I agree it probably won't happen (it's after all not the first time the UK government has tried similar nonsense).
But e.g. the EU settlement scheme offered two options for me to scan my passport: Use a phone with NFC, or go to a government center to have it scanned there.
There's nothing fundamentally preventing them from offering a similar set of options for this nonsense where the fallback for anyone who hasn't got a smartphone would be to go to a government center and tell some government official that they want to be authorized to watch porn (though given the current government, more likely it'd be outsourced without proper tender to a company run by the friends of a government minister).
I'm going to predict that 1) a contract will be negotiated with someone with political connections, 2) the scheme will be silently scrapped after significant cost overruns and failing to produce a viable solution.
Very minimal requirements, so much so I forget they even exist. In my experience A brief chat to customer services is enough to bypass it (without the need to hand over ID), and that only happens for pay as you go, As contract plan presume you are of legal age (because well you have to be to sign up for a contract), and then its a simple question during sign up and/or a toggle in the account management site (which a password reset for needs access to the sim card for a text message, not exactly rocket science for a kid to get around).
Same goes for fixed line broadband.
Edit: oh and that doesn't include bypassing the network lockouts via using your own DNS, Using Apples IP address protection (basically a VPN), or any other 3rd party VPN..
Why in the holy hell as the world's governments taken such an interest in the sex lives of their citizens?
Why is it their business in any way, shape or form?
I'm not talking about excluded topics like CP. They are illegal and rightly so.
This isn't that. This is monitoring who watches what, regardless of how this is written, and lied about to get passed.
> Why in the holy hell as the world's governments taken such an interest in the sex lives of their citizens?
Or their morals? Or their property? Or their family matters? Best of the philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists had thought about that but failed to produce any comprehensible answer. It's a mystery completely out of the man's reach, apparently.
On a serious note: of course they're interested in that because that's one of the most basic and fundamental parts of human society and it has always been regulated, in one way or another, in all of the societies for millennia.
First, I'm not referring to 623 BC. I'm referring to the past decade or so, where there has been a huge spike in the government snooping on people's sex lives.
The tech today, never existed before, so while I don't doubt there was maybe some sort of monitoring, historically, you can add all of it up and it still won't equate to the data gathering of today's tech.
The usual for this type of control is Religion, not specifically chasing someone down who rubbed one out, to a pic of a furry.
I mean, haven't governments always taken an interest? Lots of countries had and still have sodomy laws. Polygamy has been fought for centuries in the West. And I think most Western governments have fought the church over oversight over marriage somewhere between the 18th and the 20th centuries?
> Why in the holy hell as the world's governments taken such an interest in the sex lives of their citizens?
You're looking at it too narrowly.
Anything anyone can "take away" from you has power over you. It's a dominance play.
Government controls how you engage in sex.
Telcos control who you talk to.
Media controls what you see and hear.
Automakers control how you move.
Banks control how you trade.
I'm sure there are more examples (look how difficult it is to homestead anywhere), but the point is that in gatekeeping functions critical to our existence, we're always beholden to someone. Capturing two of these forms the basis of a cult. No surprise the Church used to worm its way into as much of this stack as possible; these days it's Big Tech doing the same.
The Conservative Party has always been the party of curtain twitching NIMBY authoritarians.
The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist, the greatest trick the conservatives ever played was convincing the world that they were conservative.
> I’m not sure how we push back against authoritarianism?
This is one of the reasons why the 2nd Amendment is a good thing. However in the UK they lost track of why a population needs to be able to defend itself when a tyrannical regime tries to take over…
In the US, the party in favor of unrestricted gun access is also the party that performatively hates porn, so I'm not sure if that would help in this case.
I do not think there is enough data to base this statement on. I am not aware of any high quality surveys or polling or better that would assess what overlap there is between people who highly favor freedom, with those who highly favor the 2nd Amendment, with those who highly oppose porn, with those who highly favor face scans.
