> A joint statement by Buffy Wicks, the lead author of AB 2273, Jordan Cunningham, another AB 2273 author, and 5Rights Foundation states, “The Bill is practicable and realistic, drawing as it does on the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC).”
How is Buffy Wicks so damn gullible with tech legislation? Her AB 1043 and AB 1856 (Digital Age Assurance Act), intended to protect children online and regulate Big Tech (but unintentionally criminalizing open source), was sponsored by a dark money influence operation from Meta.
The right people to protect children are those responsible for them - their parents and guardians.
If there is a problem with children not being sufficiently protected, that is the level at which to solve it. Give families tools and information to do so.
I’ll just add that age verification schemes serve no purpose—-and are actively harmful—-unless there is some reasonable policy that’s applied after the enforcement.
The companies pushing age verification make their money monetizing access to children. They are exactly the sorts of groups I’d like to keep my kids away from. Forcing the kids to label themselves as minors just makes them more vulnerable to online exploitation.
> No ID checks at clubs, bars, or other adults-only venues.
Those are mostly there because of alcoholic drinks being served and the venue wants to create a certain atmosphere. There are plenty of parents that would take their kids there if they could.
The rest is not just there for kids but also for adults (or elderly).
There is a bunch of adults who would step in a hole in the ground or fall off a balcony.
While what you say seem intuitive, it is missing one point. Those locations probably are not recording exactly who is coming and going and what they are saying/doing.
That is where this become more than just gate keeping and becomes full on tracking.
Yes. There is also an inequality issue because not all parents/guardians are equipped to afford the same protections for their children. For example, there are parents out there who would let their children smoke at 8 years old because they don't care. This isn't fair. Such lack of care becomes abuse and parents shouldn't have a right to abuse their children.
It's really on us to figure out how we can have things like the internet without harming children. Now, this is quite annoying, because I have never, and would never, give a child access to the internet in the first place. The internet was never driving around on public streets. I never wanted to force it on anyone.
We all dropped the ball here. We've all accepted and even celebrated more and more of our lives being online. But, more importantly, nobody noticed when children started to get smartphones with internet access. In my mind this is no different than giving children cigarettes or other adult materials. But nobody batted an eye. I'm also not surprised, though. Loads of people here have made tons of money from children having access to the internet.
Unfortunately it's so hard to go back from something like this. So we end up in this stupid situation where people will accept more surveillance because we can't just take phones away from children.
Said parents and guardians cannot protect their kids all the time - they have their own responsibilities like work. Most kids go to school during the day. The few that aren't grow up in homeschooling systems or cult-like environments, which are their own problem.
I frequently see this rhetoric (parents should look after their kids) from naive people on the internet that clearly don't have kids of their own (or don't have teenagers, or don't live or let their kids live free, etc)
> you know, i feel like the "it's the parents' responsibility" comments that turn up on submissions like this often tend towards phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."
if you’ve had kids maybe you’d like to share with the class exactly how you go about doing exactly what you’re describing?
if not, maybe let parents figure out how to parent rather than expecting them to be perfect for everyone else’s benefit.
> phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."
I need to remember this one, thanks!
The only way parents can try to protect their kids from the world is to keep them isolated, homeschooled, or in some kind of commune or cult. Which unfortunately is not uncommon in the US.
> let parents figure out how to parent
While I agree, I also think there's a role in society to help parents on how to parent, via e.g. education and awareness. Every generation brings new unknowns, like what kids can do in Roblox or how they can browse the internet on their smart fridge, and it's unreasonable to assume every parent knows all of that.
That can only work if parents as an interest group don't bother the rest of us with the very 'think of the children' nonsense. If you are inventing laws that affect us, we should also have a say.
This is something where I agree and disagree with both sides.
Parents should have the tools to protect their children, the providers should have those tools in place. But those that are dealing the goods as also heavily invested in trying to maximize engagement and so they do not really work to hard on providing those tools.
the weird thing about it all is that age is a bad proxy in the first place for a child's level of safety in interacting with online content. Some kids are super mature at 11 and others still need protection at 16. For some reason the world has fixated on "years alive" as a perfect measure of vulnerability and now are doggedly pursuing it.
Even if perfect age verification is implemented, kids will be harmed. Because they are vulnerable while above the arbitrary age limit. So -arguing for age verification is harming children. Won't somebody think of the children?
And the answer comes back to the same point. Parents should mediate this. Online content should advertise its maturity level, and parents should be able to configure devices at setup time for the maturity level they are appropriate for. Then apps should respect that and everyone can be better off without robbing everybody of anonymity or freedom.
I don't think anyone believes that age is a perfect proxy. Just that it is good enough, and that any better solution is either much more difficult or impossible.
You clearly don't have kids. You drop them at school and for maybe 8 hours a day, as a parent you have 0 control over whats happening. Bullying, peer pressure etc. How is that also parent's responsibility?
Parents shouldn't buy smart phone to kids, period. There are 0 reasons kid of say 15 or lower should have one instead of dumb phone (or new commodore one with google maps and whatsapp but no browser or apps), in same way we don't allow cigarettes or alcohol to be given or sold to them. Helicopter control freak parents can go to hell, their mental issues shouldn't be messing their kid's lives. But to claim parents have 100% responsibility could work only if kids spend 100% of the time with them.
Totally disagree. If you want to stop kids from using cell phones and social media, you are not going to achieve that at the family level. It is just not possible because if your peers are on the platforms and are using smart phones, no amount of family level restrictions are going to stop kids from using them. It has to be at the state or higher level so that everyone is prevented from using social media or smart phones at the same time so that is the norm. It has to be alcohol tier regulation if you actually want it to be effective
Pretty much. As soon as kids start going to school, there is a large amount of time where they are out of the supervision of the parents. This is when they end up being dragged to the general flow of society for better and worse.
If you're going to take an aspect of UK law it would be better to take some aspects of the police training: how long they are trained, how to do de escalation, the idea of policing by consent.
I love such cases... because "almost" all of them have hidden political agendas... so, as usual, I let my investigative agent run over this and prepare me detailed connections graph between prominent personnel, orgs, funding, and political connections...
Search for "5rights foundation" in that "search graph" box on left side, then click on relevant search result from below (dont click on + icon.. thats for finding routes) ... and the graph will adjust to this node and show all connections..
btw, one of them most powerful feature is finding connections between any nodes... just search for them one by one, click "+" on searched entity, do this for both, or more.. then click: "shortest path" ... you can investigative how anyone is connected to anyone else
For example: "Center for American Progress" is connected to "UK House of Lords" through this long chain:::
Center for American Progress -> [has former fellow] -> Simon Clark -> [board chair of] -> Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — US -> [lobbied for] -> KOSA / KOSPA (Kids Online Safety Act / Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act) -> [engaged with] -> 5Rights Foundation <- [founded] <- Baroness Beeban Kidron (Beeban Tania Kidron, Baroness Kidron) <- [has member] UK House of Lords
"Connections"... how most important personnel from 5rights are associated with other entities (people, org, events, etc), that can directly, or indirectly, connect to political circle... thus, act as political influence network...
Very nice, this is what investigative journalism should be doing as well, but if it's "democratized" by just putting it up on a website we don't need to wait for anyone to publish it.
As long as all the sources are listed and verifiable, of course.
thanks.. there are a few nodes that are giving error when clicked.. but, i am fixing as i am discovering these... as I said, this is still in development...
> These NGOs have converged upon a unified strategy: use the rhetoric of ‘child safety’ to advocate for digital ID laws that would prevent adults from using the internet anonymously.
Of course.
Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security
That argument loses you most of the population in a vote, myself included. Parents may disagree, for a start; I reckon most women (especially outside of tech) read that and mark you down as "creepy man I don't want near kids".
It's also wrong, as there are lots of rules that are in fact designed to protect children. I recommend reading up on the history of child abuse in the Boy Scouts of America (now Scouts BSA), FBI agent Kenneth Lanning's investigation, and the safeguarding and leadership training that scout leaders must take today.
The UK has a system, I think it's called the DBS, which depending on the level of check ranges from "is this person a convicted sex offender?" to "non-crime hate incidents". One can argue a lot about what the correct level should be, no-one has yet convincingly explained to me why specifically "non-crime" actions should be in a secret police record. But I am on board with someone convicted by a court for child sex offences not being allowed to become a schoolteacher.
Or guarantee that even if you provide such data to a nice, friendly, democratically run and ethically managed administration, that some future regime change to a completely different group of people won't result in catastrophic misuse.
This is the issue I have with most of my well meaning but somewhat politically uninformed friends. The idea of “wouldn’t it be good if …” (idealized scenario), is never followed up with a “yes, but …” (realistic evaluation of how politics actually works).
Yes it might actually work out ok if a mythical benevolent dictator could manage things with infinite precision and unlimited compassion. I would imagine that has never happened at any reasonable scale.
The Conservative folks seem to phrase this as a desire to “keep government small” - which always seemed a little clunky given the stakes and track record of these governments.
> Yes it might actually work out ok if a mythical benevolent dictator could manage things with infinite precision and unlimited compassion. I would imagine that has never happened at any reasonable scale.
That's because people aren't recognizing me as their benevolent god-emperor yet.
The problem is that the government was handed an emotion and a mandate to eliminate it. You’ve declared a “war on jealousy” and demanded the government assemble the troops. That’s not handing them a well reasoned plan and “hoping they don’t mess it up”, you messed it up when you scribbled “no more addiction” on a protest sign.
Now ask yourself which government is currently bombing another country over one man's ego (or due to blackmail by an "ally"), and whether they're on that list, and whether the literal thousands of people killed are just acceptable sacrifices to maintain someone's worldview about 'the good guys'?
And yet, compared to every military in the past, compared to the fact that war was seen as a normal thing in the past, compared to how it used to be standard to rape and pillage in the past, and that was just expected and fine and normal, current modern militaries of the West are exceptionally disciplined, and their use by politicians doubly so.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't do better and shouldn't.
But we do need to compare "How things have been for all of human history" to "How we do things now", and see that our modern democracies show immense restraint and a lack of malfeasance, compared to how they've been used in the past.
I feel that people view how the world is today, through such a restricted world view. Where the history of how things were, and the immense and great and incredible progress we've made, is thrown aside because "Oh bad thing happened!", and therefore "The entire West is completely corrupt and everything sucks and we should rip it all down because it's bad".
One only need take a tour around the rest of the world. To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively. And yes, I know that's saying a lot.
> And yet, compared to every military in the past, compared to the fact that war was seen as a normal thing in the past, compared to how it used to be standard to rape and pillage in the past, and that was just expected and fine and normal, current modern militaries of the West are exceptionally disciplined, and their use by politicians doubly so.
Are you serious?
During the Vietnam War era, the US dropped over 7.5 million tons of ordnance across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which is more than double the tonnage dropped in all of WW2. In rural parts of Laos and Cambodia, unexploded ordinance is still a daily threat to people. 50 years on.
> To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively.
When I see comments like this, I want to believe that it's not real but sadly, I suspect you really believe this.
OK. Now compare the entire world's militaries, over the last 50 years, worst-for-worst act. Or since you mentioned WWII, what's the worst done by armies during that time? Hmm?
After all, you're trying to find and hold up the worst the US has done, right? So to compare, you need to find the worst in modern militaries. In militaries of all time. That was what I discussed, after all.
I was quite clear. Compare to all of history. Compare to all militaries today.
Instead you grab at part of an action, and hold it up, without making that comparison. Still.
As a Canadian who has had your current ridiculous president state that we should be the 51st state, and belittled us by calling our Prime Ministers "Governors"? Who has talked about unilaterally redrawing borders? As a Canadian who has considered how I may have to one day slaughter Americans crossing our border? How I may have to look my brothers in the eye, and kill them? I still say that the US military has been a shining light for freedom around the world. If I can remain impartial, then surely you can.
I also say that about police officers in the West, including the US.
Are there bad actions taken by police departments? By individual officers? By groups of officers, over the last decades? YES! Yes, most assuredly.
Now compare the overall score with police in totalitarian regimes.
Comparison is vital, important, key, and any finger pointing has to be in context.
And also note, I said "yes we must do better".
But if you think the US military is evil, then you have never seen evil. Ever.
I understand the Vietnam war is a sore point in America due to recruitment. But your comment is so incredibly one-sided that it's not a serious argument anymore.
The opposing party in the Vietnam war was far worse than the US on a moral level, before, during and after the war. And it wasn't a small difference. We're talking about democracy and democratically selecting laws here? Well: the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets.
> the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets.
The 1954 Geneva Accords, which ended the French war, called for nationwide reunification elections by July 1956. Those elections never happened. Ngo Dinh Diem, the US-backed first president of South Vietnam who was a brutal authoritarian, refused to hold them. The US backed his refusal and kept backing him afterward.
In Eisenhower's 1963 memoir, he wrote that everyone knowledgeable he'd spoken to believed Ho Chi Minh would have taken around 80% percent of the vote if elections had happened.
The Vietnamese didn't really care about the Soviets. They are a fiercely independent and proud people with a long history of defending themselves against foreign interlopers and aggressors.
So let me restate your asinine and totally inaccurate conclusion:
The large majority of the population in Vietnam, in both the North and the South, didn't want a foreign power controlling their country and determining their fate. They wanted to run their own country, and have peace.
The large majority of the population in Vietnam, in both the North and the South, didn't want a foreign power controlling their country and determining their fate. They wanted to run their own country, and have peace.
And yet, the poster you're replying to said no such thing. Not even close. They merely said they wanted help repelling an enemy. You're also using hindsight to frame this conflict, something entirely unfair to the people involved at the time.
The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
edit
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Re your response. Were they ordered to rape and pillage by their full chain of command?
Or were they acting illegally, regardless of the outcome?
Would a military in a dictatorship have deemed that "illegal"? What about 200 years ago? 1000?
You seem to be ignoring the concept of comparables. And taking acts that the military itself teaches its own soldiers, was wrong.
It's good to have principles. And good to defend them. But if you ignore what others are saying, and the context of their words, you start to slide into zealoty.
Have you really backslid from "modern militaries don't rape and pillage" to "modern militaries rape and pillage, but it doesn't count because it's illegal"?
> You're also using hindsight to frame this conflict, something entirely unfair to the people involved at the time.
Millions upon millions of people around the world protested the Vietnam War, including millions of people in the US.
On one day alone, an estimated 2+ million Americans participated in anti-war protests. Over 500,000 men were officially categorized as draft dodgers, more than 200,000 charged with violating the Selective Service Act and millions more found a way not to go to Vietnam through deferments and exemptions.
It's both amusing and sad that there are some people (like you) who 50 years later can't see what was apparent to so many people at the time.
> The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
That's right. Those pesky Vietnamese villagers just wouldn't let American GIs stop torching their villages, gang-raping their women and children, and executing them. The American military was trying to leave but spreading democracy demanded sacrifice.
And perhaps, then the alternatives are more devastating, and it must be done.
I've written about this in other comments over the last couple of years, but the root of all of this is quite simply, foreign interference. We all remember Cambridge Analytica, its interference in democratic elections in the West, and even how it caused a few regimes to topple in the 3rd world. It's machinations and manipulation of curated news stories was quite simplistic and minor compared to where we sit now.
You simply cannot have a high-trust, well functioning democracy, if 99% of the stuff recommended to you is entirely fabricated nonsense. Worse, if it purposely fabricated to create as much social unrest as possible, and doubly worse if it becomes curated to each person and created and generated on demand.
CA managed this by having a sloth of "different archetypes" for its 100 or so altered news stories per topic. If you were a left wing shopkeep, or a right wing car salesperson, or anything else, you'd be slotted into one of these 100 version of the precise same news story, and fed the best lies to make you do as the payee requested.
Modern AI means this can be far more fine tuned. And algorithms can be gamed, just as CA gamed them with support of Facebook's APIs.
So my point here is twofold. First that government moves slow. What we're seeing now, is the result of CA a decade ago. Really, two election cycles, with senatorial and congressional committees and debates during that time.
And second is that things will not continue as they are now. Nothing you, or I, or anyone does will result in an unchanged Internet. From the perspective of lawmakers, and really a lot of the public, the "world wide" Internet is really only used by "The Rest of the World" to attack us. Attack water plants, hospitals, meat packing plants, nuclear reactors, and beyond that, to manipulate our children into thinking Western Democracy is vile and malign in various ways.
Now of course, there's no reason for most of those things to be on the Internet at all. But the manipulation of adults and children in our society just isn't going to wash. In days gone by, you'd see each community with police informants, not the sort in cop movies where the guy was crooked, but instead actual cities who would keep an eye out, and inform if someone planned something against the state. Pretty much every pub had one in the UK, for example.
Heck, when I was a teenager in Canada, one of my friends had a plan to become an officer. Part of this path was reporting on everything he heard at local parties, of an untoward nature. It's how misinformation campaigns used to be curtailed, stopped, dealt with.
Yet suddenly we presume that the average person, and average kid is going to just deal with misinformation. And bizarrely so, compared to misinformation in a pub, we let people get siloed so every single thing they read and see says the same lie.
How can an average person ever stand again absurdities, if from their perspective everything they can see around them says it is true?
So back to the start? The above, correctly assessed or not, is what the politicians and police and agencies view as happening in the West. And while there are multiple ways to deal with this, their stance is "Why are you afraid of putting your name on your words?".
If we want something other than all the bills being proposed, and all the change coming, we as a tech community need to provide a path to end all anonymity on the internet, in the least privacy reducing way possible. And there are some ways to do so. They've been discussed. But if we don't provide such a method, and drive this conversation, you know who will?
Politicians, with no technical capability at all. The average Joe, scared for his country and family.
Try to fight those two types of people, and you will lose every single time.
So my recommend is, everyone needs to stop bellyaching, suck up to the harsh realities here, and take this massive, unstoppable river, and redirect it by a few degrees so that the best-case is achieved.
Straight to Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities, since more competition between governments must be good for the customers of government-like services!
How did you arrive at mafias. That's just another form of (abusive) small scale government. A more legitimate and probable type of government is any of the different forms of anarchism or worker cooperatives, if you want to argue for "disband government".
> OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
It's funny because this is exactly the opposite of what actually happened. Mafias are the reaction to the "unification" of Italy, and they almost all come from the previous governments that existed before unification. Northern Italy conquered the south and defeated all the little states there ... and then levied taxes and did not much else. Specifically they did not provide policing, and very few public services.
And then the remnants of the old governments stepped in, provided public services, security on the streets and "pressured" people into paying a second tax. Now you can say that they were almost-feudal governments and therefore defended and enforced the law of large landowners but that wasn't seen as a problem ... because that's how it had always been.
The reason for their success, their initial success at least, is that, first, when Italy was young, it left citizens to their fate, suppressing dissent, stationing small forces in most of Italy that abused locals, were extremely corrupt and did little else. What is generally blamed for their later reputation is that the mafias started using their power more and more for their own purposes, irrespective of cost, while the mafias also pressured the centralized state to do the opposite.
Especially early on it's very hard to pick "the right" side in the war on mafias. In the beginning people saw the mafias as the good guys, and with good reason. Over time mafias became worse and the central state became better, but honestly, the central state wasn't particularly good for people either (in fact it still can be improved quite a bit)
> OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
Conservatives seem to be fine with mafia rule, so long as the don has the correct party affiliation.
> When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
Mob rule doesn't with very well as a defacto government, or oligarchy. Nor food and drug safety or national defense. Some things just have to be tackled by society as a larger group. Ideally as locally as possible, but not so locally that minorities are crushed or rule becomes petty and micromanaged.
That's partly because congress, including state congresses and judges/dept of justice just don't care about that. They are totally unable to see either the consequences of their own imperfection or even just limits to their power.
> Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.
You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.
Politicians often have kids too, and what parent does not worry about their own kids? Is it that much worse if a politician genuinely cares about other people's kids too?
There are no politicians worried about kids. There are politicians worried about the votes of people who worry about kids, which is effectively the same thing.
>When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!
What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?
The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?
This level of cynicism is only possible if someone has never interacted with people on a local political level. Once again, it's more a reflection of your own worldview than an accurate reflection of all of humanity. There are some people who genuinely have empathy for others and want to do good. The way some of you refuse to believe that is truly disturbing.
There are some people who have genuine empathy for others and want to do good, and they aren't politicians. The only thing disturbing about this is you don't see it.
In the case of food stamps, that was the leverage by which social engineers destroyed the black family via incentives for single mothers — collapsing from 75% married (circa 1950s) to 25% married (modern).
The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.
Just so I'm clear here, you think half of Black moms have pushed their child's father away for the lucrative reward of food stamps? And that scenario was preplanned by some unnamed "social engineers"?
Your narrative is embellished and does not correlate strongly with the data [1].
Embellished: marriage rates are 33.8% for Black women and 37.8% for Black men, neither of which I would round to 25%.
Uncorrelated: marriage rates dropped sharply among people of all single races on the Census except for Asians. It has dropped more sharply for Black respondents, but anything disproportionately affecting the lower and middle economic classes would disproportionately affect Black families.
Show me some data, and not outdated welfare policies from the 1980s, that supports the "social engineers" causal narrative better than plain deindustrialization. Or deindustrialization combined with good old American racism and mass incarceration. I am willing to change my position on this.
There are many scenarios in which politicians can be legitimately worried about the kids. For example if they want to install crosswalks and enforce speed limits around a school, or if they want to increase funding for social services.
I do believe we should allow for a lot more nuance in our political opinions and avoid most statements that can be made in the constraints of a short comment on social media.
The main example that comes to mind is anything having to do with the environment. “The kids” will face the brunt of our actions (or inactions) on that front so a “for the kids” argument is completely valid. Dismissing a proposal simply because of a “for the kids” element is incredibly reductive and will genuinely end up harming kids.
“For the kids” arguments are distinct from arguments worrying about future generations in that they are almost entirely focused (ostensibly) on preventing harm to children while they are children rather than “all our descendants including the adults”.
Then let's ban child safety locks, child labor laws, and any law that distinguishes child abuse from other forms of abuse. Let's also allow minors to buy tobacco and alcohol while we're at it if we're claiming that any law that exists to protect children as children is inherently misguided.
I think if you spoke to the people actually making the claim they’d define it a little better to include only cases where adults are being asked to give up rights, freedoms, or privileges. But you can ask them.
I didn’t take a position on the argument. I pointed out a distinction.
Oh, I'm sure a lot of those people have been convinced to back these laws out of sincere desire to protect children.
The problem is that those laws are NOT designed to protect children, and the people who convince politicians and the public to support them are NOT doing so out of genuine concern to protect children.
The real, underlying reason why they are being pushed for so hard is to destroy privacy and control people which is going to make everyone but the elite less safe, children included.
Especially if and when we get another Nazi Germany type regime and realize that - oh shit, they have 24/7 overview of where every single person in the world is, what they do, what they think, what their worldviews and identities are.
Sincere or not, their arguments are automatically voided by the simple fact they are building a dystopian cyberpunk panopticon. Nothing justifies that oppression. Not even children.
