audience as there's plenty of flexibility in the topic and objectivity is often just a secondary goal. Eg since the movie is targeted at families, it'll avoid explicit depictions of sex. On the other hand, you can't just change the reality of what a scientific article on sexual reproduction is going to show, yet that information is not necessarily problematic for people under 18 to access (and of course you'll have a hard time balancing what is socially healthy with what is acceptable to parents).
On top of all that though, we don't need to make even more things be behind this absurd age gate. I remember how ridiculous it felt turning 18, going from legally being a child to being a mostly free adult just on a specific day, despite obviously not having suddenly changed as a person in 1 day and having already been living independently at university thousands of miles away from home. Same again upon turning 21.
This idea of sharp limits defined by age is just an intellectually lazy approach which is not how we should be treating access to general information for a fifth of a person's life. Tech companies love this kind of intellectual laziness, and similar thinking is responsible for why said tech companies are responsible for so many current social issues.
I wouldn't even worry about how useful the rating systems are, I'd worry about how arbitrary they are even if you accept their standards. E.g. the "one fuck" rule for PG-13 films, except a film like The Martian can say it twice without being rated R because the raters vote on what they think American parents would think about the film in that case.
"The government will decide what is safe or not" is an extremely frightening phrase to me when it comes to issues of morality.
I recognize the importance of having the government decide what foods are safe, what industrial byproducts are safe, and so forth when it comes to matters of objective science but when they start policing content like books and websites it starts stepping into some serious authoritarianism...
you'd think with various state governments deciding that "gay marriage isn't safe" and some of the more extreme governments deciding that "critical race theory isn't appropriate" (you know, stuff like the entire civil war and why it was fought. "state's rights" my ass. I learned the basis of that in 3rd/4th grade. I learned about MLK in 1st/2nd grade) that we'd be wary of such lines of thought. Games and movies avoid that with self-regulation for a reason. Having the govt. decide what social media is appropriate is outright censorship (and not the kind the gamers love to complain about. Literal government suppression of information).
A tv should show zero content until it has fully verified the identity / age of the viewer(s) and sense if someone new arrives and then stop programming
until that person is verified.
This could also be done by transmitting scrambled content, that can only
be fixed by wearing identity ensured glasses genetically locked to the wearer.
this brings back the old school meme of "please drink verification can"[1]. I don't even think they were called memes back in the day, or at least these were the days where memes were a very specific caption.
The parents buy a laptop, and they have the admin password. You need the admin password to change the setting.
If parents want to enable this or not for their kids, it's up to the parents to decide. Also, if adults want to enable the filters for their own personal use, that's fine too.
There's literally an entire industry doing a bad job of this right now. If Google actually cared about improving the status quo, then instead of trying to mandate adults use cryptographically signed advertising identities to browse the web, they could use their web crawl and influence over web standards to improve the quality of opt-in content filters (by producing better site ratings lists, in the style of adblock lists, for example).
Device-level protection doesn't work for kids that can break into the bootloader or jailbreak the machine their parents got for them, but not many things realistically will.
Also, the scheme's failure to work against sophisticated users is a feature: at some point, kids turn into adults. These mechanisms shouldn't be capable of censoring adults' internet feeds.
Today there is no legal requirement for laptop manufacturers to implement "safe content" setting and, as I am aware, there is no such OS-level settings in any OS.
iOS seems to have "parental controls", but they are implemented in the worst way possible. For example, to restrict access to websites, you have to manually enter the domains into black or white lists [1]. It seems like Apple tried to comply with some kind of regulations the cheapest way.
There should be just a single checkbox, because I don't think there are many people who are ready to manually compile white lists of websites and browse through those complicated settings.
windows does have parental controls, but they of course can only extend to Edge. I'm sure you can control whether a non-admin can install Chrome/Firefox or really anything non-authorized if you need to.
>There should be just a single checkbox. because I don't think there are many people who are ready to manually compile white lists of websites and browse through those complicated settings.
And who compiles the list? why do we trust them to turn a switch on or off?
Also, I hope you can understand why I think "because parents are stupid/lazy" is the worst kind of reasoning you can give to enforce control over the entire internet. We solve laziness with awareness and stupidity with education. Why are we giving up on that?
What I meant is that OS should have one simple option, not a complicated tree of settings made for sysadmins. And it should be reliable, and apply to all applications, so that you cannot insert a thumb drive with Firefox or Tor browser and enjoy uncensored Internet access.
> why do we trust them to turn a switch on or off?
Because many people do not want to compile a white list of allowed websites themselves. It is too much trouble. So they would rather delegate this to some organization.
> Also, I hope you can understand why I think "because parents are stupid/lazy" is the worst kind of reasoning you can give to enforce control over the entire internet.
This doesn't enforce control over Internet, this only adds a locked-down mode for children. For adults, there are no restrictions.
>This doesn't enforce control over Internet, this only adds a locked-down mode for children.
I'll remind you that your proposal mentioned:
>Make it a legal requirement for parents to set up this option for their children on every device they use
I don't like the idea that the government a) mandates a parent take action on their devices just becsuse they have children nor b) that specific companies are mandated to make specific feature on their private OS (and we won't even go into the rabbit hole of how you enforce this for Linux. Are kids now not allowed to use Linux?
And to respond to another comment:
>For options to be available, you need regulations. Today without regulations there is no OS that would provide a single checkbox like "show only content appropriate for N year old". It seems that there is no motivation for device and OS manufacturers to invest into implementing such options and filters.
I fundamentally disagree with both of these premises. You can create options without government intervention. That's exactly how games and movies work.
And just becsuse OS's don't have the options nor convenience you want doesn't mean they are mandated to apply them (again, I will also mention Linux as a confusing factor to mandate). Third party tools exist that do all this for you on all major private OS's convinently and will curate lists for the parent. It's up to the parent to seek these out (or, learn how to use the admin settings. We're not talking about command line prompts nor batch scripting here).
Here's an even simpler solution: Parents parent their children and pay attention to what they do online instead of letting third parties decide what is or isn't appropriate for their children to see, but I guess we've decided to abandon that idea for some reason.
> Device-level protection doesn't work for kids that can break into the bootloader or jailbreak the machine their parents got for them, but not many things realistically will.
Kids that are clever enough to hack their devices to get around those kinds of restrictions are probably old enough and smart enough to not need the censoring.
>Parents parent their children and pay attention to what they do online instead of letting third parties decide what is or isn't appropriate for their children to see
I think both of you are making the same point. offer options not mandates. internet or device filters are options a parent can enable, not mandates in order to not have Child Protective Services at their door. if some highly religious parent wants to shut down everything except the Bible that's their choice (not one I agree with, but a choice). If a parent trusts their kid to have free reign over the internet that's also a choice (I imagine that's how many of us were raised, before such filters even existed).
For options to be available, you need regulations. Today without regulations there is no OS that would provide a single checkbox like "show only content appropriate for N year old". It seems that there is no motivation for device and OS manufacturers to invest into implementing such options and filters.
I'm not against this, but I do believe such a header would give parents a false sense of security in what they can allow their children to do on the internet.
Then again, for those of us who are skeptical that such a program can work, I'm guessing we already aren't or do not plan to allow our kids on the internet without supervision, so it's a bit of a moot point for me.
I'm just annoyed that there is a certain set of incentives that allow for people to ignorantly trust the security and safety of various websites and applications, and then get some sort of reward/handout in the form of a class-action lawsuit against these services when they're finally caught failing to live up to the proposed safety regulations. So every idiot who had an account can line up for $20, and I get zero reward for correctly avoiding the situation by not signing up. These are perverse incentives IMO, and I'll just continue to be annoyed with all solutions that continue to allow this sort of thing to happen.
Under your proposal, there's an inevitable lawsuit where a bunch of people get paid out for allowing their children to get goatse'd because 'kidpxrn.biz' falsely put on the safe-for-kidz header. Sure, they got sued, but a bunch of kids got goatse'd in the process, and their parents got $20. Cool future, I guess.
> Under your proposal, there's an inevitable lawsuit where a bunch of people get paid out for allowing their children to get goatse'd because 'kidpxrn.biz' falsely put on the safe-for-kidz header
There could be an organization that reviews site content and moderation policies, ensures that site operator and owner are not foreigners (so that they can be put to jail) and issues cryptographic proof of verification that the website would display in an HTTP header. As website owners are not anonymous they will not risk a jail term to put unsafe content on the site.
Here's the fail in your plan: I'll register "mommylookaway.com", make it a simple web proxy like proxysite.com, and set the content flag to child safe. Making it illegal does nothing, just as law doesn't stop spreading other illegal material over the internet, right at this moment.
Telegram etc can also have web frontends that do the same.
There's no easy way around this, and that's because of a totally different reason. The reason being that the cause for all this is control, namely government control and surveillance over the populace. Companies profit from this and governments can increase their power with this, so they are natural allies in this scenario - government has the will and power over law, and companies have the know-how and the technical means, and of course a similar thirst of power.