The 2nd Amendment is worded as a conditional ("since well-trained militia is required for the state security, the citizens must be allowed to bear firearms") and its premise is actually false, so shouldn't it, technically speaking, have lost its legal power?
If you’re a male American citizen of a certain age, you are in the militia. Thats what “militia” means—it refers to the part of the citizenry capable of military service.
Historically it did. The Second Congress passed two Militia Acts in 1792, the second of which mandated that each member of the militia buy a musket or rifle along with ammunition and other kit, and to be organized into specific units as directed by their state legislatures.
The Bill of Rights (i.e. the first 10 Amendments) are individual rights. There's plenty of commentary about this, but quoting from the ACLU in particular:
"The entire Bill of Rights was created to protect rights the original citizens believed were naturally theirs."
I'm a gun owner and a believer in the natural right to keep and use tools. But small arms in the context of modern government technological authoritarianism amounts to little more than a security blanket - telling yourself both that you can protect yourself from it, and also that things aren't bad enough "yet". But at best you can go out in a blaze of "glory" while further contributing to the system's advance.
History is full of examples showing that you're wrong. That is not the best case scenario at all. Is it a possible scenario? Sure, but not the best case or only case by any means. The country itself is founded on examples of you being incorrect.
I don't really know what you're referring to from history, given that this level of technological development and fine-grained agile government/corporate perception/control is a pretty recent phenomenon. Our society is no longer kept in line by force projection from groups of humans with small arms, but rather surveillance tech, dispatchable forces, and the economic advantages of specialization/cooperation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gsz7Gu6agA
2A arguably protects anything from steak knives to nukes, despite what tyrants in power say.
People owned warships, cannons, etc privately at that time it was written. If people shouldn't have arms such as nukes or f-15 and 'scaled up weapons' the 2A should be amended to exclude some arms.
The relevance is neither the historical basis nor text restricts 2A to small arms, so why are we restricting the conversation to precisely their effectiveness?
>>...2A...
> But small arms in the context of modern government technological authoritarianism amounts to little more than a security blanket ...
I didn't mean to direct focus onto just small arms. The same dynamic applies with explosives, cannons, fighter jets, etc. For example, does having a ready-to-go tank in your back yard eliminate the problems with not getting a building permit?
The point is that focusing on weapons is futile when society is no longer ordered by overt force but rather economic/pragmatic attractors. In the western world the battle based on physical force has essentially been fought and won permanently - the result is democracy which is a similar dynamic without most of the violence. If a critical mass of people come together and want to change things, then that happens. The system has responded by dividing people into tribes and diverting them such that a critical mass opposed to the system itself doesn't actually happen.
I dunno. Small arms + blankets + petrol beating out an occupying force is pretty common. Hamas is building rockets out of drain pipes. What really matters is the morale to actually pull together and fight which is completely non existent in the western world. We need to become a lot less comfortable before anyone will do anything. Especially "British" "People".
Resisting occupation or engaging in terrorism against a foreign power are completely different scenarios than pushing back against democratically blessed bureaucratic overreach.
The KillDozer is an appropriate example. I cheered for that guy, along with many others. Some of the corrupt town officials got their comeuppance. But what did it really accomplish systematically?
When people criticize small arms in terms of resisting government, its usually because the government has better toys, and assume they would simply roll over the problem with tanks and planes. Thus you work your way back around to an occupation scenario.
The issue is that those toys have workarounds, especially for locals. The soviets ran into these problems several times. Sending tanks piloted by locals to put down locals often ended in a stalemate or worse (The locals cant tell whose piloting the tank, the tankers can identify their neighbors however)
If you want to narrow things down to guns keeping local politics straight, there was that recent business with the hardware store shotgun vs Shinzo Abe. The shotgun gentleman seems to have gotten every single demand met.
> When people criticize small arms in terms of resisting government, its usually because the government has better toys
But that is not the point I'm making. Like sure, I agree that a militia wielding small arms can resist an invading army, say in the case that the US military was defeated or didn't respond to an area because it wasn't considered strategic enough.
