I stand by my repeated statements of how this could have been solved simply using an RTA header [1] on the server side and require the most common user agents to look for that header putting the onus on parents where it currently legally resides. It's not perfect, nothing is nor ever will be but using the header solution is entirely private, does not store or leak data and puts the decision into the device owners rather than creating perverse incentives to track everyone. It may actually protect most small children whereas today teens quickly find a work-around and then teach smaller children how to work around these centralized gate-keepers. The current solutions are just about tracking people by real identity and incentivizing teens to commit identity crimes.
Correct.
None of these laws are actually about protecting children. That's not the real goal. The real goal is the complete elimination of anonymity on the web, where both private companies and the state can keep tabs on everything you do.
Not being able to be at least pseudo-anonymous has a real chilling effect on speech and expression. Even if there are laws in place protecting such rights, people will self-censor when knowing they are being watched.
It's how freedom of speech and expression dies without actually scratching that part off of the bill of rights.
It's a mix. I'm sure there are some people really trying to protect kids. There are other people that just want all porn off the Internet. And there are bad actors that want total surveillance. And they are all on the same side of this issue.
> I'm sure there are some people really trying to protect kids.
yes, I believe the term for them is "useful idiots"
Not idiots necessarily, sometimes just long-time observers who have finally become cynical. People that were pro-guns for decades may watch several years of failure to adopt basic and uncontroversial gun-control regulation, then eventually become anti-gun. People that were in favor of regulating it once may suddenly become fearful for their safety, and want no regulations at all in case that regulation puts them out in the cold. Since both PR campaigns and any action on policy tends to cater to extremes, there's always pressure that is shrinking the middle
The goal was to put Company A in between you and the web. Collecting data and selling it for profit. It’s never about what they say it’s about. Lobbyists have bought every aspect.
Youtube has been repeatedly told about videos that are abusive towards children and they do nothing about it. They're not interested in effective solutions
Youtube has been repeatedly told about videos that are abusive towards children and they do nothing about it. They're not interested in effective solutions
Youtube is user-generated content which is precisely why I would prefer they add an RTA header. Random people uploading videos can claim to be kid friendly when they are not. Take that responsibility away from the uploaders and away from Youtube and hand it to the parents. Less work, liability and cost for Youtube should be a nifty incentive at the risk of blocking some advertising to children which is another loaded topic all together.
I consider myself lucky to have grown up before the internet, but after local BBS' were a thing. My parents had absolutely no idea what went on in those systems, and I found the freedom incredible. Being able to explore and spread my wings a bit was a huge part of my childhood and teen years, and it wouldn't have been possible if my parents were hovering over my shoulder, or if I were unable to make an account because I wasn't 18.
That said, I was mostly dealing with griefers in Trade Wars or LoRD, and the worst thing I could find locally was GIFs of women in bikinis (and waiting for them to download was an excellent way to learn patience). I didn't have to worry so much about the threats that exist today online.
I am so grateful that I grew up when I did and got to experience that.
I feel like we've always been living on borrowed time, due to the historical accident of the internet being built by academics and public institution employees. If internet protocols had been built by for-profits, HTTP requests would include credit card # as a mandatory header.
People were talking about micropayments for content in the early '90s. The first digital currency proposals were made with exactly this use case in mind. Ironically, the protocol that finally stuck the landing is terrible at handling this exact situation.
It was less commercial then. It was not as much "occupied" by intermediaries who think the internet exists for their commercial gain and anyone who uses it owes them something
I think it is amusing how these commercial third party intermediaries today are trying to frame things like "chat control" and "age restrictions" as attacks on internet users' rights rather than attacks on their intermediation "business model"
Generally, there is no age restriction on subscribing to internet service. However third party intermediaries that have now occupied seemingly every corner of the web, so-called "tech" companies, want everyone to believe that intermediaries _are_ the internet (as opposed to middlemen who seek to surveil as many internet subscribers as they can)
I am glad I grew up before the internet so that I understand and appreciate the only service that matters is _internet service_. People today take internet service for granted perhaps but I can remember when it was a new frontier
With internet service, there were so many possibilities. Today, so-called "tech" companies portray internet service as a given, apparently useless on its own,^1 whilst they advertise themselves as offering "services" (usually for free, a Trojan Horse for commercial surveillance). They utilise bandwidth paid for by the internet subscriber to transfer encrypted surveillance data to themselves
1. For example, when Mozilla claims something like without an online advertising "ecosystem" the internet would be worthless. The greed and self-entitlement behind this framing is both absurd and hilarious
I think it's important to not throw babies out with bathwater here.
