It’s yet another step in seeing the Internet becoming owned by big corporations. Only big corporations can implement these things.
Art, creativity, people doing internet things as a hobby, that is dying more and more everyday.
This is the second time in my life that Labour have gained power after a long Conservative tenure, only to dive straight into enacting policies that were more right-wing than their predecessors.
It’s less of a left - right thing (that’s mainly economics). It paternalism Vs liberty thing. Labour have always had a very strong “we must protect the populace” theme to their policies. Conservatives have it too, but they want to do it in a different way.
Sadly it’s a really difficult thing to stand against. Who wants to be labelled the person enabling paedophiles, when all you want is the right to private communication.
To be honest I don’t think much of this is about catching or preventing paedos, and is just straight up authoritarianism.
You’re right. It’s not, but that’s what you’re labelled when you stand against it.
It’s important to continue standing against it nonetheless, and not be intimidated out of action.
Meme photo of two astronauts in space, one holding a gun to back of the other’s head. It is overlayed with the text “Always has been.”
Part of that is allowing labels to be so powerful. Someone doesn’t have to watch kiddie porn or molest children to be branded a pedophile, but when you have that label for someone, it’s implied that’s what they did. We saw this same shit during the Bush years with the “terrorism” label. We’re actually seeing it again with Luigi Mangione and people protesting at Tesla dealerships. People don’t care about reality if there’s simple branding that wipes critical thinking away.
To correct one thing, the left-right political spectrum is based on authority. It goes back to the French Revolution, in which the nobility - favoring top-down power hierarchies - literally occupied the right side of the assembly hall while the revolutionaries - favoring true equality and egality - sat on the left.
This cannot be separated into distinct domains since power is wealth and wealth is power. The political compass fallacy is, and always was, nothing more than rightist propaganda to muddy language and ideology in an effort to hold on to their wealth and power.
Paternalism vs liberty. Tell me more. I haven’t heard of this comparison before.
The full spectrum is really more like “authoritarian vs libertarian”. Political policy should really be split into two different spectrums. On one spectrum, you have financial policy. On the other, you have social policy. The two normally get lumped together because politicians campaign on both simultaneously. But in reality, they’re two separate policies. So the political spectrum should look less like a single left/right line, and more like an X/Y graph with individual points for each person’s ideology. Something more like this:
On this graph, as you go farther left, the government has more ownership and provides more, (and individuals own less because the government provides more for their needs). As you go farther up the chart, social policy gets more authoritarian. So for example, something on the far right bottom corner would be the Cyberpunk 2077/The Outer Worlds end-stage capitalist where megacorps inevitably own everything and have their own private laws.
Once you separate the two policies into a graph (instead of just a left/right line) it becomes clear why “small government” doesn’t necessarily correspond to “fewer laws” when dealing with politicians.
I assume “Republican” on this diagram is not used in the contemporary American sense. Otherwise it would be somewhere up in that little grey cloud.
In any case, official US politics takes place entirely within the top right quadrant, and UK politics seems to have retreated there too. Canada is in danger of getting up there as well. And we don’t have any mechanism to vote our way out of that box, so change will have to come from action outside of electoral politics.
The precise location of individual points really depends on personal biases, but I agree that the “Republican” point is wrong on this chart; Pretty much all of America’s political discussion takes place on the right side of the graph.
I think it’s being used in the traditional sense, not the contemporary American sense.
That’s a political compass, and it’s still missing several political axes.
I guess one potential axis would be ‘stagnation’, in the sense that social mobility between classes stops changing. That could be anything like straight up caste systems, or informal stratification from wealth getting locked up by the 1%. I hypothesize, that such an axis would be a measurement of how ‘elderly’ a society is becoming. When politics become too locked in due to unchanging political critters, the ability for a society to recognize and properly act in a situation becomes compromised.
My parent, they lost mental acuity and flexibility with the years, alongside their bodily agency, and have become quarrelsome. IMO, such dementia is what we are seeing in a aging America and the UK.