Situations like this must not be mistaken for the technicalities that they present. It's simply the next step in the power grab.
Yes, this part wasn't thought out well enough. Let there be an organization that verifies site owners (to verify that they are not abroad and can be put in jail if needed), content and moderation policies and issues a cryptographic signature. The website displays the signature in HTTP headers.
I'm sorry, but this is still similarly handwave-y. Content moderation is contentious enough as it is, and on top of that, there is already persistent outright illegal content on the internet. There is illegal content on the clear web, and also a lot of illegal activity on instant messaging platforms, even on highly non-anonymous ones like Facebook.
This issue is not technical, and so, we should stop trying to fix it with technical solutions. The proposal is only relevant because it's an effective smokescreen. There is real abuse happening, people are understandably, but overly anxious about that abuse, and a corporation sees an opportunity for power in this situation. That's all there is to it.
I like some aspects of this approach, but two points don't work well with me.
1. It shouldn't be a legal requirement for parents to enable this on their kids devices. This should mearly be an option available to parents. Do not tell me how to raise my kids.
2. "Safe for kids" is pretty nebulous, and you already know certain dumpy states would abuse the hell out of this (i.e. declaring content "unsafe for kids" if it features a man with effeminate characteristics).
Maybe a solution to the latter problem would be to use content descriptors instead of a blanket "safe for kids" flag. i.e. individual flags for pornography, graphic violence, naughty words, etc.
The government is already doing it, depending on the country, you can get prosecuted if for example you buy alcohol for children or let them do something dangerous.
> Maybe a solution to the latter problem would be to use content descriptors instead of a blanket "safe for kids" flag. i.e. individual flags for pornography, graphic violence, naughty words, etc.
Maybe, but this increases possibility for fingerprinting.
> The government is already doing it, depending on the country, you can get prosecuted if for example you buy alcohol for children or let them do something dangerous.
The difference is that alcohol can cause immediate and even irreversible harm to anyone, especially children. Alcohol is heavily regulated even for use by full grown adults, specifically because of its capacity for harm. Evidence that seeing nudity or hearing dirty words does the same is incredibly sketchy at best. But even then, in most states, it is perfectly legal to let your own kids drink alcohol on your own private property.
> Maybe, but this increases possibility for fingerprinting.
Maybe, I think that depends on the implementation. But either way, I doubt it is much of a concern for parents who just want better control over what their kids see and do online.
I like the idea of a set of tags that can be used to filter content, if so desired. It would need a set of agreed-upon tags with the option to add others. And yes, voluntary would have to be a requirement.
> Make an OS-level setting ("show safe content only") that only parents can change.
> Also, with "safe content" setting OS should allow running and installing only apps that are verified to be safe
This is hard to do on PCs where you can install your own operating system and have full control, but they're not the dominant Internet device anymore. You would have to make those illegal or illegal for children to have. But this is effectively possible on modern phones.
> Make it illegal to send invalid "safe content" headers.
A. This requires all states and all countries to agree what is and is not safe content
B. Enforcement across national borders will be inefficient unless the two countries are tightly coupled. Disagreements could be leveraged for political ends (just think of current conflicts).
C. Unless a site that hosts user-generated content reviews every single item of content before allowing it to be published, it can't guarantee that all content on its platform is safe. Therefore it would have to be marked unsafe unless a special provision is made here.
> This requires all states and all countries to agree what is and is not safe content
There could be an organization that reviews site content and moderation policies and assigns a rating, issuing a cryptographic signature to the website.
> Enforcement across national borders will be inefficient
The rating will not be assigned to foreign-owned websites. Also, the enforcement is pretty efficient, there are police raids on sites with illegal content, and people get arrested for it.
> Unless a site that hosts user-generated content reviews every single item of content before allowing it to be published, it can't guarantee that all content on its platform is safe.
In short people, there's no need for cryptography certification security etc, what the governments push for would require websites and services to make at most exactly the same decisions!!!
There's no certification required that I'm aware about, websites operators are required to make the decisions themselves exactly like in this proposal !!
Conundrums with user content, hosted services, legal responsibility, same!!!
The only difference is that with age verification the website would have to decide if he needs to prompt the age verification system, with this if he wants to send the header!
Once there's a header (good old PICS) in a tls connection that's it!
(of course the huge difference with this system is that here only the services that explicitly want to be offered to minors would need to do something, as opposed to everyone - and as an aside this would limit immensely what's accessible to minors)
> no need to make life complicated for adult people.
I like that it's the main goal for all these huge and pervasive legal changes.
I know there's all the cultural "can't show a nipple to my pure innocent girl", but it still amazes me our societies as a whole have to deal with the radicalism of a few.
Raised barriers of entry means there will be improvements for services which can "help lift smaller companies up". For example, for finance, AML/KYC companies. Now I guess, for some internet services, "age verification" companies. This way age verification services may have some competition between each other and that can make it easier for people to do, and also cheaper for everyone to use.
There's an easy solution to "protecting" children on the Internet. Let people and not companies decide what to view on a platform. Like Youtube can provide an option to whitelist channels or let users programmatically define rules on what kind of content they want in their feed. The downstream effect of this is that if some parents want to control what their kids see, they can just setup an account with rules on what content is allowed. Google doesn't need to appoint itself as a nanny.
But then, such super easy technological solutions come in the way of selling people to advertisers. So here we are.
I'm sad there's no other sites I know of, certainly not mainstream ones, that do moderation like HN does. I'm glad to see the [dead] comments on here, so I know what's current in not allowed and spam content.
I think Scott Alexander wrote up a blogpost about the difference he saw between moderation and censorship. It's similar to what you suggested.
I find it really sad that we no longer hold parents and communities responsible for just not. letting. their. kids. on. the. internet.
Don't give your kid a smart phone. Don't let them use a computer unsupervised.
Worried about them seeing shit from classmates? I think most schools these days don't allow phones during school hours, so just pick your kid up immediately as school ends and at worst they're gonna see 10 minutes of hardcore pornography per day but that's a pretty ridiculous assumption.
Alternatively, instill good values and behaviors in your kid so that they will choose to avoid this.
I find it really sad that we no longer hold parents and communities responsible for just not. letting. their. kids. smoke. cigarettes.
Don't give your kid a pack of smokes. Don't let them buy things unsupervised.
Worried about them seeing classmates smoke? I think most schools these days don't allow smoking during school hours, so just pick your kid up immediately as school ends and at worst they're gonna see 10 minutes of smoking per day but that's a pretty ridiculous assumption.
Alternatively, instill good values and behaviors in your kid so that they will choose to avoid smoking.
> I find it really sad that we no longer hold parents and communities responsible for just not. letting. their. kids. on. the. internet.
As a parent, I'm willing to take all the blame in the world for letting my kid on the internet if you're willing to live with no internet for 10 years.
Should be simple enough, right ?
Oh, I'll help you find what you need anytime, just tell me what to search for and I'll print and send you the results whenever I have some spare time.
Kids are supposed to become adults, and for that they need to actually interact with the actual workd, do adulty things and process the reality.
It's a delusion to think you can live in a school shaped faraday cage for 10+ years and just become a balanced and productive member of the society when the door unlocks at 18.
I did live with no internet for 10 years as a kid. I turned out perfectly fine and now have a successful career in software.
If I had all my living expenses paid for, didn't have to work, and basically just got to learn all day, I'd love to leave the internet behind for a decade.
> If I had all my living expenses paid for, didn't have to work, and basically just got to learn all day, I'd love to leave the internet behind for a decade.
Of course not. You're still working, keep a computer at work with all the filtering and surveillance coming with it (just like kids have internet access at school), but no access outside that. You pay your bills at the counter, buy everything in brick and mortar, short of asking me to order them for you online.
This is how it feels to have a 12yo kid needing a new backpack, or looking for a new game, but they can't just go to the store because brick and mortar stores just became ridiculously limited if they still even exist, and looking for it online means having your parents over your shoulders with very limited time and nowhere to ask online, because you're not the age that is allowed to talk to people yet.
PS: it's a really good exercice to imagine leaving your teenage life now, with or without internet. The gap between what we remember being kids, and what it actually feels like right now is pretty eye opening. As adults we remodeled a lot of our life around the internet, but many still assume kids live in the 80's worlds.
So they're really going for that web environment integrity bullshit? And they're marketing it to politicians as 'protecting children'? Absolute scumbags if that is the case.
"The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished —it is no longer secure in its instincts."
This might be a threat, but I see weakness: Google is faltering. I haven't been impressed by them - and especially what they produce (their research looks cool, but is not going places) - in years and they are holding on for dear life. Producing new and interesting products is apparently no longer a viable avenue. They literally cannot do anything else but try and survive by throwing out the toys so nobody can play.
It's a big boat and it takes a while to sink, but it will.
