I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored, can even as much as seriously be considered by an allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government, much less make it into law.
Also:
Step 1: Build mass surveillance to prevent the 'bad guys' from coming into political power (its ok, we're the good guys).
Step 2: Your political opponents capitalize on your genuinely horrific overreach, and legitimize themselves in the eyes of the public as fighting against tyranny (unfortunately for you they do have a point). They promise to dismantle the system if coming to power.
Step 3: They get elected.
Step 4: They don't dismantle the system, now the people you planned to use the system against are using it against you.
The UK has never been a free speech state. Remember the extremely weird era when Gerry Adams MP could not be heard on TV and had to have his voice dubbed?
Few European countries have free speech in the way the US does because their legal frameworks explicitly recognise potential harms from speech and freedoms speech can inhibit and attempt to balance these competing freedoms.
I don’t think that makes us ‘not a free speech state’ — although the suppression of the IRA spokesmen was weird and criticised at the time.
Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…
|Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media.
I must have missed the news where Hamas or Islamic Jihad had established themselves in the US for decades and had been able to get serious electoral candidates into the federal government.
I am not seeing the parallel here between US policies on foreign based Islamic extremist groups and the UKs handling of the IRA.
War correspondent Jeremy Scahill of Blackwater and Dirty Wars fame has been doing interviews with and reporting on communiqués from both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for quite some time now. I wouldn't be surprised if being able to do this was part of the reason he and Ryan Grim bailed from the Intercept.
Free speech in the US is not absolute. You cannot make true threats or incite violence. For example, calling for the extermination of Democrats or Republicans would cross the line.
Not exactly. The Supreme Court has ruled that general hateful statements can be protected, but if a politician says "Democrats/Republicans should be exterminated" in a way that sounds like a real threat or call to action, it can become incitement or a true threat. So the line isn't about the words alone, it's about context and intent.
The original intent was supposed to be that Adams and others would not be on TV at all. The TV broadcasters relatively quickly realised that there was a loophole which meant that as long as his voice wasn't broadcast they were within the rules. But what was weird was that the UK government didn't immediately close this loophole (especially given that the same loophole was not available in the Republic of Ireland where the same broadcast ban existed at the time).
Small nitpick: I don't think it's right to refer to him as "Gerry Adams MP", due to the policy he followed of refusing to swear the oath of allegiance and thus not taking up the seat.
The problem with the nitpick is it inevitably runs into the issue of who the authority is here, and, by the very nature of the beast, said authority is disputed here. It seems small, but in reality it’s the whole thing.
IIRC, Gerry Adams was always performed by Stephen Rea, a moderately successful actor and heart-throb in certain circles. Adams said that SR “did me better than I do”.
Can't have the populace heating the voice of the guy who was never proven to be a member of the ra, better they listen to the sexy husband of convicted provo bomber Dolours Price instead.
Dolours being the sister of Marian Price who is currently suiting Disney over being depicted shooting Jean McConville in the back of the head in Say Nothing.
> I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored
It’s not like this is new or unique to the UK, the US has been busted indiscriminately spying on all of its citizens multiple times - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
I'm not a fan of the OSA but proponents of it will *keep winning* if you *keep misrepresenting it*.
You can, and should, argue about the effects but the core of the OSA and how it can be sold is this, at several different levels:
One, most detailed.
Sites that provide user to user services have some level of duty of care to their users, like physical sites and events.
They should do risk assessments to see if their users are at risk of getting harmed, like physical sites and events.
They should implement mitigations based on those risk assessments. Not to completely remove all possibility of harm, but to lower it.
For example, sites where kids can talk to each other in private chats should have ways of kids reporting adults and moderators to review those reports. Sites where you can share pictures should check for people sharing child porn (if you have a way of a userbase sharing encrypted images with each other anonymously, you're going to get child porn on there). Sites aimed at adults with public conversations like some hobby site with no history of issues and someone checking for spam/etc doesn't need to do much.
You should re-check things once a year.
That's the selling point - and as much as we can argue about second order effects (like having a list of IDs and what you've watched, overhead etc), those statements don't on the face of it seem objectionable.
Two, shorter.
Sites should be responsible about what they do just like shops and other spaces, with risk assessments and more focus when there are kids involved.
Three, shortest.
Facebook should make sure people aren't grooming your kids.
Now, the problem with talking about " a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored," is where does that fit into the explanations above? How do you explain that to even me, a highly technical, terminally online nerd who has read at least a decent chunk of the actual OFCOM guidelines?
Mass surveillance doesn’t seem very difficult to build if you have power. If you don’t build it, it seems like step 4 hit becomes “they build it and use it against you.” That’s not to say it’s a good idea to build such a thing, but the “your enemies will use it against you” argument doesn’t make much sense to me. The only real solution to bad guys gaining power is to either prevent them from gaining power or remove them if they already have.
The thing you have to understand is that the average Brit wants and possibly needs the government to tell them how to live their lives. It's a completely foreign paradigm to the average American, though alarming "progress" has been made on the American front as of late.
No. We were typically indifferent to our Government. Very much a case of 'go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.' But substitute 'tea'.
But in the last couple of decades, things have changed. Arguably, a public referendum in 2016, was very much a protest vote against several Parliaments that didn't listen to its citizens. And the last decade shows nothing has changed.
My friends and family, and myself included, were never very political, and very much a case of 'No Matter Who You Vote For The Government Always Gets In', but now everyone is talking about the Government. Interesting times ahead.
I am not nor will I ever be a Brit, let alone an average one. But I live here and I have seen and heard things from seemingly average Brits. Would they describe themselves using my exact words? Doubtful. But what other conclusion can one draw from their observed behavior? The Online Safety Act in particular enjoys extraordinarily high support among the general public.
When I talk to people in Britain about sugar-taxes, smoking bans, porn bans, hate-speech laws, etc, most people will explain that without these things people will say/do harmful things therefore the government should stop them.
I remember when they started rolling out biometric facing scanning technology in stores and using it to ban people from all supermarkets within a designated area – basically forcing them to shop in smaller stores without these cameras or get their friends and family to buy their groceries. I thought this was utterly insane but to be horror Brits seem to almost universally support of this stuff because face scanning is a great way to identity people which private companies have flagged high-risk.
Our opinion of others is very low, and are comfort with authoritarianism is relatively high.
They think (like many Americans right now) that it will only be done against ‘those other people’. When they realize it’s been applied to them, it’s too late (they’ve been ‘othered’ now) and people will ignore them - or they’ll have to blame themselves or cover it up in order to fit in.
It’s classic.
Eventually, enough people will have been fucked by it that the numbers will shift back the other way - and then the opposite end of the pathology (not being able to recognize the main groups own needs enough to defend them or pull together as a coherent group) starts building.
It's disturbing to me that so much of this type of legislation originates with the "Conservatives", and the only viable alternative in Labour thinks this type of legislation doesn't go far enough. I guess at least things will be interesting with Farage in Number 10.
Obviously few would with that framing, but if they're given policies, lots of British people across the political spectrum would support ones that are more paternalistic.
Support for the OSA is very high: https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
British people are much happier with the state being paternalistic, across the political spectrum, it is a very strong differentiator between the US and the UK. "The government should do something!" You can see it in attitudes to the NHS, pensions, welfare. At its peak, in the 70s, 32% of people lived in social housing!
Labour voters, young and old, are generally quite paternalistic. Lots of Conservative voters are too, depending on the flavour. The exceptions are the Lib Dems and some conservative tribes. I am consistently surprised when talking to highly-educated, politically engaged people, left or right, how much the default is that the state should act.
I think there’s more difference than there has been since the 1980s. People really underestimate how far the Tory base (and parliamentary party following closely) have shifted to the right. The willingness of sitting Tory MPs to knowingly lie and dissemble on immigration related issues to create heat is a real break from a past consensus.
Current opinion polls for both are abysmal, but I don't think that civic freedoms are the main reason; the main reason is immigration, which all the previous governments promised to limit and then silently decided not to.
Decided not to, but continued to actively campaign on. It’s created a really weird situation where the actual policy choices are hugely disconnected from the rhetoric and emotion in the debate.
Legal immigration from South Asia dominates illegal immigration by an order of magnitude, but nobody wants to lose seats in Birmingham, so essentially doesn’t figure in the arguments about small numbers of afghans in miserable hotels in Essex.
For the Conservatives it's all about irregular/illegal immigration. Labour are hugely unpopular on that having apparently no idea what to do about it but they also have massive challenges on the economy/cost of living and the state of publicly funded services.
Immigration is sucking support more from the tories than labour. They rode into power based upon a promise to do something about it and then massively increased it.
Labour are recently leaning into being anti immigration because it's one of the few wealthy-donor-friendly policies they can pursue which will potentially gain them votes.
> allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government
The UK isn't any of that, it's always be an authoritarian country. The fact that British are amongst the most apathetic people on Earth fuels that, they just accept everything.
You're right - it's disgusting that their government told them that Nazism is bad and that they should fight to defend their own country. Fucking appalling, really.
The West aren't good guys and have never been the good guys. We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to, but without that to contrast with, we look increasingly like the managed democracies you see out East.
What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law.
- It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff
- It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
- It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat
- It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
- It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.
Places like China are finding out why you need these things, and are building these systems so their society can succeed.
Democracy's just an (Western) artifact of enforcing and maintaining rule of law.
> What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law.
The trouble with this is that it isn't compatible with prosecutorial discretion. It requires that if someone is breaking the law, they get prosecuted for it. Otherwise unenforced laws accumulate until everyone is breaking a hundred laws at any given time and then only the disfavored get prosecuted.
But if you want laws to be consistently enforced then they need to be few and simple enough for people to understand and comply with them, and that was historically the magic formula, which we've increasingly abandoned, much to our detriment.
> It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
> It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
This is a bit complicated. Law can absolutely be used to persecute people.
For example, there once was so-called Bill of Attainder, which basically meant that a certain person was labeled as an outlaw, traitor, and handled as such.
It was an actual law, voted on by the Parliament, but even though usage of Bills of Attainder was perfectly consistent with rule of law, it was not that different from a classical Stalinist show trial in effect.
This is also why Bills of Attainder are banned by the US Constitution.
While the West aren't really the good guy, I think there is an argument that could be made that the West is the better guy. Because while government outreach like those discussed are a scary possibility in the West nowadays, in the 'East' (more like Russia & China), it is a given and there are no recourse.
The West is the least bad if you live in an area where Western forces aren't currently bombing you or directly supporting the people starving you to death. Then China probably seems a lot better.
From the perspective of the Gazan parents watching their children starve to death, yes, China probably seems a lot better than the UK, which is directly responsible for their situation.
The Ukrainian parent suffering Russian bombing is likely has a much better opinion of the UK for their support, but that doesn't make the UK the good guys. Just less bad in that particular situation.
Forced deportation of Ukrainian children, the rhetoric denying Ukrainian nationhood and massacres in places like Bucha definitely put the Ukrainian war into genocide territory.
But if you want to talk about "real" genocides, China is backing Myanmar.
> there is an argument that could be made that the West is the better guy
The problem is you don't know how you are actually behaving towards the global south, so your perception is very skewed and people outside the west will have a vastly different perception than you, that you will never understand. Like some people in the west are waking up on Israels behavior now, but the rest of the world was aware of their genocidal terror for over half a century while you lived in innocent bliss. They see your support for Obama and Dove emojis in your profile picture while their entire extended families are getting systematically murdered by your bombs to this day.
Meanwhile in your made up fantasy land, its China that is this great threat to world peace.
Yeah, its amazing how good the isralies are at everything (tech, intelligence, manufacturing) but its taking them years to commit genocide. Despite their massive force advantage.
Genocide is a process and intent, not an outcome. Are you saying it's not genocide because everyone's not dead or forced off their land yet?
Considerably fewer civilians died in say, Srebrenica. Bosnian Muslims still live there. There are still Jews in Germany, Tutsis in Rwanda. The original inhabitants of the Americas and Australia still live there.
I'd also note -- as someone who's lived there -- that what Israel as a nation really excels at isn't tech, intelligence or manufacturing. Plenty of other countries are equal and above. I'd say it's marketing and comms.
Russians of any gender or minority could vote for their representative in 1917. Women in the States only got full suffrage in 1920, African Americans in 1965. So no real pedigree there.
But a whole state-level legislative architecture meant that suffrage wasn't accessible nationwide till the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Modern voter registration laws, which are gathering pace today, are largely targeted at keeping minority voters from exercising their democratic rights.
No, it's not naive at all. The UK in particular are not the good guys.
Apart from their appalling behaviour during their recent expeditionary wars, their current support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, their sexual and physical abuse of locals near British Overseas bases, they also have an incredibly poor record with their own citizens.
British behaviour in Northern Ireland was itself genocidal, and involved the regular murder of civilians from decades. Even today they are continuing the legal protection of the perpetrators.
Well, all countries are complex collections of people and ideas, so like people, there are no pure good guys.
But we have all been subjected to particularly US propaganda portraying the West as the global good guys, and specproc challenged that worldview in the comment to which you replied. Ironically, you criticised him for being naive as he was challenging the concept of the West as the good guys, something you now call naive yourself.
From what I witnessed over years is, European countries loved to point fingers to other countries to educate them about how their democracies shall look like.
Now they are doing the very same things they pointed fingers about and, now there's no structured information flow to hide this.
As I sometimes tend to say: "God has an interesting sense of humor".
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia all have fairly robust democracies. Yes, some of them probably look and feel different than those of NATO, but they are a great improvement over previous colonial administrations, monarchies, theocracies, and "single party democratic states" (Korea and Taiwan before late 1980s/early 1990s break-throughs).
I was thinking largely of Russia, but when it comes to internet freedoms we're absolutely heading in a China direction.
Coming at it here from a broadly UK perspective. We have:
- Very little difference between ruling parties on core issues since the seventies, I'm thinking largely on the economic and foreign policy front here.
- Prison under terrorism offenses for peaceful protest.
- Arrests for (checks notes) complaining about the management of your local school in a WhatsApp group.[1]
People who argue we're somehow better than the people we happen to be fighting need to take a long hard look around. And maybe also remember that when we're not fighting folks (e.g., Saudi, Israel) abhorrent behaviour is tolerated and supported.
Japan has had a ruling party in power almost continously for 70 years. If the ruling party was not friendly to the West, then I bet you it would be called something else than democracy.
> We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to
You can't think yourself a free thinker to realize the west is a force for evil in the world and simultaneously believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism is it makes for a very incoherent world view. "It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time."
> believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism
The main problem with communism was that it was much worse than Western propaganda portrayed it to be. Because if Western propaganda had tried to depict it truthfully, no one would have believed it. Communism is so much worse that it is literally unbelievable, so anti-communist propaganda has to make communism look good in order for anyone to believe it.
That's assuming voting systems or checks and balances don't matter. If you made structural mistakes in how you choose politicians, you're going to have a worse time than if you use better systems.
The game Alpha Centauri had the most hard hitting quote that I think applies now.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny...Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. Commissioner Pravin Lal, 'U.N. Declaration of Rights' "
The only sources of information we currently see about protests happening across the US are by small broadcasters. There is plenty of news that is being systematically being suppressed by the top-down information chain because it is so effective in clamping down dissent.
IMO, free flowing information still remains the best safeguard against tyranny.
Those are two independent problems. If you have a centralized system, you're screwed, because they just capture it. If you have a decentralized system vulnerable to propaganda techniques then they do that.
What you need is a decentralized system resistant to propaganda techniques.
I mean, just as the phrase goes "your terrorist is my rebel," one could say "your propaganda is my information." That's exactly why a decentralized system matters. It doesn't just resist capture by a single authority, it allows competing narratives to exist side by side. What one group sees as misinformation, another might see as essential context. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate bias entirely, but to prevent any one group from controlling the flow of all information.
Of course not. That shouldn't even be possible in a properly designed system.
Rather what you need is a means for propaganda to be rapidly identified and refuted with counterarguments in a way that its would-be victims can see it.
Additionally, it’s usually more effort to refute something than to state something, especially as it seems there is little requirement for proof when making the statement.
Not specifically related to this “child protection” thing, but you can’t deny that the free flow of information also leads to some pretty terrible things, driven by actors such as states, magnified x1000 by social media, and now also AI.
Every platform these days is full to the brim with misinformation and propaganda (which ends up in mainstream media as well), deliberately making many of us hateful and sometimes violent. The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
I’m 100% for personal liberty and accountability, and admittedly I don’t have a solution for this.
I do think the Elon Musk approach (“just let people decide for themselves”) is very naive at best.
Again just to be clear this has nothing to do with the UK thing which I strongly disagree with.
The free flow of information isn't driving extremism, it's echo chambers. People have a tendency of surrounding themselves with only those who already agree with them on some topic, so that a heavily partisan position suddenly becomes 'moderate.' This is how you have people simultaneously claiming, for instance, that the US is becoming more liberal than ever, and that it's becoming more conservative than ever.
You can also see this with the perception gap [1]. Those who are most involved in politics tend to be the paradoxically least knowledgeable about what 'the other side' thinks and believes. Typical contemporary examples would be republicans thinking democrats want to defund the police, or democrats thinking republicans are against immigration.
When you have contrary ideas bouncing against each other, poor ideas are easily demonstrated to be such - and you get a more realistic view of what people 'on the other side' actually think and believe. It naturally tempers against radicalism. But when you start to control information, you get the opposite. This is made even worse by the sort of people that find themselves on a life trajectory to go work, let alone volunteer, for the 'Ministry of Truth'. They tend to be the exact sorts that want to create information bubbles and echo chambers.
----
In general I think the truth tends to trickle up, even if it might get a bit dirty on the way there. I'd appeal to places like the USSR on that. They not only directly controlled absolutely all published information, but strictly controlled migration in and out of the country, informers everywhere making people terrified of speaking their mind, and just generally had a rock solid grip on information. The result? People still knew they were all full of shit. There's a great series of jokes from the era here. [2] On of my favorites, "Why do we need two central newspapers, Truth (Pravda) and News (Izvestiya) if both are organs of the same Party? Because in Truth there is no news, and in News there is no truth."
> The result? People still knew they were all full of shit.
It's just that the purpose of all this totalitarian control wasn't so that people wouldn't know. It was so that people couldn't do anything about it even if they knew.
The result was achieved, the measures you listed as examples worked effectively.
Knives help you cook delicious food, knives can also help you stab your partner to death. This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).
Different technologies are in different places on the "societal usefullness versus danger" spectrum. Nuclear weapons are obviously on the "really fricking dangerous" side, no country lets a civilian own them. Forks are obviously on the "useful" side, even though you can technically use one to gouge somebody's eye out.
What's the right tradeoff for guns, printing presses, typewriters and social media companies is a matter of some debate.
Knives in the UK are age restricted for purchase. Anyone can carry a folding pocket knife with a blade less than 3" without needing a reason. Any other mechanism, fixed blade, or longer blade require a lawful reason to carry. This includes recreation (e.g. fishing, camping) work (e.g. joinery, cooking).
There are a handful examples of overzealous officers misunderstanding and detaining for the wrong reasons, and plenty of examples of people who pretended to the media it was for innocent reasons until the court case showed otherwise.
For your point about forks, I'll note that they are actually covered by the same law; as are all pointed objects.
You do however have to undergo age verification, but under a much less intrusive process than online (a shop assistant looks at you and guesses, or looks at your ID and does not retain a copy).
> Knives help you cook delicious food, knives can also help you stab your partner to death. This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).
This is a reasonable enough metaphor but we don't have to pretend to be idiots either and act like every single technology is totally neutral in its design. Knives are a good example, actually. Kitchen knives are totally adequate for killing people (I assume, I'm no expert) but they clearly have a design meant for something else. A nuclear weapon, to choose a stupidly obvious example, has no capability other than mass death. It seems reasonable to ask ourselves whether we want these two objects to be under the same regulatory regime.
They would be used for constructive purposes far more if not for mutual distrust between nuclear powers, and the public hysteria around anything associated with the word "nuclear":
And I bet you felt really accomplished and proud about yourself with that insult to a random person on the internet. The peak of your intellectual capabilities. You know what they say, people who have no value to add in a conversation, can only attack other people.
What insult? I quoted your hilarious profile bio, and then said you're parroting brainwashed tropes. I haven't insulted you...but you clearly feel offended, but as people like you tend to say "your feelings aren't my problem"
I cant help but feel this analogy misses the mark. With the information people are consuming being guided by algorithms, its extremely hard for people to realise theyre being herded towards a specific viewpoint these days. It kind of reminds me of one of those mirror houses at the fairground - its extremely hard to get the correct signal in all the noise. You are what you consume and if everything you consume is of a misguided point of view, very quickly you're sliding towards being assimilated into that point of view.
I now believe that guiding technology use comes down to leadership. "with the exact same technological advances, on one side of the world we created modern america, while on the other side we created the soviet union"
Except they can't choose for their kids, or at least, not easily. Google basically own the android ecosystem and they don't want to provide any controls that could be used to limit their ability to generate as revenue. Look at Chrome's extensions. Try blocking domains. Your only hope is to use the god-awful Google Family controls AND NextDNS AND an adblocking mobile browser. These days some parents are trying to get schools to ban phones, because individual parents can't, "or my little Tommy will be the only one without a phone". So you then have to worry about what other kids have access to. Porn in private WhatsApp channels etc.
As a parent who using family link, I don't find it bad or inadequate. What is bad about it. How is it unfit for purpose? My child literally has no access to anything I don't want her to. If I had a complaint, it's that tracking her media consumption on YouTube is a PITA.