One can disagree with Mozilla and think advertising sucks, and use tools to block it or FOSS products that don't force it on us, while also seeing how e2ee encryption bans ("chat control") and age verification rules are a restriction of both the rights of service providers and the rights of users.
Another way to put it is, just because a regulation is a restriction of the rights of a service provider does not mean it isn't also a restriction of the rights of a user.
The former does not make the latter true, but in some cases both are true.
I'd also add that if we can't stop bad laws that restrict the rights of (and piss off) both service providers and users , we have no hope of stopping similarly bad laws that only restrict the rights of users.
(Service providers, even small ones if they take the time to speak with their member of Congress, can be very credible, sympathetic, and persuasive stakeholders. When we can fight on the same side--realizing that sometimes we will fight on opposite sides--it's better for user rights that we do so. One of the tragedies of the left and parts of the right in the Trump era is that they see any regulation that hurts Big Tech as a win, even if it also hurts user rights. User rights are safer if we can distinguish between regs that hurt Big Tech and users from regs that don't hurt users.)
And when I was a kid some of my peers were watching Al Queda execution videos.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I do not think kids should have unrestricted access to the internet, especially if their parents can’t/won’t set limits.
If they won’t set limits that’s an issue with the parents, not the internet.
If dad leaves the liquor cabinet unlocked the solution isn’t to ban alcohol.
A free and open internet is non negotiable.
How does a parent check what the child does on the way to school or meeting friends in a shopping mall.
Public wifi and smart phones chngaes what can be done and what needs to be done.
How does a parent check that a friend isn’t passing pills to them in the back of the bus? How are they checking that they don’t shoplift when out on their own? This is not an argument.
Do your best as a parent and that is enough. Perfection is not possible or even desired; kids do have a degree of agency, and if they want to break the rules they are going to do it! And breaking some rules (ideally in a safe-ish way) is one way that we learn how to be independent from parents as we mature.
Everything is negotiable. We collectively choose where to draw all the arbitrary lines you draw. Free and open internet is as arbitrary as a completely locked-down internet.
If we give up the ability to negotiate, then we would not be able to have this conversation in the future. As we have seen many times, all over the world, authoritarian regimes will absolutely suppress dissent and chill speech if they have the tools. Today maybe it's adult content. They're already attacking the press and anyone critical about the administration: they keep trying to get the corporations to fire their comedians and rein in their reporters. So this isn't slippery slope. We're there and nearing the bottom.
We, the people who build and operate the internet as well as the tech that enables it, collectively choose to maintain a free and open internet for the benefit of all free people.
Maybe with enough effort you can force the internet to fracture into a centralized TV-style internet and a “shadow” free internet, but you’ll probably kill the economy in the process. Regardless, you’ll never stamp out those of us who will maintain the free internet over whatever channels we can find.
Alcohol is banned for minors so that argument doesn't work.
Kids also cannot sign up for internet service, or pay for it. So in both cases, we're talking about society gating access to something, adults obtaining that product legally and bringing it into their home.
The question, then, is who is responsible for the children in the household? I've always answered this exactly one way: the parents. Power and responsibility must go together, so if the parents are responsible, then the parents must have the power. Parents have been held legally responsible for the crimes of their children, and given the coverage of parents being arrested for letting their kids go on a walk across town, I'd say this sets up incentives pretty well.
But all of that is a sideshow; a narrative. What we actually have is a massive swing towards authoritarianism globally, largely fueled by in increase in the internet allowing for unprecedented surveillance overreach, and the folks trying to seize control of those reins are using children seeing porn as a way to seem benevolent to garner support from folks that don't understand what's actually happening. Huge swathes have been duped into believing the narrative and fighting for age-gating in the worst possible ways, and that's because they're missing the larger pattern.
It's manufactured consent.
Kids can access the internet in all kinds of places outside the home, and outside the purview of their parents supervision. Schools, libraries, friend's houses, public wifi anywhere.