When irresponsible parents raise irresponsible children, the effects will not be limited to themselves. I don't want to go back to open smoking, causing increased rates of cancer to everyone just because some people want their freedom to smoke. Preventing tobacco sales to children greatly reduced that.
This is coming up again and again because The current status quo does. Not. Work.
There is direct evidence from trials, in which Meta researchers told executives that features like infinite scroll and others “ are inherently at odds with well-being”
There is no effective fight for freedom if there is no effective understanding of the politics and social forces driving change.
The freedom of the internet in the 90s was in itself a social revolution, not just a technological one.
Fighting for a status quo that didn’t work for children and even for many adults is a losing fight.
Fighting for privacy and against ad tech, and against addictive design features for all users is a far stronger fight.
The same reason you pay taxes. Not everyone is law abiding, taxes pay police to uphold order. Child laws improve upbringing, reducing chance of future criminal acts.
We live in a society, you wouldn't be on HN otherwise.
Which is precisely the point. Children are political weapons. Precisely crafted to shut down any opposition to whatever it is you're pushing. Oh you're against this? Pedophile.
You don't argue with these people. You summarily dismiss them. You recognize the game they are playing and you refuse to play it.
Call attention to their methods instead: they are exploiting and weaponizing children to push their big tech friendly surveillance agenda.
The flaw in 'calling attention to their methods' is that you rarely have a meaningful opportunity to argue against a bureaucratic system that operates this way.
Whether individuals inside the system are true believers or cynical operators, the response to calling out their methods will be identical:
If they genuinely believe the rhetoric: They will simply double down and say, 'Yes, and protecting the children makes this absolutely necessary.'
If they know it is a manipulation tactic: They will still reply with, 'It is for the children,' because they know it is an impenetrable PR shield that gets them their way.
In either scenario, the bureaucracy is entirely immune to the criticism.
Exposing the game might help persuade third-party observers, but it does absolutely nothing to stop the bureaucratic machine from using that exact same line to steamroll the agenda forward.
The statement “These are child safety laws” premises that the laws would save children - so the way to refute is to ask for proof. Outside of vaccines I doubt there is anything concrete that will directly benefit children. There is no argument that holds up to scrutiny. They also don’t have any good way to measure safety, though Goodhart’s Law would have an impact.
I mean, I want to show an example where it is only a problem when someone else is not as convinced as yourself, one way or the other.
>so the way to refute is to ask for proof..
No use. The same proof will not be convincing for everyone. Let us take vaccine. The proof for a Vaccine for X saving Y lives is often the following.
"Before the vaccine there was Y deaths per year from X. But after vaccines there is zero deaths from X".
The implication is that vaccines saved X lives. This could convince most of the people. But someone can ask. Are those kids who are not dying of X (thanks to the vaccine), are dying of something else?
Now the picture is not so clear.
See, same data, different results depending on how deep you want to probe,
We should not ignore it, but firmly dismiss it with reason. The recent Illinois law that applies to all Internet-capable operating systems is blatantly unconstitutional. People should not be forced by law to disclose their age (or anything) in order to engage in digital communication. That forced utterance of your own age is compelled speech, a violation of the First Amendment.
For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
Comes down to something I have said for a long while. Anyone that wants power, who is saying it, why are they saying it and why do people believe them.
> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom
These are NGOs not parents. And "child safety" is often a euphemism. The point is it's hard to argue against child safety. For example, if opaque NGOs demand deanonymization to stop CSAM, I am assuming most people would not want to seem like they are in favor of CSAM. So you need an organized effort to argue in favor of privacy and even then anyone who does it can easily be smeared as a CSAM user. So child safety can backdoor something else.
You're straw manning most people by trying to insist upon this, as most Americans support a ban on social media for children. [1] That turns into the overwhelming majority if you consider only Americans with children. And the percent of Americans that oppose things like age verification for the usage of social media sites is in the single digits.
So it will most likely happen especially because you are certainly right, in part, that no government has ever said no to actions that'd give them more power, let alone ones that are widely supported. But the point of this is that rather than having this as some sort of red-line no, I think it'd be much more pragmatic to try to argue for identity verification regulations that would be most palatable.
Conversations on age verification tend to split into 2 streams.
Conversations where the root submission talks about failures at social media firms and the evidence of harms, or evidence from trials.
Conversations on the attacks against freedom and privacy.
I see very little hope that an actual rebuttal or alternative to the desire to muzzle tech will be forged, because the two conversation streams seem to rarely intersect.
We are not in the 90s anymore. Tech as most people experience it is not the new new thing, and most parents are tired of tech. A more recent pew survey showed that nearly half of teens think that social media is bad for teens. We know that Meta went ahead with features even after their own internal research told them it was bad for teen mental health.
How in hell, is there any effective response created, if the social pressure parents and children are driving, is being dismissed as a conspiracy?
This should be the time that the business models and incentives that allow loot boxes and addicting design mechanisms should be discussed.
There needs to be an actual solution that addresses the issues users are facing, or else they are simply going to choose to sacrifice freedoms for the hope of gaining some control.
In general I would agree with you, but one issue I have here is that I think social media even done fully responsibly would end up being very undesirable for children. Even if we have no algorithm and just 'friend on friend' stuff, social media tends to significantly amplify a lot of the nasty stuff that happens at every school - bullying, rumor milling, conspiratorial stuff (like kids falsely reporting somebody else to try to get them in trouble), and so on.
There's also the typical image crafting stuff that drives envy, insecurity, and so on - kids aren't sharing when they eat left overs mashed up in a bowl, but they are sharing when they go eat at an expensive steak restaurant. That bias already significantly affects adults perceptions of others' life/lifestyle, let alone children. And even without 'the algorithm', there's going to be FOMO and the general addictiveness of updates that's going to leave kids as zombies to their phones rather than interacting with each other as much in real life.
So I'm not really sure it's viable to try to 'fix' social media. You can certainly make it better than it currently is, but I think the issue is that we have horrible companies managing a horrible product.
"The government says all children need to show an ID when browsing the internet in order to be safe"
"The government says all children need to be vaccinated in order to be safe"
I'm not saying these arguments are equivalent, but they seem equivalent because they induce the same feeling of loss of agency. And one cannot simply ignore and dismiss something like this.
Half the laws we're complaining about (e.g. California, Illinois) are literally just regulating parental controls, and I can no longer give the benefit of the doubt to people who act as if this is the same as forcing internet users to scan their ID. People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta to make sure Meta won't have to be safe for children even when the parental controls checkbox is turned on.
Regulating parental controls by making you scan an ID to use a computer is even worse than doing it to access a website. I understand that today's laws are not doing that, but do you genuinely, truly believe in your heart of hearts that once every OS has mandatory age fields, that nobody is going to start proposing legislation to attempt to enforce its validity by ID verification + hardware attestation? You're not willing to give the benefit of doubt to people with concerns about this, but you are willing to give the benefit of doubt to the surveillance states that have been pushing us down a slippery slope for 25+ years, sliding further and further down every single year without reprieve?
Of course that is not parental controls. That's 3rd party controls. Parental controls means you create a child account for children and when a site is detected as being adult ideally using RTA headers [1] then a password prompt asks for the parents approval. That is parental controls.
Indeed, that's a reasonable approach. Just to clarify that we're agreeing, the comment I was replying to was strongly defending California and Illinois' laws that require the OS record an age field for the primary user of the device, which while currently self-declared is at least an obvious path for future, more invasive legislation.
The problem with a self declared approach is that puts a signalling mechanism in place. Once in place the laws can easily scope creep year over year to add more information or require putting in ID information or some future nation-wide digital ID and Trump coin digital wallet which could easily be the plan all along. All they need is the API that will interface with websites using some agreed upon standard and then it can easily be extended line by line. Give them an inch, they will take a mile.
With proper parental controls there is no signalling.
> I understand that today's laws are not doing that,
Come on. Like 80% of my entire post was devoted to pointing out a gradual erosion of rights over time, and I explicitly stated that it's not the case today.
Sorry, I didn't read that far. I do think this is a classic slippery slope though.
But don't underestimate human adaptability. Slippery slope arguments assume that once a technology introduces a specific risk, society lacks the agency to create counter-measures, new norms, or alternative uses for that technology.
I haven't found that to be the case throughout most of history.
Tech people keep ignoring the fact that many people a) find the parental controls too hard to use and b) have no confidence that their kids won't find a way to circumvent them.
If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups established to manufacture consent, but this is infowars-type conspiracy thinking. Most people are just not that facile with technology and people who have kids are atavistically opposed to anything that could harm their kids.
Tech people's unwillingness to even engage with concerns about harm to children (eg the GP) more or less guarantees more aggressive regulation. IT's a self-defeating position.
I recently put some thought into what I would have done if I had encountered "parental controls" to use the Internet when I first encountered it as a young teen in 1992. I would have made it my personal mission in life to circumvent everything and anything possible. I feel fortunate that no such controls existed and the adults in my life knew significantly less about the technology than I did.
Was I exposed to some clearly adult content? Yes. But I didn't find it particularly compelling, the video games I could download and other things I could explore were more interesting.
It is also concerning to me that gen-alpha (or whatever the age bracket is called) people are increasingly being pushed into walled garden, app-based social media platforms instead of actually learning what the Internet really is, and what it's capable of.
My dad added parental controls to our PC sometime around 1997. It also had Eudora installed, which my dad used for email. Poking around, I found the ini file that had the ciphertext of the password for the email server. On a whim, I made another account in Eudora and put the ciphertext in as my password. In the ini, the plaintext of the password came out; I guess Eudora used some symmetric rot16 or xor like cipher! The same password worked to unlock parental controls, which had taken me just about a week to circumvent.
Agreed. I was a middle-schooler in the 2000's, had my own PC in my own bedroom, we had broadband access and I, of course, was exposed to porn while I was trying to download cracks and keygens on Astalavista and other such sites. Mislabelled files on eMule too. Links to porn also were readily shared on IRC channels. But yeah, I can't say it had a damaging effect on me.
It was a mix of being afraid of getting a virus from a porn site, knowing that porn wasn't for my age, and late-night FTA TV airing softcore anyways.
My parents told me to be responsible and kind of explained the dangers of the world the best way they could, and it was expected that I'd be grounded and lose computer access if they found me on a porn site. I preferred playing games. I definitely encountered some dark places on the clearnet (and on the darknet as well) and promptly GTFO.
At the school's computer lab they had plenty of content control which I had the most fun trying to bypass them. For what reason? Just so I could.
I have a feeling we had a similar experience growing up. I generally agree, but also, we got QAnon/Alex Jones and such which have quite directly screwed up my country. So I don’t know, my opinion is often contradictory and fluid. I don’t know where I stand anymore. I believe in an “open internet,” but also, there’s people like Andrew Tate who have ruined the minds of people I care about.
We can debate if these systems and people existed before (they did), but the reach and scale is different now. My most controversial opinion these days is that not everyone should be allowed to upload to YouTube if it’s public facing. We need basic screening and filtering.
One personal observation, the early commercial internet as it was transitioning from universities/research labs/certain high-tech firms into a mass market thing with millions of users, it had its share of nutjobs and crazy as well. But it was boutique, hand crafted , personal level crazy and it was for the most part disregarded because none of the whackjobs could collect a sufficient following or megaphone to spread their message.
For instance in about 1994 I remember coming across a set of textfiles that were some lengthy manifesto about how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere. But it never got any traction.
Now we have the unfortunate venn diagram overlap between something like a Tate and a major social media platform, and he can get his message out to millions of angry, horny, unemployed young men...
> For instance in about 1994 I remember coming across a set of textfiles that were some lengthy manifesto about how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere. But it never got any traction.
There was a BBS in my area that ran on a small bank of 14.4 USR modems that had a gold mine of content like that. It was such a fun time.
> "...not everyone should be allowed to upload to YouTube if it’s public facing..."
You still fantasize about building mechanisms for restricting information as if the very people you oppose won't use it on you when they get into power; no, as if the very people you oppose aren't _currently_ ascendant or even in office and would delightedly use it against you right this moment. Madness.
When you build a high tech muzzle, remember that it will fit onto your head just as well as it fits those you built it for.
Well, I'm sorry parental controls are too hard to use, but all of the parents who want all other adults to sacrifice their online anonymity just to make to for it need to get their heads screwed on straight. They're screwing a) themselves b) everyone else and c) their own children when they reach adulthood.
I don't think this is a viable or realistic option in 2026/2027. Try to imagine what your own personal reaction would have been when you were 14 years old if 90%+ of your peers had an iphone 17 or equivalent and your parents gave you a flip phone, and tried to ban you from using smartphones.
Why repeat the same argument if it clearly hasn't worked? Do you expect it to suddenly become effective?
Change in behavior can only follow from change in incentives. Parents must be held legally liable if they allow their children access to social media. That means jail time for negligence.
Because according to HN there's no way to force social media companies to not serve children without destroying privacy. That leaves parents who aren't changing their behavior because nothing has incited them to change. Legal liabily is an incentive that changes behavior.
Maybe not everyone agrees that social media causes literal cancer. I mean it’s not great, but it’s not the worst thing on earth, either. It’s clearly become a moral panic at this point.
Supposedly the incentive already exists because parents want their children saved from the harms of facebook and social media. The story is that parents are clamoring for the government to do something about it. I don't think parents really are, or where they are the expectation is that the social media companies will be forced to change their behavior, not that parents will be forced to start parenting their children or be forced to provide a scan of their face and passport every time they do an internet search.
The government has just decided to fall back on "think of the children" as a way to implement more surveillance and control.
The incentive for parents to stop giving their children smartphones does not exist. If it did exist, it would incite parents to perform the action: ie not give their children smartphones.
Incentives incite action. No action. No incentive.
That's not true. Incentives aren't the whole cause of behavior and they aren't the solution to changing it either. That's the same simplistic and flawed mentality that pushes for harsher punishments to deter crime when the evidence shows that doesn't work and that not even death penalty is an effective deterrent. People have several incentives to lose weight, but increasingly they still overeat.
Incentives play a role, you don't want to encourage wrong behaviors certainly, but they're just one factor in determining what people do or don't do. At best, they nudge. Those nudges aren't likely to overcome stronger forces, or even several weaker ones.
> Someone may have a desire or intention to lose weight. But unless they lose the weight they lack incentive.
Here are just some of the incentives overweight people have to lose weight:
They'll look better, to themselves and others. They'll have more clothing options. They'll feel better. They'll be healthier. They'll have drastically lower odds of many future heath problems. They'll live longer which means they can spend more time being with their loved ones.
Those are all incentives. Everyone who is obese has those incentives, even though different individuals may assign different values to them. Even with all those incentives that hasn't stopped the obesity problem. incentives don't incite action, but they can encourage them.
It literally says incite "to determination or action". Given that parents aren't actually taking smart phones away, neither determination nor action are present.
I'll grant you the examples you give incite people to desire to change weight just as negative consequences incite parents to desire that "something should be done," but it doesn't incite them to actually do something.
Describing something as incentive because it incites desire without changing behavior is not exactly what I think of when I think of incentives.
Think of being in the position of trying to come up with incentives for a group of people. Would you call your incentives successful if they created a desire in that group without anyone actually doing anything differently?
You missed the "or has a tendency to incite" part. It's important because incentive doesn't promise a change in action. People can do things even when they have have no incentive to do it. Sometimes people will even do things when they have every incentive not to do it.
If I were going to try to come up with incentives for a group of people, I wouldn't try to create a desire in them. I'd try to give them something they already desired as a reward for doing what I wanted them to do. They'll probably never want to do the thing I want them to do. They might hate doing it. If the incentive is high enough though they just might do it anyway. If my incentives weren't enough to sway them, they'd still be incentives, just ones that were inadequate/ineffective. I wouldn't even be surprised if they failed. Incentives fail to cause changes in behavior all the time.
On one hand the software world needs to re-learn the lost art of proper UX research and rely on data from user trials instead of on vibes and reading tea leaves with analytics, but on the other hand parents have a wholly unrealistic expectation of being able to keep their kids in a hermetically sealed bubble until they turn 18.
Kids are going to get into stuff you don’t want them to no matter how hard you try to prevent that, short of keeping them in locked padded rooms with no electronics (which would be abuse). Parents are right to want to steer them in the right direction and keep them out of the worst trouble, but that’s as far as it goes.
Plenty of us survived the internet when it was an even wilder west, IRC chats with strangers trying to learn perl, not putting your name and social security number into random websites. Being aware of predators. It's a very specific kind of power-hungry move fast and break things tech that refuses to accept responsibility of the fallout.
Anonymity, the right to move privately and be private online is much bigger than parents who are frustrated with out of control capitalism.
Besides, this only benefits the big corporations. They of course will happily back anything that absolves them of their sins.
It was a noncommercial wild west. You were up against some troll trying to get a reaction by linking you to goatse, not some trillion dollar international corporation with a literal army of addiction experts A/B testing how to maximize engagement.
I fully appreciate that you care more about anonymity on principle, but it seems very naive to assume that principles are necessarily going to win out over the demands of aggrieved reactionary parents. Cranky parents are very consistent voters and providers of tax revenue in most polities and politicians want them to be reasonably happy and quiescent for the sake of stability. It seems to me you are wildly underestimating the size of your potential opposition.
You won't go far by calling everyone you disagree with, cranky, aggrieved, and reactionary. Maybe take some time to understand their concerns and you won't be so surprised when their vote wins.
Are aggrieved reactionary parents demanding that they should have to scan their face to look at websites? It seems to me like they just want social media companies to be forced to change their harmful and predatory practices and that instead of properly regulating the bad behavior of social media companies the government has decided to use this issue as a means to give themselves more surveillance and control.
We don't need to make parents the enemy of our online privacy. We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children to every shitty social media company and shady website on the internet to "protect" them.
Certainly I think they'd be happy if social media companies changed their behavior, but the problem is that they and the politicians don't really know how to make them do that. So the next best thing they can think of is a digital version of 'you can't come in here if you're under 18' similar to nightclubs, betting shops etc.
We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children
OK, but (as I have asked many times before) what is your alternative, beter proposal? People intuitively understand the idea of checking ID to prevent sales of alcohol to minors, keep teens out of adult spaces and so on, because virtually every adult remembers being a teenager and not being allowed to do certain things due to not being old enough. That makes checking identity an easy sell to people.
What is your better idea that is similarly easy to sell? Because if you don't have one,people will fall back on the mediocre idea of ID checks. I feel like anyone working in the tech field should understand that the best technological solution does not always win out.
> OK, but (as I have asked many times before) what is your alternative, beter proposal?
How about laws that prevent social media websites from pushing harmful content users didn't ask for? How about forcing them to abandon the practices and dark patterns that result in those platforms being addictive? How about putting executives behind bars when their algorithms are shown to cause mental health and body image issues in children? These platforms know that what they're doing is hurting people, but they don't care because they're profiting from it. These companies intentionally designed systems that are harmful and user-hostile. They've got algorithms that seek out and target people's vulnerabilities. They ignored repeated warnings from their own researchers, and actively concealed evidence of the harms they were causing. We don't have to let them do it. Not to children or anyone else. Facebook isn't going to die off if they go back to showing people only things their friends and family post. It might even get more popular. They might make fewer billions though and that's unthinkable to them.
There are a lot of things that can be done, but the government isn't interested because actually solving the problems social media causes isn't going to give them the power they're actually after and it could cause them the bribe money they get from these companies.
Well you're articulating the result you want, but not the mechanism for how you expect to achieve it. A law has to articulate which behaviors are legal or, and what the penalties for non-compliance are. Otherwise we could just pass laws saying 'the economy has to make everyone prosperous, people have to feel safe and fulfilled' and call it a day.
So, what actual rules do you want to make in service of these desirable outcomes? They have to be clear and straightforward enough that they can't be just gotten around with clever lawyers or argued past the point of meaninglessness by shills posing as philosophers. I do not like the idea of everyone having to show ID online (or even much in real life), but I can see why it's popular because it's very easy to explain and understand.
What I'd recommend is research on specific behaviors taken by social media companies to determine which are shown to cause harms. Some of that is already done by the companies themselves. If, for example, infinite scrolling is seen as a practice that increases addiction to the platforms, a law can be passed that makes it illegal to implement infinite scrolling. A law like that is pretty easy to explain and understand. TikTok was called out for sending push notifications to children's phones late at night to drive compulsive consumption and disrupt sleep patterns. Laws can be passed to limit how many unsolicited push notifications platforms can send and during which hours. Laws like that focus on the actual problems themselves, regardless of which platform is doing it, or who they are doing it to.
So let's say I have a business SaaS application, am I banned from showing content in an infinite scroll window? How would I prove my application is targeted for business users and not actually targeting children?
Not saying these are impossible questions to answer or get right in a law, just that there are more things to think about than which component you decide to show data inside.
You wouldn't have to prove that you were or weren't targeting children. You'd just have to operate a social media platform and allow infinite scrolling.
The law would define a social media platform. Maybe something like:
The term “social media platform” means a website or internet medium that— (A) permits a person to become a registered user, establish an account, or create a profile for the purpose of allowing users to create, share, and view user-generated content through such an account or profile; (B) enables 1 or more users to generate content that can be viewed by other users of the medium; and (C) primarily serves as a medium for users to interact with content generated by other users of the medium. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?def_id=42...]
If your SaaS app met that definition of a social media platform it would be illegal for you to show content in an infinite scroll window. Because your application targeted business users who paid for the service, people would be less likely to sue you. Maybe it'd be worth it to you to include infinite scroll anyway. Companies knowingly break the law all the time after calculating that even on the off chance they get caught the fines they'd face will probably be less than the profit they'd make. The larger your platform got, the less worth it breaking the law could become and of course if the public felt the fines were so low as to be ineffective, the law could be amended to increase the fines.
The law could even allow some platforms to include harmful content like infinite scrolling if certain conditions are met. For example, platforms could be allowed to include infinite scrolling if they require a credit card to sign up, and they display a warning explaining that the platform uses infinite scrolling which has been determined to be harmful by promoting addictive and compulsive behaviors, and it provides an option to disable that feature. Still, it's probably better to widely ban those kinds of practices that serve no purpose other than driving engagement/addictive behavior. We can just decide as a society that we value people's mental health more than maximizing tech billionaire profits.
The EU has been pretty successful with rough definitions and "I know it when I see it". The Digital Markets Act just specifies which specific companies are too powerful and need to be regulated, and a process for adding more.
Parents aren't calling on governments to regulate it. Implementations like Apple's Client Side Scanning was not a populist movement, and many savvy parents spoke up about how it crossed multiple lines that set the stage for authoritarian abuses. Apple got so much flak for entertaining the idea that they had to drop it, there was no way to come out looking benign with it.
This is the "Christian moms need Congress to regulate Cable TV" problem all over again. Don't let them watch TV if you oppose what is on it. It's not HBO's responsibility to raise your child, it's yours.
