221–230 of 274 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article doesn't quite spell it out but I assume you won't be able to turn off safe search unless you log in with a verified 18+ account.
This is how Youtube works now. Age restricted videos can't be viewed without logging in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh, this is minor political fluff. Australia is still doing quite good.
in the digital rights and government spying department --- maybe VS china or Nkorea but in the "west" we are profanely the worst. easily.
Might want to wind back that Aussie Exceptionalism a notch or three. That or read up a little more.
What is it with some of the anglo countries and these ridiculous slides into nannying, vaguely repressive surveillance. It's not even much useful for real crime fighting, as the case of the UK amply and frequently demonstrates.
https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.... Read the legislation. Ask yourself if it's better for a country's government or a foreign set of social media companies to control what young people see. One has a profit motive above all else. One can be at least voted for or against.
Neither should control adults.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Thinking back to my teenage years I'm almost certain I would have been tempted to waste too much time online when it would have been better for me to be doing homework or playing sport. That is true. I spent my time coding a 2D game engine on an 486, it eventually went nowhere, but it was still cool to do. But if I had the internet then, all that energy would have been put into pointless internet stuff.
I had internet access since 13yo, although it was the internet of 1996, so it was way more basic. And for me it was a place to explore my passions way better than any library in a small city in Poland would allow. And sure - also a ton of time on internet games / MUDs, chatrooms etc. And internet allowed me to publish my programs, written in Delphi, since I was 13-14yo, and meet other programmers on Usenet. On the ot…
A resident of said country here. Another questionable measure by Government to protect our mollycoddled, insufficiently-resilient society. That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access. Personally, I'm not too worried about what risqué stuf…
My take is just like we have allowance to introduce children to the concept of money, parents could use data allowance to introduce children to the concept of the internet. The worst content out there is typically data-heavy, the best - not necessarily, as it can well be text in most cases.
The last one is difficult because you need a common standard, either someone becomes a monopoly (or two or three quasi-monopolies such as google/apple) or better still this is one of few cases where government regulation could do more good than harm.
I think China is already close to the last phase at least in cities, going down the government regulated route?
This is highly country dependent of course - in some places shops must accept coins by law, even if it's so unusual that you have to roll a critical success to get the right amount of change back.
I would like a world where we can give children physical pocket money rather than some abstraction, and they don't need a smartphone of their own to check their balance. But we'll probably have to fight for that at some point.
What is it with some of the anglo countries and these ridiculous slides into nannying, vaguely repressive surveillance. It's not even much useful for real crime fighting, as the case of the UK amply and frequently demonstrates.
https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.... Read the legislation. Ask yourself if it's better for a country's government or a foreign set of social media companies to control what young people see. One has a profit motive above all else. One can be at least voted for or against.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slippery slope is specifically about opening the gates to further slipping. This clearly isn't the case since there is going to be slipping regardless of this specific instance going through all the way or not.
> It's wrong to call this a slippery slope because we're not at the top but instead already well on our way down a slope that is indeed slippery. Not a convincing take.
Its more of a constantly lowering bar, not a slippery slope that just needs to be stopped once.
Or in words you might find more appealing: Its worse than a slippery slope.
2025: if you're logged in, then we check your age to see if you can do or see some stuff 2027: the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities 2028: because VPNs are being used to circumvent the law, if the logging entity knows you're an Australian citizen, even if you're not in Australia or using an Aussie IP address then they must still apply the law 2030: you must be logged in to vis…
> your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case
Already the case. Mostly for the kind of dumb criminal who is suspected of murder and has been found googling "defences to murder" and "how to hide a body".
> the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities
If there's a court order (good) or a national security letter (occasionally good but very open to abuse). Maybe the NSA or some guy in DOGE has automatic API access to this data anyway.
> you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits
Already the case for youtube and reddit content marked NSFW - either by the creator or by a fairly stupid algorithm. (You can see these boobies, but not those ones.) But the age verification is mostly "open a new account and enter a birth date". Also reddit has the dumbest age verification/login bypass ever. (Your honor, editing an URL is nation-state level hacking and we can't reasonably defend against that.)
> all visits to all sites will be recorded
Something something Permanent Record.
> you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet
Ok this one is cheating a bit, but don't you need a google (or samsung etc.) account to set up an android let alone access the internet?
Also cheating a bit but you need a login and contract with your ISP to get on the internet too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access. This would be completely and utterly unenforceable in any capacity. Budget smartphones are cheap enough and ubiquitious enough that children don't need your permission or help to get one. Jus…
Which is of course why we don't bother making selling cigarettes and alcohol to children illegal. Except we totally do that because it largely works even if sufficiently motivated individuals can and do get around the restrictions.
Even if you could stop phones, you wont stop them from accessing it from literally a near infinite supply of other devices.
It's pure and utter fantasy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is of course why we don't bother making selling cigarettes and alcohol to children illegal. Except we totally do that because it largely works even if sufficiently motivated individuals can and do get around the restrictions.
Cigarettes and alcohol are consumbable products that must be acquired again and again. There are already millions of phones in open circulation and you only need to acquire it once. Even if you could stop phones, you wont stop them from accessing it from literally a near infinite supply of other devices. It's pure and utter fantasy.