You may be right about the authoritarianism; it's a tendency of our species and makes it all the more remarkable that Western freedoms have lasted this long. I think, though, that it's more likely simple greed. The giant tech companies, dependent on ad revenue because nobody would actually pay for what they are offering, must be able to track and profile people.
The "protect kids from porn" lobby has always been around, it has nothing to do with surveillance or the internet. These people would be picketing a bookstore that sold Hustler magazine back in the 1970s, and demanding that customers be made to prove their age.
> Kids can access the internet in all kinds of places outside the home, and outside the purview of their parents supervision. Schools, libraries, friend's houses, public wifi anywhere.
Then these places should make sure kids are not doing wrong things on the web on their machines. Just like a shop should make sure to not sell alcohol to kids. A library should have some kind of web filter anyway to at least block porn.
They meant banning alcohol altogether. A.k.a. prohibition.
The day we have an epidemic of children and teens abusing alcohol to the point of it turning into a national healthcare emergency, you will find that stricter control of alcohol will certainly be put in place.
We are at that point now with children having unrestricted access to online content that isn’t age appropriate, as well as being influenced by insane weirdos on TikTok and the like at an age where they are particularly impressionable.
Isn't that day today?
The CDC says 4,000 underage drinkers die in the US every year. Maybe we could reduce that with stricter controls, but at what point does that become too burdensome to the rights of legal drinkers?
It's even harder to get the balance right when it comes to free speech issues like online pornography.
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." - Heinlein
If you hand power to the state every time people fail to properly handle their responsibilities, you end up in a dictatorship. It is a parent's responsibility to keep their kids away from the dark corners of the internet. Thoughtful regulation would create tools to allow them to do that easily, not hand parenting over to governments.
Where are those former peers now? You reference this like their life trajectory must have been irreparably harmed by it. Are they in prison? Were they killed while committing violent crime? Are they on disability from being permanently emotionally crippled? Or what?
A little tangential since this is more about gating white supremacist content than violence or sex, but I was on 4chan when it was being infiltrated by genuine white supremacist organizations and Russians that talked about how manly Assad was to influence teenagers interested in anime. I had people in real life to talk to about these things so I narrowly escaped the influence. Looking at the current state of the US, not everyone did. That being said, despite my hope that older people would be less prone to such influence, it doesn't always seem to be the case.
Same, so much so!
My feelings of freedom in that era, as a teen in a small 90s US city, were what fueled me to co-found one of the organizations (Fight for the Future) cited in the article!
(No longer in the trenches, just on the board, deserve zero direct credit for any of this work--it's all them!)
Ha, I remember finding the adult section of the file uploads. It took fourteen year old me thirty minutes to download one jpeg of boobs.
LoRD was fantastic, as were the turn based games that other people would dial in to take part of. It was such a different era, but we made it work by setting time limits and cooperating.
I remember winning a 10-kill LORD game on a local BBS. It took ages of me staying up until midnight to kill all the resurrected players after the daily reset. I had only one real competitor on that server and he gave up after I slew the dragon twice in one week (due to great luck.)
Guess at some point in the future it will come out who bankrolled all this because multiple countries in Europe and America don’t just roll something like this out in 8 months organically without someone paying off politicians to push it
Protecting children is one of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Governments are also getting more conservative recently with regards to domestic surveillance & social freedoms. In this regard, it's not anyone new, it's just the usual suspects: the same people who fund conservative media, the prison industrial complex, etc.
This seems like an attempt to leverage something widely regarded as reasonable (stop kids from accessing pornographic content without parental oversight) as the camel's nose through the tent to establish widespread identity tracking on the internet.
> The SESTA-FOSTA law is a combination of two bills: the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act; and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. It passed Congress in March, and President Donald Trump signed it into law in April.
> ...
> The biggest companies say they can manage the risks. Match Group—owner of Match.com, Tinder, Ok Cupid and Plenty of Fish—says any potential legal issues give “huge advantages” to those with enough size to comply. “We are able to have a big legal team, a big customer care team,” Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-law-targets-sex-trafficking...
The fight for this kind of legislature has been ongoing for many years as part of a broader program that seeks to shape the kinds of information that can be stored, consumed, and propagated on the Internet. Age verification is only one branch of the fight, but an important one to the many who support government control: it is an inroad that allows governments to say they have a stake in who sees what.