>Where required, age assurance – which can range from declaration to inference and verication – should be risk-based, preserving users’ access to information and services, and respecting their privacy.
so it's purposfully vague. It can be anything from a checkbox you check saying "I'm 13/18/etc." to "we require a face scan or governent issued ID in order to verify you". If you believe their claim, they want to do something more towards the former except with 18+ sites. If you don't believe their claim, you probably veer more towards Techdirt's cynicism as it being sugarcoating for semi-invasive age verification:
>But… it’s not? It’s basically lobbying for age verification, just in the guise of “age assurance,” which is effectively “age verification, but if you’re a smaller company you can get it wrong some undefined amount of time, until someone sues you.” I mean, what’s here is not “lobbying against age verification,” it’s basically saying “here’s how to require age verification.”
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>Secondly, why would Age Assurance hinder new companies that want to create content platforms?
Regulation. the more you need to do to get your site off the ground (and make its money back), the higher the cost. Or if they ignore/are ignorant of it they can be sued out of the race.
This can be good (GDPR requirements to protect privacy), but like everything we need to weigh if the effect is worth the outcome. I am admittedly more scrutiny on if every website over X size needs to make sure their site is "child friendly".
I'm fine with age assurance. If you're under 13, you go to the post office to prove that you're under 13, they digitally sign some token on your phone, and then your access is restricted according to the law. If you are an adult who wishes to remain anonymous, take no action. Problem solved!
It would be interesting to see how the reverse of this system is implemented; adults must prove they're adults before being able to access certain websites. What technical measures would allow this? Information can leak in HTTP requests and responses, i.e. "curl -H 'User-Agent: help me i am trapped at the bottom of the ocean' https://example.com" before any authentication has taken place. Is an adult allowed to send that request to a child? Probably not! This would mean the system has to be implemented at a lower level layer; websites would only be served on private IP ranges, and you'd have to setup an IPSec tunnel or similar first to prevent that out-of-band leakage. (You can get more absurd; everyone has a /64 of IPv6 space for themselves, so you can use your source address as a form of intentional information leakage; 1:2:3:4::1234 is a 1, 1:2:3:4::4321 is a 0. This means that, legally, you would have to be careful about how you do the TCP 3 way handshake, because, as a middlebox, you can't prove that sending a SYN in reply to a SYN is not actually someone requesting adult content.)
All in all, this seems technically impossible to implement, prone to making identity theft even more lucrative than it already is (don't reuse your ID.me password anywhere else, or some kid is going to use it to cheat in a video game and get you sent to jail a la South Korea), and unconstitutional ("prior restraint").
I think you're overthinking this. You can just put the age-restricted portion of the website (which for some websites might be 99% of their content, but I think that's fine) behind a login page that verifies whatever age token you come up with. If the only information you can send to the website is your credentials, and the website can't send any "unsuitable" information to you, I'm not sure what the issue with allowing HTTP access is.
Well, the government has to take action against you, the site operator, if you aren't enforcing the rules correctly. That means they have to think of every possible way to monitor the traffic, both in-band and out-of-band. They then have to do this for every site on the Internet. (Or sure, just selectively enforce it against whoever X says is a threat to their ad revenue today.)
When you make something, you only have to figure out one way to make it work. When you try to secure something, you have to figure out every possible way the defenses could fail, or you've done nothing.
Can any modern journalist please just read the really quick AP style guidelines? It took me like 5 graphs before I actually understood what action google was taking. The initial bullshit hemming and hawing was excruciating.
It takes a while to get to the point but the article eventually gives one:
>Last Monday, Google announced “a policy framework to protect children and teens online,” which was echoed by subsidiary YouTube, which posted basically the same thing, talking about it’s “principled approach for children and teenagers.” Both of these pushed not just a “principled approach” for companies to take, but a legislative model (and I hear that they’re out pushing “model bills” across legislatures as well).
And if you want google's official lede:
>Today we’re releasing our Legislative Framework to Protect Children and Teens Online. The Framework outlines some principles for laws seeking to improve online experiences and keep children and teens safer when using the internet. We hope that sharing our experiences and perspectives will advance the work of the policymakers and experts addressing these issues, and we look forward to engaging constructively with them.
in essence, they want to push out more government sanctioned age verification (or "age assurance" as Google calls it), similar to COPPA.
It is possible to do an age verification system with the following properties:
1. The site that wants to verify your age learns that your age meets their criteria but does not learn anything else from the verification system except as noted in #2.
2. The site that you present ID information to in order to prove your age does not learn what site the verification is for. The site in #1 will learn what site you presented ID to but not when you presented it.
3. Someone who obtains all the records from both sites is not able to tell whether or not you visited the site in #1.
It seems inevitable that age verification is going to become a requirements at many sites. Instead of just trying to stop that from happening those who want to maintain the ability to browse anonymously should probably also put some effort into trying to insure that if/when it does happen sites are required to accept a system with those three properties.
4. A third party knows which service you frequent and can also deny the service
5. With device tracking and fingerprinting and leaked data, establishing your real ID should ironically be childs play. You only look at the cryptographically relevant data of resource and auth provider, but there is contemporary data that makes including a third party a security issue. Otherwise #3 is wrong in any practical case.
Age verification is already implemented for some services. I don't use them anymore. There are better alternatives.
I guarantee this will do nothing to achieve its stated goals. Kids are far more resourceful than adults give them credit for and have an abundance of time to apply to obstacles put in their way. Never underestimate a hard drive of torrented porn circulating on the bus.
Actually given recent reports on how kids these days only know how to tap at mobile and nothing else, we may need to stringent these restrictions just to teach them how to hack network like good old days.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadIf we coddle people too much we risk people not... talking to other people. That's already happening. Maybe instead of tech the world should be focused on physical things, like new innovations in building technology. We have so many homeless people, in my opinion, because we're constantly focusing our attention on tech - which is a skill that a smaller percentage of the population has a brain for.
The trades need to come back, we need to beat SA in projects like "The Line" - and in the words of Joshua Weissman - But Better.
We're at risk for just continued class divisions and potentially a war because we're turning a bunch of coddled spoiled kids into a millionaires that are being looked at with massive disdain.
Maybe the internet should move back to being a background resource, not a precursor to ADHD.
I'm really not sure what else you're on about though.
Why are targeted ads the thing we should fear for our kids? Are we inventing problems? Kid watches superman movie and is shown an ad for batman vs here is an ad for a random movie. Adults and tracking is bigger issue, kids don't have positions in society to lose or secrets to keep or money to lose.
What are we fooling ourselves into believing we are protecting again?
This is a standard business practice for the advertising and marketing industry. It's evil.
> Why are targeted ads the thing we should fear for our kids?
Again, you seem to be either defensive or intentionally misconstruing the point. These types of problems shouldn't invoke fear in people. I think you're getting yourself too mixed up in the idea that [X modern issue] is fearmongering and that nothing bad ever happens.
Kids are dumb and impressionable. If they spend 8 hours a day scrolling through an endless feed of cool posts featuring cool products being worn / used by cool people, they will absolutely get attached to the idea that it's normal and expected to have that thing. That's manipulative and disgusting marketing, and it's genuinely worrying that you don't seem to care at all.
> Kid watches superman movie and is shown an ad for batman vs here is an ad for a random movie
Again, intentionally misconstruing the idea... it's more like "kid spends 2/3 of their time awake being mined for data and having every interaction across every platform cross-correlated to ensure that *a company* can profit off of them". I suppose that's perfectly healthy and normal to you, that a company can know more about a child and exactly what they do and what they like than any human does.
I'm reminded strongly of cartoons which were created to sell toys. Still happens today.
It's better to block targeted advertising from adults too. Blocking ads for everyone in the household is only going to benefit everyone.
They would also very much like you to install their venue app on your phone so they can track your location as you approach and exit the venue.
And I don't have a problem with that. I'd have a problem if the age verification leaves a record in a database or is performed by a central entity rather than the employees of the establishment.
Now I don't know if "the line" will ever exist, but if it does get built, it will likely be the most impressive thing to exist.
If we compete, not only are we making homes, but an entirely new set of jobs for probably hundreds of thousands for potentially 20 years. Past that? Do the next build.
We've gotten to this amazing place with computers and... then we just figure out a billion ways we can flip bits and strings in a database endlessly and call it work... bleh.
We need to move on from Tech.
They have that Chrome change, whose name eludes me, which provides secure Browser validation to the host; this legislation would make use of that feature ubiquitous and mandatory.
Google don't care if an individual site blocks them (in my experience they are one of the better crawlers at obeying robots.txt) because they know - given their search monopoly - that the vast majority of the internet would never dare to cut them out. WEI is a way to cement their current position further without needing to play dodgy games with special Google certs.
If they put out WEI and start encouraging sites to use it for better SEO, the majority of the internet will do it (and wont put in the same effort to support other crawlers because those search pages are only < 1% of traffic according to their Google Analytics)
At that point, when change (legal, technical, social, whatever) comes to try and break apart their hold on search - there is yet another technical constraint that works in Google's favour. It won't be Google's "fault" that websites give them privileged crawl access and greater reach, but we'll all be stuck with it.
Do you really think a private legal system would be better? That is the alternative, you can't enforce laws without a police force.