This continues to be an absolutely false characterization of what Apple was planning to do, which it was doing BECAUSE IT WANTED TO SUPPORT USER PRIVACY
There was a time when users falsely characterized Dual_EC_DRBG as "private" because Dell's whitepapers looked good. History proved those users to be chumps.
> I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups established to manufacture consent, but this is infowars-type conspiracy thinking
You may not be aware of this, but Meta has been actively spending millions of dollars to redirect the rage against their algorithms and addictive harms, especially against children, and one of their strategies to try and help avoid liability is to put the onus on the federal government to pass ID legislation, to literally make it easier for Meta and similar companies to age gate most content under simple blanket policies. The way that they are doing this is by funding otherwise very small "parents rights organizations" with money and connections they otherwise wouldn't have. What does Meta gain from this? Less liability and lower cost in content moderation. What do the parents rights groups get? "Check ID laws".
That's enough motivation for both groups, it's very simple.
Now where do you get into "conspiracy theory" territory? Well thetr are also other groups that want online ID for their own purposes, and they are more than happy to help fund these groups to get something they also want.
All of this is very easy to provide backing links for with a simple Google search, if you're interested.
I'm very aware of that. As I said in another comment, 'ID checks to exclude minors' is a simple and intuitive idea that's very easy to sell; qualities that are singularly lacking in alternative proposals.
How should online services be regulated to mitigate algorithmic harms? To get something over the line politically, it needs to be simple enough that it can be articulated in a few sentences.
> How should online services be regulated to mitigate algorithmic harms?
That would be a good conversation to have!
Instead what is happening is moneyed interests are inputting hundreds of millions of dollars into organizations that otherwise wouldn't have it, which is giving an "unnatural" amount of political influence to those groups, which is changing our country, and not just on this issue. They're literally doing it just to keep their money, and ID checks let them keep it without actually reducing the harms.
Bringing attention to their methods is much better than dignifying the "think of the children" nonsense with a response.
You just posted the answer:
> Especially when there are very obvious and tangible harms from modern social media.
The addictive and manipulative dark patterns of the big techs are harmful and should be banned straight up for everyone. No need to spare the children and let adults get abused. No need to verify age at all.
So why don't we just ban it? Because that'd eat into profits so much it could actually kill their business models.
All this "children" bullshit is just them trying to preserve their business models. It's them saying "year we're harmful and addictive and gambling tier but look we're adult only now". This is why Meta's among the corporations lobbying for this stuff.
Manipulation stops working when the other party is aware of it. Bring their manipulation out into the light.
> These NGOs have converged upon a unified strategy ...
Not just for the war on anonymity. NGOs, often funded by government money (so missing two third of their name), have unified on other topics.
One example that comes to mind is teaming up to organize the biggest influx of migrants into the EU following the arab spring movements: there have been hidden camera recording NGO employees explaining how to dodge controls, how to answer questions (by lying), and they've been actively helping sneaking people illegally in the EU.
A good question one could ask itself before downvoting me is this: if it's a fact that NGOs are teaming up, worldwide, to lie using the rethoric of "child safety" [1]... On which other topics did NGOs lie?
Or are we to believe all NGOs are good and well-meaning, except those working to end anonymity?
And before I forget: in Africa for example it's fully well known that NGO typical means "DGSE":
There are french "doctors" in some of those NGOs who know less about medicine than what I know about medicine by having ex-girlfriends that were doctors.
By squinting one's eye just a little it look like NGO is not that far from a synonym of "shady undercover gov op".
And btw why should any of my taxpayers dollars go to even a single NGO if it's non-governmental?
And another big one: while some of those NGOs have been hard at work passing legislation which as a a result gets people arrested for "hate speech" (or even just for saying "christian prayers in their heads") in the UK, other NGOs are even harder at work making sure that the absolute most horrible of all hate speech cannot ever be criticized "because it's religious".
The double standards are literally insane.
If I was in the UK, I'd GTFO. And not to the EU.
[1] speaking of which, btw, there are serious allegations about NGOs participating in child trafficking, for example in the Haiti SNAFU
There's an ongoing debate in Australia to ban gambling advertisements. One of the arguments that is supportive of a ban says that children shouldn't be exposed to gambling advertisements during sports broadcasts, as they should be family friendly.
Kids can't gamble so yes we should enforce laws and ignore that one too. We can then debate if sports gambling itself should be legal or advertised at all.
In the inverse, none of the opposition matters until it can solve the problems the universal surveillance approach doesn't even solve anyways. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
It's a tradeoff situation and nobody wants to leave it as such to find an answer which serves the best balance. Instead, we are doomed to discuss the absolutes of freedoms vs the absolutes of child safety.
I'd really like to see something like a required parental controls architecture products had to support (but not every device had to force universally). These kind of solutions only goes as far as the problem is a technical one, e.g. a kid on their dad's office computer they weren't supposed to access can still see things they shouldn't, but such is the truth with any pure technical approach to the problem which is not actually fully technically bound.
Believe it or not, sometimes the best answer is to do nothing until the crowd moves on to the next panic, as with the “Satanic Panic” in the 1980s. Turns out D&D was not actually a gateway to Satan worship.
If we’re talking 80s, a better comparison would be He-Man.
The FTC let the free-market run riot with children’s TV. Shows used commercials to push expensive plastic toys. The shows themselves became commercials for their associated product lines. Parents felt unable to resist the social pressure channeled through their children and congress eventually passed an act that let the FCC reign in the FTC’s damage.
In the 2020s family economics has raced to the bottom: wages have stagnated, the cost of goods and services is set based on a household where everyone is in full time employment, and latch-key kids now have He-Man in the palm of their hands courtesy of Apple, Google, Samsung, and Xiomai.
This situation is ripe for exploitation by anyone who can offer parents a solution to their kids’ insatiable phone addiction.
I agree with the other commenter who replied to you. I don’t think this comes from actual parents. And the article suggests this latest push is from right-leaning groups whose goals are surveillance and censorship.
That said, I’m a father of 3. I’m a millennial and tech worker. I have the digital literacy to teach my kids about the internet and its horrors in a safe way. Not every parent does, so passing this off as a “parent better” issue doesn’t solve anything either.
I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”, but I’m open to similar ideas so parents can get some support without compromising on privacy.
Why would you think that? Most of my friends are parents now and all of them are quite concerned about the effect of social media, phones, and technology more broadly.
Basically all of them are planning to delay exposing their kids to phones and screens for as long as possible.
> I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”,
If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag. Lock it behind the most basic parental controls that can be protected and remotely monitored. There are some loopholes with kids downloading apps that allow custom web requests without the flag being sent, so there probably needs to be an app allowlist or special App Store category to match.
Carve out some legal exemptions for Linux distributions that no kids are using and leave it to the iOS, Android, Windows, and Macs of the world. Any parent who doesn’t like the idea doesn’t have to enable it on their kids’ devices.
> If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag.
Parental controls already exist. Lawmakers want to step in and parent peoples' kids for them by removing these freedoms from everyone.
It doesn't have to be sent anywhere, websites should send a flag when serving various types of content, so parental controls has the information it needs for filtering. Websites could still infer what's being filtered of course, but doing the decision on the client allows for much more granular/extensible categories of content, as well as allowlisting, time limits, etc. Some sites/proxies won't be marked properly, but 99% self-categorizing would help a lot, and it's not like making them do ID checks or attestation is easier than setting an HTTP header or something
Filtering on the app side is more flexible. A game that has some levels not suitable for children could when on a child's device still let them play most of the game.
Like, explain to me how you think this could be done meaningfully other than some setting that can just be arbitrarily flipped without adding massive complexity.
We know what good UX is already from history. Movies for example have an age rating system that clearly lists the ages the movie is suitable for. If you look underage, you get asked to provide ID.
Parents do not have the time or energy to configure modern parental controls which work more like tuning firewall rules.
The other part of the problem is you need collective action, if you ban your child from Facebook, they won’t get invited to parties anymore. If all children get banned, the parties will be arranged over sms or some other non social media. As it is today, banning your kids from social media is overly punishing since all the other kids are using it.
That was my point though.. showing ID at the door doesn’t translate well to the Social Media landscape.
If we actually cared about supporting children and parents as a country, parental controls and access, and making sure that systems were actually safe and protected privacy, would NOT be an afterthought.
The polling I have seen from Germany and Australia of a social media ban for children was quite in favor of it. Sentiment here on HN and on Reddit was the polar opposite. We are in a bubble.
Sentiment here is the same mostly. It’s just guised in an inability to handle the obvious next step. E.g. when a mentally ill person uses ChatGPT and harms themselves, the question asked is “why did we let this person use ChatGPT?” There’s no way to do this allow/deny functionality without an extensive ID service. “Kids are using service A or service B and the social media companies aren’t doing anything about it!” Well, it’s not possible to offer something to a person and determine that they’re not a child except with some service that identifies child/adult.
The answer every time is “well then Google/Apple/Facebook/Shopify/mcMaster Carr shouldn’t exist as a business” and if I’m being honest that is not an achievable target so you’re going to arrive at the attested internet.
I'm not trying to call everyone else voting for these things dumb, but does the average person who doesn't think about this stuff for a living actually know what they're voting for?
> Like it or not, there is a large constituency who wants to “protect the children”.
The problem is not that they want to protect children. The problem is that these people are either technically clueless or deceptive which is why they present these surveillance measures as the only reasonable approach.
Big tech companies aside, the broader tech community did not fail to engage on the digital parenting problem. We could've solved this problem long ago before anyone even noticed it, but we're actively being blocked from doing so by the exact same people pushing for mass surveillance. See detailed explanation here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
The only real downside to this is that a 0kp cannot be reliably tied to an identity of the person using the device and thus tickets could be proxied/shared around with semi technical tools (and/or an ai agent tasked with creating a proxy). This really isn't solvable without device-level attestation[0], as if a website needs to reliably say "this person is actually this person" then it needs all pieces of data itself.
This could be solved by adding in a still privacy-preserving step like "The device is doing periodic face id scans and matching them to an identity, and constantly renews/re-presents to the age assurance consumer", but that has its own drawbacks[0].
0: Namely, lock in to devices that can do this, and that includes basically guaranteeing a double digit percentage of adult humans would not have access due to their device being old, unsupported, missing the hardware, etc. And with so many humans excluded, you would not have mass adoption. Probably also excludes rooted devices if we bring in attestation of unmodified software.
It’s weird to see that locking down devices even further is being proposed as a solution to anything.
The unspoken part of this requirement is that websites would have to block users who aren’t connecting via one of these attested, verified, locked down devices.
There is the obvious loophole that using a VPN to a country without these requirements would circumvent it. That’s how kids are already circumventing age restrictions in places like Australia and it’s why the UK has taken an interest in attacking VPNs.
Locked down devices are kind of the only solution that both (A) preserves privacy and (B) solves the problem. However, it indeed strips a user of the freedom to use their device in the way that they want; although, safe to say that the US doesn't have all that much problem with that, given Apple's continued market dominance.
The alternative is what we're getting right now: laws that require verifying ID documents, often in ways that restrict even the notion of maintaining the user's privacy. Attestation might be an "OK" to "good" solution while this is between bad and really bad.
Client-side filtering solves the problem, because children's clients are owned by their parents. We should mandate that websites and apps send metadata about the content being served (eg extending the Rating: RTA header from 20 years ago) and mandate that OSs/browsers allow filtering to be easily configured at setup. This is a more private but also much more granular/useful solution, it's only difficult today because of a lack of coordination
> Finally, anonymity didn't exist for my grandparents.
Your grandparents could walk to the next town over and give themselves a different name and nobody would ever know who they were. They could get a job, be paid in cash, and deposit that money in a bank account with no KYC. They could drop a letter in a public mailbox without a return address, or put up posters at night, or make phone calls from public telephones. Nobody would know who did it, and there would be no surveillance footage to review after the fact, no digital footprint to trace. They could write a letter to their local newspaper to be printed with a fake name, or publish a book or story or magazine under an assumed identity. There were no ALPRs, no automated facial recognition, no built-in vehicle telematics, no drones, no smartphones to track anyone’s movement, no doorbell cameras on every block, no video tapes, no serial numbers hidden in the printouts from copy machines, no DNA analysis, no databases instantly searchable with the click of a button.
Feel free to make a value judgement about whether what we have now is better or worse than the past, if you want, but don’t invent history to rationalise it. The internet did not invent anonymity. It used to be the default.
> Hardware age attestation will be a long timeframe project. The current work should be towards standards that can get us there.
Unfortunately it's so much easier for lawmakers to slap down a law that says "you must verify IDs right now if you want to continue to exist" with no requirement, and often not even support for, privacy preserving ways to make this happen. The laws are happening now. The chance of reform to align with a privacy-preserving option once the laws are implemented is slim to none.
Fair play. This should 100% be viewed as a logical extension of that same effluvium. This is not a bug but a feature for them, many of these laws allow companies like Meta to offshore the responsibility of not harming children onto individuals while continuing to melt the brains of anyone unfortunate enough to still have a Facebook or Instagram account.
This is the flow back from the idea of 'information wants to be free'.
In letting things flow to easily the opposition is to have heavy lock down on information. A lot of the time, the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.
> Like it or not, there is a large constituency who wants to “protect the children”.
Is there, though? The push is coming from lobbyists who seem to be largely funded by wealthy elites, corporations, and other opaque organizations. One of them seems to be Meta. It doesn’t look like a grassroots effort.
UK government (and the rest of Europe) has had a very easy time implementing strict administrative regulations due to public acceptance. And the children argument is like the easiest angle to attack, you can use it for almost any cause and win.
France just like the rest of Europe is a weak continent that uses Putin and Pedos as an excuse to pull off the weirdest shit. Chat Control, Gov Identity baked on everything, digital bills, digital money.
I have never wanted to move out of Europe more than now tbf. Complete f* morons - I get spammed by the wanna be child protectors who are giving a smartphone to their kids.
I don't know how to deal with this anymore - what we are not realizing is that *we* are under engagement - this *is* state surveillance.
Some state-resistant technology (idk if this term is in general use) like Signal planned for a lot of contingencies that could happen caused by governments. Tor is kind of like that too. So I have more optimism for building tech that is state-resistant than I do for any kind of constitution, or movement, or law. That's not to say give up but I think it's hard to argue against a state.
War is coming to Europe. At this point I'm even thinking about moving to China - at least they don't accept Zuckerberg checks. Tbf in my case I'm also a tech holder - so i'm just getting robbed.
I lived in China for a while a decade ago, studied at Tsinghua and did some research as well.
IMHO you have more freedom in China than in Europe. Can you walk on the street and say "Fuck Xi Jinping" like you would in France with Macron? Probably not. But it's a completely useless freedom to have.
At least in China you get relative safety when you walk on the street at night. And when the government decides to restrict some liberties you don't have to pay tens of thousands of politicians and lobbyist to do it.
If you have to choose your poison pill, you might as well pick the cheap one that does bring a semblance of harmony and not complete polarization and chaos.
You see, China and the US aren't that different you know. In the US, I can go up to Donald Trump and say "I don't like Donald Trump. The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"
In China, I can go up to Xi Jinping and say "I don't like Donald Trump! The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"
I actually think sustained adherence to the goal of deanonymizing the Internet to basically get kids off of it in the face of significant minority opposition, actually portrays strength. I care deeply about privacy and surveillance in the real world, but who cares about the Internet, it’s an optional virtual space. For anything that’s not optional like banking, commerce etc. I’m completely OK with being not anonymous because that’s the status quo.
There are many people who have voiced this topic already. If you don't care about your privacy why do other people have to give it up ? It's a non-argument - nobody cares about your opinion.
I think the easiest way to get involved is to become an EFF member. They'll keep you up to date on all the censorship and surveillance bills. Then you can contact your legislator, sent letters to the CA legislature committees, or show up to the hearings in Sacramento.
What you don’t realize is most people want this. The social media bans across Western Europe, and Australia are heavily supported by the vast majority of the population.
Yep, here in Australia you almost never hear anyone mention it. The silence is deafening, especially with how quickly people just rolled over on this stuff "For the children".
That said it was funny, yesterday Microsoft said I had to age verify my account. I went in basically with the intention of backing out of it at the first sign of over reach.
First step was, 'provide you email for this account'. So I did that and then... approved! You are certified over 18+. That is the flip side of this, some of these companies will put up some of the weakest barriers on this stuff.
You could make it easy to ban on children's devices, rather than having websites do it. At the moment you either have a small set of allowed applications, which is fine for younger kids, or domain-list filtering which is unreliable, hard for parents to set up (and not that hard for kids to get around). There are many ways to improve the situation – I think websites should have to attach metadata about the content being served, browsers should use this to apply a device policy, and devices should make it easy to configure basic rules on first setup. People aren't asking specifically for hardware-attested facial scanning
There’s no such thing as children’s devices. Everyone uses the same smartphones. Optional on device restrictions don’t matter as long as your peer group is on the platform, kids will not stop using it. People are not asking for biometric scanning, but I believe the vast majority would be OK with some sort of ID based authentication system. Now there are ways we can do that in a decentralized way where neither of the parties have total information and I fully advocate for that.
Are you saying parents would choose not to block it, or children would get around it? Like you say people want to block it, but currently it's very hard while allowing access to Google and other resources, or it's easy to get around. Why does this require server verification?
For example, all devices could require your ZKP ID attestation to be usable unfiltered. Then the relevant apps/sites would be equally inaccessible to children. And then you remove the ZKP ID attestation because the device owner (parent, school, etc) already knows when the user is a child.
The on the ground reality is that now most social interactions at schools and the content for those interactions happen on social media and apps/private chat rooms. If you don’t have a smartphone or not using those platforms, you’re just left out. There’s going to be serious social cohesion issues for the kids that don’t have access to them. It’s also going to cause continuous pressure throughout your schooling years to circumvent whatever restrictions your parents are putting on and to be in constant conflict with them because of that pressure. That’s life altering stuff.
ZKP ID would work but that’s essentially deanonymization because you have to provide your ID to someone though no one has total information. Also just checking for its absence doesn’t work because that’s opt in and less than 5% of parents would do it. Every individual, irrespective of age would have to have a valid one.
For the first time in human history, the cost of surveillance has dropped below the cost of privacy.
It is more expensive today to maintain your privacy and anonymity than it is to surveil you. The collective surveillance grid makes it possible to track people's movements, whereabouts, their predilections, political views, personal images and more for a few cents every day. It's a bargain.
And in this new world, the eye watches everyone, all the time, forever. Most people, including people on HN, are still stuck in a human-first world. The new surveillance state isn't going to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.
And they will be used to watch you. Especially if you're attractive. Or, valuable. Or, blackmail-able. After all, NSA employees routinely abuse multi-billion dollar surveillance assets to stalk women. It's so common that the NSA calls it LOVEINT.
In the world to come, people are going to wish they were being surveilled by the NSA. Because at least the NSA punishes these people. Occasionally.
When this kind of technology becomes this cheap and this pervasive, then the end of anonymity means unaccountable sheriff deputies stalking their former spouse and family. Or, prospective romantic interests.
With this new oracle, these people will be able to set up alerts for when their spouse is thinking of leaving them. To catch their child accessing support for abuse or something more ephemeral like being an atheist, having different political views or LGBT+.
Anyone who doesn't see the forest for the trees, or who embraces this because "parental controls are too hard to use" will doom themselves and future generations to a world that's materially worse than our hyper-surveilled present.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but at this rate I'm going to miss the days when it was just the NSA reading my emails (and they still do! Howdy!). I know the track record. But at least the NSA has some sense of institutional responsibility and control. Most institutions in your life, including your HOA don't.
It is a great example of how difficult it is to anticipate the N-th order effects of things. 79 years ago the transistor was invented, in less than a century it ended up being the back back of a global surveillance system. Not many people could have foreseen this.
Cheaper computer technology has been great for the average persons uses but it cuts both ways. It also means much cheaper surveillance. I suspect that governmental/corporate surveillance now costs less than 1% of their spending, something that simple couldn't have been done even a few decades back.
I do wonder what the world would have been like is say computer technology peaked at 486 level performance/memory. Much of what we have today simply could not have happened in terms of surveillance and social media damages. Alas, this is the world we didn't get.
> 79 years ago the transistor was invented, in less than a century it ended up being the back back of a global surveillance system. Not many people could have foreseen this.
The question I would really like the "people" pushing so hard for surveillance to ask themselves is:
How would the Nazi Germany and Hitler gone if they had this system in place, telling them who and where every single Jewish, gay, gypsy, disabled, or just ideologically opposed to them person was, 24/7?
What about other insane rulers? What do you think they would - or rather, will - do with these systems?
It's cute people think the UK has this level of influence over the USA
Like, pick a side: are we the tiny backwater micro state on the verge of bankruptcy with no standing in the world, or are we a hugely influencial world power directing US law?
We know what this is really about, its to give the UK intelligence services the ability to spy on US citizens and then pass the information on to US intelligence. We'll probably get similar laws in all the other five eyes as well.
That's not what this is about at all. Its British NGOs lobbying US states to pass state-level digital-ID laws. The end goal seems to be to make anonymous posting on the internet illegal. Its more about mass censorship than surveillance.
It might just be me, but when the US decides to do something like requiring age verification on porn sites it feels half-hearted, sort of stupid and mostly annoying. When the EU does it, it feels naive, overreaching, bureaucratic, mostly harmless (but annoying and misguided). When it is the UK that attacks privacy it feels incredibly dystopian, at least to me. It's somehow darker, compared to the US or the EU and I don't understand why.
Someone I used to associate with was always really switched on with these things. Many things he said in the past that sounded a bit extreme or conspiratorial, turned out to be the real deal years later. Always interesting in retrospect.
The one thing he always said is, they have always been watching and know who is who, what these things do is allow it to be entered into the court of law. Now they can act on these things.
There's a better network layer solution than trying to block visitors at every host or at the endpoint devices' OS/application layer. I know because a company in my country is already testing such a thing in private beta. A router firmware that provides two wifi endpoints per home, one for adults and one for minors. You only share the minors' password with your children. The firmware maintains a whitelist of sites (it periodically downloads from a central server, I think). There is nothing to be installed on endpoint device, and no gatekeeping is necessary at the host. Apparently this can be extended to mobile networks as well, but I haven't looked at it in detail.
Yes, if it's to provide full safety coverage, it has to be rolled out at telco level including mobile connectivity, which is where this solution runs into red tape.
It seems to me the intrusiveness of age verification will continue to grow.
They want the OS to report the user's age. People will use this to claim whatever age they want. For instance, if companies cannot advertise to children, they might find that almost every computer is reporting that the user is a child--turns out adults want the protections kids receive as well--sometimes.
Eventually they will have to enforce a system intrusive enough that no lying or abuse of the system is possible. We might even approach "Verification Can" levels of verification.