It has nothing to do with age gating, and everything to do with tracking. While there may be some funding going on behind the scenes, governments love tracking on its own merits.
I think it's possible that there are secretive efforts to destroy permissionless access to the internet, but my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time.
A somewhat analogous situation is how landlords raise rents in sync with each other, not because they're intentionally colluding to fix prices, but because nowadays it's easy to see average rental prices in neighborhoods, and the natural strategy is to set your rental prices based on that.
> my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time.
I think that's the wrong guess. Even with chat control, in some previous forms, the proposals came of the back of lobbying. One such case was Ashton Kutcker's startup https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start...
The more recent proposals for chat control were drafted by non-public "high level groups", the identity of which wasn't revealed to the public https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters/going-dark
Do you think the main force is misplaced good intentions (which I assume is what drives Ashton Kutcher) or more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public?
Kutcher wrote a letter of support for his friend Danny Masterson who was convicted raping multiple women so if he is truly concerned about abuse of women it doesn't seem to apply when it involves people he knows doing it. When this came to light his defense was that he didn't think anyone but the judge was going to see the letter.
Those are heavily co-mingled. Policing and intelligence agencies in particular view themselves as having good intentions which look like harm from the outside.
Good intentions misplaced into efforts to control other people are sinister intentional efforts to harm the public.
I don't think anyone is that naive to not see the negative implications of the things they are proposing, or helping develop. They might feign ignorance, and excuse themselves with "following orders" but the majority know it's not right in principle.
I tend to follow information in this space, and could talk about it endlessly (though it would still have minimal effect in the end).
From the things I'm seeing right now, in my mind, all this clampdown on privacy is to have better control of the message and discussion in order to preserve the corrupt status quo. To give one example, many leaks and reports initially come in anonymous due to fear of repercussion from those in power. My country (Romania) changed the legislation a couple of years back to prevent people from reporting corruption anonymously (in a highly corrupt state). Maybe that's why Trump said he loves Romanians, recently, he'd like to do that at home as well.
> more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public
Until recently I wasn't the type of person that would entertain the idea of a shadowy organization that tries to puppetmaster the world. Though with the recent Epstein emails release that in black and white stated about Slovakia's 2018 government "the government will fall this week - as planned" (day prior to mass protests that lead to it falling), makes you wonder about the backroom politics of the western world, and why we need more transparency there, and less control from them.
edit:
And of course, any change that is put behind a "think of the children" message, should raise everybody's eyebrows to the max.
Just imagine a capable individual just like yourself, but with such a rotting core that they see the same devious plans you and I do, but lack the backbone/principles and moral/ethical fiber to prevent them from pursuing those ideas. Instead, they full endorse and selfishly benefit from them at the expense of others. With our large population, this individual, and many such like them are guaranteed to exist at all levels of the socio-economic ladder. Solipsism is the root of corruption continuing to sprout.
Off-topic, but actually a number of landlords raise prices in sync with each other because they use price-setting services like RealPage that intentionally try to maximize rents across multiple landlords. They just settled a lawsuit over this: https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-realpage-settlement-r...
Do social movements _always_ have people at the top pulling the strings? Is it _never_ the case that even when you can identify thought leaders, the movement itself is organic and broadly supported?
Internet comments aren't a social movement
Everything that these laws are supposedly regulating has always been there and we have an entire generation now that grew up with it. Everyone was fine just like video games were fine, movies were fine, racy books were fine, and the printing press was fine.
The Internet comments make it seem like lazy parents but it's very convenient that the solution is to ID every single person on the Internet. Facebook pushed this hard with their real name policy and then had to back off because people complained about trans people being forced to use their old names. They've been successfully demonized so now it's time to push as hard as they can. It's probably not just Facebook but it's obviously not organic.
I think it's "organic" from the big tech companies looking to pull up the ladder behind them. These laws are straight up regulatory capture to make it much harder to start new Internet businesses, while forcing their users to divulge even more personal info.
Google has been bugging me with Android popups for years "please add your birthday to help Google comply with the law". Obtaining that bit of my information isn't something they need to do - it's something they want to do because every bit of personal information they scrape out of me makes their adtech surveillance database joins that much more accurate.