The whole "my kid will be left out" thing is so bizarre to me. So what? My kid is already banned from Roblox and that means of her whole circle, she's the only one who doesn't play and oh well. When I was a child it wasn't uncommon for a child to be without something their peer group had usually for money reasons. I don't see technology as any different. Kid has stuff their friends don't and vice versa.
That's why I get mad about age restriction laws on the internet. I do want to introduce my child to some of these things in a supervised way so I can teach her about them. Something I can't do if it's literally illegal because other parents decided to shove a phone/tablet in their kid's face and walk away.
I know way too many parents who never bother to use parental controls and learn that they're not actually will to live through their kid's whining about their restrictions.
The biggest problem with giving kids phones is that it opens them up to potential non stop bullying over WhatsApp/iMessage/etc. And yet the online safety act doesn't even claim to try to "do something" about that (not that it would be possible anyway but that didn't stop them elsewhere).
> Every platform these days is full to the brim with misinformation and propaganda (which ends up in mainstream media as well), deliberately making many of us hateful and sometimes violent. The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
I remember what it was like before the internet, and misinformation and propaganda were just as pervasive and perverse, except you couldn't be sure about it unless you read a book, did actual research or talked to an expert, and you sure as shit weren't going to change anyone's mind or at least be able to say "you're wrong and here's why" when you hear obvious bullshit.
IMO, there was a big change in the nature of harmful misinformation once you could Google things like "did convenience store workers really celebrate on 9/11" when that particular urban myth spread in the aftermath of the attack.
I do agree that the nature and vector of misinformation and propaganda are different. The ways in which we're wrong and dumb changed, but we were just as wrong and dumb before the internet, and we were statistically more hateful and violent then, too.
Look at the positives: now you are aware that every channel is full of misinformation and propaganda and treat it all as such. That gives you better media literacy than previous generations who tended to trust everything that was given to them "from above" - it enables us to be more intellectually mature and honest with ourselves about the nature and history of news media, even if you might not actually find that pleasant or convenient to deal with.
True, awareness of misinformation is higher today. But, being aware that all channels are polluted with misinformation doesn’t automatically make someone better at distinguish the truth. Also older generation automatically are not buying everything they see https://www.mpg.de/24132917/0205-bild-online-misinformation-...
Actually, having "misinfo everywhere" goggles can push people think that everything is propaganda or nothing can be trusted. This is also one way Russia and China is using its propaganda: give so much multi meaning information that normal governance information is also considered as something that cannot be trusted. Or atleast trying.
I concede that but awareness is a better starting position for potential improvement rather than ignorance. I guess we are agreeing on the substance but I am taking an optimistic view rather than a pessimistic one. I accept that I might be very misguided.
I dont buy the misinformation/propaganda argument as the past was far far worse on all fronts in that regard than today. Additionally, most platforms are highly censored and curated being the exact opposite of free flow of information.
I think the let people decide for themselves is the best option as any alternative is by definition tyranny/control and why the parent quote is so spot on.
You got a point, though I am not sure which things you are referring to. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi tried to have tight control in east Berlin but eventually failed. China is doing currently the full scale automated information gathering and control against Uighur Muslims. Not sure how China is using propaganda for the Chinese themselves. Also NSA uses mass surveillance already at the moment for foreigners and internal political opponents.
But propaganda as a weapon is not a thing to underestimate. As investigated e.g. Jessika Aro https://www.igpub.com/putins-trolls/ and some might argue about the role of election interference for the Trump election and re-election as well.
So, if the leaders are dictators and hates people, it wont be good with or without new surveillance laws as there are already existing ways to do that.
The main misinformation you see on the Internet is attention-grabbing women pretending to care about you and people trying to misrepresent mass-made white-label Chinese stuff as indie original designs.
Few people spread hate other than to say our society is a disaster and we'd be better off with communism or anarchy which has been typical discourse of young men since the dawn of the modern age.
In general I've found much higher quality of content on the Internet than elsewhere, with genuine testimonies, in-depth analyses, and a variety of opinions and experiences. Whenever I watch the news on TV I am appalled by how superficial and one-sided it is, sometimes misunderstanding the issue altogether, completely out of touch and misrepresenting reality.
The issue with social media isn't the free flow of information but the amplification of certain information — the information that tends to make you angry. The amplification is the cause of echo chambers, spreading of misinformation and disinformation, etc. It makes possible what in essence is a distributed denial of service attack on the human brain.
Sure, chain emails existed before, but they had a pretty low ceiling of how many it would reach. It didn't scale well.
In other words, you should regulate the amplification mechanism ("algorithm"), not what information is allowed to be said. I think forcing platforms to go back to subscribe+reverse chronological feeds would be a pretty good start.
Genuinely astounding how few commenters here understand that the outrage is deliberate and curated because outrage improves messaging persuasiveness.
All of the corporate-owned social media platforms have censorship, curation, and selection policies which impose an editorial slant on what's boosted and what isn't.
All of them. No exceptions.
None of them offer anything resembling a free, open, flow of information. (Mastodon does, or at least tries to, but it has very little reach compared to others.)
And all of them are poisoned by the output of huge well-funded bot farm networks posting harmful content. Whether it's anti-vax nonsense, climate change denial, inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric, divisive political rage bait of all kinds, or covert propaganda designed to look reasonable and pull people into a rabbit hole of fake activism and misinformation, all of these networks are acting as a public brainwashing service for political ends.
There is no "marketplace of ideas." Nothing that happens on social media is truly organic and bottom-up.
And this is not an accident. These are primarily influence, behaviour modification, and persuasion networks, tailored using personal profiling, but disguised as entertainment and social connection, and allowing just enough dissent from the official party lines to create a superficial veneer of free speech.
This process is essentially unregulated. There used to be some FTC oversight, but there isn't any more.
Do you think absolutely all content should be allowed to be accessible?
If you wouldn't allow child porn (which 4chan deletes/doesn't allow), where exactly do you draw the line between blocking sites with cp, and allowing sites like 4chan which host porn without consent (voyeur/spy/revenge)?
There's a difference between prosecuting a crime, and restricting people to prevent it from even happening. Both have a place but only the former retains your liberty.
Yes, thats the problem. Prosecuting crimes on the internet is near impossible due to the restrictions and often anonymity. Thats why we rely on platform providers to help us, the public.
Facebook, Youtube and others put in effort to take down illegal content.
4chan only does the bare minimum such that they don't gain too much relevancy in the public eye.
UK or other countries may decide that 4chan doesn't to enough and ban it because of the help of 4chan in faciliating the spreading of illegal content.
So again, where is the difference between 4chan which hosts/spread illegal content and other sites where we're fine with banning them?
> Prosecuting crimes on the internet is near impossible due to the restrictions and often anonymity.
The US does it quite well. The FBI has a near endless number of court cases where they subpoena ISPs and content hosting platforms to de-anon and gather evidence to build cases. My biggest concern about the movement of crime from the streets to "cyberspace" is that almost all Internet crime is considered Federal (across state lines), thus carries much harsher penalties that state-only crimes.
Remember, allowing children unlimited access to hardcore porn (something that was not possible before this age of tyranny) is key to our "freedom". At least that is what the HN demographic will loudly tell you.
Have you considered parenting your children instead of letting the state do it for you? The latter means they can use the good old “for the children” rhetoric to control what adults can and cannot see: for example, they can choose that homosexuality is a sin and bad therefore any LGBT friendly website is bad. Apply freely as your government dictates, such as pro-Palestine content. We must protect our kids from terrorists, after all. :)
Meanwhile your children are absolutely going to find a way to get that content regardless, likely in darker corners of the internet, exposing them to much, MUCH worse content than if they would have just gone on the good old hub (plus actual predators) while also making it basically impossible for you to control instead of just making it a firewall rule away from locking it yourself instead of letting the government do it.
I'm a full adult (legally anyway) but I can't control everything I see on HN or Reddit or whatever when I'm passively scrolling; I for one am glad that there's giant teams of moderators curating the internet for me.
I'll advocate for freedom of speech but I don't want to have to listen to everything.
Hard disagree. I would love for moderation to be opt-out, for example. I might not agree with moderator actions, so I would very much prefer to see an unfiltered HN instead of having someone else dictate what I am allowed to see or not. The same applies to other websites, especially Reddit.
Alas, I have no choice in the matter, but I would very much prefer I did.
While I understand some content HAS to be regulated (CSAM) doesn’t mean everything has to be, because inevitably that will devolve into the government policing wrongthink.
And you just end up with poorly integrated moderation with extra steps when community starts cooperating to make it more efficient (e.g. maintaining filter lists).
Or there's no effective moderation so people that want more curated content and better UX moderation-wise will move elsewhere.
Nobody's forcing you to use moderated platforms either.
That said, I think the showdead setting in HN is good to have, so you can still opt to see content that would otherwise be filtered.
I don't understand why you see these as either-or propositions. It's important that I parent my children to understand the dangers of alcohol, and it's also a good idea that it's illegal for my local grocery store to sell them any, and neither of these are contradicted by the fact that they'll be able to find some if they really want to. Norms and friction matter.
It’s a good idea for grocery stores to not sell children alchohol. It’s a bad idea for grocery stores to not sell alcohol to ANYONE, adults included, because children might buy it by faking their IDs. That’s the difference here.
Alcohol is a perfect example as well, because I personally drink it only occasionally but would very much rather see it completely banned, as I think it would solve a lot of problems with society. In reality it likely wouldn’t, but the gut feeling is there. If I were to blindly follow my instinct and not know history, I would call for a total ban on it to protect the children.
The same is happening here, but at a much more dangerous level.
Plenty of friction exists. Access to devices being banned at schools, ISP parental controls, selective DNS blocking, Google/Apple child accounts.
For the most part it's just carelessness. Before the Internet children that were persistent enough and that had apathetic parents still found a way (perhaps less volumes and less extreme though)
Perhaps a better implementation of the law would be requiring all sites to mark content as NSFW if it is, and having opt-in device level toggles, so parents could protect their kids more easily, but anyone who’s actively seeking the content is able to. Teenagers will get around this ridiculous verification with ease either way.
This argument is basically the same as saying that stores should be allowed to sell alcohol to kids because it's the parents' responsibility to guard the store so their kids don't buy it.
Kids do not only have access to their own devices (for one, these days schools provide them with devices that parents have little say over often with only trivial filtering). And that is assuming the best case scenario where parents have the technical know-how to put in place non-trivial limits. Most don't.
People under age can obtain fake IDs, all over the world. This is illegal, but it still happens. At some point, it is ultimatey a parents responsibility to prevent their children from doing so by acting as a parent to their child and preventing them from engaging in destructive behavior. This is established law, even, in many countries, where a parent can be held accountable for the criminal actions of their children for failing to prevent it.
And frankly, I don't give enough of a shit about other peoples' kids to believe that internet usage should require identification like is being pushed by major governments. I want good things for these kids, I want them to grow up in a good society and a good world, and I dont want harm to come to them. But I recognize that a "good society" and a "good world" and one that minimizes harm to people is one where information is available without restrictions and without censorship and without the risk of a government that might decide it wants to commit genocide against you in the not-so-distant future using your search history to persecute you. Pardon my riffing off Flowbots' Handlebars there, but this really is the world that people live in today; powerful world-stage governments want to restrict information about topics they do not like, and are persecuting people who posess this information; the next steps are very, very well documented.
Creating the monster we are watching grow is not worth anything anyone could ever promise you.
Pretty much. Everytime they mention porn, they are poisoning the discussion.
If porn was the only thing getting affected, I would gladly support all these surveillance tactics, every single one of them. Porn and prostitution in general is riddled with trafficking, drug addiction and other forms of exploitation.
The reality is that what's at stake here are things that (unlike porn) are not harmful to us, but very important to us. Like the ability to have a free space for thought and information sharing without the oversight of anybody else, not least a potential adversary. This defence is very important against a tyrannical state.
But let's ignore all that and instead make it about children's right to "explore their gender and sexuality" on the internet. This is what I saw some guy arguing a few days ago.
Children can also be groomed over text messages, should we let the government read all our text messages now?
Children can also be depicted wrong in photos, should we let the governments of the world have access to our photos so they can check for themselves if that is happening or not?
(both are hypothetical questions, the answer is no of course not. This is the responsibility of the caretaker in their life to guide them safely through the world.)
I also remind people that laws change over time and that perfect crime prevention is actually a bad thing. The easiest example one can point to homosexuality. We now accept that people attracted to the same sex. But at one point in time in many places that was illegal. The last person in Canada to go to jail for being gay was in 1965, charged with gross indecency. But times and morals change so imagine if we had perfect police and everyone had to wear a camera at all times and every single thing you did was monitored and reported back to the police. No gays, no abortions, no alcohol, no speaking against governments or police, so many ways we would be oppressed.
I am not saying people who harm children should free to break the law but the solution can not be to monitor everything every person does. The solution for me would be to teach people how to better set parental controls for their kids and to educate both parents and kids about dangers and online safety.
When you want to grant the very state, that actively protected ethnically targeted organized gang-rapes-to-prostitution-rings, with enough trust to even remotely care about children having unlimited access to pornography, maybe you are part of the problem.
I don't think your comment should be downvoted. Children viewing porn is a legitimate problem. The other problem is that adults should not be forced to share their identity to view content - particularly that which might be used to blackmail them. I don't have children. And I don't think your children outweigh my right to privacy.
It’s not like the internet was censored when I was coming up, and I don’t think less of kids today than I do of myself.
Kids stumbling across something when browsing innocently isn’t really a major issue, and if they seek it out: they will find it, you won’t stop them, kids are smarter than you think (just, immature and unwise).
The best method, honestly, is for parents to be forethcoming..
however you have now successfully reframed the discussion into “what about the kids”, when in reality it’s about getting everyone’s ID so that they can better enforce their draconian internet comment laws… the government even outright said this. https://archive.is/3pave
if the government really cared about protecting children, they would’ve made a freely available child protection software that anyone can install in their home network, or subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.
> subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.
The thing is, the tech and infra for this is already out there. For example DNS services that offer adult-website filtering. The cost to implement this at the ISP level really wouldn't cost much (at at technological level).
Honest question - when were you "coming up" and are you sure it didn't do anyone any harm then?
I'm mid-late 40s and the internet was not really there when I was growing up. Someone ten years younger than me would have much more porn available to them, easily, in the home during their formative years. But even since then it's likely become more pervasive and present by an order of magnitude, and people have connected devices with them all the time in a way they wouldn't have back then.
We also have lots of academics saying that porn is changing attitudes to sex and what is acceptable behaviour (the rise of choking, for instance).
So it seems reasonable to ask the question, not whether today's kids are vulnerable to harms we weren't vulnerable to, but have things changed significantly in the intervening years?
Note - I'm not defending the clusterfuck that is the OSA. But the world is not always as it was.
I’m 35 now, so in the 00’s I had my entire pre-teen and teenage years.
My brother and sisters are 26, 28 and 33- we aren’t worse than our parents (we have 3 different mothers between us) or grandparents from a mental health or moral perspective; and we were all exposed to liveleak and 4chan in various ways.
I’m not sure how else to measure to he honest with you.
Just because we don't want children to do something doesn't mean the state should impose upon all of its population a norm to control their actions, and I don't think anyone pretending otherwise has a valid or respectable opinion.
> I don't think your comment should be downvoted. Children viewing porn is a legitimate problem.
The thing is, in the UK, porn websites are already blocked by default by most ISPs and mobile networks. Only the account owner can allow access to them, either by calling them or by changing something in their account settings. And yes, you'll need to verify that you're an adult if you signed up to the service without providing them with details (possible with some mobile providers).
This has been the case for the past 10 or so years, so why exactly do we need this age verification stuff?
Is it? Children viewing porn has been a thing ever since the invention of the printing press, or at the very least, ever since the first Playboy got printed.
Were those videos? No. Did they depict sex acts? No. It's qualitatively different. I was raised in an extremely liberal household full of Playboy mags, looking at photos of naked women since I was 5 years old. The violence of what is today mainstram porn would have been extremely fringe, and probably impossible to find outside an underground video group for sadists. I have no real problem with kids looking at nudes. That is not this. Porn has pushed itself into dementia chasing shock value. Seeing a blowjob photo was something a child could encounter in the early 90s, maybe a very sophisticated child with very early access to all the dark shit on the early internet. If you spent hours figuring out how to find one. But maybe you'd see one or two. Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten, "consentually"? That's a new problem. It is a real problem, and it doesn't matter whether it's shown to a child on a website or on a home VCR, it's enormously corrupting and there absolutely is a societal harm in allowing it to happen. The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.
> The violence of what is today mainstram porn would have been extremely fringe
I want to push back against some of this comment. I would argue that for non-boomers, today's mainstream porn is most likely OnlyFans, where women have greater control than ever over adult content being created.
> Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten
This is a tiny, tiny fraction of adult content. The rest of your comment reads like "clutching your pearls" to me.
> Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten, "consentually"? That's a new problem.
That is not that new either, BDSM has been a thing for decades. "Histoire d'O" for example came out in 1975, the literary work it's based on is even older. And the panic back then about these books is exactly the same kind of bullshit we're seeing today.
> The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.
Teach your kids about sexuality from early age. That also helps cutting down on cases of sexual abuse - think of all the clergy and sports trainer scandals. A lot of these failed prosecution or went on far too long because the kids lacked the vocabulary to describe what happened to them, or didn't recognize that what they went through was wrong.
The problem is, anything veering into this direction is immediately attacked by Conservatives, religious extremists and the likes.
You've strayed considerably from your initial argument of contraband playboys being prevalent before the internet. Playboys were prevalent, yes, but not magazines with graphic depictions of violent fetishes. That such magazines existed at all isn't disputed.
The main difference between democracies and secular autocracies isn't that they have a vastly different approach to run-of-the-mill moral vices, such as prostitution or porn. It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.
I think we can agree that the UK is moving in the wrong direction without drawing parallels to a place where dissidents are disappeared, both off the internet and in real life.
And then released when the mistake came to light. Not 'disappeared'.
The whole mess around the proscribed group is awful and seems like a massive overreaction - sure, you do not mess with a country's defence infrastructure. But the appropriate thing to do is arrest those involved and charge them with specific crimes, not misuse anti-terror legislation.
But lets not pretend people are being taken off the streets and made to disappear as they do in autocratic nations.
I read on twitter, can't find the exact link, a chinese content site operating in .sg for many years, survived multiple "internet purges" by China, got banned by UK authorities last month.
I remember reading posts a decade or two ago on either Linode's forums or some other place like LinuxQuestions in broken English about tunneling through firewalls with ssh from I assume Chinese people.
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.
A slim chance of getting outed for watching porn is more important to UK males than enforcing an age gate to stop kids having unlimited access. This is all that shows.
You're on hacker-news, so this is simple to explain;
Create a new flag in the http header that indicates under-age, and put heavy restrictions (and fines) on what content is allowed to be served as a response. Get this through to google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and apple as a device-wide parent-control feature. Universally enforced and legally backed parent control.
1. Simple to enforce
2. No major security issues
3. No risk of abuse as a surveillance or control mechanism.
4. No issue of "did not know user wasn't child" loophole if anyone is found in violation. If a child is still found on a adult website; it is entirely blamable on parent not running the parent control feature, or the website not respecting the flag.
This type of solution is proposed by the Russian state using special sim-cards for children under 14. Odd how the UK is the extreme one all of a sudden.
Instead we get;
1. Difficult to enforce effectively and easy to circumvent with rudimentary methods for those it actually affects.
2. Security nightmare to do correctly. (recent tea leak)
3. Easy excuse to ban any content the government disapproves
of. (wikipedia is now a adult site)
4. A normalization to hand out personal ID and photos to random websites.
5. A perfect excuse for authoritarian governments to implement something similar since "free and democratic nation did the same".
This is not about children. It is never about children. Banning encryption, collect all personal digital communication for review, and personally identify all people online. These three things are non-negotiable, regardless of motive. "protect the children" is easy to say, easy to make everyone agree with, easy to straw-man opponents into monsters. But whenever its used, we better make darn sure that's the real motive.
I would gladly back the first solution above. We need to protect children better, but this law is not about that.
Wikipedia is on the list of sites that the government is trying to force age verification on[1].
This isn't about people being scared they're going to be outed for watching porn. Even if the government honestly have no intentions to further restrict people's access to information, this is a genuine step towards authoritarian censorship.
I'm (somewhat hypocritically) not against purging 4chan & other sites that ferment dangerous right wing hatred from the internet, I am against anything that tries to limit or restrict access to legal content
The UK is where the US is headed if we don't grow a pair and snap out of this weak autocrat worshiping phase we seem to find ourselves in. It could happen so easily here.
Partisanship being the highest civic value in the US guarantees that we will not break out of that phase but will instead usher it in fully with two mildly different flavors. Coke and Pepsi autocracy with each insisting the other tastes like sewage and their own is ambrosia.
And yet so many look for the government to solve society’s ills, as if the “wrong government” will never ever take control. Perhaps we should all do more things for ourselves, and advocate for more laws that restrict what the government is allowed to do
This is a silly take. As soon as an authoritarian government takes power they just strip away the protections put in place to prevent abuse. The answer to preventing the "wrong" government from taking power is to have a strong "right" government.
This is a silly take. The answer to preventing one branch of the federal government from abusing power is to strengthen the other branches, and to strengthen federalism itself. Both are enshrined in the constitution and are the largest checks on growing executive power? In effect “weakening” any one part of the government.
The UK doesn’t have Texas or California or New York.
The UK has Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Scotland, particularly, is anti-authoritarian.
The only thing that kept Scotland from voting for independence was a promise the UK would stay in the EU. If the Scottish referendum was to happen today, I don’t think England would win their vote.
And leaving the EU has caused massive complications for the Good Friday agreement that specifically agreed to removing border controls between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Yet none of these countries were able to apply enough pressure to change the UK government’s downward spiral.