A pretty huge part of the problem is that our police act as vastly inferior substitutes to just proper social services. An incredibly simple and good example of how this could be done better is being demonstrated in Denver, where they have unarmed mental health first responders, because most of the time someone is in crisis they're only a threat to themselves, so being armed only makes the situation worse.
They're also trained to view the public as the enemy (warrior training), making them a walking threat. Our police kill people at a rate many times higher than other comparably developed nations; about 60x the UK, for reference. Yes our gun ownership is higher, but the relatively low rate of police deaths shows that their readiness to resort to violence is unjustified.
If we allocated even half of our police budgets towards social services, we'd live safer lives.
Net negative means that society would improve if we just removed it without replacing it with anything. Can you defend that?
But yes, I think freeing up that enormous amount of budget for almost any other purpose would be an improvement.
Do you have good arguments for this? For example, if we dismantled the entire police force to reduce the government deficit, or to increase healthcare spending, or to reduce taxes, do you really think society would improve?
Your examples above didn't dismantle the police entirely and had a very small set of alternative spending. It isn't consistent with what you said in this post. You need to explain why you think that dismantling the entire police force would be a net positive, how do you think that society would work without a police force?
> Your argument says that we can improve the police, not that the police is net negative.
>Net negative means that society would improve if we just removed it without replacing it with anything. Can you defend that?
Also, net negative means that their negative actions outweigh their positive actions. I don't know how you got the idea that negative == not repairable. You're putting arguments that they didn't say into their mouth. You're only arguing in false dilemmas.
No it can't, if removing X causes more problems then having X prevents those worse problems.
> Also, this is a common strawman: almost no one advocates police abolition over police reform
The person I responded to argued just this. This is what police being net negative means, that society would improve by removing the police. I wouldn't have said anything if he just thought that the police could use a budget cut or a reform.
TBF I still feel that's a gun problem. It's very hard to "accidentally" kill someone with a baton, taser, or even a knife (not that I know any police with a knife). Meanwhile, richochet bullets can kill someone in the complete opposite direction of fire if your're really unlucky. more likely, a shot misses and goes past the scene and into the crossfire of someone innocent.
but as anyone battling 2A knows, that's (and was) going to be a very long debate.
You can in USA. Inform the grand jury and they can investigate and indict. Most anyone can do this by, for example, mail to the grand jury foreperson. I pulled up a big State for you:
"DUTIES OF GRAND JURY. The grand jury shall inquire into all offenses subject to indictment of which any grand juror may have knowledge or of which the grand jury is informed by the attorney representing the state or by any other credible person."
https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/CR/htm/CR.20A.htm
The district attorney can present, and so can "any other credible person."
Police are called law-enforcement for a reason, it is because they are how we enforce laws.
edit: A criminal defendant may be tried in front of a jury. A grand jury is something completely different - regular people who meet in private, can review information, and can indict.
What will happen if you remove the police force is that someone creates a private police force, like a mafia. So now the government no longer can make laws, the mafia makes the laws, essentially dismantling the country.
I guess you could use the military to enforce laws, but martial law isn't a good thing either.
So saying you think the police is net negative is essentially saying you think it would be better to live with a mafia ruling your life. They would knock on your door and demand money instead of the democratically decided tax rates etc, is that really better?
However, the penchant for people to be complete assholes to each other over things that are none of their business is real and a huge problem. So, yes it makes sense to be able to hide but, sadly, it doesn't advance the social contract.
I think an ideal society has rich disagreement and a wide diversity of thoughts and opinions. With that diversity comes conflict which provides us all with opportunities to more deeply reflect on our own beliefs.
Someone liking to dress in a cowboy hat, underwear, and playing a guitar in Times Square? Not my cup of tea, but sure, go for it.
You can't simply beat your chest and claim superiority and thus we need competition of ideas. E.g. the most prosperous happy places on earth tend to have social contracts that look out for groups such as women, homosexuals, etc.
You can't simply prove an idea is better by appealing to your own sense of morals/justice and if there's no evidence that some ideals are better than others, how would you reach consensus anyways?
In order to make everyone share the same social contract you either have evidence based progress or authoritarianism and historically the evidence suggests authoritarianism doesn't pan out all that great.
So at some point there is also a line that has to be drawn. The Holocaust is one of those lines, and I pray that I would had the strength to stand up to my peers and say, no this isn't right,and go to whatever lengths I thought I could do to make change. In a lot of ways, I think the civil rights movement was a lot of chest beating and I think that actually helped.
It's not really clear to me that "most prosperous happy places on earth tend to have social contracts that look out for groups such as women, homosexuals, etc." Certainly, when you look at economic prosperity and I don't know how you'd measure happiness.
It comes down to the fact that other people may do things which we find distasteful or even offensive. You will never, ever be able to get a large group of people to conform to standards of personal behavior to the extent that this is not true, and so privacy becomes a necessity. But as long as those things aren't causing real harm then they simply aren't my business or that of the government.
In my opinion the only worthwhile discussion when it comes to privacy is what constitutes harm and whether a given harm is possible to prevent without causing even greater harm through restriction of privacy and anonymity. In many cases when it comes to safety and privacy, the cure can be worse than the disease.
Privacy is what I do without interacting with the public. Playing D&D is a privacy matter. Only my friends and I know we do it.
It's still better that they were forced to hide, than a world where they couldn't hide.
> I feel like anonymity is just a band-aid.
The norms of a society are nether stable over time nor across members at a single point in time.
There is no stasis point, there is no right answer. There is only entropy.
Agreed. Just like it was better we had some not great laws protecting abortion than the shit-show we have now. That is the challenge I think, is getting something that is actually in the real world vs. what the ideal is, since none of us seem to be able to agree on that ideal.
I disagree completely. I think that privacy is an essential component of having a free society. It's not really about porn.
Of course, there could be a lot of bullying just out in the open too, but anonymity isn't a cure all, just helps with the symptom. IMHO.
Additionally I don't want to share even trivial stuff like interest in music or movies with everyone. If I do, it is on my own terms. I don't want to share who is in my social circle either. My social media presence is highly curated and shallow for professional reasons (although by being shallow it doesn't contrast other online presences too much).
I hide stuff and that is completely fine and something I want to do. If people are interested, they can ask me.
Anonymity isn't just a band-aid here, it is a tool and I value it quite highly. Nothing to do with equality or advancing rights.
Anonymity would be you posting your playlist of songs with the theme of Down with Martians (or other group) without anyone knowing it was you. I don't necessarily think we have to have that ability to allow people to do that.
sure, but we know ideals are just that. We know even today that saying you are homosexual can get you harassed by certain circles. We know that anonymous sources are necessary so that the whistleblower isn't retaliated upon by the government, company, or peers.
These aren't new issues and humanity has probably dealt with it in all of civilized history. I think preserving anonymity is a much easier fight than trying to make everyone get along and accept one another.
>Privacy is what I do without interacting with the public
You are granted privacy even when in public. You may be wearing a skirt and a strong breeze blows in the park. A pervert isn't entitled to take a picture of you because you were in public and happened to have your underwear revealed. or worse, throw themselves under you and take a picture directly.
Even without the extreme example, there are a bunch of privacy laws in terms of how and who and where you can record in public. Privacy in general simply means:
>The state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people.
And this is granted to you even if in public spaces. It's part of why we have public indecency laws to begin with: because a person performing lewd conduct (especially in front of minors) has been determined to be disturbing the public's privacy.
Thinking back years, going back to my first Debian install in 2000, in retrospect this is where things were always heading.
It’s the same path every other industry has gone down, to ultimately yield all power to a few large corporations.
The main issue with this is that even if you have a group of people passionately defending against this, googles attempts will likely persist long after any one person or group is no longer able to work against.
On a side note, this is part of the reason why corporations were never intended to be allowed to exist as long as they do today, they were supposed to come with an expiration date.
Not sure dismantling a company like Google is the right play, it just amazes me how much foresight people had 100 years ago and that we still let a bunch of those things happen.
"No parent, or guardian, shall permit their children under the age of 13, to possess or easily have access to any device, which provides unfiltered and unrestricted access to the internet in such a way that said parent, or guardian, is not fully aware of each and every website that the child may access with said device."
[As for anyone like, what about the vulnerable? There's this thing called a library, and don't tell me public schools don't have resources.]
Just saying.
However google here is that junkie who tattoed buddhists scriptures on his arms, but never bothered to live by them. He did the "don't do evil" tattoo when he was devising a plan to rob a monastery. That was his inner self tried to stop him. When he decided to take hostages, he added "learn to do good". Shortly before he decided to build a torture chamber, his inner self made the final attempt and made him do the "clean your heart" tattoo. Corporations are soulless creatures, and can't tell what's good and what's evil.
But articles like this complain about the company, instead of the politicians. What a load of crap.
If corporation gets a fine that's lower than their profits from breaking the law, then it's not a punishment but government getting its cut. Prosecuting few low hanging fruits doesn't make this administration any less neoliberal than previous ones, also remember that they will get prosecuted mostly for stealing from richer.
Also - corporations are full of people. And those are all Americans. Even lobbyists are Americans.