Realistically one can come up with any number of axes and still be wrong, because the domain of politics isn’t a metric space.
Around our local voting season there’s actually a online test to check which parties are more aligned with the person values and it puts things into a graph like this. It’s very useful
How did neo-liberalism make it to the left?
I didn’t bother actually checking the individual points, because I was simply using it for illustrative purposes. The actual location of the points is largely up to interpretation, based on personal biases and viewpoints. For instance, plenty of .ml posters would likely object to calling Leninism highly authoritarian, or lumping it in with Maoism. But this particular compass does both of those.
deleted by creator
Illusion of choice.
The OSA was brought in by the tories. Labour agree with it as well. Both of them are authoritarian bastards.
Yeah, it’s a lot of admin for most small providers to be bothered with. Less of a hit to just block the whole UK.
Which is why big tech is actively lobbying for these laws because they know that they will be the only ones who can comply and therefore exist.
Perfect response. This gets the message across, “governments of the world, the Internet doesn’t need you, you need the Internet”.
So of all the fucking things to restrict, why this? Facebook is a hundred times more dangerous than any porn. Ban that shit instead.
because Facebook is an abstract danger, porn is (relatively) well defined
Fuck off with your device based verification system. That’s just the same service, but as a more invasive app installed on your phone.
Instead of scanning a face or ID and uploading it to a service, we’re expected to run unverified closed source code on the device we carry everywhere in our pockets?!
Fuck off with your device based verification system. That’s just the same service, but as a more invasive app installed on your phone.
not necessarily. you give a phone to your children. you partly lock it down by setting it up as a child account, with its age. you make sure to install a web browser that supports limiting access to age appropriate content according to the age set in the system, maybe taking a parent allowed whitelist. the website is legally obliged to set an appropriate age limit value in a standard HTTP header.
that way, the website does not know your age. the decision is on the web browser.
the web browser checks the configuration in the system, that only the parent can change. it does not send it anywhere, only does a yes/no decision. if the site is not ok, it’ll show a thing like when the connection is not secure or it was put on the safebrowsing list, except that you can’t skip it, only option is to request parent permission.
and finally the age is set in the operating system, without verifying its truthiness, but once again requesting lock screen authentication.
oh and app installs need parent approval for kid accounts, like it should almost always be.this way it’s as private as it can get. the only way a website can find out information about you from this, is to log if your browser loaded the html but not any other resources, because that means you were caught in the age filter. but that’s it.
there’s multiple pieces in this that is not yet implemented, but they should be possible with not too much work.
this is all possible with open source code, if you make sure the kid can’t install anything without parent approval. stores like fdroid could have some badge or something if a browser supports this kind of limitation.This is kinda genius
All’s well until other countries try to implement this and you will very quickly see how nearly none of them agree with each other on which age limit goes where. In my opinion, the best way to ensure that children don’t go to certain places on the internet is to either not give them access to the internet at all or to only let them use whitelisted websites that you review yourself before adding.
how nearly none of them agree with each other on which age limit goes where.
that’s the task of the website to figure out, the device does not have to be aware of the laws. but I think is still much easier to manage than id verification.
I habe an other idea. don’t make the websites send agelimit http headers, because as you said that can easily vary by country. instead send http headers that tell what kind of content is available there. only the categories that could be questionable. that way the device (actually the browser) would decide if with the kid account’s age that kind of content is accessible.
that way the browsers need to know the age limits, and maybe it’s easier to handle it this way.In my opinion, the best way to ensure that children don’t go to certain places on the internet is to either not give them access to the internet at all or to only let them use whitelisted websites that you review yourself before adding.
ok, and I agree, but only very few parents will do that unfortunately. especially considering that their kids could be discriminated against by their
limitedclasates who don’t have their access so broadly limited.and then, you still need such a whitelisting capability, which I think does not really exist today in firefox and such browsers. addons cant solve this because they can be removed.
categories that could be questionable
That still could vary greatly by country and culture, as one man’s pornography could very well be another man’s art. You would either need a great deal of near-duplicate categories or just label something as explicit the moment a single country pipes up about a woman not concealing her hair or something else that doesn’t bother you one bit.
ok, and I agree, but only very few parents will do that unfortunately. especially considering that their kids could be discriminated against by their limited clasates who don’t have their access so broadly limited.