Looking at the current US, that seems to work not at all. The checks on power is only effective if enforced, and as there is no effort to enforce separation of powers, there are no checks.
This. The antidote to authoritarianism is a mobilized and motivated populace.
Liberals (small l) have spent 200 years being afraid of the masses and mass revolts, instead being enamored with pieces of paper that are supposedly holding everything up and keeping the forces of authoritarian reaction at bay.
They have done it, and the west (over half the US states, the UK and Australia at a bare minimum) have entirely ceded any moral high ground regarding it.
Yeah we ceded it long ago in the US being reliant on child sweatshop labor for the lowest price possible and demanding allegiance to America but no obligation to provide each other any social welfare
Western countries had no morality before just a facade of one. Now that they are loosing economic power they are also loosing the ability to control the narrative.
This is beyond vague. What do you even mean by morality? And how is it better for non-western entity to allegedly control the narrative, except also using it for its own benefit, which would be immoral by definition?
'The West also does bad stuff' is not the same thing as 'China and the west are the same' or 'Russia and the west are the same'. That's a false equivalency. The west has a long tradition of respecting individual rights. You aren't going to get disappeared like you absolutely will in those places. Say what you will about the failings of the west, but there's a clear moral high ground there, even if that height is an inch tall.
Don't make up stuff learn your own history individual rights in the west have been by race, color, education, wealth or sexual orientation and easily forgotten when the individuals are not white.
Ah no on a topic of censorship someone was saying how good western countries were before about personal freedoms and I called out that lie as many of those freedom are just for TV shows and literature only. All citizens did not and still do not enjoy all the freedoms he is spouting the only difference the restrictions are being more broadly applied so he is effected so talks about the past was better. The past was better only for white skinned straight man maybe you could add rich as when when it come to personal freedoms
You are heavily mixing freedom with access to opportunity. They are not the same.
I come from an Eastern European country. Before 1990, if I would have wanted to not study and only drink and let my live go like Diogenes, that would have never worked. The authorities would pick me up from the street and forcefully make me go work something, even if I don't like it. Even if I have studied, the authorities still may decide where I can go to work. The possibility to decide how I can build or fuck up my own live - this is what I understand as freedom.
Opportunity - this is something very different. And to that I can agree with you about the "white skinned man", even if it is very far away from my understanding about the world because of where I was born and how I lived.
No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians, but it's one of their most dominant traits. That is, if you ascribe normal ethics and morals to them. But politicians' are a different breed, and the sooner we understand that, the better.
They will say, and do, whatever they perceive as being the most politically expedient thing to do. The ones that took moral stances in the actual best interest of the populace usually suffered politically for that. The ones that side with power tend to keep their power. This is the folly of political systems in general short of tyrannies, dictatorships, and kingdoms. And now we are seeing how democracies can be stretched into the same quality of life as so-called "lesser" systems but people don't like hearing that argument because the alternative is made out to be so scary.
It's not so much that democracy is the problem, but that it's too easy to sway people when it's so easy for money and power to be leveraged to manufacture consent. So now it's the people electing their own tyrants who will enrich and entrench themselves and being grateful for the privilege to be used for that purpose.
steps down off of soap box and stops yelling at clouds
Cambridge Analytica showed politicians in real time that on a population scale, hypocrisy doesn't make any difference. In fact people will bend themselves around to square the circle.
Politicians finally knowing for a demonstrable, data-backed, evidence-based fact that they can do basically whatever they want and keep their support as long as they just say they right things is what has brought us from 2016 to now.
Remember, half the population are under 100 IQ points.
And most general people I meet here in the USA are either heavily propagandized, extraordinarily dumb, or both.
We could be for "better and better, which is what the Chinese have been doing the last 50 years. Instead we've been at" fuck you I got mine haha", and "don't let THEM have anything".
Well, the out groups have sacrificed so they have no more. Now making the lower and middle and even upper middle class suffer is the name of the game.
I’m quite sure they don’t see it as hypocrisy. China censors the internet because they want to control everything about their citizens lives. But us? Oh, we’re censoring the internet to protect the children.
Always has been. What has changed is they now have the power to force their constituency to live with their hypocrisy and lies. Any effort to challenge the "leader" results in claims that you are now a "terrorist."
The internet was supposed to empower the citizenry. It's been captured and is now a tool used to suppress them. So now we see leaders completely unchallenged when their darker habits are exposed.
It's just a different version of the same thing. In chinas case, they aggressively locked down internet influence. In the wests case, they held off a bit and made up bullshit reasons like saving the children with age verification. I cant stand this version of the 'free' west where they promote totalitarian information control and demand real IDs. This is nazi shit.
The free internet might be gone in the next decade. Probably time to buy a few hard drives and do some archiving. I don't just mean piracy. Articles, blogs, anything you find precious.
It sounds just as unfair as including a levy on blank CDs paid to music copyright holders, regardless of how the CDs are used. But being unfair doesn't mean it can't happen in your country.
> A common misconception is that levies are compensation for illegal copying such as file sharing. This is incorrect, however, levies are only intended to compensate for private copying that is legally allowed in many jurisdictions. For example, uploading a purchased CD on to another personal device such as a laptop or MP3 player.
"Private copying" is generally allowed under copyright law -- except that under DMCA, it's only allowed if you're not circumventing DRM. So for example, you can legally make a private copy of a CD, but not a Blu-ray disc.
> "Private copying" is making private copies of is generally allowed under copyright law -
Private copying is not generally allowed, but private copying levies tend to be adopted alongside specific exceptions for certain cases of private copying in the copyright law of the jurisdiction adopting them (e.g., in the US, those in the Audio Home Recording Act.)
Right, what I meant is that private copying is allowed because these levies exist -- but the fact that they exist only allows you to make private copies, not (as was stated) download anything.
Depends on the jurisdiction. In several personal use rights are broad enough to download almost anything (eg except software or databases), and the levy is explicitly described in law as a compensation.
Back in another life (videography), I had acquaintances who would throw looks when they heard I’d purchased a single terabyte.
Seems that narrative might already be - at least mildly -pervasive.
I don't get it. What do you need 400TB of storage for? (To be clear: I am not saying that you should not be allowed to buy it.) I assume this is for personal use. I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year. Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations?
Also: Why did you pay cash, in the center of Berlin, Germany? Even if you are paying rock bottom used prices around 100 EUR, why carry 2,000+ EUR in cash?
> I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year.
You must not work with video.
Even with photography, a single raw photo can already use tens of megabytes (source: just looked at a raw photo file I happened to have around). A single raw video (or even a single already edited video) uses even more.
Now consider that you need at least twice that for redundancy (RAID-1 at the minimum). If you use things like Ceph for speed and redundancy, it's AFAIK recommended to have at least four separate nodes, each with its own storage.
I'm always disappointed that the geometric growth in spinning magnet disks slowed - if the growth curve from the '80s to 2010 had continued to today we'd have petabyte HDDs now.
I've been downloading YouTube videos for the past few years. Not randomly, from specific channels I select. Today I passed 12100 videos.
It's getting harder. YouTube keeps making yt-dlp work worse. (And I started when it was youtube-dl!) I limit my downloader script to no more than 2 videos at a time, every 3 hours, hopefully in order not to trip any rate limits. All good so far.
When I try to capture a few friends videos of events I had run from instagram stories with yt-dlp, I get nice friendly warning that to avoid my account being restricted or deleted i should stop using tools.
The free internet is mostly gone already. Most people already only browse the same 5-10 sites belonging to big tech, thus already part of the surveillance apparatus.
I think about the same. Right now we are at the normalizing the ID verification stage and banning specific content in certain countries/states, once we are desensitized, VPNs will come next, and then some government solution to track everything you do online.
They can go after hostings as well and everybody can take down a lot of things out of fear.
What do people think about email as an ever-lasting censorship resistant protocol? It's federated and encrypted at source (in some cases - see Protonmail, etc). I can run my own email server on my own domain, so for example I could have my news letter be an email subscription. Any attempt to censor me would require blocking my domain and/or blocking my email server - both of which could be moving targets.
I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.
If you don’t use rss, just say you don’t use rss. I assure you that many of us do. It continues to deliver me hundreds of articles from dozens of sources day after day, decade after decade. my services that check rss, continue to run their automated tasks. It’s an amazing protocol and even when big corpos try and take it away, hacks come up to restore access.
Podcasts tend to be available from different sources to extend their reach YouTube and Spotify don't offer RSS feeds, however other services like redcirle.com, megaphone.fm, anchor.fm, and audioboom.com all offer RSS feeds. Even Apple should as it has a set of iTunes extensions for RSS to annotate things like the episode number.
I've been able to find RSS feeds for all the podcasts I listen to.
> As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag though - whilst some big websites still have an RSS feed, you can’t get the full article text, smaller blogs etc seem to be better in that regard.
RSS is alive and well. I use it daily with dozens of sites and authors. It's incredibly useful, widely used, and well supported.
Finding content is the issue. Unless I go directly to each site every day and scan for new articles I'm likely to miss them. If not for aggregators and RSS how else would this be accomplished?
> [RSS] is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.
arguing that RSS is dead because the average person doesn't understand it is like saying HTTP's dead for the same reason. neither are dead: we've just abstracted them to the point that they're no longer the front-facing part of any interaction.
RSS isn't dead. I use it daily. Most podcasts — all if you subscribe to the philosophy that mp3s without rss aren't podcasts — are built on it. Most websites still provide a feed, even if the owner isn't aware of it.
This is really important. It's time to take history into our own hands given the penchant for erasure by the elites and how dumb the elites have become.
This has been brewing for years. The international network will not survive multiple independent governments all attempting to impose their own laws on it. It's bound to fracture into several regional networks with heavy filtering at the borders.
I am glad to have known the true internet before its demise. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
The Internet was philosophically designed to move information, and for every effort to prevent that there is a workaround. There will always be a free protocol.
> Can we count on ISPs not mucking with stuff at the transport layer?
That used to be common in the past, many ISPs ran transparent HTTP proxies to reduce the use of their slow upstream links. The current push to use strong encryption and authentication everywhere (for instance, plain HTTP without TLS has become rare) makes it much harder.
Same as market; anything that does not use it will use less efficient alternatives like politics. Sadly market like tao and politics has no moral either.
And notice it’s not being destroyed by the (largely fantastical) “fascist threats” constantly being whined about; rather, this is all the direct act of a decidedly left-wing government. Shocking to no one who has even a passing familiarity with the history of the 20th century…
It's almost like an uneducated public is easier to control..
Praise anti-intellectualism, change the media landscape so that everything is either consumed through short bursts of dopamine or presented in a way to manipulate you, and you'll have a society of people who are driven by their emotions with a very short memory.
As for the UK OSA, I think people are waking up to the fact that politicians will do what they want, use the enemy of the day to justify it, and group you in with that enemy if you oppose them, but I'm afraid without significant change to the system that this will continue to occur.
And the parents that are worried about their children getting fucked up by hardcore porn and social media. Not much acknowledgment of this point of view from the HN demographic. Luckily parents actually vote in elections, unlike the under-30 HN digital nomads who live on the internet.
>And the parents that are worried about their children getting fucked up by hardcore porn and social media.
Rarely brought up during the OSA debate, but I think we all know every UK ISP has "Safety Shield" on to block access to adult entertainment - by default. When purchasing the service you're asked if you want it disabled.
If parents are disabling it, they can't be that worried.
I know plenty of lifelong smokers who lack cancer, so it’s fine then?
In any case, if we’re to share anecdotes, I don’t have a single man I know that has said “wow, pornography has enriched my childhood / adult life.” I know plenty that have had trouble in their relationships, however.
1. "Parents of children", unfortunately, have little political clout (also when including their votes).
2. Children are not "fucked up" by seeing people having sex. I mean, ok, parents can be worried about them being "fucked up", but this is to a great extent the same engineering-of-consciousness that the TF article is discussing, and which the UK government wishes to affect.
> This is not an ask from or concern of the general population.
It isn’t, but when asked in a “Do you support saving children?” way a lot of people do support it. You might say that’s idiotic, and you’re right, but any campaign to reverse this stuff has to reckon with it.
Anyone who asks that is arguing in bad faith and using children as political weapons to achieve their ends. It's gotten to the point I outright dismiss anything the politicians say the second I hear the words "children" and "terrorists".
This is what I mean when I say it has to be reckoned with. You can outright dismiss it yourself but it doesn’t make it go away when a sizeable number of voters do not dismiss it.
It is more a long the lines that large document leaks have allowed people to see how NGOs have become vehicles for State Intelligence and corporate/political power.
Can you point me to some leaks you are referring to? Honestly curious. I have no doubt that there are some bad actors in this space, but Non Governmental Organizations is such a wide category I find it strange that that acronym keeps popping up like some evil entity rather than calling out the individual orgs.
I don't see where disinformation or Russians come in. It is well documented that some NGOs are pushing changes in internet legislation to benefit themselves and their donors financially.
It depends what you consider a “serious NGO,” but the NSPCC, the Molly Rose Foundation, the Breck Foundation, the End Violence Against Women Coalition, and other NGOs actively campaigned for and supported it.
There are a lot of extra steps the UK government can take beyond the fines:
> In the most extreme cases, with the agreement of the courts, Ofcom will be able to require payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site, preventing it from generating money or being accessed from the UK.
They’ve done this before (various piracy websites are blocked by ISPs).
The criminal liability of senior managers could cause travel headaches too.
Unfortunately the government is winning, Apple’s ADP encryption is no longer available in the UK. The Online Safety Act was finally forced through after over 10 years.
They’ll eventually get what they want in any case the same way a chisel can eventually dig through a mountain.
In the UK. Their abuse will be restricted to people living within their borders unless the US allows it. The UK is not in any position to harass US companies, even more so now that they lack EU's backing.
Only UK residents (including their children) will really be harmed by this nonsense.
eSafety is a joke. However, the Human Rights Commission has the funding to launch multi-year investigations into YouTubers that make people cry and poop their pants. That's power, although they do admit the investigations cannot currently proceed beyond investigations due to there aren't any punishments or remedies in the statute. But that's a clerical error that should be remedied some day.
Warning> Incoming rant..... The bizarre thing about the UK, ( and possibly other 1st world countries ), is the seemingly unaware populace -that many institutions are nepotistic and gated. This may just be a universal thing, but it took me most of my adult life to slowly come to terms with the fact, the local council ( people in charge of a borough), of a small nice (going downhill over 30 years) suburb here in london, don't allow, and have never allowed as far as I can tell, the ascension to power of any outsider from the council. I could hardly believe it when I found out, I had just assumed all political / council positions were a slow process of democratic voting. But no, you can't just canvas for the role of councillor. It differs from village to village.
So , 1- this is the case, 2- I was unaware most of my life ( people dont know. discuss it ) 3- the only "old timer" business man in the area, whose been there and worked 50 years has himself said "are corrupt" - clearly atleast a dim view. Now I understand this is heresay, but perhaps it honestly just take 40 years or so for endemic corruption to even "come out" and by then its just the old "who know", who soon enough pass away, their children perhaps believing it too, leaving for other areas of the globe for opportunity.
One can slowly understand why the fabric of a SEEMINGLY unfair, un-meritocratic, rule bending, society that limits vertical movement slowly ebbs apart.
EDIT > The reason I said rule bending is simply, one of the most successful people I know just lied about their academic achievements, no one seemingly bothered to check, and they took the position of someone who was honest. This must be somehow related.
>a stand-off has been engineered between UK censorship measures nobody asked for, and the constitutional rights of all Americans.
This is probably my favorite line in the entire piece. Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children, and now they are being pitted against the constitutional rights of United States citizens.
Truly incredible work from the UK government. I imagine the United States will not be happy..
>Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children
More likely: Ofcom is seeing traditional media dying, so the bureaucrats needed to come up with something to remain relevant and employed.
Ofcom is supposed to be funded by fees charged to the companies that it regulates. There are no hints of social media having to pay them yet, but in the future?
Think of all the work that OSA is creating: age verification companies, regulation compliance consultants, certifications, etc.
Once private companies in the US figure out how much profit they can make off this, they surely will follow..
These laws weren't created by Ofcom. They were passed as primary legislation by the previous government (and enthusiatically implemented by the current one).
Already underway in several states. Bills in Texas and Utah have already been approved, with several other states entertaining such proposals, although none have moved out of committee as yet.
It's all so tiresome.
If this were really about protecting the children they could've solved the matter with the equivalent of a mandate on device manufacturers and website operators to respect a DO-NOT-SERVICE-I-AM-A-CHILD (or whatever) header in HTTP. Hell, if it were really about protecting children, parents would get access to dumbed down versions of the kind of tools corporate IT has for managing business phones ... so they can lock them down, limit how they're used, right down to what apps can be installed.... but that would deprive advertisers of a golden ticket for knowing what views are legit, put parents back in control, and actually work... so can't have that. :D
I imagine they would counterargument your proposal along the lines of: "the most endangered children cannot rely on their families to protect them online"
I'm largely in line with where a lot of the comments under these political posts are coming from, but there's no discussion in them. It's rhetoric, outrage, and oversimplifying things.
The comments on HN are worth reading precisely because of the discussions, so I'm not sure what the point of political posts are if that fails.
In general I agree, but I think this is one of those cases where theres no oversimplifying, it really is just what you see on its face.
A UK bureaucracy is threatening fundamental and constitutional rights of an American. Its so outrageous, I really dont think there's any nuanced discussion to be had.
The whole western world is looking at this to know if their own populations will passively accept this particular brand of tyranny. If the UK citizenry doesn't vote it out in the next round of elections, this is coming for all of us.
You'll only be able to connect to domains that have been bought with a state-issued ID and digitally signed. If you run afoul of the rules, you'll be taken down, fined, or worse.
The means to publish and consume will be taken from us.
"Trusted" computing. "You wouldn't download a car." "Think of the children". "Free speech allows hate."
Within a generation of complete and total control of communications, we will be slaves. Powerless, impotent, unable to organize, disposable fodder.
I've recently had a glimpse of that - buying my first .no domain required me to be registered on the Norwegian population register, and full digital verification. There was even a phone call with the registrar! Some of the other rules are bonkers too [1]:
- Each private individual may at any time subscribe to up to 5 domain names directly under .no
- Each organisation may at any time subscribe to up to 100 domain names directly under .no
You don't connect to domains, you connect to IPs. You can resolve a domain to an IP however you want. And IPs can be shared or change regularly.
The convention is use DNS to resolve domains and DNS providers play by some rules, but if enough people start to dislike the rules you will start seeing unsanctioned DNS services and the like.
Another option is for browsers to consult a p2p DHT (just use the one for torrents) for a special class of domains (eg. https://[pubkey].dht). This is similar to how Tor does this but in this case you don't need to hide your server location because presumably it's located somewhere where the laws favor you.
IP blocking is a very different type of problem and one that would require hiring China as a consultant. And still be only marginally effective.
What makes IP blocking so difficult, and why would China need to be brought in as a consultant? Does setting up such technologies exceed the capabilities or experience of Western engineers?
That's the best case scenario. Honestly we'll be lucky if we can even run "unauthorized" software that hasn't been digitally signed by the government on our own computers. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is coming to an end.
This whole online safety act thing gives me goosebumps.
I had lived most of my live in Russia until migrating in 2022 and I’m pretty familiar with what it means when the gov starts messing with digital censorship.
If you’re not aware, it’s getting systematically harder and harder to browse the free web in Russia despite 50%+ of population using “some” VPN app.
And I’m not even talking extremist / anti-russian resources that the government turned against originally, but most of the independent websites that use CloudFlare free tier, for example. Because cloudflare enables proxying and a couple other IP-masquerading techniques by default, to effectively block a single website you have to block the entire cloudflare IP range and DNS - which is >20% of the web.
As for the VPNs, most of the common protocols and frameworks (eg OpenVPN) are already banned + detected via DPI, and people have to get into more and more sophisticated setups like VLESS+Reality (= most of the non-technical people can’t set it up by themselves or even buy a subscription to such thing).
“Simple” shadowsocks, originally popularized in China to fight the great firewall are already almost rendered completely useless.
And it will get worse. The gov service which is responsible for blocking has a very high budget + some pretty neat tech to help them cut off more and more ways to bypass the censorship.
This is the future of any state that gets into this game. The future where you might have to become very proficient in networking and use some “shady” stuff like Tor to just read a blog post about Linux.
It doesn’t matter what it starts with - fighting anti-gov propaganda or, for god’s sake, porn (the least harmful thing for the kids in this horrible ai-post-capitalism world that we live in) — once the regulators get the feeling of power over the free web, every lobbyist, organization and party will come for a part of the web that you personally might enjoy, or even earn living from.
The new ban is easily bypassed even without a VPN. The government is trying to block cracks in a dam with their fingers. Assuming they even care about results rather than performative posturing.
Little bit unrelated, but "Just verify your age (impossible without verifying your identity)" is false.
It is possible to verify the age without verifying identity.
It can be done using Zero Knowledge Proof.
4chan is not in the UK and ofcom has no jurisdiction. This would be like Singapore trying to prosecute you for smoking marijuana in your own home in the U.S.
Have you ever opened 4chan? There are literally 3 threads right now with "drawn images" illegal in many countries. To me it's crazy it's still open. Early 4chan had the worst kind of images you could think of.
Being mean, for varying degrees of "mean", is actually illegal in most countries that aren't the USA and surely 4chan passes the threshold in at least some of them.
No, there is no "poster child" to justify wider site-blocking, nor even narrower site blocking. It is illegitimate governments to manipulate Internet nodes so as to filter what passes through them. If they have a problem with some website, let them take it up with the publisher/creator.