On this topic, have people noticed the sudden coordinated media push for Flock Is Your Friend? The Free Press, The Atlantic, and Axios have all churned out pro-Flock articles in the last week. Clearly someone (I assume A16Z, but it could be multiple groups) is panicking about the mounting bipartisan backlash to Flock cameras and is starting to write checks to try and head it off.
My theory is that the establishment sees the oncoming economic crisis and is desperately trying to plan for managing the fallout. They don’t like Flock or its backers, but they feel they have no choice. Same as why Palantir is gradually being rehabilitated in the mainstream press.
You’ll also notice that Anduril is quickly being accepted now that we’re expending munitions faster than our replacement rate.
Put in a less polite way, they're preparing for the metaphorical pitchforks and torches held by mobs of the common people which might manifest themselves in a more kinetic format.
Yes. My hope is that the rare earths shortage, memory shortage, and current focus on munitions will delay the era of drone-based policing until after the crisis.
I suspect the crisis isn't a short term economic shock but a long term decline from resource decline, possible water/food shortages amplified by climate blow back. Something that will not end in your lifetime or the next generations.
Military's, intelligence agencies and actuaries have been warning about this for decades now and their language is getting very direct on this and the time lines nowadays.
If you have ever been caught in a rip while swimming, there is a moment when you suddenly getting a sucking sensation as you transition from stable waters into an outward flow. I am starting to think we are in that transitional phase on global stability, that the 2030's are not going to be a comfortable time for many.
They are ensuring that potential disruptors can be reigned in if needed. To try and stop things from being even more unpredictable, for better or worse. Buckle up.
You don't build long term surveillance systems and billionaires don't build bunkers for what they think of as a temporary tough situation.
Fair, perhaps I should have said until after the crisis passes its most acute phase. I expect the eventual energy and climate system shock to result in mass unrest and many excess deaths. Meanwhile wars are almost guaranteed, which will further stretch resources. If we make it out of the initial crisis without a strategic nuclear war, we may settle into a period of extended decline that’s relatively stable, though very unpleasant.
No problem at all, thanks for asking! Two from this year both from the UK.
I really wish I had kept all the others from the US, Europe, Aus/NZ etc. It is a very common theme but they are largely kept quiet and only typically (partially) released through freedom of information requests.
This one from Actuaries UK was one that set off alarm bells. As they advise the insurance industry, they are structured to be politically neutral. The key takeaway is the impacts of 3c temperature rise by 2050 on page 9. The reason this is an issue, we are currently on target to hit that with us likely to pass 2c mid next decade with the rate of warming increasing.
This one from the UK government is all about addressing national security regarding this issue. Typically they are advising that they secure their food supplies and hardened up boarders in the next 5 years. Funnily enough Brexit may have given them the power to enforce this much more than they would have otherwise had. But that just means they have built a unique flavor of oppression.
I recommend the Energy Skeptic blog, they often provide sources and links to papers: https://energyskeptic.com/
They also pass my personal test of not advocating for dumb feel-good ideas. Recently they published a well-sourced article on why the US rail system isn’t a good candidate for electrification.
Was all about just doing the math on energy transitions. He wasn't anti renewable technology but did want to point out how scale is a problem that few understand.
My favorite number of his is, that at 3% growth year over year, we would need all the energy of the Milky way galaxy by the year 13,000. As the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, this would defy physics itself.
Seconded, that’s a good one too. I also recommend Jem Bendell as a palate cleanser, his work is fluffier but it’s all about finding ways to thrive during decline rather than succumbing to doom and gloom.
Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan, and Aaron Schaffer from the Washington Post also wrote a shameful article on this topic on August 4th (the title changed, along with an image of a woman who was harassed to something else). No counterpoint. Total submarine article.
The threat from COVID (and more importantly, long COVID) never went away, but they sure convinced the average person that it did.
Today you can see an N95 in the wild once in awhile, so some people are paying attention, but they are less than 1%. Many others are suffering brain damage, unexplained heart issues, taxed immune systems, etc and have no idea why (nor does their doctor).
That'd be a lot easier to believe if you provided a source, which you should do if you care enough to comment in the first place, I think?
A cursory google suggests that the return-to-office movement is primarily driven by management's desire for voluntary turnover, avoiding the bad press of mass layoffs. But certainly doesn't show that it's 'been debunked 100 times'.
In my own experience, it's been 50/50 a desire for voluntary turnover, and also a control tactic. Employees are easier to strong-arm when they're immersed in the idea that company culture actually matters.
Didn't mean to imply that was the only reason, so I've added another reason to my comment.
I haven't come across much of the debunking of the commercial property issue. I would say it's undeniably factor, but we can argue about the scale.
A total of $800 billion—in real terms—of value is at stake by 2030, and, on average, the total value of office space is expected to decline by 26 percent from 2019 to 2030.
You think XYZ Company is going to listen to some consultant telling them in a press release that they should go back into the office because some REIT needs more money in it? Why would the CEO of a tech company care at all what the value of their leased office building is? Do you understand how leases and real estate works?
You think that the size of investment firms that own something like, a good sized chunk of midtown Manhattan class A and B commercial real estate aren't capable of deploying social and tradtional-media influence tools to push an agenda to repopulate their office space? That would be a very inaccurate assessment of how large and motivated they are.
You actually don't think that the world's largest REITs hire lobbyists at the municipal, state and federal levels? That's an extremely naive and uninformed position.
The funny thing about this quote in context was that Ben Franklin was using it to argue for MORE state power, not less. Remember, Ben was the guy that would steal private letters and publish them in his newspaper.
The goal behind these efforts, fundamentally, is to make it impossible to organize efforts to dissent against whatever comes next. We still have the tools for mass organization but we lack unifying charismatic leaders who could use them in time.
This is something I have noted with Trump, he seems to be one of the last names that made it really big in pre-social media era and had a somewhat unified presence in peoples minds.
Making it to that level nowadays is actually really difficult, heck I would argue that even people like Mr Beast hasn't hit that level of awareness due to the fragmented nature of media and fame.
You can build movement in an echo chamber, it just depends if that is enough.
Delay the legislation whenever possible, call your Congress critter and make their lives a tiny bit worse. Deny them at every level of government including local and state assemblies where you have a bigger voice. Defend your communities by actually showing up to city council meetings. That kinda stuff...
Fight this shit off. We do not need this. Digital Privacy has tools coming up - we are all loosing on this because of a few monkeys I wish some people had to courage to deal with. I'm honestly exhausted by this shit. Let all of it rot.
They can keep floating this stuff and we have to put in a thousand times as much energy to shoot it down. We get worn down quicker than they can. It only has to work once for them, we have to keep pushing back.
My very pessimistic take is one out of Taoism. If you wish for them to fail, let them grow. Eventually the weight of the whole system collapses itself, the question is just on what time frame.
The way out is to go through. I don't like this framing but it seems to be the most accurate.
You don’t even have to “let them” grow, they will do it regardless, as they hold the seats of power. But that doesn’t mean that silent acquiescence is the right path, either. Speaking up attracts like-minded allies.
It’s also a good idea to maintain your own private means of communication, as there will be some hard times ahead.
The whole think of the children angle is so cursed. Used to push surveillance meanwhile actual harm against children goes ignored. See Epstein files and the grooming gangs in the UK
If it actually did anything to protect the children it wouldn’t be so objectionable
> Used to push surveillance meanwhile actual harm against children goes ignored.
Worse, these laws will actually create new harms to children who will be forced to give their identity to websites and identity services that will exploit them and fail to protect that data.
I haven't seen any claim that it was isolated to one ethnic group. I have only seen the claim that it was disproportionately immigrants of Pakistani background.
Epstein and grooming gangs are both real. Not that the whole "grooming gangs" problem hasn't been vastly amplified and turned into a repeated media talking point by a bunch of the extreme right wing in the UK, however. There's plenty of domestic non south asian pedos and molestors there too.
Yeah, the US is getting the worst version. We can't have federal digital ID because "mark of the beast" but you have to show ID to watch porn so a bunch of private ID verification gatekeepers have shown up.
I can't be the only one who will never comply with these draconian, anti-privacy laws, nor the only one with the technical prowess to bypass them. Never used social media (unless you count HN as social media, which is a stretch), so perhaps it won't be as great a loss as it will be to many. I have no doubt there are many like-minded people (in number if not in population %) that feel the same, and will undoubtedly repopulate newsgroups and message boards that are not subject to this authoritarian nonsense.
Didn't HN decide to not allow AI submissions? This is quite explicitly one in that the operator of the site declares to "automate investigative journalism" and launched the site with its five pieces of 'journalism' yesterday.
And to point out the obvious on the actual quality of the piece, The US has itself passed age verification laws in 20 states, such as Texas where it was driven not by the British but by domestic interest groups and decidedly state senators like Angela Paxton.
Also given the slant of the site it's pretty obvious was the political motivation here is, I guess yelling at the British always works
It is very unlikely that “NGOs” have the funding influence and power to do this. The more likely source is state backed intelligence agencies. The NGOs are just there to create a buffer.
Ask yourself logically - who would pay these NGOs to do things like attempt to extort meta into a $500M+ settlement over “harming child mental health.”
This is all connected and intelligence agency backed. It’s far from innocent, it’s non corporate - some had suggested meta was behind it - but as we have seen meta is the one getting targeted.
I'm always surprised how defensive people get in here about privacy when so many corporations have vastly more information about you than the government does.
That's not really true though is it. The Sackler family caused over 500,000 deaths. Nestlé has killed millions of babies. DuPont and 3M poisoned every living creature on Earth. Nobody spent even one day in prison for any of it.
Corporations all over the world routinely and knowingly poison, injure, or outright murder their employees and their customers. They spend massive amounts of money preventing the public from knowing about the harms they are causing. Even in the most egregious cases where there is well documented proof of what they've done the heads of these companies still get away with it. They profit from it. They're just happily living their lives in their mansions and on their yachts while graves are dug and families are torn apart.
Not that it makes it any better, those people were treated as just externalities to doing business. Government violence is a lot more targeted. Yes, it has the same result but the intention is very different. One is just careless, the other is malicious.
When corporations knowingly kill people it isn't careless. What they do is entirely calculated. For example, it wasn't carelessness that caused the Philip Morris executives to hire a bunch of scientists who were then ordered to falsify reports saying that smoking wasn't harmful in an attempt to trick the public to keep smoking when the company was sitting on a mountain of evidence showing that their product was killing people.
Government violence is different though. When the government acts against the public they are generally required to follow long and complex procedures with multiple points of checks and accountability. A cop has to get enough evidence to convince a judge to issue an arrest warrant. A person is taken into custody and given access to a lawyer. A trial is held in court with a jury. At every step there are volumes of records detailing exactly what was done, by whom, and why. All of that information is public record and we can request those records to keep watch on what the government does. If the government abuses the power we give them we can vote them out of office and replace them.
Obviously there are a lot of problems with our legal system and places where all of that breaks down, but the goal was for there to be transparency and accountability and nothing stops us from improving the situation. With corporations on the other hand, they act in secret, they don't have to ask anyone for permission, they aren't required to keep records of everything they do, you have no legal right to examine the records they have, and even if you find out a CEO is responsible for murdering a bunch of people for profit you have no power to vote that CEO out of office.
It's pretty clear which of whose two entities is the larger threat. Which one of them has already repeatedly poisoned you and your entire family. Which one do you think was responsible for more violence done to your loved ones?
This isn’t a “gotcha”. Many here take exceptional steps against this kind of thing and also advocate for restrictions on what kind of data corporations can collect.
Governments and Companies have different motivations.
Governments want control, Companies want money.
Control typically comes from a reduction in rights, freedoms, money. When you fail to give those up "naturally" violence, worsened living conditions and abuse are the tools used.
The corporations aren't going to throw you in jail if you cross state lines to get an abortion. The US government is already doing this when they get that data.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what
someone says.
If the same standard were applied for posts, this one would fail. I recognize that it is a popular perspective that these measures are essentially a war on anonymity, but that is not what they intend to fix, although it is quite possible that anonymity is a casualty of whatever war is at hand.
I believe efforts to resist these measures would be more effective if they engaged with the problem: the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds, beyond what any society should consider acceptable. I personally don't think shocking content is the worst of it. Algorithms that maximize engagement over enriching experience are a curse for any age group, and developing brains face the worst of it.
Is age-gating the internet the right answer? Will it even help? Are there ulterior motives? Those are open questions that need discussion. Dismissing a genuine problem is choosing not to engage in the discussion.
I disagree with you. Plans to eliminate anonymity have been discussed for years in elite circles, at Davos and similar events, and it’s most often framed in the context of social control (eliminating dissent or foreign influence).
Larry Ellison on surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
This is not new and it’s not about kids. This is the culmination of years of planning that began after the Arab Spring, when elites began to get concerned about how the Internet could be leveraged for domestic regime change.
As far as the matter of ulterior motives, we're not in disagreement. Assuming that's true, it is important to address the real problem they are hijacking to realize their goals. Dismissing it as a made up problem just means you lose credibility with anyone who is paying attention.
It will always be possible to find a cause du jour to justify violating the rights of citizens, because crime happens and reality is messy. The real problem is that the mass media is complicit in this agenda, so they amplify the excuse until bad laws are passed (laws which seldom solve the problem).
While I do think we should make efforts to reduce crime and create better spaces for kids, laws like this aren’t the answer.
Ellison is probably in favor at least partially because he's a database salesman, and oppressive domestic spy agencies need lots and lots of really big databases.
> the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds
Because of the goal of advertising revenue as the ultimate driver as to build an addictive permanent scroll of slop on tiktok or instagram, and the desire of social media companies to build walled gardens where someone's entire online experience stays in their "app.". As you say, this affects young and old alike.
Technology helps, but it also enabled increased 'toxicity' in general, across the global ecosystems, including social, human relations, trust, digital crime etc.
It's not just about child safety. No one is safe from this increasing levels of toxic environment created by digital/online ways. A lot of types of people will be extinct, who are unable to deal with technology driven media onslaught, complexity, online crime and content manipulation. There is no scope for trust and assumptions. One need to be on their toes in every engagement with others and these systems, or hire an agent/expert even for simple tasks in life.
The tech-savvy people here might argue for freedom and anonymity at any cost. But think of other social classes, laws and the way the nations and societies came to be what they are today. The world doesn't just belong to tech nerds only.
People need safety from all this tech. That may against the wishes of a tiny minority of the people. But a nation, by nature, enforces generic policies that benefit those most of the people.
> A joint statement by Buffy Wicks, the lead author of AB 2273, Jordan Cunningham, another AB 2273 author, and 5Rights Foundation states, “The Bill is practicable and realistic, drawing as it does on the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC).”
How is Buffy Wicks so damn gullible with tech legislation? Her AB 1043 and AB 1856 (Digital Age Assurance Act), intended to protect children online and regulate Big Tech (but unintentionally criminalizing open source), was sponsored by a dark money influence operation from Meta.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_b...
She is actually well-respected with housing and transportation bills but I don't know what's going on with her tech bills.
Why assume that the appearance of gullibility isn't the act of pretending to be gullible for gain?
We have dark money in the UK too and linked to the same orgs it just arrives via different channels.
The DAAA doesn't criminalize open source. Please stop spreading disinformation.
Buffy is a real name?!
It used to be a nickname variant of Elizabeth.
This makes as much sense as Bill and William, or Bob and Robert.
no
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_(given_name)
Well-respected by who?
>(but unintentionally criminalizing open source)
Why do you assume this was unintentional? Because she said so?
Why do you assume it actually happened? The DAAA doesn't criminalize open source.
> Well-respected by who?
She was elected to the California State Assembly, so presumably by her constituents.
The right people to protect children are those responsible for them - their parents and guardians.
If there is a problem with children not being sufficiently protected, that is the level at which to solve it. Give families tools and information to do so.
I’ll just add that age verification schemes serve no purpose—-and are actively harmful—-unless there is some reasonable policy that’s applied after the enforcement.
The companies pushing age verification make their money monetizing access to children. They are exactly the sorts of groups I’d like to keep my kids away from. Forcing the kids to label themselves as minors just makes them more vulnerable to online exploitation.
Yes, it is an egregious attack on the privacy and safety of minors.
No ID checks at clubs, bars, or other adults-only venues.
No school zone speed limits, or protected crossings on streets near schools.
No requirements for railings on public balconies, fencing around public pools, protective covers over drains or other holes in the ground.
Parents/guardians can just supervise.
Sounds great!
> No ID checks at clubs, bars, or other adults-only venues.
Those are mostly there because of alcoholic drinks being served and the venue wants to create a certain atmosphere. There are plenty of parents that would take their kids there if they could.
The rest is not just there for kids but also for adults (or elderly).
There is a bunch of adults who would step in a hole in the ground or fall off a balcony.
So why are ID checks necessary at a venue that serves alcoholic drinks, in particular, out of all the venues that exist?
While what you say seem intuitive, it is missing one point. Those locations probably are not recording exactly who is coming and going and what they are saying/doing.
That is where this become more than just gate keeping and becomes full on tracking.
You are saying something quite different to the comment I responded to:
> The right people to protect children are those responsible for them - their parents and guardians.
My position is that there is a social responsibility to protect children which extends to the community at large, not just their immediate guardians.
Yes. There is also an inequality issue because not all parents/guardians are equipped to afford the same protections for their children. For example, there are parents out there who would let their children smoke at 8 years old because they don't care. This isn't fair. Such lack of care becomes abuse and parents shouldn't have a right to abuse their children.
It's really on us to figure out how we can have things like the internet without harming children. Now, this is quite annoying, because I have never, and would never, give a child access to the internet in the first place. The internet was never driving around on public streets. I never wanted to force it on anyone.
We all dropped the ball here. We've all accepted and even celebrated more and more of our lives being online. But, more importantly, nobody noticed when children started to get smartphones with internet access. In my mind this is no different than giving children cigarettes or other adult materials. But nobody batted an eye. I'm also not surprised, though. Loads of people here have made tons of money from children having access to the internet.
Unfortunately it's so hard to go back from something like this. So we end up in this stupid situation where people will accept more surveillance because we can't just take phones away from children.
You are being facetious.
I really don't believe that they are. Historically, communities raised children, and leaving everything up to parents is an anomaly.
Said parents and guardians cannot protect their kids all the time - they have their own responsibilities like work. Most kids go to school during the day. The few that aren't grow up in homeschooling systems or cult-like environments, which are their own problem.
I frequently see this rhetoric (parents should look after their kids) from naive people on the internet that clearly don't have kids of their own (or don't have teenagers, or don't live or let their kids live free, etc)
reads like you’re espousing a theoretical position from a theoretical perspective
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205469
> you know, i feel like the "it's the parents' responsibility" comments that turn up on submissions like this often tend towards phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."
if you’ve had kids maybe you’d like to share with the class exactly how you go about doing exactly what you’re describing?
if not, maybe let parents figure out how to parent rather than expecting them to be perfect for everyone else’s benefit.
> phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."
I need to remember this one, thanks!
The only way parents can try to protect their kids from the world is to keep them isolated, homeschooled, or in some kind of commune or cult. Which unfortunately is not uncommon in the US.
> let parents figure out how to parent
While I agree, I also think there's a role in society to help parents on how to parent, via e.g. education and awareness. Every generation brings new unknowns, like what kids can do in Roblox or how they can browse the internet on their smart fridge, and it's unreasonable to assume every parent knows all of that.
>maybe let parents figure out how to parent
That can only work if parents as an interest group don't bother the rest of us with the very 'think of the children' nonsense. If you are inventing laws that affect us, we should also have a say.
This is something where I agree and disagree with both sides.
Parents should have the tools to protect their children, the providers should have those tools in place. But those that are dealing the goods as also heavily invested in trying to maximize engagement and so they do not really work to hard on providing those tools.
the weird thing about it all is that age is a bad proxy in the first place for a child's level of safety in interacting with online content. Some kids are super mature at 11 and others still need protection at 16. For some reason the world has fixated on "years alive" as a perfect measure of vulnerability and now are doggedly pursuing it.
Even if perfect age verification is implemented, kids will be harmed. Because they are vulnerable while above the arbitrary age limit. So -arguing for age verification is harming children. Won't somebody think of the children?
And the answer comes back to the same point. Parents should mediate this. Online content should advertise its maturity level, and parents should be able to configure devices at setup time for the maturity level they are appropriate for. Then apps should respect that and everyone can be better off without robbing everybody of anonymity or freedom.
Arguably, all online content should be moderated - just because I'm 40 doesn't mean I want to come across decapitations and the like.
Under the DAAA the parent can just lie about the child's age in the settings.
I don't think anyone believes that age is a perfect proxy. Just that it is good enough, and that any better solution is either much more difficult or impossible.
You clearly don't have kids. You drop them at school and for maybe 8 hours a day, as a parent you have 0 control over whats happening. Bullying, peer pressure etc. How is that also parent's responsibility?
Parents shouldn't buy smart phone to kids, period. There are 0 reasons kid of say 15 or lower should have one instead of dumb phone (or new commodore one with google maps and whatsapp but no browser or apps), in same way we don't allow cigarettes or alcohol to be given or sold to them. Helicopter control freak parents can go to hell, their mental issues shouldn't be messing their kid's lives. But to claim parents have 100% responsibility could work only if kids spend 100% of the time with them.
Totally disagree. If you want to stop kids from using cell phones and social media, you are not going to achieve that at the family level. It is just not possible because if your peers are on the platforms and are using smart phones, no amount of family level restrictions are going to stop kids from using them. It has to be at the state or higher level so that everyone is prevented from using social media or smart phones at the same time so that is the norm. It has to be alcohol tier regulation if you actually want it to be effective
Pretty much. As soon as kids start going to school, there is a large amount of time where they are out of the supervision of the parents. This is when they end up being dragged to the general flow of society for better and worse.
If you're going to take an aspect of UK law it would be better to take some aspects of the police training: how long they are trained, how to do de escalation, the idea of policing by consent.
(I realise UK police are far from perfect).
> I realise UK police are far from perfect
I think most people can see that there are levels to everything and UK police are better than a lot of places whilst still needing to improve.
don't think so, mate
Always makes me chuckle when brits believe their law enforcement is anywhere near as toxic and corrupt as america’s.
And now, "it's still in the package!"
I love such cases... because "almost" all of them have hidden political agendas... so, as usual, I let my investigative agent run over this and prepare me detailed connections graph between prominent personnel, orgs, funding, and political connections...
https://5rights.stupidlabs.lol/
Disclaimer: this project of mine is still in development, and not quote 100% accurate.. so, take it with a bit of salt.. do your own research...
Also, this is running on a cheap server... please don't hammer it..
Yo this is an excellent use of LLMs...
Is there any connection with the 5rights foundation?