But we should do something useful, and we're looking for easier targets to focus our rage and aggression on. I recommend those being the people that explicitly have been given power. Based on what I know about the American constitution, I believe that would be the government.
TBF Mike's done both: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/22/i-explained-to-a-court-h...
This isn't some ragtag blogger, he very much makes sure to utilize and report on all available channels on issues like these. But of course, what HackerNews votes on will be swayed more by "complaining about tech company" instead of "complaining to the judges".
The second will be more or less what we have now, but my fear is that access to this layer will be restricted further and further until it goes the way of Usenet and ISPs either willingly (or by regulation) turn off access to it.
1. Children (duh, this article)
2. Misinformation (accountability, no astroturfing)
3. Misinformation Robots (age verifying robots is a difficult task)
4. Malicious Robots (do you need Cloudflare if you have an Age ID Firewall?)
5. Scraping Robots (nothing prevents scraping like knowing who to sue...)
6. Hackers (nothing prevents hacking like knowing who to sue, even if it's only 80% of the time...)
7. AI Use / Abuse (anonymity is a dangerous thing with AI)
Etc. To be honest, if I was an Age ID verification company, I'd be calling around to my competition to figure out how to develop some kind of interoperability standard; in the hopes that would make age-restricted services much more convenient and thus widespread. Now if they could get Billing integrated into the system as well, then we're cooking with gas.
On top of all of your reasons.
8. Destroy privacy of anonymous users.
9. Increase privacy by preventing reposting (by robots or trolls) of information that a court has ordered suppressed. (Example from the near future: AI-generated revenge porn.)
10. Increase privacy by preventing companies like Clearview AI from legally getting away with murder of privacy.
Edit for Belopolye's response below: Very good point; but that would require all websites to be in on it and not just a partial implementation. But the movie and video game industries would love that...
Basically any site whose owner or operator you cannot put to jail.
.. and then the requirement
.. and then the law?
I'll take my Internet unsafe, thank you very much.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37330234
* A site must be certified by some board in order to be accessible. At what level is a site certified? Root level? Page level? Individual content item.
* A site hosts user generated content. This could be as small as comments on an article, or as large as YouTube. How is the site certified? If each piece of content must be certified, who assumes responsibility for certification?
* A site is certified as appropriate for all ages. The owner of the site then puts content that would have caused to to fail certification. At what interval is a site expected to recertify? What is the ramification for certification and then hosting of objectionable content?
* You have a process that is onerous for site administrators to comply with in order to host content for children. What incentive is for them to comply vs. not host a site that requires certification?
* As a parent, you install a compliant operating system that enforces this system. Sites comply with the program and it works without exception. Kids talk, as they do, and share how to get around this system by using a Linux live environment to boot into an OS that does not enforce the parental control header. How do you prevent this?
* As a parent, you install a compliant operating system that enforces this system. Your kid either does not know how, or is prevented from circumventing these access controls. They have one or more friends that have computers that are not blocked from accessing this content. How do you prevent them from accessing content in this system?
There could be an organization that verifies that the owner and operator of the site are not foreign (so they can be taken to court if needed), reviews the content policy and moderation policy to ensure that no unsafe content can be published, and issues a cryptographic signature to the website. The website displays a signature in HTTP headers.
> How is the site certified? If each piece of content must be certified, who assumes responsibility for certification?
There should be moderation policy guaranteering safety, for example, all comments must be reviewed by moderators.
> The owner of the site then puts content that would have caused to to fail certification
Then they can get into jail if they do it intentionally.
> What incentive is for them to comply vs. not host a site that requires certification?
They can have paid content or show ads.
> by using a Linux live environment to boot into an OS that does not enforce the parental control header.
Requirement to install Linux will stop majority of children.
The near collapse of democracy in the United States, the various nasty impacts of social media, the death of professional journalism, the emergence of automated propaganda bots, etc are all negative impacts of open internet that are destroying society.
This may not be the answer, but neither is that status quo. We can't go back to 2003 or 1993.
The older people here live like it's 2003. It's not. HN is a throwback to those days, but we live in a world shaped by anonymous actors performing in bad faith.
So which of these is a walled-garden internet going to fix?
Actually which of these are even a consequence of the internet being open in the first place?
Pretty sure the answer to both is: none. These (perceived) issues are completely tangential and have absolutely nothing to do with the internet being open or closed.
This sounds a lot to me like: "People I don't like are using this thing, so let's ruin it for everyone."
You're still not going to like these people afterwards, nor are going to change them for the better by antagonizing everyone.
Banning anonymous speech would make it more dangerous to advocate against current policy, and speed up this collapse you're worried about.
So you propose a controlled demolition? That's what abolishing the right or opportunity to speak anonymously amounts to. Professional journalists don't need to be protected from anonymous jeers, if anything is killing their industry it's their failure to monetize and maybe you can blame adblockers for that, but not anonymous speech. And frankly, professional journalists have always predominantly been the mouthpieces of wealthy. Need I remind you that professional journalists working for the likes of William Randolph Hearst cynically provoked the Spanish-American War for profit? The glory days of journalism are an illusion that appears when you look back at the past through rose-tinted glasses. Whatever the answer is, it isn't to silence those who already have the least power, those who can only speak anonymously without corporate apparatuses to back them up.
Social media is the only thing you could possibly blame on the open internet, but it has more to do with the same incentive problem as internet journalism -- advertising is money, and advertising needs "engagement". Social media, like journalism, needs propaganda and conspiracy and flamewars to thrive in order to exist. They have no real incentive to reduce it, except to make it sure it doesn't cross the point where it goes a little too far and they start getting accused of "causing the near collapse of democracy in the united states"
Absolutely not, you are perhaps caught in the 2023 notion of social media. Early social sites thrived without any ads and company or celeb profiles even, just like early FB. Social media is and should be about common user interactions, most importantly the inner circle of acquaintances and then interest groups. Everything else was just made up to drive clicks and ad revenue.
I keep my opinion that Instagram is for idiots for example. Yes, probably an ignorant perspective and it isn't exclusively the case, but an opinion I can very much live with.
Has much is metastasizing, and how much is it just perceived to have done so because of failing media literacy about the internet? Basic late 90s/early 2000s internet safety was to assume untrustworthyness for everything. And regardless of how well a source proves itself, you keep giving it the side-eye.
But, where would people learn that media literacy today? The people and institutions that are branded as "serious" in our society don't have any financial incentive to want their audience to know critical reading/listening. Quite the opposite actually.
My internet happy place is pretty dandy. Trust in media and democracy wasn't destroyed by the internet, on the contrary, it was destroyed by people that didn't want to accept different perspectives anymore, tried to silence others and consolidate the content on previously free internet platforms.
The foundation of this bullshit idea is intellectual property. Let's just go ahead and get rid of that, and let the people manage their network.
For myself, if this plays out as I’ve described it just means it’s time to…go read a book or something, I don’t know.
That is their leverage, yes, but the tool at hand is copyright.
As I get older and live through this amazing ride, I am increasingly of the mind that the total abolition of "intellectual property" in all its manifest forms would not only be the saving move for humanity, but that it's more or less inevitable.
Climate change is going to put so much pressure on us to innovate very rapidly, and patents and copyright now form such obvious impediments, nobody except Disney is going to give a care about enforcing intellectual property within 20 years. These are the last desperate days of the old order trying to bury its spoils through centralisation and locking-down.
As an author, coder, inventor and creator I also see that generative "AI" - or rather the emergence of a portable semiotic/literary digital collective consciousness - will spell the end for ego-driven protection rackets that make us say "Think of the creators who need food!"
New tools will provide such abundance to creativity. We will still create of course, and enjoy it very much.
"The Internet" is such a fascinating story. Just at the point when we think all is lost, quite by surprise, and suddenly, we win. So in the 22nd century I imagine we will look back on the days when one couldn't freely share any digital artifact as we look back on slavery and witch hunting today.
And in that richness and abundance people will stop seeking out what is harmful to them to nurse their empty, depressive desperation and hopelessness. And those that profit from pushing misery at others will have no place the table.
I am only sad I won't get to live in that time - but watching the death of such rotten conceits as "intellectual property" and the "advertising industry" will be satisfaction enough.
I mean the internet at first got away being what it was, because it was small, and because it didn't affect outside of the internet that much.
But now that the net is big, and connected to 'real things' that suddenly being a degree of separation from the "Genocide power hour forum" is actually quite unpleasant and has many risks. Businesses will gladly move to some walled garden to avoid this, they don't care about freedom, they care about profit. And while your aunt and uncle say they care about freedom, they mean "Freedom to be exactly like them and any other degenerates get nailed to a cross".
Your average voter will get tired of the crime and harassment online will vote in the next authoritarian that says they have an simple easy solution for the internet problem. Us techies will say "but the authoritarian is wrong, this isn't simple or easy". The authoritarian knowing how propaganda works will tell the lie twice as big and twice as often and win the next election.
