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Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#241

Post by fc417fc802 »

convolvatron wrote: post #236
fc417fc802 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. We need a standardized method for meta tags that accommodates arbitrary user (or rather service operator) defined categories. We also need a broad push to force all websites to adopt said tags so that parental controls can work effectively. Government enforcement of particular categories is one option there (but not the only one, browsers could just start refusing to load any site that doesn't send the tag).

I think you'll find that trying to neatly bin the internet into neatly defined categories is something of a fool's errand. I guess the canonical example is centuries old fine art that shows a bit of nipple. what about whitelists? this never comes up anymore. I can load profiles from the 'child safety council' if that's what I want, and should expect to cover some of the overhead in evaluating all the submitted links.…

Whitelists have the exact same problem you're objecting to. Not everyone will agree what should or shouldn't be on one.

In practice I don't think it's an issue. What I'm arguing for is the infra to facilitate self categorization and (likely) also a legal requirement limited to only a few specific categories. For example the government might mandate that porn, social media, and user generated content all be accurately tagged and provide legal definitions.

Nothing about what I describe would preclude additional layers of categorization such as (but not limited to) whitelists. In fact it should improve such efforts by providing a standardized method they can use for arbitrarily fine grained categorization that will be compatible with other software out of the box.

Note that my tagging proposition could be applied per network request. So if the service operator wants to it should facilitate filtering out (for example) a comment section without blocking access to the rest of the site.

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#243

Post by fc417fc802 »

tlogan wrote: post #146
abc123abc123 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way! It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone, in return for not having to care about their offspring and the illusion of 100% safety. I think the authoritarian trend accelerated during corona. Our western political nobility got a real taste for power, and they have not been able to free themselves from that afrodisiac ever since. Therefore chat control, 1, 2, 3, and when…

I do not think parents are the one pushing these controls. They are busy raising the kids.

I think parents are raising the alarm about nefarious social media practices (ie recommendation algorithms that actively do harm) and those services are in turn pushing these controls in order to deflect responsibility away from themselves.

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#244

Post by amiga386 »

juleiie wrote: post #96
amiga386 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a further rumination on how Joseph Stalin held power. It was meant to inform Orwell's fellow English socialists, who still dreamed of their own revolution, what the practical upshot of that would be. Stalin did not rule by people ceding their freedoms in exchange for comfort; they suffered intense hardship! Their land was taken from them, dwellings and vehicles allotted based on party loyalty…

I don’t know what to think about China. I think I was brainwashed already. I spend too much time on Reddit where it seems they like China a lot and want to become China. (Is this AI generated sentiment?) Though none of them seems to be moving to China now that I think about it. Look, it’s extremely hard to remain some kind of objective nowadays on the internet. I no longer know what is true and what is false. Truth h…

I know the feeling. The only thing you can do is try to keep an honest perspective on reality. Look for confirmation from reliable sources, wait to see how things turn out before passing it on. It feels bad finding out something important is actually hallucinated codswallop, but it's much worse if you sent it on to your friends first. Don't believe things because you'd like they were true, or reject because you'd prefer they were false.

There's always a tussle for who "controls the narrative", it's not always the well-informed. Look at the Covid 19 outbreak. An honest medic would say it's your choice to take the rapidly-developed vaccine, we don't have as extensive safety and efficacy studies as usual but we're in a time crunch, here are its known side-effects, but also consider what happens if you don't take it and end up contracting the virus, which was ultimately fatal for millions, more fatal the older you were. I wouldn't have believed such basic medical advice could be politicised, but there it was with an American right-wing claiming the medics were lying (why would they?!) and performatively defying basic instructions to avoid spreading a pandemic, then predictably dying of something they could completely have avoided, like Herman Cain. Then they started going for the absolutely bonkers science-free "remedies" invented by their tribe, like shining UV light up your arse or taking horse de-worming tablets. Meanwhile the American left-wing wanted to insist on people wearing masks (even where distancing or ventilation improvements would be more effective) and fire people for not taking the vaccine (what happened to informed consent?)

I don't know which Nobel prize winner became the villain, but I can believe both that it can happen unjustly (politicians or social activists start attacking them for their other beliefs), and sometimes justly; "Nobel disease" is when the celebrated scientist lets recognition go to their head and starts speaking in areas where they aren't experts. The famed example is Linus Pauling who got the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, but in later years started hawking vitamin C tablets saying it could cure cancer; it can't, and he died of cancer. Additional studies have shown that when taken intravenously it can have an effect on some cancer cells as part of a chemotherapy regime, but as orally ingested tablets it's worthless.

For what I've said on China in the previous comment, I have never been, but I am fairly certain of the veracity of all the issues I raised. I can't speak for any specific Chinese person and how they feel about their government, I'm sure millions of them are happy in life no matter how the country is run, and certainly the country is more prosperous these days, but these issues are still there, and we in the West should try our best to avoid lapsing into authoritarianism or totalitarianism.

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#245

Post by bcraven »

trollbridge wrote: post #242
pretzel5297 wrote: post #74

[flagged]

As a parent, then, what do you do when a public school district hands every 7 year old a Chromebook and has completely inadequate filtering on it?

Take it off them when they're not in school.

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#246

Post by fc417fc802 »

maccard wrote: post #187
phatfish wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not being reductive at all. I'm certain parent commentor doesn't have kids so they don't care. If someone was using the street outside their house to deal drugs and causing problems they would be happy for the police to "regulate" that activity. It's just selfishness. "I want some privacy utopia on the internet (which can no longer exist, the internet isn't the place of the 90s and early 00s), so your kids can b…

How does banning VPNs equate to policing drug dealing? The drug dealing is already illegal.

It doesn't equate; it's being employed as an analogy to address the justifiability of broad enforcement efforts targeting something.

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#247

Post by akho »

coffeefirst wrote: post #170
pretzel5297 wrote: post #74

[flagged]

Okay. How? I have a little boy. He does not use computers yet. One day he will. His friends will have YouTube or it’s spiritual successor and everyone in his school will be on TikTok where they’re hammered with whatever brainrot gets the most engagement. What do you propose, exactly?

What age are you worried about?

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#248

Post by jiaosdjf »

I just don't accept any ban on VPNs, I will just be a criminal. I'm not fighting for a country I'm not allowed to wave the flag of and I'm not respecting any digital safety laws that simply do not apply to me because I am not a child. I will provision my own infra if thats what it takes, I simply don't care. Fuck this country.

Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools

#249

Post by convolvatron »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #241
convolvatron wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll find that trying to neatly bin the internet into neatly defined categories is something of a fool's errand. I guess the canonical example is centuries old fine art that shows a bit of nipple. what about whitelists? this never comes up anymore. I can load profiles from the 'child safety council' if that's what I want, and should expect to cover some of the overhead in evaluating all the submitted links.…

Whitelists have the exact same problem you're objecting to. Not everyone will agree what should or shouldn't be on one. In practice I don't think it's an issue. What I'm arguing for is the infra to facilitate self categorization and (likely) also a legal requirement limited to only a few specific categories. For example the government might mandate that porn, social media, and user generated content all be accurately…

the point being that instead of there being a kind of commission to create a schema, there are a whole bunch of different whitelists. so if your religion objects to the existence of mangoes, then you can subscribe to a mango-free internet filter.

and instead of burdening the isp the publisher of mango sorbet recipes with ticking off all the right schema boxes, this can all be enforced at the consumer.

all the rest of these approaches kind of assume that there is 'reasonable' and 'unreasonable' content, and that we all mostly agree on the difference. which I think is fundamentally fallacious. do you really think we can agree, as a species, what PG-13 should mean for the entire internet?

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