If the UK government is worried about children exposed to harmful content, well, let us first remember that they are assisting and supporting the massacre of children in Gaza, and the starvation of hundreds of thousands of them. And when that stops - I suppose they're welcome to suggest content filtering software to parents.
I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back. Their motivation will have nothing to do with defending free speech, but an enemy of my enemy IS my friend.
If the limitations on conducting A/B tests on people under 13 are enforced, you will need a driver's license to connect to the internet, and you will need to show it to every website.
Surely a state ID is enough, right? I know at least 3 legal adults in my circles alone without a driver's license, though I believe they all have either a state ID or permit. (Not that I support requiring any sort of meatspace identification for acting in cyberspace).
> This bill requires covered online platforms, including social media platforms, to implement tools and safeguards to protect users and visitors under the age of 17.
What is an "online platform", and how would they know the visitor is under 17?
What the summary leaves out is that elements of it like 'harm to minors' have loopholes you could drive a truck through. It's designed to allow arbitrary censorship of wrongthink with 'think of the children' as cover.
>> I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back
He'll need to start first with taking action at home. Florida and I believe Texas have also implemented age restrictions for various websites and did so before the UK.
Well-paced article. The exposition sounds bleak, but then Betteridge's law creeps up slowly over the middle of the article, and the piece crescendos toward a final showdown.
Even worse than blocking certain sites, would be if they burden everybody in a mountain of paperwork, making a lot of internet endaveours no longer feasible. I'm not sure how they do it in China, I know there is an internet registration number, not sure if they have paperwork, e.g. to demonstrate that your site is compliant. Let's hope they come to their senses!
The most insane thing about this headline is that implies parents are giving their children devices with unfiltered access to the Internet and then the government needs to play wack-a-mole with every single website they come across to prevent children from accessing it.
That’s the hallmark of socialist countries. It used to be that where in Eastern Germany people would look to government for a solution, those in the West would start a business, or learn a new skill, or read self help books. Nowadays, the self help books are read only for entertainment, and people look to government as the solution to any problem, no matter where they are, or how individualistic and free market they call themselves as a nation.
I don't know about iOS, but on Android I have access to Family Link which means I can control what apps my kids can run off the app store, and I can control whether they can access explicit websites (according to google) or have free access. I know other parents that are well aware of this tool, but they have to make sure those phones or tablets are signed into with accounts they have ownership of. I think this is the direction that the government should be pushing for and making sure apple google and microsoft are all playing nicely to allow parents to manage devices under the family.
iOS is similar. You can also limit apps/books/movies/etc. by content age rating, block adult sites, etc. without parental approval (which just happens over messages).
There is even an on-device image classifier for images/video to blur pornography from messages and keep them from sending it to others.
Parents are absolutely giving children devices with unfiltered internet access. I think people here need to step out of their ivory tower. I would say most people don't even know to think about the things people here think about. "Unknowns unknowns", if you will. We all agree here that this is a bad idea. What percentage of the worlds population do you think reads Hacker News?
If you're going to say that, I think most people wouldn't even access websites to begin with. They spend most of their time on Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok.
I know people who don't know how to use Google because they only use a smartphone to browse scroll Instagram and Facebook. They're never going to access a website.
That's just par for the course in UK culture.
During American criminal trials, the jury is told not to watch the news.
During British criminal trials, the entire British press is legally forbidden from reporting on the trial.
who wouldn't want the gov banning workers organizing collective action online? can you think of the damage to children if they mistake it for a Minecraft server? do you want to be responsible for that?
I have met plenty of millenial's, veterans of the worst of deviant art and 4chan, and the kids are allright.Perhaps a bit extra adult and focused, but that's a good thing right!
They have no fucks to give, and rightly expect the worst from there overlords, but make light of it in an obnoctios abrasive kind of way, while standing and fighting the most egregious excesses and violence brought from our governments, who want pasty soft and confused masses of worky workers to exploit, rather than alert, 18 year old vetrans who have seen, heard, and fought depravity on the internet and beyond.
So now, bieng too late, the gubberment, is trying to use strong arm and smeer tactictics to controll everything, when they dont grasp the basic realitys that everything on a computer is a file, and all processors have an input/output interface and some kind of widly availible comunications protocol, oh and hundreds of millions of significantly intelligent and pissed of people who are not buying it.
key word in the title is "justify", but these are purely self justifications from a dangerous and out of touch group who have taken all of the strings of power and wealth into there clutchy overfull desperate grasp.
The truely sureal part of banning file sharing is that the powers that be would rather have people rip thier media, than end up talking with each other and sharring there own.
However you really need to name your MP. These political public figures need named and shamed for using binary fallacious logic like that. And barring listening to constituents, get rid of them.
If you're an engineer, contribute to technologies that take power away from those who lord over you. Which in this case would be distributed, censorship-resistant communication technologies. There's a lot of work to be done, not only in hard engineering, but also in things like UI and marketing, as widespread adoption is the best way to maximise the chance of success. For all its flaws, cryptocurrency (in particular anonymous ones like Monero) is a demonstration that this is possible: no government desires for its citizens to have a means to transact large sums anonymously online, yet Monero still exists. And as governments impose more restrictions on the internet, there'll be more and more demand for means to bypass those restrictions.
By all means work on better privacy technology but censorship isn't a technology problem. It is a human problem. We cannot work around ignorance forever. We have to engage the system to affect real change.
Over the last few years, it's become ever more apparent to me that technology can't fix what's broken. Even as we invent more ways to bypass censorship it becomes more so that people have less to say that I might want to hear with those technologies. And it's not just an ideological thing either, because best I can tell there's plenty of that stuff for whichever way you lean. What I mean is that people write less, there's less for me to read. But they have plenty of hustlely Youtube videos of the sort I have no inclination to watch. Less journalism, but plenty of opinions/editorials (I have enough opinions of my own, thanks). Less music... the whole recording industry seems to have imploded.
We're not in danger of censorship so much as we're in danger of there no longer being anything for them to censor away from me. I don't think it's just me either, I know some of you are seeing the same things I am.
They represent their constituents - you are one of those. If the majority of their constituents support the legislation they're doing their job. Could you post their full response to you? Pretty shocking if they accused you of being a terrorist pedophile and worth making people aware of which MP this was!
More made up problems for a fundamentally inept government to solve because fixing real problems like a broken healthcare system is hard and not a guaranteed political win.
Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
> Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
It’s amusing/depressing that Labor in Australia is doing the same nonsense too. They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
> They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
Labor won the last two general elections though? And the alternative is currently in disarray.
I'm not going to argue that Labor Australia are doing god's work - particularly on health at the system seems to be in crisis and need a lot more funding. But the opposition are in total disarray and desperately trying every wedge-issue in the book in an attempt to ignite culture-wars style partisanship here, which is (thankfully) falling on barren soil.
I think it was an agenda years in the making. I saw the groundwork being laid for this in 2021 and it somehow survived a general election and an entirely new government with a different political alignment. Ive seen other laws like this. It was nothing to do with the politics or the politicians, it has to do with civil servants who are working with their own agenda. Just like yes prime minister.
We should have something that sets the TCP SYN bit in every packet (between participating hosts) so that it overloads surveillance systems.
Bittorrent letters aren't from a generic surveillance system - it's participating copyright holders downloading the files from you and then pressing charges for you sharing it to them.
I still can't believe the UK got suckered into the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. All it took was like two years of making you vote every three months and you gave up your democracy.
You're not like the US. The US turns over a good portion of Congress every two years, and re-elects what is basically a active King every four. All you did was make sure that no one in government has to think about the public for a second, while they do what their backers and buddies ask, then retire in five years.
There's no way out of it. Starmer should try to get down to an <10% approval rating just to make the history books.
The fixed term act, as the other poster pointed out, was repealed in 2022
It was also a hilarious failure given that during the 11 short years it was active there were two two-year parliaments. It also didn't stop PMs being deposed from within, during that same period there were 5 different prime ministers.
So I think your read on it is a little exaggerated there.
The Online Safety Act was passed when the Tories were still in government.
Rolling that back essentially makes you a prime minister that believes children should have unfettered access to porn, self-harm material, gore, and that the outspoken parents of kids who've killed themselves after accessing this material shouldn't be listened to. At least, that's how the media (on all sides) would spin it. Not really a fight worth picking.
The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
If their real interest was in protecting children, they'd make a free, publicly accessible age blocking system that parents could choose to opt into, that isn't thrust upon all citizens at once
> The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
Given the spread of explicit "give us our pedo games" and "let kids watch porn" voices, I don't think there's any demand for a moderate solution.
And when the moderate solution is actively rejected for a very real problem, nobody has a right to complain when the problem eventually is addressed using extreme solutions.
He's not doing a very good job of anything. His main problem is he has very few fundamental beliefs. All he has is some vague left wing aligned principles which he allows others to advise him on and then selects whatever position will gain himself the most goodwill. Which is why his ministers can propose atrocious ideas and he will go along with them. It's not as if he has anything better to suggest.
The problem the majority of people have with this law is "I can't easily access my free porn anymore". The counter-argument is "child kills self"[1] because shitty tech companies can't control their thirst for money. Like I said, I don't agree with the legislation but it's not an easy argument to make.
In a world where you can cast your vote anonymously in the voting booth, it’s a dangerous game to piss off a large number of voters, even if they can’t admit publicly why. They will be reminded every day of that idiotic policy. Like cookie consent banners.
I think you’re correct and the person you’re replying to is correct too.
Voters aren’t all that rational. They could choose to vote against the person that blocked their access to porn but also choose to vote against the person who made porn available again because doing so puts children in danger or whatever the scaremongering line would be.
He says he's against the OSA but he's also funded by religious right nutters who think it's a great first step. So if/when he gets into power, don't expect anything better to replace it. Not that I would expect him to uphold a single promise: as I understand it, Reform doesn't even commit to a formal manifesto, anyway.
Farage is a moral-free scumbag who will be known in history as one of the architects of Britain's period of decline. The fact that he hasn't been held to account is one of the great scandals of our age.
I'm no brexiteer but ... it's not like the Tories were going to hand him the keys to Number 10 and say "Have at it". He wasn't an MP at all at that point.
It's like the "Idiots didn't even know what they were voting for!" argument. Sure, they didn't. Because the people who actually had the power to make a plan to vote for, declined to do so, specifically to increase uncertainty and perception of risk for voting leave.
You can blame Farage and brexit voters for a lot (and you should!) but neither he nor they ever had the political power to make or execute a plan.
I'm all about liberal freedom, but blocking 4chan would actually help society given how abused it is by counter-intelligence. There is bullshit spewed there constantly and no one should be subject to that trash in a functioning society.
I don't think you know what counter intelligence means. That'd just be a regular intelligence or government PR operation.
I don't use 4chan but that stuffs pretty easy to spot on Tiktok and reddit if you're paying attention. Conspiracy type stuff is rampant on those sites. Especially around elections or conflicts like wars.
Content moderation or censorship can be an equally dangerous vector for government influence campaigns as well.
Q anon was started by Chan's admin, some random guy living in South East Asia, and was embarrassingly amateur
You can be upset about the sort of content on 4chan. Most of the planet would agree. You don't need to frame it as something sophisticated because you don't like it and want it censored.
I don't think censorship is a good thing unless it's censoring concerted efforts to spread false information which reshape the political landscape. You are underselling the bullshit that you say "8chan admins" were responsible for. It's inexcusable.
I'm not upset about the content aside from it being a clear devious effort to spread lies and shift public opinion.
Stop framing it as something different. No one with a brain is buying it, and yes, we are pissed.
The funny thing about "false information" being "spread" by "8chan admins" (or 4chan for that matter) is.... you can avoid it by simply not going there. Stop going there if you don't like it.
So true! I wish people would stop eating up the false information from 4chan and whatever else chan, 8chan apparently but the reference got removed. Its a cesspool.
Have you considered that spreading false information is common on that forum that i should simply not attend? Maybe the idiots you talk to on 4chan should be held to a higher standard? Or do you think "doing your own research" means believing in the first thing a right wing retard news source tells you?
I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored, can even as much as seriously be considered by an allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government, much less make it into law.
Also:
Step 1: Build mass surveillance to prevent the 'bad guys' from coming into political power (its ok, we're the good guys).
Step 2: Your political opponents capitalize on your genuinely horrific overreach, and legitimize themselves in the eyes of the public as fighting against tyranny (unfortunately for you they do have a point). They promise to dismantle the system if coming to power.
Step 3: They get elected.
Step 4: They don't dismantle the system, now the people you planned to use the system against are using it against you.
Sounds brilliant, lets do this.
The UK has never been a free speech state. Remember the extremely weird era when Gerry Adams MP could not be heard on TV and had to have his voice dubbed?
Few European countries have free speech in the way the US does because their legal frameworks explicitly recognise potential harms from speech and freedoms speech can inhibit and attempt to balance these competing freedoms.
I don’t think that makes us ‘not a free speech state’ — although the suppression of the IRA spokesmen was weird and criticised at the time.
Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…
|Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media.
I must have missed the news where Hamas or Islamic Jihad had established themselves in the US for decades and had been able to get serious electoral candidates into the federal government.
I am not seeing the parallel here between US policies on foreign based Islamic extremist groups and the UKs handling of the IRA.
War correspondent Jeremy Scahill of Blackwater and Dirty Wars fame has been doing interviews with and reporting on communiqués from both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for quite some time now. I wouldn't be surprised if being able to do this was part of the reason he and Ryan Grim bailed from the Intercept.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/islamic-jihad-hamas-gaza-trum...
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/osama-hamdan-hamas-interview-...
Free speech in the US is not absolute. You cannot make true threats or incite violence. For example, calling for the extermination of Democrats or Republicans would cross the line.
That would not cross the line.
Not exactly. The Supreme Court has ruled that general hateful statements can be protected, but if a politician says "Democrats/Republicans should be exterminated" in a way that sounds like a real threat or call to action, it can become incitement or a true threat. So the line isn't about the words alone, it's about context and intent.
The original intent was supposed to be that Adams and others would not be on TV at all. The TV broadcasters relatively quickly realised that there was a loophole which meant that as long as his voice wasn't broadcast they were within the rules. But what was weird was that the UK government didn't immediately close this loophole (especially given that the same loophole was not available in the Republic of Ireland where the same broadcast ban existed at the time).
Small nitpick: I don't think it's right to refer to him as "Gerry Adams MP", due to the policy he followed of refusing to swear the oath of allegiance and thus not taking up the seat.
The problem with the nitpick is it inevitably runs into the issue of who the authority is here, and, by the very nature of the beast, said authority is disputed here. It seems small, but in reality it’s the whole thing.
IIRC, Gerry Adams was always performed by Stephen Rea, a moderately successful actor and heart-throb in certain circles. Adams said that SR “did me better than I do”.
Can't have the populace heating the voice of the guy who was never proven to be a member of the ra, better they listen to the sexy husband of convicted provo bomber Dolours Price instead.
Dolours being the sister of Marian Price who is currently suiting Disney over being depicted shooting Jean McConville in the back of the head in Say Nothing.
Democracy and monarchy are also at odds.
The actions and words of the United Kingdom are vastly different.
> I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored
It’s not like this is new or unique to the UK, the US has been busted indiscriminately spying on all of its citizens multiple times - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Nobody really cared and nothing changed.
I'm not a fan of the OSA but proponents of it will *keep winning* if you *keep misrepresenting it*.
You can, and should, argue about the effects but the core of the OSA and how it can be sold is this, at several different levels:
One, most detailed.
Sites that provide user to user services have some level of duty of care to their users, like physical sites and events.
They should do risk assessments to see if their users are at risk of getting harmed, like physical sites and events.
They should implement mitigations based on those risk assessments. Not to completely remove all possibility of harm, but to lower it.
For example, sites where kids can talk to each other in private chats should have ways of kids reporting adults and moderators to review those reports. Sites where you can share pictures should check for people sharing child porn (if you have a way of a userbase sharing encrypted images with each other anonymously, you're going to get child porn on there). Sites aimed at adults with public conversations like some hobby site with no history of issues and someone checking for spam/etc doesn't need to do much.
You should re-check things once a year.
That's the selling point - and as much as we can argue about second order effects (like having a list of IDs and what you've watched, overhead etc), those statements don't on the face of it seem objectionable.
Two, shorter.
Sites should be responsible about what they do just like shops and other spaces, with risk assessments and more focus when there are kids involved.
Three, shortest.
Facebook should make sure people aren't grooming your kids.
Now, the problem with talking about " a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored," is where does that fit into the explanations above? How do you explain that to even me, a highly technical, terminally online nerd who has read at least a decent chunk of the actual OFCOM guidelines?
Mass surveillance doesn’t seem very difficult to build if you have power. If you don’t build it, it seems like step 4 hit becomes “they build it and use it against you.” That’s not to say it’s a good idea to build such a thing, but the “your enemies will use it against you” argument doesn’t make much sense to me. The only real solution to bad guys gaining power is to either prevent them from gaining power or remove them if they already have.
The thing you have to understand is that the average Brit wants and possibly needs the government to tell them how to live their lives. It's a completely foreign paradigm to the average American, though alarming "progress" has been made on the American front as of late.
No. We were typically indifferent to our Government. Very much a case of 'go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.' But substitute 'tea'.
But in the last couple of decades, things have changed. Arguably, a public referendum in 2016, was very much a protest vote against several Parliaments that didn't listen to its citizens. And the last decade shows nothing has changed.
My friends and family, and myself included, were never very political, and very much a case of 'No Matter Who You Vote For The Government Always Gets In', but now everyone is talking about the Government. Interesting times ahead.
> now everyone is talking about the Government
How are they talking about it?
There is a kernel of truth.
But I think you are, maybe to a large extent, misattributing political apathy.
Are you (or do you know) many 'average Brits' who would agree with this statement (as applying to themselves)?
I am not nor will I ever be a Brit, let alone an average one. But I live here and I have seen and heard things from seemingly average Brits. Would they describe themselves using my exact words? Doubtful. But what other conclusion can one draw from their observed behavior? The Online Safety Act in particular enjoys extraordinarily high support among the general public.
For what it's worth as a Brit I agree with you.
When I talk to people in Britain about sugar-taxes, smoking bans, porn bans, hate-speech laws, etc, most people will explain that without these things people will say/do harmful things therefore the government should stop them.
I remember when they started rolling out biometric facing scanning technology in stores and using it to ban people from all supermarkets within a designated area – basically forcing them to shop in smaller stores without these cameras or get their friends and family to buy their groceries. I thought this was utterly insane but to be horror Brits seem to almost universally support of this stuff because face scanning is a great way to identity people which private companies have flagged high-risk.
Our opinion of others is very low, and are comfort with authoritarianism is relatively high.
They think (like many Americans right now) that it will only be done against ‘those other people’. When they realize it’s been applied to them, it’s too late (they’ve been ‘othered’ now) and people will ignore them - or they’ll have to blame themselves or cover it up in order to fit in.
It’s classic.
Eventually, enough people will have been fucked by it that the numbers will shift back the other way - and then the opposite end of the pathology (not being able to recognize the main groups own needs enough to defend them or pull together as a coherent group) starts building.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
It's disturbing to me that so much of this type of legislation originates with the "Conservatives", and the only viable alternative in Labour thinks this type of legislation doesn't go far enough. I guess at least things will be interesting with Farage in Number 10.
Obviously few would with that framing, but if they're given policies, lots of British people across the political spectrum would support ones that are more paternalistic. Support for the OSA is very high: https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
British people are much happier with the state being paternalistic, across the political spectrum, it is a very strong differentiator between the US and the UK. "The government should do something!" You can see it in attitudes to the NHS, pensions, welfare. At its peak, in the 70s, 32% of people lived in social housing!
Labour voters, young and old, are generally quite paternalistic. Lots of Conservative voters are too, depending on the flavour. The exceptions are the Lib Dems and some conservative tribes. I am consistently surprised when talking to highly-educated, politically engaged people, left or right, how much the default is that the state should act.
As much as US folks bemoan the ‘nanny state’, it’s because they look at the UK and cringe.
Average Brit here - we do not like this and the way politics here has been so tumultuous has shown the general public are sick of this behaviour too.
Tumultuous in what way? There's so little distance between Conservative and Labour today that it really doesn't matter who's in power.
I think there’s more difference than there has been since the 1980s. People really underestimate how far the Tory base (and parliamentary party following closely) have shifted to the right. The willingness of sitting Tory MPs to knowingly lie and dissemble on immigration related issues to create heat is a real break from a past consensus.
And they have record low shares of the vote, so … seems consistent?
And both are now more unpopular than ever.
and yet they keep voting for blue labour or red labour…
Current opinion polls for both are abysmal, but I don't think that civic freedoms are the main reason; the main reason is immigration, which all the previous governments promised to limit and then silently decided not to.
Decided not to, but continued to actively campaign on. It’s created a really weird situation where the actual policy choices are hugely disconnected from the rhetoric and emotion in the debate.
Legal immigration from South Asia dominates illegal immigration by an order of magnitude, but nobody wants to lose seats in Birmingham, so essentially doesn’t figure in the arguments about small numbers of afghans in miserable hotels in Essex.
For the Conservatives it's all about irregular/illegal immigration. Labour are hugely unpopular on that having apparently no idea what to do about it but they also have massive challenges on the economy/cost of living and the state of publicly funded services.
Immigration is sucking support more from the tories than labour. They rode into power based upon a promise to do something about it and then massively increased it.
Labour are recently leaning into being anti immigration because it's one of the few wealthy-donor-friendly policies they can pursue which will potentially gain them votes.
What are you on about?!
You're speaking like someone who needs a loud narcissist to tell them who to hate today.
I'm speaking like someone who has to live with the consequences of horrible legislation like this because I live here.
The average Brit isn't even aware this is happening.