Search for "5rights foundation" in that "search graph" box on left side, then click on relevant search result from below (dont click on + icon.. thats for finding routes) ... and the graph will adjust to this node and show all connections..
btw, one of them most powerful feature is finding connections between any nodes... just search for them one by one, click "+" on searched entity, do this for both, or more.. then click: "shortest path" ... you can investigative how anyone is connected to anyone else
For example: "Center for American Progress" is connected to "UK House of Lords" through this long chain:::
Center for American Progress -> [has former fellow] -> Simon Clark -> [board chair of] -> Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — US -> [lobbied for] -> KOSA / KOSPA (Kids Online Safety Act / Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act) -> [engaged with] -> 5Rights Foundation <- [founded] <- Baroness Beeban Kidron (Beeban Tania Kidron, Baroness Kidron) <- [has member] UK House of Lords
Graph: https://ibb.co/tTL0cGjm
Sorry, I feed stupid to ask, but what does the graph tell us in that particular case?
"Connections"... how most important personnel from 5rights are associated with other entities (people, org, events, etc), that can directly, or indirectly, connect to political circle... thus, act as political influence network...
Very nice, this is what investigative journalism should be doing as well, but if it's "democratized" by just putting it up on a website we don't need to wait for anyone to publish it.
As long as all the sources are listed and verifiable, of course.
We need this for everything.
That's super cool!
thanks.. there are a few nodes that are giving error when clicked.. but, i am fixing as i am discovering these... as I said, this is still in development...
Thanks for checking and good words..
Fixed.
> These NGOs have converged upon a unified strategy: use the rhetoric of ‘child safety’ to advocate for digital ID laws that would prevent adults from using the internet anonymously.
Of course.
Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security
That argument loses you most of the population in a vote, myself included. Parents may disagree, for a start; I reckon most women (especially outside of tech) read that and mark you down as "creepy man I don't want near kids".
It's also wrong, as there are lots of rules that are in fact designed to protect children. I recommend reading up on the history of child abuse in the Boy Scouts of America (now Scouts BSA), FBI agent Kenneth Lanning's investigation, and the safeguarding and leadership training that scout leaders must take today.
The UK has a system, I think it's called the DBS, which depending on the level of check ranges from "is this person a convicted sex offender?" to "non-crime hate incidents". One can argue a lot about what the correct level should be, no-one has yet convincingly explained to me why specifically "non-crime" actions should be in a secret police record. But I am on board with someone convicted by a court for child sex offences not being allowed to become a schoolteacher.
Worth noting that there's no security in a system that abusively collects your data. That goes for children as well.
Or guarantee that even if you provide such data to a nice, friendly, democratically run and ethically managed administration, that some future regime change to a completely different group of people won't result in catastrophic misuse.
This is the issue I have with most of my well meaning but somewhat politically uninformed friends. The idea of “wouldn’t it be good if …” (idealized scenario), is never followed up with a “yes, but …” (realistic evaluation of how politics actually works).
Yes it might actually work out ok if a mythical benevolent dictator could manage things with infinite precision and unlimited compassion. I would imagine that has never happened at any reasonable scale.
The Conservative folks seem to phrase this as a desire to “keep government small” - which always seemed a little clunky given the stakes and track record of these governments.
> Yes it might actually work out ok if a mythical benevolent dictator could manage things with infinite precision and unlimited compassion. I would imagine that has never happened at any reasonable scale.
That's because people aren't recognizing me as their benevolent god-emperor yet.
> is never followed up with a “yes, but …” (realistic evaluation of how politics actually works).
OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
> OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
Only if "following this logic" means "extrapolate to an unreasonable extreme." Compare:
1. "Just eat healthy food and you'll be healthy!"
2. "Yes, but [things are complex]"
3. "Following that logic, we should just eat trash."
I am still curious: when is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
The problem is that the government was handed an emotion and a mandate to eliminate it. You’ve declared a “war on jealousy” and demanded the government assemble the troops. That’s not handing them a well reasoned plan and “hoping they don’t mess it up”, you messed it up when you scribbled “no more addiction” on a protest sign.
When the consequences of the government not abusing it isn’t devastating.
By that logic, countries like the US, UK, France, etc. shouldn't be allowed to have a standing military.
Nearly there...
Now ask yourself which government is currently bombing another country over one man's ego (or due to blackmail by an "ally"), and whether they're on that list, and whether the literal thousands of people killed are just acceptable sacrifices to maintain someone's worldview about 'the good guys'?
And yet, compared to every military in the past, compared to the fact that war was seen as a normal thing in the past, compared to how it used to be standard to rape and pillage in the past, and that was just expected and fine and normal, current modern militaries of the West are exceptionally disciplined, and their use by politicians doubly so.
Of course, that doesn't mean we can't do better and shouldn't.
But we do need to compare "How things have been for all of human history" to "How we do things now", and see that our modern democracies show immense restraint and a lack of malfeasance, compared to how they've been used in the past.
I feel that people view how the world is today, through such a restricted world view. Where the history of how things were, and the immense and great and incredible progress we've made, is thrown aside because "Oh bad thing happened!", and therefore "The entire West is completely corrupt and everything sucks and we should rip it all down because it's bad".
One only need take a tour around the rest of the world. To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively. And yes, I know that's saying a lot.
> And yet, compared to every military in the past, compared to the fact that war was seen as a normal thing in the past, compared to how it used to be standard to rape and pillage in the past, and that was just expected and fine and normal, current modern militaries of the West are exceptionally disciplined, and their use by politicians doubly so.
Are you serious?
During the Vietnam War era, the US dropped over 7.5 million tons of ordnance across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which is more than double the tonnage dropped in all of WW2. In rural parts of Laos and Cambodia, unexploded ordinance is still a daily threat to people. 50 years on.
As for raping and pillaging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_Vietnam_War
> To compare our militaries to those in non-democratic nations. To how those leaders act, in reality, compared to our leaders. Even the current US admin looks good, comparatively.
When I see comments like this, I want to believe that it's not real but sadly, I suspect you really believe this.
OK. Now compare the entire world's militaries, over the last 50 years, worst-for-worst act. Or since you mentioned WWII, what's the worst done by armies during that time? Hmm?
After all, you're trying to find and hold up the worst the US has done, right? So to compare, you need to find the worst in modern militaries. In militaries of all time. That was what I discussed, after all.
I was quite clear. Compare to all of history. Compare to all militaries today.
Instead you grab at part of an action, and hold it up, without making that comparison. Still.
As a Canadian who has had your current ridiculous president state that we should be the 51st state, and belittled us by calling our Prime Ministers "Governors"? Who has talked about unilaterally redrawing borders? As a Canadian who has considered how I may have to one day slaughter Americans crossing our border? How I may have to look my brothers in the eye, and kill them? I still say that the US military has been a shining light for freedom around the world. If I can remain impartial, then surely you can.
I also say that about police officers in the West, including the US.
Are there bad actions taken by police departments? By individual officers? By groups of officers, over the last decades? YES! Yes, most assuredly.
Now compare the overall score with police in totalitarian regimes.
Comparison is vital, important, key, and any finger pointing has to be in context.
And also note, I said "yes we must do better".
But if you think the US military is evil, then you have never seen evil. Ever.
> But if you think the US military is evil, then you have never seen evil. Ever.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/photos/2006/08/nachtwey_phot...
It takes a lot to get me to want to say something very nasty to a person but you, sir, would deserve it.
I assume you already have read them, but theres some books one guy wrote once about a Gulag Archipelago or 3. Worth re-reading.
You're becoming abusive. But I guess if people don't agree with you, that makes it OK to step out of bounds.
Sort of like when military units go out of bounds, or the police?
Back to the point, have you yet made the comparisons I mentioned?
I understand the Vietnam war is a sore point in America due to recruitment. But your comment is so incredibly one-sided that it's not a serious argument anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Cong_and_People%27s_Army_...
The opposing party in the Vietnam war was far worse than the US on a moral level, before, during and after the war. And it wasn't a small difference. We're talking about democracy and democratically selecting laws here? Well: the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets.
> the large majority of the population in Vietnam, including in the North, wanted the US to defeat the Vietcong and the Soviets.
The 1954 Geneva Accords, which ended the French war, called for nationwide reunification elections by July 1956. Those elections never happened. Ngo Dinh Diem, the US-backed first president of South Vietnam who was a brutal authoritarian, refused to hold them. The US backed his refusal and kept backing him afterward.
In Eisenhower's 1963 memoir, he wrote that everyone knowledgeable he'd spoken to believed Ho Chi Minh would have taken around 80% percent of the vote if elections had happened.
The Vietnamese didn't really care about the Soviets. They are a fiercely independent and proud people with a long history of defending themselves against foreign interlopers and aggressors.
So let me restate your asinine and totally inaccurate conclusion:
The large majority of the population in Vietnam, in both the North and the South, didn't want a foreign power controlling their country and determining their fate. They wanted to run their own country, and have peace.
The large majority of the population in Vietnam, in both the North and the South, didn't want a foreign power controlling their country and determining their fate. They wanted to run their own country, and have peace.
And yet, the poster you're replying to said no such thing. Not even close. They merely said they wanted help repelling an enemy. You're also using hindsight to frame this conflict, something entirely unfair to the people involved at the time.
The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
edit
--
Re your response. Were they ordered to rape and pillage by their full chain of command?
Or were they acting illegally, regardless of the outcome?
Would a military in a dictatorship have deemed that "illegal"? What about 200 years ago? 1000?
You seem to be ignoring the concept of comparables. And taking acts that the military itself teaches its own soldiers, was wrong.
It's good to have principles. And good to defend them. But if you ignore what others are saying, and the context of their words, you start to slide into zealoty.
Have you really backslid from "modern militaries don't rape and pillage" to "modern militaries rape and pillage, but it doesn't count because it's illegal"?
> You're also using hindsight to frame this conflict, something entirely unfair to the people involved at the time.
Millions upon millions of people around the world protested the Vietnam War, including millions of people in the US.
On one day alone, an estimated 2+ million Americans participated in anti-war protests. Over 500,000 men were officially categorized as draft dodgers, more than 200,000 charged with violating the Selective Service Act and millions more found a way not to go to Vietnam through deferments and exemptions.
It's both amusing and sad that there are some people (like you) who 50 years later can't see what was apparent to so many people at the time.
> The US repeatedly tried to get out of that war. Multiple times. They just kept getting pulled back in.
That's right. Those pesky Vietnamese villagers just wouldn't let American GIs stop torching their villages, gang-raping their women and children, and executing them. The American military was trying to leave but spreading democracy demanded sacrifice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre
And perhaps, then the alternatives are more devastating, and it must be done.
I've written about this in other comments over the last couple of years, but the root of all of this is quite simply, foreign interference. We all remember Cambridge Analytica, its interference in democratic elections in the West, and even how it caused a few regimes to topple in the 3rd world. It's machinations and manipulation of curated news stories was quite simplistic and minor compared to where we sit now.
You simply cannot have a high-trust, well functioning democracy, if 99% of the stuff recommended to you is entirely fabricated nonsense. Worse, if it purposely fabricated to create as much social unrest as possible, and doubly worse if it becomes curated to each person and created and generated on demand.
CA managed this by having a sloth of "different archetypes" for its 100 or so altered news stories per topic. If you were a left wing shopkeep, or a right wing car salesperson, or anything else, you'd be slotted into one of these 100 version of the precise same news story, and fed the best lies to make you do as the payee requested.
Modern AI means this can be far more fine tuned. And algorithms can be gamed, just as CA gamed them with support of Facebook's APIs.
So my point here is twofold. First that government moves slow. What we're seeing now, is the result of CA a decade ago. Really, two election cycles, with senatorial and congressional committees and debates during that time.
And second is that things will not continue as they are now. Nothing you, or I, or anyone does will result in an unchanged Internet. From the perspective of lawmakers, and really a lot of the public, the "world wide" Internet is really only used by "The Rest of the World" to attack us. Attack water plants, hospitals, meat packing plants, nuclear reactors, and beyond that, to manipulate our children into thinking Western Democracy is vile and malign in various ways.
Now of course, there's no reason for most of those things to be on the Internet at all. But the manipulation of adults and children in our society just isn't going to wash. In days gone by, you'd see each community with police informants, not the sort in cop movies where the guy was crooked, but instead actual cities who would keep an eye out, and inform if someone planned something against the state. Pretty much every pub had one in the UK, for example.
Heck, when I was a teenager in Canada, one of my friends had a plan to become an officer. Part of this path was reporting on everything he heard at local parties, of an untoward nature. It's how misinformation campaigns used to be curtailed, stopped, dealt with.
Yet suddenly we presume that the average person, and average kid is going to just deal with misinformation. And bizarrely so, compared to misinformation in a pub, we let people get siloed so every single thing they read and see says the same lie.
How can an average person ever stand again absurdities, if from their perspective everything they can see around them says it is true?
So back to the start? The above, correctly assessed or not, is what the politicians and police and agencies view as happening in the West. And while there are multiple ways to deal with this, their stance is "Why are you afraid of putting your name on your words?".
If we want something other than all the bills being proposed, and all the change coming, we as a tech community need to provide a path to end all anonymity on the internet, in the least privacy reducing way possible. And there are some ways to do so. They've been discussed. But if we don't provide such a method, and drive this conversation, you know who will?
Politicians, with no technical capability at all. The average Joe, scared for his country and family.
Try to fight those two types of people, and you will lose every single time.
So my recommend is, everyone needs to stop bellyaching, suck up to the harsh realities here, and take this massive, unstoppable river, and redirect it by a few degrees so that the best-case is achieved.
Straight to Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities, since more competition between governments must be good for the customers of government-like services!
How did you arrive at mafias. That's just another form of (abusive) small scale government. A more legitimate and probable type of government is any of the different forms of anarchism or worker cooperatives, if you want to argue for "disband government".
> OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
It's funny because this is exactly the opposite of what actually happened. Mafias are the reaction to the "unification" of Italy, and they almost all come from the previous governments that existed before unification. Northern Italy conquered the south and defeated all the little states there ... and then levied taxes and did not much else. Specifically they did not provide policing, and very few public services.
And then the remnants of the old governments stepped in, provided public services, security on the streets and "pressured" people into paying a second tax. Now you can say that they were almost-feudal governments and therefore defended and enforced the law of large landowners but that wasn't seen as a problem ... because that's how it had always been.
The reason for their success, their initial success at least, is that, first, when Italy was young, it left citizens to their fate, suppressing dissent, stationing small forces in most of Italy that abused locals, were extremely corrupt and did little else. What is generally blamed for their later reputation is that the mafias started using their power more and more for their own purposes, irrespective of cost, while the mafias also pressured the centralized state to do the opposite.
Especially early on it's very hard to pick "the right" side in the war on mafias. In the beginning people saw the mafias as the good guys, and with good reason. Over time mafias became worse and the central state became better, but honestly, the central state wasn't particularly good for people either (in fact it still can be improved quite a bit)
Following this logic, shouldn’t we all just do nothing and parish in the same spot we’re standing in?
Or perhaps you’re not actually following the logic but rather an oversimplified characterization of it?
I am still curious: when is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
Firefighters, schools, tax collection, well fare programs
Or are you suggesting these would turn as problematic as zero-privacy surveillance systems in case the government becomes totalitarian?
Acceptable in what way? Socially? Or do you mean realistically?
> OK, but following this logic, shouldn't we disband the government altogether and have mafias rule us all?
Conservatives seem to be fine with mafia rule, so long as the don has the correct party affiliation.
> When is it acceptable to hope that something is actually going to work well enough when handed over to the government?
Mob rule doesn't with very well as a defacto government, or oligarchy. Nor food and drug safety or national defense. Some things just have to be tackled by society as a larger group. Ideally as locally as possible, but not so locally that minorities are crushed or rule becomes petty and micromanaged.
US is currently recovering (fever breaking) from the petty and micromanaged stage. We haven't been coherent as a nation for like 20+ years.
Seen from the outside, the US seemed a lot more coherent pre-Trump.
Let’s keep the “gain as much power and grow as big as possible with whatever means necessary” machine as small as possible.
Which is no longer a hypothetical
> Or guarantee
Not possible. You can strengthen defenses but you cannot guarantee it can withstand any possible, dynamic and adaptive attack strategies.
So what you say is impossible to do.
That's partly because congress, including state congresses and judges/dept of justice just don't care about that. They are totally unable to see either the consequences of their own imperfection or even just limits to their power.
A LOT of damage is done that way.
He who gives up freedom for security ends up with neither.
So does he who gives up security for freedom. All things must be balanced.
> Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.
You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.
Yes it’s normal to worry about your kids. It’s normal for family and friends to worry about your kids.
When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!
Politicians often have kids too, and what parent does not worry about their own kids? Is it that much worse if a politician genuinely cares about other people's kids too?
There are no politicians worried about kids. There are politicians worried about the votes of people who worry about kids, which is effectively the same thing.
>When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!
What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?
The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?
You should be worried the politician is going to enslave people to make the food for the children.
Politicians don’t care about your kids, they only care about your vote.
This level of cynicism is only possible if someone has never interacted with people on a local political level. Once again, it's more a reflection of your own worldview than an accurate reflection of all of humanity. There are some people who genuinely have empathy for others and want to do good. The way some of you refuse to believe that is truly disturbing.
There are some people who have genuine empathy for others and want to do good, and they aren't politicians. The only thing disturbing about this is you don't see it.
So you should just oppose everything any politician proposes?
In the case of food stamps, that was the leverage by which social engineers destroyed the black family via incentives for single mothers — collapsing from 75% married (circa 1950s) to 25% married (modern).
The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.
Just so I'm clear here, you think half of Black moms have pushed their child's father away for the lucrative reward of food stamps? And that scenario was preplanned by some unnamed "social engineers"?
Your narrative is embellished and does not correlate strongly with the data [1].
Embellished: marriage rates are 33.8% for Black women and 37.8% for Black men, neither of which I would round to 25%.
Uncorrelated: marriage rates dropped sharply among people of all single races on the Census except for Asians. It has dropped more sharply for Black respondents, but anything disproportionately affecting the lower and middle economic classes would disproportionately affect Black families.
Show me some data, and not outdated welfare policies from the 1980s, that supports the "social engineers" causal narrative better than plain deindustrialization. Or deindustrialization combined with good old American racism and mass incarceration. I am willing to change my position on this.
1: https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-...
There are many scenarios in which politicians can be legitimately worried about the kids. For example if they want to install crosswalks and enforce speed limits around a school, or if they want to increase funding for social services.
I do believe we should allow for a lot more nuance in our political opinions and avoid most statements that can be made in the constraints of a short comment on social media.
The main example that comes to mind is anything having to do with the environment. “The kids” will face the brunt of our actions (or inactions) on that front so a “for the kids” argument is completely valid. Dismissing a proposal simply because of a “for the kids” element is incredibly reductive and will genuinely end up harming kids.
“For the kids” arguments are distinct from arguments worrying about future generations in that they are almost entirely focused (ostensibly) on preventing harm to children while they are children rather than “all our descendants including the adults”.
Then let's ban child safety locks, child labor laws, and any law that distinguishes child abuse from other forms of abuse. Let's also allow minors to buy tobacco and alcohol while we're at it if we're claiming that any law that exists to protect children as children is inherently misguided.
I think if you spoke to the people actually making the claim they’d define it a little better to include only cases where adults are being asked to give up rights, freedoms, or privileges. But you can ask them.
I didn’t take a position on the argument. I pointed out a distinction.
Child safety locks make adults give up freedom because the lock has to be unlocked, which is like asking for ID.
At least that's the anti-AB1043 logic. AB1043 says every phone must have a child safety lock.
Oh, I'm sure a lot of those people have been convinced to back these laws out of sincere desire to protect children.
The problem is that those laws are NOT designed to protect children, and the people who convince politicians and the public to support them are NOT doing so out of genuine concern to protect children.
The real, underlying reason why they are being pushed for so hard is to destroy privacy and control people which is going to make everyone but the elite less safe, children included.
Especially if and when we get another Nazi Germany type regime and realize that - oh shit, they have 24/7 overview of where every single person in the world is, what they do, what they think, what their worldviews and identities are.
It's impossible for any of this to end well.
Sincere or not, their arguments are automatically voided by the simple fact they are building a dystopian cyberpunk panopticon. Nothing justifies that oppression. Not even children.
When irresponsible parents raise irresponsible children, the effects will not be limited to themselves. I don't want to go back to open smoking, causing increased rates of cancer to everyone just because some people want their freedom to smoke. Preventing tobacco sales to children greatly reduced that.
This is coming up again and again because The current status quo does. Not. Work.
There is direct evidence from trials, in which Meta researchers told executives that features like infinite scroll and others “ are inherently at odds with well-being”
There is no effective fight for freedom if there is no effective understanding of the politics and social forces driving change.
The freedom of the internet in the 90s was in itself a social revolution, not just a technological one.
Fighting for a status quo that didn’t work for children and even for many adults is a losing fight.
Fighting for privacy and against ad tech, and against addictive design features for all users is a far stronger fight.
I have no problem parenting my own kids, why do I have to give up my rights because others cant.
The same reason you pay taxes. Not everyone is law abiding, taxes pay police to uphold order. Child laws improve upbringing, reducing chance of future criminal acts.
We live in a society, you wouldn't be on HN otherwise.
> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security.
The immediate reply is the accusational: "why are you trying to trying to prevent safety for kids".
It's a simple next step to accuse you of hiding your own child abuse ring.
This sounds like hype, but it's the normal path here in Australian.
Which is precisely the point. Children are political weapons. Precisely crafted to shut down any opposition to whatever it is you're pushing. Oh you're against this? Pedophile.
You don't argue with these people. You summarily dismiss them. You recognize the game they are playing and you refuse to play it.
Call attention to their methods instead: they are exploiting and weaponizing children to push their big tech friendly surveillance agenda.
The flaw in 'calling attention to their methods' is that you rarely have a meaningful opportunity to argue against a bureaucratic system that operates this way.
Whether individuals inside the system are true believers or cynical operators, the response to calling out their methods will be identical:
If they genuinely believe the rhetoric: They will simply double down and say, 'Yes, and protecting the children makes this absolutely necessary.'
If they know it is a manipulation tactic: They will still reply with, 'It is for the children,' because they know it is an impenetrable PR shield that gets them their way.
In either scenario, the bureaucracy is entirely immune to the criticism.
Exposing the game might help persuade third-party observers, but it does absolutely nothing to stop the bureaucratic machine from using that exact same line to steamroll the agenda forward.
Yep. And if not child abuse then terrorism.
Drug trafficking money laundering child molesting copyright infringing terrorists.
The statement “These are child safety laws” premises that the laws would save children - so the way to refute is to ask for proof. Outside of vaccines I doubt there is anything concrete that will directly benefit children. There is no argument that holds up to scrutiny. They also don’t have any good way to measure safety, though Goodhart’s Law would have an impact.
>Outside of vaccines
Will you allow an argument against this?
I mean, I want to show an example where it is only a problem when someone else is not as convinced as yourself, one way or the other.
>so the way to refute is to ask for proof..
No use. The same proof will not be convincing for everyone. Let us take vaccine. The proof for a Vaccine for X saving Y lives is often the following.