I support this entirely. One of the largest reasons why the internet is getting much worse with time is that businesses want to use it. Getting them off the open internet would eliminate a fair amount of nastiness and might return some of what we've lost.
The giveaway is the amount of traffic generated by users in the second category is much lower than it used to be, while the first category grows. Just look at how much everyone here complains about their inability to find interesting things in this second tier today. Now that the VC money isn't going to prop up free stuff, or the ecosystem of dev tools to support free stuff, it's hard to see how the second lives on.
What will be left is P2P, torrents, and psyops masquerading as organic meme wars, everything else will evaporate or migrate to the first tier.
The complaint here isn't the use of age and/or identity verification for anything at all. It's using it to access social media. There isn't much in the way of a good legal reason to do this and previous attempts have seemingly been shut down by courts. Children are currently allowed to enter and occupy congregation spaces also used by adults, i.e. churches, parks, community centers, libraries. Private clubs are allowed to ban children if they want to, but have never been legally required to unless they specifically provide adult services like strippers and booze.
This also, of course, seems way less workable than real-world versions. At least in person, if a child presents a fake ID, a bouncer can sanity check that they look like the photo and look like they might actually be an adult. 12 year-olds with pocket change to spare can pretty trivially pay a poor person who doesn't give a shit to scan their retinas in Sam Altman's world coin face reader and hand over their private keys and now they've got a fake ID that no website can call bullshit on. Even without that, a kid can easily get an older sibling or friend to share a login, just like my wife's younger sister used to borrow my wife's ID to get into clubs and bars or I used to buy cigarettes and liquor for my friends because I had the earliest birthday.
Policymakers don't want to admit it, but it is ultimately up to parents to police what their children do on the Internet. There is no automated system that can't be beaten until they figure out a way to hook up a blood prick to your computer and check telomere length to estimate your genetic age, assuming we don't figure out how to reverse that, and even that can't prevent a child from shoulder-surfing an adult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendmen...
I'm posting because a lot of people are unaware of this part of the American constitution, similar to how jury nullification is something 'they' don't want you to know about ;-)
It did that awhile ago with amp.
> just because something is a good idea for companies to do does not mean that it should be mandated by law.
like forcing use of USB-C connectors.
Make it a legal requirement for parents to set up this option for their children on every device they use. Make it illegal to send invalid "safe content" headers.
Also, with "safe content" setting OS should allow running and installing only apps that are verified to be safe (for example, it should not allow installing messengers like Telegram or browsers that do not respect safe content settings).
This way there is no need to verify anything and make life complicated for adult people.
1. Might be hard to enforce the safe content header... They have a hard enough time with copyright content, and there's a much larger financial incentive in that case.
2. Need to agree on what is safe and what isn't. Bit of a can of worms there...
You don't need to enforce it. Sites without this header will not be accessible from a browser when "safe content" setting is active.
> Need to agree on what is safe and what isn't
There are ratings for games and movies, let's consider "safe content" to be a content which a 12-year old can watch.
The existing ratings are terrible, though, and as a parent I think they allow things that I very much object to my children seeing, and prohibit things that I don't.
If anyone can do a secure, child-safe device that’s so expensive they don’t need to show ads to be profitable, it’s them.
Yes, but there is no company that feels they are profitable enough so they still shows ads. Apple shows ads and makes decent profits from it, they are just a massive company like all the others.
There are obvious examples of unsuitable content like pornography but there’s also a wide variety of content out there at varying levels of suitability. And a lot of people with different opinions about what is suitable (e.g. non pornographic nudity). Good luck finding universal agreement on that. And how would anyone act on a violator? Would the police have access to a universal blocklist in all ISPs?
There are already a number of voluntary systems that operate the way you describe. Legally mandating it would be very difficult.
There are ratings for movies and games, just use any of them, for example, "General Audiences" rating.
Another user suggested that there should be an organization that issues or revokes the cryptographic signatures after verifying website's content. The site displays the signature proving that it was checked to be safe, in HTTP headers.
Look at Florida and their "don't say gay" bill. They want kids to remain oblivious to the existence of LGBT people, using "think of the children" rhetoric, and I have no doubt they would use "child friendly internet" legislation to ban even the most milquetoast acknowledgment of our existence, because they see it all as "indoctrination" and "grooming." As a lesbian, I find this abhorrent, but even if you're not LGBT, you should be afraid of these kinds of laws, because the Christian right will inevitably use them against you, too. If you're atheist (and if you use HN, you probably are), believe in the theory of evolution, believe in climate change, are a person of color...you get the picture.
And then there's the fact that the internet is international. Content about women's suffrage, for instance, would likely be deemed "inappropriate for children" in much of the Arab world, both because most of those nations are not democratic, but also because they want to avoid empowering women.
The suggestions to "just use the MPA rating system" are bad because, even if those ratings were objective (they're not), the good thing about them is that they're not legislatively enforced. If a child wants to see an R-rated movie, the theater won't sell them a ticket directly, but if they're accompanied by a parent, they can see it, and that's probably the best system we can hope for: a voluntary system where parents can allow their kids access to what they feel is appropriate. And for all the flaws that has, it's better than having CPS take your kids because you let them read the wikipedia page about being trans.
Regarding foreign countries, they already block the content they don't like, but for everyone, so this plan won't change anything there.
Why is that a given?
Same for alcohol, which amazingly isn't legal in US till 21!!!
So let's be clear. We aren't talking about good policy or maximizing safety and minimizing harm. We're talking about trigger issue to make pro and con demographics vote along party lines on this issue instead of having the freedom to vote on relevant issues which would positively impact society.
Yes, yes, I know teenagers get ahold of porn, I was also a teenager once. But the OP was talking about passing a law for this stuff. You think a politician that stands up and says “porn for 15 year olds is cool by me!” is going to last more than five minutes? Of course they won’t.
Instead of one "safe mode" there could be several, for example "safe for all", "safe for teens" etc.
Regarding movie sites, there are paid sites where you can legally watch anime or cartoons, and I am sure they will pass the certification for safe content.
That has an objective standard and a clear harm to children (and adults, but we're not able to prevent it). Meanwhile, there would definitely be a wide range of relatively harmless content arbitrarily not on your whitelist.
>Instead of one "safe mode" there could be several, for example "safe for all", "safe for teens" etc.
This is a good improvement on your idea, but it won't fix a lot of the issues people have with it.
>I am sure they will pass the certification for safe content.
Not the anime or cartoons I would have wanted to watch as a minor. The Simpsons, Family Guy, do I need to go on to South Park or Rick and Morty? Banned, there's sexuality and violence. Kids want these and will work around it.
Why? Let the parents decide -- they now have the controls they need.
> Make it illegal to send invalid "safe content" headers.
Just make them cryptographically signed. Anything without a valid signed header is "adult".
Yes this is better, let some organisation issue these signatures.
... and this is just the tip of the iceberg
IMO a policy like this would not be easy to pull off at all.
There are ratings for movies and games, we can use them.
> What if different countries have different definitions?
Then browser will refuse to open pages from that countries. For example, there could be an organization assigning rating to websites and issuing them a cryptographic signature as a proof. The browser will refuse to open any page without this signature, including pages from countries with different standards.
> How do you enforce this policy?
With jail terms.
> At what point is a person allowed to view not "safe" web content?
At the age of 18.
These are provided by a private entity. What we clearly need is an official government morality commission.
much of social media is unrated, and no organization is going to rate every tiktok before releasing it to the wild. Even rated Video Games with online (even as family friendly as Nintendo) have the same "online interactions are not rated", because you cannot predict what activity will happen between two people in real time.
>At the age of 18.
TV and movie ratings have multiple age gates. 6+, 10+, and 17+ are the most common (and there are all kinds of 12/13/14/16+ ratings). This is exactly why "for kids" is such a asinine binary to base things on. the government doesn't define any age gates, but pretty much every single piece of media that rates content recognizes that a 5 year old is different from a 16 year old.
>The browser will refuse to open any page without this signature, including pages from countries with different standards.
neat, more region locking. just what everyone wanted. I guess NordVPN is going to campaign hard for this.
Nobody in their sane mind will campaign for allowing children to access harmful content.
Probably would be a lot of work, but if it's important then we could definitely do it.
Furthermore, OS makers could lobby for additional age gates. I.e. a child phone for ages 15 and under, a teenager phone for ages 16-17, an adult phone for 21.
The system is so complicated that I think many parents simply get confused and do not want to use it.
Instead there should be a single checkbox: "allow safe content only on this device". That's all (and you can leave detailed settings for system administrators).
[1] https://www.internetmatters.org/parental-controls/smartphone...
- Web browser, both Safari and embedded app browsers honour these settings
- You can disable apps that do not have parental controls integrated
I do not know if there are generally available whitelists for websites, and I assume this would depend on the cultural context like the nationality and religion of the parents. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Safe according to who? There is no actual consensus outside of a core of extreme things about what is "safe for kids" and what is not.