>Internet comments aren't a social movement
This seems strictly wrong. People talk online. People get their ideas online, and share their ideas online. Internet comments _alone_ are not a social movement, but they certainly do frequently represent social movements.
Musk in his tit for tat with Trump recently revealed huge numbers of the Internet comments supporting MAGA were foreign plants. He didn't reveal which accounts were bots though. All these comments supporting censorship appear mostly on platforms that would love to ID every person on their platform.
Internet comments do not represent anything anymore that doesn't manifest in the actual world. They are excellent at having a few influence the many
I agree with you, and probably more than it sounds. But I think the point you make is still too strong a case. ie, even if the online comments are ~90% foreign influence it doesn't also follow that everything is astroturfing or that real people do not discuss issues online.
To your point though, maybe we can no longer reliably tell the difference, and so it'd be better to adopt your view as a rule of thumb.
This isn't a social movement.
Concern over accessibility of internet pornography is absolutely a social movement. I don't necessarily agree with some of what is being pushed, but there's a large constituency here.
Yeah, this is much more easily explained by the fact that a lot of things on the internet are damaging kids.
Yes, and that thing is chiefly corporate social media. Which could be fixed literally overnight by parents, over a few weeks by school district policy, and over a few months with sites publishing metadata to aid client side blocking. Phones, the primary independent computing device for kids, are already locked down to the point that an owner has to jump through many (detectable and auditable) hoops to install arbitrary software.
None of this requires some draconian regime where it becomes sites' own responsibilities to obtain and verify their users meatspace identities.
It would be excellent to know who is pushing this and through what means. There is some unprecedented alignment across borders to restrict access and rights.
Those pesky... adults!
This strikes me as almost conspiratorial thinking, and it's reflected in the article. At one point they say KOSA is unpopular but.. it isn't? These laws (KOSA, OSA) enjoy broad, bipartisan popularity and politicians are jumping on the bandwagon because they want votes. It really is as simple as that.
There's absolutely no way to counter this, or at least to round off the censorship power-grab this is allowing, if we don't admit to ourselves that people have become suspicious of the tech sector (us) and are reaching to clip our wings - starting with access to their kids.
The laws are only moderately popular in the abstract, but when you show people the reality and the future implications then popularity drops. The key is educating people about the dangers of this type of legislation, including dangers to privacy and authoritarian control over information. In the US especially both major parties hate each other with a passion; this animosity can be leveraged with proper framing.
What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have ever expressed interest in this?
If the politicians keep voting for things their constituents don't (and in these cases actively push back against so hard that the politician are forced to withdraw the push) that seems like strong evidence that politicians are doing something with an external incentive...
Politicians having bad incentives (e.g. campaign donations) isn't conspiracy thinking, it's a documented reality. Hell, we even had a supreme court judge taking a present from somebody who's case he was ACTIVELY OVERSEEING.
> What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have ever expressed interest in this?
UK: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
US: https://issueone.org/press/new-poll-finds-near-universal-pub...
Aus: https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-un...
So far as I know there's nothing confounding here - people from across the political spectrum just seem to think it's a good idea to introduce age checks and to restrict children from accessing adult content.
That's a powerpoint of somebody really trying to push an agenda and has nothing to do with age verification. The 88% support is for "social media platforms to protect minors from online harms, such as the promotion of eating disorders, suicide, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation."
I'm sure social media could say with 99% accuracy whether somebody is a minor already just based on advertising data and if a law prevented facebook from showing diet pill ads to a kid that has absolutely zero with some sort of government tracking bullshit.
The fact that you are citing 3 studies without even reading them apparently really makes me suspicious of your motivation here.
Plot twist: It's Ashton Kutcher.
https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotligh...
The Christian right has been pushing for this forever. They finally acquired enough political and cultural purchase to get this measure pushed over the line.
Internet Gatekeeping, ID Cards, New Facial Recognition Powers, Secret government talks have identified a huge problem, planned all this during the covid years is my guess. Something is going down and this is their safest bet i reckon. Possibly to do with unregistered recent inhabitants and improving the capability to identify them. That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you something.
nice conspiracy thinking. I for one can't wait for ID confirmed social media, where I don't have to read anything produced by russian bots
What does the movie Scarface have to say about it?
https://www.realclearhistory.com/2017/04/01/the_migrant_cris...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift
https://www.reddit.com/r/moviequestions/comments/133gbzl/in_...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/we-talked-to-migrants-about-...