"Before the vaccine there was Y deaths per year from X. But after vaccines there is zero deaths from X".
The implication is that vaccines saved X lives. This could convince most of the people. But someone can ask. Are those kids who are not dying of X (thanks to the vaccine), are dying of something else?
Now the picture is not so clear.
See, same data, different results depending on how deep you want to probe,
We should not ignore it, but firmly dismiss it with reason. The recent Illinois law that applies to all Internet-capable operating systems is blatantly unconstitutional. People should not be forced by law to disclose their age (or anything) in order to engage in digital communication. That forced utterance of your own age is compelled speech, a violation of the First Amendment.
For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
In the modern discourse and context, 99 times out of 100, indeed they are, and indeed it should be.
Comes down to something I have said for a long while. Anyone that wants power, who is saying it, why are they saying it and why do people believe them.
That one can get deep really quick.
> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom
These are NGOs not parents. And "child safety" is often a euphemism. The point is it's hard to argue against child safety. For example, if opaque NGOs demand deanonymization to stop CSAM, I am assuming most people would not want to seem like they are in favor of CSAM. So you need an organized effort to argue in favor of privacy and even then anyone who does it can easily be smeared as a CSAM user. So child safety can backdoor something else.
The worse is - we say it's about child safety - but that same rhetoric is actually defending kids to have a smartphone.
You're straw manning most people by trying to insist upon this, as most Americans support a ban on social media for children. [1] That turns into the overwhelming majority if you consider only Americans with children. And the percent of Americans that oppose things like age verification for the usage of social media sites is in the single digits.
So it will most likely happen especially because you are certainly right, in part, that no government has ever said no to actions that'd give them more power, let alone ones that are widely supported. But the point of this is that rather than having this as some sort of red-line no, I think it'd be much more pragmatic to try to argue for identity verification regulations that would be most palatable.
[1] - https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54969-eight-in-ten-parents...
Conversations on age verification tend to split into 2 streams.
Conversations where the root submission talks about failures at social media firms and the evidence of harms, or evidence from trials.
Conversations on the attacks against freedom and privacy.
I see very little hope that an actual rebuttal or alternative to the desire to muzzle tech will be forged, because the two conversation streams seem to rarely intersect.
We are not in the 90s anymore. Tech as most people experience it is not the new new thing, and most parents are tired of tech. A more recent pew survey showed that nearly half of teens think that social media is bad for teens. We know that Meta went ahead with features even after their own internal research told them it was bad for teen mental health.
How in hell, is there any effective response created, if the social pressure parents and children are driving, is being dismissed as a conspiracy?
This should be the time that the business models and incentives that allow loot boxes and addicting design mechanisms should be discussed.
There needs to be an actual solution that addresses the issues users are facing, or else they are simply going to choose to sacrifice freedoms for the hope of gaining some control.
In general I would agree with you, but one issue I have here is that I think social media even done fully responsibly would end up being very undesirable for children. Even if we have no algorithm and just 'friend on friend' stuff, social media tends to significantly amplify a lot of the nasty stuff that happens at every school - bullying, rumor milling, conspiratorial stuff (like kids falsely reporting somebody else to try to get them in trouble), and so on.
There's also the typical image crafting stuff that drives envy, insecurity, and so on - kids aren't sharing when they eat left overs mashed up in a bowl, but they are sharing when they go eat at an expensive steak restaurant. That bias already significantly affects adults perceptions of others' life/lifestyle, let alone children. And even without 'the algorithm', there's going to be FOMO and the general addictiveness of updates that's going to leave kids as zombies to their phones rather than interacting with each other as much in real life.
So I'm not really sure it's viable to try to 'fix' social media. You can certainly make it better than it currently is, but I think the issue is that we have horrible companies managing a horrible product.
"The government says all children need to show an ID when browsing the internet in order to be safe"
"The government says all children need to be vaccinated in order to be safe"
I'm not saying these arguments are equivalent, but they seem equivalent because they induce the same feeling of loss of agency. And one cannot simply ignore and dismiss something like this.
> loss of agency
That's exactly what this is.
They want to build an internet where it is structurally impossible for children to be harmed in any way.
This requires the destruction of the very concept of agency. You can't just do things. You need government approval.
rhetoric all the way down
Note how they always ignore parental controls, and skip straight to deanonymize everyone.
Half the laws we're complaining about (e.g. California, Illinois) are literally just regulating parental controls, and I can no longer give the benefit of the doubt to people who act as if this is the same as forcing internet users to scan their ID. People who conflate these two things are paid lobbyists of Meta to make sure Meta won't have to be safe for children even when the parental controls checkbox is turned on.
But the other half are. UK, Brazil, Texas, Virginia.
Haven’t seen a good DARVO in a while.
Deny: the laws aren’t about this! (Many of the laws are)
Attack: these people are lying! (They are not)
Reverse victim and offender: these people are Meta lobbyists! (Meta has spent a lot of money on groups campaigning for these laws)
Regulating parental controls by making you scan an ID to use a computer is even worse than doing it to access a website. I understand that today's laws are not doing that, but do you genuinely, truly believe in your heart of hearts that once every OS has mandatory age fields, that nobody is going to start proposing legislation to attempt to enforce its validity by ID verification + hardware attestation? You're not willing to give the benefit of doubt to people with concerns about this, but you are willing to give the benefit of doubt to the surveillance states that have been pushing us down a slippery slope for 25+ years, sliding further and further down every single year without reprieve?
Of course that is not parental controls. That's 3rd party controls. Parental controls means you create a child account for children and when a site is detected as being adult ideally using RTA headers [1] then a password prompt asks for the parents approval. That is parental controls.
[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20230829-Think-Of-The-Chi...
Indeed, that's a reasonable approach. Just to clarify that we're agreeing, the comment I was replying to was strongly defending California and Illinois' laws that require the OS record an age field for the primary user of the device, which while currently self-declared is at least an obvious path for future, more invasive legislation.
The problem with a self declared approach is that puts a signalling mechanism in place. Once in place the laws can easily scope creep year over year to add more information or require putting in ID information or some future nation-wide digital ID and Trump coin digital wallet which could easily be the plan all along. All they need is the API that will interface with websites using some agreed upon standard and then it can easily be extended line by line. Give them an inch, they will take a mile.
With proper parental controls there is no signalling.
What law anywhere in the US is specifically forcing the physical scanning of an ID to use a computer?
> I understand that today's laws are not doing that,
Come on. Like 80% of my entire post was devoted to pointing out a gradual erosion of rights over time, and I explicitly stated that it's not the case today.
Sorry, I didn't read that far. I do think this is a classic slippery slope though.
But don't underestimate human adaptability. Slippery slope arguments assume that once a technology introduces a specific risk, society lacks the agency to create counter-measures, new norms, or alternative uses for that technology.
I haven't found that to be the case throughout most of history.
We could very easily push for giving parents the kinds of control and auditing that hackers, manufacturers, and governments currently have
Tech people keep ignoring the fact that many people a) find the parental controls too hard to use and b) have no confidence that their kids won't find a way to circumvent them.
If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups established to manufacture consent, but this is infowars-type conspiracy thinking. Most people are just not that facile with technology and people who have kids are atavistically opposed to anything that could harm their kids.
Tech people's unwillingness to even engage with concerns about harm to children (eg the GP) more or less guarantees more aggressive regulation. IT's a self-defeating position.
I recently put some thought into what I would have done if I had encountered "parental controls" to use the Internet when I first encountered it as a young teen in 1992. I would have made it my personal mission in life to circumvent everything and anything possible. I feel fortunate that no such controls existed and the adults in my life knew significantly less about the technology than I did.
Was I exposed to some clearly adult content? Yes. But I didn't find it particularly compelling, the video games I could download and other things I could explore were more interesting.
It is also concerning to me that gen-alpha (or whatever the age bracket is called) people are increasingly being pushed into walled garden, app-based social media platforms instead of actually learning what the Internet really is, and what it's capable of.
My dad added parental controls to our PC sometime around 1997. It also had Eudora installed, which my dad used for email. Poking around, I found the ini file that had the ciphertext of the password for the email server. On a whim, I made another account in Eudora and put the ciphertext in as my password. In the ini, the plaintext of the password came out; I guess Eudora used some symmetric rot16 or xor like cipher! The same password worked to unlock parental controls, which had taken me just about a week to circumvent.
Agreed. I was a middle-schooler in the 2000's, had my own PC in my own bedroom, we had broadband access and I, of course, was exposed to porn while I was trying to download cracks and keygens on Astalavista and other such sites. Mislabelled files on eMule too. Links to porn also were readily shared on IRC channels. But yeah, I can't say it had a damaging effect on me.
It was a mix of being afraid of getting a virus from a porn site, knowing that porn wasn't for my age, and late-night FTA TV airing softcore anyways.
My parents told me to be responsible and kind of explained the dangers of the world the best way they could, and it was expected that I'd be grounded and lose computer access if they found me on a porn site. I preferred playing games. I definitely encountered some dark places on the clearnet (and on the darknet as well) and promptly GTFO.
At the school's computer lab they had plenty of content control which I had the most fun trying to bypass them. For what reason? Just so I could.
As usual it seems education is the only long-term solution. Forcibly keeping people out just makes them want it more.
I have a feeling we had a similar experience growing up. I generally agree, but also, we got QAnon/Alex Jones and such which have quite directly screwed up my country. So I don’t know, my opinion is often contradictory and fluid. I don’t know where I stand anymore. I believe in an “open internet,” but also, there’s people like Andrew Tate who have ruined the minds of people I care about.
We can debate if these systems and people existed before (they did), but the reach and scale is different now. My most controversial opinion these days is that not everyone should be allowed to upload to YouTube if it’s public facing. We need basic screening and filtering.
One personal observation, the early commercial internet as it was transitioning from universities/research labs/certain high-tech firms into a mass market thing with millions of users, it had its share of nutjobs and crazy as well. But it was boutique, hand crafted , personal level crazy and it was for the most part disregarded because none of the whackjobs could collect a sufficient following or megaphone to spread their message.
For instance in about 1994 I remember coming across a set of textfiles that were some lengthy manifesto about how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere. But it never got any traction.
Now we have the unfortunate venn diagram overlap between something like a Tate and a major social media platform, and he can get his message out to millions of angry, horny, unemployed young men...
> For instance in about 1994 I remember coming across a set of textfiles that were some lengthy manifesto about how the US government had supposedly manufactured AIDS in a lab somewhere. But it never got any traction.
There was a BBS in my area that ran on a small bank of 14.4 USR modems that had a gold mine of content like that. It was such a fun time.
> We need basic screening and filtering.
Based on whose values and criteria? Yours?
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
> "...not everyone should be allowed to upload to YouTube if it’s public facing..."
You still fantasize about building mechanisms for restricting information as if the very people you oppose won't use it on you when they get into power; no, as if the very people you oppose aren't _currently_ ascendant or even in office and would delightedly use it against you right this moment. Madness.
When you build a high tech muzzle, remember that it will fit onto your head just as well as it fits those you built it for.
> controversial
Is that how they’re spelling the r-word now.
In which decade did “the kids” in your country have “good ideas”
Well, I'm sorry parental controls are too hard to use, but all of the parents who want all other adults to sacrifice their online anonymity just to make to for it need to get their heads screwed on straight. They're screwing a) themselves b) everyone else and c) their own children when they reach adulthood.
Parents can stop giving kids smartphones.
I don't think this is a viable or realistic option in 2026/2027. Try to imagine what your own personal reaction would have been when you were 14 years old if 90%+ of your peers had an iphone 17 or equivalent and your parents gave you a flip phone, and tried to ban you from using smartphones.
Why repeat the same argument if it clearly hasn't worked? Do you expect it to suddenly become effective?
Change in behavior can only follow from change in incentives. Parents must be held legally liable if they allow their children access to social media. That means jail time for negligence.
Why would we even consider jailing parents before banning social media from kids and jailing Mark Zuckerberg for pushing it on them?
The power imbalance between individual parents and big tech is immense.
How can we be mad at random parents for not defeating the most powerful and rich people in history?
Because according to HN there's no way to force social media companies to not serve children without destroying privacy. That leaves parents who aren't changing their behavior because nothing has incited them to change. Legal liabily is an incentive that changes behavior.
Maybe not everyone agrees that social media causes literal cancer. I mean it’s not great, but it’s not the worst thing on earth, either. It’s clearly become a moral panic at this point.
Supposedly the incentive already exists because parents want their children saved from the harms of facebook and social media. The story is that parents are clamoring for the government to do something about it. I don't think parents really are, or where they are the expectation is that the social media companies will be forced to change their behavior, not that parents will be forced to start parenting their children or be forced to provide a scan of their face and passport every time they do an internet search.
The government has just decided to fall back on "think of the children" as a way to implement more surveillance and control.
The incentive for parents to stop giving their children smartphones does not exist. If it did exist, it would incite parents to perform the action: ie not give their children smartphones.
Incentives incite action. No action. No incentive.
That's not true. Incentives aren't the whole cause of behavior and they aren't the solution to changing it either. That's the same simplistic and flawed mentality that pushes for harsher punishments to deter crime when the evidence shows that doesn't work and that not even death penalty is an effective deterrent. People have several incentives to lose weight, but increasingly they still overeat.
Incentives play a role, you don't want to encourage wrong behaviors certainly, but they're just one factor in determining what people do or don't do. At best, they nudge. Those nudges aren't likely to overcome stronger forces, or even several weaker ones.
I'm sorry, but that is simply wrong. You're confusing desire/intention with incentive.
Someone may have a desire or intention to lose weight. But unless they lose the weight they lack incentive.
It's simple: incentives incite action. Don't make it more complicated to win an argument.
> Someone may have a desire or intention to lose weight. But unless they lose the weight they lack incentive.
Here are just some of the incentives overweight people have to lose weight:
They'll look better, to themselves and others. They'll have more clothing options. They'll feel better. They'll be healthier. They'll have drastically lower odds of many future heath problems. They'll live longer which means they can spend more time being with their loved ones.
Those are all incentives. Everyone who is obese has those incentives, even though different individuals may assign different values to them. Even with all those incentives that hasn't stopped the obesity problem. incentives don't incite action, but they can encourage them.
incentive noun [ C or U ] Something that encourages a person to do something by offering them a reward (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/incentiv...)
You can have a ton of encouragement, but that doesn't mean it will be enough to incite a behavior. What definition of incentive are you using?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/incentive
It literally says incite "to determination or action". Given that parents aren't actually taking smart phones away, neither determination nor action are present.
I'll grant you the examples you give incite people to desire to change weight just as negative consequences incite parents to desire that "something should be done," but it doesn't incite them to actually do something.
Describing something as incentive because it incites desire without changing behavior is not exactly what I think of when I think of incentives.
Think of being in the position of trying to come up with incentives for a group of people. Would you call your incentives successful if they created a desire in that group without anyone actually doing anything differently?
You missed the "or has a tendency to incite" part. It's important because incentive doesn't promise a change in action. People can do things even when they have have no incentive to do it. Sometimes people will even do things when they have every incentive not to do it.
If I were going to try to come up with incentives for a group of people, I wouldn't try to create a desire in them. I'd try to give them something they already desired as a reward for doing what I wanted them to do. They'll probably never want to do the thing I want them to do. They might hate doing it. If the incentive is high enough though they just might do it anyway. If my incentives weren't enough to sway them, they'd still be incentives, just ones that were inadequate/ineffective. I wouldn't even be surprised if they failed. Incentives fail to cause changes in behavior all the time.
On one hand the software world needs to re-learn the lost art of proper UX research and rely on data from user trials instead of on vibes and reading tea leaves with analytics, but on the other hand parents have a wholly unrealistic expectation of being able to keep their kids in a hermetically sealed bubble until they turn 18.
Kids are going to get into stuff you don’t want them to no matter how hard you try to prevent that, short of keeping them in locked padded rooms with no electronics (which would be abuse). Parents are right to want to steer them in the right direction and keep them out of the worst trouble, but that’s as far as it goes.
So really, both sides need to improve here.
Plenty of us survived the internet when it was an even wilder west, IRC chats with strangers trying to learn perl, not putting your name and social security number into random websites. Being aware of predators. It's a very specific kind of power-hungry move fast and break things tech that refuses to accept responsibility of the fallout.
Anonymity, the right to move privately and be private online is much bigger than parents who are frustrated with out of control capitalism.
Besides, this only benefits the big corporations. They of course will happily back anything that absolves them of their sins.
It was a noncommercial wild west. You were up against some troll trying to get a reaction by linking you to goatse, not some trillion dollar international corporation with a literal army of addiction experts A/B testing how to maximize engagement.
I fully appreciate that you care more about anonymity on principle, but it seems very naive to assume that principles are necessarily going to win out over the demands of aggrieved reactionary parents. Cranky parents are very consistent voters and providers of tax revenue in most polities and politicians want them to be reasonably happy and quiescent for the sake of stability. It seems to me you are wildly underestimating the size of your potential opposition.
You won't go far by calling everyone you disagree with, cranky, aggrieved, and reactionary. Maybe take some time to understand their concerns and you won't be so surprised when their vote wins.
Are aggrieved reactionary parents demanding that they should have to scan their face to look at websites? It seems to me like they just want social media companies to be forced to change their harmful and predatory practices and that instead of properly regulating the bad behavior of social media companies the government has decided to use this issue as a means to give themselves more surveillance and control.
We don't need to make parents the enemy of our online privacy. We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children to every shitty social media company and shady website on the internet to "protect" them.
Certainly I think they'd be happy if social media companies changed their behavior, but the problem is that they and the politicians don't really know how to make them do that. So the next best thing they can think of is a digital version of 'you can't come in here if you're under 18' similar to nightclubs, betting shops etc.
We just need parents to reject the idea that they have to give up their identity and the identity of their children
OK, but (as I have asked many times before) what is your alternative, beter proposal? People intuitively understand the idea of checking ID to prevent sales of alcohol to minors, keep teens out of adult spaces and so on, because virtually every adult remembers being a teenager and not being allowed to do certain things due to not being old enough. That makes checking identity an easy sell to people.
What is your better idea that is similarly easy to sell? Because if you don't have one,people will fall back on the mediocre idea of ID checks. I feel like anyone working in the tech field should understand that the best technological solution does not always win out.
> OK, but (as I have asked many times before) what is your alternative, beter proposal?
How about laws that prevent social media websites from pushing harmful content users didn't ask for? How about forcing them to abandon the practices and dark patterns that result in those platforms being addictive? How about putting executives behind bars when their algorithms are shown to cause mental health and body image issues in children? These platforms know that what they're doing is hurting people, but they don't care because they're profiting from it. These companies intentionally designed systems that are harmful and user-hostile. They've got algorithms that seek out and target people's vulnerabilities. They ignored repeated warnings from their own researchers, and actively concealed evidence of the harms they were causing. We don't have to let them do it. Not to children or anyone else. Facebook isn't going to die off if they go back to showing people only things their friends and family post. It might even get more popular. They might make fewer billions though and that's unthinkable to them.
There are a lot of things that can be done, but the government isn't interested because actually solving the problems social media causes isn't going to give them the power they're actually after and it could cause them the bribe money they get from these companies.
Well you're articulating the result you want, but not the mechanism for how you expect to achieve it. A law has to articulate which behaviors are legal or, and what the penalties for non-compliance are. Otherwise we could just pass laws saying 'the economy has to make everyone prosperous, people have to feel safe and fulfilled' and call it a day.
So, what actual rules do you want to make in service of these desirable outcomes? They have to be clear and straightforward enough that they can't be just gotten around with clever lawyers or argued past the point of meaninglessness by shills posing as philosophers. I do not like the idea of everyone having to show ID online (or even much in real life), but I can see why it's popular because it's very easy to explain and understand.
What I'd recommend is research on specific behaviors taken by social media companies to determine which are shown to cause harms. Some of that is already done by the companies themselves. If, for example, infinite scrolling is seen as a practice that increases addiction to the platforms, a law can be passed that makes it illegal to implement infinite scrolling. A law like that is pretty easy to explain and understand. TikTok was called out for sending push notifications to children's phones late at night to drive compulsive consumption and disrupt sleep patterns. Laws can be passed to limit how many unsolicited push notifications platforms can send and during which hours. Laws like that focus on the actual problems themselves, regardless of which platform is doing it, or who they are doing it to.
So let's say I have a business SaaS application, am I banned from showing content in an infinite scroll window? How would I prove my application is targeted for business users and not actually targeting children?
Not saying these are impossible questions to answer or get right in a law, just that there are more things to think about than which component you decide to show data inside.
You wouldn't have to prove that you were or weren't targeting children. You'd just have to operate a social media platform and allow infinite scrolling.
The law would define a social media platform. Maybe something like: The term “social media platform” means a website or internet medium that— (A) permits a person to become a registered user, establish an account, or create a profile for the purpose of allowing users to create, share, and view user-generated content through such an account or profile; (B) enables 1 or more users to generate content that can be viewed by other users of the medium; and (C) primarily serves as a medium for users to interact with content generated by other users of the medium. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?def_id=42...]
If your SaaS app met that definition of a social media platform it would be illegal for you to show content in an infinite scroll window. Because your application targeted business users who paid for the service, people would be less likely to sue you. Maybe it'd be worth it to you to include infinite scroll anyway. Companies knowingly break the law all the time after calculating that even on the off chance they get caught the fines they'd face will probably be less than the profit they'd make. The larger your platform got, the less worth it breaking the law could become and of course if the public felt the fines were so low as to be ineffective, the law could be amended to increase the fines.
The law could even allow some platforms to include harmful content like infinite scrolling if certain conditions are met. For example, platforms could be allowed to include infinite scrolling if they require a credit card to sign up, and they display a warning explaining that the platform uses infinite scrolling which has been determined to be harmful by promoting addictive and compulsive behaviors, and it provides an option to disable that feature. Still, it's probably better to widely ban those kinds of practices that serve no purpose other than driving engagement/addictive behavior. We can just decide as a society that we value people's mental health more than maximizing tech billionaire profits.
The EU has been pretty successful with rough definitions and "I know it when I see it". The Digital Markets Act just specifies which specific companies are too powerful and need to be regulated, and a process for adding more.
Parents aren't calling on governments to regulate it. Implementations like Apple's Client Side Scanning was not a populist movement, and many savvy parents spoke up about how it crossed multiple lines that set the stage for authoritarian abuses. Apple got so much flak for entertaining the idea that they had to drop it, there was no way to come out looking benign with it.
This is the "Christian moms need Congress to regulate Cable TV" problem all over again. Don't let them watch TV if you oppose what is on it. It's not HBO's responsibility to raise your child, it's yours.
Can we stop pretending an online porn blocker is the same as AI scanning the photos you take and uploading ones it doesn't like?
This continues to be an absolutely false characterization of what Apple was planning to do, which it was doing BECAUSE IT WANTED TO SUPPORT USER PRIVACY
Um no, Apple didn't scan all your pictures and upload some to Apple because it supported your privacy.