The closest thing to government intervention is the FCC, since the govt. does have some regulations on how TV and Radio can run (since the govt. infrastructure is used to broadcast). e.g.:
>Broadcasting obscene content is prohibited by law at all times of the day. Indecent and profane content are prohibited on broadcast TV and radio between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.
So the only things really controlled are profanity (i.e. a relatively tiny list of words you must not say or bleep out) and "obscenity" (feel free to look up that govt. definition. Enjoy the rabbit hole). As for "indecency"
>Indecent content portrays sexual or excretory organs or activities in a way that is patently offensive but does not meet the three-prong test for obscenity.
so, not really much for radio. Mostly prevents non-artistic/educational genitalia for TV's sake.
-----
but all that was a tangent. The internet is not under FCC protocol and the FCC only endorses certain advertising, spam, and malware related issues, not content.
On top of all that though, we don't need to make even more things be behind this absurd age gate. I remember how ridiculous it felt turning 18, going from legally being a child to being a mostly free adult just on a specific day, despite obviously not having suddenly changed as a person in 1 day and having already been living independently at university thousands of miles away from home. Same again upon turning 21.
This idea of sharp limits defined by age is just an intellectually lazy approach which is not how we should be treating access to general information for a fifth of a person's life. Tech companies love this kind of intellectual laziness, and similar thinking is responsible for why said tech companies are responsible for so many current social issues.
Done dealing with unfilteres 3rd parties as they are always not to be trusted. Generate everything
I recognize the importance of having the government decide what foods are safe, what industrial byproducts are safe, and so forth when it comes to matters of objective science but when they start policing content like books and websites it starts stepping into some serious authoritarianism...
A tv should show zero content until it has fully verified the identity / age of the viewer(s) and sense if someone new arrives and then stop programming until that person is verified.
This could also be done by transmitting scrambled content, that can only be fixed by wearing identity ensured glasses genetically locked to the wearer.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/1ggg4u/please_drink_... (since you know. 4chan doesn't exactly archive itself)
The parents buy a laptop, and they have the admin password. You need the admin password to change the setting.
If parents want to enable this or not for their kids, it's up to the parents to decide. Also, if adults want to enable the filters for their own personal use, that's fine too.
There's literally an entire industry doing a bad job of this right now. If Google actually cared about improving the status quo, then instead of trying to mandate adults use cryptographically signed advertising identities to browse the web, they could use their web crawl and influence over web standards to improve the quality of opt-in content filters (by producing better site ratings lists, in the style of adblock lists, for example).
Device-level protection doesn't work for kids that can break into the bootloader or jailbreak the machine their parents got for them, but not many things realistically will.
Also, the scheme's failure to work against sophisticated users is a feature: at some point, kids turn into adults. These mechanisms shouldn't be capable of censoring adults' internet feeds.
iOS seems to have "parental controls", but they are implemented in the worst way possible. For example, to restrict access to websites, you have to manually enter the domains into black or white lists [1]. It seems like Apple tried to comply with some kind of regulations the cheapest way.
There should be just a single checkbox, because I don't think there are many people who are ready to manually compile white lists of websites and browse through those complicated settings.
[1] https://www.internetmatters.org/parental-controls/smartphone...
windows does have parental controls, but they of course can only extend to Edge. I'm sure you can control whether a non-admin can install Chrome/Firefox or really anything non-authorized if you need to.
>There should be just a single checkbox. because I don't think there are many people who are ready to manually compile white lists of websites and browse through those complicated settings.
And who compiles the list? why do we trust them to turn a switch on or off?
Also, I hope you can understand why I think "because parents are stupid/lazy" is the worst kind of reasoning you can give to enforce control over the entire internet. We solve laziness with awareness and stupidity with education. Why are we giving up on that?
What I meant is that OS should have one simple option, not a complicated tree of settings made for sysadmins. And it should be reliable, and apply to all applications, so that you cannot insert a thumb drive with Firefox or Tor browser and enjoy uncensored Internet access.
Because many people do not want to compile a white list of allowed websites themselves. It is too much trouble. So they would rather delegate this to some organization.
> Also, I hope you can understand why I think "because parents are stupid/lazy" is the worst kind of reasoning you can give to enforce control over the entire internet.
This doesn't enforce control over Internet, this only adds a locked-down mode for children. For adults, there are no restrictions.
I'll remind you that your proposal mentioned:
>Make it a legal requirement for parents to set up this option for their children on every device they use
I don't like the idea that the government a) mandates a parent take action on their devices just becsuse they have children nor b) that specific companies are mandated to make specific feature on their private OS (and we won't even go into the rabbit hole of how you enforce this for Linux. Are kids now not allowed to use Linux?
And to respond to another comment:
>For options to be available, you need regulations. Today without regulations there is no OS that would provide a single checkbox like "show only content appropriate for N year old". It seems that there is no motivation for device and OS manufacturers to invest into implementing such options and filters.
I fundamentally disagree with both of these premises. You can create options without government intervention. That's exactly how games and movies work.
And just becsuse OS's don't have the options nor convenience you want doesn't mean they are mandated to apply them (again, I will also mention Linux as a confusing factor to mandate). Third party tools exist that do all this for you on all major private OS's convinently and will curate lists for the parent. It's up to the parent to seek these out (or, learn how to use the admin settings. We're not talking about command line prompts nor batch scripting here).
> Device-level protection doesn't work for kids that can break into the bootloader or jailbreak the machine their parents got for them, but not many things realistically will.
Kids that are clever enough to hack their devices to get around those kinds of restrictions are probably old enough and smart enough to not need the censoring.
I think both of you are making the same point. offer options not mandates. internet or device filters are options a parent can enable, not mandates in order to not have Child Protective Services at their door. if some highly religious parent wants to shut down everything except the Bible that's their choice (not one I agree with, but a choice). If a parent trusts their kid to have free reign over the internet that's also a choice (I imagine that's how many of us were raised, before such filters even existed).
Then again, for those of us who are skeptical that such a program can work, I'm guessing we already aren't or do not plan to allow our kids on the internet without supervision, so it's a bit of a moot point for me.
I'm just annoyed that there is a certain set of incentives that allow for people to ignorantly trust the security and safety of various websites and applications, and then get some sort of reward/handout in the form of a class-action lawsuit against these services when they're finally caught failing to live up to the proposed safety regulations. So every idiot who had an account can line up for $20, and I get zero reward for correctly avoiding the situation by not signing up. These are perverse incentives IMO, and I'll just continue to be annoyed with all solutions that continue to allow this sort of thing to happen.
Under your proposal, there's an inevitable lawsuit where a bunch of people get paid out for allowing their children to get goatse'd because 'kidpxrn.biz' falsely put on the safe-for-kidz header. Sure, they got sued, but a bunch of kids got goatse'd in the process, and their parents got $20. Cool future, I guess.
There could be an organization that reviews site content and moderation policies, ensures that site operator and owner are not foreigners (so that they can be put to jail) and issues cryptographic proof of verification that the website would display in an HTTP header. As website owners are not anonymous they will not risk a jail term to put unsafe content on the site.
What is safe content?
Is the Bible safe content? Is the Koran? etc.
What about news stories about Israel? Hamas? etc.
Love the phrasing.
Telegram etc can also have web frontends that do the same.
There's no easy way around this, and that's because of a totally different reason. The reason being that the cause for all this is control, namely government control and surveillance over the populace. Companies profit from this and governments can increase their power with this, so they are natural allies in this scenario - government has the will and power over law, and companies have the know-how and the technical means, and of course a similar thirst of power.
Situations like this must not be mistaken for the technicalities that they present. It's simply the next step in the power grab.
This issue is not technical, and so, we should stop trying to fix it with technical solutions. The proposal is only relevant because it's an effective smokescreen. There is real abuse happening, people are understandably, but overly anxious about that abuse, and a corporation sees an opportunity for power in this situation. That's all there is to it.
1. It shouldn't be a legal requirement for parents to enable this on their kids devices. This should mearly be an option available to parents. Do not tell me how to raise my kids.
2. "Safe for kids" is pretty nebulous, and you already know certain dumpy states would abuse the hell out of this (i.e. declaring content "unsafe for kids" if it features a man with effeminate characteristics).
Maybe a solution to the latter problem would be to use content descriptors instead of a blanket "safe for kids" flag. i.e. individual flags for pornography, graphic violence, naughty words, etc.
The government is already doing it, depending on the country, you can get prosecuted if for example you buy alcohol for children or let them do something dangerous.
> Maybe a solution to the latter problem would be to use content descriptors instead of a blanket "safe for kids" flag. i.e. individual flags for pornography, graphic violence, naughty words, etc.
Maybe, but this increases possibility for fingerprinting.
The difference is that alcohol can cause immediate and even irreversible harm to anyone, especially children. Alcohol is heavily regulated even for use by full grown adults, specifically because of its capacity for harm. Evidence that seeing nudity or hearing dirty words does the same is incredibly sketchy at best. But even then, in most states, it is perfectly legal to let your own kids drink alcohol on your own private property.
> Maybe, but this increases possibility for fingerprinting.