The OSA is the first time people may actually notice, because their porn habits will be disrupted.
> your political opponents
are on the same "side" with you. A country is not divided into two (or more) political sides. A country is divided into classes.
It was even how modern voting system originated. See: Estates-General, Prussian three-class franchise, etc.
See also: both parties of the US didn't release Epstein files.
> allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government
The UK isn't any of that, it's always be an authoritarian country. The fact that British are amongst the most apathetic people on Earth fuels that, they just accept everything.
Except conquest by the Germans. Much to Hitler’s dismay, the Brits very much refused to accept that.
They accepted what their government told them, which supports the point.
You're right - it's disgusting that their government told them that Nazism is bad and that they should fight to defend their own country. Fucking appalling, really.
The British were also very evil, but they got to write the history books.
The West aren't good guys and have never been the good guys. We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to, but without that to contrast with, we look increasingly like the managed democracies you see out East.
What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law.
- It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff
- It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
- It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat
- It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
- It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.
Places like China are finding out why you need these things, and are building these systems so their society can succeed.
Democracy's just an (Western) artifact of enforcing and maintaining rule of law.
> What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law.
The trouble with this is that it isn't compatible with prosecutorial discretion. It requires that if someone is breaking the law, they get prosecuted for it. Otherwise unenforced laws accumulate until everyone is breaking a hundred laws at any given time and then only the disfavored get prosecuted.
But if you want laws to be consistently enforced then they need to be few and simple enough for people to understand and comply with them, and that was historically the magic formula, which we've increasingly abandoned, much to our detriment.
> It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Scott_(criminal)
> It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
https://troymedia.com/lifestyle/your-money/debanking-is-otta... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personal-finance/a...
> It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint,_Michigan
> It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...
> It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/tax-evasion-by-wealthiest-am...
I mean, I get that it could be worse, but...
This is a bit complicated. Law can absolutely be used to persecute people.
For example, there once was so-called Bill of Attainder, which basically meant that a certain person was labeled as an outlaw, traitor, and handled as such.
It was an actual law, voted on by the Parliament, but even though usage of Bills of Attainder was perfectly consistent with rule of law, it was not that different from a classical Stalinist show trial in effect.
This is also why Bills of Attainder are banned by the US Constitution.
And by contrast it is America which which has the civil forfeiture practices.
While the West aren't really the good guy, I think there is an argument that could be made that the West is the better guy. Because while government outreach like those discussed are a scary possibility in the West nowadays, in the 'East' (more like Russia & China), it is a given and there are no recourse.
The West is the least bad if you live in an area where Western forces aren't currently bombing you or directly supporting the people starving you to death. Then China probably seems a lot better.
So if Germany supports Israel bombing Gazans they are bad, but if China supports the Russian bombing of Ukrainians, suddenly it's a lot better?
Maybe re-read my comment.
From the perspective of the Gazan parents watching their children starve to death, yes, China probably seems a lot better than the UK, which is directly responsible for their situation.
The Ukrainian parent suffering Russian bombing is likely has a much better opinion of the UK for their support, but that doesn't make the UK the good guys. Just less bad in that particular situation.
False equivalence. One of them is a (failed) proxy war the other is genocide.
Forced deportation of Ukrainian children, the rhetoric denying Ukrainian nationhood and massacres in places like Bucha definitely put the Ukrainian war into genocide territory.
But if you want to talk about "real" genocides, China is backing Myanmar.
> there is an argument that could be made that the West is the better guy
The problem is you don't know how you are actually behaving towards the global south, so your perception is very skewed and people outside the west will have a vastly different perception than you, that you will never understand. Like some people in the west are waking up on Israels behavior now, but the rest of the world was aware of their genocidal terror for over half a century while you lived in innocent bliss. They see your support for Obama and Dove emojis in your profile picture while their entire extended families are getting systematically murdered by your bombs to this day.
Meanwhile in your made up fantasy land, its China that is this great threat to world peace.
Anyone who thinks the West is the better guy needs to look closely at the Western-backed Genocide in Palestine.
Yeah, its amazing how good the isralies are at everything (tech, intelligence, manufacturing) but its taking them years to commit genocide. Despite their massive force advantage.
Genocide is a process and intent, not an outcome. Are you saying it's not genocide because everyone's not dead or forced off their land yet?
Considerably fewer civilians died in say, Srebrenica. Bosnian Muslims still live there. There are still Jews in Germany, Tutsis in Rwanda. The original inhabitants of the Americas and Australia still live there.
I'd also note -- as someone who's lived there -- that what Israel as a nation really excels at isn't tech, intelligence or manufacturing. Plenty of other countries are equal and above. I'd say it's marketing and comms.
Disheartening rhetorical trick that makes the post 2015 left unbearable.
Everyone knows what genocide means.
You're trying to semantically 'rig the game' stop trying to gaslight me.
You're going to have to explain yourself there, son.
So naive. Talking points from the mouthpieces of the CCP and Russia who would love us to believe we’re all the same
Russians of any gender or minority could vote for their representative in 1917. Women in the States only got full suffrage in 1920, African Americans in 1965. So no real pedigree there.
And only in 1917... :)
African Americans got the right to vote in the US in 1870.
But a whole state-level legislative architecture meant that suffrage wasn't accessible nationwide till the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Modern voter registration laws, which are gathering pace today, are largely targeted at keeping minority voters from exercising their democratic rights.
Great timeline here: https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/politics/black-v...
If you want to talk about whether something exists in practice rather than on paper then I have some news for you about Russia.
Yeah, exactly. I'm saying the UK and America have democracies of equal quality to and poorer pedigree than Russia.
Edit for clarity.
Not everyone you disagree with is a CCP/Russia/<insert_scapegoat> mouthpiece.
No, but they could very easily be using the same talking points
So? Maybe the Russians are right about some things, now and then.
Doubtful
No, it's not naive at all. The UK in particular are not the good guys.
Apart from their appalling behaviour during their recent expeditionary wars, their current support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, their sexual and physical abuse of locals near British Overseas bases, they also have an incredibly poor record with their own citizens.
British behaviour in Northern Ireland was itself genocidal, and involved the regular murder of civilians from decades. Even today they are continuing the legal protection of the perpetrators.
I consider it naive to even start talking about nation states in terms of ‘good guys’
Well, all countries are complex collections of people and ideas, so like people, there are no pure good guys.
But we have all been subjected to particularly US propaganda portraying the West as the global good guys, and specproc challenged that worldview in the comment to which you replied. Ironically, you criticised him for being naive as he was challenging the concept of the West as the good guys, something you now call naive yourself.
So it seems you aren't internally consistent.
From what I witnessed over years is, European countries loved to point fingers to other countries to educate them about how their democracies shall look like.
Now they are doing the very same things they pointed fingers about and, now there's no structured information flow to hide this.
As I sometimes tend to say: "God has an interesting sense of humor".
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia all have fairly robust democracies. Yes, some of them probably look and feel different than those of NATO, but they are a great improvement over previous colonial administrations, monarchies, theocracies, and "single party democratic states" (Korea and Taiwan before late 1980s/early 1990s break-throughs).
I was thinking largely of Russia, but when it comes to internet freedoms we're absolutely heading in a China direction.
Coming at it here from a broadly UK perspective. We have:
- Very little difference between ruling parties on core issues since the seventies, I'm thinking largely on the economic and foreign policy front here.
- Prison under terrorism offenses for peaceful protest.
- Arrests for (checks notes) complaining about the management of your local school in a WhatsApp group.[1]
People who argue we're somehow better than the people we happen to be fighting need to take a long hard look around. And maybe also remember that when we're not fighting folks (e.g., Saudi, Israel) abhorrent behaviour is tolerated and supported.
[^1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9dj1zlvxglo
Japan has had a ruling party in power almost continously for 70 years. If the ruling party was not friendly to the West, then I bet you it would be called something else than democracy.
> We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to
You can't think yourself a free thinker to realize the west is a force for evil in the world and simultaneously believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism is it makes for a very incoherent world view. "It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time."
> believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism
The main problem with communism was that it was much worse than Western propaganda portrayed it to be. Because if Western propaganda had tried to depict it truthfully, no one would have believed it. Communism is so much worse that it is literally unbelievable, so anti-communist propaganda has to make communism look good in order for anyone to believe it.
Politicians represent the country, if politicians are corrupted and stupid then the country is corrupted and stupid
That's assuming voting systems or checks and balances don't matter. If you made structural mistakes in how you choose politicians, you're going to have a worse time than if you use better systems.
The people will always get the politicians they deserve.
The game Alpha Centauri had the most hard hitting quote that I think applies now.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny...Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. Commissioner Pravin Lal, 'U.N. Declaration of Rights' "
> As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny.
This had until recently been only tested for top-down information. Nowadays, everyone can be a broadcaster and we're seeing quite different results.
Free flow of information should be considered different from free flow of nonsense.
And who determines which is which? It is quite a hard problem.
The only sources of information we currently see about protests happening across the US are by small broadcasters. There is plenty of news that is being systematically being suppressed by the top-down information chain because it is so effective in clamping down dissent.
IMO, free flowing information still remains the best safeguard against tyranny.
But the tyranny we're seeing today is arguably a result of individual broadcasters ...
Interesting that I read about protests in America all the time. Maybe The Associated Press is just a small broadcaster?
I feel like totalitarians are learning to hack and exploit the free flow of information using sophisticated propaganda techniques.
Doesn’t mean a locked down system is better though. With that they don’t have to bother.
Those are two independent problems. If you have a centralized system, you're screwed, because they just capture it. If you have a decentralized system vulnerable to propaganda techniques then they do that.
What you need is a decentralized system resistant to propaganda techniques.
I mean, just as the phrase goes "your terrorist is my rebel," one could say "your propaganda is my information." That's exactly why a decentralized system matters. It doesn't just resist capture by a single authority, it allows competing narratives to exist side by side. What one group sees as misinformation, another might see as essential context. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate bias entirely, but to prevent any one group from controlling the flow of all information.
Yes, the question is what such a system would look like. E.g. would there be limitations of free speech?
Of course not. That shouldn't even be possible in a properly designed system.
Rather what you need is a means for propaganda to be rapidly identified and refuted with counterarguments in a way that its would-be victims can see it.
I think the problem with such an approach is that the majority of people will stop reading if the arguments become too complicated.
This is how populism works.
Additionally, it’s usually more effort to refute something than to state something, especially as it seems there is little requirement for proof when making the statement.
I mean, yes, but also…
Not specifically related to this “child protection” thing, but you can’t deny that the free flow of information also leads to some pretty terrible things, driven by actors such as states, magnified x1000 by social media, and now also AI.
Every platform these days is full to the brim with misinformation and propaganda (which ends up in mainstream media as well), deliberately making many of us hateful and sometimes violent. The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
I’m 100% for personal liberty and accountability, and admittedly I don’t have a solution for this.
I do think the Elon Musk approach (“just let people decide for themselves”) is very naive at best.
Again just to be clear this has nothing to do with the UK thing which I strongly disagree with.
The free flow of information isn't driving extremism, it's echo chambers. People have a tendency of surrounding themselves with only those who already agree with them on some topic, so that a heavily partisan position suddenly becomes 'moderate.' This is how you have people simultaneously claiming, for instance, that the US is becoming more liberal than ever, and that it's becoming more conservative than ever.
You can also see this with the perception gap [1]. Those who are most involved in politics tend to be the paradoxically least knowledgeable about what 'the other side' thinks and believes. Typical contemporary examples would be republicans thinking democrats want to defund the police, or democrats thinking republicans are against immigration.
When you have contrary ideas bouncing against each other, poor ideas are easily demonstrated to be such - and you get a more realistic view of what people 'on the other side' actually think and believe. It naturally tempers against radicalism. But when you start to control information, you get the opposite. This is made even worse by the sort of people that find themselves on a life trajectory to go work, let alone volunteer, for the 'Ministry of Truth'. They tend to be the exact sorts that want to create information bubbles and echo chambers.
----
In general I think the truth tends to trickle up, even if it might get a bit dirty on the way there. I'd appeal to places like the USSR on that. They not only directly controlled absolutely all published information, but strictly controlled migration in and out of the country, informers everywhere making people terrified of speaking their mind, and just generally had a rock solid grip on information. The result? People still knew they were all full of shit. There's a great series of jokes from the era here. [2] On of my favorites, "Why do we need two central newspapers, Truth (Pravda) and News (Izvestiya) if both are organs of the same Party? Because in Truth there is no news, and in News there is no truth."
[1] - https://perceptiongap.us/
[2] - https://johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm
> The result? People still knew they were all full of shit.
It's just that the purpose of all this totalitarian control wasn't so that people wouldn't know. It was so that people couldn't do anything about it even if they knew.
The result was achieved, the measures you listed as examples worked effectively.
“ democrats thinking republicans are against immigration.”
Um, I don’t know if you’ve just returned from a long journey in the wilderness or something, but Republicans are definitely against immigration.
Knives help you cook delicious food, knives can also help you stab your partner to death. This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).
Different technologies are in different places on the "societal usefullness versus danger" spectrum. Nuclear weapons are obviously on the "really fricking dangerous" side, no country lets a civilian own them. Forks are obviously on the "useful" side, even though you can technically use one to gouge somebody's eye out.
What's the right tradeoff for guns, printing presses, typewriters and social media companies is a matter of some debate.
Knives in the UK are age restricted for purchase. Anyone can carry a folding pocket knife with a blade less than 3" without needing a reason. Any other mechanism, fixed blade, or longer blade require a lawful reason to carry. This includes recreation (e.g. fishing, camping) work (e.g. joinery, cooking).
There are a handful examples of overzealous officers misunderstanding and detaining for the wrong reasons, and plenty of examples of people who pretended to the media it was for innocent reasons until the court case showed otherwise.
For your point about forks, I'll note that they are actually covered by the same law; as are all pointed objects.
> This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).
No it doesn’t. I can easily go to any number of local shops and buy a knife without any hassle.
A large number of Americans believe all sorts of nonsense about the UK
You do however have to undergo age verification, but under a much less intrusive process than online (a shop assistant looks at you and guesses, or looks at your ID and does not retain a copy).
Same as buying alcohol or a child ticket on the bus or an old age discount
The Us has even higher limits - many things are banned to many adults. Alcohol, lottery tickets etc.
Right, which isn’t really any hassle at all.
> Knives help you cook delicious food, knives can also help you stab your partner to death. This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).
This is a reasonable enough metaphor but we don't have to pretend to be idiots either and act like every single technology is totally neutral in its design. Knives are a good example, actually. Kitchen knives are totally adequate for killing people (I assume, I'm no expert) but they clearly have a design meant for something else. A nuclear weapon, to choose a stupidly obvious example, has no capability other than mass death. It seems reasonable to ask ourselves whether we want these two objects to be under the same regulatory regime.
> has no capability other than mass death
A 30-kiloton nuclear explosion was used by the USSR to extinguish a large natural gas fire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtabulak_gas_field
They would be used for constructive purposes far more if not for mutual distrust between nuclear powers, and the public hysteria around anything associated with the word "nuclear":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosion
And the massive amounts of harmful fallout, don’t forget that.
The U.K. doesn’t ban knives. It has an age limit to buy them, and bans carrying them in public without a lawful excuse.
>The U.K. doesn’t ban knives.
Yet
"The uncomfortable truth is where the downvotes are. Groupthink is like shackles on your mind."
The irony as you parrot brainwashed tropes.
And I bet you felt really accomplished and proud about yourself with that insult to a random person on the internet. The peak of your intellectual capabilities. You know what they say, people who have no value to add in a conversation, can only attack other people.
What insult? I quoted your hilarious profile bio, and then said you're parroting brainwashed tropes. I haven't insulted you...but you clearly feel offended, but as people like you tend to say "your feelings aren't my problem"
I cant help but feel this analogy misses the mark. With the information people are consuming being guided by algorithms, its extremely hard for people to realise theyre being herded towards a specific viewpoint these days. It kind of reminds me of one of those mirror houses at the fairground - its extremely hard to get the correct signal in all the noise. You are what you consume and if everything you consume is of a misguided point of view, very quickly you're sliding towards being assimilated into that point of view.
I now believe that guiding technology use comes down to leadership. "with the exact same technological advances, on one side of the world we created modern america, while on the other side we created the soviet union"
> I do think the Elon Musk approach (“just let people decide for themselves”) is very naive at best.
I thought the Elon Musk approach was to control the algorithm and decide for his users what they see. Or just ban journalists he dislikes.
Except they can't choose for their kids, or at least, not easily. Google basically own the android ecosystem and they don't want to provide any controls that could be used to limit their ability to generate as revenue. Look at Chrome's extensions. Try blocking domains. Your only hope is to use the god-awful Google Family controls AND NextDNS AND an adblocking mobile browser. These days some parents are trying to get schools to ban phones, because individual parents can't, "or my little Tommy will be the only one without a phone". So you then have to worry about what other kids have access to. Porn in private WhatsApp channels etc.
As a parent who using family link, I don't find it bad or inadequate. What is bad about it. How is it unfit for purpose? My child literally has no access to anything I don't want her to. If I had a complaint, it's that tracking her media consumption on YouTube is a PITA.
The whole "my kid will be left out" thing is so bizarre to me. So what? My kid is already banned from Roblox and that means of her whole circle, she's the only one who doesn't play and oh well. When I was a child it wasn't uncommon for a child to be without something their peer group had usually for money reasons. I don't see technology as any different. Kid has stuff their friends don't and vice versa.
That's why I get mad about age restriction laws on the internet. I do want to introduce my child to some of these things in a supervised way so I can teach her about them. Something I can't do if it's literally illegal because other parents decided to shove a phone/tablet in their kid's face and walk away.
I know way too many parents who never bother to use parental controls and learn that they're not actually will to live through their kid's whining about their restrictions.
The biggest problem with giving kids phones is that it opens them up to potential non stop bullying over WhatsApp/iMessage/etc. And yet the online safety act doesn't even claim to try to "do something" about that (not that it would be possible anyway but that didn't stop them elsewhere).
> Every platform these days is full to the brim with misinformation and propaganda (which ends up in mainstream media as well), deliberately making many of us hateful and sometimes violent. The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
I remember what it was like before the internet, and misinformation and propaganda were just as pervasive and perverse, except you couldn't be sure about it unless you read a book, did actual research or talked to an expert, and you sure as shit weren't going to change anyone's mind or at least be able to say "you're wrong and here's why" when you hear obvious bullshit.
IMO, there was a big change in the nature of harmful misinformation once you could Google things like "did convenience store workers really celebrate on 9/11" when that particular urban myth spread in the aftermath of the attack.
I do agree that the nature and vector of misinformation and propaganda are different. The ways in which we're wrong and dumb changed, but we were just as wrong and dumb before the internet, and we were statistically more hateful and violent then, too.
Life itself leads to both good and bad things. But it's not worth making life worse by denying people freedom of communication and privacy.
Look at the positives: now you are aware that every channel is full of misinformation and propaganda and treat it all as such. That gives you better media literacy than previous generations who tended to trust everything that was given to them "from above" - it enables us to be more intellectually mature and honest with ourselves about the nature and history of news media, even if you might not actually find that pleasant or convenient to deal with.
True, awareness of misinformation is higher today. But, being aware that all channels are polluted with misinformation doesn’t automatically make someone better at distinguish the truth. Also older generation automatically are not buying everything they see https://www.mpg.de/24132917/0205-bild-online-misinformation-...
Actually, having "misinfo everywhere" goggles can push people think that everything is propaganda or nothing can be trusted. This is also one way Russia and China is using its propaganda: give so much multi meaning information that normal governance information is also considered as something that cannot be trusted. Or atleast trying.
I concede that but awareness is a better starting position for potential improvement rather than ignorance. I guess we are agreeing on the substance but I am taking an optimistic view rather than a pessimistic one. I accept that I might be very misguided.
I dont buy the misinformation/propaganda argument as the past was far far worse on all fronts in that regard than today. Additionally, most platforms are highly censored and curated being the exact opposite of free flow of information.
I think the let people decide for themselves is the best option as any alternative is by definition tyranny/control and why the parent quote is so spot on.
You got a point, though I am not sure which things you are referring to. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi tried to have tight control in east Berlin but eventually failed. China is doing currently the full scale automated information gathering and control against Uighur Muslims. Not sure how China is using propaganda for the Chinese themselves. Also NSA uses mass surveillance already at the moment for foreigners and internal political opponents.
But propaganda as a weapon is not a thing to underestimate. As investigated e.g. Jessika Aro https://www.igpub.com/putins-trolls/ and some might argue about the role of election interference for the Trump election and re-election as well.
Even highly educated people are susceptible to propaganda eventhough they consider not https://www.mpg.de/24132917/0205-bild-online-misinformation-...
So, if the leaders are dictators and hates people, it wont be good with or without new surveillance laws as there are already existing ways to do that.
Let's not be overly dramatic.
The main misinformation you see on the Internet is attention-grabbing women pretending to care about you and people trying to misrepresent mass-made white-label Chinese stuff as indie original designs.
Few people spread hate other than to say our society is a disaster and we'd be better off with communism or anarchy which has been typical discourse of young men since the dawn of the modern age.
In general I've found much higher quality of content on the Internet than elsewhere, with genuine testimonies, in-depth analyses, and a variety of opinions and experiences. Whenever I watch the news on TV I am appalled by how superficial and one-sided it is, sometimes misunderstanding the issue altogether, completely out of touch and misrepresenting reality.
"just let people decide for themselves” is not new, the idea goes way back to John Stuart Mill at least. The "marketplace of ideas".
It was also the prevailing attitude to speech in the UK until the past 10-15 years.