There was a time when users falsely characterized Dual_EC_DRBG as "private" because Dell's whitepapers looked good. History proved those users to be chumps.
> I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups established to manufacture consent, but this is infowars-type conspiracy thinking
You may not be aware of this, but Meta has been actively spending millions of dollars to redirect the rage against their algorithms and addictive harms, especially against children, and one of their strategies to try and help avoid liability is to put the onus on the federal government to pass ID legislation, to literally make it easier for Meta and similar companies to age gate most content under simple blanket policies. The way that they are doing this is by funding otherwise very small "parents rights organizations" with money and connections they otherwise wouldn't have. What does Meta gain from this? Less liability and lower cost in content moderation. What do the parents rights groups get? "Check ID laws".
That's enough motivation for both groups, it's very simple.
Now where do you get into "conspiracy theory" territory? Well thetr are also other groups that want online ID for their own purposes, and they are more than happy to help fund these groups to get something they also want.
All of this is very easy to provide backing links for with a simple Google search, if you're interested.
I'm very aware of that. As I said in another comment, 'ID checks to exclude minors' is a simple and intuitive idea that's very easy to sell; qualities that are singularly lacking in alternative proposals.
How should online services be regulated to mitigate algorithmic harms? To get something over the line politically, it needs to be simple enough that it can be articulated in a few sentences.
> How should online services be regulated to mitigate algorithmic harms?
That would be a good conversation to have!
Instead what is happening is moneyed interests are inputting hundreds of millions of dollars into organizations that otherwise wouldn't have it, which is giving an "unnatural" amount of political influence to those groups, which is changing our country, and not just on this issue. They're literally doing it just to keep their money, and ID checks let them keep it without actually reducing the harms.
This but unironically.
Same for the environment and construction. And there’s a correlate for rhetoric too, such as comparing people to Hitler or Stalin.
Sounds like a good way to cede the argument to the opposition and let those that do believe them make up the rules.
Especially when there are very obvious and tangible harms from modern social media.
Either you participate and help drive privacy preserving methods to solve the problems, or someone else will solve it in a way less desirable to you.
Bringing attention to their methods is much better than dignifying the "think of the children" nonsense with a response.
You just posted the answer:
> Especially when there are very obvious and tangible harms from modern social media.
The addictive and manipulative dark patterns of the big techs are harmful and should be banned straight up for everyone. No need to spare the children and let adults get abused. No need to verify age at all.
So why don't we just ban it? Because that'd eat into profits so much it could actually kill their business models.
All this "children" bullshit is just them trying to preserve their business models. It's them saying "year we're harmful and addictive and gambling tier but look we're adult only now". This is why Meta's among the corporations lobbying for this stuff.
Manipulation stops working when the other party is aware of it. Bring their manipulation out into the light.
I mean yes, we should just ban it all, but I'll take banning it for kids as a first step rather than an all or nothing where we will get nothing.
Banning it just for kids requires identification and is strictly worse.
If you want it banned for everyone, ID verification doesn’t even matter since presumably you wouldn’t be on the platform anyway.
> These NGOs have converged upon a unified strategy ...
Not just for the war on anonymity. NGOs, often funded by government money (so missing two third of their name), have unified on other topics.
One example that comes to mind is teaming up to organize the biggest influx of migrants into the EU following the arab spring movements: there have been hidden camera recording NGO employees explaining how to dodge controls, how to answer questions (by lying), and they've been actively helping sneaking people illegally in the EU.
A good question one could ask itself before downvoting me is this: if it's a fact that NGOs are teaming up, worldwide, to lie using the rethoric of "child safety" [1]... On which other topics did NGOs lie?
Or are we to believe all NGOs are good and well-meaning, except those working to end anonymity?
And before I forget: in Africa for example it's fully well known that NGO typical means "DGSE":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_General_for_Extern...
There are french "doctors" in some of those NGOs who know less about medicine than what I know about medicine by having ex-girlfriends that were doctors.
By squinting one's eye just a little it look like NGO is not that far from a synonym of "shady undercover gov op".
And btw why should any of my taxpayers dollars go to even a single NGO if it's non-governmental?
And another big one: while some of those NGOs have been hard at work passing legislation which as a a result gets people arrested for "hate speech" (or even just for saying "christian prayers in their heads") in the UK, other NGOs are even harder at work making sure that the absolute most horrible of all hate speech cannot ever be criticized "because it's religious".
The double standards are literally insane.
If I was in the UK, I'd GTFO. And not to the EU.
[1] speaking of which, btw, there are serious allegations about NGOs participating in child trafficking, for example in the Haiti SNAFU
“Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you”
Any argument with such blatant oversimplifications is almost certainly lacking in nuance and can be ignored and dismissed.
I get what you’re pointing at: politicians regularly abuse these arguments, but that doesn’t mean it’s 100% of all arguments involving children.
If they use blatant, binary positions and you try to be subtle and nuanced you've already lost.
Go ahead. Play their game. Be nuanced. Argue in good faith.
Then watch as they accuse you of supporting pedophilia.
There's an ongoing debate in Australia to ban gambling advertisements. One of the arguments that is supportive of a ban says that children shouldn't be exposed to gambling advertisements during sports broadcasts, as they should be family friendly.
Should that argument be ignored too?
Kids can't gamble so yes we should enforce laws and ignore that one too. We can then debate if sports gambling itself should be legal or advertised at all.
The laws you want enforced to prevent kids from gambling were the subject of debate too.
In the inverse, none of the opposition matters until it can solve the problems the universal surveillance approach doesn't even solve anyways. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.
It's a tradeoff situation and nobody wants to leave it as such to find an answer which serves the best balance. Instead, we are doomed to discuss the absolutes of freedoms vs the absolutes of child safety.
I'd really like to see something like a required parental controls architecture products had to support (but not every device had to force universally). These kind of solutions only goes as far as the problem is a technical one, e.g. a kid on their dad's office computer they weren't supposed to access can still see things they shouldn't, but such is the truth with any pure technical approach to the problem which is not actually fully technically bound.
Like it or not, there is a large constituency who wants to “protect the children”.
By demonizing them and failing to engage with the worries over social media and pornography We have brought it on ourselves.
Is it to be wondered at that many people are angry when tech companies have polluted the commons with their effluvium?
[delayed]
There is a term for this: a moral panic.
Believe it or not, sometimes the best answer is to do nothing until the crowd moves on to the next panic, as with the “Satanic Panic” in the 1980s. Turns out D&D was not actually a gateway to Satan worship.
If we’re talking 80s, a better comparison would be He-Man.
The FTC let the free-market run riot with children’s TV. Shows used commercials to push expensive plastic toys. The shows themselves became commercials for their associated product lines. Parents felt unable to resist the social pressure channeled through their children and congress eventually passed an act that let the FCC reign in the FTC’s damage.
In the 2020s family economics has raced to the bottom: wages have stagnated, the cost of goods and services is set based on a household where everyone is in full time employment, and latch-key kids now have He-Man in the palm of their hands courtesy of Apple, Google, Samsung, and Xiomai.
This situation is ripe for exploitation by anyone who can offer parents a solution to their kids’ insatiable phone addiction.
Laws are actually being written though to clamp down on non-id-verified internet browsing. No laws came out of the moral panic of the 1980s.
Right, I’m saying there shouldn’t be such laws.
If D&D didn't lead you to Satan, you were playing it wrong. ;)
I agree with the other commenter who replied to you. I don’t think this comes from actual parents. And the article suggests this latest push is from right-leaning groups whose goals are surveillance and censorship.
That said, I’m a father of 3. I’m a millennial and tech worker. I have the digital literacy to teach my kids about the internet and its horrors in a safe way. Not every parent does, so passing this off as a “parent better” issue doesn’t solve anything either.
I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”, but I’m open to similar ideas so parents can get some support without compromising on privacy.
> I don’t think this comes from actual parents.
Why would you think that? Most of my friends are parents now and all of them are quite concerned about the effect of social media, phones, and technology more broadly.
Basically all of them are planning to delay exposing their kids to phones and screens for as long as possible.
I am also a concerned parent. And I acknowledged that I have the time and priledge to parent my kids through this.
The sentiment of "keep my kids safe on the internet" definitely comes from parents. Yes. We agree.
How we actually get there in a privacy-respecting way is the issue.
> I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”,
If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag. Lock it behind the most basic parental controls that can be protected and remotely monitored. There are some loopholes with kids downloading apps that allow custom web requests without the flag being sent, so there probably needs to be an app allowlist or special App Store category to match.
Carve out some legal exemptions for Linux distributions that no kids are using and leave it to the iOS, Android, Windows, and Macs of the world. Any parent who doesn’t like the idea doesn’t have to enable it on their kids’ devices.
> If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag.
Parental controls already exist. Lawmakers want to step in and parent peoples' kids for them by removing these freedoms from everyone.
It doesn't have to be sent anywhere, websites should send a flag when serving various types of content, so parental controls has the information it needs for filtering. Websites could still infer what's being filtered of course, but doing the decision on the client allows for much more granular/extensible categories of content, as well as allowlisting, time limits, etc. Some sites/proxies won't be marked properly, but 99% self-categorizing would help a lot, and it's not like making them do ID checks or attestation is easier than setting an HTTP header or something
Filtering on the app side is more flexible. A game that has some levels not suitable for children could when on a child's device still let them play most of the game.
just add a flag to the OS
What a fucking stupid, impossible, idea.
Like, explain to me how you think this could be done meaningfully other than some setting that can just be arbitrarily flipped without adding massive complexity.
What complexity do you imagine here? Put it behind ACLs or some other permissions scheme. I could almost believe you’re being sarcastic or trolling.
How is it impossible? The OS already advertises which codecs and cyphers it accepts. Is adding an age flag a bridge too far?
And arbitrarily changed? Can a regular user arbitrarily change the super user password?
We know what good UX is already from history. Movies for example have an age rating system that clearly lists the ages the movie is suitable for. If you look underage, you get asked to provide ID.
Parents do not have the time or energy to configure modern parental controls which work more like tuning firewall rules.
The other part of the problem is you need collective action, if you ban your child from Facebook, they won’t get invited to parties anymore. If all children get banned, the parties will be arranged over sms or some other non social media. As it is today, banning your kids from social media is overly punishing since all the other kids are using it.
That was my point though.. showing ID at the door doesn’t translate well to the Social Media landscape.
If we actually cared about supporting children and parents as a country, parental controls and access, and making sure that systems were actually safe and protected privacy, would NOT be an afterthought.
> I don’t think this comes from actual parents.
The polling I have seen from Germany and Australia of a social media ban for children was quite in favor of it. Sentiment here on HN and on Reddit was the polar opposite. We are in a bubble.
Sentiment here is the same mostly. It’s just guised in an inability to handle the obvious next step. E.g. when a mentally ill person uses ChatGPT and harms themselves, the question asked is “why did we let this person use ChatGPT?” There’s no way to do this allow/deny functionality without an extensive ID service. “Kids are using service A or service B and the social media companies aren’t doing anything about it!” Well, it’s not possible to offer something to a person and determine that they’re not a child except with some service that identifies child/adult.
The answer every time is “well then Google/Apple/Facebook/Shopify/mcMaster Carr shouldn’t exist as a business” and if I’m being honest that is not an achievable target so you’re going to arrive at the attested internet.
Okay, that's probably true..
I'm not trying to call everyone else voting for these things dumb, but does the average person who doesn't think about this stuff for a living actually know what they're voting for?
> Like it or not, there is a large constituency who wants to “protect the children”.
The problem is not that they want to protect children. The problem is that these people are either technically clueless or deceptive which is why they present these surveillance measures as the only reasonable approach.
Big tech companies aside, the broader tech community did not fail to engage on the digital parenting problem. We could've solved this problem long ago before anyone even noticed it, but we're actively being blocked from doing so by the exact same people pushing for mass surveillance. See detailed explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
Perhaps but we have a problem globally where NGOs can mask nasty politics inside of faux charity.
Most tasty actions in this world always hide behind a claim to virtue.
> By demonizing them and failing to engage with the worries over social media and pornography We have brought it on ourselves.
There is a really good way to do this that solves most concerns: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...
The only real downside to this is that a 0kp cannot be reliably tied to an identity of the person using the device and thus tickets could be proxied/shared around with semi technical tools (and/or an ai agent tasked with creating a proxy). This really isn't solvable without device-level attestation[0], as if a website needs to reliably say "this person is actually this person" then it needs all pieces of data itself.
This could be solved by adding in a still privacy-preserving step like "The device is doing periodic face id scans and matching them to an identity, and constantly renews/re-presents to the age assurance consumer", but that has its own drawbacks[0].
0: Namely, lock in to devices that can do this, and that includes basically guaranteeing a double digit percentage of adult humans would not have access due to their device being old, unsupported, missing the hardware, etc. And with so many humans excluded, you would not have mass adoption. Probably also excludes rooted devices if we bring in attestation of unmodified software.
It’s weird to see that locking down devices even further is being proposed as a solution to anything.
The unspoken part of this requirement is that websites would have to block users who aren’t connecting via one of these attested, verified, locked down devices.
There is the obvious loophole that using a VPN to a country without these requirements would circumvent it. That’s how kids are already circumventing age restrictions in places like Australia and it’s why the UK has taken an interest in attacking VPNs.
Locked down devices are kind of the only solution that both (A) preserves privacy and (B) solves the problem. However, it indeed strips a user of the freedom to use their device in the way that they want; although, safe to say that the US doesn't have all that much problem with that, given Apple's continued market dominance.
The alternative is what we're getting right now: laws that require verifying ID documents, often in ways that restrict even the notion of maintaining the user's privacy. Attestation might be an "OK" to "good" solution while this is between bad and really bad.
Locked down devices will never preserve privacy since the government can just mandate spyware that you won't be able to remove.
There is no form of digital ID that isn't evil, but anything requiring attestation is super evil.
Client-side filtering solves the problem, because children's clients are owned by their parents. We should mandate that websites and apps send metadata about the content being served (eg extending the Rating: RTA header from 20 years ago) and mandate that OSs/browsers allow filtering to be easily configured at setup. This is a more private but also much more granular/useful solution, it's only difficult today because of a lack of coordination
Those in tech who study this already understand the need to hardware attestation. Everyone else will understand soon enough.
Old hardware will have to be grandfathered. Old cars don't track us and that has created a market for old cars.
Hardware age attestation will be a long timeframe project. The current work should be towards standards that can get us there.
Finally, anonymity didn't exist for my grandparents. It won't exist for my grandchildren.
> Finally, anonymity didn't exist for my grandparents.
Your grandparents could walk to the next town over and give themselves a different name and nobody would ever know who they were. They could get a job, be paid in cash, and deposit that money in a bank account with no KYC. They could drop a letter in a public mailbox without a return address, or put up posters at night, or make phone calls from public telephones. Nobody would know who did it, and there would be no surveillance footage to review after the fact, no digital footprint to trace. They could write a letter to their local newspaper to be printed with a fake name, or publish a book or story or magazine under an assumed identity. There were no ALPRs, no automated facial recognition, no built-in vehicle telematics, no drones, no smartphones to track anyone’s movement, no doorbell cameras on every block, no video tapes, no serial numbers hidden in the printouts from copy machines, no DNA analysis, no databases instantly searchable with the click of a button.
Feel free to make a value judgement about whether what we have now is better or worse than the past, if you want, but don’t invent history to rationalise it. The internet did not invent anonymity. It used to be the default.
Thank you for your comment. I feel so many people completely forgot how little data our actions left behind not so long ago.
> Hardware age attestation will be a long timeframe project. The current work should be towards standards that can get us there.
Unfortunately it's so much easier for lawmakers to slap down a law that says "you must verify IDs right now if you want to continue to exist" with no requirement, and often not even support for, privacy preserving ways to make this happen. The laws are happening now. The chance of reform to align with a privacy-preserving option once the laws are implemented is slim to none.
The only constituency who matters is their parents and guardians. If parenting and guardianship is failing, then help them be better.
Fair play. This should 100% be viewed as a logical extension of that same effluvium. This is not a bug but a feature for them, many of these laws allow companies like Meta to offshore the responsibility of not harming children onto individuals while continuing to melt the brains of anyone unfortunate enough to still have a Facebook or Instagram account.
edit: sp
This is the flow back from the idea of 'information wants to be free'.
In letting things flow to easily the opposition is to have heavy lock down on information. A lot of the time, the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.
> Like it or not, there is a large constituency who wants to “protect the children”.
Is there, though? The push is coming from lobbyists who seem to be largely funded by wealthy elites, corporations, and other opaque organizations. One of them seems to be Meta. It doesn’t look like a grassroots effort.
UK government (and the rest of Europe) has had a very easy time implementing strict administrative regulations due to public acceptance. And the children argument is like the easiest angle to attack, you can use it for almost any cause and win.
France just like the rest of Europe is a weak continent that uses Putin and Pedos as an excuse to pull off the weirdest shit. Chat Control, Gov Identity baked on everything, digital bills, digital money.
I have never wanted to move out of Europe more than now tbf. Complete f* morons - I get spammed by the wanna be child protectors who are giving a smartphone to their kids.
I don't know how to deal with this anymore - what we are not realizing is that *we* are under engagement - this *is* state surveillance.
Some state-resistant technology (idk if this term is in general use) like Signal planned for a lot of contingencies that could happen caused by governments. Tor is kind of like that too. So I have more optimism for building tech that is state-resistant than I do for any kind of constitution, or movement, or law. That's not to say give up but I think it's hard to argue against a state.
My issue with the whole move out of country X is that, where would you move to? It seems like everyone is moving in lock-step globally.
War is coming to Europe. At this point I'm even thinking about moving to China - at least they don't accept Zuckerberg checks. Tbf in my case I'm also a tech holder - so i'm just getting robbed.
I lived in China for a while a decade ago, studied at Tsinghua and did some research as well.
IMHO you have more freedom in China than in Europe. Can you walk on the street and say "Fuck Xi Jinping" like you would in France with Macron? Probably not. But it's a completely useless freedom to have.
At least in China you get relative safety when you walk on the street at night. And when the government decides to restrict some liberties you don't have to pay tens of thousands of politicians and lobbyist to do it.
If you have to choose your poison pill, you might as well pick the cheap one that does bring a semblance of harmony and not complete polarization and chaos.
You will be prosecuted in some cases in France. This is a law named “insult to a representative of public authority”
If you shout insults at Macron, you will be prosecuted. If you display insults about Macron, you will be prosecuted.
https://www.rue89strasbourg.com/insulte-macron-selestat-mani...
https://www.ouest-france.fr/societe/justice/un-homme-de-77-a...
I will update an old Yakov Smirnoff joke.
You see, China and the US aren't that different you know. In the US, I can go up to Donald Trump and say "I don't like Donald Trump. The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"
In China, I can go up to Xi Jinping and say "I don't like Donald Trump! The policies of the republican government are rubbish!"
I actually think sustained adherence to the goal of deanonymizing the Internet to basically get kids off of it in the face of significant minority opposition, actually portrays strength. I care deeply about privacy and surveillance in the real world, but who cares about the Internet, it’s an optional virtual space. For anything that’s not optional like banking, commerce etc. I’m completely OK with being not anonymous because that’s the status quo.
There are many people who have voiced this topic already. If you don't care about your privacy why do other people have to give it up ? It's a non-argument - nobody cares about your opinion.
1984 was based in London and the UK.
Is anyone that cares going to put on a suit and talk to the people passing laws?
Yeah we definitely have. Here's me and another dev opposing AB 1856 (would have criminalized open source in the name of age assurance): https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279266#t=10...
And here's like ~120 of us who showed up to oppose AB 2023 (the 3D printer spyware bill). It was incredible. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279741#t=19...
I think the easiest way to get involved is to become an EFF member. They'll keep you up to date on all the censorship and surveillance bills. Then you can contact your legislator, sent letters to the CA legislature committees, or show up to the hearings in Sacramento.
What you don’t realize is most people want this. The social media bans across Western Europe, and Australia are heavily supported by the vast majority of the population.
Yep, here in Australia you almost never hear anyone mention it. The silence is deafening, especially with how quickly people just rolled over on this stuff "For the children".
That said it was funny, yesterday Microsoft said I had to age verify my account. I went in basically with the intention of backing out of it at the first sign of over reach.
First step was, 'provide you email for this account'. So I did that and then... approved! You are certified over 18+. That is the flip side of this, some of these companies will put up some of the weakest barriers on this stuff.
You could make it easy to ban on children's devices, rather than having websites do it. At the moment you either have a small set of allowed applications, which is fine for younger kids, or domain-list filtering which is unreliable, hard for parents to set up (and not that hard for kids to get around). There are many ways to improve the situation – I think websites should have to attach metadata about the content being served, browsers should use this to apply a device policy, and devices should make it easy to configure basic rules on first setup. People aren't asking specifically for hardware-attested facial scanning
There’s no such thing as children’s devices. Everyone uses the same smartphones. Optional on device restrictions don’t matter as long as your peer group is on the platform, kids will not stop using it. People are not asking for biometric scanning, but I believe the vast majority would be OK with some sort of ID based authentication system. Now there are ways we can do that in a decentralized way where neither of the parties have total information and I fully advocate for that.
Are you saying parents would choose not to block it, or children would get around it? Like you say people want to block it, but currently it's very hard while allowing access to Google and other resources, or it's easy to get around. Why does this require server verification?
For example, all devices could require your ZKP ID attestation to be usable unfiltered. Then the relevant apps/sites would be equally inaccessible to children. And then you remove the ZKP ID attestation because the device owner (parent, school, etc) already knows when the user is a child.
The on the ground reality is that now most social interactions at schools and the content for those interactions happen on social media and apps/private chat rooms. If you don’t have a smartphone or not using those platforms, you’re just left out. There’s going to be serious social cohesion issues for the kids that don’t have access to them. It’s also going to cause continuous pressure throughout your schooling years to circumvent whatever restrictions your parents are putting on and to be in constant conflict with them because of that pressure. That’s life altering stuff.
ZKP ID would work but that’s essentially deanonymization because you have to provide your ID to someone though no one has total information. Also just checking for its absence doesn’t work because that’s opt in and less than 5% of parents would do it. Every individual, irrespective of age would have to have a valid one.
For the first time in human history, the cost of surveillance has dropped below the cost of privacy.
It is more expensive today to maintain your privacy and anonymity than it is to surveil you. The collective surveillance grid makes it possible to track people's movements, whereabouts, their predilections, political views, personal images and more for a few cents every day. It's a bargain.
And in this new world, the eye watches everyone, all the time, forever. Most people, including people on HN, are still stuck in a human-first world. The new surveillance state isn't going to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.
And they will be used to watch you. Especially if you're attractive. Or, valuable. Or, blackmail-able. After all, NSA employees routinely abuse multi-billion dollar surveillance assets to stalk women. It's so common that the NSA calls it LOVEINT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
In the world to come, people are going to wish they were being surveilled by the NSA. Because at least the NSA punishes these people. Occasionally.