The point I am making is that it's fallacious to think that weapons can do anything to push back against homegrown democratically approved bureaucratic tyranny. As I said in another comment - how can a gun, explosives, or even a tank alleviate the problems you will face from not getting a building permit?
But this is what I'm talking about... Keep following that idea to flesh out the details. If there are enough people on board to make it an actual secession, then you also have enough voting power to just get friendly people into city hall and either eliminate permit requirements or at least rubber stamp them.
If there aren't enough people for that, then it's not actually a secession but rather just a few rebellious people the bureaucracy will eventually grind down. And the hyper-individualist suitcase nuke idea from Snow Crash is quite compelling, but so far seemingly untenable.
And neither one does anything about the extra-governmental system of control when you go to sell your house and the bank cartel sets the price much lower due to all the "unpermitted" work.
A big problem the communists had during Tiananmen Square was that PLA units were generally assigned to the localities that they drew their soldiers from. So Beijing was covered primarily by Beijinger soldiers. This was problematic because it turns out they didn't want to shoot their own, so they had to bring in PLA units from far away before the crackdown could really begin in earnest. They corrected this problem by mixing up units (so PLA units are stationed from places far away from where the soldiers were sourced). They also added actual riot police in the form of the PAP so they didn't have only PLA soldiers with tanks to put down internal insurrections.
As far as resisting "government" in a democracy, it is much more likely that one side of an ideological divide wants to subdue the other (or both want to subdue each other using force). More like Republicans vs. Democrats and not really the people vs. the US military. One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
The primary reason a government in control of a strong military (e.g. U.S.) wants to restrict private gun ownership is so that they can scare the populace indirectly by means of rampant crime, riots, etc. which they tacitly permit (or secretly encourage) The population is thereby forced to go along with ever more draconian laws and regulations because their safety is (or is perceived to be) threatened.
> Facial age-estimation tech, that will scan users' faces and use software to infer if they are an adult, is also an option.
Wouldn't this be trivially defeated by software which presents as a webcam and provides...any image you choose? Or is this also assuming a privileged, out of control of the user, remotely accessible camera?
As a father of young children, the internet wasn't quite there for watching porn until the turn of the millennium. And a few more years again for mobile.
Compared to today's landscape where teenagers and younger have a mobile phone and 24/7 access to porn.
I have my concerns. I'm not anti porn, but I'd like my kids to have a healthy relationship with it, and with future partners.
63 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadBut e.g. the EU settlement scheme offered two options for me to scan my passport: Use a phone with NFC, or go to a government center to have it scanned there.
There's nothing fundamentally preventing them from offering a similar set of options for this nonsense where the fallback for anyone who hasn't got a smartphone would be to go to a government center and tell some government official that they want to be authorized to watch porn (though given the current government, more likely it'd be outsourced without proper tender to a company run by the friends of a government minister).
I'm going to predict that 1) a contract will be negotiated with someone with political connections, 2) the scheme will be silently scrapped after significant cost overruns and failing to produce a viable solution.
The only reason you don’t think “oh that’s just China” is that the idea is just being floated in the news atm and hasn’t just been implemented. :-p
Same goes for fixed line broadband.
Edit: oh and that doesn't include bypassing the network lockouts via using your own DNS, Using Apples IP address protection (basically a VPN), or any other 3rd party VPN..
Also the "big brother is watching" ad campaign for vpn providers is pretty much writing itself.
Why is it their business in any way, shape or form?
I'm not talking about excluded topics like CP. They are illegal and rightly so. This isn't that. This is monitoring who watches what, regardless of how this is written, and lied about to get passed.
Or their morals? Or their property? Or their family matters? Best of the philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists had thought about that but failed to produce any comprehensible answer. It's a mystery completely out of the man's reach, apparently.
On a serious note: of course they're interested in that because that's one of the most basic and fundamental parts of human society and it has always been regulated, in one way or another, in all of the societies for millennia.
First, I'm not referring to 623 BC. I'm referring to the past decade or so, where there has been a huge spike in the government snooping on people's sex lives.