The issue with social media isn't the free flow of information but the amplification of certain information — the information that tends to make you angry. The amplification is the cause of echo chambers, spreading of misinformation and disinformation, etc. It makes possible what in essence is a distributed denial of service attack on the human brain.
Sure, chain emails existed before, but they had a pretty low ceiling of how many it would reach. It didn't scale well.
In other words, you should regulate the amplification mechanism ("algorithm"), not what information is allowed to be said. I think forcing platforms to go back to subscribe+reverse chronological feeds would be a pretty good start.
Genuinely astounding how few commenters here understand that the outrage is deliberate and curated because outrage improves messaging persuasiveness.
All of the corporate-owned social media platforms have censorship, curation, and selection policies which impose an editorial slant on what's boosted and what isn't.
All of them. No exceptions.
None of them offer anything resembling a free, open, flow of information. (Mastodon does, or at least tries to, but it has very little reach compared to others.)
And all of them are poisoned by the output of huge well-funded bot farm networks posting harmful content. Whether it's anti-vax nonsense, climate change denial, inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric, divisive political rage bait of all kinds, or covert propaganda designed to look reasonable and pull people into a rabbit hole of fake activism and misinformation, all of these networks are acting as a public brainwashing service for political ends.
There is no "marketplace of ideas." Nothing that happens on social media is truly organic and bottom-up.
And this is not an accident. These are primarily influence, behaviour modification, and persuasion networks, tailored using personal profiling, but disguised as entertainment and social connection, and allowing just enough dissent from the official party lines to create a superficial veneer of free speech.
This process is essentially unregulated. There used to be some FTC oversight, but there isn't any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades
Fuckin’ Lal was always a warmonger. Time to send in the mind worms to teach him a lesson.
Do you think absolutely all content should be allowed to be accessible?
If you wouldn't allow child porn (which 4chan deletes/doesn't allow), where exactly do you draw the line between blocking sites with cp, and allowing sites like 4chan which host porn without consent (voyeur/spy/revenge)?
There's a difference between prosecuting a crime, and restricting people to prevent it from even happening. Both have a place but only the former retains your liberty.
Yes, thats the problem. Prosecuting crimes on the internet is near impossible due to the restrictions and often anonymity. Thats why we rely on platform providers to help us, the public.
Facebook, Youtube and others put in effort to take down illegal content.
4chan only does the bare minimum such that they don't gain too much relevancy in the public eye.
UK or other countries may decide that 4chan doesn't to enough and ban it because of the help of 4chan in faciliating the spreading of illegal content.
So again, where is the difference between 4chan which hosts/spread illegal content and other sites where we're fine with banning them?
Remember, allowing children unlimited access to hardcore porn (something that was not possible before this age of tyranny) is key to our "freedom". At least that is what the HN demographic will loudly tell you.
Have you considered parenting your children instead of letting the state do it for you? The latter means they can use the good old “for the children” rhetoric to control what adults can and cannot see: for example, they can choose that homosexuality is a sin and bad therefore any LGBT friendly website is bad. Apply freely as your government dictates, such as pro-Palestine content. We must protect our kids from terrorists, after all. :)
Meanwhile your children are absolutely going to find a way to get that content regardless, likely in darker corners of the internet, exposing them to much, MUCH worse content than if they would have just gone on the good old hub (plus actual predators) while also making it basically impossible for you to control instead of just making it a firewall rule away from locking it yourself instead of letting the government do it.
I'm a full adult (legally anyway) but I can't control everything I see on HN or Reddit or whatever when I'm passively scrolling; I for one am glad that there's giant teams of moderators curating the internet for me.
I'll advocate for freedom of speech but I don't want to have to listen to everything.
Hard disagree. I would love for moderation to be opt-out, for example. I might not agree with moderator actions, so I would very much prefer to see an unfiltered HN instead of having someone else dictate what I am allowed to see or not. The same applies to other websites, especially Reddit.
Alas, I have no choice in the matter, but I would very much prefer I did.
While I understand some content HAS to be regulated (CSAM) doesn’t mean everything has to be, because inevitably that will devolve into the government policing wrongthink.
enable showdead to see killed comments/articles on HN.
Thank you!
>I'll advocate for freedom of speech but I don't want to have to listen to everything.
Nobody is preventing you from filtering out at the client side whatever it is that you don't want to hear.
And you just end up with poorly integrated moderation with extra steps when community starts cooperating to make it more efficient (e.g. maintaining filter lists). Or there's no effective moderation so people that want more curated content and better UX moderation-wise will move elsewhere. Nobody's forcing you to use moderated platforms either.
That said, I think the showdead setting in HN is good to have, so you can still opt to see content that would otherwise be filtered.
I don't understand why you see these as either-or propositions. It's important that I parent my children to understand the dangers of alcohol, and it's also a good idea that it's illegal for my local grocery store to sell them any, and neither of these are contradicted by the fact that they'll be able to find some if they really want to. Norms and friction matter.
It’s a good idea for grocery stores to not sell children alchohol. It’s a bad idea for grocery stores to not sell alcohol to ANYONE, adults included, because children might buy it by faking their IDs. That’s the difference here.
Alcohol is a perfect example as well, because I personally drink it only occasionally but would very much rather see it completely banned, as I think it would solve a lot of problems with society. In reality it likely wouldn’t, but the gut feeling is there. If I were to blindly follow my instinct and not know history, I would call for a total ban on it to protect the children.
The same is happening here, but at a much more dangerous level.
Plenty of friction exists. Access to devices being banned at schools, ISP parental controls, selective DNS blocking, Google/Apple child accounts. For the most part it's just carelessness. Before the Internet children that were persistent enough and that had apathetic parents still found a way (perhaps less volumes and less extreme though)
Their parent can apply blocks on their devices is what I'd tell you.
Because these are ultimately excuses for spying on adults
Perhaps a better implementation of the law would be requiring all sites to mark content as NSFW if it is, and having opt-in device level toggles, so parents could protect their kids more easily, but anyone who’s actively seeking the content is able to. Teenagers will get around this ridiculous verification with ease either way.
This argument is basically the same as saying that stores should be allowed to sell alcohol to kids because it's the parents' responsibility to guard the store so their kids don't buy it.
Kids do not only have access to their own devices (for one, these days schools provide them with devices that parents have little say over often with only trivial filtering). And that is assuming the best case scenario where parents have the technical know-how to put in place non-trivial limits. Most don't.
People under age can obtain fake IDs, all over the world. This is illegal, but it still happens. At some point, it is ultimatey a parents responsibility to prevent their children from doing so by acting as a parent to their child and preventing them from engaging in destructive behavior. This is established law, even, in many countries, where a parent can be held accountable for the criminal actions of their children for failing to prevent it.
And frankly, I don't give enough of a shit about other peoples' kids to believe that internet usage should require identification like is being pushed by major governments. I want good things for these kids, I want them to grow up in a good society and a good world, and I dont want harm to come to them. But I recognize that a "good society" and a "good world" and one that minimizes harm to people is one where information is available without restrictions and without censorship and without the risk of a government that might decide it wants to commit genocide against you in the not-so-distant future using your search history to persecute you. Pardon my riffing off Flowbots' Handlebars there, but this really is the world that people live in today; powerful world-stage governments want to restrict information about topics they do not like, and are persecuting people who posess this information; the next steps are very, very well documented.
Creating the monster we are watching grow is not worth anything anyone could ever promise you.
Pretty much. Everytime they mention porn, they are poisoning the discussion.
If porn was the only thing getting affected, I would gladly support all these surveillance tactics, every single one of them. Porn and prostitution in general is riddled with trafficking, drug addiction and other forms of exploitation.
The reality is that what's at stake here are things that (unlike porn) are not harmful to us, but very important to us. Like the ability to have a free space for thought and information sharing without the oversight of anybody else, not least a potential adversary. This defence is very important against a tyrannical state.
But let's ignore all that and instead make it about children's right to "explore their gender and sexuality" on the internet. This is what I saw some guy arguing a few days ago.
You ate the “save the children” koolaid.
Children can also be groomed over text messages, should we let the government read all our text messages now?
Children can also be depicted wrong in photos, should we let the governments of the world have access to our photos so they can check for themselves if that is happening or not?
(both are hypothetical questions, the answer is no of course not. This is the responsibility of the caretaker in their life to guide them safely through the world.)
I also remind people that laws change over time and that perfect crime prevention is actually a bad thing. The easiest example one can point to homosexuality. We now accept that people attracted to the same sex. But at one point in time in many places that was illegal. The last person in Canada to go to jail for being gay was in 1965, charged with gross indecency. But times and morals change so imagine if we had perfect police and everyone had to wear a camera at all times and every single thing you did was monitored and reported back to the police. No gays, no abortions, no alcohol, no speaking against governments or police, so many ways we would be oppressed. I am not saying people who harm children should free to break the law but the solution can not be to monitor everything every person does. The solution for me would be to teach people how to better set parental controls for their kids and to educate both parents and kids about dangers and online safety.
When you want to grant the very state, that actively protected ethnically targeted organized gang-rapes-to-prostitution-rings, with enough trust to even remotely care about children having unlimited access to pornography, maybe you are part of the problem.
I don't think your comment should be downvoted. Children viewing porn is a legitimate problem. The other problem is that adults should not be forced to share their identity to view content - particularly that which might be used to blackmail them. I don't have children. And I don't think your children outweigh my right to privacy.
It’s really not though.
It’s not like the internet was censored when I was coming up, and I don’t think less of kids today than I do of myself.
Kids stumbling across something when browsing innocently isn’t really a major issue, and if they seek it out: they will find it, you won’t stop them, kids are smarter than you think (just, immature and unwise).
The best method, honestly, is for parents to be forethcoming..
however you have now successfully reframed the discussion into “what about the kids”, when in reality it’s about getting everyone’s ID so that they can better enforce their draconian internet comment laws… the government even outright said this. https://archive.is/3pave
if the government really cared about protecting children, they would’ve made a freely available child protection software that anyone can install in their home network, or subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.
> subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.
The thing is, the tech and infra for this is already out there. For example DNS services that offer adult-website filtering. The cost to implement this at the ISP level really wouldn't cost much (at at technological level).
Honest question - when were you "coming up" and are you sure it didn't do anyone any harm then?
I'm mid-late 40s and the internet was not really there when I was growing up. Someone ten years younger than me would have much more porn available to them, easily, in the home during their formative years. But even since then it's likely become more pervasive and present by an order of magnitude, and people have connected devices with them all the time in a way they wouldn't have back then.
We also have lots of academics saying that porn is changing attitudes to sex and what is acceptable behaviour (the rise of choking, for instance).
So it seems reasonable to ask the question, not whether today's kids are vulnerable to harms we weren't vulnerable to, but have things changed significantly in the intervening years?
Note - I'm not defending the clusterfuck that is the OSA. But the world is not always as it was.
No, thats totally fair.
I’m 35 now, so in the 00’s I had my entire pre-teen and teenage years.
My brother and sisters are 26, 28 and 33- we aren’t worse than our parents (we have 3 different mothers between us) or grandparents from a mental health or moral perspective; and we were all exposed to liveleak and 4chan in various ways.
I’m not sure how else to measure to he honest with you.
Just because we don't want children to do something doesn't mean the state should impose upon all of its population a norm to control their actions, and I don't think anyone pretending otherwise has a valid or respectable opinion.
> I don't think your comment should be downvoted. Children viewing porn is a legitimate problem.
The thing is, in the UK, porn websites are already blocked by default by most ISPs and mobile networks. Only the account owner can allow access to them, either by calling them or by changing something in their account settings. And yes, you'll need to verify that you're an adult if you signed up to the service without providing them with details (possible with some mobile providers).
This has been the case for the past 10 or so years, so why exactly do we need this age verification stuff?
> Children viewing porn is a legitimate problem
Is it? Children viewing porn has been a thing ever since the invention of the printing press, or at the very least, ever since the first Playboy got printed.
Were those videos? No. Did they depict sex acts? No. It's qualitatively different. I was raised in an extremely liberal household full of Playboy mags, looking at photos of naked women since I was 5 years old. The violence of what is today mainstram porn would have been extremely fringe, and probably impossible to find outside an underground video group for sadists. I have no real problem with kids looking at nudes. That is not this. Porn has pushed itself into dementia chasing shock value. Seeing a blowjob photo was something a child could encounter in the early 90s, maybe a very sophisticated child with very early access to all the dark shit on the early internet. If you spent hours figuring out how to find one. But maybe you'd see one or two. Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten, "consentually"? That's a new problem. It is a real problem, and it doesn't matter whether it's shown to a child on a website or on a home VCR, it's enormously corrupting and there absolutely is a societal harm in allowing it to happen. The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.
> Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten, "consentually"? That's a new problem.
That is not that new either, BDSM has been a thing for decades. "Histoire d'O" for example came out in 1975, the literary work it's based on is even older. And the panic back then about these books is exactly the same kind of bullshit we're seeing today.
> The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.
Teach your kids about sexuality from early age. That also helps cutting down on cases of sexual abuse - think of all the clergy and sports trainer scandals. A lot of these failed prosecution or went on far too long because the kids lacked the vocabulary to describe what happened to them, or didn't recognize that what they went through was wrong.
The problem is, anything veering into this direction is immediately attacked by Conservatives, religious extremists and the likes.
> BDSM has been a thing for decades
But decades ago it was not possible to reach content like that in a few seconds, using magical device we carry 24/7.
You've strayed considerably from your initial argument of contraband playboys being prevalent before the internet. Playboys were prevalent, yes, but not magazines with graphic depictions of violent fetishes. That such magazines existed at all isn't disputed.
If they do it, I never want to hear any criticism of the great firewall of China from them ever again.
The main difference between democracies and secular autocracies isn't that they have a vastly different approach to run-of-the-mill moral vices, such as prostitution or porn. It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.
I think we can agree that the UK is moving in the wrong direction without drawing parallels to a place where dissidents are disappeared, both off the internet and in real life.
A lot of UK institutions are run on "norms" with no actual law placing legal check and balance in place.
This is also why it's so crucial for the UK not to let bad laws pass.
Anti olympic posters got police raids. Plasticine action on your tshirt got arrests.
What so especially ironic is the posters views comes from the narrative control the UK is so disparate to get control of.
Any notion that the UK is actually run by the people is nonsensical, the so called democracy is pure and utter theatre.
> Plasticine action on your tshirt got arrests.
And then released when the mistake came to light. Not 'disappeared'.
The whole mess around the proscribed group is awful and seems like a massive overreaction - sure, you do not mess with a country's defence infrastructure. But the appropriate thing to do is arrest those involved and charge them with specific crimes, not misuse anti-terror legislation.
But lets not pretend people are being taken off the streets and made to disappear as they do in autocratic nations.
I read on twitter, can't find the exact link, a chinese content site operating in .sg for many years, survived multiple "internet purges" by China, got banned by UK authorities last month.
I remember reading posts a decade or two ago on either Linode's forums or some other place like LinuxQuestions in broken English about tunneling through firewalls with ssh from I assume Chinese people.
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.
A slim chance of getting outed for watching porn is more important to UK males than enforcing an age gate to stop kids having unlimited access. This is all that shows.
You're on hacker-news, so this is simple to explain;
Create a new flag in the http header that indicates under-age, and put heavy restrictions (and fines) on what content is allowed to be served as a response. Get this through to google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and apple as a device-wide parent-control feature. Universally enforced and legally backed parent control.
1. Simple to enforce
2. No major security issues
3. No risk of abuse as a surveillance or control mechanism.
4. No issue of "did not know user wasn't child" loophole if anyone is found in violation. If a child is still found on a adult website; it is entirely blamable on parent not running the parent control feature, or the website not respecting the flag.
This type of solution is proposed by the Russian state using special sim-cards for children under 14. Odd how the UK is the extreme one all of a sudden.
Instead we get;
1. Difficult to enforce effectively and easy to circumvent with rudimentary methods for those it actually affects.
2. Security nightmare to do correctly. (recent tea leak)
3. Easy excuse to ban any content the government disapproves of. (wikipedia is now a adult site)
4. A normalization to hand out personal ID and photos to random websites.
5. A perfect excuse for authoritarian governments to implement something similar since "free and democratic nation did the same".
This is not about children. It is never about children. Banning encryption, collect all personal digital communication for review, and personally identify all people online. These three things are non-negotiable, regardless of motive. "protect the children" is easy to say, easy to make everyone agree with, easy to straw-man opponents into monsters. But whenever its used, we better make darn sure that's the real motive.
I would gladly back the first solution above. We need to protect children better, but this law is not about that.
No it does not.
It's creating the infrastructure for mass surveillance (this is mass surveillance) and shifting the Overton window.
You're fine with this, what's the next target. They're already onto the subject of VPN's.
Do you like the taste of bacon?
Wikipedia is on the list of sites that the government is trying to force age verification on[1].
This isn't about people being scared they're going to be outed for watching porn. Even if the government honestly have no intentions to further restrict people's access to information, this is a genuine step towards authoritarian censorship.
I'm (somewhat hypocritically) not against purging 4chan & other sites that ferment dangerous right wing hatred from the internet, I am against anything that tries to limit or restrict access to legal content
1 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjr11qqvvwlo
If you're worried about kids being abused in the UK you have way bigger issues to deal with than porn on the web man.
In fact screwing around with the web this way is likely to make those other issues much harder to solve.
And there are ways to hide VPNs as bittorrent sharing. No matter what the blocking method, there is a counter tech ready for battle.
(Bitorrent encryption was largely a reaction to ISP shaping/blocking a couple decades ago.)
The UK is where the US is headed if we don't grow a pair and snap out of this weak autocrat worshiping phase we seem to find ourselves in. It could happen so easily here.
Let us be brutally honest: UK did not land where it is now because it is in a weak autocrat worshiping phase. It is in FULL-NANNY mode.
"Now children, none of you can play nice, so I'm taking the toy away".
Bluesky has already decided to block Mississippi rather than comply with their age verification requirements.
Partisanship being the highest civic value in the US guarantees that we will not break out of that phase but will instead usher it in fully with two mildly different flavors. Coke and Pepsi autocracy with each insisting the other tastes like sewage and their own is ambrosia.
And yet so many look for the government to solve society’s ills, as if the “wrong government” will never ever take control. Perhaps we should all do more things for ourselves, and advocate for more laws that restrict what the government is allowed to do
> And yet so many look for the government to solve society’s ills
I mean, this is why state and government came into being, so nothing strange with such expectation.
This is a silly take. As soon as an authoritarian government takes power they just strip away the protections put in place to prevent abuse. The answer to preventing the "wrong" government from taking power is to have a strong "right" government.
This is a silly take. The answer to preventing one branch of the federal government from abusing power is to strengthen the other branches, and to strengthen federalism itself. Both are enshrined in the constitution and are the largest checks on growing executive power? In effect “weakening” any one part of the government.
The UK doesn’t have Texas or California or New York.
The UK has Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Scotland, particularly, is anti-authoritarian.
The only thing that kept Scotland from voting for independence was a promise the UK would stay in the EU. If the Scottish referendum was to happen today, I don’t think England would win their vote.
And leaving the EU has caused massive complications for the Good Friday agreement that specifically agreed to removing border controls between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Yet none of these countries were able to apply enough pressure to change the UK government’s downward spiral.
Looking at the current US, that seems to work not at all. The checks on power is only effective if enforced, and as there is no effort to enforce separation of powers, there are no checks.
And how exactly having Texas or California or New York would solve this?
These things can happen over time. They don't have to suddenly jump into place out of nowhere.
i.e, as long as the people in charge are the people I like, its fine!
This. The antidote to authoritarianism is a mobilized and motivated populace.
Liberals (small l) have spent 200 years being afraid of the masses and mass revolts, instead being enamored with pieces of paper that are supposedly holding everything up and keeping the forces of authoritarian reaction at bay.
They don't.
Well, nobody would rally over a few blocked porn sites, would they now? I can already imagine the banners.
You have come to the central tension at the heart of democracy!
They have done it, and the west (over half the US states, the UK and Australia at a bare minimum) have entirely ceded any moral high ground regarding it.
Yeah we ceded it long ago in the US being reliant on child sweatshop labor for the lowest price possible and demanding allegiance to America but no obligation to provide each other any social welfare
Western countries had no morality before just a facade of one. Now that they are loosing economic power they are also loosing the ability to control the narrative.
This is beyond vague. What do you even mean by morality? And how is it better for non-western entity to allegedly control the narrative, except also using it for its own benefit, which would be immoral by definition?
'The West also does bad stuff' is not the same thing as 'China and the west are the same' or 'Russia and the west are the same'. That's a false equivalency. The west has a long tradition of respecting individual rights. You aren't going to get disappeared like you absolutely will in those places. Say what you will about the failings of the west, but there's a clear moral high ground there, even if that height is an inch tall.
Long tradition of respecting them so long as one is a white man.
Long history of trampling rights of white men too if a richer one wants their stuff.
Inch tall is generous. More like sheet of A4 paper.
Apply your same standard to ethnic minorities in Russia or China and tell me how tall that moral high ground is.
It's easy to sit in a hole 20 feet deep and criticize the west for only being an inch above ground.
Don't make up stuff learn your own history individual rights in the west have been by race, color, education, wealth or sexual orientation and easily forgotten when the individuals are not white.
“But what about America’s racism” in a thread about censorship is a pretty bog standard disinformation tactic.
It’s not the topic and whataboutism isn’t a defense even when it’s related to the topic.
Ah no on a topic of censorship someone was saying how good western countries were before about personal freedoms and I called out that lie as many of those freedom are just for TV shows and literature only. All citizens did not and still do not enjoy all the freedoms he is spouting the only difference the restrictions are being more broadly applied so he is effected so talks about the past was better. The past was better only for white skinned straight man maybe you could add rich as when when it come to personal freedoms
You are heavily mixing freedom with access to opportunity. They are not the same.