When this kind of technology becomes this cheap and this pervasive, then the end of anonymity means unaccountable sheriff deputies stalking their former spouse and family. Or, prospective romantic interests.
https://www.firstalert4.com/2026/08/03/brentwood-officer-acc...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/cops-using-license-pl...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/rogue-officers-turned...
https://www.newsweek.com/flock-camera-police-arrests-1226378...
https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-rea...
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/26/us/flock-cameras-surveill...
With this new oracle, these people will be able to set up alerts for when their spouse is thinking of leaving them. To catch their child accessing support for abuse or something more ephemeral like being an atheist, having different political views or LGBT+.
Anyone who doesn't see the forest for the trees, or who embraces this because "parental controls are too hard to use" will doom themselves and future generations to a world that's materially worse than our hyper-surveilled present.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but at this rate I'm going to miss the days when it was just the NSA reading my emails (and they still do! Howdy!). I know the track record. But at least the NSA has some sense of institutional responsibility and control. Most institutions in your life, including your HOA don't.
https://ktvz.com/cnn-regional/2021/07/22/arnold-residents-ce...
It is a great example of how difficult it is to anticipate the N-th order effects of things. 79 years ago the transistor was invented, in less than a century it ended up being the back back of a global surveillance system. Not many people could have foreseen this.
Cheaper computer technology has been great for the average persons uses but it cuts both ways. It also means much cheaper surveillance. I suspect that governmental/corporate surveillance now costs less than 1% of their spending, something that simple couldn't have been done even a few decades back.
I do wonder what the world would have been like is say computer technology peaked at 486 level performance/memory. Much of what we have today simply could not have happened in terms of surveillance and social media damages. Alas, this is the world we didn't get.
> 79 years ago the transistor was invented, in less than a century it ended up being the back back of a global surveillance system. Not many people could have foreseen this.
George Orwell was pretty on the mark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-F...
The question I would really like the "people" pushing so hard for surveillance to ask themselves is:
How would the Nazi Germany and Hitler gone if they had this system in place, telling them who and where every single Jewish, gay, gypsy, disabled, or just ideologically opposed to them person was, 24/7?
What about other insane rulers? What do you think they would - or rather, will - do with these systems?
It's cute people think the UK has this level of influence over the USA
Like, pick a side: are we the tiny backwater micro state on the verge of bankruptcy with no standing in the world, or are we a hugely influencial world power directing US law?
This faced a huge backlash when first introduce in the UK, there's even a infamous meme with a children saying face the wall lol.
Several states have already had this for a while now.
We know what this is really about, its to give the UK intelligence services the ability to spy on US citizens and then pass the information on to US intelligence. We'll probably get similar laws in all the other five eyes as well.
That's not what this is about at all. Its British NGOs lobbying US states to pass state-level digital-ID laws. The end goal seems to be to make anonymous posting on the internet illegal. Its more about mass censorship than surveillance.
It might just be me, but when the US decides to do something like requiring age verification on porn sites it feels half-hearted, sort of stupid and mostly annoying. When the EU does it, it feels naive, overreaching, bureaucratic, mostly harmless (but annoying and misguided). When it is the UK that attacks privacy it feels incredibly dystopian, at least to me. It's somehow darker, compared to the US or the EU and I don't understand why.
It never came, it has always been here.
Someone I used to associate with was always really switched on with these things. Many things he said in the past that sounded a bit extreme or conspiratorial, turned out to be the real deal years later. Always interesting in retrospect.
The one thing he always said is, they have always been watching and know who is who, what these things do is allow it to be entered into the court of law. Now they can act on these things.
There's a better network layer solution than trying to block visitors at every host or at the endpoint devices' OS/application layer. I know because a company in my country is already testing such a thing in private beta. A router firmware that provides two wifi endpoints per home, one for adults and one for minors. You only share the minors' password with your children. The firmware maintains a whitelist of sites (it periodically downloads from a central server, I think). There is nothing to be installed on endpoint device, and no gatekeeping is necessary at the host. Apparently this can be extended to mobile networks as well, but I haven't looked at it in detail.
That sounds like a great solution for when your child is in your house using your wifi.
Yes, if it's to provide full safety coverage, it has to be rolled out at telco level including mobile connectivity, which is where this solution runs into red tape.
Since 9/11, the war on anonymity was always strong in the US.
It seems to me the intrusiveness of age verification will continue to grow.
They want the OS to report the user's age. People will use this to claim whatever age they want. For instance, if companies cannot advertise to children, they might find that almost every computer is reporting that the user is a child--turns out adults want the protections kids receive as well--sometimes.
Eventually they will have to enforce a system intrusive enough that no lying or abuse of the system is possible. We might even approach "Verification Can" levels of verification.
I will go back to DOS before I hand over this information. I already have my setup for it when this comes down the line.
Can also just lie about your age, "I am as old as the fjords, as young as a newborn lamb" - Thor - GTA Vice City radio ;)
On this topic, have people noticed the sudden coordinated media push for Flock Is Your Friend? The Free Press, The Atlantic, and Axios have all churned out pro-Flock articles in the last week. Clearly someone (I assume A16Z, but it could be multiple groups) is panicking about the mounting bipartisan backlash to Flock cameras and is starting to write checks to try and head it off.
My theory is that the establishment sees the oncoming economic crisis and is desperately trying to plan for managing the fallout. They don’t like Flock or its backers, but they feel they have no choice. Same as why Palantir is gradually being rehabilitated in the mainstream press.
You’ll also notice that Anduril is quickly being accepted now that we’re expending munitions faster than our replacement rate.
> trying to plan for managing the fallout
Put in a less polite way, they're preparing for the metaphorical pitchforks and torches held by mobs of the common people which might manifest themselves in a more kinetic format.
Yes. My hope is that the rare earths shortage, memory shortage, and current focus on munitions will delay the era of drone-based policing until after the crisis.
I suspect the crisis isn't a short term economic shock but a long term decline from resource decline, possible water/food shortages amplified by climate blow back. Something that will not end in your lifetime or the next generations.
Military's, intelligence agencies and actuaries have been warning about this for decades now and their language is getting very direct on this and the time lines nowadays.
If you have ever been caught in a rip while swimming, there is a moment when you suddenly getting a sucking sensation as you transition from stable waters into an outward flow. I am starting to think we are in that transitional phase on global stability, that the 2030's are not going to be a comfortable time for many.
They are ensuring that potential disruptors can be reigned in if needed. To try and stop things from being even more unpredictable, for better or worse. Buckle up.
You don't build long term surveillance systems and billionaires don't build bunkers for what they think of as a temporary tough situation.
Fair, perhaps I should have said until after the crisis passes its most acute phase. I expect the eventual energy and climate system shock to result in mass unrest and many excess deaths. Meanwhile wars are almost guaranteed, which will further stretch resources. If we make it out of the initial crisis without a strategic nuclear war, we may settle into a period of extended decline that’s relatively stable, though very unpleasant.
Could you please link those warnings? I’m interested in institutional forecasts of such challenges in the upcoming decades.
No problem at all, thanks for asking! Two from this year both from the UK.
I really wish I had kept all the others from the US, Europe, Aus/NZ etc. It is a very common theme but they are largely kept quiet and only typically (partially) released through freedom of information requests.
This one from Actuaries UK was one that set off alarm bells. As they advise the insurance industry, they are structured to be politically neutral. The key takeaway is the impacts of 3c temperature rise by 2050 on page 9. The reason this is an issue, we are currently on target to hit that with us likely to pass 2c mid next decade with the rate of warming increasing.
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/r3cporjb/planetary-solvency-c...
This one from the UK government is all about addressing national security regarding this issue. Typically they are advising that they secure their food supplies and hardened up boarders in the next 5 years. Funnily enough Brexit may have given them the power to enforce this much more than they would have otherwise had. But that just means they have built a unique flavor of oppression.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nature-security-a...
I have said it for years now about a lot of countries. They will welcome immigrants with open arms, those arms being machine guns, rockets and drones.
I recommend the Energy Skeptic blog, they often provide sources and links to papers: https://energyskeptic.com/
They also pass my personal test of not advocating for dumb feel-good ideas. Recently they published a well-sourced article on why the US rail system isn’t a good candidate for electrification.
Another great one, at least the earlier stuff was 'Do the Math' by Tom Murphy.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
Was all about just doing the math on energy transitions. He wasn't anti renewable technology but did want to point out how scale is a problem that few understand.
My favorite number of his is, that at 3% growth year over year, we would need all the energy of the Milky way galaxy by the year 13,000. As the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, this would defy physics itself.
Seconded, that’s a good one too. I also recommend Jem Bendell as a palate cleanser, his work is fluffier but it’s all about finding ways to thrive during decline rather than succumbing to doom and gloom.
You are giving them way, way, way too much credit. They are not planning for a future economic crisis.
Pro-Flock bots come out in droves in the replies to any Xitter post that’s even mildly negative towards them too. It’s not the least bit subtle.
basically: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wont-somebody-please-think-of...
Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan, and Aaron Schaffer from the Washington Post also wrote a shameful article on this topic on August 4th (the title changed, along with an image of a woman who was harassed to something else). No counterpoint. Total submarine article.
Noticed the same with some media publishing anti-work-from-home articles recently.
"We need the plebs to want to mock people who work from home, to reduce the reticence in coming back to work in the office"
"We need our commercial property values to go back up"
Edited to add:
"Our managers need to _feel_ as if they're actually managing people"
The entire back-to-normal narrative was and still is a total mindfuck:
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
The threat from COVID (and more importantly, long COVID) never went away, but they sure convinced the average person that it did.
Today you can see an N95 in the wild once in awhile, so some people are paying attention, but they are less than 1%. Many others are suffering brain damage, unexplained heart issues, taxed immune systems, etc and have no idea why (nor does their doctor).
Eesh, those are some sobering numbers.
It's 2026, the conspiracy theory that business people wanted RTO for office space value has been debunked 100 times. Such a silly, nonsense idea.
That'd be a lot easier to believe if you provided a source, which you should do if you care enough to comment in the first place, I think?
A cursory google suggests that the return-to-office movement is primarily driven by management's desire for voluntary turnover, avoiding the bad press of mass layoffs. But certainly doesn't show that it's 'been debunked 100 times'.
In my own experience, it's been 50/50 a desire for voluntary turnover, and also a control tactic. Employees are easier to strong-arm when they're immersed in the idea that company culture actually matters.
Didn't mean to imply that was the only reason, so I've added another reason to my comment.
I haven't come across much of the debunking of the commercial property issue. I would say it's undeniably factor, but we can argue about the scale.
A total of $800 billion—in real terms—of value is at stake by 2030, and, on average, the total value of office space is expected to decline by 26 percent from 2019 to 2030.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/real-estate/our-insights...
You think XYZ Company is going to listen to some consultant telling them in a press release that they should go back into the office because some REIT needs more money in it? Why would the CEO of a tech company care at all what the value of their leased office building is? Do you understand how leases and real estate works?
I understand there's significant motivation behind the potential of losing $800 billion in value.
I think those kinds of numbers can have more fundamental implications.
You think that the size of investment firms that own something like, a good sized chunk of midtown Manhattan class A and B commercial real estate aren't capable of deploying social and tradtional-media influence tools to push an agenda to repopulate their office space? That would be a very inaccurate assessment of how large and motivated they are.
If you are willing to believe a nonsense conspiracy like that then there is no way we could have a productive conversation.
You actually don't think that the world's largest REITs hire lobbyists at the municipal, state and federal levels? That's an extremely naive and uninformed position.
Follow the money. That also shows which media sources you should never trust
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin
The funny thing about this quote in context was that Ben Franklin was using it to argue for MORE state power, not less. Remember, Ben was the guy that would steal private letters and publish them in his newspaper.
Having privacy necessarily means that it will also make conversation between any adult and child private.
This is simply a risk that I am willing to make. Just fuck off already.
What can the average person do to try and dismantle these NGOs?
The goal behind these efforts, fundamentally, is to make it impossible to organize efforts to dissent against whatever comes next. We still have the tools for mass organization but we lack unifying charismatic leaders who could use them in time.
Nowadays that seems to be almost by design.
This is something I have noted with Trump, he seems to be one of the last names that made it really big in pre-social media era and had a somewhat unified presence in peoples minds.
Making it to that level nowadays is actually really difficult, heck I would argue that even people like Mr Beast hasn't hit that level of awareness due to the fragmented nature of media and fame.
You can build movement in an echo chamber, it just depends if that is enough.
Delay the legislation whenever possible, call your Congress critter and make their lives a tiny bit worse. Deny them at every level of government including local and state assemblies where you have a bigger voice. Defend your communities by actually showing up to city council meetings. That kinda stuff...
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/prot...
Fight this shit off. We do not need this. Digital Privacy has tools coming up - we are all loosing on this because of a few monkeys I wish some people had to courage to deal with. I'm honestly exhausted by this shit. Let all of it rot.
It is imbalance of power at play.
They can keep floating this stuff and we have to put in a thousand times as much energy to shoot it down. We get worn down quicker than they can. It only has to work once for them, we have to keep pushing back.
My very pessimistic take is one out of Taoism. If you wish for them to fail, let them grow. Eventually the weight of the whole system collapses itself, the question is just on what time frame.
The way out is to go through. I don't like this framing but it seems to be the most accurate.
You don’t even have to “let them” grow, they will do it regardless, as they hold the seats of power. But that doesn’t mean that silent acquiescence is the right path, either. Speaking up attracts like-minded allies.
It’s also a good idea to maintain your own private means of communication, as there will be some hard times ahead.
Pretty much. It is a narrow path between, pushing back and ensuring safety. It can be done but you have to be careful.
The whole think of the children angle is so cursed. Used to push surveillance meanwhile actual harm against children goes ignored. See Epstein files and the grooming gangs in the UK
If it actually did anything to protect the children it wouldn’t be so objectionable
> Used to push surveillance meanwhile actual harm against children goes ignored.
Worse, these laws will actually create new harms to children who will be forced to give their identity to websites and identity services that will exploit them and fail to protect that data.
What do you think about California AB1043?
Epstein is real, the “grooming gangs” are not, unless you’re talking about Jimmy Saville.
This is flagrantly untrue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
First sentence: "From the late 1980s until 2013..."
so the grandparent commentor has broken UK law by knowingly sharing false information. over here officer, a thoughtcrime has taken place!
I think OP is referring to stuff like the Rupert Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry
What about it?
TBF they are real, but are they isolated to one ethnic group? No. Are the victims as numerous as Rupert Lowe's report makes it out to be? No.
I haven't seen any claim that it was isolated to one ethnic group. I have only seen the claim that it was disproportionately immigrants of Pakistani background.
Epstein and grooming gangs are both real. Not that the whole "grooming gangs" problem hasn't been vastly amplified and turned into a repeated media talking point by a bunch of the extreme right wing in the UK, however. There's plenty of domestic non south asian pedos and molestors there too.
Honestly I wouldn't be so cranky about this if it were proper government based ID instead of creepy Thiel companies doing it.
And if it was mostly about posting content anonymously instead of even reading these sites.
Yeah, the US is getting the worst version. We can't have federal digital ID because "mark of the beast" but you have to show ID to watch porn so a bunch of private ID verification gatekeepers have shown up.
We should copy nothing from the UK on topics of technology, privacy or air conditioning.
> Talk shit about China and communism and dictators and shit > Proceed to do the same things
Today's America in a nutshell
despicable
I can't be the only one who will never comply with these draconian, anti-privacy laws, nor the only one with the technical prowess to bypass them. Never used social media (unless you count HN as social media, which is a stretch), so perhaps it won't be as great a loss as it will be to many. I have no doubt there are many like-minded people (in number if not in population %) that feel the same, and will undoubtedly repopulate newsgroups and message boards that are not subject to this authoritarian nonsense.
Didn't HN decide to not allow AI submissions? This is quite explicitly one in that the operator of the site declares to "automate investigative journalism" and launched the site with its five pieces of 'journalism' yesterday.
And to point out the obvious on the actual quality of the piece, The US has itself passed age verification laws in 20 states, such as Texas where it was driven not by the British but by domestic interest groups and decidedly state senators like Angela Paxton.
Also given the slant of the site it's pretty obvious was the political motivation here is, I guess yelling at the British always works
It is very unlikely that “NGOs” have the funding influence and power to do this. The more likely source is state backed intelligence agencies. The NGOs are just there to create a buffer.
Ask yourself logically - who would pay these NGOs to do things like attempt to extort meta into a $500M+ settlement over “harming child mental health.”
This is all connected and intelligence agency backed. It’s far from innocent, it’s non corporate - some had suggested meta was behind it - but as we have seen meta is the one getting targeted.
There is Ashton Kutcher. And it's conceivable to me that some wannabe-Palantir private companies might back these ideas.
The day cannot come soon enough where every online user is tied to a verified person in a government database.
Why? So we can have a government sanctioned credit score of sorts?
I'm always surprised how defensive people get in here about privacy when so many corporations have vastly more information about you than the government does.
The government has a monopoly on violence and companies do not.
(yet). Contractors for the government that will be happy to help implement the violence are coming soon. If they're not already here by some metrics.
That's not really true though is it. The Sackler family caused over 500,000 deaths. Nestlé has killed millions of babies. DuPont and 3M poisoned every living creature on Earth. Nobody spent even one day in prison for any of it.
Corporations all over the world routinely and knowingly poison, injure, or outright murder their employees and their customers. They spend massive amounts of money preventing the public from knowing about the harms they are causing. Even in the most egregious cases where there is well documented proof of what they've done the heads of these companies still get away with it. They profit from it. They're just happily living their lives in their mansions and on their yachts while graves are dug and families are torn apart.
Not that it makes it any better, those people were treated as just externalities to doing business. Government violence is a lot more targeted. Yes, it has the same result but the intention is very different. One is just careless, the other is malicious.
When corporations knowingly kill people it isn't careless. What they do is entirely calculated. For example, it wasn't carelessness that caused the Philip Morris executives to hire a bunch of scientists who were then ordered to falsify reports saying that smoking wasn't harmful in an attempt to trick the public to keep smoking when the company was sitting on a mountain of evidence showing that their product was killing people.
Government violence is different though. When the government acts against the public they are generally required to follow long and complex procedures with multiple points of checks and accountability. A cop has to get enough evidence to convince a judge to issue an arrest warrant. A person is taken into custody and given access to a lawyer. A trial is held in court with a jury. At every step there are volumes of records detailing exactly what was done, by whom, and why. All of that information is public record and we can request those records to keep watch on what the government does. If the government abuses the power we give them we can vote them out of office and replace them.
Obviously there are a lot of problems with our legal system and places where all of that breaks down, but the goal was for there to be transparency and accountability and nothing stops us from improving the situation. With corporations on the other hand, they act in secret, they don't have to ask anyone for permission, they aren't required to keep records of everything they do, you have no legal right to examine the records they have, and even if you find out a CEO is responsible for murdering a bunch of people for profit you have no power to vote that CEO out of office.
It's pretty clear which of whose two entities is the larger threat. Which one of them has already repeatedly poisoned you and your entire family. Which one do you think was responsible for more violence done to your loved ones?
I completely agree.
The end results is they are two sides of the same coin but with very different mechanics. Neither should be accepted.
Because most here works in said corporations.
Corporations can't arrest and jail me. The most they can do is file a lawsuit.
This isn’t a “gotcha”. Many here take exceptional steps against this kind of thing and also advocate for restrictions on what kind of data corporations can collect.
Privacy doomerism is a form of complicity.
Governments and Companies have different motivations.
Governments want control, Companies want money. Control typically comes from a reduction in rights, freedoms, money. When you fail to give those up "naturally" violence, worsened living conditions and abuse are the tools used.
More the reason to be defensive about it and fighting back corpo and government.
"I'm surprised how much people hate this thing when this other thing, which they also hate, is even worse"?
The corporations aren't going to throw you in jail if you cross state lines to get an abortion. The US government is already doing this when they get that data.
That isn't true. This is settle law -- states can not prevent people from going to other states to have abortions.
All this talk starts from the assumption that anonymity is something to which anyone in a society should have a right.
HN has this guideline for comments:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says.
If the same standard were applied for posts, this one would fail. I recognize that it is a popular perspective that these measures are essentially a war on anonymity, but that is not what they intend to fix, although it is quite possible that anonymity is a casualty of whatever war is at hand.
I believe efforts to resist these measures would be more effective if they engaged with the problem: the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds, beyond what any society should consider acceptable. I personally don't think shocking content is the worst of it. Algorithms that maximize engagement over enriching experience are a curse for any age group, and developing brains face the worst of it.
Is age-gating the internet the right answer? Will it even help? Are there ulterior motives? Those are open questions that need discussion. Dismissing a genuine problem is choosing not to engage in the discussion.
I disagree with you. Plans to eliminate anonymity have been discussed for years in elite circles, at Davos and similar events, and it’s most often framed in the context of social control (eliminating dissent or foreign influence).
Larry Ellison on surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
This is not new and it’s not about kids. This is the culmination of years of planning that began after the Arab Spring, when elites began to get concerned about how the Internet could be leveraged for domestic regime change.
As far as the matter of ulterior motives, we're not in disagreement. Assuming that's true, it is important to address the real problem they are hijacking to realize their goals. Dismissing it as a made up problem just means you lose credibility with anyone who is paying attention.
It will always be possible to find a cause du jour to justify violating the rights of citizens, because crime happens and reality is messy. The real problem is that the mass media is complicit in this agenda, so they amplify the excuse until bad laws are passed (laws which seldom solve the problem).
While I do think we should make efforts to reduce crime and create better spaces for kids, laws like this aren’t the answer.
Ellison is probably in favor at least partially because he's a database salesman, and oppressive domestic spy agencies need lots and lots of really big databases.
> the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds
Because of the goal of advertising revenue as the ultimate driver as to build an addictive permanent scroll of slop on tiktok or instagram, and the desire of social media companies to build walled gardens where someone's entire online experience stays in their "app.". As you say, this affects young and old alike.
Capitalism. Your problem is capitalism. The so-called vaunted “free market.”
Technology helps, but it also enabled increased 'toxicity' in general, across the global ecosystems, including social, human relations, trust, digital crime etc.
It's not just about child safety. No one is safe from this increasing levels of toxic environment created by digital/online ways. A lot of types of people will be extinct, who are unable to deal with technology driven media onslaught, complexity, online crime and content manipulation. There is no scope for trust and assumptions. One need to be on their toes in every engagement with others and these systems, or hire an agent/expert even for simple tasks in life.
The tech-savvy people here might argue for freedom and anonymity at any cost. But think of other social classes, laws and the way the nations and societies came to be what they are today. The world doesn't just belong to tech nerds only.
People need safety from all this tech. That may against the wishes of a tiny minority of the people. But a nation, by nature, enforces generic policies that benefit those most of the people.