261–270 of 419 posts
"Lawmakers want to ban VPN users from accessing porn websites."
or
"Lawmakers wants porn websites to ban VPN users"
It's an important distinction that has caused a lot of confusion in the last thread about this article.
I know that the author is arguing a slippery slope for political reasons, but it's not factual and it causes confusion.
If the goal is to protect minors, then alcohol may be a better model: a) Alcohol is considered harmful for minors, hence b) It is unlawful for minors to posses and consume alcohol; c) It is unlawful to sell alcohol to minors; Similarly: 1) Internet may potentially contain harmful material, hence: 2) It is unlawful for minors access Internet; 3) It is unlawful to sell or provide to minors access to Internet or any dev…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your examples are unlike each other. What stops people from speeding more than they already do is enforcement. The law isn't doing anything. But the TSA isn't a law. The TSA is, notionally, the enforcement. And it doesn't do anything either. So the TSA really is pointless. If you drive around at 30 mph over the limit, you're going to get a ticket, and this traffic cop presence stops people from speeding "too much". I…
The examples are similar in that they demonstrate that reducing probability is a reasonable goal, and it is a mistake to say anything imperfect is useless. Your take on TSA seems to be in the imperfect=useless camp. There are good ROI, efficiency, and philosophical reasons to want to abolish TSA, but it seems naive to say there is zero value and their mere existence has not deterred anyone.
People speed to get to a destination faster or to relieve their frustration on the road (street racers notwithstanding). If the cost of speeding increases they'll speed much less, because they're more interested in their terminal goal. There's a lot of elasticity here.
Attacking a plane is a terminal goal for terrorists. If it gets harder, they'll do it somewhat less or pursue softer targets. But there's much less elasticity here. So it's less clear that more security measures will result in fewer deaths.
That doesn't imply the TSA is useless but I think it might be clarifying to the discussion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is the objective, it's always been the objective. The worst part is that I bet these people don't even think of themselves as authoritarian so much as they stumble into it through a combination of selfishness, ignorance, and complete disregard for ethics. They like money and power, more information means more of both, darn the torpedos, tap the lines, hit the gas and all of a sudden it's oops all facism.
[flagged]
Hitler and Mussolini, the infamous socialists. What an insane idea. Its only claim to fame seems to be famous American conservatives who want to cleanse the image of the far-right by writing off their ideologies to the other side. It also conveniently lets everyone pretend that totalitarianism could never happen here - it's all just evil communism/socialism, and we're not doing communism here, so just trust us, y'all!
These ideologies have very little in common. While states practicing both have been heavily totalitarian, the means through which they got there, the reasoning for their absolute power and its methods of enforcement, the strength of their grip and their national ideas/goals were completely different. Trying to shove them into one box is beyond reductionism, it borders on good-and-evil storytelling where all the bad guys have a simple, one-line explanation for their badness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just a VPN ban, the word VPN in the context means proxy, and you can setup a proxy with something as basic as a SSH command. It's basically a restriction on communication, i.e. the government decides who you're allowed to talk to, not just a privacy issue.
Not really, that’s just the type the EFF gins up. The problem is the regulation of speech and requiring verification. The VPN stuff is a misapplication of security “best practices”. Tech companies are amoral and happily facilitate the use of their technology for oppression in other places.
So as soon as they left with little intention to return, they suddenly become the problem that socialists really hate to discuss: ex-Soviets hate socialism. It's like cults, or, if we're honest, there's other repressive groups and repressive ideologies that have loooooooooong lost their any usefulness and really only the repression remains.
In other words, if tech companies show Chinese that non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there, then no amount of CCP censorship will ever actually convince those people that the CCP has good intentions.
Judging by my conversations with Chinese, it's working.
If the goal is to protect minors, then alcohol may be a better model: a) Alcohol is considered harmful for minors, hence b) It is unlawful for minors to posses and consume alcohol; c) It is unlawful to sell alcohol to minors; Similarly: 1) Internet may potentially contain harmful material, hence: 2) It is unlawful for minors access Internet; 3) It is unlawful to sell or provide to minors access to Internet or any dev…
Showing ID to buy alcohol is pretty common though.
Someone needs to make a case as for why in 2015 this was perfectly acceptable but in 2025 it's not anymore. The internet has gotten tamer since its inception and porn is still porn, exactly as depraved as it always was. What's considered the bad parts of the internet these days used to be the whole thing.
If the goal is to protect minors, then alcohol may be a better model: a) Alcohol is considered harmful for minors, hence b) It is unlawful for minors to posses and consume alcohol; c) It is unlawful to sell alcohol to minors; Similarly: 1) Internet may potentially contain harmful material, hence: 2) It is unlawful for minors access Internet; 3) It is unlawful to sell or provide to minors access to Internet or any dev…
Showing ID to buy alcohol is pretty common though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really, because pre-Soviet Union wasn’t a capitalist society. Russia and China were barely industrial nations.
If buying and selling things internationally makes a country capitalist, then Soviet Russia was capitalist. Pre-Soviet Russia was mercantilist, which can be somewhat handwavyly described as capitalism-unless-I-can-kill-you, both between people within a nation and between nations themselves and is still not entirely dead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr... The findings in the Times article were subsequently debated in the House of Lords. The figures weren't disputed: https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
I don't really get why this is surprising or actually particularly worrying. 30 arrests a day for something in a population of seventy million people, a large proportion of whom are online in some way, is not that much. And it's not 30 arrests per day for saying things the government don't like or that are politically incorrect, is it? It's mostly for things that rise to the level of threats or harassment or cause al…
We don't know, as offence type isn't provided by police services.
The key takeaway is that arrests have risen since 2020 while convictions have not. Given the sole evidence needed for a conviction is also needed for an arrest, you'd think convictions would rise at almost the same level. But it looks like people are being arrested and later released for perfectly legal speech. That would arguably be seen by many as an impairment of freedom of expression.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really get why this is surprising or actually particularly worrying. 30 arrests a day for something in a population of seventy million people, a large proportion of whom are online in some way, is not that much. And it's not 30 arrests per day for saying things the government don't like or that are politically incorrect, is it? It's mostly for things that rise to the level of threats or harassment or cause al…
>And it's not 30 arrests per day for saying things the government don't like or that are politically incorrect, is it? We don't know, as offence type isn't provided by police services. The key takeaway is that arrests have risen since 2020 while convictions have not. Given the sole evidence needed for a conviction is also needed for an arrest, you'd think convictions would rise at almost the same level. But it looks…
Yes, but this also coincides with the pandemic which put more people online and created a lot of anger and harassment of nurses, doctors, government officials, and it also coincides with growing activism in the trans debate space, which has undoubtedly led to more actual harassment.
> But it looks like people are being arrested and later released for perfectly legal speech.
But you just said we don't know, because offence type is not provided?