The tech today, never existed before, so while I don't doubt there was maybe some sort of monitoring, historically, you can add all of it up and it still won't equate to the data gathering of today's tech.
The usual for this type of control is Religion, not specifically chasing someone down who rubbed one out, to a pic of a furry.
You're looking at it too narrowly.
Anything anyone can "take away" from you has power over you. It's a dominance play.
Government controls how you engage in sex.
Telcos control who you talk to.
Media controls what you see and hear.
Automakers control how you move.
Banks control how you trade.
I'm sure there are more examples (look how difficult it is to homestead anywhere), but the point is that in gatekeeping functions critical to our existence, we're always beholden to someone. Capturing two of these forms the basis of a cult. No surprise the Church used to worm its way into as much of this stack as possible; these days it's Big Tech doing the same.
I suspect that will be an unintended side effect of this authoritarianism.
The Conservative Party was previously the more libertarian option in the U.K. (effectively) two-party system.
I’m not sure how we push back against authoritarianism?
The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist, the greatest trick the conservatives ever played was convincing the world that they were conservative.
This is one of the reasons why the 2nd Amendment is a good thing. However in the UK they lost track of why a population needs to be able to defend itself when a tyrannical regime tries to take over…
We've just gotten used to calling it the first 10, because the other one took a long time to ratify.
People owned warships, cannons, etc privately at that time it was written. If people shouldn't have arms such as nukes or f-15 and 'scaled up weapons' the 2A should be amended to exclude some arms.
>>...2A...
> But small arms in the context of modern government technological authoritarianism amounts to little more than a security blanket ...
The point is that focusing on weapons is futile when society is no longer ordered by overt force but rather economic/pragmatic attractors. In the western world the battle based on physical force has essentially been fought and won permanently - the result is democracy which is a similar dynamic without most of the violence. If a critical mass of people come together and want to change things, then that happens. The system has responded by dividing people into tribes and diverting them such that a critical mass opposed to the system itself doesn't actually happen.
The KillDozer is an appropriate example. I cheered for that guy, along with many others. Some of the corrupt town officials got their comeuppance. But what did it really accomplish systematically?
The issue is that those toys have workarounds, especially for locals. The soviets ran into these problems several times. Sending tanks piloted by locals to put down locals often ended in a stalemate or worse (The locals cant tell whose piloting the tank, the tankers can identify their neighbors however)
If you want to narrow things down to guns keeping local politics straight, there was that recent business with the hardware store shotgun vs Shinzo Abe. The shotgun gentleman seems to have gotten every single demand met.
But that is not the point I'm making. Like sure, I agree that a militia wielding small arms can resist an invading army, say in the case that the US military was defeated or didn't respond to an area because it wasn't considered strategic enough.
The point I am making is that it's fallacious to think that weapons can do anything to push back against homegrown democratically approved bureaucratic tyranny. As I said in another comment - how can a gun, explosives, or even a tank alleviate the problems you will face from not getting a building permit?
If there aren't enough people for that, then it's not actually a secession but rather just a few rebellious people the bureaucracy will eventually grind down. And the hyper-individualist suitcase nuke idea from Snow Crash is quite compelling, but so far seemingly untenable.
And neither one does anything about the extra-governmental system of control when you go to sell your house and the bank cartel sets the price much lower due to all the "unpermitted" work.
As far as resisting "government" in a democracy, it is much more likely that one side of an ideological divide wants to subdue the other (or both want to subdue each other using force). More like Republicans vs. Democrats and not really the people vs. the US military. One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
And/or just AI generate the faces to prove their age.
A dedicated chip that slaps Margaret Thatcher's face on all generated output.
Wouldn't this be trivially defeated by software which presents as a webcam and provides...any image you choose? Or is this also assuming a privileged, out of control of the user, remotely accessible camera?
Compared to today's landscape where teenagers and younger have a mobile phone and 24/7 access to porn.
I have my concerns. I'm not anti porn, but I'd like my kids to have a healthy relationship with it, and with future partners.