I come from an Eastern European country. Before 1990, if I would have wanted to not study and only drink and let my live go like Diogenes, that would have never worked. The authorities would pick me up from the street and forcefully make me go work something, even if I don't like it. Even if I have studied, the authorities still may decide where I can go to work. The possibility to decide how I can build or fuck up my own live - this is what I understand as freedom.
Opportunity - this is something very different. And to that I can agree with you about the "white skinned man", even if it is very far away from my understanding about the world because of where I was born and how I lived.
US government is, ostensibly, blocked from censoring speech so it props up willfully ignorant business owners.
Here we are, VC backed corpo forum used by anon agents to downvote inconvenient commentary.
What you must understand is that they do it because of a moral failing, whereas we do it because the situation requires it.
You're being sarcastic, right?
The UK is morally hollow by design.
No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians, but it's one of their most dominant traits. That is, if you ascribe normal ethics and morals to them. But politicians' are a different breed, and the sooner we understand that, the better.
They will say, and do, whatever they perceive as being the most politically expedient thing to do. The ones that took moral stances in the actual best interest of the populace usually suffered politically for that. The ones that side with power tend to keep their power. This is the folly of political systems in general short of tyrannies, dictatorships, and kingdoms. And now we are seeing how democracies can be stretched into the same quality of life as so-called "lesser" systems but people don't like hearing that argument because the alternative is made out to be so scary.
It's not so much that democracy is the problem, but that it's too easy to sway people when it's so easy for money and power to be leveraged to manufacture consent. So now it's the people electing their own tyrants who will enrich and entrench themselves and being grateful for the privilege to be used for that purpose.
steps down off of soap box and stops yelling at clouds
> No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians
Cambridge Analytica showed politicians in real time that on a population scale, hypocrisy doesn't make any difference. In fact people will bend themselves around to square the circle.
Politicians finally knowing for a demonstrable, data-backed, evidence-based fact that they can do basically whatever they want and keep their support as long as they just say they right things is what has brought us from 2016 to now.
Remember, half the population are under 100 IQ points.
And most general people I meet here in the USA are either heavily propagandized, extraordinarily dumb, or both.
We could be for "better and better, which is what the Chinese have been doing the last 50 years. Instead we've been at" fuck you I got mine haha", and "don't let THEM have anything".
Well, the out groups have sacrificed so they have no more. Now making the lower and middle and even upper middle class suffer is the name of the game.
That's like saying half the population is dumber than the average
Remember, as long as you can convince people that IQ is a valid metric, they’ll believe anything you say.
I’m quite sure they don’t see it as hypocrisy. China censors the internet because they want to control everything about their citizens lives. But us? Oh, we’re censoring the internet to protect the children.
> but it's one of their most dominant traits
Always has been. What has changed is they now have the power to force their constituency to live with their hypocrisy and lies. Any effort to challenge the "leader" results in claims that you are now a "terrorist."
The internet was supposed to empower the citizenry. It's been captured and is now a tool used to suppress them. So now we see leaders completely unchallenged when their darker habits are exposed.
> No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians
You’re clearly not paying attention to American politics.
Which apparently might be opening up significantly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44994403
I really wonder if true
It's just a different version of the same thing. In chinas case, they aggressively locked down internet influence. In the wests case, they held off a bit and made up bullshit reasons like saving the children with age verification. I cant stand this version of the 'free' west where they promote totalitarian information control and demand real IDs. This is nazi shit.
"oh we're doing it to protect the children! China's firewall is meant to repress political information and democracy! See, very different!"
I’m gonna blow your mind. If it happens I’m going to loudly criticize both!
The free internet might be gone in the next decade. Probably time to buy a few hard drives and do some archiving. I don't just mean piracy. Articles, blogs, anything you find precious.
I suspect that in some places they might start requiring ID when purchasing large volumes of storage.
"Only a criminal would need 10 terabytes of storage!"
Something stupid like that.
It sounds just as unfair as including a levy on blank CDs paid to music copyright holders, regardless of how the CDs are used. But being unfair doesn't mean it can't happen in your country.
holy shit it's real
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
Which then allows you to download without being sued because you already paid.
No, it doesn't. From that Wikipedia entry:
> A common misconception is that levies are compensation for illegal copying such as file sharing. This is incorrect, however, levies are only intended to compensate for private copying that is legally allowed in many jurisdictions. For example, uploading a purchased CD on to another personal device such as a laptop or MP3 player.
"Private copying" is generally allowed under copyright law -- except that under DMCA, it's only allowed if you're not circumventing DRM. So for example, you can legally make a private copy of a CD, but not a Blu-ray disc.
> "Private copying" is making private copies of is generally allowed under copyright law -
Private copying is not generally allowed, but private copying levies tend to be adopted alongside specific exceptions for certain cases of private copying in the copyright law of the jurisdiction adopting them (e.g., in the US, those in the Audio Home Recording Act.)
Right, what I meant is that private copying is allowed because these levies exist -- but the fact that they exist only allows you to make private copies, not (as was stated) download anything.
Depends on the jurisdiction. In several personal use rights are broad enough to download almost anything (eg except software or databases), and the levy is explicitly described in law as a compensation.
Wow
Back in another life (videography), I had acquaintances who would throw looks when they heard I’d purchased a single terabyte. Seems that narrative might already be - at least mildly -pervasive.
Thankfully streaming video games never took off, otherwise we couldn't really use that excuse.
I got casually questioned by the clerk in Berlin Mitte last month when buying 20x 20TB drives for cash.
“Industrial-scale piracy” is what I told him, truthfully. I think he thought I was joking.
Pretty soon it’ll only be hyperscalers or large enterprises that have data storage. You’ll have the 4TB max in your phone or laptop and that’ll be it.
I don't get it. What do you need 400TB of storage for? (To be clear: I am not saying that you should not be allowed to buy it.) I assume this is for personal use. I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year. Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations?
Also: Why did you pay cash, in the center of Berlin, Germany? Even if you are paying rock bottom used prices around 100 EUR, why carry 2,000+ EUR in cash?
> I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year.
You must not work with video.
Even with photography, a single raw photo can already use tens of megabytes (source: just looked at a raw photo file I happened to have around). A single raw video (or even a single already edited video) uses even more.
Now consider that you need at least twice that for redundancy (RAID-1 at the minimum). If you use things like Ceph for speed and redundancy, it's AFAIK recommended to have at least four separate nodes, each with its own storage.
Who is your HDD dealer? Hmu. Do we have HDD taxis yet?
Apple hearing they have an excuse not to add more storage, cue happy shareholder noises
I'm always disappointed that the geometric growth in spinning magnet disks slowed - if the growth curve from the '80s to 2010 had continued to today we'd have petabyte HDDs now.
I've been downloading YouTube videos for the past few years. Not randomly, from specific channels I select. Today I passed 12100 videos.
It's getting harder. YouTube keeps making yt-dlp work worse. (And I started when it was youtube-dl!) I limit my downloader script to no more than 2 videos at a time, every 3 hours, hopefully in order not to trip any rate limits. All good so far.
When I try to capture a few friends videos of events I had run from instagram stories with yt-dlp, I get nice friendly warning that to avoid my account being restricted or deleted i should stop using tools.
I use a browser extension that simply gives me the download button in the interface and haven't experienced any such warnings: https://github.com/TheKonka/instagram-download-browser-exten...
Thought you might find it helpful.
Have you considered sharing them somehow? I always thought yt-dlp would end up p2p
Isn’t an official downloading functionality part of their premium offering? If you’re a power user perhaps it’s worth just paying.
I am a premium subscriber, but "downloaded" videos are trapped inside the app. You can't actually get them out.
I see I had no idea.
On mobile (iOS), it requires maintaining a subscription… and, once a month at least, internet connection.
The free internet is mostly gone already. Most people already only browse the same 5-10 sites belonging to big tech, thus already part of the surveillance apparatus.
I think about the same. Right now we are at the normalizing the ID verification stage and banning specific content in certain countries/states, once we are desensitized, VPNs will come next, and then some government solution to track everything you do online.
They can go after hostings as well and everybody can take down a lot of things out of fear.
What do people think about email as an ever-lasting censorship resistant protocol? It's federated and encrypted at source (in some cases - see Protonmail, etc). I can run my own email server on my own domain, so for example I could have my news letter be an email subscription. Any attempt to censor me would require blocking my domain and/or blocking my email server - both of which could be moving targets.
I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen an open source project that uses email as an encrypted chat app in the last months.
Edit: this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44335065
Interesting - thanks. It looks like at least the Android and iOS apps have been updated in the last few days - so it is under active development:
https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-ios
Doesn't work with all email providers though, from their FAQ:
https://providers.delta.chat/
Proton mail isn't supported (I'm guessing because of the way Proton encrypts your email at rest?).
AFAIK they recommend using a dedicated chatmail-enabled provider to avoid problems with using a "normal" email provider.
https://delta.chat/en/chatmail
It's a good time to get an RSS reader and build some direct connections to your sources. They're coming for the "aggregators" next.
rss is dead. and aggregating won't be your main issue anyway.
If you don’t use rss, just say you don’t use rss. I assure you that many of us do. It continues to deliver me hundreds of articles from dozens of sources day after day, decade after decade. my services that check rss, continue to run their automated tasks. It’s an amazing protocol and even when big corpos try and take it away, hacks come up to restore access.
RSS is the technological backbone that enables the distribution and subscription of podcasts...which by the way is massive at the moment.
As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
That used to be the case few years ago. Now it seems that all popular podcasts are hidden inside commercial services such as Spotify.
Podcasts tend to be available from different sources to extend their reach YouTube and Spotify don't offer RSS feeds, however other services like redcirle.com, megaphone.fm, anchor.fm, and audioboom.com all offer RSS feeds. Even Apple should as it has a set of iTunes extensions for RSS to annotate things like the episode number.
I've been able to find RSS feeds for all the podcasts I listen to.
YouTube, very surprisingly, does offer RSS feeds (for now).
Youtube offers rss feeds, for example: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCXuqSBl...
It's just a bit clunky to find. You need the channel id which you can find in the page source somewhere.
Note that this is a regular rss, not podcast rss.
Nope
Still get all of my podcasts via RSS. Several dozen.
> As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag though - whilst some big websites still have an RSS feed, you can’t get the full article text, smaller blogs etc seem to be better in that regard.
There are RSS readers which can automatically download the full article text. I use Handy Reading on Android which can also do so on-demand.
RSS is alive and well. I use it daily with dozens of sites and authors. It's incredibly useful, widely used, and well supported.
Finding content is the issue. Unless I go directly to each site every day and scan for new articles I'm likely to miss them. If not for aggregators and RSS how else would this be accomplished?
> RSS is alive and well
That's a stretch.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss/
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...
> [RSS] is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.
arguing that RSS is dead because the average person doesn't understand it is like saying HTTP's dead for the same reason. neither are dead: we've just abstracted them to the point that they're no longer the front-facing part of any interaction.
The Conversation feeds say otherwise.
RSS isn't dead. I use it daily. Most podcasts — all if you subscribe to the philosophy that mp3s without rss aren't podcasts — are built on it. Most websites still provide a feed, even if the owner isn't aware of it.
Hmm ironically it's how I'm reading this rn
Most news sites have RSS feeds. Wordpress ships with an RSS feed.
And for sites that don't you can make your own feeds by selecting links on pages (such as how AP News doesn't have an RSS feed).
This is really important. It's time to take history into our own hands given the penchant for erasure by the elites and how dumb the elites have become.
This has been brewing for years. The international network will not survive multiple independent governments all attempting to impose their own laws on it. It's bound to fracture into several regional networks with heavy filtering at the borders.
I am glad to have known the true internet before its demise. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
That's my suspicion. An internet governed to the least common cultural and legal denominator will be bland, boring, and useless.
Bought some drives recently having come to the same conclusion. Future of the internet looks bleak.
The Internet was philosophically designed to move information, and for every effort to prevent that there is a workaround. There will always be a free protocol.
Can we count on ISPs not mucking with stuff at the transport layer? I feel like at some point the only way is to create new networks entirely.
> Can we count on ISPs not mucking with stuff at the transport layer?
That used to be common in the past, many ISPs ran transparent HTTP proxies to reduce the use of their slow upstream links. The current push to use strong encryption and authentication everywhere (for instance, plain HTTP without TLS has become rare) makes it much harder.
Same as market; anything that does not use it will use less efficient alternatives like politics. Sadly market like tao and politics has no moral either.
And notice it’s not being destroyed by the (largely fantastical) “fascist threats” constantly being whined about; rather, this is all the direct act of a decidedly left-wing government. Shocking to no one who has even a passing familiarity with the history of the 20th century…
It's almost like an uneducated public is easier to control..
Praise anti-intellectualism, change the media landscape so that everything is either consumed through short bursts of dopamine or presented in a way to manipulate you, and you'll have a society of people who are driven by their emotions with a very short memory.
As for the UK OSA, I think people are waking up to the fact that politicians will do what they want, use the enemy of the day to justify it, and group you in with that enemy if you oppose them, but I'm afraid without significant change to the system that this will continue to occur.
„If I Were The Devil“ (1965)
https://youtu.be/jnPE8u5ONls
Not at all according to booru admninistrators. They-re specifically pointing fingers at Russel Vought.
From my perspective, this is born out of NGO's and political elite. This is not an ask from or concern of the general population.
And the parents that are worried about their children getting fucked up by hardcore porn and social media. Not much acknowledgment of this point of view from the HN demographic. Luckily parents actually vote in elections, unlike the under-30 HN digital nomads who live on the internet.
>And the parents that are worried about their children getting fucked up by hardcore porn and social media.
Rarely brought up during the OSA debate, but I think we all know every UK ISP has "Safety Shield" on to block access to adult entertainment - by default. When purchasing the service you're asked if you want it disabled.
If parents are disabling it, they can't be that worried.
> children getting fucked up by hardcore porn
What evidence do you have that this is a reasonable concern?
I've seen plenty of hard-core porn since the age of 10 and turned out just fine. I don't know anyone in my generation that has said otherwise.
I know plenty of lifelong smokers who lack cancer, so it’s fine then?
In any case, if we’re to share anecdotes, I don’t have a single man I know that has said “wow, pornography has enriched my childhood / adult life.” I know plenty that have had trouble in their relationships, however.
1. "Parents of children", unfortunately, have little political clout (also when including their votes).
2. Children are not "fucked up" by seeing people having sex. I mean, ok, parents can be worried about them being "fucked up", but this is to a great extent the same engineering-of-consciousness that the TF article is discussing, and which the UK government wishes to affect.
> This is not an ask from or concern of the general population.
It isn’t, but when asked in a “Do you support saving children?” way a lot of people do support it. You might say that’s idiotic, and you’re right, but any campaign to reverse this stuff has to reckon with it.
Ditto for "do you want more secure software?" It turns out people don't realise that also means making software secured against their will.
Anyone who asks that is arguing in bad faith and using children as political weapons to achieve their ends. It's gotten to the point I outright dismiss anything the politicians say the second I hear the words "children" and "terrorists".
This is what I mean when I say it has to be reckoned with. You can outright dismiss it yourself but it doesn’t make it go away when a sizeable number of voters do not dismiss it.
Every authoritarian regime relies on large numbers of useful idiots.
Is it just me or is this demonizing of NGOs a very recent phenomenon trickling into the dialogue? I find it quite alarming.
It is more a long the lines that large document leaks have allowed people to see how NGOs have become vehicles for State Intelligence and corporate/political power.
Can you point me to some leaks you are referring to? Honestly curious. I have no doubt that there are some bad actors in this space, but Non Governmental Organizations is such a wide category I find it strange that that acronym keeps popping up like some evil entity rather than calling out the individual orgs.
"Non Government Organizations" that get (a lot of) public money and then get to use it in any clandestine way they feel like is worth demonizing.
It is not recent, at least in eastern europe. It is a part of russian disinformation playbook.
I don't see where disinformation or Russians come in. It is well documented that some NGOs are pushing changes in internet legislation to benefit themselves and their donors financially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)#Criticism
And not corporate despite the lobbying?
Afaik not a single serious ngo support this.
It depends what you consider a “serious NGO,” but the NSPCC, the Molly Rose Foundation, the Breck Foundation, the End Violence Against Women Coalition, and other NGOs actively campaigned for and supported it.
Well sure, but no true NGO supports it.
Lobbying only does something if government is corrupt.
There are a lot of extra steps the UK government can take beyond the fines:
> In the most extreme cases, with the agreement of the courts, Ofcom will be able to require payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site, preventing it from generating money or being accessed from the UK.
They’ve done this before (various piracy websites are blocked by ISPs).
The criminal liability of senior managers could cause travel headaches too.
OFCOM is powerless. ISP blocks are worthless.
This is going to fizzle out, like the Australian eSafety team trying to remove content off X globally.
Or get Apple to poke holes in it's crypto. Just not going to happen.
Unfortunately the government is winning, Apple’s ADP encryption is no longer available in the UK. The Online Safety Act was finally forced through after over 10 years.
They’ll eventually get what they want in any case the same way a chisel can eventually dig through a mountain.
There is no winning. It's an infinite game of whackamole.
> Unfortunately the government is winning
In the UK. Their abuse will be restricted to people living within their borders unless the US allows it. The UK is not in any position to harass US companies, even more so now that they lack EU's backing.
Only UK residents (including their children) will really be harmed by this nonsense.
eSafety is a joke. However, the Human Rights Commission has the funding to launch multi-year investigations into YouTubers that make people cry and poop their pants. That's power, although they do admit the investigations cannot currently proceed beyond investigations due to there aren't any punishments or remedies in the statute. But that's a clerical error that should be remedied some day.
Yes, and it's not just the UK
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg2kz9kn93o
True. Proposal not law mind.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
Warning> Incoming rant..... The bizarre thing about the UK, ( and possibly other 1st world countries ), is the seemingly unaware populace -that many institutions are nepotistic and gated. This may just be a universal thing, but it took me most of my adult life to slowly come to terms with the fact, the local council ( people in charge of a borough), of a small nice (going downhill over 30 years) suburb here in london, don't allow, and have never allowed as far as I can tell, the ascension to power of any outsider from the council. I could hardly believe it when I found out, I had just assumed all political / council positions were a slow process of democratic voting. But no, you can't just canvas for the role of councillor. It differs from village to village. So , 1- this is the case, 2- I was unaware most of my life ( people dont know. discuss it ) 3- the only "old timer" business man in the area, whose been there and worked 50 years has himself said "are corrupt" - clearly atleast a dim view. Now I understand this is heresay, but perhaps it honestly just take 40 years or so for endemic corruption to even "come out" and by then its just the old "who know", who soon enough pass away, their children perhaps believing it too, leaving for other areas of the globe for opportunity.
One can slowly understand why the fabric of a SEEMINGLY unfair, un-meritocratic, rule bending, society that limits vertical movement slowly ebbs apart.
EDIT > The reason I said rule bending is simply, one of the most successful people I know just lied about their academic achievements, no one seemingly bothered to check, and they took the position of someone who was honest. This must be somehow related.
>a stand-off has been engineered between UK censorship measures nobody asked for, and the constitutional rights of all Americans.
This is probably my favorite line in the entire piece. Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children, and now they are being pitted against the constitutional rights of United States citizens.
Truly incredible work from the UK government. I imagine the United States will not be happy..
>Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children
More likely: Ofcom is seeing traditional media dying, so the bureaucrats needed to come up with something to remain relevant and employed.
Ofcom is supposed to be funded by fees charged to the companies that it regulates. There are no hints of social media having to pay them yet, but in the future?
Think of all the work that OSA is creating: age verification companies, regulation compliance consultants, certifications, etc.
Once private companies in the US figure out how much profit they can make off this, they surely will follow..
These laws weren't created by Ofcom. They were passed as primary legislation by the previous government (and enthusiatically implemented by the current one).
Already underway in several states. Bills in Texas and Utah have already been approved, with several other states entertaining such proposals, although none have moved out of committee as yet.
It's all so tiresome.
If this were really about protecting the children they could've solved the matter with the equivalent of a mandate on device manufacturers and website operators to respect a DO-NOT-SERVICE-I-AM-A-CHILD (or whatever) header in HTTP. Hell, if it were really about protecting children, parents would get access to dumbed down versions of the kind of tools corporate IT has for managing business phones ... so they can lock them down, limit how they're used, right down to what apps can be installed.... but that would deprive advertisers of a golden ticket for knowing what views are legit, put parents back in control, and actually work... so can't have that. :D
I imagine they would counterargument your proposal along the lines of: "the most endangered children cannot rely on their families to protect them online"
Related:
4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44982681
I'm largely in line with where a lot of the comments under these political posts are coming from, but there's no discussion in them. It's rhetoric, outrage, and oversimplifying things.
The comments on HN are worth reading precisely because of the discussions, so I'm not sure what the point of political posts are if that fails.
In general I agree, but I think this is one of those cases where theres no oversimplifying, it really is just what you see on its face.
A UK bureaucracy is threatening fundamental and constitutional rights of an American. Its so outrageous, I really dont think there's any nuanced discussion to be had.
The whole western world is looking at this to know if their own populations will passively accept this particular brand of tyranny. If the UK citizenry doesn't vote it out in the next round of elections, this is coming for all of us.
Sure, 4chan is a cesspool, but what if I start a replacement? How does the UK block it? Do we end up with an allowlist only internet?
That's the thing, one day you won't be able to.
You'll only be able to connect to domains that have been bought with a state-issued ID and digitally signed. If you run afoul of the rules, you'll be taken down, fined, or worse.