From what i can gather, there was some confusion as to why some nations which clearly and obviously have very high crime/fraud/corruption statistics yet at the same time have incredibly low prison/prisoner statistics (https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-th...) and the governments couldn't figure it out or overlooked it. It turns out that those nations just kick out the trouble and the trouble arrives at other shores, quickly setting up black market trade routes, money laundering shops, heavy violence, and a complete disregard for laws.
Corporations and center-left/center-right liberal governments support now and have always supported mass immigration because it lowers wages. Nobody especially cares about identifying them, the reason they flooded in recently (over the past couple decades) is because they were deliberately let in through written policies. They did this despite public objections. In the US, we know exactly who they are; we issue illegal immigrants special IDs and business licenses. They get bank loans; they're homeowners. They get in-state tuition at colleges.
Starmer is currently using anti-immigrant sentiment to push his digital IDs, but that's because he is a cynic. He does whatever he needs to do to satisfy his bosses.
> That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you something.
It tells you that the US puts nations under siege for decades for committing the crime of self-determination, then lets in with absolutely no obstacles all of the economically destroyed and desperate, the extremely right wing, and the participants in CIA-financed death squads who flee, then uses them as a voting block (and a resource) to support the continuation and escalation of those sieges.
edit: immigrants commit less crime in the US than natives. Their children commit more crime, because they rise to the level of natives at their socioeconomic bracket.
Social media is more damaging to kids than porn
Damaging in different ways. I'm not sure you can say one is worse.
Sure most kids can look at naked people and not be too affected, we all have the same parts. But beyond that, a lot of really harmful behavior is depicted in some porn and kids are not really mature enough to understand that in real healthy relationships people don't actually have sex like that.
Both porn and social media can be addictive and unhealthy if they become a substitute for interacting with real people. And this also happens with adults not just kids.
Porn is a special subset of social media.
With how harshly HN users have been going at UK and the EU, I was surprised seeing that not only is the mass surveillance build out better in the US, but also the user verification.
Google is suddenly asking to verify my age on an account I have used for five years linked to my credit card. This is about surveillance of all of us, not "protecting kids".
It’s not age-gated. It’s ID-required.
I think all of this has gone overboard, even though I agree that children should not be exposed to pornography, I don't know what to do about it because I expect parents to monitor their child's Internet usage, which is a losing ideal. Are there better alternatives?
Just because something isn't ideal doesn't mean it's worth making a law about. Running with scissors -- not best practice. Worth trying to legislate? Absolutely not.
Somebody who's 17 choosing to look at porn? Not in America's top 1 million problems.
If we had a way to prove age without revealing any other identity that could be used for tracking/profile building. I don't see that being supported by the tech industry though, as they are almost completely reliant on tracking to earn money.
So it is up to me to monitor your child? I don't work in porn or an even remotely related field but I have to implement age verification now because of Texas's law. Someone explain to me how this is protecting any children.
I think we must think about what the downside of kids maybe being introduced to porn really. Realistically, it is pretty low. Given that, we shouldn't really be giving up anything to try and stop it. I was exposed to porn several ways pre-Internet. Older siblings, news stands, late night cable. If I wanted more, I could get it. It was simply not a problem.
Maybe there is a problem for a tiny number of individuals, OK. A one size fits all approach like this still isn't the solution in these cases, though.
>I was exposed to porn several ways pre-Internet. Older siblings, news stands, late night cable. If I wanted more, I could get it. It was simply not a problem.
Yup. Me too.
And it goes back much further. Cf. "Pictures of Lily"[0] for a pop culture exposition from nearly sixty years ago. The point being that "porn" isn't anything new, nor was it difficult to obtain (hence a popular song about "porn") even before computer networks.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-PHDR2yhxE&list=RDg-PHDR2yh...
Edit: For those who would cite the current ubiquity of "hardcore" porn on the 'net, I'd say that's a difference in degree, not in kind. Something to consider.
A difference in degree can make all the difference.
A fraction of the money poured into these mass surveillance systems and proposals would have gone a long way in developing better parental control software.
If startups build parental control it carries the wrong incentives.
Realistically what's needed for proper parental control.