I suppose that we could at least be able to convince the parents that letting their children go unsupervised on the internet is like letting them go unsupervised in the big city. Totally fine if they’re old enough to know what they’re doing and don’t stray too far from where they’re meant to be going, but unacceptable if they’re not so wise yet and aren’t at least somewhat regularly checked up on. Children will always want the forbidden fruit, but their parents should restrain them until they understand why it was forbidden to them in the first place, and how to safely interact with it.
and then, you still need such a whitelisting capability, which I think does not really exist today in firefox and such browsers. addons cant solve this because they can be removed.
I’m not too well versed in this kind of software either, but I just looked up some parental controls services and they seem to offer device-level blocking of unwanted websites/apps/downloads/etc. Web browsers don’t need to do the blocking, as the parental controls probably refuse the connections to the web domains.
I didn’t even mention all of this being completely bypassed if you used another website as a kind of proxy: go to proxywebsite.com -> it has a search bar -> use it to go to explicitwebsite.com -> proxywebsite.com returns the html, css, js etc of explicitwebsite.com without you ever visiting it -> profit.
That still could vary greatly by country and culture, as one man’s pornography could very well be another man’s art. You would either need a great deal of near-duplicate categories or just label something as explicit the moment a single country pipes up about a woman not concealing her hair or something else that doesn’t bother you one bit.
that’s right. but I don’t think this system would be manageable for website owners if they wanted to comply with any and all countries laws. what if a country just bans any pictures about women? or something insensible like that.
since this system is only for child protection, and wont be able to barr adults from accessing sites, I think it makes sense if a website owner only wants to be compatible with countries that have sensible laws for this purpose. like banning child access to any kind of porn, gambling, and such. I think the PEGI rating system could be used for this, it’s been around for ages. but if a country has banned pictures that depict women in any way, they would just outright block that country, both because it would be very hard to deal with them anyways and because this is not supposed to be a censoring tool.I suppose that we could at least be able to convince the parents that letting their children go unsupervised on the internet is like letting them go unsupervised in the big city. Totally fine if they’re old enough to know what they’re doing and don’t stray too far from where they’re meant to be going, but unacceptable if they’re not so wise yet and aren’t at least somewhat regularly checked up on. Children will always want the forbidden fruit, but their parents should restrain them until they understand why it was forbidden to them in the first place, and how to safely interact with it.
that sounds good, and things like this should go in place of TV and youtube ads, but it’s very hard to reach so many parents without some kind of mandatory thing. and then, where I live I often enough see parents who have a baby stroller with a built-in fucking smart phone holder!! and guess what it is being used, the brainrot is flooding from them all the time. I guess that’s their approach to parenting even at home. it would be especially hard to convince these parents that this is bad.
Ah, I had been thinking that the parent would decide. But of course, how naive of me lol
Doesn’t need to be by age tbh- you could have content tags and filter by content instead of age (I.e. No graphic violence). That would ignore country discrepancies and then give more flexibility
All of this is precluded by you using a browser that is authorised and approved by the government.
fuck any and all government that wants to limit what browsers we can use! the legislation should end at requiring websites to provide their classification in the headers. after that, it’s the parents job to set up the device properly.
Who said the device based service has to be closed source?
It doesn’t have to be, but the businesses making it claim it needs to be.
Experience, most proposal for “age and identity verification” being badly implemented mostly closed-source solutions that only works on devices they deem trusty, meaning (seemingly) non-rooted phones with specific OSes.
To be fair, this already applies to any baseband blob.
There’s a UK Parliament petition to repeal the Online Safety act. There’s no guarantee it’ll do anything but might be worth a try for anyone in the UK.