Maybe, I think that depends on the implementation. But either way, I doubt it is much of a concern for parents who just want better control over what their kids see and do online.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit
> Also, with "safe content" setting OS should allow running and installing only apps that are verified to be safe
This is hard to do on PCs where you can install your own operating system and have full control, but they're not the dominant Internet device anymore. You would have to make those illegal or illegal for children to have. But this is effectively possible on modern phones.
> Make it illegal to send invalid "safe content" headers.
A. This requires all states and all countries to agree what is and is not safe content
B. Enforcement across national borders will be inefficient unless the two countries are tightly coupled. Disagreements could be leveraged for political ends (just think of current conflicts).
C. Unless a site that hosts user-generated content reviews every single item of content before allowing it to be published, it can't guarantee that all content on its platform is safe. Therefore it would have to be marked unsafe unless a special provision is made here.
There could be an organization that reviews site content and moderation policies and assigns a rating, issuing a cryptographic signature to the website.
> Enforcement across national borders will be inefficient
The rating will not be assigned to foreign-owned websites. Also, the enforcement is pretty efficient, there are police raids on sites with illegal content, and people get arrested for it.
> Unless a site that hosts user-generated content reviews every single item of content before allowing it to be published, it can't guarantee that all content on its platform is safe.
Then it doesn't get a "safe" rating.
In short people, there's no need for cryptography certification security etc, what the governments push for would require websites and services to make at most exactly the same decisions!!!
There's no certification required that I'm aware about, websites operators are required to make the decisions themselves exactly like in this proposal !!
Conundrums with user content, hosted services, legal responsibility, same!!!
The only difference is that with age verification the website would have to decide if he needs to prompt the age verification system, with this if he wants to send the header!
Once there's a header (good old PICS) in a tls connection that's it!
(of course the huge difference with this system is that here only the services that explicitly want to be offered to minors would need to do something, as opposed to everyone - and as an aside this would limit immensely what's accessible to minors)
I like that it's the main goal for all these huge and pervasive legal changes.
I know there's all the cultural "can't show a nipple to my pure innocent girl", but it still amazes me our societies as a whole have to deal with the radicalism of a few.
Raised barriers of entry means there will be improvements for services which can "help lift smaller companies up". For example, for finance, AML/KYC companies. Now I guess, for some internet services, "age verification" companies. This way age verification services may have some competition between each other and that can make it easier for people to do, and also cheaper for everyone to use.
But then, such super easy technological solutions come in the way of selling people to advertisers. So here we are.
I think Scott Alexander wrote up a blogpost about the difference he saw between moderation and censorship. It's similar to what you suggested.
Don't give your kid a smart phone. Don't let them use a computer unsupervised.
Worried about them seeing shit from classmates? I think most schools these days don't allow phones during school hours, so just pick your kid up immediately as school ends and at worst they're gonna see 10 minutes of hardcore pornography per day but that's a pretty ridiculous assumption.
Alternatively, instill good values and behaviors in your kid so that they will choose to avoid this.
3 or more people could just take turn using it, no big deal. That ship has sailed.
Don't give your kid a pack of smokes. Don't let them buy things unsupervised.
Worried about them seeing classmates smoke? I think most schools these days don't allow smoking during school hours, so just pick your kid up immediately as school ends and at worst they're gonna see 10 minutes of smoking per day but that's a pretty ridiculous assumption.
Alternatively, instill good values and behaviors in your kid so that they will choose to avoid smoking.
As a parent, I'm willing to take all the blame in the world for letting my kid on the internet if you're willing to live with no internet for 10 years.
Should be simple enough, right ?
Oh, I'll help you find what you need anytime, just tell me what to search for and I'll print and send you the results whenever I have some spare time.
Kids are supposed to become adults, and for that they need to actually interact with the actual workd, do adulty things and process the reality.
It's a delusion to think you can live in a school shaped faraday cage for 10+ years and just become a balanced and productive member of the society when the door unlocks at 18.
If I had all my living expenses paid for, didn't have to work, and basically just got to learn all day, I'd love to leave the internet behind for a decade.
Of course not. You're still working, keep a computer at work with all the filtering and surveillance coming with it (just like kids have internet access at school), but no access outside that. You pay your bills at the counter, buy everything in brick and mortar, short of asking me to order them for you online.
This is how it feels to have a 12yo kid needing a new backpack, or looking for a new game, but they can't just go to the store because brick and mortar stores just became ridiculously limited if they still even exist, and looking for it online means having your parents over your shoulders with very limited time and nowhere to ask online, because you're not the age that is allowed to talk to people yet.
PS: it's a really good exercice to imagine leaving your teenage life now, with or without internet. The gap between what we remember being kids, and what it actually feels like right now is pretty eye opening. As adults we remodeled a lot of our life around the internet, but many still assume kids live in the 80's worlds.
"The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished —it is no longer secure in its instincts."
It's a big boat and it takes a while to sink, but it will.
What exactly is "Age Assurance"? Secondly, why would Age Assurance hinder new companies that want to create content platforms?
>Where required, age assurance – which can range from declaration to inference and verication – should be risk-based, preserving users’ access to information and services, and respecting their privacy.
so it's purposfully vague. It can be anything from a checkbox you check saying "I'm 13/18/etc." to "we require a face scan or governent issued ID in order to verify you". If you believe their claim, they want to do something more towards the former except with 18+ sites. If you don't believe their claim, you probably veer more towards Techdirt's cynicism as it being sugarcoating for semi-invasive age verification:
>But… it’s not? It’s basically lobbying for age verification, just in the guise of “age assurance,” which is effectively “age verification, but if you’re a smaller company you can get it wrong some undefined amount of time, until someone sues you.” I mean, what’s here is not “lobbying against age verification,” it’s basically saying “here’s how to require age verification.”
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>Secondly, why would Age Assurance hinder new companies that want to create content platforms?
Regulation. the more you need to do to get your site off the ground (and make its money back), the higher the cost. Or if they ignore/are ignorant of it they can be sued out of the race.
This can be good (GDPR requirements to protect privacy), but like everything we need to weigh if the effect is worth the outcome. I am admittedly more scrutiny on if every website over X size needs to make sure their site is "child friendly".
It would be interesting to see how the reverse of this system is implemented; adults must prove they're adults before being able to access certain websites. What technical measures would allow this? Information can leak in HTTP requests and responses, i.e. "curl -H 'User-Agent: help me i am trapped at the bottom of the ocean' https://example.com" before any authentication has taken place. Is an adult allowed to send that request to a child? Probably not! This would mean the system has to be implemented at a lower level layer; websites would only be served on private IP ranges, and you'd have to setup an IPSec tunnel or similar first to prevent that out-of-band leakage. (You can get more absurd; everyone has a /64 of IPv6 space for themselves, so you can use your source address as a form of intentional information leakage; 1:2:3:4::1234 is a 1, 1:2:3:4::4321 is a 0. This means that, legally, you would have to be careful about how you do the TCP 3 way handshake, because, as a middlebox, you can't prove that sending a SYN in reply to a SYN is not actually someone requesting adult content.)
All in all, this seems technically impossible to implement, prone to making identity theft even more lucrative than it already is (don't reuse your ID.me password anywhere else, or some kid is going to use it to cheat in a video game and get you sent to jail a la South Korea), and unconstitutional ("prior restraint").
When you make something, you only have to figure out one way to make it work. When you try to secure something, you have to figure out every possible way the defenses could fail, or you've done nothing.
>Last Monday, Google announced “a policy framework to protect children and teens online,” which was echoed by subsidiary YouTube, which posted basically the same thing, talking about it’s “principled approach for children and teenagers.” Both of these pushed not just a “principled approach” for companies to take, but a legislative model (and I hear that they’re out pushing “model bills” across legislatures as well).
And if you want google's official lede:
>Today we’re releasing our Legislative Framework to Protect Children and Teens Online. The Framework outlines some principles for laws seeking to improve online experiences and keep children and teens safer when using the internet. We hope that sharing our experiences and perspectives will advance the work of the policymakers and experts addressing these issues, and we look forward to engaging constructively with them.
in essence, they want to push out more government sanctioned age verification (or "age assurance" as Google calls it), similar to COPPA.
1. The site that wants to verify your age learns that your age meets their criteria but does not learn anything else from the verification system except as noted in #2.
2. The site that you present ID information to in order to prove your age does not learn what site the verification is for. The site in #1 will learn what site you presented ID to but not when you presented it.
3. Someone who obtains all the records from both sites is not able to tell whether or not you visited the site in #1.
It seems inevitable that age verification is going to become a requirements at many sites. Instead of just trying to stop that from happening those who want to maintain the ability to browse anonymously should probably also put some effort into trying to insure that if/when it does happen sites are required to accept a system with those three properties.
5. With device tracking and fingerprinting and leaked data, establishing your real ID should ironically be childs play. You only look at the cryptographically relevant data of resource and auth provider, but there is contemporary data that makes including a third party a security issue. Otherwise #3 is wrong in any practical case.
Age verification is already implemented for some services. I don't use them anymore. There are better alternatives.