The means to publish and consume will be taken from us.
"Trusted" computing. "You wouldn't download a car." "Think of the children". "Free speech allows hate."
Within a generation of complete and total control of communications, we will be slaves. Powerless, impotent, unable to organize, disposable fodder.
1984 is coming.
I've recently had a glimpse of that - buying my first .no domain required me to be registered on the Norwegian population register, and full digital verification. There was even a phone call with the registrar! Some of the other rules are bonkers too [1]:
- Each private individual may at any time subscribe to up to 5 domain names directly under .no
- Each organisation may at any time subscribe to up to 100 domain names directly under .no
[1]: https://www.norid.no/en/om-domenenavn/regelverk-for-no/
There's a reason we in Sweden has a nickname for Norway; "the last soviet state"
You don't connect to domains, you connect to IPs. You can resolve a domain to an IP however you want. And IPs can be shared or change regularly.
The convention is use DNS to resolve domains and DNS providers play by some rules, but if enough people start to dislike the rules you will start seeing unsanctioned DNS services and the like.
Another option is for browsers to consult a p2p DHT (just use the one for torrents) for a special class of domains (eg. https://[pubkey].dht). This is similar to how Tor does this but in this case you don't need to hide your server location because presumably it's located somewhere where the laws favor you.
IP blocking is a very different type of problem and one that would require hiring China as a consultant. And still be only marginally effective.
What makes IP blocking so difficult, and why would China need to be brought in as a consultant? Does setting up such technologies exceed the capabilities or experience of Western engineers?
The perl clutching on HN is hilarious. Dude, just torrent your porn if you don't want to engage with the age check.
What was the point of the age check again?
> Do we end up with an allowlist only internet?
That's the best case scenario. Honestly we'll be lucky if we can even run "unauthorized" software that hasn't been digitally signed by the government on our own computers. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is coming to an end.
This whole online safety act thing gives me goosebumps.
I had lived most of my live in Russia until migrating in 2022 and I’m pretty familiar with what it means when the gov starts messing with digital censorship.
If you’re not aware, it’s getting systematically harder and harder to browse the free web in Russia despite 50%+ of population using “some” VPN app.
And I’m not even talking extremist / anti-russian resources that the government turned against originally, but most of the independent websites that use CloudFlare free tier, for example. Because cloudflare enables proxying and a couple other IP-masquerading techniques by default, to effectively block a single website you have to block the entire cloudflare IP range and DNS - which is >20% of the web.
As for the VPNs, most of the common protocols and frameworks (eg OpenVPN) are already banned + detected via DPI, and people have to get into more and more sophisticated setups like VLESS+Reality (= most of the non-technical people can’t set it up by themselves or even buy a subscription to such thing). “Simple” shadowsocks, originally popularized in China to fight the great firewall are already almost rendered completely useless.
And it will get worse. The gov service which is responsible for blocking has a very high budget + some pretty neat tech to help them cut off more and more ways to bypass the censorship.
This is the future of any state that gets into this game. The future where you might have to become very proficient in networking and use some “shady” stuff like Tor to just read a blog post about Linux.
It doesn’t matter what it starts with - fighting anti-gov propaganda or, for god’s sake, porn (the least harmful thing for the kids in this horrible ai-post-capitalism world that we live in) — once the regulators get the feeling of power over the free web, every lobbyist, organization and party will come for a part of the web that you personally might enjoy, or even earn living from.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903
529,454 signatures and counting
Ah yes, online petitions: doing absolutely nothing for 30 years.
I suggest reading how this official government website works.
Online petitions give voice to people who can felt heard but ignored.
And do as much as a sternly worded letter to the editor.
Ok, but the online petitions will just be ignored anyway.
Pied piper internet 2.0 time! Why can't we use/build a faster variant of TOR, for every day use?
The new ban is easily bypassed even without a VPN. The government is trying to block cracks in a dam with their fingers. Assuming they even care about results rather than performative posturing.
Little bit unrelated, but "Just verify your age (impossible without verifying your identity)" is false. It is possible to verify the age without verifying identity. It can be done using Zero Knowledge Proof.
The USA has weaponized free-speech - no surprise other countries are building up defence.
More like "building up siege mentality".
> has weaponized free-speech
What does this mean
4chan doesn't do anything illegal unless you think that being mean should be banned.
They arrest people for saying "We love bacon".
"Police drag away a man for saying he likes bacon near a sprawling mosque construction site" (https://www.wndnewscenter.org/we-like-bacon-man-arrested-for...)
Well that depends on what laws are passed, doesn’t it? 4Chan is now in violation of a new UK law.
4chan is not in the UK and ofcom has no jurisdiction. This would be like Singapore trying to prosecute you for smoking marijuana in your own home in the U.S.
Yeah and I can guarantee you're in violation of laws somewhere too.
It's just as irrelevant.
…did you read the article?
Have you ever opened 4chan? There are literally 3 threads right now with "drawn images" illegal in many countries. To me it's crazy it's still open. Early 4chan had the worst kind of images you could think of.
I find it more offensive that there are "many countries" where "drawn images" are illegal to share.
Women driving or walking outside without headgear is illegal in many countries.
There are no drawn or otherwise images on 4chan that are illegal under United States law.
Being mean, for varying degrees of "mean", is actually illegal in most countries that aren't the USA and surely 4chan passes the threshold in at least some of them.
No, there is no "poster child" to justify wider site-blocking, nor even narrower site blocking. It is illegitimate governments to manipulate Internet nodes so as to filter what passes through them. If they have a problem with some website, let them take it up with the publisher/creator.
If the UK government is worried about children exposed to harmful content, well, let us first remember that they are assisting and supporting the massacre of children in Gaza, and the starvation of hundreds of thousands of them. And when that stops - I suppose they're welcome to suggest content filtering software to parents.
I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back. Their motivation will have nothing to do with defending free speech, but an enemy of my enemy IS my friend.
S.1748 - Kids Online Safety Act[1] is working its way through and as I understand it has fairly broad support.
There may be significant differences between KOSA and OSA in their implementation but they are the same in essence.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
KOSA is one of those bills that gets introduced in every session (sometimes under different names) without any chance of passing.
Honestly from the summary this seems pretty.. reasonable?
If the limitations on conducting A/B tests on people under 13 are enforced, you will need a driver's license to connect to the internet, and you will need to show it to every website.
Companies don't need A/B tests to tell them that requiring a driver's license is going to hurt conversions more than no more A/B tests.
Surely a state ID is enough, right? I know at least 3 legal adults in my circles alone without a driver's license, though I believe they all have either a state ID or permit. (Not that I support requiring any sort of meatspace identification for acting in cyberspace).
But it's literally the same thing.
> This bill requires covered online platforms, including social media platforms, to implement tools and safeguards to protect users and visitors under the age of 17.
What is an "online platform", and how would they know the visitor is under 17?
What the summary leaves out is that elements of it like 'harm to minors' have loopholes you could drive a truck through. It's designed to allow arbitrary censorship of wrongthink with 'think of the children' as cover.
The devil is always in the detail.
>> I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back
He'll need to start first with taking action at home. Florida and I believe Texas have also implemented age restrictions for various websites and did so before the UK.
So maybe they're not your friend.
But the predator of your predator isn’t your protector, just a bigger predator.
The current US administration isn’t pro free speech, they just use other tools to prevent it.
UK uses laws, US uses money respectively the lack of money for you if your speech doesn’t suit them.
US free speech has a price tag.
> But the predator of your predator isn’t your protector, just a bigger predator.
That line sounds like the start of a counter to "Won't somebody think of the children."
You're joking right?
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
Mississpi is a pretty Republican state and has enacted even more stringent and privacy-invasive laws.
Mississippi is forcing wikipedia, 4chan, a ton of other sites to have ID uploads?
The us is on a parallel track You will be underwhelmed.
Well-paced article. The exposition sounds bleak, but then Betteridge's law creeps up slowly over the middle of the article, and the piece crescendos toward a final showdown.
Even worse than blocking certain sites, would be if they burden everybody in a mountain of paperwork, making a lot of internet endaveours no longer feasible. I'm not sure how they do it in China, I know there is an internet registration number, not sure if they have paperwork, e.g. to demonstrate that your site is compliant. Let's hope they come to their senses!
Unexpected application of Betteridge’s law.
The most insane thing about this headline is that implies parents are giving their children devices with unfiltered access to the Internet and then the government needs to play wack-a-mole with every single website they come across to prevent children from accessing it.
The most insane thing about western society is the tendency of a lot of the populace to abrogate all responsibility to the government.
That’s the hallmark of socialist countries. It used to be that where in Eastern Germany people would look to government for a solution, those in the West would start a business, or learn a new skill, or read self help books. Nowadays, the self help books are read only for entertainment, and people look to government as the solution to any problem, no matter where they are, or how individualistic and free market they call themselves as a nation.
I don't know about iOS, but on Android I have access to Family Link which means I can control what apps my kids can run off the app store, and I can control whether they can access explicit websites (according to google) or have free access. I know other parents that are well aware of this tool, but they have to make sure those phones or tablets are signed into with accounts they have ownership of. I think this is the direction that the government should be pushing for and making sure apple google and microsoft are all playing nicely to allow parents to manage devices under the family.
iOS is similar. You can also limit apps/books/movies/etc. by content age rating, block adult sites, etc. without parental approval (which just happens over messages).
There is even an on-device image classifier for images/video to blur pornography from messages and keep them from sending it to others.
Parents are absolutely giving children devices with unfiltered internet access. I think people here need to step out of their ivory tower. I would say most people don't even know to think about the things people here think about. "Unknowns unknowns", if you will. We all agree here that this is a bad idea. What percentage of the worlds population do you think reads Hacker News?
If you're going to say that, I think most people wouldn't even access websites to begin with. They spend most of their time on Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok.
I know people who don't know how to use Google because they only use a smartphone to browse scroll Instagram and Facebook. They're never going to access a website.
Large companies have dozens or hundreds (even thousands) of their own internal websites, plus tons of SaaS for HR, tax, benefits, etc.
People use "websites" all the fucking time.
That's just par for the course in UK culture. During American criminal trials, the jury is told not to watch the news. During British criminal trials, the entire British press is legally forbidden from reporting on the trial.
who wouldn't want the gov banning workers organizing collective action online? can you think of the damage to children if they mistake it for a Minecraft server? do you want to be responsible for that?
Given that web traffic to certain adult websites has dropped 90% from the UK, in waiting to hear news of the lawsuit.
What is the resultant increase in traffic from other countries I wonder? VPN endpoint traffic has to pop up somewhere.
I have met plenty of millenial's, veterans of the worst of deviant art and 4chan, and the kids are allright.Perhaps a bit extra adult and focused, but that's a good thing right! They have no fucks to give, and rightly expect the worst from there overlords, but make light of it in an obnoctios abrasive kind of way, while standing and fighting the most egregious excesses and violence brought from our governments, who want pasty soft and confused masses of worky workers to exploit, rather than alert, 18 year old vetrans who have seen, heard, and fought depravity on the internet and beyond. So now, bieng too late, the gubberment, is trying to use strong arm and smeer tactictics to controll everything, when they dont grasp the basic realitys that everything on a computer is a file, and all processors have an input/output interface and some kind of widly availible comunications protocol, oh and hundreds of millions of significantly intelligent and pissed of people who are not buying it. key word in the title is "justify", but these are purely self justifications from a dangerous and out of touch group who have taken all of the strings of power and wealth into there clutchy overfull desperate grasp. The truely sureal part of banning file sharing is that the powers that be would rather have people rip thier media, than end up talking with each other and sharring there own.
For someone who has never been there, sure. It’s hardly the worst *chan though and I’d argue KiwiFarms is less redeemable.
The only real difference is the size of the audience between them. It hasn't changed since its earliest days. Many of the users go between them.
i think so.
wow this Peter Kyle guy is a disgusting populist
My local MP won’t do anything and basically dismissed me as a pedo/terrorist for even considering talking against the OSA.
What can be done if those who represent you, don’t?
Vouched.
However you really need to name your MP. These political public figures need named and shamed for using binary fallacious logic like that. And barring listening to constituents, get rid of them.
That's just the way democracy works. What you have to do is convince your fellow voters. Do that and your MP will go along. Or be replaced.
If you're an engineer, contribute to technologies that take power away from those who lord over you. Which in this case would be distributed, censorship-resistant communication technologies. There's a lot of work to be done, not only in hard engineering, but also in things like UI and marketing, as widespread adoption is the best way to maximise the chance of success. For all its flaws, cryptocurrency (in particular anonymous ones like Monero) is a demonstration that this is possible: no government desires for its citizens to have a means to transact large sums anonymously online, yet Monero still exists. And as governments impose more restrictions on the internet, there'll be more and more demand for means to bypass those restrictions.
By all means work on better privacy technology but censorship isn't a technology problem. It is a human problem. We cannot work around ignorance forever. We have to engage the system to affect real change.
Over the last few years, it's become ever more apparent to me that technology can't fix what's broken. Even as we invent more ways to bypass censorship it becomes more so that people have less to say that I might want to hear with those technologies. And it's not just an ideological thing either, because best I can tell there's plenty of that stuff for whichever way you lean. What I mean is that people write less, there's less for me to read. But they have plenty of hustlely Youtube videos of the sort I have no inclination to watch. Less journalism, but plenty of opinions/editorials (I have enough opinions of my own, thanks). Less music... the whole recording industry seems to have imploded.
We're not in danger of censorship so much as we're in danger of there no longer being anything for them to censor away from me. I don't think it's just me either, I know some of you are seeing the same things I am.
There is not "less music".
There are more options than there have ever been to listen to music someone made around the world from you, even in real time.
Which specific projects in particular?
They represent their constituents - you are one of those. If the majority of their constituents support the legislation they're doing their job. Could you post their full response to you? Pretty shocking if they accused you of being a terrorist pedophile and worth making people aware of which MP this was!
More made up problems for a fundamentally inept government to solve because fixing real problems like a broken healthcare system is hard and not a guaranteed political win.
Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
> Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
It’s amusing/depressing that Labor in Australia is doing the same nonsense too. They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
> They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
Labor won the last two general elections though? And the alternative is currently in disarray.
I'm not going to argue that Labor Australia are doing god's work - particularly on health at the system seems to be in crisis and need a lot more funding. But the opposition are in total disarray and desperately trying every wedge-issue in the book in an attempt to ignite culture-wars style partisanship here, which is (thankfully) falling on barren soil.
I think it was an agenda years in the making. I saw the groundwork being laid for this in 2021 and it somehow survived a general election and an entirely new government with a different political alignment. Ive seen other laws like this. It was nothing to do with the politics or the politicians, it has to do with civil servants who are working with their own agenda. Just like yes prime minister.
It's building on the Snoopers Charter 2016
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_201...
People seem to have forgotten that all major UK ISPs are now logging TCP connection metadata and all DNS queries
ISPs will send you warning letters if you're using bittorrent
We should have something that sets the TCP SYN bit in every packet (between participating hosts) so that it overloads surveillance systems.
Bittorrent letters aren't from a generic surveillance system - it's participating copyright holders downloading the files from you and then pressing charges for you sharing it to them.
This law was passed in 2023.
I still can't believe the UK got suckered into the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. All it took was like two years of making you vote every three months and you gave up your democracy.
You're not like the US. The US turns over a good portion of Congress every two years, and re-elects what is basically a active King every four. All you did was make sure that no one in government has to think about the public for a second, while they do what their backers and buddies ask, then retire in five years.
There's no way out of it. Starmer should try to get down to an <10% approval rating just to make the history books.
I can't quite tell whether you know this from the way you wrote your comment, but the Fixed-Term Parliaments act was repealed in 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-term_Parliaments_Act_201...
The fixed term act, as the other poster pointed out, was repealed in 2022
It was also a hilarious failure given that during the 11 short years it was active there were two two-year parliaments. It also didn't stop PMs being deposed from within, during that same period there were 5 different prime ministers.
So I think your read on it is a little exaggerated there.
I mean he has the same bosses right?
You mean the electorate ?
Maybe the Bavarian Illuminati.
The Online Safety Act was passed when the Tories were still in government.
Rolling that back essentially makes you a prime minister that believes children should have unfettered access to porn, self-harm material, gore, and that the outspoken parents of kids who've killed themselves after accessing this material shouldn't be listened to. At least, that's how the media (on all sides) would spin it. Not really a fight worth picking.
The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
If their real interest was in protecting children, they'd make a free, publicly accessible age blocking system that parents could choose to opt into, that isn't thrust upon all citizens at once
I've only done one of these age verifications (for Bluesky) and that didn't require any personal information beyond seeing my face.
The digital credentials API trial seems interesting though: letting the browser verify your age without sharing any other personal details. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or...
>a form of age check that doesn't require personal information
But your age is personal information.
sure, but it's far from the most identifying information you can hand over to a government, though
> The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
Given the spread of explicit "give us our pedo games" and "let kids watch porn" voices, I don't think there's any demand for a moderate solution.
And when the moderate solution is actively rejected for a very real problem, nobody has a right to complain when the problem eventually is addressed using extreme solutions.
Where are you hearing those voices?
That’s populist talk, and if the PM wants to play populism, he’s not doing a very good job of it.
He's not doing a very good job of anything. His main problem is he has very few fundamental beliefs. All he has is some vague left wing aligned principles which he allows others to advise him on and then selects whatever position will gain himself the most goodwill. Which is why his ministers can propose atrocious ideas and he will go along with them. It's not as if he has anything better to suggest.
The problem the majority of people have with this law is "I can't easily access my free porn anymore". The counter-argument is "child kills self"[1] because shitty tech companies can't control their thirst for money. Like I said, I don't agree with the legislation but it's not an easy argument to make.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-62998484
In a world where you can cast your vote anonymously in the voting booth, it’s a dangerous game to piss off a large number of voters, even if they can’t admit publicly why. They will be reminded every day of that idiotic policy. Like cookie consent banners.
I think you’re correct and the person you’re replying to is correct too.
Voters aren’t all that rational. They could choose to vote against the person that blocked their access to porn but also choose to vote against the person who made porn available again because doing so puts children in danger or whatever the scaremongering line would be.
Nick Farage from Reform plans to pick this fight. Of course whether he does it or not will be seen.
He says he's against the OSA but he's also funded by religious right nutters who think it's a great first step. So if/when he gets into power, don't expect anything better to replace it. Not that I would expect him to uphold a single promise: as I understand it, Reform doesn't even commit to a formal manifesto, anyway.
Farage is a moral-free scumbag who will be known in history as one of the architects of Britain's period of decline. The fact that he hasn't been held to account is one of the great scandals of our age.
Unless he gets into power he’s just a symptom.
I like the fact that as soon as his cause 'won' he stepped down so that he didn't need to do any of the actual hard work in implementing the disaster.
He had no power.
I'm no brexiteer but ... it's not like the Tories were going to hand him the keys to Number 10 and say "Have at it". He wasn't an MP at all at that point.
It's like the "Idiots didn't even know what they were voting for!" argument. Sure, they didn't. Because the people who actually had the power to make a plan to vote for, declined to do so, specifically to increase uncertainty and perception of risk for voting leave.
You can blame Farage and brexit voters for a lot (and you should!) but neither he nor they ever had the political power to make or execute a plan.
People literally wanted this though.
Not a fight worth picking if truth, sanity, principles and integrity are worthless to you, I'm sure.
Just want to point out that none of those are guiding principles for politicians either.
I'm all about liberal freedom, but blocking 4chan would actually help society given how abused it is by counter-intelligence. There is bullshit spewed there constantly and no one should be subject to that trash in a functioning society.
I think the world needs a 2007 /b/ right now
We'd like to, but Pool's Closed.
You are either stupid or criminal.
The world would be better off if you all drowned instead of asserting your unloved incel selves into every online doscussion.
Worthless pool of idiocy.
Only if you werent there
So you've identified yourself as an idiot with nothing useful to say and an obvious agenda. Nice.
Go back to 4chan and talk about touching kids inappropriately.
I don't think you know what counter intelligence means. That'd just be a regular intelligence or government PR operation.
I don't use 4chan but that stuffs pretty easy to spot on Tiktok and reddit if you're paying attention. Conspiracy type stuff is rampant on those sites. Especially around elections or conflicts like wars.
Content moderation or censorship can be an equally dangerous vector for government influence campaigns as well.
I don't think you have a point, sorry. My post was correct. That forum is abused to create counter-factual q-anon type shit.
Q anon was started by Chan's admin, some random guy living in South East Asia, and was embarrassingly amateur
You can be upset about the sort of content on 4chan. Most of the planet would agree. You don't need to frame it as something sophisticated because you don't like it and want it censored.
I don't think censorship is a good thing unless it's censoring concerted efforts to spread false information which reshape the political landscape. You are underselling the bullshit that you say "8chan admins" were responsible for. It's inexcusable.
I'm not upset about the content aside from it being a clear devious effort to spread lies and shift public opinion.
Stop framing it as something different. No one with a brain is buying it, and yes, we are pissed.
The funny thing about "false information" being "spread" by "8chan admins" (or 4chan for that matter) is.... you can avoid it by simply not going there. Stop going there if you don't like it.
So true! I wish people would stop eating up the false information from 4chan and whatever else chan, 8chan apparently but the reference got removed. Its a cesspool.
Have you considered that spreading false information is common on that forum that i should simply not attend? Maybe the idiots you talk to on 4chan should be held to a higher standard? Or do you think "doing your own research" means believing in the first thing a right wing retard news source tells you?
You are so embarassing.
You're thinking of Jim Watkins who provided the hosting for 8chan, not 4chan. Two completely different image boards.
No, 4chan is a lie factory. There is no confusion here.
You are the problem. I was very clear and do know what counter-intelligence is.