Don’t forget to write to your MP - being polite but angry helps. Explain the issues, shortcomings and why you feel this should be repealed and a better user-friendly and privacy respecting alternative needs to be found BEFORE implementing stupid asinine knee-jerk legislation like this.
My poor MP is getting it in the jugular because they boasted about working in data security and I’m exploiting the hell out of that statement so they can’t easily weasel their way out of it.
Part of me wants every website to do this. The UK just gets blocked from majority of the internet then people in the UK can get angry and rebel.
The great firewall of starmer
At this point Dark-web tech needs an upgrade, we might just need a “2nd internet”
i2p
That moment when you decide to use i2p because its more sustainable for every user to be a node just for your server’s location to get leaked in a vulnerability. This is why most deep web migration to i2p ended
Have any links or extra info on that?
i2p before 2.3.0 (Java) allows de-anonymizing the public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses of i2p hidden services (aka eepsites) via a correlation attack across the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses that occurs when a tunneled, replayed message has a behavior discrepancy (it may be dropped, or may result in a Wrong Destination response). https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-36325
I must have missed that. When did that happen? I used i2p a long time ago and it seemed very promising. I imagine it has got better since.
How about Gemini? https://geminiprotocol.net/
Gemini is a group of technologies similar to the ones that lie behind your familiar web browser. Using Gemini, you can explore an online collection of written documents which can link to other written documents. The main difference is that Gemini approaches this task with a strong philosophy of “keep it simple” and “less is enough”. This allows Gemini to simply sidestep, rather than try and probably fail to solve, many of the problems plaguing the modern web, which just seem to get worse and worse no matter how many browser add-ons or well meaning regulations get thrown at them.
How it applies to geolocation and server hosting in light of the OSA I really have no clue. But it’s an interesting underground hacker/tinker type alternative.
did this or the google ai thing came first?
Social/Political problems need social/political solutions, not technical solutions.
Respect.
Imagine if people could just choose what country they’re browsing from
Not a long term solution.
Imagine if people could choose what country they’re
browsingfrom.just MOOOOOOOOOVE
Forget tax havens, eventually some countries will probably become content havens and sell server space hosted there. Probably some carribean island
Yeah, we’re all mad, fuck the suits and all that.
But why does the distinction between “real-world adult material” and “creative, non-realistic”, “artistic, animated works” that “do no harm” matter? Last time I checked, realistic adult material can be just as artistic, and the harm done by negligently letting children watch it seems comparable.
Are they in favour of age verification for “uncreative, realistic” pornography, or is the real distinction just between real-life and online?
I interpreted it as “can’t possibly be doing harm to the people in the video” - eg as much of mainstream porn can do - since there are none if everything is animated fiction
And that is the correct interpretation.
Admittedly, I’m pretty sure UK did this with the underage consumers in mind, not the industry actors, for whom both sorts of porn would have a similiar impact. (I’d assume)
Personally though, the constant repeating to me sounded comedic and they were making fun of how seriously we’re taking nude drawings with this, which sounds silly even if it’s justified.
Yeah, the “it’s just cartoons so it’s not harmful” argument falls flat pretty quickly. There are much better arguments to be made for why the law is dumb.
I think it’s more about the legal distinction between drawn and ‘real’ porn.
TBH “negligently letting children watch it” seems like a sensless statement to me. The onus should be on parents to filter their kids’ internet environments, not literally every accessible site on the open internet (which are never going to comply with a patchwork of age verification regs).
It’s the same schtick you hear from pedophiles in defense of their child sex dolls and it’s unsurprising to see it coming from rule34 in particular considering they serve up a lot of that content in cartoon form.
hand wringing over objectionable video games is why queer artists are now having their platforms removed. if you dont want to see certain kinds of fictional porn, then either avoid the website it is hosted on, or make an account and edit your blacklist. also, if youre worried about your children having access to gay yiff, then restrict their access
There’s a lot of rule34 comic sites out there, I just found out. Which one is this? Just for research and background.