1. Software that parents can install on phones, and computers (which comes as an upside of less lockdown on devices)
2. A way to whitelist websites and applications (particularly for phones).
3. A way to share, reuse and collaborate on whitelists. No enforcement of a central authority.
As a culture we just have to come to accept that parents should be responsible for managing kids’ devices, and provide them with the device-level tools for doing so. If a parent lets a 10 year old hang out in a sketchy alleyway every weekend, we would blame them for the inevitable consequences. Why do we not blame them for failing to monitor what their kids are up to online?
And before someone tries to bore me with anecdotes about how your particular kid evaded whatever restrictions you put in place, I think if kids put in thoughtful effort and planning to evade restrictions then parents are off the hook. Same as if a kid stages an elaborate ruse (one that would fool most parents) to get out of the house and drink with friends. That’s not on you. Parents aren’t prison wardens and we shouldn’t ask for a police state to fill in parenting gaps.
Making the state into the parent will affect us all, not just kids. I (and plenty of others) will fight to the end to preserve the last vestiges of the free, open internet. Overlay networks and even sneakernet if necessary. We’re not going to accept authoritarian control of communications no matter how much politicians want it.
Well said. This is a social failure being exploited by shrude politicians to usurp more authority. Replacing parents with the state keeps playing out, and keeps being a horrible idea.
That's a very good point
Repurpose the IPv4 "evil bit" as an "is adult" bit.
> I don't know what to do about it
Do something similar to what we do with video: make a government enforced voluntary rating system (that is, you use if you want, if you use and lie, the government hits you) with a standard where sites can tell their ratings to the clients.
Have the parents decide if they will use the rating for anything.
Assuming the reason for these laws is to protect children from pornography, you could ask, what are the specific harms from pornography? You could identify those harms through scientific study (some have been done; it appears the harms are mostly due to a lack of education and understanding about what's going on in porn) and address them (educate children to understand what's going on intellectually/emotionally and how to treat people with respect). But that would require talking to kids about sex, which adults are petrified of. Our culture is puritanical, and uses fear and shame to avoid dealing with things like sex. It then perpetuates this fear and shame onto each generation, and it pervades every product and service we have. So we could try fighting the irrational fear and become less afraid of sex (and pornography would probably change because of it). But good luck doing that in this country.
> I don't know what to do about it
1. No smart phones for the child before the age of NN, me I say 18. A Smart phone makes a great High School Graduation gift.
2. Only internet access from a desktop computer with a hosts file that the child cannot change. That probably means no Microsoft Windows PC. See: https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
eazy-peezy
You either don't have kids, or your children are adults.
It's impractical in today's world to raise children without access to devices like tablets and smart phones. That's like having a sugar-free, no TV, hand-sewn, ect, ect, household.
What's more important is to know what your kids are getting into, making sure they are comfortable discussing what they see, and teaching them independent decision making skills.
For example, a few years ago, my then seven-year-old complained to me about all of the Jesus videos that were popping up on Youtube. I told her to thumbs down them, and now Youtube no longer suggests them. She also knows that if other kids watch Jesus videos, that's their right and to keep her mouth shut.
I'm curious, what were the "Jesus videos?"
>> Hmm I can't find any porn on the internet, better ask around
> Sure Timmy I'll send you porn, but it's illegal and I'm taking a big risk here so you gotta do something for me, also you can't tell anyone
You've failed to solve the porn problem and now you've created a larger grooming/CDM problem.
You can add porn sites to the hosts file yourself.
The point that people are making is that while restricting overt internet porn does remove it from sight of a lot of kids, it will also continue to circulate as "samizdat" through whatever filesharing mechanisms exist. When I was at school someone got busted for distributing BBS porn on floppy disks, no network required. Now we have terabyte SD cards.
Absolutely true. When I was a kid a few people got in trouble for drawing and circulating pixelated “porn” on their graphing calculators. You can’t stop teenagers from being teenagers.
hosts file isn't even the correct tool for this job. I don't know why this is being suggested a serious solution. I can add domain names and chose which IP address they resolve to. It can't even block websites.
If I didn't know any better I would assume you are spreading misinformation to put children into an unsafe situation
Yes I know this is technically true. One could use iptables, but it is easier for people (users) to do this instead of getting iptables / pf or whatever configured. It is one size fits all.